“Just say the word, sir.”
“Then everyone listen up,” said Mazer. “We’ll split into two squadrons. These three fighters will stay behind: Borgensen, Porcevic, and Agappe.” He tapped the screen in front of him and selected the three fighters, each loaded with a full cache of ordnance and breach missiles. “You’re A Squad and our safety net. If the battleship reaches you, destroy it.” Mazer tapped at the screen and brought up the schematics of the battleship.
“Lieutenant Opperman,” said Mazer, “who’s the best navigator in this squad?”
“That would be Nav Officer Sylva, sir. She’s sitting right beside me.”
“Sylva, map us a path to that ship that gets us there as fast as humanly possible, taking into consideration that we’re going in opposite directions and need to intercept. Can you do that in the next ninety seconds?”
“I will certainly try, sir.”
“Captain Sarr,” said Mazer.
The Senegalese captain back in the control room answered. “Go ahead, Rackham.”
“I need you or someone in that room deeply familiar with this class of battleship to identify primary targets on that ship. What should we be hitting? Where are the weaknesses? I want two options. Option one, obliteration. Total destruction. So that every piece of it flies away and nothing hits GravCamp. Option two, scuttle and redirect. I want to know how to put it out of commission without killing everyone inside.”
“Give me a minute,” said Sarr.
“Sixty seconds and counting,” said Mazer, “because that’s all we can afford.”
Sarr was back in thirty seconds and put another officer on the comms who knew the D-class inside and out. A schematic appeared in Mazer’s HUD as the officer went through the targets. Mazer quickly made assignments to A Squad, selecting portions of the schematics for each of the pilots to target.
“It feels wrong targeting one of our own,” said Agappe.
“Those are your orders,” said Mazer. “We don’t know what’s going on in that ship, but you will not hesitate to execute your orders if the opportunity arises, even if Opperman and I are still on board and trying to disable it. Are we clear? You will not hesitate to fire.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Maintain your current velocity,” said Mazer. “You should intercept it long before it reaches GravCamp, but there is still a threat of shrapnel and debris striking the space station and pods, so I repeat, do not hesitate. The longer you wait, the greater the risk to every marine at GravCamp.”
“Yes, sir. Understood.”
“The rest of us are B Squad,” said Mazer. “We will shoot forward and intercept the battleship. Mission one is to take out its guns. Here are the assignments.”
The schematic lit up again as Mazer doled out targeting assignments to B Squad.
“B Squad, do not breach the hull if it can be avoided,” said Mazer. “I want to minimize casualties, if we can. That said, do what’s necessary to take out its guns. It decimated the Antietam, so whoever has seized control of the helm controls the guns as well. Once the guns are down, Opperman and I will infiltrate the ship at the helm, if possible. If at any time I give the order or if Opperman and I become casualties and our biometrics go offline, the rest of you in B Squad will incapacitate the ship. Sylva, I’ve given you about three minutes. What have you got?”
Sylva responded, “I’m sending the flight path now, sir. It’s not pretty. But it gets us there.”
A crude navigational holo appeared on Mazer’s HUD. It showed lines that looped wide and came back toward the center, like the outline of flower petals.
“We need to do a loop,” said Sylva. “It’s coming toward us at incredible speed. So we’ve got to reach its speed and match its direction right before it reaches us.”
“This says we’re going to sustain eight Gs for thirty seconds to accelerate up to that velocity,” said Opperman. “That doesn’t sound fun.”
“It’s more than we’ve practiced in maneuvers,” said Sylva. “And far more than safety regs recommend. But it’s our best shot.”
Mazer muted his comm and turned to Bingwen. “You’re small, eight Gs is a lot.”
“I’ll black out,” said Bingwen. “But the suit will continue to feed me oxygen. I’ll be fine. Let’s go. We don’t have a choice.”
Mazer hesitated for a microsecond. With Bingwen in the co-pilot seat, it would be safer for Bingwen if Mazer’s fighter hung back with A Squad and didn’t attempt the acceleration. But Mazer had trained with a breach team. If anyone was qualified to infiltrate the ship, it was him. He couldn’t give that assignment to anyone else.
