The bags they'd need were permanently packed. Denise disengaged the bungalow's active alarm and tugged them from the hall cupboard where they were stowed—a couple of sports shoulder bags, the kind anybody would take for a week's holiday. Inside were clothes—some needing washing—toiletries, coral souvenirs, several bracelet pearls with the supplements any student would own. All the items would pass a spot inspection. It would take a detailed lab analysis to detect any sort of subterfuge. Her ring pearl interrogated the hidden systems, running final function and power checks. Once their validity was confirmed, she dumped them beside the door, then ran back to her own room, stripping off her blouse. Her blood still seemed to be hot and fizzing, even though her heart had slowed right down. Now the starships had arrived, she felt invigorated. A simple faded-copper T-shirt and black shorts gave her a great deal more freedom of movement. She twisted the plain gold band on her index finger that contained the pearl, reassured by the contact. A strange preparation ritual for a warrior about to go into combat, but then this was not an arena the gladiators, knights and ninjas of old would recognize.
Denise was lacing up her sneakers on the doorstep when the boys arrived. They'd acquired an open-top jeep from the diving school, which Josep was driving. He braked it to a sharp halt at the end of the drive. Ray jumped out and slung the cases in the rear. Denise took the backseat. She was still slipping on her safety harness when Josep accelerated away, sending gravel pelting into the jasmine.
"Which way are you going?" she asked.
"We figured the outer loop road," Ray called over his shoulder. "It's longer, but the traffic regulation AS says it's still relatively clear."
Denise visualized a layout of the town. Their bungalow was just about on the opposite side from the airport. Perhaps they should have planned that better, as well. But once they got onto the loop road, it would take them directly there.
"How long?" she asked Josep. She had to shout; the wind was whipping her short hair about as he sped them along the concrete road with its broad, neatly mown verges.
"Forty-five minutes," he said.
"You're kidding."
His smile was grim. "I can do it!"
"Okay." Denise started to instruct her Prime, and indigo timetables slid across her vision. Scheduled planes were still flying out of the airport. According to the bookings program, just about every tourist in Memu Bay was trying to bring his or her departure flight forward to today. Prime accessed the Pan-Skyways reservation system and searched through the passenger list on a flight to Durrell that was due to leave in an hour and ten minutes. Only a quarter of them had checked in so far. Several had contacted the airline to say they'd been caught up in the traffic snarl and were running late. Sensible people, she thought. She erased two of them and substituted Ray and Josep, under their ghost identities.
"We're in," she said gleefully.
The loop road was a big improvement. At first. Traffic on their side of town was light. It began to build, increasing in proportion to the distance to the airport. Even Josep had to slow down as both lanes began to fill.
"Where've they all come from?" she asked, looking round in dismay. Family cars, sedans with darkened windshields, jeeps like theirs, vans and trucks; every one had a driver gripping the wheel with an intent don't-mess-with-me expression on his face.
"I don't know," Josep muttered. "But I know where they're going." He swung the wheel sharply, sending the jeep around a big pickup and onto the hard shoulder. Free of the jammed-up main lanes he accelerated again. Tires bounced frantically through the potholes, the suspension juddering loudly.
Ray grinned happily. "There goes your license."
"It's a stolen jeep, and I'm not licensed to drive it anyway. Now smile for the traffic cameras."
Denise rolled her eyes and pulled a floppy old fishing hat on her head as other drivers shouted at them. To the side of them, traffic was grinding to a complete halt. She could see the kind of luggage people were carrying. Cars just had suitcases thrown into the backseats, but several vans and pickups were piled high with furniture, some even had pets, mainly dogs barking in confusion. A small pony peered nervously out of one rig. She couldn't understand where they thought they were going. It wasn't as if this continent had a big rural community that could absorb them. There was only the Great Loop Highway with its scattered settlements around the Mitchell Plateau Mountains. And she knew what their inhabitants would think of refugees from the city.
"Damn," Josep grunted. Other people had started to swerve onto the hard shoulder. Vehicles stuck on the inside lane were tooting their horns furiously at the lawbreakers trundling past. It didn't take more than another five hundred meters before the hard shoulder was reduced to a parking lot They were still a good twelve kilometers from the airport.
"Go around them," Ray said.
