“I thought you might want to know,” Marten said. “The lead asteroids are rotating.”
“You found this out how?” asked Cassius.
“Just as you would,” Marten said, “through sensors.”
“Insolence,” hissed Sulla. Several other Highborn turned from their boards to watch the exchange.
Hiding his irritation with Kluge and his bridge-crew, Cassius said, “It was my understanding that the cyborgs had dismantled each asteroid’s fusion core.”
“So that’s what was happening,” Marten said. “Nadia read some strange sensor—”
“If the cores have been dismantled,” Cassius said, “how are the asteroids managing this rotation?”
“I have no idea,” Marten said. “In fact, it doesn’t matter how, just that it’s happening.”
“You should punish the preman,” Sulla said.
Cassius muted the holoimage and cast a cold eye on Sulla. This was a delicate balancing act. One must never accede to an inferior’s demands. Yet he couldn’t let Kluge speak to him this way. The bridge-crew observed, and they reported almost everything in time to others.
“You must learn that premen are tools,” Cassius said. “Ultraist creed would deprive us of these tools at this critical juncture in the war.”
“We must live or die on our own abilities,” Sulla said. “To rely on others implies weakness in our own strength.”
Cassius laughed and shook his head, making Sulla bristle. “You wear a battleoid-suit into combat. It amplifies your strength. Likewise, you marshal weaker premen into a force to multiply power. Our strength allows us to do this. Yet you are correct about Kluge. He has irritated me once too often. I will capture and strenuously retrain him so the preman learns his place.”
“Better to kill him,” Sulla said.
“I would rather make him suffer,” Cassius said, “and turn a rebellious tool into an efficient instrument. Now attend to your tasks.” Not waiting to see if Sulla obeyed him, Cassius switched off mute. He asked Kluge, “In your estimation, why are the asteroids rotating?”
“I don’t know for sure. But it’s my guess that most of the enemy lasers and torpedo-bays are aimed primarily in one direction. Those in the back were aimed back. Those in front—”
“Were aimed in front,” Cassius finished. Despite his insolence, the preman was clever. This was going to be a bigger fight than he’d anticipated.
“The rotation shows me they don’t like your Doom Stars coming in,” Marten added.
Trust a preman to state the obvious. Hmm. He needed to increase the assault forces, to use the troops already landed on the first five asteroids. “Are any of your patrol boats operational?” Cassius asked.
An evasive look swept over Kluge’s features. “They’re pretty beat up,” he said.
How crude their attempts to dissemble. Premen were like children in their simplicity. “You must board your least damaged boat and await my signal.”
“I not sure we have enough space marines left to take another asteroid,” Marten said.
Sulla slapped his panel.
Cassius refused to let either Sulla or Kluge irritate him further. Still, it was unimaginable that a subhuman should speak to him this way, and in front of his bridge-crew. Premen had endless examples of Highborn superiority and should know by now how to snap to obedience at the slightest order. Kluge—when the time came, he would retrain the subhuman harshly.
“You will join in the assault or face punishment,” Cassius said.
Marten glanced away, and there were muffled sounds. Likely, someone off-screen spoke to the preman. When Marten faced him again, a hooded look had transformed the subhuman’s features. The cleverness had taken an ugly turn, giving Kluge the look of a liar.
“We await your orders,” Marten said.
Cassius bared his teeth. The blatant subterfuge didn’t fool him. But there would be time enough to deal with Kluge. Now he needed to concentrate on the rotating asteroids. It appeared as if he was going to have to fight his way to the Saturn-launched planet wreckers. He’d have to fight and guard his shuttles in order to keep Highborn causalities to a minimum.
-83-
Asteroid E continued to accelerate out of the asteroid-pack. In the control room of the first dome, Marten watched Nadia at her sensor board.
Osadar stepped away from her station to stand beside Marten. Despite the fusion-generated power blasting out of the crater-sized exhaust-port, the G-forces were slight. The asteroid’s mass saw to that.
“Logically, we are in danger,” Osadar said.
