‘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 Virtual tank was a rough cube, metres high, containing current and summary data on the Empire’s defences and the position of the Alpha invaders – that rogue GUTship fleet, 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 light-speed, 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 itself?’ Kale asked.
Stillich frowned. ‘“Take cover . . . Flee the cities and the domed colonies . . . Take your children, take food, water, power and air.” Sounds like they’re talking about their invasion fleet. And maybe something else we haven’t detected yet.’
‘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, 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. Today the park was crowded, and getting more full all the time. People walked in carrying children, or bundles of belongings in cases, sheets and blankets. Some were trailed by serving bots, though many of the bots looked as if they were malfunctioning, confused.
The boundary of the park wasn’t clear, for parkland and oak forest covered much of London now; as with 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 off-world infrastructure. But even as Stillich watched, one of those tremendous buildings quivered, and shattered glass rained from its faces. The buildings themselves needed smartness to stay standing.
There was a flash in the sky, like a high explosion. Moments later a distant sonic boom rumbled. People ducked, cowering from the sky.
‘It’s that damn Alphan warning,’ said Admiral Kale. ‘It’s scared them all out of their homes. But this is a city of millions. Where are they supposed to hide?’
Stillich said, ‘That warning was sent by planetary colonists. They live under domes, in towns of a few hundred, tops. I’ve seen them. The Empress was relying on their consciences, to have them spare the cities. But what do they know of cities? Maybe they can imagine conditions on Mars or Titan. How can they imagine this?’
Kale said, ‘I wish there was something we could do for these people. Organise them. I feel helpless standing here.’
‘We’ll have to leave that to the civilian police,’ Stillich said.
People were again raising their faces to the sky. Something else, then. Stillich looked up.
Suddenly the bright blue air was full of sparks that flared and died. A streak of light cut across the sky, and there was a rippling boom of shocked air. Battle was joined, then.
‘Sirs.’ Pella called them over. ‘We’re getting some joy. The optic-fibre net is mostly intact, and some of our data desks stayed free of the viruses. The information flow is patchy. We’ve sent up another couple of recon satellites to replace those we’ve lost.’
‘Damn it, woman, get to the point. What’s happening?’
‘It’s the comet, Admiral. You were right, Captain.’
That stray comet, buried deep in the heart of the Solar System, had burst, transforming in a flash into a shoal of kinetic-energy weapons – dumb missiles but massive, fast-moving, and precisely targeted.
‘They’ve been hitting us off-world,’ said Pella. ‘Obviously we’re vulnerable wherever there’s no decent atmospheric cover. Mars, the big dome over Cydonia. They targeted the Serenitatis accelerator on the Moon, for some reason. There is what appears to be a shoal of the things heading out to Titan, Port Sol – we may be able to intercept some of them – the smart plague isn’t helping us deal with this, of course.’
‘A crude tactic, but effective,’ the Admiral said. ‘And Earth?’
The battle was visible in the sky. The comet bombs had first targeted the off-planet infrastructure. Space-elevator beanstalks had all been snipped, and orbital power nodes, resource lodes and comms satellites were being smashed. Earthport, the wormhole Interface cluster, had been particularly heavily targeted. In with the dumb bombs there was a scattering of high-yield nuclear devices, emitting electromagnetic pulses to disable anything too small to be targeted individually.
And a second wave of the comet-ice bombs was now raining down into the atmosphere, hitting power facilities like dams and the big orbital-power microwave receiver stations, transport nodes like harbours, air-, space- and seaports, bridges, road and rail junctions, traffic control stations . . .
‘There haven’t been too many casualties yet,’ Pella said. ‘Or at least we don’t think so. Some collateral stuff, where dams have come down, for instance. Meanwhile the smart plague has hit monorails and flitters and orbital shuttles; all over the planet you have stuff just falling out of the sky.’