Sighing, Josep engaged the high-traction mode for the hub motors and urged the jeep off the hard shoulder and onto the verge. They bounced along the grass, tilted at quite an angle. Tires left long spin tracks in soil still wet from the morning's downpour. Cars on the hard shoulder tooted angrily as they bumped and fishtailed past the completely stationary lines.
That ride ended three kilometers short of the airport, when the verge turned into a cutting. The banks were too steep for the jeep to use even on high traction.
Josep braked and they slowly slithered down the slope until the tire rims were resting on the curbstones lining the hard shoulder. Nothing was moving on the dual roadway. People had climbed out of their vehicles, talking to each other in exasperated voices. Denise could hardly believe it, but the trams on the high-speed link between the roadways were also stationary. Maniac drivers had actually tried to use the rails as a road, ramming through the crash-barrier that guarded the outer lane. There was a long zigzag line of cars and vans bumper to bumper along the tramway, looking as if several dozen of them had all collided in slow motion. Those drivers were screaming at each other. She could see several fistfights had broken out "Out," Josep said. "Come on, we're close enough now."
A big DB898 passenger plane thundered overhead, its undercarriage bogies folding into its fuselage. Hihydrogen turbofans whined loudly as it rose in a steep climb. Everyone standing about on the road stopped what they were doing to watch it pass. The majority then started walking, as if the aircraft had been some kind of religious summons.
Denise, Josep and Ray started a fast, easy jog, drawing jealous stares from families and older people tramping along the concrete with moody desperation. Thanks to the d-written enhancements throughout their bodies, the weight of the bags and the intense midafternoon sun had no effect on them, so they were able to maintain a steady pace for the entire three kilometers. Denise had a mild sweat when they reached the arrivals hall, but that was all.
The crowds around the various airline gateways were thicker than fans going into a stadium turnstile on a league finals day, and a lot more restless. They pushed and shoved their way toward the front, either ignoring or giving out aggressive nose-to-nose stares to anyone who objected. Up on the walls, giant sheet screens were showing man-in-the-street interviews; with just about everyone the reporters found asking the same thing: when are our exo-orbit defenses going to blast these invader bastards into radio-active gas? Surely some clandestine top-secret government project had built them ready for this moment? Why are we defenseless?
They arrived at the Pan-Skyways gate three with five minutes left until boarding ended. There, in the middle of five hundred noisy, straining, angry people, Denise gave both of them a kiss and a hug. If they were surprised by the uncharacteristic display of affection they didn't show it. She'd often been exasperated by them during the last year; now she realized how much she cared for them, almost as much as for their mission. "Look after yourselves," she mumbled. It wasn't a wish; it was a command.
They returned the hug, promising her they would. When they showed their ghost identity cards to the gate it opened smoothly to let them through.
Denise wormed her way out through the crush of people and went up to the observation deck on the roof. She was the only person there. A humid offshore breeze plucked at her T-shirt as she stood pressed up against the railing. Twenty minutes later, the big Pan-Skyways jet taxied out onto the runway and raced into the hot sky. Denise watched it vanish into the hazy horizon, then lifted her gaze to the sky's zenith. Seven tiny, bright stars were visible through the azure veil.
Her arms were spread wide, hands gripping the smooth, worn metal of the railing. When she took a deep breath, she could feel the oxygen flowing through her arteries, fortifying her enhanced cells. Her physical strength brought a cool self-confidence with it, a state of mind she relished.
Welcome back, she told the sparkling interlopers. Things are going to be a little different this time around.
* * *
.
Simon Roderick sat at the desk in his appropriated cabin, surrounded by data. Some of it came from holographic panes, the rest was provided by DNI. All of it flowed and flashed at his whim. Organization, the key to success in any field, even one with as many intangibles as this. He knew how Captain Krojen considered himself at the mercy of the Koribu's AS, how isolated that made him from the physical running of the starship, a situation Simon never placed himself in, no matter what his supervisory assignment. The captain's trouble was his insistence on routing commands through his officers, keeping them involved. If he kept humans out of the equation he would find himself a lot closer to achieving true authority over his machinery.
