Infinite Day (102 page)

“Preliminary calculations place it 800 million kilometers away, moving at 10 million kilometers an hour and slowly decelerating.”

“Very clever. It's being tugged by multiple thruster units.”

“Have to be continuously monitored and damped to stop resonances building up. That's some engineering.”

“Data on the accompanying fleet coming in: Silverfish spotted. At least six. Twenty-plus other vessels.”

“Four full-suppression complexes.”

“And eight . . . look like military freighters.”

“Looks like they're heading for Earth orbit.”

Ethan called out a question. “The military freighters; anyone got any ideas what they are for?”

“Yes,” Vero said softly. “Invasion equipment. Krallen. Artillery. That sort of thing.”

Ethan blinked. “I see.”

“When?” Merral asked. “When will they be here?”

“They could be on top of us in just over a week.”

“Make that six days. Next Lord's Day. Maybe.”

“Anything in the way?”

“No. Jupiter's the other side of the sun. Mars is well to the side. They are coming straight at us.”

Ethan drew Merral to one side. “They are here. Far sooner than we expected. And with that
thing
.”

“I'm afraid so,” Merral said. “An oversight. But it vindicates the decision not to use Daybreak.”

“Just so. We'd have missed it.” Ethan shrugged. “Well, some of my decisions are easy.” He caught Seymour's eye and waved him over. “Commander, prepare an attack as soon as possible. See if we can destroy that thing.”

Over the next dozen hours, the appearance of the Blade began to change. The blue discharges faded away, and then gradually its image grew hazy. A high-powered asteroid observation scope showed that a cloud of dust and gas was gathering around it.

After three hours a flickering red glow started to appear as the dust particles became heated and charged. Soon a radiant cloud had enveloped the entire length of the Blade, and within hours the estimates were that it was at least a hundred kilometers thick. The thirty accompanying vessels kept a safe distance from the nebula of hot gas.

Merral stood back as Seymour and the orbital engineers designed the interception attack. Twenty-five vessels with over a thousand crew were to be involved in the largest Assembly attack force to date. They were to be backed up by three modified Guardian satellites using pulsed, multispectral lasers. There could be no hope of surprise, only the hope that firepower and determination would win the day.

Twenty-six hours after the Blade and its escorts had appeared in the system, the attack began.

It was all over in ninety minutes.

Twenty-one Assembly vessels were destroyed; the remaining four fled with serious damage. Eight Dominion vessels, including two full-suppression complexes, were destroyed, but no damage was done to the Blade, secure behind its ever-growing fiery cloud of gas and dust. One large thermonuclear warhead was detonated less than a hundred kilometers away, but it caused no apparent damage.

The evaluation meeting held very late that night was a somber affair. The defenses had been effectively impenetrable, and the dust and gas had safely screened the Blade from laser attack. The other weapons had been ineffectual. It was not simply that there were batteries of beam weapons that struck down anything heading toward the Blade. It seemed to be something else—a strange aura so that pilots found themselves disoriented or so terrified that they gave up attack runs. The curse also struck machines so that robotically targeted missiles lost their lock on the target and either failed to detonate or swung past.

After two hours, near desperation reigned. Ethan ran his fingers through thinning hair again and asked in a dulled monotone, “Any more comments? Other than the obvious?”

Vero, who had somehow inserted himself at the table, raised a finger. “Just an observation. I think we haven't considered the loss ratio carefully enough. It poses such problems for the lord-emperor that there are serious implications.”

Everyone apart from Seymour, evidently lost in thought, looked at Vero. The expressions were puzzled and hostile.

“We lost, Sentinel,” said a physicist with anger in his voice, “and badly, or didn't you notice? Four to one!”

“I can do the m-math.” Vero's voice was brittle. “But pay attention. The Assembly is vastly bigger than the Dominion and just starting to rearm. We can—dare I say it?—absorb such losses. In a year's time, we could field a hundred ships and beat such a fleet.” His brown eyes looked urgently around. “Do you see the implications?”

Ethan gave him the slow, numbed stare of a man who has had too much bad news. “Spell them out.”

“They have to deal us a knockout blow now, or they are finished. We have known it since the start. This confirms that they will come here. They
must
seize Earth and the Gates.”

There were nods of agreement now.

“So how do we stop them?” Ethan asked.

Vero looked hard at him. “I don't suppose we can make a polyvalent fusion weapon in time.”

Ethan gave a slow shake of the head. “Hardly. And anyway—”

“Sir, we have one.” One of the engineering team interrupted him.

“What? Where?”

“Orbital Factory Four, sir,” she answered. “We made two for Project Daybreak. It's such a complex procedure that we had to face the possibility that the bomb might be nonfunctional. So we made two—just in case. Only the one was sent to Sarata, and only that one was destroyed.” She paused. “We have a decommissioned bomb at Orbital Factory Four.”