“I’ll be fine,” said Bingwen. “Every second we wait, we disrupt the flight plan. We go. Now.”
Mazer gave the countdown to the pilots as Sylva uploaded the flight instructions into each fighter’s navigational system. At zero, the thrusters opened, and Mazer was slammed against his seat again. The pressure grew quickly, and in moments Mazer felt as if he weighed two tons, as if his organs were coalescing inside him into a single blob of tissue, as if an unseen mountain were pressing him against the seat.
After twelve seconds, he didn’t think he could take any more of it. He was nearing his breaking point, with eighteen seconds to go.
Seventeen.
Sixteen.
The noise in the cockpit was fading. The console lights, as if seen through a lens losing its focus, began to blend together into a soft soup of color. The biometrics on Mazer’s HUD indicated that Bingwen had passed out. Mazer wanted to call out to him, reach for him, turn to him. But Mazer’s arms and head were frozen in place. Even speech was impossible. He was stone, lead, immovable, held in the seat by an unseen vice. He watched the numbers for Bingwen’s heart rate and oxygen levels slowly dip. Down one digit, down two, down five.
Come on, Bing. Hang in there. A little further now.
The world grew black at the corners of Mazer’s vision as the seconds ticked by. He was slipping. Darkness was creeping in, swallowing him, pulling him downward. Bingwen’s oxygen dipped farther, then farther still.
Breathe, Bingwen. Breathe.
The numbers for the ship’s velocity were a blur of light as they accelerated. Mazer stared at the digits as they raced upward. Would Kim know what happened to him? he wondered. If he succumbed to the darkness, if his heart ruptured, if he suffered an aneurysm, would Kim ever get word? She was whispering in his ear now; Mazer could feel her pressed close against him, lying tangled in the bed, her bare leg wrapped around his, her breath hot on the side of his face, telling him she loved him, telling him she wanted a son or a daughter, it didn’t matter so long as it was made from him. A child that was half Maori, half American, half her, half him. She opened her mouth and spoke again, but now the words were silence. Blackness, like a blanket, had smothered the memory.
The pressure released instantly. The velocity numbers stopped spinning. The thrusters had cut. Thirty seconds had expired. Acceleration was over. Target velocity reached.
Mazer blinked, disoriented. Half a minute had felt like a lifetime. A sensation of equal parts euphoria and exhaustion coursed through him. His whole body felt weak and tingly. He shook himself, checked the readouts. They had reached the necessary velocity.
He felt a slight shift as his body slid to the left in the straps. They were moving in the wide loop now. They were circling around, getting into position.
“Report,” said Mazer. “Everyone check in.”
The pilots all responded. They were shaken but awake.
“Bingwen.” Mazer reached over and shook Bingwen but got no response. “Bingwen.”
The boy roused, shifted in his seat, his arms floating up in zero G around him. “What did I miss?”
Mazer exhaled in relief. “The easy part. We’re in the loop. Battleship is still coming. We intercept in sixty seconds. Opperman, suit up.”
Mazer unbuckled from the seat and flew back to the weapons bay. He opened the locker and removed the battle sui
t, a heat-resistant metal armor engineered by Victor Delgado for asteroid tunnel combat that fit over Mazer’s flight suit and oxygen supply. It was bulky and cumbersome, and Mazer felt hindered somewhat in his movements whenever he wore one. But if he was conducting a breach, he’d make that tradeoff for the added protection.
“Who would conduct a coup?” said Bingwen. “How stupid is that? Why cripple the Fleet in the middle of a war? Right when we need a cohesive, unified force against the Formics?”
“Terrorists are willing to burn down the world to promote hateful ideologies,” said Mazer. “This is their MO.”
“Maybe this isn’t terrorists,” said Bingwen. “Maybe these are people who believe they’re saving the Fleet and not weakening it.”
“It doesn’t matter what their position is,” said Mazer. “They’re killing people.”
“All the more reason to be cautious,” said Bingwen. “You don’t know what you’re getting into. This could be the work of a single person or dozens.”
