Their driver finally seemed to master the intricacies of the car’s manual controls, and they shot forwards, weaving around
the other disorientated cars. “Adrian?” Monica datavised.
“With you. Nobody here can origin that electronic warfare outbreak.”
“Doesn’t matter, we’re on top of it.”
“Calvert’s in front of us,” the driver said. “He’s right on Mzu’s tail, this hasn’t affected him at all.”“Shit!” Monica directed
her shell helmet sensors to switch to infrared, and just caught the pink blob of Calvert’s car hidden by snow a hundred and
twenty metres ahead of them. Behind her, two embassy cars were already pulling away from the stalled police vehicles, while
another one was creeping along the verge, trying to get around.
“Adrian, we’re going to need an evac. Fast.”
“Not easy.”
“What do you fucking mean? Where are the embassy’s Royal Marine utility planes? They should be on backup, for God’s sake!”
“They’re both liaising with the local defence force. It would have been suspicious if I’d called them back.”
“Do it now!”
“I’m on it. You should have one there in about twenty minutes.”
Monica thumped an armoured fist into the seat, splitting some of the fabric. The car was racing on through the snow, surprisingly
stable for one under manual control. Four sets of headlights were visible behind them. A fast datavised review informed Monica
they were all embassy cars, which gave her some satisfaction.
She put her machine gun down and picked up a maser carbine, then undid her seat belt.
“Now what?” Samuel asked as she leaned forward to get a better view through the windscreen.
“Joshua Calvert, your time is up.”
“Uh oh,” said the electronics expert. He looked up in reflex.
• • •
Ashly approached the ironberg foundry yard from the west, following five minutes behind the Edenist flyers. The spaceplane’s
forward passive sensor suite revealed the basics of the missile launch and dogfight. Then the X-ray lasers had fired from
orbit. He held his breath as the sensors reported a microwave radar beam sweep across the fuselage. It came from the starships
seven hundred kilometres above. Now is not a good time to die. Especially as I know what’s in store if I do. Kelly was right:
screw fate and destiny, just spend the rest of time in zero-tau. I think I might try that if I get out of this.
Nothing happened.
Ashly let out a shudder of breath, finding his palms sweating. “Thank you whoever thought up low-visibility profiling,” he
said out loud. With its top-grade stealth systems active, the spaceplane was probably invisible to any sensor on, or orbiting,
Nyvan. His only worry had been an infrared signature, but the thick snow eradicated that.
He ordered the spaceplane’s computer to open a secure channel to Tonala’s net, hoping no one with heavy weaponry would detect
the tiny signal. “Joshua?” he datavised.
“Jesus, Ashly, we thought you’d been hit.”
“Not in this machine.”
“Where are you?”
“Thirty kilometres from the foundry yard. I’m about to go into a holding pattern. What’s happening down there?”
“Some idiot used electronic warfare on the cars. We’re okay; Dick hardened our programs. But the police are out of it for
the moment. We’re still on Mzu’s tail. I think a couple of embassy cars are behind us, maybe more.”
“Is Mzu still heading for the foundry yard?”
“Looks like it.”
“Well unless the cavalry comes up over the hill, we’re the only pickup she’s got left. There’s nothing flying within my sensor
range.”
“Unless they’re stealthed, too.”
“You’ve always got to look on the bleak side, haven’t you?”
“Just being cautious.”
“Well if they’re stealthed, I. ..” Ashly broke off as the flight computer warned him of another radar sweep emanating from
the starships. The beam was configured differently this time, a ground scan profile. “Joshua, they’re hunting
you. Get out! Get out of the car!”
• • •
Every electronic warfare block in the embassy car was datavising frantic alerts.
We are being targeted by the Organization frigates,
Samuel told
Hoya
and Niveu. There was little he could do to conceal his rising panic. Once, the knowledge that his memories would be held
safely in the
Hoya
would have been enough for him. Now he wasn’t so sure that was all that mattered.
You must stop them. If they kill Mzu, it’s all over.
The snow-lashed sky behind the car flashed purple.
