“If it’s any consolation,” Blackstone said, “I believe they’ve sent more.”
“So it must be something else,” she said.
Blackstone shook his head. There were other probes headed to Uranus and still more on the way to Saturn, but they wouldn’t reach their destinations for a long time.
“Why spray those gels around so much planetary area?” Kursk asked. “We’re talking about a gas giant, not just a tiny terrestrial planet.”
“The answer is simple,” said Blackstone. “To hide their launching of more planet killers.”
“If you’re right, they’ve given themselves away by deploying all those gels. We know how they operate. Surely, they must understand that we wouldn’t let ourselves be surprised.”
“Everything is a matter of time, distances and size,” Blackstone said. “We have spotted one ice-asteroid, and that was almost by chance. It is headed for the Sun, most likely for Earth or Mercury.”
“You explained that yesterday,” she said.
“We need more data,” Blackstone said as he gripped the map-module. “I should have sent more probes months ago.”
This informational war at such stellar distances presented difficult problems. One made a move and then waited months for the results. Did the cyborgs want him to rush out toward the approaching ice-asteroid with his fleet? He had no doubt whatsoever that the cyborgs had taken control of the Saturn System. After gleaning everything he could get his hands on about the cyborg assault on Jupiter, it was the obvious conclusion. If he attacked the ice-asteroid, journeying toward it, his battlewagons would be months away from returning to Mars. Was that asteroid a decoy meant to lure his warships out of Mars orbit? Did other hidden asteroids speed toward Mars, hoping to hit and obliterate human life on the Red Planet?
There was a worse possibility. The asteroid could be targeting Earth. Why hadn’t he sent more probes? Information was so critical. Unfortunately, the Mars Battlefleet had expended most of its Stalingrad-Seven probes during the fight against the Doom Stars. They only had a few left. With miserly feelings, he’d ordered each one launched. Soon, the Martians would begin construction of large-scale probes. But those would lack certain critical features of a Stalingrad-Seven.
“This means more sleepless nights,” said Kursk, sounding disappointed.
Blackstone hardly noticed. He was mentally computing vectors, fuel-rates and ship tonnages. Space warfare was in large measure a matter of finding the enemy before he struck unexpectedly. Or it was striking him, hoping the enemy hadn’t tricked you into a fatal move. The idea of a planet wrecker—it sickened Blackstone to the core of his being. The cyborgs sickened him. They had been like aliens from a different star. He hoped the man or woman or the team of scientists who had invented them roasted in an infernal afterlife. The idea of everyone uniting against them—mankind’s only hope was unity against the enemy. Better the Highborn than the cyborgs. It was a shame Social Unity and the Highborn had bled each other so badly. He wondered if the cyborgs had engineered that.
“Where are the other asteroids?” Blackstone muttered to himself. “I have to find them.” He knew they were out there. It was a knot in his gut that simply wouldn’t go away. The Jovian moon Carme pointed to it. That the cyborgs had tried to make a planet wrecker in the Jupiter System pointed to the possibility they would try that elsewhere. It was time to begin making plans based on that premise.
-31-
The Spartacus hurtled through space, journeying the great distance between Jupiter and Mars. The meteor-ship had traveled for over a month now. And it had already gained its highest velocity for the trip. Soon, Marten would order them to begin deceleration.
The speeds gained in the meteor-ship were many times greater than what he’d achieved in the Mayflower. The shuttle had lacked fuel for such extended acceleration and deceleration. It was the difference of a warship over a vessel meant to ferry personnel between craft.
“There is a priority message from the Chief Strategist,” Nadia said.
Marten sat up, realizing that he’d been dozing. He straightened his uniform, coughed into his hand and nodded to Nadia. Afterward—after listening to Tan’s message—he stared at Nadia.
“It’s finally happening,” she said.
Marten pushed off his chair and floated for the hatch. “Tell Osadar to meet me in the tank,” he said.
“Yes Force-Leader,” said Nadia.
