IMPACT: T plus 1392 days, 12 hours, 16 minutes
Wednesday hid under the desk, heart pounding with terror, clutching a stubby cylinder. She'd seen the body of the customs officer stuffed inside the darkened kitchen; realized he was dead, like the handwritten instructions in the diplomatic pouch said. Now the thing that did it was coming for her, and she wished—
There was a scratching click of claws on polycellulose flooring. I don't want to be here, she prayed, fingers slipping around the sweat-lubed cylinder.
This isn't happening to me! She could see the hellhound outside, imagining it in her mind's eye: jaws like diamond saw blades, wide-set eyes glowing with the overspill from its phased-array lidar. She could see the small, vicious gun implanted in its hollow skull, its brains governed by a set of embedded computers to override its Doberman instincts. Fist-sized overlapping bald patches, psoriatic skin thickening over diamond mesh armor. It could smell her fear. She'd read the papers in the strong room, realized how important they must be, and pushed the door ajar, thinking to leave—yanked it shut barely ahead of the snarl and the leap. Acrid smoke had curled up from the hinges as she scrambled into the ductwork, fled like a black-clad spider into the service axis and through the pressurized cargo tunnel and the shadows of the almost-empty dock, panting and crying as she went. Always hearing a scrabble of diamond-tipped claws on the floor behind her. I don't exist. You can't smell me!
Herman—as usual, when she needed him most—wasn't talking.
The dog could smell her—or smell someone. She'd tabbed into a public term and watched the dog, or one of its cousins, stalk across the loading bay like the spectral, elongated shadow of a wolf—something born in frozen forests beneath a midnight sun, evolved to lope across the cyborg-infested tundra of an alien world. It had glanced at the hidden camera with glowing eyes, a glow that spun into static as it locked on and fired. It could sneeze nerve gas and shit land mines, if you believed her kid brother Jerm's cheap third-person scripted arc-ventures; a product of a more sophisticated technosphere than Moscow's, its muscles didn't run on anything as primitive as actin/myosin contraction, and its bones were built for leverage—a hellhound running at full power hissed like a primitive locomotive, dissipating waste heat as steam hot enough to scald anyone who got too close.
She raised the riot cartridge, fingers tightening on the trigger switch, and pointed it at the doorway. Dim shadow of legs, too many legs. They paused, and the shadow swung across the wall, homing in. She squished down on the trigger and the canister kicked back at her hands as a terrible clatter rushed towards her and the air in front turned black. No, blue: like the dead man's tongue, lying there. The paper said all but one copy of the data cartridge containing the customs transfer log were to be destroyed, and anyone who knew was to die. A tenuous aerogel foam bubbled and farted, rushing out into a ballooning mass as the dog lunged forward, teeth snapping, making a soft growling sound deep in its throat. It thumped against her feet in a soap-bubble cocoon, the growl turning into a deafening moaning howl of frustration.
Shuddering, Wednesday shuffled backward, pushing the heavy desk over as she stood up. She looked around wildly. The dog's hind legs scrabbled at the floor, driving it after her. She could see a glow of rage in its eyes as it struggled with the sticky antipersonnel foam. "Good doggie," she said vacuously, backing away, wondering inanely if she should hit it. But no, if a hellhound thought you had won, it would blow itself up, wouldn't it? They always did that in the arc-ventures—
Something cold and wet stubbed itself against the back of her neck, and snuffled damply. She sagged, her knees and stomach turning to sacks of ice water; paw-fingers like bone clamped tight on her shoulders, holding her upright. Her eyelid monitor flickered, then died as the lights came up.
The hound on the floor seemed to grin up at her—no, past her. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly human, a deep gravelly growl converging from three directions. "Victoria Strowger, this is emergency police pack four-alpha. By order of Captain Mannheim, superintending evacuation process for Old Newfoundland, we are placing you under arrest. You will return with us to the main hub traffic bay to await uplift. I must caution you that any resistance you offer may be dealt with using weapons of nonlethal intent. Running back aboard this habitat was a senseless waste of police time." Two of the voices fell silent, but a third continued: "And while we're about it, why were you running away?"
