Nebula

by Howard Marsh

  The first three robot ships went up in enormous bursts of energy as their gravity engines and shields collapsed when hit with the strong plasma blasts. Those explosions served to disable several of the other robot ships that were close, so the first round of artillery fire was able to take out eight of the thirty five robots. Twenty seven were left, still an uneven match against Haverford’s five fighters.

  The robots dispersed quickly, as soon as they realized what was happening, but the plasma cannons were able to get off one more salvo each, hitting another three of the robots and taking out two others from the effects of the explosions. Now there were twenty two left for Haverford to deal with.

  Three of the robots charged at the artillery ships at very high speed, too fast for the artillery on the transports to track and target them. Milo wanted to help, but he couldn’t fire in their direction since the EMP would also hit the lightly shielded transports. Haverford and his fighters chased them and fired rapid x-ray bursts to try to hit them as they moved at high speed. They were able to hit two of them, causing them to drop to low speed where Haverford’s fighters were able to finish them off with their plasma cannons. The other robot evaded the x-ray fire and continued to where it was now within firing range of one of the transports. It opened fire and destroyed the transport with a single plasma burst. It then turned toward one of the other two transports, but that ship had already established a fire control lock on the robot and got its shot off before the robot could open fire.

  Haverford ordered the two surviving transports to back away at near light speed while he and his fighters closed for battle with the nineteen remaining robots. He also sent Milo back with them. The EMP gun would be useless in this close-quarters fight, and he wanted to preserve as much of his long range firepower as he could. The loss of the one transport with its long range plasma cannon was something that he hadn’t planned on, and he didn’t want to lose any of the others.

  Harry could sense the coordination going on among those robots as they prepared to engage Haverford’s five fighters. He could read their robot minds and could see that they knew that this was an uneven battle that they certainly would win. Not only did they outnumber the five Nebula fighters, but the robots’ reaction times and ability for close coordination would overwhelm the humans.

  But they didn’t count on the other fighters that had just finished with the cruisers on the flanks, and they weren’t aware of the twenty five fighters that Haverford had stationed on Deimos and Phobos. The reinforcements arrived just as the robots were closing in for the kill. Haverford’s ships came in at near light speed and slowed abruptly as they reached firing range for their x-ray guns and plasma cannons. With both x-ray and plasma fire directed at the remaining robot ships, the outcome was immediately clear. The robots reacted quickly, but not quickly enough and all were destroyed in a battle that took less than one minute. Only two more of the Nebula fighters were lost in the exchange.

  Haverford was both happy and dismayed with the results of the past few minutes. Nebula had clearly won, but they had lost an artillery ship and more of his fighters than he could afford to lose. In terms of a military engagement, it was an overwhelming victory, but in human terms the loss almost outweighed the feeling of triumph. And, aside from the human lives that were lost, the fighters that were lost in this battle, and the others that were lost in the earlier fight represented a significant fraction of the total Nebula fighter fleet. A few of the fighters might be repairable, but he knew that it would take too much time to be of use for the next round that was certain to come very soon.

  Now that the battle was over, each side retreated to lick their wounds and assess the situation. The alien ships backed away well beyond range of any Nebula artillery, and the Nebula ships returned to Earth. Brad’s team on Mars was now alone and far away from any friends or enemies for now. They too had to assess the situation and make plans for the next alien onslaught that they knew would follow.

  It was clear to Haverford that his forces couldn’t keep up the defense much longer. The alien fleet still had powerful ships and would wear them down even if they could read the enemy messages and pull surprise attacks and ambushes. If the pathogens didn’t do their job soon, the situation would become very grave.

  Chapter 13

  “Message traffic is garbled. I can’t decrypt it anymore.” Mikio’s announcement was unexpected and certainly unwelcome news.

  “They changed their encryption codes,” Harry replied. “I see it in the data flowing through the robot networks. They finally figured out that we may be reading their mail, and all their communication terminals have been loaded with a new key. But they still don’t know that we’re tapped into their robots, and the robots don’t use encryption. I’ll still be able to see most of the important stuff, but we’ll probably miss some information that the robots don’t get. We’ll have to construct our own version of the alien messages from what Yuri and I can see, and that may slow things down a bit, but I think that we’ll still have a leg up on them.”

  “OK,” Brad answered. “I’ll let Ops know. We’ll now have to rely on the robot links for our information from now on, but that shouldn’t hurt too much if all the important data is shared with the robots. It’s just too bad that Ops can’t read the traffic directly anymore. But they’ll have to put up with it.”

  Brad then turned to Mikio. “Mikio, set up shop next to the robot interface station and try to figure out how you can pass information into the radio network for Ops and the tactical units. Let’s try to make the information flow as quickly as possible. I want you and Harry to stay on the robot network. We need to monitor it full time now that we don’t have any other taps into the alien plans. The rest of us will start to plan for every contingency that we can think of.”

