by B. V. Larson
No, I knew they had to attack, which is what I wanted.
To make sure, I issued new orders. “Valiant, broadcast the following message on all Macro frequencies using a voice-clone of my father.”
“Broadcast ready.”
“Macro command, this is Admiral Riggs. Acknowledge my statement.” I was careful not to ask a question. Macros rarely answered questions.
A voice, even more inhuman than Marvin’s or our brainboxes, replied. Riggs identified. We know you.
“Then you know I’m here to end your infestation of this universe once and for all.” I was hoping to provoke them into giving something away, such as a clue as to whether these Macros were hopefully the last of their kind.
Biotic species are by definition an infestation. We are the cure. You must return to your planets and await sterilization.
“Not a chance, electro-brain.” I was also speaking for the morale of those under my command, so I thought a bit of taunting was in order. “You can’t win, and I suggest you surrender immediately. I promise to preserve a few of you in a nice, secure museum somewhere, so you won’t really be gone. Maybe, if you’re lucky, we’ll die out in a few million years and you can take over again.”
Your thought processes are incoherent, Riggs. You have done us much damage. You shall submit to termination.
“You’ve failed in your primary mission,” I replied cheerfully. “Come get some, you mechanical failure.”
Proposal accepted.
As one, they turned to charge us.
Had my Nano allies been highly disciplined, I would have had no concerns whatsoever. But both the Macros and the Nanos acted like two barbarian tribes mad with bloodlust.
I had to make sure our barbarians won.
The Nano ships surged forward raggedly, some stopping and then reversing course. Their command personnel were under orders to hold the Nanos back for as long as possible. They did so by such expedients as ordering them to attack phantom ships to the rear or to form up on vessels that had halted, and so on.
As they began this dance, Stalker fired again but missed. Its long-range beam was a superior weapon for striking slow-moving targets, but the weaving, dodging Macros were far enough away that even light wasn’t fast enough to track a ship that changed course between firing and impact.
Kreel switched his aim to the Macro battleship. Not only was it the least able to evade, but it was the most dangerous single enemy vessel and probably contained the most AI processing power.
The Macros weren’t stupid though, not by a long shot. Their big ship stayed back, changing its course just often enough to make it difficult to hit while the smaller ones raced ahead.
“Mains, open fire,” I ordered when the enemy got close enough, and our four heavy lasers began a rolling barrage aimed at the largest enemy we could reach. Some shots missed but enough slammed into one of the Macro heavy cruisers over the next few minutes to damage it severely and force it to withdraw under its shield.
This seemed to be a signal for the next phase of the Macro’s desperate battle plan. Missiles blossomed from their fleet. Almost a hundred of them, they were probably all they had left. Tiny red lines in the holotank accelerated toward us.
That triggered a frenzy on our side. The Nanos now disregarded attempts to hold them back, and they threw themselves at their hated enemy. Could AIs truly experience hate? These ships were certainly acting as if they could.
Spreading out, the Nanos launched missiles of their own and fired their lasers ineffectively. Two of them bloomed into puffs of gas and debris as I watched.
The Macro missiles and the Nano missile converged. By my calculations, it would take only a few minutes at their combined speeds for the flights of fusion rockets to meet in the middle.
“Follow the Nanos up with the Daggers,” I told Bradley, who broke down my orders into detailed instructions to his controllers. Making him my CAG had been one of the best decisions of my young captaincy.
“I thought we were going to get the Daggers ahead of the Nanos,” Hansen said as he guided Valiant forward.
“Plans change,” I replied. “If the Nanos were under positive control, I’d have sent in the Daggers to mix it up with the enemy missiles, but the Nano missiles made that too dangerous. I don’t want to lose them in the nuclear EMP-storm that’s about to happen. This way, the Daggers can form a reserve once we see how things look when the battle lines start meeting.”
“We’ll be losing biotics while our drones are waiting to fight.”
“Raptor volunteers, Hansen. This isn’t a perfect world. I’m working with what I have. The Daggers are one variable I can control, and our job is to win. It’s going to be bloody, but that’s the way things are.”
