Cone shook her head.
“Good luck,” said Hawthorne, standing. Cone stood too. They shook hands across the desk. She had a firm grip. Then the former Security Specialist took her leave.
Sighing, Hawthorne turned to Manteuffel. “That’s the problem, Colonel. The truly effective people are always the most dangerous.” He sank into his chair and turned back to the screen. “What do I do with the Fifth Fleet? I wish I knew the answer to that.”
“Sir?”
“War isn’t only about winning, but about winning the peace that comes afterward.”
“Don’t we first have to win the war before worrying about the peace?” asked Manteuffel.
“That’s what makes this such a difficult decision. How you win the war—if you can—will determine much of the peace. For instance, if we destroy the asteroids but lose all our spaceships, it puts us at a severe disadvantage against the Highborn.”
“What if we fail to use our spaceships well enough and the asteroids destroy life on Earth?” Manteuffel asked.
“Ah,” said Hawthorne. “Now you’re beginning to understand my dilemma. And that’s what makes Cassius so dangerous. I think he’s better at these calculations than anyone else is.”
“Maybe what we need is luck, sir,” Manteuffel said.
“Luck is for fools and madmen. No, what we need is to make the right decisions.” Hawthorne stared at the monitor and began to rub his forehead. What should he do with the Fifth Fleet? He needed to decide soon, because no decision was still a decision. What should he do? Why couldn’t he make his choice?
-64-
“Time’s running out for Earth,” Marten said.
Nadia sat beside him in a patrol boat, which was parked on the surface of the meteor-ship. Nadia was in the patrol boat’s pilot’s chair and wore an armored vacc-suit like everyone else. Her visor was open and her pretty features were strained.
As the space fighting continued, the asteroids reached the halfway point between Mars and Earth. All the commando missiles had either perished or disgorged their cargos. EMP blasts, hard radiation, x-rays, gamma rays, lasers—radio communications with others had become nearly impossible. Maybe as bad, the sensors picked up little more than harsh static.
“Are you ready?” Marten asked.
A red light flashed on Nadia’s board. She groaned fearfully.
The patrol boat had a direct link to the Spartacus’s controls. No one remained aboard the meteor-ship. They’d all crammed into the patrol boats that so far were still parked on the Spartacus’s outer shell, on the side farthest from the asteroids. In the end, mass made the best shield against lasers and against the big cyborg torpedoes.
Marten adjusted the controls of his screen. Their targeted asteroid was ten kilometers in diameter. It was deeper in the field and thus partly shielded by bigger asteroids. It still had lasers turrets and now several torpedoes lifted from it, accelerating for the Spartacus.
“Osadar!” Marten shouted, using a tight-link to a different patrol boat.
“I see them,” Osadar said. “And I’m launching.”
Even through the patrol boat, Marten felt the Spartacus shudder. It meant Zenos had blasted off the meteor-ship. The Spartacus decelerated, slowing its velocity as the asteroid loomed ever closer. The patrol boats still lacked enough thrust and fuel to decelerate hard enough to land. If the Spartacus died too soon….
“We should have decelerated before this,” Nadia whispered.
“Not a chance,” Marten said. “It would have left us exposed too long.”
Behind him in the patrol boat, space marines rustled as they adjusted their armored suits. Each vacc-suit was composed of articulated metal and ceramic-plate armor. A rigid, biphase carbide-ceramic corselet protected the torso, while articulated plates of BPC covered the arms and legs. Weapons clacked, boots shuffled and men breathed too heavily.
Through the tight-link, Osadar cursed.
Marten studied his board. Another flock of torpedoes zoomed toward them from deeper in the asteroids. How many cyborgs had toiled like ants to achieve those launches? In Marten’s opinion, there were simply too many asteroids to capture and redirect and too little time in which to do it.
“Light up the defenses,” said Marten.
Osadar in her patrol boat controlled some of the meteor-ship’s functions. Nadia controlled others and Omi the remaining aboard his patrol boat.
