Star Force 10: Outcast

by B. V. Larson

  First he paused near several of the largest asteroids in the system. These monster rocks were almost planets being hundreds of miles in diameter. I wanted to know whether the Lithos were everywhere or only on the larger bodies. Marvin didn’t find any evidence of infestation. I’d been worried that the silico-nanites had been spread like dust throughout the star system, seeding and growing on the surface of every world.

  The science team decided, after long study, that it was probable the Pandas had created the Lithos and seeded them here in this system. Once the Lithos had gained sentience, they’d spread themselves around deliberately. To the Lithos, the asteroids were cold, unpleasant islands, and so they hadn’t colonized them.

  Back in home space around Earth, the rings connecting our local systems had seemed to conform to a pattern. One ring would be near a star and one far away. In the Panda system, both were middling far, but that was the only anomaly we’d found. Well, that plus the third ring in the Thor system. Maybe there were more of the rings inside planets in other systems, and we simply hadn’t found them yet.

  In any case, here in the Litho system I thought the other ring would most likely be farther out, so I told Marvin to work his way from the outside sunward, starting with the farthest gas giant and its moons.

  Once we’d had a chance to chart the stars, we figured out we were five hundred fifty light years from Earth at a star with nothing but a catalogue number. I declared a naming contest with the crew nominating and then voting on the ones they liked best. “Matterhorn” won out, I suppose because of the flying mountains.

  I wondered if Hansen was right after all, since this star system was farther away than the last one was. Maybe we should turn and try to fight our way back to the Matterhorn ring where we’d arrived. Either way, I had to do what my father had done repeatedly during the Macro Wars: build a new fleet and use it to get the job done.

  But before Marvin reached Matterhorn 7, the outermost planet in the system, the Lithos made their move.

  -19-

  We’d been in the Matterhorn system for weeks before the Lithos finally decided they’d had enough of their uninvited guests and decided to crush us once and for all.

  “They’re launching, sir,” Hansen said, sitting bolt upright.

  “Got it,” I replied, staring at the red pinpricks that had appeared around the Litho ships. First, dozens sparked into existence, then hundreds, and then thousands. I could hardly believe my eyes. “How can they have so many missiles?”

  “Maybe their ships are also their factories,” Hansen suggested.

  “That makes sense. If their silico-nanites permeate everything, then possibly they can manufacture things on the spot. Maybe they move materials around a bit, but they aren’t like us, with everything in discrete packages and mechanisms. They’re more like a massive substance with a collective mind. Maybe each flying mountain is some kind of single colony-creature.”

  “Or colony-planet.”

  “Right. Whatever silicon structure they invade, it becomes completely infected. Everything ends up as part of the Lithos except for the things they don’t like—too much water, too cold, and no significant radiation.”

  Hansen nodded. “So they’ve been making missiles—or maybe I should say ‘calving’ them off of their substance.”

  We watched in growing tension despite our factual discussion. Hansen had already sounded the alarm, summoning personnel to their battle stations even though the threat was far away. I frowned briefly as I hadn’t given him that order. It was a reasonable thing to do, however, so I let it go.

  The Lithos continued launching. There were somewhere above twenty-five hundred missiles now. More than enough, but they weren’t stopping.

  “Forget about how they did it,” I said. “Why did they choose to launch now?”

  “Because they figure they have enough to beat us?”

  “Maybe.” I adjusted the holotank. “This shows intercept in ten hours. And look…the ships aren’t following the missiles.”

  “Conserving energy?”

  I stared, watching the clouds of missiles. It appeared every Litho ship had launched at least a hundred, meaning a total of over four thousand headed our way. What was more remarkable was that each one was hardly smaller than our battlecruiser. So big…my blood ran cold.

  “Those can’t be missiles.”

  Hansen stood up to join me at the holotank. “What are they then?”

  “Small attack ships?”

  “But the Lithos build everything to huge scale, even bigger than the Macros. How likely is it a ship of that size even has a ranged weapon?”