“From the Highborn or the cyborgs?” asked Marten.
“…Both,” said Osadar.
“We don’t have the people or the hardware to take another asteroid,” Marten said. “But we might be able to hold onto the one we have. What do you think is going to happen next?”
“The most logical move,” Osadar said. “The cyborgs will beam our dome, destroying our controls and possibly disabling our fusion core.”
“Maybe,” said Marten. He was still thinking about the Grand Admiral. The Highborn frightened him. There was something grimly effective about Cassius. The Highborn possessed a driving force that had managed to radiate through the communications.
“As a Web-Mind,” Osadar said, “I would beam this asteroid into submission.”
“Marten,” Nadia said. Her voice was thick with worry. “The cyborgs are beaming—”
Marten shoulders tightened. Was he about to die? Was Osadar correct?
“—The cyborgs are beaming the Doom Stars,” Nadia finished saying.
Marten hurried to Nadia’s board. The captured asteroids, the five, accelerated at a gentle angle away from the tight formation of the remaining twelve. That had exposed the inner asteroids, making them the rearmost ones now. The debris-fields acted as shields for some of them. From other asteroids with a line-of-sight shot, it seemed as if a hundred lasers lanced out, striking the lead Doom Star, the Julius Caesar. The vast warship was ahead of the other two by one thousand kilometers. It used a debris-field as a shield from four asteroids, boring in toward the others like a sonic drill. Marten knew why. The Julius Caesar wanted to launch its shuttles from close range.
“Where its shielding cloud?” asked Marten. He didn’t know why Cassius had refrained from normal space-combat procedures.
“The battle is over,” Osadar said in gloom. “The Doom Star lacks even the slightest particle shield, and it has inexplicably forgotten to spray any gels or crystals. How could the Highborn be so reckless as to charge the asteroids like that?”
“Look,” Nadia said. “The Highborn are striking back.” She adjusted her controls. “The wattage expended by the ultra-laser—it’s amazing.”
For the next thirty seconds, Marten, Osadar and Nadia watched the cyborgs pour concentrated laser-fire against the Julius Caesar. Impossibly, the outer armor held. It should have already melted in spots.
“What’s going on?” Marten finally asked.
Osadar’s head swiveled with cyborg speed. “Run an analysis please.”
“On what?” a bewildered Nadia asked.
“On the composition of the Julius Caesar’s outer plating,” Osadar said.
Nadia’s fingers clicked on her board. She frowned at the readings and finally looked up. “This doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t?” asked Marten.
“The plating…it’s like collapsed star matter,” Nadia said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
-84-
From his command shell aboard the Julius Caesar, Grand Admiral Cassius rapped out orders. It was hard to shout over the thrum of the fusion core and the beaming ultra-laser. Every time the laser fired, the thrum increased to an ear-piercing whine.
That was the secret to the long-range laser. Power, massive amounts of power pumped through the system. To gain that power, one needed large engines and coils. It was why each Doom Star was so vast. Frankly, he thought the cyborgs shoul
d have installed ultra-lasers on their asteroids. But that would have taken much longer than installing regular combat beams. And there was secret technology needed for the one-million-kilometer-ranged lasers.
Cassius studied the holoimages. He clapped his hands over his ears—the whine, the noise penetrated his shell’s buffering. The laser shot from the holoimage of the Julius Caesar. It struck against Asteroid C, down into a deeper than usual impact-crater. The wide beam lighted on the cyborg turret there. The array of focusing mirrors, pumping station, coil-chambers and armored-plating heated to intolerable levels. At the same time, the turret’s beam fired through the Highborn ultra-laser, producing a strange radiance of wavering color. Then one mirror melted into a molten lump, dripping onto the lunar-like surface. Gas began to radiate into a feeble cloud. Before the turret slagged into an indecipherable mound, the Highborn laser retargeted elsewhere, having destroyed its prey.