On his screen, Marten watched. The Spartacus’s point-defense cannons began to adjust as they targeted torpedoes. Each fired depleted uranium pellets. In the background, Marten saw the Zenos’ exhausts as the missiles sped at the torpedoes. Then a huge stabbing beam struck from a million-kilometers away. The beam hit a torpedo, destroying it.
“Highborn sensors must be better than ours,” Osadar said.
Marten tried to swallow in a dry throat. This was the worst part—the approach to landing. He wished he were anywhere but here. The cyborgs were living murder. The number of asteroids—there were seventeen of them if you counted the two debris fields as two loosely-packed asteroids. Seventeen objects, each large enough to bring extinction to Earth. How were they supposed to deflect them in time?
Another torpedo disintegrated in the beam of the Highborn laser. Then a smaller cyborg missile exploded, filling the vacuum with a powerful electromagnetic pulse.
“I’ve lost visual,” Omi said over the tight-link.
“I never should have brought you into this,” Marten told Nadia.
She was too busy with her board to respond. Now a second ultra-heavy laser flashed to their aid.
At that moment, a terrific jolt shook everyone in the patrol boat.
“What happened?” Omi asked over the tight-link.
“Here comes another torpedo,” Osadar said. “Prepare to detach.”
“It’s too soon,” Omi said.
Then Marten saw it on his screen. A black-as-sin torpedo sped at the Spartacus. A big laser flashed near the torpedo, missing it. Three point-defense pellets hit, tearing holes but failing to stop the monstrosity. Then the torpedo went nova. Through the patrol boat’s heavily-tinted window of ballistic glass, the intense flash hurt Marten’s eyeballs and put splotches in his vision. The terrific jolt of the shock-blast made Marten’s teeth rattle until he clamped them together. Twenty seconds later, a second explosion dwarfed the first. All around Marten, the boat’s bulkheads rattled uncontrollably and groaned in metallic complaint.
Outside, a jagged and growing crack splintered the meteor-ship’s shell. Oxygen sheeted upward as the inner ship spewed its precious air. A wobbling patrol boat fired thrusters, fighting to escape the Spartacus’s destruction.
“Launch!” someone screamed.
In a daze, Marten saw Nadia. She slapped buttons. Then Gs thrust him lower into his crash-seat. They were lifting off the dying ship.
-65-
It was a Hell-ride to the asteroid. The patrol boat’s auto-cannons fired constantly. Anti-missiles bloomed around them. And the lunar-like surface grew larger. Then a patrol boat to their left exploded.
Marten tried to open channels with the others. Because they’d lifted off the meteor-ship, he’d lost the tight-links and had to rely solely on radio transmissions. Harsh static played in his ears. With a shake of his head, Marten decided to ignore the others for now as he studied the growing asteroid. It had a crater-sized exhaust-port, which was a huge cavity making it like a massive cave. Near the port—
“Laser turret!” shouted Marten.
Whether the cyborgs had saved it as an ace card or maybe had made fast repairs was impossible to know. The critical thing was that a beam erupted from it, lancing straight at them.
Nadia yanked the controls. Gs forced everyone to the left as the patrol boat banked sharply. Decoy chaff spewed. The beam struck, and one of the stubby, wing-like projections disappeared in a slag of hot metal, taking two auto-cannons with it.
The beam lanced again, and now it cooked decoy chaff.
; The last launch of a counter-missile made the patrol boat shudder. Blips on Marten’s screen showed that other patrol-boats had fired missiles. For a moment, he heard Osadar’s voice. The patrol boat banked hard in a different direction as Nadia ejected an electronic counter-measure pod. Its single purpose was to emit dummy patrol-boat signals.
The laser turret beamed again. The right side of their patrol boat turned red and some of that side melted away. Hot globs of metal cooked seven space marines in their armor.
Marten shouted obscenities as he struck his board in helpless rage.
Then a patrol-boat-launched missile exploded against the laser turret. The armored turret absorbed the effect as it lost mass. Two more hit as depleted uranium pellets hammered it, gouging and blowing away armor. As the beam stabbed again, taking out a counter-measure pod, a last missile destroyed the turret.
