Peter Hamilton - Great North Road

Sid was about to curl his fingers around her hand when his audio smartcells let off a declamatory chime. A bright red icon flared in the middle of his grid. “Crap on it!” he exclaimed.

“What?”

“Code red.”

“What’s that?”

“An HDA emergency.”

Jacinta’s hands flew to her mouth in shock. “A Zanthswarm?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh God, the children, Sid, we have to get the children.”

“What’s happening?” Sid asked his e-i. “Why is there a code red?”

“HDA’s North Europe early-warning radar network is detecting spaceships entering Earth’s atmosphere.”

“What?”

Two hundred and eighty-three lightwave ships fell from the zenith of the glorious cerulean sky above Newcastle. They fell silently, discarding their stealth effect as they came swooping down on the unsuspecting city so they blossomed as dark aquamarine shapes in the eyes of the frantic residents staring upward. Though there were many sizes and profiles, from squat teardrops to giant spheres with stumpy twisted fins protruding from their equator, none of them were small.

A teardrop with fluted contours led the formation, arrowing down toward Last Mile. Similar, people noted, to the mysterious craft that had been glimpsed there exactly a week ago when the D-bomb plot was thwarted by their very own Ian Lanagin. For the final kilometer of its descent, thin trails of vapor sprouted from the tips of the malformed rings extending from its midsection. While its brethren began to slow languidly, this one moved with fast purpose, unwinding five spiraling snow-white contrails as it plummeted down.

The idle workforce of Last Mile’s struggling businesses spilled onto the Kingsway to watch the strange armada sink toward them. Images from iris smartcells and the meshes of Last Mile detonated across the transnet, projecting the sight across every trans-space world.

The lead spaceship finally decelerated hard, coming to a halt just above the metal bridge ramp that led into the silver phosphorescence of the gateway itself. With an ease belying its size and mass, it pitched over ninety degrees, presenting its nose to the trans-spatial connection. A moment later it flashed forward, flying through to St. Libra.

The rest of the spaceships continued their descent in a more measured, ominous fashion. They came down in a shoal, moving in graceful union, adjusting their position until they engulfed the gateway along with the vast concrete burrow that housed the machinery generating it.

Hundreds of figures sprinted away from the hovering ships, pouring out of the Border Directorate terminal, the cargo-processing halls, the pipeline control room, the administration offices, and the gateway engineering center. They looked back fearfully over their shoulders as they went, seeing fuselage hatches curtain open. Out tumbled an army of cybernetic termites: meter-long machines with spindly flexible legs and a chittering array of mandible tools. They swarmed the gateway, flooding through the open doors along the side and scampering over the concrete roof of the burrow to find vents, which they wormed their way into.

Within ten minutes the gateway’s remarkable shimmering oval of interdimensional radiance cooled and dimmed, evaporating like a wizard’s curtain to reveal a wall of densely packed, high-voltage physics machinery behind. The army of metallic scavengers were already crawling over it, jabbing their tools into the fissures between modules, prising open conduits, tugging out bundles of cabling. Lasers sparkled dazzling red as they sought to cut through the framework girders, sending sparks fountaining down to bounce along the bridge ramp like dying fireworks.

Slowly, and with single machine-purpose intent, they gnawed their way deeper and deeper into the bulk of the generator systems. Liberated sections were lifted out and carried away by the teeming victorious termites, flowing upward into the waiting spaceships.

With the dismantling process successfully instigated, one teardrop-shaped spaceship rose silently and streaked away to the north.

It had been fifty-five years since Constantine North had seen the truncated pyramid of rainbow prism glass that he and his two siblings had lived in for over forty years while they built their commercial empire. His spaceship came down on the lawn in front of the main doors, and he stepped out to breathe down the air of his birthworld. The smell of mown grass and the last fading cherry blossom summoned up memories and emotional resonances from the older, unreformed sections of his brain. He rather enjoyed the nostalgia, stopping to admire the grounds with their thick fence of trees and two long lakes. The trees had matured nicely over the intervening decades, giving the vista a shaggier, more natural appearance.

Constantine walked up the stone steps to the heavy glass doors of the main entrance, the Aldred-avatar at his side. Augustine was waiting in the cavernous central atrium, where the St. Libra vegetation reached almost to the ceiling. Several of his sons were standing beside him, forming an exemplary praetorian guard. Only when his visitors were inside did he start walking, the Rex exoskeleton legs humming quietly. He spared the hulking monster only the briefest of glances, proving to everybody how irrelevant he considered it.

“Brother,” Constantine said. “You look good. The rejuve treatment is working, yes?”

Augustine stood in front of him not offering any greeting, any acknowledgment of what was happening. “Aye, but not as well as yours, I see.”

“We refined Bartram’s methods, that’s all.”

Augustine smiled without humor, and looked at the monster again. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he bellowed, his self-control lost, spittle flying from his mouth. “You bring this, this… thing to my house. Our house!”

“Our lives are changing, Augustine. I need you to understand that. What better way… ?”

“Your life was nearly over, you stupid shit. I’ve spent the last ten minutes pleading with General Shaikh not to blow your spaceships to hell.”

“He can’t actually do that, but thank you for your intervention. I’ll call him myself soon, and offer him the lightwave drive by way of compensation for today. The military do so love shiny new technology. There’s always so many ways to abuse it.”

“And the gateway?” Augustine asked dangerously. “You’re destroying it.”

“I’m relocating it. This life is over, Augustine. Northumberland Interstellar, the bioil, the money, let it go. I have a life so much better waiting for both of us.”

“I have spent my life building that company; you spent more than half of yours as well. You can’t do this! Give me my gateway back. I’ll get the bioil flowing again if I have to nuke Sirius back into life myself.”

“It’s our gateway, brother, and I need it to save the life of everyone left on St. Libra, all the millions of humans cowering in the Independencies as they starve to death. Isn’t that a more noble goal to devote yourself to?”

“Save them? How? They can come back the same bloody way they went to their medieval squalor nations if you’d just leave the bloody thing alone.”

Constantine sighed and turned to the Aldred-avatar. “Show him.”

Behind Augustine, the bullwhip tree growing in the center of the atrium quivered. One of its lower coiled branches came lashing out, slamming into a marble bench, splitting it in two. Both halves skidded apart over the polished tile flooring, broken pebbles scattering wide. The branch slowly withdrew, coiling itself back up like a serpent returning to slumber.

Two targeting lasers were now shining out of the mansion’s pillars, tracking up and down the bullwhip’s trunk, trying to find the hidden hostile.