The battle had turned into a maelstrom of beams, torpedoes and cyborg troop-pods. The enemy was trying to recapture the five asteroids. It surprised Cassius the cyborgs had saved so much weaponry and not employed it during the first phase of the battle. But it wasn’t going to save the aliens, this desperate fighting. The cyborg lasers struck his collapsium-coated ship, the only one in the Highborn fleet. It was their fatal error—one he’d worked to achieve. Given this window of opportunity, Cassius continued to strike.
The ultra-powerful beam from each Doom Star destroyed one enemy laser-turret after another. Most kills took less than a minute. More time was taken retargeting. Though Highborn efficiency, Cassius destroyed the enemy’s offensive capabilities. It was one of the reasons he’d driven straight into their vitals. A laser beam increased its deadliness the shorter its range. So this close the million-kilometer-ranged laser became an annihilating beam of fearsome destructiveness.
Yet there was a risk. Not even collapsium could long sustain the concentrated attack of a hundred lasers. The breakthrough technology had been difficult to make and was incredibly dense. The plating on the Julius Caesar was only a micro-micron thick, but it had greater mass than the normal six-hundred-meter thick particle shield of a Zhukov-class Battleship. The electrons of an atom had been collapsed on the nuclei so the atoms were compressed. The atoms touched, producing a substance that made lead in comparison seem like a sponge.
The Julius Caesar rotated slightly every several seconds, timing its firing of the giant laser. No enemy beam remained on one spot long. Even so, the collapsium weakened under the prolonged mass-attack. The plating grew red and then black in places. The blackness thickened so it appeared as a light-absorbing spot of nullity. During that time, the Doom Stars beamed with immunity, destroying whatever the lasers touched. Then cyborg lasers began to slip through the weakened collapsium. It wasn’t a complete breakthrough, but occasional beams firing through null-spots. For those seconds, the various beams burned into the composite armor underneath. Once through that, the coherent-light struck highly-polished reflex plating. The initial bounce off the reflex gave the Julius Caesar yet more time. The ultra-lasers continued to rave with annihilation.
Then the impossible occurred.
“Your Excellency,” Sulla told Cassius. “There’s damage to the forward coil-banks. I’m also reporting strikes in the number five shuttle-bay.”
Cassius absorbed the message as he glared at the holoimages before him. Those images swirled in a kaleidoscope of movement. It seemed as if space between the Doom Stars and the asteroids was alive with life, with mechanical corpuscles, many containing a deadly virus of gun-toting death. There were beams, torpedoes, counter-missiles, point-defense-shot depleted-uranium pellets, energized sand clouds, hot plasma globules and cyborg troop-pods.
“Enemy pods are gaining on our five asteroids!” Sulla shouted.
Images and words washed over Cassius’s senses, and they would have surely swamped a lesser personage. A ruthless adherence to his victory conditions guided Cassius and helped him see the correct solution in moments of crisis.
“I see the troop-pods,” Cassius said, speaking in a calm voice. It was one of his powers to be able to do so at a time like this. “Continue with the laser-turret destruction.”
The Julius Caesar rotated slightly, beamed, destroyed, retargeted, rotated again and shot its laser at yet another hapless turret. Cassius thought to himself that it was hard to defeat advanced technology married to Highborn valor and resolution. The collapsium with the ultra-laser…it spelled victory.
“The enemy lasers are retargeting, Your Excellency!”
Cassius shifted in his shell. He’d hoped the cyborgs weren’t that smart or quick. All he needed was another ten minutes to slag every enemy turret in sight. He’d deal later with the asteroids hiding behind the debris-cluster. The Genghis Khan and the Gustavus Adolphus had remained well behind the Julius Caesar for a reason. It was a calculated risk bringing those Doom Stars so near the enemy. Their armor could not long sustain the enemy lasers at this range. If they were to defend themselves, they would need to pump out prismatic crystals and heavy lead-additive gels. But if they did that, they would be unable to fire their lasers, which he needed in order to finish the fight. The cyborgs might well cripple the Julius Caesar otherwise.
