Eighty seconds after Kitayama pressed the red button, a small, bright, yellow flare twinkled momentarily on the synced screens of the oyabun and his most trusted kobun. They nodded in unison.
“The package is in place, then,” the oyabun said, his eyes sharp and satisfied. “And no loose ends.”
“Yes, oyabun, and only we know of its existence and position.”
“And now it is our job to forget the package, Tomoaki.”
“Forget what package, oyabun?”
Kitayama matched the oyabun’s smile with one of his own.
2420 BCE: Wunderland, leading Trojan point asteroids, and planetside near Munchen
Upon the dull surface of the rock-that-was-not-a-rock, reflections of Alpha Centauri’s steady yellow light shone faintly. Other highlights-faint, brief-flickered across its surface: signs of the dying flares of ships and asteroids nearby. A human ship-a ramscoop traveling within a gnat’s whisker of the speed of light itself-had come rushing into the system, spewing death and destruction as it came. Scores of large, steel-alloy projectiles had been strewn in a wide arc as the craft made its approach: many had already ploughed into various planetoids, the debris from which had surged outward like shrapnel from anti-personnel warheads, destroying nearby kzin warships.
The remaining projectiles were now approaching various planets and planetoids located deeper in the system, several bound for the kzin subpolar bases on Wunderland itself. The Fifth Kzin Fleet, primed to begin its long sublight trek to invade Earth, could not respond in time: without any real warning, they were functionally stationary from the time the attack commenced to the time that it finished.
The magnetically induced corona that followed hard on the energetic bow-wave of the ramscoop tested the limits of the kzinti’s EM shielding. Those limits, as well as many throughout the human communities of the asteroid belt known as the Serpent’s Swarm, were exceeded by the next high-energy cataclysm: the cascade of coronal mass ejections triggered by the projectiles that had plunged straight into Alpha Centauri prime. Although no danger to the stability of the star, they tore huge holes down to the bottom of the photosphere, leaving nature-abhorred vacuums in their wake, as well as a brief moment of absolute magnetic disruption.
When the plasma rushed back into the empty vortices left in the wake of these warheads, and the magnetic fields reconnected, it was akin to high waves rushing headlong upon each other in the ocean: a shattering torrent sprayed upward from the thunderous collision of these two opposed forces. But, in this case, it was particles and radiation that sprayed outward through the system, due to arrive at Wunderland within a day, and the center of the Swarm within two.
Amidst all the destruction and streaming particles and energies, the kzinti missed detecting two subtler, but ultimately more destructive, actions taken by the human ramscoop vessel. Firstly, it deposited a small infiltration/commando ship which, equipped with a stasis field, would soon wreak legendary havoc across the system. Secondly, and functionally undetectable since it was but one emission among countless others, the main vessel sent a brief, powerful omnidirectional signal, which was backed up by transmitters in two of the near-relativistic projectiles. Around the system, as the signal spread outward, a variety of dormant systems awoke in response to its summons.
One such system was embedded in the small space-rock drifting serenely with the rest of the rubble that comprised the trailing edge of Wunderland’s leading cluster of Trojan point asteroids. Low power electronics, aided by bioelectric relays that generated no discernible signature, awakened automated systems. Motion recorders and atomic clocks compared data with beacon triangulation systems and visual trackers. Having confirmed its precise location within the Alpha Centauri system-and, in that same act, having determined Wunderland’s relative bearing-navigational computers calculated trajectories, thrust, and duration. The moment the flight solution was confirmed, the low-power plasma thruster ignited. The pseudo-rock accelerated backward along its orbital track toward Wunderland.
The man in the protective tube at the center of the pseudo-rock awoke to the smell of fried circuitry and an alarm which both rang in his ears and pulsed in his mandibular implant. He tried to rise up, couldn’t, groggily tried looking around, couldn’t really do that either. But he slowly made his eyes focus.
They showed him a small screen at the far end of a compartment so tight that it reminded him of when, as a preschooler, he had hidden in a mossy, narrow-gauge culvert to stymie the bigger kids during an epic game of hide-and-seek. They’d never found him. Of course, he had almost failed to extricate himself, too. What price glory?
Despite the smoke and tocsin that both warned of impending catastrophe, he realized he’d almost nodded off: the cold-sleep grogginess was not out of him. He triggered a stimulant autoinjector, felt a needle pierce his thigh: he needed all his wits and all his training to figure out what was happening, right now.
He was unsurprised that the news was not good. This cryopod-capsule was the same one into which they had stuck him, three months after the kzinti invaded. The top brass hadn’t been sure of very much, back then: the only thing they could agree upon was that, when the time right, he’d be awakened and sent back to Wunderland to resume the fight against the kzin.
However, it was the method of his return that was now instilling a modest measure of anxiety in him. The small screen located only thirty centimeters in front of him was displaying status reports from his primary systems. Most of the indicators were orange, with a smattering of red and green tags. Thrust and manual systems were okay, but the more sensitive systems-such as automated guidance and sensors-were either unreliable or dead.
Another circuit fried and as the acrid smoke wafted around him, he wondered, how long before something catches fire? Fortunately, that wouldn’t be him: the unipiece combat suit he was wearing was inflammable. On the other hand, even if live flame couldn’t reach his skin and roast him, the narrow space could easily enough become a pressure cooker. So far there had only been shorting wires, but soon enough, now-
A new, more urgent klaxon superimposed itself on the multiple malfunction tones: a collision alarm. Which, without the sensors, didn’t tell him much: it could be a basketball-sized rock at short range, or a whole planet at long range. He toggled the screen over to simple visual pickup, which rolled bars of grey and green for a moment before it straightened out into an incompletely colorized image. But despite the distortions, he immediately knew what he was looking at.
Wunderland. He was going to crash into Wunderland.
Which was a pretty sizable problem. He should have been awakened hours before reaching this point-except, now that he checked, the automated revival system had failed completely. So what the hell had happened?
The answer popped up when he checked the astrographic plot and position logs. They had been pretty good up to an hour ago. Then, right in the middle of a data-line, the positional reporting feed went haywire and stopped. And now that he was looking at it, all the other failed systems had gone down at the same second.
The reason for that simultaneous failure became clear: the external sensor archives showed a more or less normal electromagnetic and radiant soup outside, until an hour ago. Then the readings went completely off the scale for the better part of twenty minutes. The peaks of the rad and solar wind readings were like nothing he’d ever seen. And so he knew: he’d been caught in a coronal mass ejection. The worst ever recorded. He was lucky anything was still working, but was damned unlucky to be auto-deployed right into the biggest solar storm on record.