Rafael Columbia came on-line, appearing on the other side of Wilson from Anna. “There are so many,” he said, and for once even he sounded intimidated and uncertain. “We’re launching combat aerobots now. They should provide some interceptor coverage against those projectiles, but only around major population centers. Damnit, we should have built ten times this many.”
“Get every working city force field up,” Wilson told him. “And not just on these twenty-three worlds. There’s no guarantee this is the limit of the invasion. Use the planetary cyberspheres to issue a mass warning, I want people to get under cover. That’s a start.”
“Then what?”
“When I’ve got more information, I’ll tell you. We need to know what they’re going to do after the initial bombardment. Anna, bring the rest of the strategy and command staff in, please. We’re going to need a lot of help today.”
“Yes, sir. I’m tracking the starships now.”
White indicators appeared inside the starfield, tagged with identification data. He had seven ships within range of the detector network. Two scoutships were days away outside the Commonwealth; while the warships and remaining scoutships were spread out around the indistinct boundary of phase three space. Wilson made a decision. “Contact the captains,” he told Anna. “I want them all to rendezvous half a light-year out from Anshun.” Their old base was the CST junction planet for the sector, and as such the most heavily populated. “We’ll start our counterattack there.” At least neither of them laughed outright at that.
“Oh, goddamnit,” Rafael grunted.
Inside the tactical display another swarm of amber warning icons were blinking up, much deeper in Commonwealth space around planet twenty-four: Wessex.
“Do what you can for them,” Wilson told Rafael. He wished it didn’t sound like a feeble joke. Could we have known it was going to be this massive? A terrible thought crept out: The Guardians knew.
“Sir,” Anna exclaimed. “I’ve got Captain Tu Lee on a direct link. They were still at the Anshun base.”
“What?”
“She’s on the Second Chance.”
Wilson’s virtual hand blurred as it jabbed at the communications icon. “What’s your situation?” he demanded as Tu Lee’s anxious face appeared in his virtual vision.
“Disengaged from the dock.” Tu Lee winced. Her image suffered a ripple of static. “Taking some incoming fire. Force field holding. What are your orders?”
Wilson almost whooped out loud. Finally, some good news. “Eliminate as many of the planetary bombardment projectiles as you can. Don’t, repeat, do not try and take on a wormhole. Not yet. I need information on them.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Godspeed, Captain.”
The Second Chance’s big life-support wheel finished its emergency despin procedure, eliminating the problem of precession, which had been screwing up their maneuvering ability.
“Full acceleration,” Tu Lee ordered the pilot. She’d been captain for a week now, taking over when the ship docked after its last mission. The navy had sent it on a deep scouting mission three hundred light-years from the Commonwealth. It didn’t have the speed of any of the new scoutships, but it beat them hands down on endurance. It also had the kind of delta-V reserve that only the new warships could match.
Their plasma rockets responded smoothly to the pilot’s instructions, producing one and a half gees acceleration. They were a thousand kilometers above Anshun’s nightside equator, and curving around above the second largest ocean. The big portals at the front of the bridge were showing brilliant white flares of nukes detonating below them. Tu Lee barred her teeth in fury at the devastation. For her the light was carefully color-coded and intensity-graded; for anyone on the surface it was near-certain death.
“Laroch, have we got a pattern for the emergence sequence yet?” she asked.
“I can confirm there’s forty-eight wormholes,” said Laroch, who was operating the sensor console. “But they keep jumping around at random. The only constant is their altitude, about one and a half thousand klicks.”
“Okay, let’s keep under that level, and track the bombardment projectiles in range. Weapons, fire whenever we get a lock. Pilot, if there’s a cluster, get us in range.”
“Incoming,” Laroch called.
Eight alien missiles hurtled toward the Second Chance. The pilot vectored their plasma rockets, altering trajectory. Plasma lances fired out from the starship’s midsection, ripping across space before bursting apart on the missiles’ force fields. Lasers locked on, pumping gigawatts of energy, straining the force fields badly. The plasma lances fired again finally overloading the missiles’ shielding. Multiple detonations blossomed silently above the planet, their plasma clouds merging into a seething patch of pure light over fifty kilometers across.
“Batch of sixteen projectiles emerged,” Laroch called out. “Heading for the planet.”
The bridge portals had them tagged, green needles with vector digits flicking around at high speed. Tu Lee called up the ship’s own missile launch command, and fired a volley of interceptors. As they leaped away at fifty gees she loaded in a sequential pattern of diverted energy functions for their warheads. The interceptors split apart into a cascade of independently targeted vehicles, rocket exhausts expanding like a starburst of lightning bolts as they spread out in pursuit of the alien projectiles. Megaton warheads detonated, a chain of dazzling lightpoints distorting the planet’s ionosphere in huge undulations, their diverted energy function sending huge emp effects rippling out.
Several of the alien weapons immediately went dead, their exhausts fading away as they tumbled inertly toward the dark landscape hundreds of kilometers below. A second barrage of warheads detonated. This time the diverted energy was channeled into one-shot X-ray lasers, directing seventy percent of the explosion’s power into a single slender beam of ultrahard radiation. Every remaining projectile broke apart, glowing debris flying outward in sinister mimicry of a meteorite shower’s splendor.
Four more wormholes opened close to the Second Chance; thirty-two missiles flew out from each. Delicate fans of sensor radiation stroked against the starship. The gee force on the bridge swung around, pressing Tu Lee into the side of her chair. Straps tightened around her shoulders and waist, holding her in place.
“There might be a lot of them,” Laroch said. “But their software is useless. I’m picking up a lot of microwave emissions from the wormholes; the missiles are being continuously updated and guided.”
The Second Chance fired volley after volley of plasma lances at the new attackers as they closed at twenty gees. A massive series of nuclear explosions turned space outside the starship a glaring uniform white. Waves of thin plasma slithered across the outer force field, shaking the superstructure. Tu Lee could hear loud metallic groans as the hull twisted and flexed from the pummeling. It was as if they were flying through a star’s corona, blinded by the hot radiation glare and buffeted by relativistic particle currents. The starship streaked out of the energy storm, a shimmering scarlet bubble trailing long cataracts of hydrogen plasma. Twenty-four alien missiles chased around to intercept her.
Alarms were shrieking from every bridge console. Screens threw up systems schematics as the crew and the RI tried to reestablish functions.
“Jump us out,” Tu Lee ordered.
At the hyperdrive console, Lindsay Sanson activated the wormhole generator. Second Chance vanished from space above the planet.
“How bad is that software?” Tu Lee demanded.
“Strange,” Laroch said. “It’s very inflexible, nothing like as advanced as ours. It’s almost as if they don’t have smart programs.”
“We can use that,” Tu Lee said. She glanced at the main status display. The starship’s systems had suffered nothing too critical. Outside of some hull ablation and tank breaches, most of the damage had been absorbed by peripherals in the life-support wheel. Without the exploration and science teams they had only forty crew on board; no one was in any immediate danger. “Get everyone into suits,” she said as she called up a display of their missile reserves. “Then take us back.”