Stephen Baxter - Starfall

"That," said Kale, "looked like a nuclear weapon."

"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 to us?"

"It's the comet, sir. You were right, Captain."

The stray comet, buried deep in the heart of Sol system, had burst, transforming in a flash into a shoal of kinetic-energy weapons—dumb 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 comet bombs had first targeted the off-planet infrastructure. The planet's 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.

A second wave of the comet-ice bombs was raining down into the atmosphere, targeting 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. "Anyhow we don't think so. Some collateral stuff—where dams have come down, for instance. And the smart plague has hit monorails and flitters and orbital shuttles; you have stuff just falling out of the sky, crashes everywhere."

"They're disabling us rather than killing us," Stillich said.

"Looks that way," growled the Admiral. "So they got in through stealth. I should have listened to you about that damn comet, Captain. You must be sick of being told you were right."

Stillich shook his head. "It's not important, Admiral. What scares me is what else we have missed. That's been the trouble through this whole exercise. None of us can imagine—"

Pella held her hand up, her hand at her ear. "Wait. There's another of their messages coming through." She touched her data desk. The same booming male voice, with its flat Alphan accent, sounded out. " ... free citizens of Alpha system and the inhabited stars have no quarrel with the people of Sol system, but with your government. We mean this final strike to be a demonstration of our capability. Please take all precautions necessary, especially along the North Atlantic seaboard. The free citizens of Alpha system ... "

Pella looked at Stillich nervously. "What 'final strike'?"

There was a burst of light in the west, like a sudden dawn. Again everybody flinched. The light seemed to draw down the sky, too bright for Stillich to look at directly.

"Call a flitter," he snapped at Pella.

'Sir—"

“Do it! Get us out of here. And find a way to get a warning to the Empress in New York."

Sol system

They hung a huge Virtual globe of the Earth in the lifedome of the Freestar, Flood's flagship. The crew watched the disaster unfold, mouths slack in awe.

The Atlantic impactor had been the biggest single chunk of the comet, but it had been as precisely targeted as the rest. It had come down in the middle of the ocean, on a ridge of continental-crust formation about a thousand kilometres south of a small island called Iceland.

From viewpoints on the ground, a particle of light was seen to descend from the sky, touching the water, and then, behind a wall of boiling cloud, a pencil of light shot vertically to the sky.

From space, as rings of cloud expanded, a fireball blossomed, clinging to the carcass of the planet like a boil. The cloud rings merged to become a solid torus, centred on the fireball, and then more clouds formed at higher level. A shock wave spread out through the cloud layer, a reflection of a ring of waves spreading out across the ocean, a water ripple dragging a wall of cloud with it.

The ripple in the ocean emerged into clear air. It was barely visible by the time it approached the land, at Newfoundland to the west and Ireland to the east. But it mounted quickly as it hit the shallowing bottoms of the continental shelves, water forced up into a heap, a wave with the volume and vigour to smash its way onto the land. All around the basin of the North Atlantic the steel-grey of the ocean overwhelmed the greenish grey of the land, the complexities of coastal topography shaping the water's thrusts. As the Alphans watched, the continents changed shape.

Beya was Flood's eldest daughter. At twenty-five years old she had become one of his most capable officers. She watched the repeated diorama in shock. "I heard garbled reports. In some of those lands around the rim of the ocean, before the wave came, they said there was salt in the rain. You know, when I heard that, I didn't know what 'rain' was, exactly. J had to look it up." She laughed. "Isn't that strange?"

"This is a demonstration," Flood said grimly. "The people of Earth know that far larger impactors have battered the planet in the past, causing vast pulses of death, even extinction. This will show them that we want victory, not destruction—but we hold destruction in our hands. This will work on their imaginations."

"Well, it's working on mine," Beya said. "Dad, I never saw an ocean before. A moon-full of liquid water, just sitting there without a dome! Earth is alive, you can see it, not some lump of rock. And now we've hurt it."

"We were never going to be able to loosen the eight-hundred-year grip of the Shiras without being strong."

"But they will never forgive us for this," Beya said.

"It's necessary, believe me." He reached for her shoulder, then thought better of it. "Any news of the Second Wave, the comet crew?"

"Nothing was left of the comet, it seems."

"Maybe the imperial military got to it. That's one ship I'm glad I wasn't on, I must say." He glanced over, to see the Virtual Earth running through its cycle of trauma once again. "Shut that thing down," he called. "Look, we broke through their outer perimeter without a single loss. In twelve hours we make perihelion, closest approach to the sun. We've all got work to do. Tomorrow, it's Sol himself!"

Solar orbit

The Thoth habitat was a compact sculpture of electric blue threads, a wormhole Interface surrounded by firefly lights. The surface of the sun, barely twenty thousand kilometres below the habitat, was a floor across the universe. Thoth was over nine hundred years old. And all his long life it had been home to Sunchild Folyon, leader of the little community which maintained Thoth, a legacy from the past, held in trust for the future.

But now the rebel fleet was approaching its perihelion, its closest approach to the sun—and Thoth's most significant hour since its construction by Michael Poole was almost upon it.

After prayers that morning Folyon went straight to the habitat's bridge, where, even through the prayer hours, shifts of sunchildren maintained watch over Thoth's systems and position. The mood on the bridge was tense, for the wormhole into the heart of the sun had been shut down for twenty-four hours already, a time unprecedented in Folyon's memory; maintenance downtimes were usually measured in minutes.