by B. V. Larson
“If we shed some mass,” he replied.
Much as I hated to do it, he was right. We had to lighten the ship, allowing our engine power to push less ship and thus do it faster.
“Sakura,” I called on the command channel, “we have to dump some mass. Get Kwon and his marines to help you jettison anything we can spare. Water, metals, other raw materials, anything we’ll be able to mine out of the sea floor.”
“If we’re going to fire any missiles,” Hansen said, “we might as well do it early. That’s mass, too.”
“Good point, but…” I stared at the holotank. “Each of those forty ships has broken up into at least forty fighters. That means we have sixteen hundred of them on our asses.” I vacillated a moment, and then said, “Go ahead and target the two nearest clusters. They haven’t spread out too much. Let’s see how they deal with nukes.”
“Firing.” Two tracks curved away from us and headed back toward the pursuing fighter squadrons. I paced for the tense minutes it took the missiles to reach their targets.
“Detonate them short of the Lithos’ predicted antiproton beam range.” I set the holotank to show me that distance and watched as the first missile approached the leading fighter group.
Suddenly, beams from the fighters lanced out all together, spearing the missile from much farther away than I’d expected. I stared at the readout for a moment, querying the sensor data. “Those weren’t antiproton beams. They were lasers.” No wonder they could reach much farther. “Send a signal to blow the second missile beyond the new range!”
“Done,” Hansen said. This time our nuke detonated with a spectacular explosion, but from much farther away. When the blast cleared, I saw that three of the fighters looked like they had been knocked out, but the rest came on.
“At least we know we can hurt them,” he said.
“One of our few missiles for three fighters is a losing ratio. It’s also bad news that they have adapted their weaponry to make it more effective against us.”
“They’re fast learners,” Hansen said.
“Apparently. That means we have to be even faster. How’s the ship’s mass looking?”
“We’ve dropped a thousand tons, but I’d like to see at least two hundred tons more. With those new lasers, we’ll be in range before we can splash down. I’d rather not have to land in the water under fire.”
“Agreed.” I contacted Sakura again. “How much more mass can we dump?”
“Everything easy is already gone,” she replied. “Now all we have are manufactured goods.”
“We need to shed two hundred more tons and the sooner the better. Start with the extra shield generators and any drones we have left. We won’t need those.”
“There’s no way we have two hundred tons more to dump!” Sakura protested.
“Do the best you can. Rip out nonessential lab equipment, half the toilets, the mess tables, bunks, whatever. Riggs out.”
“Yes, Captain,” Sakura said woodenly.
Had there been a hint of resentment in her voice? It seemed like such a minor thing. Maybe she really valued her lab equipment.
I turned back to Hansen. “Fire off the rest of the missiles except one. Target the nearest group and have the controllers try to get at least one in close before detonation to wipe out that group. That will get rid of tonnage and buy us a few more minutes.”
My mind quickly moved onto bigger concerns. All but one of our nine remaining full-up nuclear missiles soon left the rails, curving back around to come in all at once at the nearest enemy fighter group. With several minutes to see our weapons coming, the enemy spread out, which made their point defense less effective but also reduced the number of fighters we could catch in one blast. Still, we got three of our missiles into effective range, sacrificing the others to do it, and nearly wiped out that squadron, leaving only two operational Litho fighters. Those didn’t worry me, because our heavy lasers far outranged them. Even our secondary batteries hit harder and reached farther. Only in great numbers could they beat us.
“Are we going to make it?” I asked.
“Not quite, but a lot fewer of them will get shots at us before we get there.” Hansen furrowed his eyebrows. “It’s going to be rough.”
“Rough we can handle. This ship will make it through.” I really did believe that—even though I was speaking for the sake of the bridge crew and anyone else who might hear my words.
For a crewman, one of the perks of standing watch on the bridge was to be the bearer of rumor, known in Fleet as “scuttlebutt.” When off shift, most headed for the mess to eat where they invariably found a ready audience to tell what was happening in the ship’s nerve center. Smart noncoms kept their fingers on the pulse of a crew by taking their meals there. I figured Kwon would alert me to anything I needed to know—if we lived long enough to care.
