Great North Road (64 page)

Ravi and Dunham drove out to their Thunderthorn,
Bad Niobe,
under a cold desert night sky, with the stars twinkling brightly overhead—mocking them, Dunham said. Ravi loved the sight of the Thunderthorn’s aggressive 317-ton missile-tight profile, as he loved everything about the spaceplane, including the $1.8 billion unit cost. From nose to tail the SF-100 measured fifty-eight meters, with its variable sweep wings fully extended it was fifty-three meters tip-to-tip, while in their swept position for exoatmospheric flight the wings hunched back to a trim thirty-one meters. In full aerodynamic mode—hatches closed and weapons retracted—it was as sleek as its design team could make it, with sharp curving surfaces blending the wings efficiently into the fuselage; engine nacelles in the wingroots housed turbofans and rockets, sprouting twin shark-profile tailfins on top; a slight bulge on the upper fuselage for the oval cockpit capsule with its narrow silvered wraparound windshield. The fuselage was a shimmer-black metalloceramic, hugely resistant to the ferocious blasts of heat and radiation it would be soaked with in combat.

Ravi settled into the pilot’s seat and plugged his suit umbilicals into the sockets. The spaceplane’s tacnet began to upload New Florida exospheric arena data. US Tactical Aerospace Force loaded in their weapon codes. The ground crew chief confirmed tanks full and hoses uncoupling. Ravi released the ground brakes and the Thunderthorn rolled forward sedately, taking nineteenth place in the line of eighty-five war-ready Wild Valkyries.

The squadron emerged into the desert night one by one, and growled their way along the base’s taxiways to the trans-space deployment runway. At the far end the silver-gray oval of the war gateway awaited, like a smear of caged moonlight.

Ravi watched the squadron commander open up her Thunderthorn’s turbofans, and the big spaceplane surged forward, accelerating hard along the kilometer runway. The SF-100 had reached its top ground speed of three hundred kph when it streaked through the gateway. A second Thunderthorn was already accelerating along the runway behind it.

Five galling minutes of waiting later and Ravi was steering them onto the deployment runway, watching the four glaring salmon-pink exhausts of
Kickass Iole
racing away ahead of them. He rammed the throttles to max, and
Bad Niobe
surged forward eagerly amid a howl of turbines. Acceleration pushed him back into his seat.
Kickass Iole
vanished into the war gateway in front.

“Scared?” Ravi yelled out gleefully.

“Oh fuck yeah,” Dunham shouted back.

Ravi laughed in delight. And
Bad Niobe
shot through the war gateway—

—into space 750 kilometers above New Florida. Noise was sucked away as the thin vapor spume of Earth’s atmosphere that jetted through the gateway with them dispersed with an energetic sparkle, leaving them in the vacuum.
Bad Niobe
’s turbofans stuttered and died as their airflow vanished. Ravi’s grip on the joystick eased off slightly. The immediate locale seemed clear. Nacelle intake hatches slid shut. Already the war gateway had vanished, jittering away as all unanchored trans-spatial connections did. For once the phenomenon played out in the HDA’s favor, enabling Groom Lake to scatter Thunderthorns into a protective umbrella formation above their designated continent.

Ravi’s first five seconds were an imperative visual and tactical orientation.

The planet curved away beneath them, a horizon slicing across Dunham’s side of the windshield. New Florida’s thick cloud streamers gleamed bright in the gold-tinted sun. Oakland was a sprawl of brown mountains and blue-green vegetation, with its rivers and everglades flashing gold. In the little time Ravi had for a visual sweep he couldn’t see any signs of human civilization lurking beneath the lazy clouds. Nevertheless, there were twelve million US citizens living on the continent below, all desperately trying to reach the gateway that led back to Miami and safety. His task now was to buy them that time.

Already, bright stars were flaring, not far away by cosmic standards, incandescent blooms of plasma billowing wide. The first Mk-7009 nuclear missiles detonating against the enemy. Ravi never saw them shining brighter than quaint fireworks; the band filters of the cockpit windshield made sure of that.
Bad Niobe
wouldn’t let her human crew suffer from the radiation bursts and rampant high-energy particles that were starting to fill space above New Florida’s ionosphere.

Hatches irised open down
Bad Niobe
’s spine, allowing sensors slid out to scan around. A ruff of silver thermal-dump panels concertinaed upward from the rear fuselage, radiating away the heat generated by the Thunderthorn’s innumerable systems.

“Battle ready,” Dunham announced.