Despite the nature of Tan’s message, Marten grinned at his wife hunched there in her cubicle. She had such beautifully long legs, and the gracefulness of her neck…. He liked being married. He liked—loved—Nadia. Then he recalled Tan’s conversation again. The distance from Ganymede was already great enough so the light-speed messages experienced time delays, making normal conversations impossible. They had listened to Tan, begun to speak during some of her pauses, only to quit talking as she resumed her flow of information. A Saturn-originated ice-asteroid sped toward the Sun. It was quite possible that the ice-asteroid was just like Carme. The Saturn System possessed an abundance of moon-sized asteroids. Maybe there weren’t as many as in the Jupiter System, but there were enough for the cyborgs’ purposes. Had this ice-asteroid gained the needed velocity while circling Saturn many, many times?
Half an hour later, Marten and Osadar floated in the dark of the situation tank. It was a small chamber, formerly Circe’s quarters. All the statues and shackles had long ago been swept out of the chamber. In their place was high-tech features looted from the last supply-ship. Holoimages of stars appeared on the walls.
Marten and Osadar worked on the linkage with the patrol boats and downloaded the data sent by the laser-lightguide message by Tan. Two of the patrol boats had lifted off the meteor-ship and moved in opposite directions, until they’d reached exact locations. Big bay doors had opened, exposing delicate sensor equipment toward the Inner Planets. The equipment on the two patrol boats would help the Spartacus act as a giant interferometer. Likely, no one expected them to spot what more powerful and closer sensors could. Rather, it would help map the same areas from a different perspective and angle. That data they would beam to a relay Planetary Union satellite orbiting Mars. Something bad had obviously happened in the Saturn System. Something bad was likely going on now that the cyborgs wished hidden.
After the linkages were calibrated, Marten brought up strategic zoom. Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth and the Sun appeared in scale. Saturn was on the other side of the Sun as Jupiter.
The situation placed Earth and Mars on the same side of the Sun as Saturn. It wasn’t a one hundred and eighty-degree difference between Jupiter and Saturn, but it meant the Spartacus would have to pass the Sun before it reached either Mars or Earth.
It meant their sensors couldn’t sweep certain areas, because they couldn’t scan through the Sun. Rather, the sweeps took place on either side of the Sun, and at the void behind that.
Marten made a few adjustments with a hand-unit. It awed him, really. The Outer Planets orbited so much more ponderously than the Inner Planets did. In relation to the Outer Planets, the Inner ones rotated around the Sun like tops, going round and round and round. The farther an Outer Planet was from the Sun, the longer its journey took for a complete orbit.
“If we’re going to win this war,” Marten said, “we need to go on the offensive.”
“Do you wish to travel to Saturn?” asked Osadar.
Marten shook his head. The distance was daunting. This journey from Jupiter to Mars was taking long enough. Viewing the planets in strategic zoom showed him something. The Inner Planets formed their own little core, almost their own system. The Outer Planets were each like an oasis in an ocean of vast, incredible nothingness. A journey between stars—it would be a yawning gulf that would take a man’s lifetime to cross.
“You can’t win a war just defending,” said Marten. “We’re always reacting to the enemy. We have to make the cyborgs react to us.”
“How do you propose to do this?”
> “Partly by what we’re doing,” said Marten. “But more fully, by working together with the Martians and with Social Unity.”
“Then where is your complaint?” asked Osadar. “These things begin to occur.”
Marten shook his head. “It’s the time, I guess, the long stretches where nothing happens. During those times, we wait for the cyborgs to make their next move, their next assault.”
“Time has aided us,” said Osadar.
“Why do you say that?” asked Marten.
“The cyborgs have moved slowly because the distances are too great for them to move quickly. Each strategic endeavor—each taskforce used—first had to originate at a distant Outer Planet and then ferry over several billion kilometers. On their arrival at the destination, the cyborgs had to survive or die with their limited force, being unable to quickly re-supply it.”
