by B. V. Larson
“Do you hear the klaxon?”
“Sure.”
They’d been in the Phoenix for five days already. Slovakia had braked hard and expelled a lead-laced gel cloud in front of it. That screened the vessel from the torpedoes and likely, from the cyborgs—unless the melds had put secret drones far afield that looked from behind Slovakia. Sometime during the five days, the cyborg missiles had increased gravities, coming at the mothership faster, as their fusion tails streaked for many kilometers behind them.
“Here it is,” Chen said through the comm, “I was looking for the switch.” The klaxon stopped.
Easing his right arm back into the battlesuit’s sleeve, Mule turned on his computer. He had a few talents other than strict mayhem. Before he became a Marine, even before his Martian secret service days, Mule had been a hacker.
He’d had three years to think about the mission, three years to crawl around the mothership, poking here and there. He’d hacked into the main computer and written new programs for his battlesuit, giving himself some tricky options. Now he brought up an unauthorized image on his HUD. From signals emitting from the torpedoes and drones, he built a holo image of the overall situation.
The planetoid’s edge showed, as did the many tiny blips approaching it. Tyche neared or they neared Tyche. It was the same difference.
“Our torpedo is going to brake soon,” Chen said over the comm-link. “Are you boys ready?”
The others signaled yes.
“Mule, what about you?” Chen asked.
“Give me a minute.”
“Did you hear that we’re going to brake?”
“I got that,” Mule said. “Now wait a sec.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
Mule snapped orders to his suit computer. Something strange was going on out there. An Alliance drone—a tiny green blip on his HUD—blinked with a dull gray color. Then so did another drone.
“Speak to me, Mule. That’s an order.”
Mule cursed softly under his breath.
“What’s happening?” Chen asked.
“The cyborgs are using—” Mule winced as another drone went inert. “The cyborgs are doing something to our forward drones. I wonder if they’ve hacked into the control software.”
“How do you know what’s going on?”
Mule told him about his self-written programs.
“You can see the big picture?” Chen asked, with wonder in his voice.
The green blinking drones—a swarm of them—burst into motive life. On Mule’s HUD, they showed little flickering tails. This meant that in real time long blue fusion exhausts grew behind them as they began to accelerate.
Once again, their torpedo’s klaxon began to blare.
“It’s an emergency!” Chen shouted to the others. “Get set. We’re going to move.”
As Sergeant Chen finished his sentence, the Phoenix’s engine ignited.
Mule watched his HUD. Instead of flying faster at Tyche or slowing down, their torpedo slewed “upward” as if heading toward the planetoid’s North Pole.
“I don’t think we’re slowing down,” Chen said.
Slowing down had been the operational plan. If the torpedo moved at its original velocity and fired the Marine pods like bullets, each fighter would hit the surface hard enough to obliterate the powered armor shells. They had to slow down first so they could make softer landings. Ergo, the Phoenix needed to brake. For combat purposes—at least usually—the later they slowed down the better. Braking used the engines, blasting at full power. The exhaust heat easily registered on enemy sensor systems, making them targets.
“We’re not braking just yet,” Mule said. He told them what he knew so far.
“So what’s happening?” Chen asked.
Mule was fiddling with his computer, activating more of his custom software.
The burn didn’t last long for the Phoenix. Before the engine shut off, the torpedo’s main computer readjusted their flight path, aiming at their former destination point once more.
“Mule, what are you hiding from us?” Chen asked.
“I’m not hiding anything, I don’t know myself yet. I’m trying to figure out why this happened. My guess is the cyborgs used an invisible projectile against the drones. Our torpedo moved to avoid any other invisible projectiles sent at us.”
“Invisible?”
“Unseen by our side’s optics,” Mule said.
He figured the captain didn’t want to use active radar just yet. Once the captain used the ship’s radar, he lit up the mothership like a beacon. Yet if the cyborgs already knew where Slovakia was, why not use radar? Something else was going on that Mule didn’t comprehend.