  “We have one other tap,” Yuri said. “They record all their message traffic in archives like we do. The archives are distributed around a lot of servers, and the robots have access to them. They use the robots to help search and retrieve information. Ludmila already knows how to do the searches. We’ve been working together on this for the past couple of hours while we weren’t part of the action. So I’m ready to link through a robot that we can keep here on Mars as our local comms terminal.”

  “Good idea,” Brad replied. “We can keep the worker robot here. I don’t think that we have any other need for it. It can be your dedicated comms terminal. And I’ll ask Ops to send us some of those salvaged soldiers once Ludmila’s crew has them converted for our control. We may need their firepower and their ability to join the soldier robot network if any of the soldiers land here. If we have a few of them here, we can let Haverford continue to use Igor and his robot fighter.”

  Brad was about to leave the ops center to speak with Lu when Harry put up his hand and signaled for him to stay. “I’ve got more coming in on the robot network. The pathogens are working. There’s a lot of fragmentary stuff coming over the net, and I can’t get a clear picture, but there’s definitely a big panic at the fleet. The robots are only getting some of it, just new orders about reforming, decontaminating, things like that. But it’s pretty clear that the bugs have started to do their thing. And it looks big. There’s a real panic there.”

  “Good,” Brad replied. “Finally. We’ll have to get this back to Prime. Mikio, send them a short message. Just say that the pathogens have started to work and that we’ll send more information as we get it.”

  “Wait,” Yuri interjected. “I’m reading more traffic from the archives. It’s a few minutes behind what Harry told you, but I have more complete information.”

  “OK, let’s have it,” Brad said. “Mikio, send the short message now, and add that we’re getting updates and will send more in a few minutes.”

  Yuri continued, “There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the plagues seem to have infected more than ninety percent of their ships, and the results are almost totally fatal. The bad news is that at least fifteen million of the al
iens were on ships that were sufficiently isolated from the pathogen sources that they were able to decouple from the fleet and seem to be OK. So we have a lot of very angry aliens to deal with, including the ones on the command ship and on a few of their heavy warships.”

  “But that’s a lot weaker than before,” Brad replied. “At least the odds are getting a bit better. What about the battleships?”

  “It looks like two battleships were connected to ships that were infected, and their crews are all either dead or in really bad shape. The other one seems to have been luckier. It detached from the main fleet, along with other ships that weren’t infected.”

  “So that means that we only have one remaining battleship to deal with. How about the cruisers?”

  “Not clear,” Yuri answered. “They’re still taking inventory, but at least two heavy cruisers seem to have decoupled in time. They’re in the process of assembling all the remaining ships, so we should know the score pretty soon. But there’s more bad news.”

  “I don’t need more bad news,” Brad mumbled. “Let’s have it.”

  “Well, we seem to have weakened them to a point where they feel they have no option but to take Earth and rebuild their population here. Their assessment at this point is that they’ve lost too many of the life-support ships to be able to leave and try to find another place to settle. With what they have now, they can exist in space for maybe a year or two, but that isn’t enough for them to be able to explore somewhere else. Getting to another place would be at near light speed, so the travel time isn’t a problem. But parking and exploring usually takes at least ten or twenty years for all the scouts to fan out and report back. They don’t have that option any longer.”

  Harry interrupted. “More coming in on the robot network. Robots are being directed to take control of the two battleships and two heavy cruisers. The alien crews are dead, but the ships are still in perfect condition except for being contaminated with the pathogens. But robots don’t get sick, and the soldier robots can do most of things that the alien crews do, so at least some of the heavy warships will be back in action. Robots are also being sent into the life-support ships and a few of the transport ships to try to salvage equipment that can be decontaminated and brought to the surviving ships in the fleet. They’re even trying to decontaminate one of the life-support ships so they can last longer for a longer war against us.”

  Brad was silent for a few seconds before making his decision on what to do next. “Send everything that you get directly to Nebula,” he said to Harry and Yuri. “And tell them to send a ship to get me back to Earth. Lu, take over while I’m gone.”

  *

  The session at Nebula Prime was convened almost immediately upon Brad’s arrival. It was a very small session, with only Seduro and Billingsley in addition to Brad and Brendan. Seduro had moved to Nebula Prime and planned to stay there until the war played out, whatever the outcome. He allowed Billingsley to remain in charge, at least in name, and he deferred to Brendan and Brad for the military matters, with Brendan being the clear senior of the two.

  “OK, Billingsley began. “Let’s review things and then look at our options. Brendan, can you give us an update on our forces?”

