In the far distance, Terraneau shone like a light. With the ion curtain around it, the planet had a man-made appearance. Instead of the blues, greens, and whites of a habitable planet, Terraneau looked as if it had been spun in white gold. It did not look habitable.
Hard as it was to believe, a census taken four years earlier recorded 1.2 billion people living on that planet. By now, most if not all of the population would be dead. Norristown, the capital city, would be covered with the four-year-old corpses of people who’d died fighting an enemy they could not possibly have understood.
Admiral Thorne believed the aliens had abandoned Terraneau long ago, but he did not understand them, either. He did not know about the mining operations and the shitload of toxic gas the aliens left behind. He didn’t know that the Avatari used suns to finish their work, baking planets after they finished excavating them and filling them with gas. Over the next hundred thousand years, Terraneau’s sun would expand and die.
The Avatari did not capture planets to annex them into an intergalactic empire; they destroyed planets in order to use them for mining purposes.
“I have a fix on the target zone,” the pilot said.
“Do you think that was what New Copenhagen looked like from outside, sir?” Thomer asked.
“I’ve never thought about it,” I lied.
“Captain, what do we do if the aliens are still down there?” the pilot asked.
“They’re gone,” I said, hoping I sounded more confident than I felt. “They don’t have time for sightseeing, not with an entire galaxy to destroy.”
As long as the ion curtain remained in place, the Avatari could return. The curtain might even work like a burglar alarm, sending a signal to the Avatari every time we poked a hole into the atmosphere. We would certainly set off alarms when we fired off our big bomb, but it would be too late for them to do anything once that happened. At least I hoped it would.
“Do you have the torpedo ready?” I asked.
“Ready to go, sir,” the pilot said.
“Do you think this will work?” Thomer asked me.
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” I said. “We’ll know one way or the other in about five seconds.” I sent Thomer back to ride with the men in the kettle, then gave the pilot the order to fire the torpedo.
Back on the Kamehameha, engineers had built a toggle-switch trigger into the navigation console above the pilot’s head. The pilot acknowledged my order, then flipped the switch.
The weapon fired. Staring out the front of the ship, I caught the quickest glimpse of the torpedo as it sped off from under the ship—just a flash of dull white and orange against the luminous backdrop of Terraneau, then the torpedo vanished into the glare of the planet.
We hovered nearly a thousand miles above the spot where the torpedo exploded. From this distance, the flash was bright but not blinding, just a small speck of white light that flared and vanished, leaving a hole in the shining sphere of the ion curtain. The hole was small and dark, with shimmering edges where the radioactive particles from the torpedo faded into the tachyons of the ion curtain.
I put on my helmet and opened an interLink frequency that would reach every man on all five transports. “Hold on tight; we’re going in.”
We shifted direction and picked up speed. Ahead of us, the hole looked like a dark speck on a glaring lightbulb. Two opposing gravitational forces fought for me—the artificial force created by the transport’s gravity generator held me to the deck while the genuine gravity, created by our acceleration, tugged me toward the rear hatch. Feeling like I was falling upward, I became dizzy and dragged myself into the copilot’s chair.
The planet filled the windshield. In the middle of the glowing horizon, the hole that we had created with our puny torpedo looked like a mere pinprick.
“I hope the corridor holds,” the pilot mumbled to himself.
I looked over at him to consider what he had just said. When I looked up again, the hole in the ion curtain filled my view. It might have been a half mile wide. Compared to the shining border around it, the hole looked dark and deep; I could not see the end of it.
“Here we go,” the pilot said. His words barely had time to register before we bored into the atmosphere with the force of a bullet slamming into a wooden plank. The transport shook violently, nearly throwing me out of my seat. A moment later, the shaking ended. We had taken a hard knock when we slammed into the atmosphere, but we tore through.
I had always imagined the ion curtain as a skin—a thin layer of glowing particles no deeper than a storm cloud. It wasn’t like that at all. It must have been a full hundred miles thick. I felt like I was speeding through an endless tunnel.
The meters and lights around the cockpit flickered, and I realized that the door we had opened with our torpedo was shrinking. “It’s closing in on us,” I told the pilot.
“I see that, sir,” he snapped.
The lights in the cockpit winked on and off again. The outage lasted less than a second, but it felt longer.
“If it closes in on us …” I started.
“We’re dead either way,” the pilot interrupted. He was right. Only a lunatic would take a transport balls-out on a vertical drop. With its stubby wings, this bird was anything but aerodynamic. If we dropped too quickly, we would never pull out.
I glanced down at the instruments and saw the altitude and speed meters flashing nonsense. The radar screen turned dark. Then, just as suddenly as we entered the ion layer, we plummeted into open air, and the systems went normal. The sky above us glowed like a sun, and the world below us was green and blue. In the forest below us, I saw a reminder that we had entered Avatari-held space—a line of glowing spheres.
“What are those?” the pilot asked, partially standing to get a better look.
“Can you leave a beacon on this spot?” I asked, ignoring his question.
“Yes, sir,” he said. He sat back, flipped a switch on the communications console, then craned his neck to get one last look back at the spheres. Once the beacon was set, he repeated his question, “Captain, what were those things.”
Against my better judgment, I told him the truth. “It’s an intergalactic transportation system.”
“Like the Broadcast Network?” he asked.
“Something like that.” In truth the spheres were nothing like the Broadcast Network, but I didn’t want to talk about it. I had other things on my mind.
I radioed Thomer in the kettle. “How’s the breakage back there?” I asked.
“Minimal, sir,” he said.
Next, I radioed Herrington. He flew in the second transport. “Your men okay?” I asked.
“I’ve had smoother rides,” Herrington said.
“And your men?” I repeated.
“One dumb shit asked if we could do it again,” Herrington said.
I contacted Sergeant Philo Hollingsworth in the third transport. He said, “A few bruises; they’ll get over it.”
I got no response from the fourth and fifth transports. The pilot checked the radar and confirmed that both ships were gone.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Seen from the inside, the shine from the ion curtain made my eyes hurt, but it did not leave me blind. Given another few hours, my eyes would adjust. The same thing had happened on New Copenhagen; we wore sunglasses much of the time, but we learned to live with the glare.
We entered the airspace over Norristown. The wreckage that had once been a capital city reminded me of ancient ruins. The skeletons of a few tall buildings poked out of the debris below us like plants growing out of a rocky field. A three-story-tall water tower pointed up at us like an accusing finger. Norristown, once a showcase city, had become an entropic mess, with heaps of rubble, broken streets, and the occasional straight edge of a wall or walkway.
We passed over a suburb in which pockets of homes and parks remained untouched by the destruction around them. A church with twin steeples rose out of a ground like a giant gravestone. Past the church, the deep blue depths of the Norris River cut across town. I spotted the remains of a suspension bridge. Half of it lay visible under the water like a sunken ship; the other half looked solid enough to cross.