Tilting his head, studying the data, Cassius knew that this was the moment of decision. This is what made a commander into a legend or turned him into a loser. The weight of the decision pressed upon Cassius as the squeeze to his heart made his wide face pale. Forty-three percent of the enemy laser-turrets had already been destroyed. Did he gamble with the heart of Highborn power? Every second he hesitated was fraught with risk. He parted his lips to issue the order to spray the protective clouds.
“No,” he whispered.
This was the fatal moment of time, of the Solar System. The asteroids represented Earth’s death. Earth was the great industrial basin. With it and the Sun-Works Factory, the Highborn could out-produce the cyborgs. Without Earth, it became a grim possibility that the cyborgs would out-build them. The cyborgs would then likely send a vast stream of material in a deadly war of attrition the Highborn couldn’t win.
The decision tested him. Cassius knew that. Bold words were meaningless now. It was just his naked soul riding on the outcome of battle.
With effort, he tore his mind from the possibilities and forced himself to take a deep breath. Then he exhaled as hard as he could, expelling the air from his lungs. This time, he sucked air so oxygen seeped to the farthest reaches of his tissues, and he held his breath.
“I am Grand Admiral Cassius of the Highborn,” he whispered, letting the breath go. Color returned to his cheeks. Once more, he studied the holoimages, wondering what the next few minutes would bring.
-85-
“Here they come!” shouted Nadia.
Marten stood behind her. He wore his armored vacc-suit. Behind him, the dome was packed with space marines in theirs suits gripping weaponry.
The mass-meter of Nadia’s board indicated shuttle-sized vessels. Five had made it through the blizzard of spewing lasers and radioactive death to reach Asteroid E. Five cyborg troop-pods!
“They’re heading straight for us,” Nadia said.
Marten saw them on her board, oval-shaped vessels coming nearer and nearer.
Nadia twisted around and looked up at Marten. “If those five troop-pods are full of cyborgs, we’re badly outnumbered.”
“I know,” Marten whispered, as he hefted his gyroc rifle. They were going to face more cyborgs. There was no way, by no stretch of the imagination and hard fighting, that his space marines could defeat five troop-pods of cyborgs. The trick, he’d learned long ago, was to change the rules. A barehanded man facing a cyborg had no chance. A man toting a gun versus a carbine-carrying cyborg would lose almost every time, but there was a possibility of winning. A man encased in a tank against a tank-driving cyborg would up his odds tenfold.
“Now,” Marten whispered. “Send it now.”
On the board, the f
ive troop-pods began their approach to landing. They drifted over the crater and neared the three domes. All the asteroid’s laser-turrets were destroyed. Marten might have sent out men with Cognitive missiles, but the troop-pods had weaponry to take out such a force.
Nadia pressed a switch on her board. It sent a weak signal, a three-sequence pulse.
Marten turned to the space marines. “This is it, boys. It is do or die time again.” He raised the gyroc rifle over his head. “Death to the cyborgs.”
Metallic sounds were made as the space marines raised their gyrocs and IMLs. Then they roared as one,” Death to the cyborgs!” Afterward, visors clicked shut and armored suits clanged as the men headed for the airlocks.
-86-
Osadar Di received the three-pulse signal. She sat at the controls of the least damaged patrol boat. The Jovian spacecraft had never been designed as a space-marine shuttle. That was a secondary purpose. The patrol boats were space-attack craft. Jovian military theory called for them to fight in three-boat formations.
When Nadia had first picked up the approaching troop-pods on her sensors, Marten had made a quick decision. Osadar and a few others had re-crossed the crater-plain and returned to the patrol boats. The men had scourged the more damaged boats for the remaining cannon shells and missiles. These they’d loaded into the good boat.
“Strap in,” Osadar said. Long ago, in her days as a human, she’d trained as a Jovian fighter pilot. Now she was a fighter pilot again, ready to fly her most important mission.
“Ready?” she asked the men.
They gave her the thumbs-up sign, one instituted by Marten Kluge.
Osadar flipped switches. The engine roared into life. She revved it, and with a lurch, she lifted off the lunar-like surface.
Planet Wrecker ds-5 Page 29
