Звезда Пандоры

“The navy detector network is registering wormholes emerging inside the Commonwealth,” the SI said. “The Regents detector station is under attack. Get behind the bed, it will provide some cover.”

“Mellanie?” Alessandra asked, frowning.

“I’ve got to go,” she hesitated, not really believing. Then her virtual vision showed inserts coming on-line, activated by the SI. They were systems she neither recognized nor understood.

“We will try and remain in contact with you,” the SI said.

“Mellanie, there’s some kind of alert—” Alessandra said; her voice had risen in alarm.

Mellanie dived for the bed. There was a brilliant flash in the sky outside.

Wilson was alone in his awful white-glowing office, waiting for people to arrive for the second management meeting of the morning, the one on ship production scheduling and subcomponent delivery supervision. The override priority call that came in from the planetary defense division made him sit upright in his chair as it delivered big emergency icons to his virtual vision. The wormhole detector network was picking up unidentified quantum signatures inside Commonwealth space. Wormholes were opening in several star systems.

The office began to dim, scarlet and sapphire digits slipped along the ceiling and down the walls as emerald graphics flowered across the floor. The projections stabilized, arching out into the air to place Wilson at the center of a tactical star chart. He was close to the boundary of the Commonwealth, where phase three space dwindled away into galactic night. Twenty-three star systems were encircled by amber icons, with small script windows full of digits and icons.

“Twenty-three wormholes?” he murmured in dismay. The navy only had three functional warships, and eight scoutships refitted as missile carriers. Then the dataflow increased, clarifying the information coming in from the detector network. Forty-eight separate wormholes had opened in each of the twenty-three star systems, bringing the total to over eleven hundred. That was about the same number of gateways operated by CST itself. “Son of a bitch.” He couldn’t believe the numbers, he who’d been to Dyson Alpha and seen the scale of the Prime civilization for himself.

More information was pouring through now, complementing the navy network. The cyberspheres on Anshun, Belembe, Martaban, Balkash, and Samar were already suffering huge glitches and area crashes. Reports of explosions were coming in from the government systems of those planets, in almost every case corresponding to electronic failure zones. Twenty-three translucent globes expanded into Wilson’s image, representing the planets under attack. Detailed imagery was hard to find for any of them. Land survey satellites, geosynchronous relay platforms, industrial stations, and high inclination meteorological sensors were being systematically blasted out of orbit. Wormholes appeared as bright scarlet diamonds poised over the planets. They winked in and out of existence, changing position by the minute to avoid sensor lock. Radar tracked high-velocity projectiles flying out of them at each emergence.

The navy was losing contact with its detector stations on Elan, Whalton, Pomona, and Nattavaara, all planets in phase three space with relatively small populations. One by one the stations were dropping off the network, reducing the resolution in the display. No stations at all had survived on Molina, Olivenza, Kozani, and Balya, phase three worlds that weren’t even open to general settlement yet.

Anna materialized beside him, a ghostly gray outline. It was as if they were both on their acceleration couches back on the Second Chance again. “They started with nukes!” she said, aghast.

“We know how they fight battles,” he said, deliberately harsh, numbing himself to what all the display graphics really meant. With her there it was easier to haul back on his own emotions. He was the commander, he had to keep calm and analytical, to suppress that small part of himself that wanted to run out of the office and head for the hills. “Get Columbia into the command circuit. And find our ship positions for me.”

“All of them?” There was a lot of bitterness in the question.

“Do it!” His own hands were busy pulling planetary government civil defense data out of the unisphere. Little blue lights appeared on the twenty-three planet representations: cities with force fields. On the four start-up worlds, only the CST stations were protected.

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.”