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‘Hmm.’

Stillich said, ‘Sir, if we can keep them out of the System altogether—’

Kale cut him off. ‘The trouble is, Captain, if the Alphans break through this defensive crust of yours, our GUTships, once bypassed, are going to be quite useless.’ He shook his head, black hair speckling the grizzle of grey. ‘I’d suggest you explore alternative deployments – deeper defence strategies. Let them come all the way into the heart of the Solar System if they like. As you said, we may be able to dream up ways to hit them when they round the sun. It won’t matter as long as we down them in the end.’

Pella coughed. ‘I don’t think the Empress Shira will like that idea, sir.’

Kale said evenly, ‘The Empress has delegated the fighting of this battle to us.’ He pointed to the misty pea-sized ball. ‘And what’s this?’

‘Just a routine long-period comet,’ Pella said. ‘We can see from the radar reflections that its surface hasn’t been modified by previous interactions with the sun. We’ve been tracking it since it started its fall in from the Oort cloud. It’s inert. It’s just that it failed to show up on previous scans.’ She smiled. ‘It ought to make a pretty show later in the year. Morale booster.’

‘“Just a comet”,’ Stillich said. ‘And yet it arrives just as the first interstellar invasion of the Solar System ever attempted is showing up on our sensors. Let’s assign a GUTship to track it.’

Pella glanced at Kale. ‘Captain, we only have twenty-five ships. To pull one out of the line for a comet – I told you, it shows no threat signatures at all—’

Kale clapped a heavy hand on Stillich’s shoulder. ‘For once I agree with your Number One. We don’t have the resources to go shadowing blocks of ice. Forget it.’ He turned to leave. ‘Call me if anything else shows up.’

‘Sir.’ Stillich stared at the comet, still unsure. ‘Get rid of the marker, Pella.’

Pella touched the Virtual of the comet with a fingertip, thus labelling it as a ‘recognised’ object, and it winked out of existence.

‘So, Number One,’ Stillich said. ‘What’s next?’

AD 4820. Starfall minus 2 months. The Solar System.

Minya had Curle brought before her.

Twenty-five years old, Curle was the last survivor of the Mutiny of the Grandchildren. The heads of the others were displayed frozen in the walls of Minya’s cabin, here at the very heart of the comet nucleus. Minya had wanted to ensure there would be no recurrence of the Mutiny in the comet’s final decade of flight.

She inspected Curle by the light of her fat candles. Held by two of her guards, the former rebel was gaunt, filthy, pale as a worm – well, everybody was pale, after two generations locked in the lightless heart of this comet. ‘You lost a leg,’ she said to him.

It took him some gulping efforts to speak. She didn’t encourage speech in the cells. ‘Gangrene,’ he said.

‘Ah. From a wound you incurred during the Mutiny, no doubt. Don’t expect any sympathy from me. Anyhow, we’re in microgravity; you don’t need legs. If you like I’ll have the other one cut off for you. Balance you up.’ She made a scissoring gesture. ‘Snip, snip.’

‘Why have you brought me here?’

‘I’ll come to that. We’re there, you see.’

‘Where?’

She showed him an image on an antique, low-power data desk, fed by a light pipe from the surface; the comet-ship designers hadn’t even allowed the risk of radiation leakage from surface cameras. ‘Can you see? That’s the sun – Sol. We’ve arrived in the Solar System, after forty-nine years, right on schedule.’

‘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 – the Solar System is a big place—’ He laughed, or it may have been a cough. ‘I suppose it’s big. I’ve lived my whole life inside this comet. 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 for ever.’

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.’

AD 4820, August 11th. Starfall Day. The Solar 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 choice dish for a hungry, self-aware virus. This was not like the petty Stores where they had been raised; this went on for ever!

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 the Solar 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, interrogating 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 laser cannon out there to push their lightsail ships—’