By now, the lunar-like surface filled half of Marten’s screen. “There,” he said, pointing at a computer-generated map with his stylus. “Is everyone seeing this?”
Like the others, Marten’s visor was down and his HUD on. There were domes on the surface, three of them in a cluster. There were also many burnt turrets, slagged point-defense cannons and empty torpedo bays. As Osadar had once predicted, a long rail system had been laid on the surface. Some of the rail-line was twisted and melted in places. A Doom Star laser must have done that.
“Can we land?” asked Marten.
Nadia’s gloved hands worked over the controls. “Maybe,” she said. “The enemy laser took out our—”
“Don’t give me excuses,” Marten snapped. “Just get us down.”
Nadia’s silver-colored visor turned sharply toward him.
“Get us down, honey,” he said. “But do it fast.”
She turned back to her controls as the space marines in their crash-seats watched the window or the laser-opened section of the boat.
-66-
Marten used the last outer camera, turning it. Behind them, three patrol boats each burned a long exhaust plume. They each decelerated the last amount, which would hopefully allow them a soft landing.
“Nadia,” he said.
“I don’t dare push the engine any harder,” she said, as she pointed at her board.
Marten saw it. The coils were overheating and in the danger zone, far in the red. The patrol boat’s engine could easily explode. He computed their thrust and ran the probabilities of surviving a landing at this speed.
“You have to push it,” he told Nadia. “Otherwise, none of us will survive the crash landing.”
“I’ve spotted cyborgs,” Osadar said over the com-link. As she spoke, her patrol boat’s auto-cannons fired.
On the asteroid’s surface appeared tiny bright lights.
“What’s that?” Marten said.
Then his sensors picked up the objects. Shoulder-launched missiles zoomed at them.
Nadia punched a button. “That’s the last of the decoy chaff,” she said.
Marten couldn’t tear his eyes off the screen. The missiles—two veered toward the chaff. The last hit them, exploded and the patrol boat had another new hole, with three more deaths, this time from shrapnel.
“Push the engine to its limit!” Marten shouted. His eyes were glued to the screen, watching for more bright dots on the surface. Had Osadar’s auto-cannons killed those cyborgs?
The patrol boat began to vibrate, and the vibration increased steadily. So did the size of the asteroid, at least their view of it. The other asteroids were kilometers away now.
Then their ten-kilometer asteroid, the one designated as E, became their world. Marten viewed lunar-like hills, ancient impact craters and stardust. How long had this stellar object orbited Saturn before the cyborgs had ripped it out of orbit? The vibrating became unbearable, making it impossible to focus his eyes. Marten didn’t know it, but if there had been air in the main compartment, his eardrums would have burst from the sound. But because vacuum didn’t carry sound waves, those noises never affected him or any of the space marines.
The hills loomed bigger and they became more jagged. The patrol boat vibrated madly so Marten had to grip his seat. Then a single mountain became everything, and Nadia achieved the impossible. Instead of crashing against the hill, she landed their wounded boat and shut off the tortured engine. Stardust billowed upward, surrounding them, and then it slowly began to settle.
They’d reached Asteroid E. Now they had to kill the cyborgs, find the asteroid’s controls and engage its engines if they could.
-67-
Climbing down the hill was hard work in the negligible gravity. The hundreds of hours of practice on the Spartacus’s outer shell gave Marten and the others their only chance. If they jumped too high, they would reach the asteroid’s escape velocity and simply keep drifting out into space.
The space marines were tethered together in groups of three, the line attached to their belts. Nadia was tethered to Marten, and Kleon was attached to Nadia.
“You have one task,” Marten told Kleon, a space marine from Europa. “Keep Nadia alive.” She’d tried to complain, but Marten hadn’t listened.
Most of the space marines carried IMLs, the Infantry Missile Launcher. Each of those held a new and improved Cognitive missile. The rest carried gyroc rifles or lugged extra ammunition and missiles. The armored vacc-suits were just like those they’d used in the Jovian System. None of the suits had thruster-packs. The weight saved allowed each marine to carry more ammo.