Ninety minutes later, the captain spoke to them. The old man spoke to all the Marines in the many torpedoes. He used a relayed broadcast, and he no doubt emitted it from a drone well away from the mothership.
Mule heard the message in his headphones in his helmet. They all must have.
“This is Captain Han of Slovakia speaking. Each of your torpedoes just made a slight course shift. The reason is simple. The cyborgs fired black-ice projectiles at our forward drones. We believed they used steel sabots to magnetically accelerate the projectiles with rail-guns, as that’s how we do it. The melds must have done it behind a gel cloud. We observed explosions in the gel cloud two days ago, but until now had no idea what they were. Those explosions must have opened holes for the black-ice projectiles.
“Drones lead the assault for just such a reason,” the captain said. “The cyborg projectiles hit several of our drones, smashing enough internal gear to render them inoperative. It means the cyborgs must have used optics to spot the majority of you after launch.”
Mule could have already told him that, as it was obvious.
“I don’t want you men to worry,” the captain said. “The drones have already begun to accelerate at Tyche. Soon, your torpedoes will begin to brake.”
The captain cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, it has been my pleasure to bring you this far. We haven’t found any of these black-ice projectiles aimed at Slovakia, but we must presume that many are flying at us. Our gel cloud might deflect some of them enough to throw them off course, but the mothership is in danger nonetheless. Since each of your torpedoes must be on cyborg screens, the tactical AI has decided on a new Marine landing strategy.”
Mule felt a surge of fear squeeze his spine. That didn’t sound good.
There was a longer pause this time. “We had hoped to bring the Phoenixes nearer the planetoid before we had them brake,” the captain said. “That’s not going to happen now.”
“Is he talking about a change in the battle plan?” one of the Marines asked.
“Shut up!” Chen snapped. “Listen to the captain.”
“There is an emergency release code in each of your torpedoes,” the captain was saying. “This mission, you will not launch through the firing tubes as planned, nor will you insert onto the planetoid in your pods. Instead, you will crawl out of the hatches you first entered. You will find emergency hoses inside the compartment and an escape hatch from the torpedo. Listen closely, gentlemen. This could be a tricky and unorthodox operation.”
“Sir, tell them about the braking,” an officer said over the comm-link. “They need to allow their craft to brake before they attempt any of this.”
“I hope you men heard that,” the captain said. “First, each torpedo will lower its velocity through a swift but intense braking schedule. That means you’re going to be in space longer than we had anticipated. You may be alive and heading for Tyche even after Slovakia is—”
“Sir!” an officer interrupted.
“Gentlemen,” the captain raised his voice to override his officer as he continued addressing the Marines. “You will attach the life-support and waste hoses to your battlesuits. Then you will use the escape hatch and uncoil the lines as far as they will go. That’s a hundred meters in most cases, and for a few of you, it will be two hundred meters. You will
float outside the torpedo in space.”
“What?” Hayes asked. “That’s crazy. We’ve never practiced for that.”
Mule shook his head. Marine landing insertions were always in pods fired from torpedoes. It sounded as if they were going to free-fall their way down. The captain and his tac-team must be really worried to try a stunt like this.
“The next part of the journey is going to last several days longer than we’d first planned,” the captain said. “The torpedo’s AI will alert you once it is ready to accelerate at the planetoid. It will do that just before impact. You must detach before the torpedo accelerates its final time. The torpedo will proceed down to Tyche ahead of you and, we hope, destroy cyborg infrastructure. None of you is going to land in a pod, but rather through free-fall. Each of you will also have a higher insertion velocity than we had originally anticipated. The main AI suggests that the depth of the methane ice will sufficiently break your falls so…so most of you will survive a crash landing.”
“Is he kidding?” Hayes muttered. “He must be kidding.”
“Shut up!” Chen snarled.
