"And you're going to go through with it. Firing off the weapons."
"Of course I am. Wasn't that the whole point? You third-generation mutineers were such cowards."
He shook his head raggedly. "No. Lethe, it was ten years ago. I was only fifteen! If we'd been cowards we wouldn't have challenged you. This isn't our war, this war between the stars. How could it be? It's our grandparents' war. We live and die like worms in the dark. We wanted to let the Sol people alone, and just find a place to live—Sol system is a big place—" He laughed, or it may have been a cough. "I suppose it's big. I've never seen anything further than a couple of metres from my nose, so I wouldn't know."
She just smiled at him.
"And when you've shot the weapons off, what then? Do we wait for pickup by the Alpha ships?"
"Oh, I don't think that was ever very likely, do you? The Empress's soldiers would get to us long before then. No, I'm afraid that our little story was always bound to end here. And in that spirit I've done some redesign. The weapons systems were supposed to leave us with a habitable core, here in the nucleus. But what's the good of that? We're all dead anyway." She broadened her smile. "So I've weaponised everything—extended the potency of the damage we will cause. We will be remembered forever."
Curle lifted his head and looked at the faces of the guards who held him. They smiled, eyes gleaming; Minya was pleased by their determination, which showed the success of her conditioning of the surviving crew.
Curle asked, "That's your consolation, is it, you dried-up old witch? Comfort for your own death—for two wasted generations inside this block of ice—"
"Oh, off with you, back to your cell. I must say when I remember the high hopes we set off with, my poor husband Huul and myself, I think we would have regarded you as a grave disappointment."
"So why did you drag me out here?"
"To tell you how you were going to die. You did kill my babies, after all. Get rid of him."
August 11th, Starfall Day
Sol system
And then, without a subjective instant of delay, Max and the others found themselves falling into a new Store. It was a web of data spun between whole worlds, with mines of memory, troves of frozen order of an unimaginable size. And there was intelligence, artificial mind everywhere: a feast for a hungry, self-aware virus. This was not like the petty Stores where they had been raised; this went on forever!
Just for a moment the Eaters all hesitated, as if bewildered by the immensity of the feast set before them.
"He promised," Max said. "Flood promised! And he has delivered, hasn't he?"
He was answered by a roar from his jostling cohorts.
"For Flood! For Alpha! For the Starfall! Let us feed!"
And the Eaters plunged into the landscape of data before them, shitting out high-entropy disorder wherever they passed, feeding, multiplying, frenzied, unstoppable.
S-Day
London
The voice was booming, male, strangely accented to an Earth-bred ear.
"Take cover. The free citizens of Alpha system and the inhabited stars have no quarrel with the people of Sol system, but with your government. Flee the cities and the domed colonies. Take your children; take food, water, power and air. Find protection. Take cover. The free citizens of Alpha system—"
"Lethe, can't you shut that off?" Admiral Kale paced about the bunker under London, hastily buttoning up his uniform jacket, starburst at his chest.
Pella and the rest of Stillich's team sat in rows around a Virtual situation tank, hammering at data desks. "It's coming from outside the system," Pella said. "Probably all the way from Alpha. They might have used lasers—they have some mighty guns out there to push their lightsail ships—"
"I don't fucking care," said Kale. "Just jam it."
"That's impossible, sir," Stillich said bluntly.
"Take your children; take food, water, power and air. Find protection. Take—"
Abruptly the message cut off.
Stillich looked up. "Now what?"
"Captain," Pella said. "The situation display. Look."
The display was a rough cube, metres high, containing current and summary data on the empire's defences and the position of the Alpha invaders—the GUTship fleet was still a week away—complex, schematic, a constellation of data that changed by the second. But now whole blocks of the display were growing dark, as if shadows were falling.
Admiral Kale said, "Is this some fault? I thought you had back-ups—"
"Isolate your data desks from the central processing," Stillich said rapidly. "Do it now."
The staff hurried to comply.
Pella said, "Some of the drop-outs are at this end. But the transmitting stations are falling silent too. Port Sol—oh, wow, Mars just went. This is system-wide. Spreading at lightspeed, I think."
"Tell me what's doing this, Number One," Stillich said.
Pella's analysis was admirably fast. "Viruses," she said. "Semi-sentient. Voracious. They're just eating their way through our data stores, turning everything to mush. They seem to be targeting AI nodes particularly. It's a smart plague, and it's hitting us right across the system. They must have ridden in on the laser signal right after that warning—" Her data desk turned black. She sat back, disbelieving.
One man fell back from his station, clutching his chest. His colleagues rushed to help.
Stillich murmured, "Artificial heart. Anybody with implants of any sophistication is going to suffer."
Kale rammed a fist into his palm. "So they knock out our command and control before their ships even get here. And our people are no doubt already dying, as hospitals fail, and flitters fall out of the sky. Damn, damn."
"Captain, we're going to need to get to the surface," Pella said.
Stillich stood. "Yes. Take what you need. I hope the elevator is stupid enough not to have been infected, or it will be a long climb."
Kale growled, "Why the surface?"
"We have some systems up there that will still work. Those optical-fibre links we laid down are pretty dumb. We robustified the planet, remember? Although we didn't anticipate this."
"And what about the warning?" Kale asked. "Why issue that now? Their ships are a week out. You think that was referring to the viruses?"
Stillich frowned. "'Take cover ... Flee the cities and the domed colonies ... Take your children; take food, water, power and air'. Sounds like more than a virus to me."
"They're hitting us with something else, then. Other than the ships. Lethe. Listen, Stillich. Leave a skeleton crew down here. I want you to isolate that smart plague and fire it straight back at the rebels."
Pella said, "Maybe that's why they're sending manned ships. Proof against AI viruses. Surely they'll be shielded against their own weapons—"
"Then send them whatever else we've got too, with my best wishes."
Stillich hastily assigned some of his crew to carry this through. Then he hurried out after Pella and the Admiral.
They came up in the middle of Hyde Park. Under a clear August afternoon sky, they were military officers in gaudy uniforms, tense, sweating, armed, loaded with data desks and comms gear, emerging from a hatch in the green grass. Pella and the others immediately got to work setting up field comms stations.
Stillich looked around, trying to take stock. The bunker entrance was near the south-west corner of the Park, and through the trees he glimpsed the ruin of the Albert Memorial. The boundary of the Park wasn't clear, for parkland and oak forest covered much of London now; like most of Earth's cities it was like a garden from which buildings towered, needles so tall they penetrated a scattering of cloud. Above all that was the usual furniture of the sky, the contrails of descending spacecraft, the glittering sparks of offworld infrastructure.