Seconds later, the floor disintegrated, with vast chunks of concrete whirling upward, their molten edges throwing off glowing droplets. Beneath the torn rift a dazzling jade-white light poured upward to blind the cameras. Small tendrils of energy followed an instant later, scratching and clawing at every neutral surface, vaporizing metal and obliterating plastic and glass.
Then the light went out. An Alamo Avenger heaved itself up and out into the flame-shrouded ruin of the laboratory. Its head swung around to focus on its goal, casually demolishing a wall and several support pillars. Chunks of masonry and the shattered floor of the upstairs laboratory crashed down, only to slither and bounce off the armored monster’s force field. The six legs shifted around, turning the body until it was lined up behind the head, pointing directly toward the gateway. It moved forward, slowly at first, smashing through another internal wall. Gradually it built up speed.
As it charged through the constructionbot maintenance center, the floor ruptured underneath its feet. Slightly off balance, it lumbered onward for a few meters, then stopped and twisted its head around to see if there was any threat. Impenetrable jets of dust gushed up from the new rip in the ground. Then a second Alamo Avenger pushed and forced its way out of the tunnel. The first waited until it was level, then they began their final charge toward the assessment building and the gateway.
The café was utterly silent as Alessandra Baron’s overawed voice announced the rise of the spaceplanes. Adam realized he was licking his upper lip in anticipation, and hurriedly stopped. The images shifted from the smoldering land around the complex force field dome to a clean graphic of the assembly platform’s orbit around the planet. In conjunction with Baron’s now-somber voice they illustrated the impending destruction. Figures in the corner of the screen counted down. They almost matched the timer in Adam’s virtual visual.
Second Chance had at most another four minutes. He took a quick look around the rapt faces of the other customers, seeing horror and fascination in equal amounts. For once he didn’t feel any guilt at what he’d done. There were no innocents in the assembly platform, no children devoid of memorycells. Not this time. This time it would be right.
Someone working for Baron’s show managed to access the microsat geosurvey observation swarm around Anshun. Thousands of tiny solid-state sensors along the equatorial orbit shifted their alignment from the minerals buried far below to one specific speck of light. The assembly platform swam into focus at the center of the screen, a giant blue-gray sphere of malmetal. Its featureless symmetry gave it a strangely organic appearance, Adam felt.
Dark lines appeared on the surface, illustrating long petallike shapes. Adam blinked, leaning forward. They hadn’t been there a second before, he was sure. Then long, slim fantails of snow-white gas were shooting out from the spherical surface as the dark lines split open. Sunlight poured into the assembly platform, erasing the weak glow of emergency lighting; the starship’s incomplete superstructure gleamed silver-white at the center of an expanding cloud of vapor.
“No way,” Adam groaned. His timer read a hundred fifty seconds until impact.
Two plasma rockets ignited, wiping out the image in a white nova of super-energized particles. Both exhaust plumes blasted straight through the shell of folded malmetal, sending twin spears of light stabbing over a hundred kilometers down toward the planetary surface. Some of the plasma plume rebounded off the surviving structure, billowing backward around the starship and its swath of girders. Insulation blankets and cables lashed around as they dissolved back into their component atoms, while support girders melted away into pliable strings that stretched like hot cheese as the starship started to move away from the gateway. Component cargo pods ignited, shooting out from the stellar inferno like lurid orange comets, trailing a fluorescent haze behind them as their contents blazed.
The Second Chance began to accelerate away. Her huge body wavered at first as the programs and pilot—Adam wondered whether it was Kime himself—analyzed the nonsymmetric mass distribution along the fuselage. As soon as they’d mastered that, the rockets were vectored to compensate, and the starship held steady as she built velocity, heading straight up from the planet. Behind her, there was a last violent contortion amid the seething molten wreckage as the force field protecting the gateway finally ruptured. Atmospheric gas spewed out into the void, bringing with it a host of fragments from the ruined assessment room. The jet’s vigor was reduced for a few seconds as something pushed its way along the wormhole. Then like a cork from a bottle, a small force field globe burst through; it glimmered amid the debris storm as it was propelled onward by the aggressive blast of air from the gateway behind. The dark, heavy object within the sparkling bubble spun helplessly around and around as it soared away through space. Behind it, the gush of atmosphere was reduced once again. A second golden orb came through, tumbling off into the void after the first.
By now the Second Chance was twenty-five kilometers away, a dazzling elongated star ascending up toward the bright constellations. The first spaceplane leaped into view. Its tremendous closing velocity meant that there was only the briefest glimpse on the screen—a streamlined silver-gray delta shape—before it slammed into the cooling ruins of the assembly platform. The explosion that erupted was indistinguishable from a small nuclear blast. As the sphere of incandescent atoms began to darken, it suddenly renewed itself as the second spaceplane pierced its heart.
A hundred kilometers above, the Second Chance was still accelerating out toward the stars.
ELEVEN
Hoshe had thought that the flood of data would slow down after the first couple of days. Now, a week on from his initial request, he knew better. For shadowy creatures who lived outside society’s boundaries, there was an awful lot of information stored on the so-called big-time crime syndicates. On Oaktier, there were three main such organizations recognized by the police: the Johasie family, an old-fashioned mafia-style network of related hoodlums, but with enough brains and lawyers to disconnect the bosses from all the activities of their street-level soldiers; Foral Ltd., a company whose board seemed to have diversified down into crime, both financial and street; and Area 37, the smartest and most elusive, whose murky empire was bolstered by legitimate businesses and, apparently, political connections. They were based in Darklake City, and for that reason alone Hoshe favored them as the most likely suspects to murder Shaheef and Cotal. It was simple geography. Neither of the lovers had traveled outside Darklake for weeks before they disappeared. If they had accidentally stumbled on something that required their removal, then it was Area 37 who probably had the kind of resources and connections to make it happen. But what could two innocent civilians walk into that required a response of that magnitude?
The official files on organized crime syndicates Hoshe had retrieved from the Attorney in Chief’s office contained all the previous investigations, plus the alarmingly unsuccessful court cases they resulted in. Of those, reports filed by undercover operatives and informants were the most useful. The Attorney’s office knew the major and minor players, and had a general idea of what they were up to most of the time; proving anything legally was the perennial problem.
Proven or not, the files covering suspected events forty years ago were of little use. There simply weren’t any killing sprees, or violent clashes with rivals, or even big heists. It was just a steady drip feed of money from clubs, gambling, chemical and digital narcotics, prostitution, bank scams, and dubious development contracts.