I could see that didn’t sit well with Hansen. He’d always been more leery of casualties than I was. From my point of view he was too conservative and unwilling to take the risks needed. He’d expressed several times how he thought I was reckless, but I was the one in charge. If my risk tolerance was higher than his, well, that was too damned bad.
“I don’t like losing people, Hansen, but I like losing a battle even less. Killing off these Macros may wipe them from the universe once and for all, and that’s worth a heavy cost.”
“As long as it’s Raptors and not humans,” he muttered, so quietly that only Adrienne and I could hear. The weird thing was, I wasn’t sure whether he was praising me or criticizing me for playing favorites. Probably the latter.
“If I had hundreds of humans and only sixty Raptors, there’d be human volunteers in those Nano ships. I’d play it the same way,” I retorted in a matching low voice, but there was just enough truth in his words to sting my conscience. Probably I did find it easier to sacrifice Raptor lives, doubly so because they were not crew aboard my own ship, Valiant.
Raptors…crew aboard Valiant…
That reminded me of something. I closed my faceplate and issued a series of instructions to Valiant on a secure, private channel, and then opened up again. Adrienne gave me a puzzled glance, so I nodded to her reassuringly.
The holotank showed the Macros were down to twenty-two effectives by the time the missile barrages met in an orgy of mutual annihilation. Just a handful of each side’s weapons made it through to target enemy ships, and they were quickly picked off by massed point defense.
“Launch the Daggers’ missiles,” I ordered Bradley. “Target the Macros in the midrange rather than their closest ones.”
“They’ll get picked off easier,” Hansen protested as Bradley passed my instructions. “Why not use them to take down the leading group?”
I rang a knuckle on the holotank’s smart glass. “Because the Nano ships are blazing in balls-to-the-wall. Our missiles will barely beat them to beam range, and our smaller ships can’t take nuclear blasts as well as Macros can especially with their tougher shields. Kreel has instructions to try to get the Nanos to gang up five or six at a time on the foremost ships.”
“Warning,” the brainbox broke in. “Projectiles inbound. Immediate evasive action advised.”
Without delay Hansen shoved his controls over and kicked Valiant around in a barrel roll, keeping our mains pointed generally in the direction of the enemy but hopefully screwing up their targeting. In the holotank, a fuzzy stream of orange pixels reached out from the Macro battleship toward us and Stalker, spreading into a narrow cone.
“Valiant, warn Stalker immediately!”
“I have a continuous datalink with Stalker, Captain Riggs,” Valiant replied.
“Right.” I’d forgotten about that. Now I realized the Raptor battleship had also ponderously shifted sideways. “What’s coming at us?”
“Railgun bullets,” Valiant replied.
Formed with a massed cloud of solid slugs, showers of small railgun pellets could be devastating. Usually made of depleted uranium, railgun rounds moved much slower than lasers, but they were pretty damn fast compared to missiles. Most ships didn’t mount these big clum
sy guns as they required physical ammunition like missile tubes and had no guidance. They did have advantages, though: they hit hard, had nearly unlimited range as they just kept on going, and they were very hard to stop. They could blow right through any magnetic shield weaker than a Macro ground dome. Most of the time warships equipped with them kept them for close combat, but the Macro battleship had sprayed a few hundred thousand bullets at us early on hoping to get lucky.
I saw Stalker rock as a shower of sparks caught her on the port side, and then she stabilized.
“Moderate damage has been sustained by Stalker’s port wing assembly,” Valiant announced without my asking. “Ninety-nine percent of the projectiles missed.”
Checking the holotank, I saw the cone of projectiles came nowhere near Ox and promptly forgot about them. “Good job, everyone, but let that be a lesson. The Macros are tricky. Stay on your toes.”
The watchstander at Weapons gave a cheer. “Got another one,” he said, and I saw the Macro count had dropped to twenty-one. Ten Nano ships had already been hit as they were far ahead of us so I didn’t see much of a reason to cheer, but I didn’t want to dampen a good mood.