The survivors reformed into three platoons and moved down the hill. They looked like big insects, an infestation of bipedal cockroaches with weapons ready and helmet sensors sweeping everywhere.
“Overhead,” said Nadia. She carried a bigger sensor-unit, one of Marten’s tactical improvements.
Marten looked where Nadia pointed. Three patrol boats zoomed surface-ward for a landing.
“They’re bunched too close together,” Marten said.
“No!” shouted Nadia.
From the other side of their hill, bright objects accelerated up at the patrol boats.
“Cyborgs!” a space marine shouted.
The bright objects were shoulder-launched missiles. A flock of them zoomed at the patrol boats. Dots of light appeared on the patrol boats, auto-cannons firing. Then the missile-flock struck the lead patrol boat. It quit decelerating as the thrusters abruptly stopped, and it seemed to leap ahead of the last two boats. Its heading would take it past the asteroid.
Marten closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said, “Up the hill and over. We have to take out the cyborgs.”
“I killed them,” Omi said from his patrol boat. He must have meant with auto-cannon fire.
Marten stared at the last two boats coming in. They floated now, it seemed, and they came toward him.
“Follow my signal down,” Nadia said, as she adjusted the controls on her box.
“Roger,” said Omi.
“Three boat-loads of space marines,” Marten said. “I hope it’s enough to conquer this asteroid.”
Then the last patrol boats off the Meteor-ship Spartacus began to settle at the bottom of their hill.
-68-
The three domes were in the center of a shallow crater two kilometers in diameter. Marten had taken pictures of it during their descent. Ringing the crater were burnt-out laser turrets. The torpedo bays were between the turrets and domes.
Marten, Nadia and Kleon crawled up the outer slope of the crater. Above them shined the stars and the bleakness of the Great Dark. Marten fought the impulse to jump to the top of the slope. Instead, he continued to walk in the soft stardust. At each footstep, dust slowly puffed upward.
“We should have brought thruster-packs,” said Kleon.
“We have what we have,” Marten said. “Now lower your transmission strength. We don’t want the cyborgs monitoring us.”
Soon, Marten flattened himself on the slope. He eased up the final distance and peered over the crater. Ancient rocks, a few boulders an
d smaller pitted craters dotted the plain before them. Across the plain stood the three low domes. The domes were situated more on the Earth-facing side of Asteroid E. Therefore, they were out of the line-of-sight of the Doom Stars’ lasers.
Nadia crawled beside Marten as she set down her sensor box.
“Turn that on, and the cyborgs are going to know we’re here,” said Kleon, through the com-link.
“They already know,” said Marten. “Ping them,” he told Nadia. “And be ready to slide down the slope.”
First adjusting the sensor-box, Nadia flipped a switch. Then she crouched lower down the slope, with her arms reaching upward to the box.
Marten used his helmet’s zoom feature. The three domes seemed to leap forward. There were rotating antenna dishes on top of the domes. Now ports slid open on the sides. There were flashes from those ports.
“Slide down!” shouted Marten. He pushed himself and wriggled madly down the slope.
Nadia pulled the box toward her.
“Leave it!” Marten roared.
She obeyed, and the three of them crawled. Seconds later, the top of the slope exploded. Kleon flew backward, and the line tethered between him and Nadia snapped tight, jerking her off her feet after him. A second later, Marten tumbled after Nadia. Marten clawed the ground. He was terrified they’d all be knocked upward and that they’d drift into space. As the line jerked again, pulling him off the ground, Marten gripped the edge of a boulder. His hands tightened and he strained to keep his grip. It slipped. He bellowed and clawed for a purchase, barely finding one. With grim determination, he clung to the boulder. In a moment, the intense pressure pulling him spaceward ceased. He looked up. Kleon was obviously dead, his helmet shattered.
“Cut him loose,” Marten said.
Nadia floated above him, with Kleon’s corpse even higher than she was.
Planet Wrecker ds-5 Page 25