After tens of kilometres of entirely passive pursuit across the tundralike farmland, the Tonala security police had been caught
out badly by the sudden electronic warfare attack. Of all the cars, theirs came off worst, leaving them scattered across both
roadways as their surveillance suspects, quite in-furiatingly, dodged around them as if they were nothing more than inconvenient
roadcones. It took time for them to rally; processors had to be disengaged to allow the manual controls to be activated, officers
from cars that had gone over the embankment or smashed into the barrier sprinted for cars that were still functional, swiping
huge gobs of crash cushion foam from their suits. Once they had reorganized they began to drive fast after their quarry.
It meant that their cars were still bunched together, supplying the Organization starships with the biggest target. Oscar
Kearn, uncertain which one contained Mzu, decided to start there and eliminate the other cars one at a time until her soul
was claimed by the beyond. With that, they would have won. Bringing her back, one way or another, was all that mattered. Now
the spaceplanes had been destroyed, she would have to die. Fortunately, as an ex-military man himself, he had prepared his
fallback options. So far Mzu had proved amazingly elusive, or just plain lucky. He was determined to put an end to that.
The ironberg foundry yard pickup had been planned in some detail with Baranovich, its location and timing quite critical.
Although Oscar Kearn hadn’t actually mentioned
how
critical to the newly allied Cossack, nor why. But he was satisfied that if things went bad for the Organization on the ground,
Mzu would never survive.
Firstly, the frigates would be overhead, able to initiate a ground strike. And if she somehow escaped that.. .
While the Organization starships were docked with the
Spirit of Freedom
they had gained command access to the tugs delivering Tonala’s ironbergs for splashdown. A small alteration had been made
to the trajectory of one tug.
Far above Nyvan’s ocean, to the west of Tonala, an iron-berg was already slipping through the ionosphere. This time, no recovery
fleet would be needed. No ships would be employed to tow it on a week-long voyage to the foundry yard.
It was taking the direct route.
• • •
The first X-ray laser blast struck the police car which was lying down the embankment, hood embedded in the ditch. It vaporized
in a violent shock wave, sending droplets of molten metal, roasted earth, and superheated steam churning into the air. All
the snow within a two-hundred-metre radius was ripped from the ground before the heat turned it back into water. The other
car abandoned on the road was somersaulted over and over, smashing its windows and sending wheels spinning through the air.
The first explosion made Alkad wince. She glanced out of the rear window, seeing an orange corona slowly shrinking back down
into the road.
“What the hell did that?” Voi asked.
“Not us,” Gelai said. “Not one of the possessed, not even a dozen. We don’t have that much power.”
A second explosion sounded, rattling the car badly.
“It’s me,” Alkad said. “They want me.”
Another explosion lit up the sky. This time the pressure wave pushed at their car, sending it skidding sideways before the
control processor could compensate.
“They’re getting closer,” Eriba cried. “Mother Mary, help us.”
“There’s not much She can do for us now,” Alkad said. “It’s up to the agencies.”
• • •
The four voidhawks were in a standard five-hundred-kilometre equatorial parking orbit above Nyvan when
Hoya
received Samuel’s frantic call. Their position allowed them to shadow the Organization frigates which were strung out along
a high-inclination orbit. At the time, only the
Urschel
and the
Pinzola
were above the ironberg foundry yard’s horizon.
Raimo
was trailing them by two thousand kilometres.
Although it was four thousand kilometres from the
Urschel
and
Pinzola, Hoya
’s sensors could just detect the brilliant purple discharge in the clouds below the Organization frigates as they fired on
a fourth car. The voidhawk began to accelerate at seven gees, followed by its three cousins. All four went to full combat
alert status. A salvo of fifteen combat wasps slid out of
Hoya
’s lower hull cradles, each one charging away in a different direction at thirty gees, leaving the voidhawk at the centre
of an expanding and dimming nimbus of exhaust plasma. After five seconds, the drones curved around to align themselves on
the Organization frigates.
Urschel
and
Pinzola
had no choice but to defend themselves. Their reaction time was hardly optimum, but twenty-five combat wasps flew out of
each frigate to counter the attackers, antimatter propulsion quickly pushing them up to forty gees. The frigates broke off
their attack on the cars, realigning their X-ray lasers ready for the inevitable swarm of submunitions.
