At the centre of the complex lay the main lounge, a waiting and refreshment area for the thousands departing Salvaston or arriving upon it. The lounge itself was a mile across, its ceiling a chainglass confection of peaks and domes. Across a wide marble floor patterned like raspberry-ripple ice cream extended an assortment of restaurants, bars, tea shops and vending machine stalls, amid enormous seating areas. There were even walled gardens boasting a variety of exotic plants and creatures, for instance the one adjoining the Lobster Lobby, into which customers could throw the remains of their dinners to feed the carnivorous ambulatory cacti. There were numerous ponds and fountains too, like the cerulean pool in which swam G-mod goldfish glowing with internal neon. The lounge looked like some massive bazaar, street market, shopping mall and waiting room all rolled into one. However, it was nothing unusual, since places like this evolved wherever travel was nailed down to such a nexus.
What was unusual here today was the proportion of people wearing uniforms. There were troops in chameleoncloth fatigues who, out of courtesy, wore oversuits of some thin white fabric while mixing in civilian company, since there is nothing quite as disconcerting as encountering a disembodied head bobbing about in a crowd. There were also the familiar blue and yellow uniforms of ECS Rescue personnel, and military-issue ECS envirosuits, which possessed the same qualities as chameleoncloth but, their effect being electrically generated, could easily be turned off. Very occasionally, amid this crowd, the menacing shape of a war drone attracted comment and attention.
From this main area concourses radiated off to smaller departure and arrival lounges — the designation of each dependent on what the AI had currently set the nearest runcible to do, which sometimes could be performing both functions. Those departing never had very long to wait, since delays in runcible travel were practically unheard of and all bureaucratic details and security measures were enacted electronically through sensors and augmentations, and at speeds way below the notice of sluggardly human minds. New arrivals from other worlds coming through the fifty-three passenger runcibles were greeted by relatives or quickly went on their way. The proliferation of uniforms today did attract brief notice, but a few enquiries via aug or gridlink soon reassured the curious that this martial presence was due to a huge Polity fleet presently in orbit about Salvaston. Many of them had no need to wonder, since the presence of the fleet was the reason they had come: either preparing to join or simply out of curiosity about what was happening out here.
The arrival designated XAN-7834 from Xanadu might have been able to answer some of their queries, had it been able to talk and had it managed to come intact through the Skaidon warp. The Salvaston AI, monitoring numerous runcibles scattered across the planet and every microsecond making complex calculations it would take a human prodigy a lifetime to complete, kenned the arrival of the passenger in the underspace spoon of the runcible and was immediately niggled by some inconsistencies. There was something odd about the information package describing this traveller, but the AI just could not put its metaphorical finger on it. In an instant it upgraded security in that particular runcible chamber and prepared to deep-scan this new arrival. The spoon began to retract, drawing the traveller towards the real.
Detonation.
In a place somewhere between realspace and U-space, the octopoid detonated its imploder. The blast within the spoon expanded it, and also forced its way through the Skaidon warp. The face of that warp, as seen from the side of the runcible chamber, turned incandescent. Filtering through the warp, the energy lased, pumping out gamma radiation in the form of a brief but intensely powerful graser beam. It sliced straight through the runcible complex, evaporating all those travellers waiting for the next slot. It punched through the containment wall, and fire exploded out beyond. The temperature in the arrival/departure lounge rose tenfold within a few seconds. Hundreds of human beings turned to fire, fountains boiled, plants wilted and smoked. It was as if the whole place had suddenly been dropped into some massive furnace. As it shut down every single runcible within its remit, the AI saw that the only things still showing signs of life in there were the staggering silver skeletons of Golem, their syntheflesh now burned away — but even they would not last much longer.
The graser beam melted through the far wall of the lounge, but luckily beyond that lay only sections of the complex containing the cargo runcibles, and there it finally spent its energy slagging the massive handler robots. The fire the beam had generated exploded down neighbouring corridors, where it splashed against rapidly closing blast doors. However, the massive concourse blast doors took time to close, so for a full ten seconds the inferno played down the concourse and erupted into the main lounge.
It was like taking a blowtorch to an ants’ nest. Such scenes had been seen before on news programmes, but witnessing realtime a human being staggering along, screaming, while sheets of skin peeled away from his body had the power to shock even the Salvaston AI. Yet all this death and destruction, Salvaston soon realized, was not the primary objective of the attack.
The Skaidon warp was gone now, shut down, but everything beyond it in U-space had not ceased to exist. Within the spoon the massive blast abruptly ceased expanding then rapidly began to collapse back in on itself. Monitoring this, the AI deduced that the weapon used was an imploder. The implications were obvious, for the AIs had previously discussed this eventuality at length.
The USER, or underspace interference emitter, disrupted the underspace continuum by oscillating a singularity through a runcible gate. An imploder exploded first, then a complicated form of field technology fed off the energy generated by that explosion to cause a massive gravity phenomenon. This collapsed much of what was encompassed within the explosion down into a briefly generated singularity, then the singularity disrupted, releasing the same energy again. The intended result was that anything hit by such a weapon would be rendered down to energy and discrete atoms only. The aim here, however, was the singularity alone.
A singularity within a runcible gate.
The Salvaston AI had now shut down all the runcible gates, though it had not needed to. The disruption from this event spread instantly as a U-space shock wave, encompassing a real-space volume twenty light years across. The runcibles simply would not function and, as was almost certainly the aim, neither would the U-space drives of the Polity fleet hovering in space above. Now utterly cut off from the rest of the Polity until this U-space disruption ended, the Salvaston AI was not to know that this cataclysm had also happened on twenty-seven other worlds.
Chevron had achieved her purpose: now Erebus could move on Earth itself.
The events reported from Xanadu did not come to Jerusalem’s attention until 0.001 seconds after a world called Amaranthe abruptly went out of contact, but even then the AI did not realize how critical things were becoming. Only 0.102 seconds later, sensors in solar systems adjacent to Amaranthe detected U-space disruption extending in a twenty-light-year sphere, with that world directly at its centre. This was now an event of extreme tactical importance, since at Amaranthe a whole ECS fleet had been taken out of play, therefore Jerusalem onlined more processing power to deal with the problem. First the AI ordered the refusal of all runcible transmissions from Xanadu, using maximum transmission power for its own orders so that they would arrive at AIs within this quadrant in under a tenth of a second, and at all other AIs across the Polity in under a second. Then, 0.001 seconds later, as another world went offline, the AI understood precisely what was happening and that mere transmission refusal would not stop spoon detonation of the imploders sent from Xanadu, so it now ordered the immediate shutdown of the runcible network in this entire quadrant. And it was only in that same moment that the AI comprehended the entirety of Erebus’s plan of attack.