A dozen datavised emergency situation alerts vibrated urgently inside Samual Aleksandrovich’s skull. He looked up at the staff officers conducting the daily strategy review. More worrying than the initial crop of alerts was three of them immediately failing as their processors crashed. Then the lights flickered.
Samual stared at the ceiling. “Bloody hell.” Information pouring into his mind confirmed there’d been an explosion outside the asteroid. But big enough to affect internal systems? Outside his panoramic window, the central biosphere’s axial light gantry was darkening as the civil generators powered down in response to losing their cooling conduits. Whole sections of the asteroid’s ultra-hardened communications net had gone off-line. Not a single external sensor remained active.
The office lighting and environmental systems switched to their back-up power cells. High-pitched whines, the daily background sound pervading the entire asteroid, began to deepen as pumps and fans shut down.
Seven marines in full body armour rushed into the office, a detachment of the First Admiral’s bodyguard. The captain in charge didn’t even bother to salute. “Sir, we are now in a C10 situation, please egress your secure command facility.”
A circular section of floor beside the desk was sinking down to reveal a chute that curved away out of sight. Flashing lights and sirens had begun to echo the datavised alarms. Thick metal shields were closing across the window. More marines were running along the corridor just outside the office, shouting instructions. Samual almost laughed at how close such dramatics came to being counter-productive. People needed to remain calm in such events, not have their fears accentuated. He considered refusing the earnest young captain’s directive; gut instinct, acting out the role of gruff lead-from-the-front commander. Trouble was, that kind of gesture was so totally impractical at his level. Preserving the authority of the command structure was essential in a crisis of this magnitude. Threats had to be countered swiftly, which only an uninterrupted chain of command could achieve.
Even as he hesitated, the floor trembled. They really were under attack! The concept was incredible. He stared at the cups on the table in astonishment as they started to jitter about, spilling tea.
“Of course,” he told the equally apprehensive marine captain.
Two of the marines jumped down the chute first, their magpulse rifles drawn ready. Samual followed them. As he skidded his way down along the broad spiral an assessment and correlation program went primary in his neural nanonics, sorting through the incoming datastreams to discover exactly what had happened. SD Command confirmed the Villeneuve’s Revenge had detonated a quantity of antimatter. The damage to Trafalgar was considerable. But it was the thought of what had happened to the ships of the 1st Fleet which chilled him. Twenty had been docked at the time of the explosion, three further squadrons had been holding station a hundred kilometres away. Two dozen voidhawks were on their docking ledge pedestals. Over fifty civil utility and government craft were in close proximity.
The secure command facility was a series of chambers dug deep into Trafalgar’s rock. Self sufficient and self-powered, they were designed to hold the First Admiral’s staff officers during an attack. Any weapon powerful enough to damage them would split the asteroid into fragments.
In view of what had just happened, it wasn’t the most comforting thought Samual had with him as he came off the end of the chute. He strode into the coordination centre, drawing nervous glances from the skeleton crew on duty. The long rectangular room with its complex curving consoles and inset holographic windows always put him in mind of a warship’s bridge; with the one advantage that he’d never have to endure high-gee manoeuvres in here.
“Status please,” he asked the lieutenant commander in charge.
“Only one explosion so far, sir,” she reported. “SD command is trying to re-establish contact with its sensor satellites. But there were no other unauthorised ships within the planetary defence perimeter when we lost contact.”
“Don’t we have any linkages?”
“There are some sensors functional on the remaining spaceport, sir. But they’re not showing us much. The antimatter’s EM pulse crashed a lot of our electronics, even the hardened processors are susceptible to that power level. None of the working antennas can acquire an SD platform signal. It could be processor failure, or actual physical destruction. We don’t know which yet.”
“Get me a GDOS satellite, then. Link us to a starship. I want to talk to somebody who can see what’s going on outside.”
“Yes sir. Combat back-up systems are deploying now.”
More of the coordination centre crew were hurrying in and taking their places. His own staff officers were coming in to stand behind him. He caught sight of Lalwani and beckoned urgently.
“Can you talk to any voidhawks?” he asked in a low voice when she reached him.
“Several.” Deep pain was woven across her face. “I feel them dying still. We’ve lost over fifty already.”
“Jesus Christ,” he hissed. “I’m sorry. What the hell’s happening out there?”
“Nothing else. There are no Organization ships emerging as far as the survivors are aware.”
“Sir!” the lieutenant commander called. “We’re reestablishing communications with the SD network. Three GDOS satellites are out, they must have been irradiated by the explosion. Five are still functional.”
One of the holographic windows flickered with orange and green streaks, then stabilized. The image was coming from an SD sensor satellite; it was positioned on the perimeter of Trafalgar’s defence network, ten thousand kilometres away. None of the inner cordon of satellites had survived.
“Hell,” the First Admiral muttered. The rest of the coordination centre was silent.
Half of Trafalgar’s lengthy peanut-shape glimmered a deep claret against the starscape. They could see sluggish waves of rock crawling across the ridges, boulder-sized globules sprinkling from the crests, cast away by the asteroid’s rotation. The ruined spaceport was retreating from its fractured spindle, turning slowly and scattering blistered fragments in its wake. Igneous spheres drifted without purpose around the stricken rock, squirting out sooty vapour like cold comets: the ships too close to the antimatter blast for their crews to survive the radiation blaze.
“All right, we’re intact and functional,” the First Admiral said sombrely. “Our first priority has to be re-establishing the SD network. If they have any sense of tactics, the Organization will try to hit us while our weapons platforms are disabled. Commander, bring in two squadrons of 1st Fleet ships to substitute for the SD platforms, and reassign the planetary network to provide us with as much cover as it can. Tell them to watch for an infiltration mission, as well; I wouldn’t put that past Capone at this point. Once that’s done, we can start initiating rescue flights for the survivors.”