“Blowing it up without at least investigating the situation inside feels irresponsible,” said Mazer. “There might be innocent people on that ship. We’ve already lost a lot of marines on the Antietam. I don’t want us to lose any more.”
“Let’s hope they give us good attorneys at our court-martial,” said Bingwen.
The console beeped as Mazer snapped on the final piece of armor.
“Here it comes,” said Bingwen.
Mazer flew up to the cockpit as the Tik fighters closed back in from their loops to form a wide ring. If the battleship had stayed the course and maintained its velocity, and if the Tik fighters had executed the flight path accurately, the D-class battleship would fly right into the center of the ring of fighters.
“We should be fighting the Formics, not each other,” said Opperman. “This is insanity. Marines are giving the bugs hell in the Asteroid and Kuiper Belts, and we’re out here chasing down a rogue lunatic.”
“Hold your positions,” said Mazer. “And stay sharp. This thing annihilated the Antietam. It can pick us off easy if we don’t watch ourselves. Opperman, you suited up?”
“Affirmative.”
“Bingwen, give me a visual when you have one,” said Mazer.
The radio crackled. Colonel Li’s voice came through. “Mazer, do you copy?”
Mazer answered, but there was a time delay now. GravCamp was an incredible distance behind them.
“Rackham here, go ahead Colonel.”
The response was slow. The time delay was maddening. “We’ve been running the data from our eye,” said Li, “backtracking the battleship’s and the Antietam’s movements. That battleship didn’t fire on the Antietam, Mazer. It rammed it. It flew right through it like a comet.”
Mazer blinked. “Rammed the Antietam? That’s impossible, sir. It couldn’t have survived that impact, even with its shields. Both ships would have disintegrated.”
And then, like a fog clearing from his mind, Mazer understood.
“What’s he talking about?” said Opperman. “What’s happening?”
“We’re not fighting a coup,” said Mazer. “We’re fighting Formics.”
The battleship came into view, a dark shape advancing in the blackness, moving into the center of the ring of Tik fighters like a leviathan rising out of the deep. There were no lights, no IF markings, no laserline receiver or array or external equipment of any kind on its surface. There was only the hull: red and smooth and glossy, covering the ship from end to end, as if the whole vessel had been dipped in a vat of red molten metal and allowed to cool. A single piece of metal shaped like a D-class battleship. Seamless, immaculate, pristine.
“Hullmat,” said Bingwen. “They’ve taken one of our own ships and covered it with hullmat. That’s why it intends to ram GravCamp. They know they’ll come through undamaged. They’ve turned one of our own ships into a spear.”
“They didn’t cover one of our ships,” said Mazer. “They made one of their own to look like ours.”
Below them, several doors on the surface of the Formic ship began to open. The guns underneath, like folded flowers seeking the sun, stretched and extended outward, reaching, rising, turning slightly as they found their targets. Mazer was shouting orders to break formation and scatter when the Formic guns filled the darkness with lethal glowing bursts of green.
CHAPTER 18
Warheads
Perhaps the greatest deception of the Hive Queen was in giving the International Fleet a false sense of security. Or to put it differently, her greatest deception was in creating the perception that her deceptions could be easily discovered.
An example will best illustrate. Shortly after the International Fleet discovered that the Hive Queen was moving some asteroids into clusters and using the raw materials of those asteroids to build large military structures, the International Fleet sent warships to destroy the structures. However, upon arrival, the Fleet discovered that the structures were nothing more than hollow Potemkin bases. Or feints. This simple discovery led the IF to believe that all deceptions of the Hive Queen would be similarly easily uncovered.
But in truth, it is likely that the purpose of the structures was not to fool the IF, but rather to lead the IF to believe that they could not be fooled, to fill IF command with vain confidence. Doing so would blind IF command to the Hive Queen’s real deceptions. This false confidence among IF command allowed the Hive Queen to employ numerous deceptive tactics with devastating effectiveness. The blinds of Operation Deep Dive is one such example, as is her tactic of building warships shaped like our own.