Updating the calculations, the holotank told me that three more Litho squadrons would catch us before we got under cover beneath the cold waves. This was assuming they did not try to match velocities with us but only braked when they had come into range.
The first group came closer and closer. Hansen held off on flipping the ship around to begin his braking maneuver until the last possible moment. Just before they came into range of our two heavy lasers, I told him to flip the ship so we pointed back the way we came. This not only set us up for deceleration, it aimed our best shielding and firepower directly at the enemy. I let them come a little closer, knowing that the nearer they were, the harder our weapons would hit.
“Fire,” I said, and our laser gunners started picking them off. Unfortunately, it turned out that several shots were needed to fully slag one of their fighters because they were so big compared to a comparable craft of Star Force design. They were actually as large as the original Nano ships, like our gunships or frigates. At least a hundred feet long and made of stone, it took hard hits from our main batteries to knock them out. Since the Litho fighters seemed to be mostly made up of crystal, they were also hugely massive and could obviously take a pounding.
“Combine the two shots on one,” I ordered. “Target the nearest fighter in each case.” Steadily the Litho fighter numbers dropped as we blasted each in turn as fast as our heavy beams could recharge. By the time they came within range of our secondaries guns, we’d destroyed a third of them.
“Use half the standard lasers on one fighter at a time,” I said. “If one blast kills a fighter, split them up again. I want to find the minimum number of guns it takes to kill in one salvo.” It turned out we needed six to kill in one shot.
We killed about fifty of them before they started firing back.
Nineteen of their lasers lanced out, aiming at one spot on Valiant. These were weaker, and apparently fired at extreme range, because they failed to destroy their target, Heavy Laser Number Two.
“Overheating in HL2!” one of the laser gunners reported.
“Evasive maneuvers, Mister Hansen. We can’t let them gang up and fire everything at one spot like that again.” Hansen used side repellers to jink us slightly in random directions. It wouldn’t make them miss completely, but it would complicate their targeting and spread out their hit pattern. It would also reduce the time they had to strike at a particular spot.
By the time the attacking squadron was down to eight fighters, we’d taken a bunch of minor hits, losing sensors and pieces of armor. It was then that the Lithos sprung their next surprise.
I saw pinpoints of red bloom in the holotank as the eight turned into eighty. “Multiple targets, missile launch!” I snapped. “Priority to individual point defense fire.” If they had nukes onboard, we had to shoot them down.
The new swarm jumped toward us with startling speed. Sensors showed they were smaller, tinier even than our own missiles. In the Lithos’ usual scale, they must seem like mere bullets rather than missiles.
Bullets… “Give me a radiation reading on those missiles,” I barked.
“No radiation,” the word came b
ack.
“Okay, they’re not nukes,” I thought out loud. “Conventional warheads of that size can hardly hurt us. They aren’t going to hit hard enough to damage us much by impact. What are they trying to do?”
And then I remembered the snowflakes.
“Kwon, prepare to repel boarders! Get some men on the hull, and station reaction teams at key points inside.”
I was guessing, but nothing else made sense. They had built, or modified, these new missiles for one purpose: to be fast enough to chase us down and deliver something to damage us. All their radioactives had probably gone into their engines.
At the end of the chase, the only method these Litho weapons had left to attack us was manually with claws grown out of their own odd bodies.
-22-
“Give me a visual on one of those projectiles,” I said.
As I suspected, it turned out to be a snowflake. Closer and closer the cloud came, leaving the shrunken fighters behind. I pulled up one of those for a moment, and noticed it wasn’t firing anymore. In fact, the fighter had lost its arrow shape and now looked like just a chunk of rock.
“They used the remnants of their fighters to push against, and abandoned them, like marines jumping off ships,” I said. “How are we doing on shooting them down?”