“This is a desperate situation, gentlemen. We’ve always known the cyborgs were cunning. They love deception and stealth attacks above all else. But you are the Alliance Space Marines. You must land and destroy every cyborg, or destroy the life-support cubicles and the planetoid’s motive power. You cannot let the cyborgs use Tyche for whatever evil purpose it has been modified to perform.”
Several Marines growled agreement.
“I’m going offline soon,” the captain said. “After I do, the tech advisor is going to switch to the command channel and speak to the sergeants. He has a few technical aspects about the mission you’ll each need to know. I would wish you gentlemen luck, but I know you don’t need it. You’re the toughest fighting force in history. And you will kick these cyborgs to death. Do you hear me?”
The growls in Mule’s ears grew in volume.
“Kill the cyborgs, Marines. Kill the cyborgs!”
***
Two hundred and nineteen minutes later, the Phoenix rotated so its engine port aimed at Tyche. The torpedo braked for seventy-eight minutes, reducing their velocity.
“The cyborgs are definitely going to see that,” Chen said.
Mule didn’t respond. He was too busy watching his HUD. Slovakia burst sideways through its own gel cloud, accelerating away from the enemy. The captain was playing by new rules. The black-ice projectiles had changed the game.
Mule shook his head. The new game meant the mothership was simply another decoy.
As Slovakia shut off its engine, a laser beam appeared from the ship. The laser speared toward Tyche at some distant target.
“We’re rotating,” Chen said.
The deceleration aboard the torpedo had quit. The torpedo must be aligning itself back on target.
The minutes ticked by, and Slovakia’s laser stopped beaming. Mule wondered what the ship had been firing at. A new gel cloud began to form before it, sprayed from outer gel tanks. The mothership couldn’t keep flying through its gel cloud and hope to have some sort of protection left later. None of that would matter, however, if the captain didn’t stop the five missiles.
If the captain or the AI is smart, Mule thought, he should put a gel cloud behind them, too. Maybe the captain had already done that.
“It’s time to move out,” Chen said.
Mule unhooked his tubes, checked his suit and detached the buckles. He crawled and knocked on the hatch with an armored boot.
A Marine opened the hatch and helped him out.
“Open up your helmets,” Chen told them.
Mule found the side control and pressed it. The visor eased open like a Cyclops’ eye. Cold, metallic-tasting air seeped past his face and down his neck.
He peered at his squad-mates. Everyone had a heavy growth of beard.
Hayes had bloodshot eyes, and every time he glanced somewhere, the man’s eyes rolled as if they were loose in his head.
“Are you feeling okay?” Mule asked him.
Hayes muttered a litany of profanities and described in detail what he was going to do with his fist to the cyborgs.
After Hayes finished speaking, Chen spoke for several minutes. Soon, he had everyone nodding.
They helped each other open the battlesuits and climb out.
Mule practiced isometric exercises. It felt good to be out of the suit and in the chamber’s chilly air. Then he scratched everywhere. Others arm-wrestled or practiced zero-G moves on each other. Due to their open suits, the chamber smelled worse than a locker room.
Finally, they shook hands all around and slapped each other on the shoulders. One by one, they climbed back into their suits and checked each other’s locks.
“Mule and I will use the two-hundred-meter hoses,” Chen said.
Mule hooked up his hoses.
When everyone signaled they were ready, Chen pulled a lever and blew open the emergency hatch. Its metal plate flew off into space, tumbling end over end before disappearing into the distance. There came a momentary tug as the air rushed out. Mule didn’t move, though, as he’d anchored himself with his magnetized boots.
Finally, the Marines demagnetized and jumped out of the hatch. They drifted to the ends of their lines, according to the new plan.
Before, the torpedo’s battle computer would have figured out trajectories and a hundred other little problems for them. It would have launched them perfectly at the surface in their insertion pods. Now their velocity was low enough…maybe, to survive a free-fall landing on the ice. Now they were outside the torpedo so if the cyborgs destroyed the delivery vehicle, some of them might survive its destruction and land on the surface to wreak vengeance against the melds.
