Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [121]
‘Stop them,’ their leader hissed. One of the apparitions faded away.
Dattani watched the tactical display as the anti-matter beams tunnelled down at the rate of about a mile a minute.
Any faster might trigger fusion and fission reactions, according to the scientists. Nevertheless, the progress of the drilling had a sense of inevitability to it.
‘Ready the bomber squadrons. When we’ve dug the hole we’re going to drop a couple of photon charges down there.’
The flight deck was suddenly quiet. Dattani turned.
His weapons officer was lying in a pool of his own blue blood. Every other man and woman on the bridge was also slumped, their throats slit. Dattani examined Kellerston the nearest.
A woman’s hand held up a bloodstained knife in front of his face.
‘A more primitive weapon than your anti-matter beams but effective.’
Dattani piped back. She was one of the enemy, a ghost.
She wore a stiff dark blue robe, through which he could see the twinkling lights of the battlecomputers. She was hairless, flat-chested and taller than he was, but she was undoubtedly female. Her voice came from all around him.
‘How did you do this?’
‘We are Ferutu, the Lords of Time. It was a simple matter to halt the flow of time and kill your crew, one by one.’
‘The entire crew?’
‘Yourself excepted.’ There were over two thousand people onboard the Ark Royal. Her robe and hands didn’t have a single drop of blood on them.
‘Why spare me?’
The Ferutu woman smiled, pointing at the screen. ‘So that you could see this.’
Dattani watched as each of the ships in the fleet exploded in turn. The smaller were first, the fighters and shuttles popping like firecrackers. Then the cruisers.and frigates burst open, their reactors exploding. The Admiral watched as their armour-plating peeled and blistered away leaving only the skeletal framework beneath. One of the carriers, possibly the Restoration, tried to escape but only managed to collide with the Skybase. Both were consumed in a raging atomic fire.
The screen was suddenly dark again.
‘What has happened?’ The view outside was a bare starscape, with no sign of the starships. It was an illusion, the fleet is unharmed.
‘Adjust the viewer,’ she requested. Dattam leant over the control panel and did so. The planet sat there, serene as ever. There was no spaceborne activity.
‘Where is the fleet?’ he asked.
‘Long gone,’ she said. ‘Now we are in the posthistoric future.’ Behind the planet, a swollen red sun was dawning.
‘Do not mourn your race’s passing. They were never meant to have been. To us, your galaxy is known as the Mutters Spiral the home of a benevolent mutant insect species. Life never evolved on your Earth. Goodbye, Admiral.’
And she was gone.
18
The Day After Yesterday
The storm was clearing, the clouds melting away almost as fast as they had appeared. With the end of the storm came the end of the blackout. The airwaves quickly became jammed with emergency broadcasts. Technicians hurried to repair the damage to the transmat network, the computers in the Scientifica pyramid hummed with activity as they began to collate damage reports.
Aircraft and skimmers had crashed and all the hospitals were full of accident and crime victims. There had been limited looting and vandalism in some sectors of the Strip.
The atmospheric disturbance had tripped the circuits of a thousand droids and sensors. The Pryanishnikov Waystation and the mountain it had been built on had vanished. The Provost-General and Chief Scientist were missing. The Battle Platform from the Icarus Skybase was alongside the Nightingale Facility.
When one of the computers tried to contact the Icarus Skybase, it registered something akin to panic. The entire planet was surrounded by millions of tonnes of shrapnel.
Much of the debris was already caught in the gravity well, explaining the marked increase in meteorite activity. The rest was a radioactive mass of scrap metal that posed a major navigation hazard. The computer projected that an armada equivalent in size to one of the Earth Fleets had