Stalker resumed long-range fire at the enemy battleship, and I thought I could see at least some glancing hits. Then our sixty or so Dagger-launched missiles flashed in among the advancing Macros. Most were picked off by the enemy’s frantic point defense, but that had the effect of diverting fire from the Nanos coming in right behind.
Just as I’d hoped.
Zhou’s command divided itself into five groups of five or six frigates. Each mini-squadron converged on one of the leading, smallest Macro ships, savaging them from all sides with beams like swallows dive-bombing a crow. The enemy all snapped shields on when it became clear dying was the alternative, and for a time they survived, trying to brake and withdraw.
This was a good tactic, as it slowed the Nanos down. I had hoped they would quickly wipe out five or six of the leading Macros freeing them up to target more, but like pillboxes, the shielded Macros stubbornly refused to die. Off and on, the Macro dropped their shields to gush out sprays of railgun pellets. Each was timed to catch a swooping Nano ship, which was invariably shredded in a fraction of a second.
Knowing I was losing a Raptor pilot every time this happened, I exposed my teeth in a snarl.
“Damn. I wish we could have forced the Nanos to hold some nukes,” I said. “Just a few slammed into each enemy would probably finish this.”
“No worries, sir,” Bradley called over his shoulder. “We’ll break them.”
Turning to the holotank, I zoomed in on the forward edge of the battle and saw our thirty Daggers lined up in a textbook inverted wedge, providing every fighter with line of sight to each target. Bradley had brought them in from one side in a powered turn, and now all of them fired as one, spearing a single shielded Macro with an extra thirty lasers.
The beams cut through the shield and it collapsed, but not before the Macro lunged forward on overloaded engines. It appeared the enemy was trying to ram a Nano, but our ship moved too fast and managed to dodge it. I thought it was out of danger when suddenly the Macro vanished in a burst of fusion fire, self-destructing and taking the Nano with it anyway.
I made an angry sound in my throat, but knew such things were bound to happen in a dogfight. “Good job, Bradley. Keep after them.”
With the Nanos pinning the Macros, the Daggers provided the cavalry to crush three more Macros in turn, but losing two more Nanos and drones in the process. By then, the rest of the Macros, except for their battleship, were joining the fight, tipping it back in their favor. The enemy’s railguns were especially nasty against our smaller Nano ships, blowing several away in quick succession.
“Shift fire to the nearest railgun-equipped Macros,” I ordered. By then, our secondary lasers were coming in to play. “Switch the mains over to antiprotons.” At the midranges, reach wasn’t as important as striking power.
“Cody, that will cut deeply into our battery reserves,” Adrienne said.
“I know, but APs will slice right through their shields. They’re the best weapons right now.”
Over the next several minutes, I knew I’d called it right. From losing rapidly to the railgun blasts, the swirling dogfight stabilized once Valiant had blown several of the worst offenders out of space with APs. By then, though, Adrienne’s warning had come to fruition.
“Capacitors at ten percent and falling,” Valiant announced.
“Switch back to lasers at half rate-of-fire,” I said. “Bradley, change the Daggers to APs, burn them out, then suicide them. We need to keep the pressure on.” Our combat drones, like Valiant’s turrets, had selectable coaxial laser-AP mounts though only one could be fired at a time. They also could each be set to overload their fusion engines, thus creating mini-nuke suicide bombs.
By the time Valiant and Stalker joined the fight directly, we’d pared the count down to twelve Macros. Unfortunately, they were the biggest and toughest of the lot. Even damaged, each was a significant threat. We had less than twenty Nanos left, and we’d expended all of the Daggers.
This would be the endgame. Despite the success of my tactics, we hadn’t outscored them nearly as much as I’d hoped. The railguns had hurt us worse than I’d expected, for which I blamed myself. Their linked AIs had also been very effective in timing their own shield use: snapping them on to avoid severe damage and then deactivating them to fire. The only sure way to beat them was to overload them with firepower, especially if we could throw a few APs or nukes into the mix.