  “I don’t know. Get all the sensors you can on a couple of them.” I turned to Hansen. “We have ten hours until they arrive. Get the analysts working on it.”

  For about ten seconds, I pondered what the Lithos could be up to. I didn’t like anything my mind came up with.

  “What are you weird bastards going to do?” I muttered. “Hansen, we’re lifting off. Get all the mining equipment aboard and stowed. You have half an hour. And send Marvin a query to see if he has made any progress on their language.”

  Marvin didn’t answer our messages. He seemed to be continuing the scouting mission I’d given him, but wouldn’t respond. Maybe he was working on an unauthorized experiment and thought radio silence equated to invisibility. Or maybe he simply had nothing to say.

  A few hours later we had good visuals and readings on the missile-ships. Shaped like triangular crystal arrowheads, they appeared to be symmetrical and have no weapon ports or sensors. We detected enough radioactives aboard to make atomic bombs, but they had chemical rockets for boosters and repellers for normal mobility. Maybe they were simply missiles after all, but I had a feeling the Lithos still had some surprises in store.

  The missiles caught up to us with alarming speed. They were significantly faster than the battleships that had fired them. As an experiment, we flew away from the comet but without running at flank speed in a panic—not yet. I wanted to see if they simply adjusted to follow us like the snowflakes, or if they anticipated us, like the Panda missiles.

  Surprisingly, they did neither. They stayed on course directly toward the comet we’d just left behind. Because of their huge size, the missiles could slam themselves into the floating iceball before detonating. Subsurface blasts would blow out great chunks, and the heat of the atomic fires would melt and crack the ice. That prediction of destruction bothered me because I didn’t understand it. After all, if they broke the comet up, we could just go on to another comet and then another. Then I remembered the numbers and really considered them.

  “Valiant,” I said to the brainbox, “approximately how many Litho missiles will it take to break our target comet into pieces of less than one mile in diameter? Give me an estimate within ten percent accuracy.”

  I waited almost a full second before I got an answer. I presumed the brainbox was incorporating a lot of variables and running millions if not billions of modeling runs. Eventually it gave me its best guess. “Approximately fifty-nine.”

  Fifty-nine into four thousand…that meant the missile swarm could follow us and break up almost seventy comets before they were all expended.

  The Lithos hadn’t even needed to target us, I realized. They knew we could outrun their missiles. They just planned to dog our heels and take away all our materials. Like cavalry harrying a force they could not directly beat, they would raze our potential food supplies, the equivalent of burning barns and poisoning wells.

  Long before they ran out of missiles we would run out of fuel if we merely kept searching near the edge of the Matterhorn system. If we were to have a chance of surviving their attack, I had to do something about those missiles.

  Blowing them up with nukes would take materials to build missiles and warheads, but to get the materials, we needed missiles and warheads. It made for a conundrum. “How are we going to get rid of the missiles, or gain enough time to set down and mine more comets
, or maybe mine an asteroid?” I asked out loud.

  “Maybe we don’t have to,” Adrienne said coolly from my elbow. I started, not having heard her come up close to me because I was so deep in thought.

  “What do you mean?” I asked without turning to look. I could see her face reflected in the polymers of the holotank, and I tried to determine what her expression might be. Distorted by curvature and the varying lights in the background as well as the glowing nanites inside the tank itself, I couldn’t tell for sure.

  “As long as we stay ahead of them, we have nothing to fear,” she said. “I know you want to keep mining that big comet both for access to resources and for hiding behind it, but what if we think smaller?”

  “Think smaller?”

  “If the chunk was small, we could grab it and keep going. If it was the right size, we might even be able to push it along with us, staying ahead of the Lithos.”

  My mind broke free of its circular paralysis. Adrienne had given me a paradigm shift. I’d been thinking big, but she was right. Big comets were big targets. A lot of interesting things could be done with small ones.