The coordination centre crew spent an hour orchestrating the surviving 1st Fleet squadrons into a shield around Trafalgar. With more and more back-up communication links coming on line, information began pouring in. Three quarters of the asteroid’s SD network had been wiped out in the blast. Over a hundred and fifty ships had been completely destroyed, with a further eighty so radioactive they were beyond rescue. Of the spaceport facing the Villeneuve’s Revenge nothing had survived; once the bodies had been retrieved it would have to be nudged into a sun-intercept orbit. Initial casualty figures were estimated at eight thousand, though the coordination centre crew felt that was optimistic.
Once his orders were being implemented, the First Admiral reviewed the SD command centre files on the Villeneuve’s Revenge . He convened a preliminary enquiry team of six from his staff officers, briefing them to assemble a probable chain of events. The last moments of the angst-laden Kingsley Pryor replayed a dozen times through his neural nanonics. “We’ll need a full psychological profile,” he told Lieutenant Keaton. “I want to know what they did to him. I don’t like the idea that they can turn my officers against the Navy.”
“The possessed are only limited by their imagination, Admiral,” the medical liaison officer said politely. “They could apply a great deal of pressure to individuals. And Lieutenant-commander Pryor had his family stationed with him on New California, a wife and son.”
“I pledge to place myself and my actions above all personal considerations,” Samual quoted quietly. “Do you have family, Lieutenant?”
“No sir, no direct family. Though there is a second cousin I’m quite fond of; she’s about the same age as Webster Pryor.”
“I suppose academy oaths and good intentions don’t always survive the kind of horror real life throws at us. But it looks like Pryor was having second thoughts at the end. We should be grateful for that. God alone knows what kind of carnage he would have unleashed if he’d got inside Trafalgar.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sure he did his best.”
“All right, Lieutenant, carry on.” Samual Aleksandrovich returned to the situation display swarming through his mind. With the Strategic Defence redeployment under way and ships assigned to rescue duties, he could concentrate on Trafalgar itself. The asteroid was in bad shape. Essentially all of its surface equipment had been vaporized; and that was ninety per cent heat dump mechanisms. The asteroid was generating almost no power, its environmental systems were operating on their reserve supplies alone. None of the biosphere caverns or habitation sections could get rid of their heat into space, the emergency thermal stores had ten days’ capacity at most. When the habitat was designed no one had envisaged this kind of absolute damage; it had been assumed that the heat dump panels wrecked by a combat wasp could be replaced in the ten-day time scale. Now though, even if Avon’s industrial stations could manufacture enough hardware fast enough, it couldn’t be attached. Half of the rock surface was so radioactive it would have to be cut off to a depth of several metres. And that same half was also extremely hot. Most of that heat would radiate outwards over the next couple of months, but a considerable fraction would also seep inwards. Left unchecked, the temperature in the biosphere caverns would rise high enough to sterilise them. The only way to prevent that from happening was with heat dump mechanisms, which couldn’t be replaced because of the heat and radiation.
Samual cursed as the civil engineering teams datavised their various assessments and recommendations. Cost aside, he couldn’t possibly begin a program like that in the middle of this crisis.
He was going to have to evacuate the asteroid. There were contingency plans for dispersing the Navy institutions and forces around Avon’s moons and asteroid settlements. That wasn’t the problem. Capone had won a profound propaganda victory. The headquarters of the Confederation Navy bombed into extinction, whole squadrons lost, voidhawks dead. It would completely negate the entire Mortonridge Liberation campaign in the opinion of the general public.
Samual Aleksandrovich sank back into his chair. The only reason he didn’t bury his head in his hands was because of all the eyes watching him, needing him to remain confident.
“Sir?”
He looked up to see Captain Amr al-Sahhaf’s normally calm face contaminated with apprehension. Now what? “Yes, Captain.”
“Sir, Dr Gilmore reported that Jacqueline Couteur has escaped.”
A cold fury that Samual hadn’t experienced for a long time pushed its way through his rational thoughts. The damned woman was becoming his bête noir , a ghoul feeding off the Navy’s misfortune. Lethal, and contemptuously smug . . . “Has she broken out of the laboratory?”
“No sir. The demon trap’s integrity has been maintained throughout the assault.”
“Very well, assign a squad of marines, and whatever else Dr Gilmore says he needs to find her. Full priority.” He ran a search program through several files. “I want lieutenant Hewlett placed in charge of the search mission. My orders to him are very simple. Once she has been recaptured, she is to be put directly into zero-tau. And I do mean: directly. In future, Dr Gilmore can use someone less troublesome for his research.”
By the third doorway, it was noticeably warmer than usual in the broad corridor leading towards the CNIS secure weapons laboratory. The heat given off by the armour of thirty-five marines was accumulating in the air. Conditioning vents running along the ceiling were operating on reduced cycle mode; only a third of the light panels were on.
Murphy Hewlett took point duty himself, leading his squad along. They were each armed with static-bullet machine pistols modelled on Ombey’s design, with five of the team carrying Bradfields just in case. Murphy had taken time to brief them personally while they suited up; laying down simple procedures for engaging the possessed, hoping he was coming on confident.
As they arrived at the third door he signalled their technical sergeant forward. The man walked over to the door’s control processor, and studied his own block.
“I can’t find any time log discrepancies, sir,” he reported. “It hasn’t been opened.”
“Okay. Front line ready,” Murphy ordered.
Eight marines spread out across the corridor, lining their machine guns up on the door. Murphy datavised Dr Gilmore that they were in position and ready. The door swung up, hissing from the pressure difference. Tendrils of pale white vapour licked around the edges as hot and cold air intermingled. Dr Gilmore, five other researchers, and three armed marines were standing just inside. No one else was visible.