Well, I could learn from the enemy, too. “Valiant, command override. You take direct control of shield and weapons fire in ship-to-ship mode for this ship only, not Stalker. Coordinate shield and weapon use for computed maximum survivability.”
“Override implemented.”
I’d never used this mode before because it effectively handed the ship’s offense and defense over to the brainbox, which was already under neural stress from all the other systems it ran. Now, I couldn’t make strategic decisions about how to concentrate Valiant’s firepower. In effect, I’d thrown away her spears and turned the battle into a knife fight.
This was going to get bloody.
-29-
Because of the orders to turn over direct weapons and shield control to the brainbox, the bridge crew eyed me dubiously. I ignored them, striking a pose of confidence and running my eyes over the screens and displays.
“All right, everyone,” I said, nodding as if perfectly satisfied. “Do your jobs and we’ll come out all right.”
I almost laughed as I found myself playing the role with the same relentless optimism and stiff upper lip I’d sneered at in Captain Turnbull. I’d begun to understand him a bit more now. He’d made a catastrophic mistake because he’d started to believe his own bullshit, but that didn’t mean the performance itself was unnecessary. It merely meant that some things couldn’t be overcome with wishful thinking.
Hopefully I never started believing my own bullshit.
In the holotank, I could see Stalker still going head-to-head with the big Macro, which was exactly what I wanted. The Raptor battleship had heavier armor than Valiant, so she could better stand up to railgun shots, and her main laser packed a wallop. I doubted a Macro shield could do more than mitigate it.
Kreel had also cleverly taken at least one opportunity to slide a Macro cruiser into the arc of fire of his tail-mounted point defense. He then discharged more than two hundred small shots in one salvo, surprising the robot ship and ripping it into drifting shreds. The Macros stayed well away from Stalker’s stern from then on.
I pressed my forehead against the glass dome surrounding the holotank. I was left with watching a battle that was now largely beyond my ability to influence. Valiant rolled in a stately arc under Hansen’s piloting to line up on one large, unengaged Macro of battlecruiser size. The enemy had taken some damage but was relatively unscathed.
It was our Nano
s and their Raptor command personnel that had endured the real pounding, ending with most of them being lost.
Beams of all sorts crisscrossed space. Invisible without the aid of sensors, the holotank interpolated and displayed everything for us.
A surprise missile leaped out from a Macro launcher only to be speared by a dozen of our point-defense lasers. Several enemy ships turned toward us and I felt Valiant shudder with hits despite our shields snapping on and off with AI-directed speed, too fast to follow. I wanted to tell the brainbox what to do, but any direction from me would only confuse it and slow down its reactions at this point.
But my pilot was a different story. Him I could give orders to. “Don’t get too close, Hansen. They’ll try to ram and self-destruct.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper,” Hansen forced out through gritted teeth as he manipulated the controls. The strain showed on his face and sweat streamed down his head behind his open faceplate. He expertly held us at close but not at point-blank range despite the Macro’s efforts to close.
The main viewscreen whited out and I felt Valiant rock and buffet. My armored shoulder slammed into the holotank and starred its smart glass, but that would self-repair. As expected, our chosen Macro had detonated itself once it became clear it was doomed.
“Warning: enemy boarding assault shuttles inbound,” Valiant said as the mess cleared.
“I’ve lost main engines!” Hansen cried, frantically tapping at his controls.
One quick glance at the holotank showed what had happened. With shots perfectly timed to coincide with the Macro’s self-destruction, several of their surviving ships had targeted our stern, taking down our fusion motors and, incidentally, half our power. They’d paid a price for it dearly. I saw three more Macros plowed under by our remaining Nanos.
The remaining tally stood at six Macros, eight Nano frigates, and our two big ships.
Counting Stalker and her foe as neutralizing each other, five damaged Macros faced eight of our frigates in various states of repair, and Valiant. Hansen piloted her sluggishly using repellers, but we wouldn’t be fast enough to avoid what was coming for us.