IMPACT: T plus 1392 days, 12 hours, 38 minutes
Twenty-two minutes past departure time and the dogs had rounded up the last stray lamb, herding her into the service lock. Captain Mannheim had other things to worry about this instant, like topping off the number four tank and making sure Misha vented the surplus ullage pressure and kept the flow temperature within good limits. Then he was going to run the launch plan and get the hell out of this ghost system before the storm front blew in, and once clear he'd have it out with the guard dogs. (And why had they let some interfering punk kid sneak around the service core in the first place?) And then …
Twenty-two minutes! More than a thousand seconds overdue! There was room for slippage on the critical path—nobody would be insane enough not to make some allowances—but with five thousand passengers, twenty-two minutes meant all of five person-years of consumables gone just like that, virtually in an eyeblink. The refugee pods had an open-loop life-support system, there being no room for recycling tankage on this relief flight, so the whole exercise was running into millions, tens of millions. Some dumb kid had just cost the burghers of New Dresden about, oh, two thousand marks, and Captain Mannheim about two thousand extra gray hairs.
"What's our criticality profile looking like?" he demanded, leaning over to glare at Gertrude's station.
"Ah, all nominal, sir." Gertrude stared fixedly ahead, refusing to meet his eye.
"Then keep it that way," he snapped. "Misha! That tank of yours!"
"Vented and closed out within tolerances." Misha grinned breezily from across the bridge. "The load-out is looking sweet. Oh, and for once the toilet plumbing on number two isn't rattling."
"Good." Mannheim sniffed. The number two reaction motor's mass-flow plumbing suffered from occasional turbulence, especially when the hydrogen slurry feeding it went over sixteen degrees absolute. The turbulence wasn't particularly serious unless it turned to outright cavitation, with big bubbles of supercooled gases fizzing inside the pipes that fed reaction mass to the fusion rockets. But that was potentially catastrophic, and they didn't have any margin for repairs. Not for the first time, Mannheim's thoughts turned enviously to the beautiful, high-tech liner from Novya Romanov that had pulled out six hours ago on an invisible wave of curved space-time, surfing in the grip of an extremal singularity. No messing with balky, mass-guzzling antiquated fusion rockets for Sikorsky's Dream! But the Long March was as sophisticated a ship as anything the Dresdener merchant syndicate could afford, and he'd do as well with it as was humanly possible. "Ship! What's our sequence entry status?"
The robotically smooth voice of the autopilot rolled across the bridge.
"Kerberos unit and final passenger boarding notified two minutes ago and counting. Critical path elements in place. Entry status green, no exceptions raised—"
"Then commence launch cycle immediately."
"Aye. Launch cycle commencing. Station power and utility disconnect proceeding. Station mass transfer disconnect proceeding. Boarding pier disconnect proceeding. Main engine spin-up engaged, station one. Live cargo systems spin-down engaged, station two."
"I hate live cargo," Gertrude muttered. "Live cargo spin-down notification going out." Fingers tapped invisible cells in the air in front of her face. "Hub lift interlocks to safe—"
Mannheim stared at the complex web of dependencies that hovered over the blank wall of the bridge, a meter in front of his nose. Slowly, red nodes blinked to green as the huge starship prepared to cast free of the station. It was supposed to be the last ship ever to sail from this port. From time to time, he prodded a station glyph and spoke quietly to whoever's voice answered from the thin air: loadmasters and supercargo and immigration control officers and civil polizei, Jack in the drive damage control center and Rudi in the crow's nest. Once he even talked to Traffic Control. The station's robot minders plodded on imperturbably, unaware that the end of their labor was in sight, coursing toward them on an expanding shock front of radiation-driven plasma. An hour went by. Someone invisible placed a mug of coffee at his right hand, and he drank, carried on talking and watching and occasionally cursing in a quiet voice, and drank again and it was cold.
Finally, the ship was ready to depart.
IMPACT: T plus 8 minutes—1.5 hours
Moscow system died at the speed of light, death rippling outward on a tsunami of radiation.
First to die were the weather satellites, close in on the star, watching for solar flares and prominences. Buoys built to track breezes were ripped adrift by the tornado blast of the artificially induced nova, not so much disabled as evaporated, adding their stripped nuclei to the boiling fury of the iron sunrise.
Seconds later the radiation pulse melted the huge, flimsy solar collectors that glided in stately orbit half an astronomical unit out, feeding power to antimatter generators a hundred kilometers in diameter. Robot factories unattended by humans passed unmourned and unnoticed. The gamma pulse shed by their tons of stored antihydrogen added a candle glow to the hurricane.