The stream of information enveloping Simon shifted as the last of the Third Fleet starships reached its six-hundred-kilometer orbit. Its new pattern was close to the optimum he had envisaged. Needless to say, Thallspring had deployed no exo-orbit weapons against the starships during their approach. They had, though, endured a constant bombardment of communication traffic during the flight into orbit. Several tapevirals had been hidden in the packages, some of them quite sophisticated—for an isolated world. The Koribu's AS had recognized and isolated them immediately. None of them had come even close to the Barbarian Sentience subversives that the antiglobalizers had used back on Earth.
Simon shifted his attention to the images building up from the small squadron of observation satellites that the Third Fleet had released into low-Thallspring orbit. It was a world that had moved ahead in a steady pedestrian fashion since Z-B's last asset realization. Infrared mapping showed the settlements had expanded roughly as predicted, although Durrell was certainly larger than expected. Worst case, it gave them a hundred thousand more people, which the ground forces could certainly handle. Fortunately, that corresponded to an increase in industrial output. After all, those extra people had to be housed, clothed, fed and provided with jobs.
Several blank zones on the planetary simulation caused him a flicker of dissatisfaction. His personal AS noted the direction of his ire and informed him that three observation satellites and one geostationary communications relay had failed. The successfully deployed systems were being reprogrammed to fill the gaps.
He sent the planetary data into peripheral mode and established a link to Captain Krojen. The officer's sullen face appeared on a hologram pane. "I'd like you to begin the gamma soak, please," Simon said.
"I wasn't aware our reviews were complete," Krojen said. "There could be people down there."
"The primary scans haven't found any artificial structures in the location we selected. That's good enough for me. Begin the soak." He canceled the link before there was an argument, and expanded the Koribu's schematics out of the grid.
Just behind the starship's compression drive section, their gamma projector began to unfurl. The mechanism had been included on all of Z-B's colonist carrier starships as fundamental to establishing a settlement. Basically a vast gamma ray generator and focusing array, it was a cylinder fifteen meters in diameter, and twenty long, riding on the end of a telescopic robot arm. Once it was clear of the drive section, the cylinder's outer segments peeled open like a mechanical flower. On the inside, the petals were studded with hundreds of black-and-silver hexagonal irradiator nozzles. A second set of segments hinged open around the first, followed by a third. At full extension, it formed a circular disk sixty meters across.
Thallspring's second-largest ocean was rolling past underneath the Koribu, with the coastline sliding into view over the horizon. Durrell was directly ahead of the starship, a gray smear amid the emerald crescent of land that was the settlement's enclave of terrestrial vegetation. Outside that, Thallspring's native aquamarine plants embraced the rest of the land.
Koribu's gamma projection array swung around on the end of its arm until it was pointing toward the settlement Small azimuth actuators tweaked its alignment and began tracking. Tokamaks inside the starship's compression drive section started to power up, feeding their colossal energy output straight into the projector array. The amount of energy demanded by a starship to fly faster than light sliced down through the atmosphere in a beam that was no more than a hundred meters wide when it struck the surface.
The impact was centered on a patch of ground at the western perimeter of the settlement, just overlapping the border of the earth plants. No living cell of any type could survive such a concentration of radiation. Thallspring's plants, animals, insects and bacteria died instantly beneath the beam, a huge zone of vegetation that immediately turned bruise-brown and began to wither. Branches and leaves bowed down and curled up beneath the relentless invisible onslaught; fissures split open along tree trunks, hissing out steam from ruptured osmotic capillaries. Animals thudded to the ground, skins shriveled to black parchment and innards cooked, spitting out little wisps of smoke as they ossified in seconds. Even below ground, nothing was spared. The gamma rays penetrated deep into the soil, eradicating bacteria and burrowing insects.
Then the beam began to move, scanning back and forth across the ground in slow kilometer-wide swaths.
Simon shifted the soak data into peripheral. He used the Third Fleet geostationary relays to open a connection into Thallspring's datapool and requested a link to the president.
The man whose image appeared on his holographic pane was in his late fifties, heavy features roughened by lack of sleep. But there was enough anger burning in his eyes to compensate for any insomnia lethargy.
"Stop your bombardment," President Edgar Strauss growled. "For fuck's sake we're not any kind of military threat."
Simon's eyebrow twitched at the obscenity. If only Earth's politicians were as forthright. "Good day, Mr. President. I thought it best if I introduced myself first. I'm Simon Roderick, representing the Zantiu-Braun Board."
"Switch your goddamn death ray off."