“Not so well,” Hansen said. “They’re small targets and have turned edge-on. They're evading as much as they can. But I got a little surprise for them.” He laughed.
“Does anyone else need to know about this trick of yours?” I asked.
Hansen blinked then reached over to key his communications. “Sergeant Major Kwon, tell your men to get below and brace for hard deceleration. I’m about to hit the brakes in fifteen seconds.” He held up a hand and slowly counted to zero, watching the chronometer. Then he ran the engine power up to maximum.
Valiant shuddered and bucked in response.
“We’re off-balance,” Hansen said though gritted teeth. “All that mass we dumped changed our center of gravity.” Fighting the controls, he soon steadied the ship.
As he did so, I watched the falling snowflakes leap toward us like mad things. As we were pointed prow-backward with our engines braking our speed, we were letting them catch up to us that much faster. At first I thought Hansen had made a mistake, but then I figured out his surprise. If I was right about these snowflakes, they could only do us serious damage if they were able to latch on and try to dig in. Now our combined closing speeds had increased so much I doubted they could attach before bouncing off.
“Hang on,” Hansen muttered just before some of the snowflakes hit us. Valiant shook, and I heard clangs and groans as we were struck at high velocity. Then all was quiet again.
“Oh, crap,” I said as I watched more snowflakes fall toward us. This time they had linked arms and turned into a kind of super-snowflake, a latticework of crystal. “This is going to hurt.”
Now Hansen’s maneuver hardly mattered, as the hexagon of joined Lithos acted as a net, not to be thrown off. At least forty of them, linked together, smashed against the hull. A few got knocked off into space, but the rest let go of each other and began to dig their sharp crystal claws into the ship.
“Keep it together, Hansen. I’m getting into armor. And tell the crew to grab their self-defense weapons!” I bolted out the door and down to the marine deck.
My battlesuit stood humming in its niche, an extra I’d had built for me but never used in combat, only in battle sims. I threw off my pressure suit and jumped into the monstrosity. My biometrics turned it on, and its primitive brain announced, “Armored Combat Suit System: Active. Welcome, Cody Riggs.”
“Thanks, suit. Now give me a HUD view of the ship with all friendlies and enemies.” Examining the situation, I saw several breaches already imminent. Kwon and his troops were back out on the hull, fighting to keep the snowflakes from getting in. Only a few marines had stayed inside. I cursed my decision to send so many out onto the hull. The real danger would be if one of those things started rampaging around within the ship.
Grabbing a laser rifle, I plugged its thick cable into my suit. Then I looked over the other auxiliary weapons, trying to figure out what would be most effective—I couldn’t really use heavy explosives inside the ship. Finally I grabbed a breaching cutter and slung it on my back. It was like an old-fashioned chainsaw with a monomolecular band.
The HUD led me to the nearest breach. I saw a crystal spike coming up through the floor, sawing and probing even as smart metal tried to close around it. The thing had already gotten past the hull and the maintenance crawlspace.
Turning the laser rifle to its closest focus and highest setting, I blasted the reaching arm. Refracted green light washed everywhere, darkening my visor to almost black, like a welder’s mask. The Litho limb shattered, sending shards rattling into my suit. When I could see again, though, I saw smoking gashes in the walls where my beam had touched, and several painted surfaces had ignited from the heat. Alarms blared and automatic suppression systems blew in halon gas. I had to switch to short-range sonar to see.
I approached the hole in the floor and the blackened limb cautiously. The limb was still moving, so I fired another shot through its stump and into its central body mass. It took several shots, and by the time it was dead, the fire system was working overtime. Obviously, lasers were not optimal inside the hull—too much collateral damage.
I stowed my laser rifle in its cradle on my back and pulled out the cutter. It had a two-handed grip, like a huge sword, with a protected blade and a moving belt. The cutting band had an edge one molecule thick, the sharpest thing possible to materials science.
Starting it up, I ran down the passageway toward the next incursion, where I saw a group of crew faced off against one of the things. Fortunately I came into the fight from the other side.