“Yeah, that’s one way to view it,” said Marten.
“It is the correct way,” said Osadar. “As a human, I traveled from Jupiter to Saturn and then I journeyed even farther to distant Neptune. Did I ever tell you that I was supposed to pilot the first ice hauler to the Oort Cloud?”
“You might have said something about it once. It was an experimental ship, right?”
Osadar nodded.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Marten said. “I once traveled to a beamship, but that’s history.”
Osadar rose from where she worked on a holographic imaging unit. She set the sonic-screwdriver on it and stared at Marten.
“Is it broken?” he asked.
“I wonder sometimes,” said Osadar. “Maybe the correct action is to take our ship out to Neptune.”
“Maybe someday,” Marten said. “Yeah,” he said, grinning as he envisioned it. “We would go in a giant battle-group with Doom Stars, SU battleships, Martian orbitals and Jovian meteor-ships.”
Osadar made a lonely sound. “No. You do not understand. I do not envision fighting the cyborgs at Neptune. Rather, I would search for the old experimental ship, the one the cyborgs invaded. If I could find it, I would modify the ice hauler and turn it into a starship.”
“And do what?” asked Marten. “Head to Alpha Centauri?”
“Or go even farther,” said Osadar. “I wish to travel beyond the reach of man-made machines. I wish to travel to a place where it would be too far for them to follow. I doubt our ability to defeat the cyborgs. I would like to survive in a world without the constant threat of annihilation.”
Marten glanced at Osadar. There was a certain temptation in her idea. But how would they find the ice hauler? Where was it now? “No,” he said quietly. “Running isn’t the answer.”
“It is preferable to death or to the oblivion of being a mindless creature of the cyborgs. If anyone should know that, it is I.”
“Sometimes a man is meant to stand and fight. This is our Solar System.”
“Not for much longer,” Osadar said.
“Yeah? We’ll see about that.”
-32-
The days passed in tedious scanning and studying the readouts aboard the Spartacus. Marten ordered Omi to intensify space marine training, to take the soldiers outside on the meteor-ship’s shell. Marten remained in the command center, using the main screen to help study the laboriously gathered data. Everyone in his or her cubicle helped, as did Osadar in the tank.
Marten sipped Jovian coffee as he leaned forward, staring thoughtfully. The ice-asteroid heading fast for the Inner Planets was too much like Carme. They had found little cyborg data in the ruined machines on the tiny Jovian moon, but the action had spoken loudly enough.
The problem finding more data now was that space was vast. It was hard for Marten to grasp the immensity of the Great Dark. AUs, light-years, those were just fancy terms. The human mind couldn’t really understand them.
Analogies helped. Take the Earth or Mars and make them the size of a period at the end of a sentence. Then hold the period up in a large room. At the closest approach, Earth and Mars would be four meters away. The tiny speck of Earth with its teeming billions and its clouds, oceans and breathable air orbited through billions of cubic kilometers of empty space. A Doom Star would be like a microbe in an ocean. How did you spot it if it was trying to hide?
Marten took another sip and rubbed his eyes. You found it like this: days and nights of observations. The computer searched for a small glitch against the empty void that would point to movement. That movement might be an enemy vessel or planetoid.
They used thermal scanners, broad-spectrum electromagnetic sensors, neutrino detectors and mass detectors. Hour after hour, they sliced through carefully selected sections of the Great Dark, looking for anomalies.
Normally, an enemy ship emitted radiation, especially if it used a fusion or ion engine. The Great Dark seethed with radiation, however. The radiation came from the Sun and from Jupiter and Saturn. If a black-ice asteroid moved from simple velocity—having gained it around Saturn—then it would emit no radiation and no heat signature.
The Earth’s death might have been launched months ago. It was their task to discover if there were more asteroids coming. The lone ice-asteroid suggested that there were more.
“Why would the cyborgs launch such a thing?” Nadia asked.
