Звезда Пандоры

When he got out, he knew he’d never forget the sight of the convoy jostling its way up the slope. Broad sunbeams were prising their way through the battered clouds above to play over the filthy battered vehicles. Pickups were packed full. All the buses had their doors open to draw some air inside now the air conditioners had failed; people were standing down the aisles. The sound of frightened children and injured adults arrived long before the vehicles reached him. Most prominent of all was Carys’s beautiful metallic gray sports car, whose fat wheels had lowered themselves beneath the chassis on telescoping suspension struts, bounding along over the trough terrain with the ease of any four-by-four.

It drove through the stream without any difficulty and pulled up beside him. The side window came down.

“Any sign of the wormhole?” Carys asked. Barry and Sandy were squashed into the passenger seat beside her, with Panda lying along the back.

“Not from here, no.”

“Okay, I’ll keep going as far as I can.”

He waved languidly as she drove off down the valley, keeping parallel to the stream. Several four-by-fours followed her; then the first bus arrived and he joined in helping with the wounded.

By the time Mark drew up at the improvised parking lot, the scene had become a replay of the bus station. A lot of people were clambering over the boltgrass slope to get into the valley, hauling kids along. Dozens more were milling around the four buses that were carrying the injured, manhandling stretchers out of the doors.

“Found it,” Carys exclaimed jubilantly from the array. “We’re five hundred meters in from the start of the valley. Mellanie’s here waiting, and she wasn’t kidding, I’ve never seen a wormhole this small before.”

“Get them through!” Mark blurted. He felt Liz’s hand in his, gripping tight.

“Out of the car,” Carys said. “Five meters. Mellanie’s saying hello. Yeah, right, hi. Okay, Barry, go on, dear. That’s it. Hold my hand, Sandy. Mark, we’re safe—”

He let out a sob. Beside him, Liz was smiling despite her moist eyes. They looked at each other for a long moment. “Guess we’d better go and lend a hand,” she said.

Simon was gathering his little band of devotees along the side of the gushing stream. He held up a hand as Mark, Liz, and David went past. “Those of us with weapons should dig in here at the valley entrance and provide some cover for our friends and families. It will be some time before everyone is through, and the aliens will probably come after us.”

Mark gave Liz a despairing look. “I think he’s talking about us again,” he said under his breath.

“Yeah. Well at least we have some heavy-duty weapons, now.” Liz held up one of the big cylinders she’d taken from the Prime.

“We don’t know what they are, or how they work.”

She gave him a wolfish grin. “Lucky we’ve got the best technical man in Randtown with us then, huh, baby?”

It was silent in the tactical display for several minutes after the Desperado shot back into hyperdrive and withdrew from the battle above Anshun. Wilson moved his hands across icons, pulling down sensor displays. Anshun had few sensors left in working order, but the aerobots provided intermittent sweeps of space directly above the tempestuous ionosphere. Forty-eight wormholes held their position in an ephemeral necklace two thousand kilometers above the equator. As he watched, several types of Prime ships began to fly out of them, accelerating through the hellishly radioactive cloud of cosmic dust and debris that churned around the planet.

“They’re still there,” Elaine Doi said in an appalled murmur. “We didn’t close one of them. Not one!”

“You have to get through to the generators,” Dimitri Leopoldovich said. “Simply hitting them with crude energy assaults from this side is completely ineffectual, they are manifestations of ordered energy themselves.”

“Thank you, academician,” Rafael said. “We just watched four of our ships die trying to defend us, so unless you have something constructive to add, shut the fuck up.”

“Fifty-two alien ships either destroyed or disabled,” Anna said. “Our missiles outperform theirs every time. But they do have weight of numbers. That’s their advantage every time.”

“What are we going to do?” the President asked.

Wilson was disgusted with how whiny she sounded.

“Our aerobots managed to strike every landing site on Anshun while the starships were engaged above the planet,” Rafael said. “We wiped out ninety percent of them. They’ll have to start the occupation again.”

“Which I have no doubt they have the resources for,” the President said. “Weight of numbers, again.”

“Probably, but in the meantime we can complete the evacuation.”

“We now have eight extra wormholes open inside city force fields,” Nigel Sheldon said. “Another three hours should see Anshun evacuated.”

“And the other planets?” Doi asked coolly. She was rallying well after the loss of the starships.