-5-
Day 1095: Space war had its own rules. It was a giant game of hide-and-seek. The stellar void was vast, making it nearly impossible to see a cold dark object, particularly if it was composed of radar-resistant material like black ice.
Hide from radar, hide from optic sight and keep one’s thermal signature down to nothing if possible, those were key techniques. From the very beginning, the cyborgs possessed better sensors and better stealth material.
Humans liked protection, armor. Their best battleships had thick, asteroid-like particle shields, matter hundreds of meters thick. The genetically-engineered Highborn had developed collapsium armor of densely packed atoms. Here in the Oort Cloud, ordinary humans possessed none of those advantages.
As Mule drifted in space, tethered to the Phoenix, he did some computing. Either the Neptunians when they’d been alive, or the cyborgs, had built a massive exhaust port onto Tyche. That implied vast, planetoid-sized engines. That in turn implied more than one or two Lurkers: more like twenty of the stealth vessels. If Tyche swarmed with melds, two thousand Marines wouldn’t have much of a chance. In fact, if that were the reality—thousands of cyborgs—maybe the melds would attempt to capture rather than to kill them.
Capture would be worse than death. The cyborgs were a nightmare, but their leaders were worse. A Web-Mind was a cyborg times one thousand. Humanity had been fighting them long enough now to know the worst. The melds teased brain mass from involuntary donors, from prisoners of war. They spread out and wired the brains onto flats, inserted control circuitry into the tissues and submerged it all into computing gel, which they put into bio domes. The combined brain masses made the Web-Mind into a strange intellect with an inconceivable IQ.
If the cyborgs captured him and tore him down for his brain…would he live the rest of his days in soundless horror, part of a vast, living, pulsating Web-Mind?
Thinking about it enraged Mule. Maybe others would open their visor one last time and choke on nothing, on vacuum. He had a different plan. He was going to make the Web-Minds fear him. If he could, he would make it to one of the brain domes. Then he’d shoot the domes one by one, telling them about his wife, about his children and about Mars. Afterward, he’d watch the bra
ins quiver in terror as those around them died one by one.
The minutes merged into hours, and Mule focused on the space battle going around him. It proved interesting for a while, watching through his illegal HUD feed.
The captain’s next big move was a sudden and very powerful nuclear explosion in the path of the enemy missiles.
Almost by accident, Mule caught a bit of the info, the explosion. He switched the imaging on his HUD to get a better idea of what was going on. The five cyborg missiles zeroed in on the mothership—well, on the spreading gel cloud many hundreds of thousands of kilometers ahead of them. The missiles didn’t bunch together, but came one at a time in a staggered formation.
After several seconds of scanning the situation, Mule understood what must have happened. Days ago, the captain must have used the mothership’s sole rail-gun. Behind the gel cloud, he’d shot steel-skinned sabot rounds. The rail-gun accelerated the sabots and then the round shed its metallic skin. The inner kernels were polymer mines: dark, radar-resistant and optically difficult to detect. Each mine would have secretly burst through the gel cloud and continued to fly on an intercept pattern toward the approaching missiles, or rather, where the missiles would be at a projected intercept time.
As Mule scanned the data, he realized a proximity mine had just exploded—a powerful thermonuclear weapon. It created a mighty EMP near the approaching missiles.
Grinning so hard it made his mouth hurt, Mule ran analyses on the enemy missiles. According to the readings, the EMP had taken out three of them.
The last two missiles accelerated, closing in on the gel cloud.
A small explosion occurred in the lead-laced cloud. It was certainly a Slovakia-engineered event. The explosion punched a hole through the gels, creating a window, an opening. Through the window speared the mothership’s lone laser. The beam washed the nosecone of the front missile, and seconds later, the cyborg warhead detonated.
Then came another small explosion in the gel cloud, creating a new window. The laser speared out of it. But it was too late. The last cyborg missile—a big thing one quarter the size of Slovakia—had already spewed a cloud of prismatic crystals.