A 3-D radar display emerged from zero-point and expanded across Ravi’s field of vision, projected by his helmet visor. The image kept jumping, sharp graphic lines fuzzing and juddering.

“Heavy EMP out there,” he grunted. Twenty seconds since emergence, and they were already in the thick of it.
Bad Niobe
’s electronics were ultra-hardened against interference, but even her tacnet was affected, operating below optimum efficiency.

“Yeah. Quantum state is in deform, too. Can’t link to the geosats. We’ve got no comnet.”

“Ground stations?”

“Nah. Nukes and rent distortions are screwing the spectrum but good.”

“Okay. Let’s go do our job.”

Bad Niobe
was starting to fall. They hadn’t emerged at orbital velocity, the war gateway vector was locked relative to the planetary surface, so gravity was starting to make itself known. Ravi reached for the joystick again, triggering the reaction control thrusters. Burps of hot gas erupted from the tiny rocket nozzles clustered around the rear of the nacelles. The Thunderthorn swung around to stand on her tail, and … “Son of a motherfucker bitch,” Ravi whispered as the first true sight of their impassive, terrifyingly unbeatable enemy slid across the windshield.

Two hundred kilometers above them, the Zanth was tearing vast rents across spacetime to swarm into the New Florida star system. Jagged nebulae of scarlet and heliotrope were swirling and swelling in seemingly random fluctuations all around the habitable planet, a livid cloak that nearly blotted out the clean stars beyond. Out from the infinite nothingness of the open rents, chunks of Zanth resembling angular teardrops over two hundred meters across at the base were slowly oozing through. Like the Thunderthorns, their velocity relative to the planet was zero. But gravity soon captured them, pulling each chunk into a fall that accelerated them to terminal velocity long before they reached the atmosphere. Faux icebergs with boundless refractive internal planes, they scattered sunlight and starlight around them, casting an iridescent luster as they dived through empty space.

“Like being crapped on by a fallen angel,” Dunham grunted.

“No,” Ravi growled, angry at himself for being thrown by the spectacle of a billion tons of prismatic Zanth flakes cascading toward him. “There’s nothing angelic about this bastard.” He fired the
Bad Niobe
’s six main rockets. Hypergolic fuel mixed and burned in the bell-shaped nozzles at the back of the nacelles. Noise and vibration returned to the cockpit. Three g’s acceleration shoved him back hard into the seat, and the Thunderthorn rose on a searing cataract of flame toward the scintillating invader like a wrathful demigod.

Weapons bay hatches opened. D-bomb missiles telescoped out on their launch rails; their electronics were simple and hardened against the weird quantum instabilities created by the nulldimensional rents. The spherical warhead glowed with the violet malevolence of Cherenkov radiation as bands of exotic matter were restrained in their compressed state, barely extruding into spacetime.

Ravi cut the rocket engines, and
Bad Niobe
continued its silent climb. Directly ahead was a glimmering rent the shape of a mashed candyfloss bulb, tens of thousands of tiny scarlet fissures writhing together in a diabolical cyclone. Zanth chunks slithered out of the burning haze, moving with sedate grace as gold sunlight bathed their myriad facets, and they began their long plunge to the planet.

“That’s our bitch,” Ravi announced. The quantum sensors around the nose told him the rent was still eighty kilometers away.

“Arming four,” Dunham said. “I-G locked in. Ready to launch in fifteen.”

“Confirm.” Ravi punched his code into the weapons console. “We have actives. You have launch authority.” Radar was starting to pick up the first of the swarm’s shoals as they closed on New Florida. The damage any one of them would cause by just crashing into the land was enormous. Anybody within a couple of kilometers of one would die in the impact blastquake. Ravi wanted to fire every Mk-7009
Bad Niobe
carried, to nuke the Zanth chunks into radioactive fragments.

“It’s not going to make any difference,” he whispered. The deluge of cold twinkles were spread right across his view now, falling from every point in space. There were thousands of them, tens of thousands … And the swarm had only just begun.

“What?” Dunham asked.

“We’re not going to save anything. Nobody’s going to survive this.”

“For fuck’s sake, Ravi!”

Reality impact
the Groom Lake shrinks called it. The abrupt realization of the Zanth’s immensity. Faced by an enemy so overwhelming the human soul simply shrank to a fetal ball and whimpered piteously.

“Goddamnit,” Dunham snarled. He snapped the red guards off the launch switches and flicked each of them. “Four lights.”