Raimo
launched its own salvo of combat wasps in support of its confederates, opening up a new angle of attack against the voidhawks.
Two of them responded with defensive salvos.
Over a hundred combat wasps launched in less than twenty seconds. The glare from their drives shimmered off the nighttime
clouds below, a radiance far exceeding any natural moonlight.
Despite the continuing electronic warfare emission from the SD platforms, none of the orbiting network sensors could miss
such a deadly spectacle. Threat analysis programs controlling each network initiated what they estimated was an appropriate
level of response.
• • •
Officially, Tonala’s ironberg foundry yard sprawled for over eighteen kilometres along the coast, extending back inland between
eight and ten kilometres according to the lie of the land. That, anyway, was the area which the government had originally
set aside for the project in 2407, with an optimism which matched the one prevalent during Floreso’s arrival into Nyvan orbit
three years earlier. Apart from the asteroid’s biosphere cavern, the foundry became Tonala’s largest ever civil engineering
development.
It started off in a promising enough fashion. First came a small coastal port to berth the tugs which recovered the iron-bergs
from their mid-ocean splashdown. With that construction under way, the engineers started excavating a huge seawater canal
running parallel to the coastline. A hundred and twenty metres wide and thirty deep, it was designed to accommodate the ironbergs,
allowing them to be towed into the Disassembly Sheds which were to be the centrepiece of the yard. The main canal branched
twenty times, sprouting kilometre-long channels which would each end at a shed.
After the first seven Disassembly Sheds were completed, an audit by the Tonalan Treasury revealed the nation didn’t require
the metal production capacity already built. Funds for the remaining Disassembly Sheds were suspended until the economy expanded
to warrant them. That was in 2458. Since then, the thirteen unused branch canals gradually choked up with weeds and silt until
they eventually became nothing more than large, perfectly rectangular saltwater marshes. In 2580, Harrisburg University’s
biology department successfully had them declared part of the national nature park reserve.
Those Disassembly Sheds which did get built were massive cuboid structures, two hundred metres a side, and very basic. An
immense skeletal framework was thrown up, bridging the end of the branch canal, then cloaked in flat composite panels. A vertical
petal door above the canal allowed the ironberg egress. Inside, powerful fission blades on the end of gantry arms performed
a preprogrammed dissection, slicing the ironberg into thousand-tonne segments like some gigantic metal fruit.
A second network of smaller canals connected the Disassembly Sheds with the actual foundry buildings, allowing the bulky,
awkwardly shaped segments of spongesteel to be floated directly to the smelter intakes. The desolate land between the Disassembly
Sheds, foundry buildings, and canals was crisscrossed by a maze of roads, some no more than dirt tracks, while others were
broad decaying roadways built to carry heavy plant during the heady early days of construction. None of them had modern guidance
tracking cables; foundry crews didn’t care, they knew the layout and drove manually. It meant that any visitors venturing
deep into the yard invariably took wrong turnings. Not that they could ever get lost, the gargantuan Disassembly Sheds were
visible for tens of kilometres, rising up out of the featureless alluvial plain like the blocks some local god had forgotten
to sculpt mountains out of during Nyvan’s creation. They made perfect navigational reference aides. Under normal
conditions.
• • •
The road was over eighty years old; coastal winters had washed soil away from under it and frozen the surface, flexing it
up and down until it snapped. There wasn’t a single flat stretch anywhere, a fact disguised by fancifully wind-sculpted drifts
of snow. Alkad’s car lumbered along at barely more than walking pace as the suspension rocked the body from side to side.
They’d driven into the yard at a dangerously high speed along the roadway. A fifth car had been wiped out behind them, then
the blasts of energy from space seemed to stop. Alkad datavised the car’s control processor to turn off at the first junction.
According to the map she had loaded into her neural nanonics memory cell, the Disassembly Sheds were strung out across the
yard’s northern quadrant.But as she was rapidly discovering: the map is not the territory.