ARLT Section Dragon Three
Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar
2354 hours ST
The alarm in Garroway’s head brought him to full alertness, and he sat upright so sharply his head struck a projecting ledge on the bulkhead beside him.
He’d been trying to get some shut-eye, as Valdez had ordered, lying on a sleeping bag unrolled on the deck inside the Dragon Three LM. A command to his implant had begun to close down the waking portions of his brain, leaving him in a comfortable state of half-awareness when the alert came in.
Rubbing his head, he grabbed his helmet, gloves, and rifle and stumbled from the lander, along with several other Marines who’d been similarly awakened. “What the hell?” Corporal Womicki said. “I can’t link through!”
Garroway was trying to download an AI update through his link as well, and also without success. He kept getting the tone indicating a system error. The local node, however, was online, providing the disturbing news that a magnetic field was building inside the mountain’s core.
The bastards were getting ready to fire that god-awful gun again.
He saw Valdez, Lieutenant Kerns, and a handful of other Marines running across the LZ toward the gateway to the mountain. “Gunny!” he called out. “Where do we go?”
Valdez turned and looked at him, her face pale and sharp-edged. “Stay here, Private. You’re not trained for this.”
Trained for what? “I can learn, Gunny. Where do you want me?”
“Stay here! That’s an order!” And she was gone, jogging after Lieutenant Kerns.
Combat Information Center
IST Derna, in Ishtar orbit
2358 hours ST
The net had jammed.
It hadn’t gone down—thank all the gods of technology for that—but data could only flow from node to node through the system so fast, and when the data packets began queuing up, taking their turn in line, bottlenecks were sure to form.
Extremely tight, extremely dangerous bottlenecks.
A frequent problem in the early days of the Internet was narrow bandwidth, with too-small channels creating a traffic jam of data. Something of the sort was happening now, as more and more demands were placed on the transmission carriers, data-routing AIs, and relay nodes, both those on board the starships and those already on the planet.
The Algol had already launched two of the five communications satellites that would provide for full-time data access, but the net so far was operating only at about forty percent of full efficiency, with most of the storage, switching, and retrieval functions handled by Cassius on board the Derna. The streams of broadband data uploading continually to Derna’s CIC had already severely taxed the system.
Now, as the alert went out, the system slowed. First to be cut out were the low-ranking data requests—Marines on the ground, mostly, querying the system to see what was going on. As additional ground sensors kicked in to monitor events inside An-Kur, though, the communications blackout spread to upper echelons as well. Cassius was working to pull the system back into balance, but the effort would take a minute or two more yet….
Chamber of Seeing
Deeps of An-Kur
Eleventh Period of Dawn
The Godmind had a firm target lock. Fire!
The magnetic flux surged, sparking violet lightnings within the mountain core. A tiny sliver of rock, accelerated to nearly the speed of light, was transformed into a bolt of high-energy plasma flicking up the mountain’s throat in a tiny instant of time, deflected at the peak by powerful directional fields and sent searing through tortured atmosphere toward the target.
A hit!
Combat Information Center
IST Derna, in Ishtar orbit
2359 hours ST
Ramsey was still trying to open the data-stream channel between Derna and the LZ when the bolt flashed clear of Ishtar’s atmosphere and struck the Algol, in orbit less than fifty kilometers ahead of the Derna and the Regulus. In the noumenon, he could see the Algol as a bright star adrift above the slow-turning expanse of gold and violet clouds that was Ishtar’s curved horizon, saw the clouds suddenly burn blue-white…and in the same instant the star marking the transport flared to nova brightness.
Another instant passed…and then Derna’s AI sounded a ship alarm within the noumenon. “Debris on collision course. Debris on—”
Something struck the Derna, punching through the reaction mass tank like a bullet through cardboard. The shock sent the huge vessel into a tumbling roll.
Ramsey felt himself slam against a real-world bulkhead just before the noumenon snapped off, draining from his mind and leaving him in a dazed fog of disorientation and pain. It was pitch-black—power failure. He could hear the thrashing and panicked cries of others in the CIC and in the hab deck outside.