“Cease fire!” I yelled over the close-range com as I rounded the corner. Despite my order, a bolt from a laser pistol scored my armor, narrowly missing the cutter. “Cease fire, dammit, unless I’m out of the way!”
The snowflake loomed in front of me, a juggernaut twenty feet across. Its jagged arms ripped and tore into the deck, overhead and bulkheads, a slow-motion wrecking machine. Thumbing the button that pulled back the safety guard, I set the cutter against the nearest arm and pulled the trigger that made the flexible blade whirl at high speed.
I felt more than heard the supersonic whine as the device sliced into the crystal like it was made of cardboard. In a second, I’d severed one arm and set to work on another.
The monster turned on me like a giant double-jointed hand that could fold itself backward. I jumped away, holding the cutter up like some two-handed sword-wielding warrior or a chainsaw killer from an old slasher vid. Fencing with it for a moment, I managed to cut off a third arm. At that point it was doomed as it was not able to balance well enough on two appendages to use the third offensively.
“Kwon,” I gasped as I carved the thing to bits, “as soon as you get the hull clear, get to the armory and grab breaching cutters. They work better than lasers inside.”
“Now you tell me!” he grunted, still in his own fight. “We got most of them, sir. Second Squad, finish clearing the hull. First squad, follow me!”
On my HUD I could see his icon move to the airlock. He was moving in my direction and that sounded fine to me.
I knocked out another snowflake with my cutter before marines surrounded me and fanned out in all directions. Clearly my work felling crystal timber was over. I handed the device to Kwon as didn’t have one.
“Use one of these cutters instead of your laser,” I told him. “Beams do almost as much damage to our own ship as to them. As soon as you’ve finished them, start damage control!”
“Yes, sir!” Kwon took the cutter from me and headed for the nearest snowflake. Kwon had it under control, so instead of forcing my way to the new front lines, I headed back up to the bridge.
Everyone looked at me with surprise as I stomped over to the hol
otank in my heavy armor. Opening my faceplate, I talked to Valiant. “Lower gravity on the bridge to point three G.”
That would lighten me up a bit. Then I retracted my gauntlets and helmet into the suit and reduced the servo boost. I didn’t want to accidentally smash a console with an ill-timed sweep of my hand.
Right then the holotank told me that we had to keep decelerating hard if we were going to make our landing. Unfortunately, this braking allowed the next two Litho squadrons to catch up to us with frightening rapidity. Furthermore, instead of coming at us one at a time, they cleverly formed up into a mass of more than eighty fighters—which were much harder to deal with.
“Engage them at maximum range,” I said. “Divide up your fire into smaller groups this time. We have to kill or disable as many of those things as we can. If we’re lucky, we will force them to launch their snowflakes early.”
We were only able to knock them down to sixty-six fighters this time before they began calving. Over five hundred additional snowflakes blossomed in the holotank, all heading directly toward us.
“Ready that last nuke,” I called. “Set it to detonate as near as we can stand. I want them to be as densely packed as possible.” I hadn’t been entirely sure of why I had saved the last missile, but there was an old battle saying about the winner usually being the commander who kept something in reserve for the right moment.
This seemed to be that moment.
The missile flashed out of the tube and, seconds later, detonated close, right where I wanted it to. It vaporized at least half the snowflakes and only gave our ship a good sunburn. Two hundred and fifty was still too many for my comfort, but it was a hell of a lot fewer than five hundred. “Keep engaging. Run the lasers as hot as you can.” It didn’t matter how hot they got or if they had to shut down, because I figured this would be the Lithos’ last chance at us for a while.
“It’s too many,” I whispered as I saw the count fall to two hundred. We weren’t killing them fast enough. The snowflakes were matching course and speed with us, and we couldn’t maneuver much if we wanted to splash down where we needed to. I tried to come up with options, but any delay in landing would allow even more Lithos to catch up. Furiously, I worked solutions in the holotank, and came up with only one possibility.