Eight minutes after detonation, the radiation front reached the innermost human habitat in the system: the world called Moscow. The neutrino flux was high enough to deliver a rapidly lethal radiation dose even after traveling right through the planet. The nightside fluoresced, atmosphere glowing dimly against the unbearably bright background. The gamma pulse, close behind it, flashed the dayside atmosphere to plasma and slammed it into the already melting rock. Supersonic tornadoes rippled around the daylight terminator, scouring the surface down to bedrock.
Half an hour into the nova, the process of planetary disintegration was well under way. On the dayside, Moscow's atmospheric pressure dropped drastically, and the primary gaseous constituents were hydrogen and oxygen radicals stripped from the boiling fog that had been the boreal ocean. Cloud top temperatures were already in the thousands of degrees, while Mach waves rippled through the turgid troposphere on the nightside, crushing houses like matchwood kindling to become pyres for the dying bodies of their occupants. The night receded before a ghastly daylight, the sullen glare of an exploding star reflected off the planet's own comet trail of air. To an observer at ground level Moscow Prime would have covered half the sky, a magnesium flare of radiant energy that would still be bright enough to burn out eyeballs tens of trillions of kilometers away. The main shock wave of the explosion was approaching by then, a wave of plasma flash-heated to hundreds of millions of degrees, barely less dense than the dissipated atmosphere and traveling outward at 20 percent of lightspeed.
When it arrived, Moscow vanished—swallowed like a watermelon at ground zero in the expanding fireball of an atomic explosion.
Sixty minutes: the radiation pulse ghosted through the rings of Siberia, a huge green ice giant with attendant moons strung around it like lucent pearls. They flashed briefly and sprouted streamers of glowing gas as the rings flared violet, forming a huge glowing disk of light that jetted outward from the star, consuming the mass of a small moon in seconds. Siberia absorbed a huge pulse of energy, sufficient to melt the tundra at its core and spawn gigantic storms. Hurricanes the size of Moscow raced toward the nightside of the giant planet as it, too, sprouted a glowing cometary tail.
Unlike the inner bodies, Siberia was too huge to evaporate entirely. Though it glowed white-hot and molten, and its orbital track was distorted by the tremendous shock wave of the stellar explosion, the innermost core of nickel-iron remained—a gravestone marker that would take millions of years to cool in the twilight emptiness of Moscow system. The first survivor weathered the blast at a range of ninety-eight light minutes. Sleeping in deep orbit around the outer gas giant Zemlya, a robot beacon blinked awake at the first harsh glare of energy. The beacon carried huge reserves of coolant within its faceted black-armored carapace. Designed to withstand direct hits from a battleship's laser grid, it weathered the storm—although it was sent tumbling, blasted right out of its seventy-year orbit by the surge of heavy charged particles. The beacon was 118 years old, one of 750 in its series. Code-named TALIGENT SPARROW, it was part of the early warning system of the Strategic Retaliation Command of the recently vaporized Moscow Foreign Office.
TALIGENT SPARROW blinked and took stock. The stars were occluded by glowing gas and debris, some of them its own ablated skin. No matter: it had a task. Deep memory remembered the pattern of the seasons and turned sensors in search of Moscow. It tried vainly to swivel a high-gain antenna that had been reduced to a crumpled mass of molten tissue. Other sensors tried to distinguish the gamma flux of inbound relativistic missiles and failed, overloaded. A primitive expert system plumbed the depths of its decision tree and determined that something unknown had attacked it.
Qubits trickled into entropy as TALIGENT SPARROW powered up its causal channel and shrieked murder at the uncaring stars.
Somebody heard.
IMPACT: T plus 1392 days, 13 hours, 02 minutes
The police drone was robotically curt. "We've found your daughter. Please come to deck G-red, zone two meeting point, and collect her."
Morris Strowger stood up and glanced at his wife. He smiled. "I told you they'd find her." The smile slowly faded.
His wife didn't look up. With her bony fingers thrust together between her knees and her bowed head, Indica Strowger's shoulders shook as if she'd grabbed hold of a live power supply. "Go away," she said very quietly, her voice hard and controlled. "I'll be all right."