Bad Niobe
trembled. The missiles streaked away at ten g’s, their solid rocket exhaust plumes enveloping the Thunderthorn in a swirl of fizzing sun-drenched particles that was over in seconds.

Ravi watched the plumes dwindle against the gyrating scarlet rent. The monstrous constellation of Zanth chunks shimmered, growing steadily brighter as gravity pulled them closer.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Dunham demanded.

“Can you see what’s out there?”

“Oh yeah. I can see it. Ten seconds until D-bomb contact.”

Ravi tried not to sneer at the brash optimism. The quantum distortion thrown out by the rents played havoc with electronics. They’d be lucky if just one of the missiles even reached the scarlet horror above. Nonetheless, he found himself counting down.

Two D-bombs flared, brilliant magenta starbursts of spatial discontinuity pumped by hundred-megaton fusion explosions, devastating the delicately balanced crimson effervescence that extended back out of spacetime to what-or-wherever the Zanth originated. The D-bombs bruised the rent. Ravi could see the brown stain of fractured pseudodimensional fabric shiver, recoiling like living tissue struck by a thunderbolt. The stain spread,
fast,
ripping through the conductive scarlet fronds. Twisting them. The rent shuddered, spitting out streamers of bizarre energy, as if it were weeping. Then the entire edifice withered, imploding to resurrect a swath of normal space. And the ever-falling swarm of Zanth.

Ravi grinned ferociously at them. The D-bombs had worked against the rent, sealing it up.
We can make a difference. A small one, but tangible.

He scanned the radar display.
Bad Niobe
’s digital functionality was improving again now that the rent was gone. The tacnet was plotting vectors for the descending Zanth chunks. Mk-7009s rose out of their bays.

“Let’s do some damage,” Ravi said.

Four hours in free fall above New Florida. More evasive maneuvers than Ravi recalled. Hypergolic fuel down to 20 percent. A second phase of rents were snaking into existence, five hundred kilometers higher than the first. From
Bad Niobe
’s altitude, their D-bombs would just reach the new rents. They had seven Mk-7009s left. Once they were gone, the spaceplane would have to let gravity win, begin the long glide back to the surface and through a gateway to Groom Lake where they could re-up the fuel and warloads.

Four D-bombs soared away toward the spiky vermillion fissure above.

“Incoming,” Dunham warned.

Ravi had already seen the hail of boulder-sized particles sweeping in.
Bad Niobe
’s rockets burned ferociously, powering them away. Their sector had steadily become more hazardous as it filled with blast debris hurtling in every direction. He gripped the joystick, rolling the big Thunderthorn. More systems were dropping out. Somewhere south at a lower altitude, a dozen nukes detonated. The radar display was showing almost nothing.

“I don’t—” Ravi began.

The impact noise was loud enough to strike his head like a physical blow. He didn’t know if he lost consciousness or not—he certainly couldn’t make sense of anything for an indeterminate time. When he did try to focus again, he couldn’t hear anything, not even his own breathing. His suit had stiffened.
Cabin puncture!
Didn’t need what was left of the display graphics to know
Bad Niobe
was tumbling erratically as gravity tugged them down. Something was obscuring half his vision; graphics wiggled across the inside of a dark splodge. His hand came up instinctively to wipe the helmet visor. Gauntlet fingers came away red.

“Dunham.” Ravi wiped some more of the blood away, twisting around. “Dunham—oh fuckit!” His muscles locked rigid in shock. The pebble-sized Zanth fragment that’d penetrated both the metalloceramic fuselage and the cockpit capsule’s impact armor shielding had sliced Dunham’s head clean off, taking quite a lot of the shoulder with it. The battered helmet was still bouncing casually around the cockpit, spun about by the still-flailing spaceplane.

Ravi fought hard against vomiting. A hand instinctively flipped open his suit’s thigh pouch. He bumped the nausea suppressor. Warm buzz of the drug gushing along his bloodstream.

Priority: Stop
Bad Niobe
’s tumble. He applied pressure to the joystick, finding out what was left of the reaction control system simply by seeing what response he got to each nudge. The port nacelle seemed to have taken the most damage. Slowly he canceled out the giddying motion with incremental burps of gas, bringing the wounded spaceplane to a halt—forty-degree inversion relative to the planet, nose pointing at the southeast horizon. The chewed-up flight console was rearranging itself as the tacnet used the remaining display screens to show essential information.
Bad Niobe
was still venting something from a split tank. The nose began to drift again.