“They’re aliens,” Marten said. “They want to eradicate humanity and populate the Solar System with themselves.”
“But they originated from humans,” Nadia said.
“It’s probably what makes them so deadly. If they were just machines—” he shrugged.
“It’s so cold, so ruthless.”
“Tan should have sent more ships with us,” Marten said. He took another sip. “But she couldn’t. What if the cyborgs have already launched another attack at Jupiter? There are hardly enough warships left as it is.”
“Maybe the cyborgs launched the ice-asteroid to focus our attention on it.”
“For what reason?” Marten asked.
“You’re the military man,” she said. “You tell me what else the cyborgs could do.”
Marten frowned at the screen. “What would you say if I ordered the Spartacus to change heading?”
“To where?” she asked.
“Neptune.”
Everyone in the command center looked up.
Marten was too engrossed in the screen to notice. “What if we went to Neptune and searched for Osadar’s ice hauler there?”
“What ship was that?” Nadia asked quietly.
Marten told her about the experimental ship.
“That’s interesting,” said Nadia. “But wouldn’t the cyborgs already have confiscated it and made it part of their Neptune Fleet?”
“Possibly,” he said.
“We should run from the asteroid and flee out of the Solar System?” asked the sensor-officer.
“What?” Marten asked. He turned around, and he noticed everyone hanging on his words. He scowled, stared into his coffee cup and shook his head. “It’s a stupid idea. You’re right,” he told Nadia. “The cyborgs would have already converted the ice hauler to their own use. This is the battle, and we’ll choose our ground and fight now.”
“Where exactly?” asked Nadia.
Marten slotted the coffee cup into a holder on his chair. “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” he said.
-33-
Thirteen days after the initial sighting of the ice-asteroid, Commodore Blackstone of the Mars Battlefleet received an emergency request to report to the bridge of the Vladimir Lenin.
He raced out of his quarters as he tucked in his shirt. While riding the lift, he buttoned his uniform. Fitting his cap on snuggly, he strode through the hatch. Commissar Kursk was already there by the map-module. She looked up, and there were lines in her face.
She’s getting older…no, she was already older. The strain is getting to her.
“What is it?” Blackstone asked.
Kursk opened her mouth, but no words came. The look in her eyes….
Blacksto
ne felt a cold pit in his stomach. Resolutely, he approached the map-module. Highlighted in red on the screen was a larger object. At least, it was larger than the original ice-asteroid.
“It’s a big one,” he said.
Kursk shook her head. “That isn’t just a single asteroid.”
He began to fiddle with the module’s controls.
“It’s an asteroid-cluster hundreds of thousands of kilometers behind the first asteroid,” Kursk said.
Blackstone nodded. He could see that by the readings.
“The cluster is moving faster, however,” she said. “The tacticians say the cluster will catch up with the first asteroid.”
“When?”
“It isn’t when but where. Oh, Joseph,” she said, using his first name. “This is horrible. It’s insane.”
He heard the bleakness in her voice. He saw it in the lines on her face.
“They’ll merge as the cluster nears Earth,” she said.
“Give me full magnification,” Blackstone said. On the map-module, he watched as the red-highlighted object became many asteroids in close formation. “How many are there?” he asked. This was worse than he’d expected.
“We’re working on it. There could be thousands.”
“What?” he said.
“There’s a possibility that some of those asteroids are really debris fields.”
Blackstone adjusted the controls, but couldn’t get any better images. Were they using the debris as a mass shield? He shook his head. The debris wasn’t as important as the bigger asteroids, many of them.
“They mean to wipe out every living thing on Earth,” Blackstone declared.
“The cyborgs are insane,” Kursk whispered. “They’re inhuman.”
“They’re aliens,” Blackstone said. He tried to envision what this all meant. “Did these objects originate in the Saturn System? Well?” he shouted.
“We’re still working on it,” the sensor-officer said by her board.
Planet Wrecker ds-5 Page 15
