Peter Hamilton - Judas Unchained

“What have you got?” Hoshe asked.

“I’m not sure. I think I’ve just seen Isabella Halgarth.”

“Where?”

“Allwyn Street, near the Lanvia Avenue turn.”

“Hold please, I’m accessing the civic sensors.”

Renne kept an eye on traffic, and hurried out into the road. Horns tooted furiously at her as cars braked. A cyclist screamed obscenities as he wobbled past. “She’s getting into a taxi.” The girl vanished in a blue and green vehicle, and the door shut.

“Number?” Hoshe demanded.

“I can’t see, damnit. The logo is an orange trumpet, it’s on the doors.” She flagged down a taxi. “She’s heading west.” The maroon Ables Puma drew up beside her. “Just drive west,” she told the drive array.

“All right, I’m filtering traffic control arrays for a match,” Hoshe said. “Murray cabs have that trumpet logo.”

“Renne, you need backup,” Paula said. “Don’t go near her. She’s extremely dangerous.”

“I won’t.” She switched on her force field skeleton suit. “Just observing.”

“Okay, I’ve got a police team in their car,” Hoshe said. “Leaving the Green-field garage now.”

Renne was pressed up against the taxi’s front windshield, retinal inserts searching through the traffic ahead for the blue and green Ables. Her OCtattoos reported a sophisticated scan washing across her, immediately pinpointing the source. She turned quickly to see Isabella Halgarth standing on the pavement, looking straight at her. The girl’s right arm was raised, pointing at the taxi.

“Oh, shit.” Renne closed her eyes.

The maser struck the taxi’s power cells, which exploded with enough fury to lift the disintegrating car three meters off the ground. Renne’s force field was overwhelmed in the first second. But it did provide enough protection that when the paramedics started to pick up the sections of her body that had been flung over a wide radius they found her memorycell was intact. After re-life procedure, Renne would be able to remember her death.

The assembly platform brought back memories of the Second Chance being constructed above Anshun. To Nigel that whole period seemed like centuries ago now, a time when life was a great deal quieter and more leisurely. Giselle Swinsol and Nigel’s own son, Otis, were leading him through the platform’s gridwork maze inside a huge cylinder of malmetal, where the Speedwell was under construction. The Dynasty’s colony ship was much bigger than the Second Chance, a lengthy cluster of spherical hull sections arranged along a central spine. So far, Nigel had authorized eleven of the vast ships, with initial component acquisition consent for another four. In theory, just one ship could carry enough equipment and genetic material to establish a successful high-technology human society from scratch. But Nigel had wanted to begin with more than the basics, and his Dynasty was the largest in the Commonwealth. A fleet would make absolutely sure any new human civilization they founded would succeed. Now, though, he wasn’t sure if that second batch would ever be built. Like everyone else, he’d expected the navy warships to have some success against Hell’s Gateway. The moment when the navy detector network saw the Prime wormholes come back to the Lost23 had come as a savage surprise to him. He really hadn’t been prepared for a defeat of that magnitude.

“We’ve commissioned four now,” Otis was saying. “The Aeolus and the Saumarez should be ready for their preliminary trials in the next ten days.”

“Don’t quote me, but we might not have ten days,” Nigel said. “Giselle, I want you to review our emergency protocols for evacuating as much of the Dynasty as possible onto the lifeboats during an invasion. Coordinate with Campbell. We’ll need to establish hardened wormhole connections to our parties. The exploratory division wormholes will be our principal method, but we’ll need backup procedures ready.”

“Got it.” Her elegant face was slightly puffed in freefall, but she still managed a worried expression. “How likely is that?”

Nigel halted his steady drift by grabbing a carbon strut at the base of a high-mass manipulator. He was looking out at the Speedwell’s drive section, a mushroom hemisphere at the front of the starship with fluted edges that curved backward like a protective umbrella over the forward sphere sections. The outer skin was a smooth blue-green boronsteel, with a sheen that gave it the overall appearance of a beetle’s carapace.

Most of the platform’s robotic systems were folded back into the cylindrical gridwork that encased the vast starship. All of the prefabricated sections from Cressat had been locked into place; the few remaining areas of activity were involved with integrating the spheres to the ship’s power and environmental circuits.

“Only the Primes know,” he said. “But after our failure at Hell’s Gateway I don’t think it’ll be long before they respond.”

“They don’t know where this world is,” Otis said. “They don’t even know it exists; it isn’t on any database in the Commonwealth. Hell, when it comes down to it, Cressat would be tough to find. That gives us a breathing space.”

“I don’t want to evacuate,” Nigel said. “Using this fleet still remains the last option as far as I’m concerned. As of now, I’m prepared to use our weapon to defend the Commonwealth. That’s what I’m here to tell you.”

Otis gave him a tight smile. “Are we using the frigates to launch them?”

“Yes, son, you get to fly combat missions.”

“Thank Christ for that. I thought I was going to wind up sitting this out.”

“Don’t be so gung ho about this. I’m trying to avoid bloodshed.”

“Dad, you’re going to genocide them.”

Nigel closed his eyes. These days he often found himself wishing he believed in God, any god, just some omnipotent entity who’d listen sympathetically to the odd prayer. “I know.”

“The frigates aren’t even approaching readiness,” Giselle said. “And our weapon hasn’t been tested. We’ve only just completed component fabrication.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Nigel said, glad of a solid, practical problem to focus on. “We’re going to have to accelerate our schedule.”

“If you say so, but I don’t see how.”

“Show me what we’ve got so far.”

Frigate assembly bay one was a separate malmetal chamber affixed to the side of the main platform like a small black metal barnacle. Nigel drifted into it through a narrow interlink tube whose bands of electromuscle pulled him along with the ease of a ski lift. His first impression was that he’d emerged into the engine room of some colossal nineteenth-century steamship. It was hot and loud, a metallic clanking reverberating continually through air that was heavy with the smell of burning plastic. Big gantry arms swished across the few open spaces like ancient engine pistons. Smaller robotic manipulators rolled along their tracks, darting out with serpentine agility to peck at some chunk of compact machinery. Circular scarlet hologram signs were flashing everywhere Nigel looked, warning people away from the complex moving parts. At the center of the mechanical commotion the frigate Charybdis was a dark mass of densely packed components. Eventually, it would be a flattened ellipsoid, fifty meters long, encased by an active-stealth composite; but at this point the hull hadn’t been fitted.

“How near are we to completion?” Nigel asked.

“Several days,” Giselle said. “Flight readiness comes quite a while after that.”

“We can’t afford that kind of delay, not now,” Nigel said. He twisted his cuff off a fuseto patch, and drifted in for a closer look. “Where are we with the other three frigate assembly bays?”