  That also gave me other ideas. “Hansen, do we know how they’re targeting us? Is it active radar like the Panda missiles?”

  Hansen shook his head. “Nothing active. If I had to guess, I’d say heat or radiation, probably the latter. With lots of mass, it becomes easier to detect radiation. The biggest ground-based detectors use hundreds or even thousands of tons of various materials.”

  “That much mass is a piece of cake to these flying mountains or even their huge missiles. Okay, Warrant Officer Turnbull, I want you to produce a radiation source that mimics our signature, put it on a simple drone, and soft-land it back on our comet. At the same time you launch it, take measures to reduce our own gamma and neutron output. Shield our reactors, our nuclear warheads—anything that radiates.”

  Adrienne turned to look at me, but I still didn’t want to risk meeting her eyes. “That’s a good idea, Captain,” she said with some slight warmth in her voice. “You’re making a decoy flare—something to draw off the missiles.”

  “Exactly. And have another one ready. If we’re lucky, we’ll disappear entirely to them in the explosions. They’ll lose us and become confused by the fallout going in all directions. We’ll just fade into the background like a diving submarine.”

  “And if not?”

  I looked at her. “Then we’ll do it again, and again, until they either lose us or they’ve run out of missiles.”

  “I’ll get right on it, Captain,” she said. Then she was gone, leaving an empty space beside me that I could feel.

  “Hansen,” I said, “find us a comet chunk out here between a fifth and a half the ship’s mass and set up an intercept to take it aboard.” I addressed the brainbox next, “Valiant, we need to reconfigure the ship to capture such a piece and bring it safely aboard, either whole or in stages.” After almost an hour of discussion back and forth with the ship’s brain, we worked out a modification that should do what I wanted.

  Hansen found a target beyond the big comet, which was coming up quickly. An hour later Adrienne reported the drones were ready, just in time. “Launch one as soon as you can,” I told her. Five minutes later, I saw a green dot in the holotank detach itself from us and decelerate at heavy Gs for a landing on the comet. We diverged by only the barest fraction of a degree, just enough to slide by the big ball of ice. As soon as we were past, we curved slightly again to put ourselves behind it, hidden from the Litho missiles. We also turned around and began to decelerate with repellers only. I wanted no engine flare to mark us.

  We could still see most of the Litho missiles because they were spread out. Some of them had a line of sight on us, but hopefully they were fixed on the decoy. With our increased shielding, we hoped they would lose us among the pinpoint stars in the background.

  Hours passed.

  “Here they come,” I said as the holotank showed the leading missiles reaching the big comet. The main screen flashed then darkened as the system compensated for the blasts whiting out our view.

  “Full deceleration!” I ordered, knowing that for as long as the detonations went on, the Lithos wouldn’t be able to see through to us. “Get us lined up on that small comet.”

  “On it,” Hansen said, his hands gripping the controls as we shook under heavy deceleration. In the holotank, missile after missile slammed into the big comet, spreading billions of tons of irradiated and vaporized mass in all directions, the perfect screen for our activities. I wished we had a better view of the destruction of the ball of ice, but the explosions made that impossible.

  Still, our sensors could count detonations and at forty, I ordered, “Reduce braking. Use only repellers.” I wanted our engine signature to be gone by the time the Lithos stopped pounding the comet.

  “Repellers only, aye,” Hansen said. “Rendezvous with our chunk of junk in forty-seven minutes.”

  “Excellent. Miss Turnbull, pick out another big comet and send a drone to it.” Soon another decoy was on its way.

  The explosions ceased at fifty-one, which made me glad I’d stopped the braking early. On the other hand, that was fewer than we had predicted. Tricking the missiles into suiciding against decoys was going to take a long, long time. They could destroy eighty comets at that rate before running out.

  Then the cloud of missiles continued by and through the debris of the comet. I held my breath as they passed the explosion zone, cruising straight forward in our general direction. Waiting, waiting…I breathed again as I saw them turn slightly to follow the decoy. My plan was working.