  “We already lost fourteen fighters and one of the artillery ships. Six other fighters were damaged pretty badly. A few may be repairable, but it will take too long to get them back into battle in time to be of any use. Eight other fighters are also down for repairs due to less severe combat damage and some equipment malfunctions, but we can get at least a couple of them back well enough to fight. If we have to fight again in the next day or two, I estimate that we’d have fifty three fighters, two converted transports with plasma cannons, Milo’s alien fighter with the EMP gun, and Igor’s alien robot ship.

  “We also have four alien fighters that our technicians think they can repair. They’ve already got one of them into flyable condition and eight of my best pilots are practicing with it. The technicians are trying to swap out the fighters’ plasma guns for the larger ones that they took from the cruisers. They seem to fit in the mounts for the existing guns on the fighters, and the controls look identical, so we’re pretty confident that we can add those four to the mix. Then there’s the team on Mars. I’ll let Brad give the update on them since he just returned from Mars.”

  Brad then listed the personnel and their assets. He also mentioned that they would receive the five alien soldier robots from the repair shop at Nebula Two and would retain the alien worker robot to act as a message relay so that Harry and Yuri could continue to tap into the aliens’ message traffic.

  Seduro was silent for a moment and then asked, “What do we know of the enemy force?”

  Brad replied, “My team is reading the latest messages on the robot network and in the archives. We seem to have a pretty good picture at this point. They’ve assigned a lot of their soldier robots to the remaining battleship and two heavy cruisers to replace the alien crews, so those ships should be operational, but the aliens seem to be concerned that the robots may not be as competent in those ships as the original alien crews. The robots are adapted to direct interface to the ship’s computers, not the manual controls that the aliens use themselves, so they may not be as efficient maneuvering and using the weapons. But we have to assume that they’ll be competent enough, and those ships are big problems for us. It seems that one of the light cruisers managed to avoid the infection, and that will be their command ship. They still have enough soldier robots to operate fifteen of the robot ships. Then there’s that big platform ship with the very heavy weapons. They’re starting to construct it as they make the transit to Mars, so by the time they reach Mars, it may be almost ready to fight. But they need to put their big guns on Mars to make sure that they can keep us very far from the planet before they risk bringing the big guy in.”

  Haverford commented, “If they gain control of Mars and have an operational platform ship, we’ll be in big trouble. Those guns can outrange even the long range plasma cannons that we have on the two transports. We have to stop them from taking Mars and establishing a fire base that can extend far enough toward Earth to protect the platform ship as they assemble it and move it into a position to fire at Earth. If that happens, we’ll have a hard time doing anything to push them back.”

  “So what’s the plan?” Seduro responded. Silence. “Colonel Haverford, there is a plan, isn’t there?” Seduro asked.

  “Not a complete one, but we’re still working on it.”

  “Well, give us what you have now.”

  Haverford waited a few seconds before replying. “We can’t do a frontal attack against those three big ships. The transports with the plasma guns wouldn’t get close enough to fire before they’d be blown to pieces. They’re not built for that sort of exchange of fire. So we need to try to keep the enemy from establishing itself on Mars.”

  “Why can’t we fire torpedoes at them when they approach Mars?”

  “They’re already prepared for that,” Haverford replied. “They got blind-sided by us once, and they’re not stupid. They have a dense sensor field that they move ahead of their ships. It encloses them almost completely and would let them intercept any mines that we send. No, the only real option is to prevent them from taking Mars.”

  “And just how do you propose to do that?”

  Brad answered, “My team and the special ops people that Brendan sent are working up a plan. We think that we can hold them off for at least one assault, maybe two, but if they get those big ships into position near Mars, they’ll eventually be able to overpower our small force on the ground.”

  “Can we prevent them from landing?”

  “Maybe once,” Brad replied. “Their assault ships don’t appear to be very heavily armed, and their standard assault team has only twelve aliens and six robots. But then they’ll be prepared to take us out before they try again, probably using heavy artillery to sterilize the area before setting down again.”

  “So how lo
ng can we delay them, and what good will it do?”

  Brad replied again, “If we’re successful with the first assault, we figure that we would have at least two or three days before a second one. They’d have to re-plan the attack, and that would probably require a decision at their main headquarters back at the fleet. The forward-based alien commander in the light cruiser would be able to make tactical decisions, but this one would require the higher level commanders to decide how to respond.”

  “So what does this buy us except for a few more days to wait to be wiped out?”

  “Well, the pathogens might do more damage during that time,” Haverford replied. “They could be getting weaker by the minute, so a few days could be critical.”

  “That’s a nice thing to hope for Colonel,” Seduro commented. “But as you’ve always said, hope is not a course of action. Do we have any other plans?”

  “There are a couple of possibilities that we’re looking into,” Haverford replied. “We might be able to sneak one of those captured alien fighters into their formation, especially if we come in from behind. And there’s the possibility of even sending one or more of them directly to the alien fleet, to hit the ship with the senior commanders. We’re working up plans for this possibility, but it’s too early to tell if it will work.”