Polity Agent

Two big transports were down—titanic landers resembling the inverted hulls of ocean liners—a third still hovered in the sky, casting a massive shadow. Thorn scanned back towards the arcology with his monocular. It was as if someone had punctured holes in an enormous tin can and fluid ran out. Increasing the magnification, it now seemed he saw ants flooding from a nest. Higher magnification still and the monocular began whirring as it adjusted its lenses to compensate for shake. Now he truly saw the hundreds of thousands of people, family groups or individuals, loaded down with belongings or trailed by hover luggage. Antigravity platforms and gravcars manned by ECS troops or monitors hovered over these crowds. Yet it all appeared surprisingly orderly outside. There had been some sporadic shooting, but that was unsurprising with such a mass of humanity to control.

To one side a line of AG platforms and grav-transports flowed like train carriages. These contained the injured, and those wearing Dracocorp augs who were now stunned and sedated. Tracking this line of traffic out, Thorn focused on the motley collection of ships gathered beyond the large landers. The badly injured or ill were being stretchered to a twin-hulled H-ship dispatched by the medical arm of ECS. Beyond this, domed tents spread like a rash of blisters on the landscape almost to the horizon. Still other ships were scattered amid all this: some privately owned vessels, smaller hospital and rescue ships, or smaller landers sent down, from a couple of old passenger liners still in orbit, to bring supplies to this rapidly growing refugee camp.

‘What are the figures now?’ Thorn lowered the monocular.

Via Thorn’s comlink, Jack replied, ‘Coloron informs me that the runcibles here have been kept open-port to the Isostations for a week. Capacity sixty thousand every hour, but it rarely reaches that. Eight million in that first week. Runcible technicians have moved fast to set up another five runcibles on a less populated world undergoing terraforming. The population there is low, about ten million. Earth Central made the calculation that risking ten million lives there, it might save many more from here. EC is also opening up more of the big shipyards to turn into Isostations and Coloron has brought three more runcibles online here. Nearly twenty million via that route thus far.’

‘What about that liner?’Thorn enquired.

‘The Britannic can take aboard fifty thousand. Its landers can take up to about five thousand at a time, so it will very soon be full.’

‘Spit in a rainstorm,’ muttered Thorn, watching one of the landers launch. Just contemplating the figures involved was nightmarish. In two weeks the AI had managed to move off-planet only two per cent of MA’s billion population. One per cent a week at the present rate. Two solstan years minimum, to accommodate them all working on that basis, it was hopeless. ‘Anything else?’

‘Other ships are arriving, including a dreadnought within a few days. This means a wider area can be covered by orbital weapons. Coloron has extended the perimeter, as you can probably see from where you stand. That reduces the evacuation time here, considerably. Had we two weeks to spare, we could get most inhabitants clear of the arcology.’

‘How long do we have?’ Thorn asked.

With a cold exactitude, Jack replied, ‘Being optimistic: one week. By then the Jain substructure will have spread throughout the entire arcology, but it will reach the runcibles before then. And before then it’ll be subsuming those still remaining inside.’

Letting his monocular hang by its strap around his neck, Thorn gripped the rail tight. He felt sick. As a Sparkind trooper on Samarkand he had witnessed the results of a catastrophe in which 30,000 died. On Masada and its surrounding cylinder worlds, and in Elysium, that figure rose to a million. Here, already, the estimated number of deaths exceeded 100,000. A week? Maybe another 10 million through the runcibles, and maybe half the surviving population safely outside the arcology. What then? Thorn’s problem was that he knew precisely ‘what then’. The moment Jain tech got close to the runcibles, they would be blown. At some point Coloron or Earth Central would declare the risk of Jain tech spreading planetwide too high. The calculation would probably be made to a hundred decimal places. Then MA would be incinerated down to the bedrock. Unless the projection changed drastically, there would still be half a billion people remaining inside. The magnitude of it was unbearable.

‘Still nothing from the HK?’

‘No, nothing at all.’

* * * *