What is most remarkable about this latter deception is not how accurate the Hive Queen was in copying the shape and structure of our ships, but rather that she was able to produce so many and unleash them on IF targets throughout the system at the same time in a massive coordinated strike, without anyone in the Fleet knowing that she had even built them.
—Demosthenes, A History of the Formic Wars, Vol. 3
* * *
Inside the cockpit of the Tik fighter, Bingwen’s body jerked violently to one side in his restraints as the fighter barrel-rolled to the right and then dropped like a wounded bird in flight. It all happened in an instant, a sudden, hard change in direction. Bingwen’s hold on the trigger grip was gone. His arms, now free, slammed into the inner wall of the cockpit, and Bingwen felt an explosion of pain in his right elbow. The projected view in front of him, which only a moment ago featured a calm and steady view of the stars, now showed a spinning, blurred field of red: the hull of the Formic ship coming up fast.
The fighter was falling.
No, that wasn’t right, Bingwen realized. They couldn’t be falling. They were in space. There was no up or down, no gravity to pull them in one direction. They weren’t falling toward the Formic ship; they were diving. Intentionally.
Beside Bingwen in the pilot’s seat, Mazer was shouting orders into his commlink, one hand gripped tight to the flight stick, the other hand moving furiously through the small holofield above the console, rearranging a series of shapes to alter the fighter’s flight path. Bingwen heard Mazer’s orders, heard the shouts of alarm and chatter from the other pilots as they responded in kind and scrambled to avoid the gamma plasma bursting from the Formic guns beneath them. But the frantic fast-paced dialogue was just noise in Bingwen’s ears. As if the voices were a hundred meters away, speaking through a tube.
Bingwen had to get his hands back on the trigger grips. He had to work the guns. Mazer needed him on the guns.
Bingwen’s hands wouldn’t respond. They shifted one way and then another. Limp and useless and suddenly heavy.
Mazer was shouting again, but the words were even more meaningless. Noise. Screams.
Bingwen’s vision couldn’t settle. He couldn’t find anything to focus on. Nothing held still. The world moved too quickly.
Bingwen knew he needed to use his hands, to get control of his hands, but he couldn’t remember why.
So
mething was wrong, he realized. His mind was muddled.
Blood wasn’t flowing to his brain, he realized. They were diving too suddenly, too aggressively. The G-force was too great again. The thrusters had to be screaming.
Mazer banked left hard, and Bingwen’s arms struck the inner wall again. Another explosion of pain, this one worse than the first. But it helped. The jolt of instant agony roused Bingwen. Like a bucket of cold water thrown in his face.
“I need you, Bingwen. Get on that gun.”
Yes, thought Bingwen. He was the gunner. That’s why he had come. To help Mazer.
But his brain wouldn’t work. His hands wouldn’t hold.
“Bingwen, the guns!”
Mazer’s voice. Like a whip cracking. He wants me to target the Formic guns, the large mechanical arms protruding from the red ship. The gun that was firing at them. The gun that would kill them if Bingwen didn’t act.
Bingwen’s head snapped to one side as Mazer changed direction again, avoiding a wall of gamma plasma that whipped past.
I’m useless, thought Bingwen. This is nothing like the sim.
“Get to the bow of the ship,” Mazer said into his radio. “Position your fighters up near the nose. Most of the guns can’t reach you there. Use the curvature of the ship to provide cover.”
“That gun at 3 o’clock can still pick us off at the nose,” said Opperman over the radio. “That’s hardly good cover.”
“Leave the gun to me and Bingwen,” said Mazer. “We’ll draw its fire and take it out. Bingwen, look alive.”
Bingwen blinked, fighting back the disorientation, his vision swirling. Somehow he grabbed the console in front of him and held tight to the trigger grips.
If only he were stronger, he thought. If only he had Mazer’s arms.
“Answer me, Bing.”
“I’m here. I’m on it.”
Bingwen shook himself, forcing his mind to focus. He flipped on the targeting system, and the boxes of light appeared in front of him. He had done this countless times in the sim. This was easy. These were self-guided lasers. They did eighty percent of the work. He could do this with his eyes closed.
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