  Half an hour later we pulled up quietly and carefully to the small comet drifting in the direction we were going. Tiny, really, it still massed a quarter of the size of my battlecruiser.

  I had programmed the holotank for a close-up representation of our rendezvous. Valiant now sported a spidery scoop in front, a kind of basket on the prow that would half enclose the ball of ice and minerals. Nosing forward, Hansen scooped our target up and slowly applied repeller thrust to keep it pinned against the ship.

  Unfortunately, the small comets weren’t dense enough to hold much metal. They were mostly fluffy ice with just enough “dirt” inside to give our factory a diet meal after a lot of processing. It was like eating cotton candy—it was hard to get full.

  While the ship digested tidbits, I ordered Kwon to take some marines out on the hull in battlesuits and start carefully cutting one-ton chunks free. That sped up the process. In their suits, the marines were strong enough to roll or carry these ice boulders into chutes. Grinders would break them up further. After that, they would be fed into the factory.

  “Keep making decoy drones,” I told Adrienne over the intercom. “Get eight or ten ready. After that, the priority is fuel, food and water. Then repairs and more drones.”

  Hours turned into days of routine. Adrienne and I began to eat together in the wardroom again, and tensions eased between us, but I still felt like she was holding something against me. I found that exasperating since I couldn't think of what I'd done that was improper. She couldn’t have it both ways—being a warrant officer under my command and my close friend at the same time, and she didn’t have any right to interfere with what little action I was likely to get from other women.

  Despite all my misgivings, I found myself enjoying her company and seeking it out. I hoped she’d eventually start to understand how things had to work. My personal feelings, whatever they were or might be, had to be secondary to command and survival. Besides, I hadn’t really sorted out how I felt about her—or even how I should feel about her after her sister had died. Mostly, I tried not to think about it.

  I told myself it had to be easier for her. If she liked me, she could hardly feel strange about it, as she’d barely known me before her sister died. To me, however, everything about her reminded me of Olivia. Every time I started to feel normal, I would suddenly be thrown off as Adrienne said or did
something that caused a blurring echo in my mind. I knew it would be a long time before I would see only the living girl in front of me.

  Now that we had the materials coming in from various comets, I made sure the enlisted mess was stocked with basic fake beer. It wasn’t very good coming right out of the factory, but with Kwon in charge of rationing it and reining in any troublemakers, it provided a welcome diversion.

  It also made me feel a lot less guilty about drinking the stores of the good stuff locked in the dead captain’s cabin, which had become my own personal storeroom. Whenever I wanted some real privacy, I would shut myself in there, drink, and think, with only the brainbox able to get a hold of me directly. Many times I considered contacting Kalu and inviting her in, if she would still have me. But something always stopped me. In such a small, closed environment as this ship, some things couldn’t be undone.

  Greyhound and Valiant both kept radio silence to ensure the Lithos did not reacquire us on their sensors. Marvin was approaching Matterhorn 7, the outermost, many-mooned green gas giant, and he had done something to his ship to make it even harder to track than before. We only knew where he was because we’d kept a telescope automatically focused on him from the time he’d left with orders to Valiant’s brainbox to make sure we didn’t lose the visual.

  The Litho missiles didn’t get any smarter, so we kept up our routine of decoys, their launches hidden by the explosions of each comet in turn. I thought about sending several decoys off at once just to simplify our lives, but that might have provided the enemy a clue that they weren’t really following us out into deep space after all. I wanted them to see what they expected.

  Hansen got good at grabbing chunks of materials. Some were icy like comets. Some contained more metals and rock, which we desperately needed. What we weren’t finding were a lot of radioactives. The factory could manufacture enough for the decoys by bombarding metals with radiation, creating isotopes with short half-lives, but those were useless for making nuclear bombs. Nukes needed stable uranium or plutonium to trigger the reaction that gave them their explosive power.