Merral saw Vero glance at him and read the wild excitement in his eyes.
That's where the
Sacrifice
is.

Ethan turned to the engineer. “Why wasn't I told? We could have used it.”

“Sir, because it wasn't held to be significant.” The woman was flustered. “And because its use wasn't—and isn't—considered feasible.”

It's too lethal to be used within the system.

“Are you sure?”

“Sir, it needs twenty hours of work to commission it and prime it. And even if we could deliver it, the blast wave would be strong enough to strip off the outer atmosphere of the Earth.”

“Hit us all with hard radiation,” someone else added.

“Would we survive?”

Merral saw Seymour gaze around with a distracted expression and wondered if the man had heard a word of what was being discussed.

The engineer continued. “Depends which hemisphere was facing the blast. The far side might survive for a few weeks until the wind and waves took the radiation around. Sir, it was a nonstarter. And now as it gets closer, it's even less feasible.”

Ethan sighed.

Merral saw Vero rise from his seat and gesture him to the door. Making apologies, they left the room.

“My friend, I want to get some fresh air and to think.”

They climbed up the stairs and were allowed onto the roof by a guard. It was nearly midnight, and the city roofs were bathed in silver moonlight. Below them were pinpricks of orange light from the houses.
The news would be out; even at this late hour most will be awake.

Merral breathed in the cold night air and was silent.

Finally his friend spoke. “
One
, we have a b-bomb that may do the trick.
Two
, we have—next to it—a ship that could d-deliver that bomb.”

“But
three
, we have a bomb we cannot fire.”

“I know. Somehow, it must just add up. But how?”

Merral said nothing and stared at the sky. To the west a patchy haze of cloud obscured the stars.
There is rain coming in, they say.
He turned his gaze up to the three-quarters moon, close to setting.
I still find that extraordinary.

“As a child,” Merral said eventually, as much to himself as to Vero, “I used to envy people growing up on Earth being able to see the moon. Then when I was at college I used to ask myself why it had taken people on Earth so long to realize the way the Solar system worked when they had so obvious an orbiting satellite above them.”

Vero grunted. “I took the moon for granted until I went to Farholme. I was delighted to see it again the other night for the first time in over a year.”

“It's hard to believe how scarred it is.”

“The Lord put it there to guard and protect us. Those scars might have been ours. It got in the way of a lot of meteors and comets.” The words were flat; Merral sensed a repetition of some long-remembered teaching. “It stopped the bullets.” Vero hesitated. “It stopped . . . the bullets,” he repeated. “
Wait!
”

Suddenly Vero was running for the doorway and the stairs. “Quick! Jorgio was right. It's a formula. A formula! I need a physicist.” The words tumbled over each other. “And an orbital mechanics person. An atmospheric specialist, too. A radiation expert.
Quick!
”

In fifteen minutes, Vero had the people he needed. “Gentlemen, ladies, I have an idea and I want you to give me an answer as to whether it will work.”

After half an hour the table was overlain with bits of paper covered with formulae. Vero looked around. “So, will it work?”

The physicist frowned. “It's a desperate venture, but it might. . . .”

The orbital mechanics expert hesitated. “If there's no other option, I suppose . . .”

The atmospheric specialist scratched her nose. “I'm not enthusiastic. But, well, maybe . . .”

The radiation expert shook his head. “It's an awful gamble. But . . .”

Vero smiled. “I t-take that as approval. So let me summarize. On its present trajectory and speed, the Blade of Night will pass behind the moon between 11:13 and 11:22 p.m. Jerusalem time on the night of the seventeenth of February. That's four days away. It will be sufficiently close that the moon will fully cover the disk of the earth at 11:18. That's vital.”

His words were greeted by cautious and hesitant nods of agreement. Vero continued. “If we can explode that polyvalent fusion weapon within twenty to thirty kilometers of the Blade, then Earth will be effectively protected.”

“Probably.”

“All being well.”

“We need to model it,” said the atmospheric specialist. “There will be atmospheric disturbances. Loss of radio signals. Possibly climatic effects.”

“How many of our people would be killed?” Merral asked.

The orbital mechanist spoke. “We'd lose the lunar far side bases—two hundred people there. Probably another couple of hundred on spaceships and stations. Most of the Gate axes are such that they would be sideways on to the radiation blast. They'll survive.”

“We could minimize those losses by giving a solar flare warning five minutes earlier,” Vero said.

“That might halve your losses. Say a hundred dead.”

“You'd never get near enough. We haven't the ships to protect a delivery vessel. Not anymore.”

“I only need one ship,” Vero looked at Merral. “And we have that. My friend, call in Ethan and Seymour.”