-87-
Marten peered around the edge of the dome at the troop-pods floating down for a landing. The stars glittered behind them. The oval-shaped craft had stubby anti-personnel guns along the sides. If needed, those guns would fire masses of exploding pellets. The pods no longer floated, but moved down in controlled, jerky bursts. Assaulting a small asteroid like this with its almost nonexistent gravity was delicate work. Unfortunately, the cyborg pilots seemed up to the task.
Encased in his armored vacc-suit, Marten desperately wanted to scratch his nose. Why had no one ever designed a nose or face-scratching suit? He twitched his nose as he leaned against the dome and watched the troop-pods. They had skids on the bottom of the oval craft. As he waited, he wondered if the cyborgs cared that ultimately they were on a suicide mission. Was there some way to break cyborg programming, the way Osadar had broken hers? That seemed like the most cost-effective way to defeat the cyborgs, turning their soldiers the way cyborgs turned ordinary people into aliens.
A space marine stepped past Marten and slid his Cognitive missile around the dome, aiming up at the nearest troop-pod.
“What are you doing?” Marten said, grabbing the missile-tip and yanking it down. “You might accidentally achieve lock-on. That will ping on a troop-pod’s sensors and alert the cyborgs.”
The space marine backed farther behind the dome.
The five troop-pods came down in a strict formation. They were almost to the surface, with stardust beginning to swirl upward in a cloud. The top of the cloud began to hide them.
“There,” Omi said.
Hearing that through his headphones, Marten swiveled around. He followed Omi’s pointing finger. Low on the horizon flashed movement. In a second, a Jovian patrol boat reached the crater-lip. It zoomed upward and swooped down on the five troop-pods easing into the billowing cloud.
“She’s firing!” Omi shouted.
It looked like sparks on the patrol boat’s wings. Bigger blooms were the ignition of missiles.
One troop-pod began to drift. Another blossomed in an explosion, showering metal and machine parts. Something flashed past Marten and plowed into the soil, sending up a puff of stardust. On the third and fourth troop-pods, the stubby anti-personnel tubes moved upward and pellets sprayed in shotgun-like blasts. But Osadar had already passed the pods and began a long banking maneuver so she could come back at them. As that occurred, hatches opened on the troop-pods. One after another, cyborgs jumped, and thruster-packs expelled hydrogen-spray as they began to descend individually.
This was the most vulnerable moment in a space-landing assault. It’s what Marten had hoped would occur.
“Kill them!” he shouted.
Space marines hurried past him. More, he knew, came around from the other side of the dome. Jovians sank onto one knee and raised their infantry missile launchers. Others went prone. A few stood. In moments, a flock of Cognitives zoomed at the remaining troop-pods and at individually exposed cyborgs. Marten knelt, raised his gyroc and sent up one rocket-shell after another. He fired, reloaded and continued firing. Nearby, Omi did the same thing.
In the patrol boat, Osadar passed again, destroying the last functional troop-pod and dozens of thruster-pack-spewing cyborgs. Those cyborgs used laser-carbines. But as they fired, their unattended thruster-packs often took them in the wrong direction. It was far from a turkey-shoot. Cyborgs had uncanny reflexes and abilities. But with surprise and the patrol boat, the odds now lay with the Jovians.
“It looks like we’re going to hold our asteroid,” Omi said as he reloaded.
Marten grunted, even as his rifle pinged with lock-on. On his HUD, a dot centered on a red silhouette of a floating cyborg. Marten fired an APEX shell. The hardened round struck the cyborg and exploded, killing the target.
“What’s troubling you?” asked Omi.
Marten looked over at his friend. He’d been watching the dead cyborg drift into space. “We’re winning,” he said. “But how are the others doing?”
-88-
The space battle raged as the Julius Caesar bored into the asteroids. Behind it by over one thousand kilometers, the Genghis Khan and Gustavus Adolphus followed.
From his command shell, Grand Admiral Cassius watched the nearest debris-cluster. He’d given orders so the Julius Caesar continued to use the cluster as a shield from the last cyborg asteroids. A grim thought kept beating in his brain, however. He wanted to take his ship past the debris-cluster to entice the cyborgs to turn all their beams onto the Julius Caesar. He wasn’t sure how much longer the Gustavus Adolphus could survive the laser pounding. He had to kill the enemy lasers before they gravely injured a Doom Star.
By what quirk fate had chosen the Gustavus instead of the Genghis Khan Cassius had no idea. Cyborg lasers continued to beam en masse against the targeted Doom Star.
“He’s pumping crystals,” Sulla said.
Cassius held himself rock-still. This was a matter of timing now. Admiral Octavian had just disobeyed a direct order. He’d better succeed.
“His laser has gone offline,” said Sulla.
“Why did he do that?” said Cassius, asking himself the question more than desiring an answer from others.
“There’s an incoming message,” Sulla said.
Cassius ignored it as he studied the situation. Doom Stars could pump crystals and gels at a fantastic rate. Ports had opened on the Gustavus Adolphus as it spewed. The growing crystal-cloud blocked Octavian’s laser against the still-firing asteroid turrets.
“I hope you’ve chosen correctly,” Cassius whispered. It was a Highborn’s prerogative to disregard orders. But if the officer chose poorly, it meant disgrace and likely death by hanging. In Octavian’s place, Cassius would have continued to attack instead of choosing to defend and let others do his fighting for him.
Cyborg lasers chewed through the growing cloud. The Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan sought out the enemy beam turrets, destroying them as fast as they could. Seconds turned into minutes as time ticked by.
Sulla’s oily-bright face turned toward him. “Your Excellency!”
“I see it,” Cassius whispered.
Three lasers cut a hole in the prismatic-crystal cloud. Another beamed and sliced through the Gustavus Adolphus’s nearly nonexistent composite armor. It must have been the perfect spot, or the worst. The reflex shielding behind didn’t hold, and the cyborg laser remained on target for far too long. The deadly laser—the terrible offending beam—burned through a shuttle bay. It continued to drill and smashed through a coolant tank, living quarters, medical facilities, the edge of a coil-chamber and into the meld reactor to the fusion core. That started explosions, and those explosions wrecked vital inner components of the ship. Highborn died in mobs from shrapnel, heat and meld-poisoning and soon from vacuum-exposure.
“Destroy that laser!” Cassius shouted.
“Retargeting,” said Sulla, his big hands roving over his board.
Time ticked by, and growing explosions added to the wounding of the Gustavus Adolphus. Big shuttle-bay doors opened. One after another in a stream, shuttles accelerated out of the stricken warship. Meanwhile, the ultra-lasers of the two sound Doom Stars hunted and destroyed the final enemy laser turrets.
Watching the battle unfold put a worm of doubt into Cassius’s stomach. Torpedoes in waves now accelerated out of the nearest debris-cluster. It meant the torpedoes had been carefully weaving their way through the debris-field. That implied individual cyborgs piloted the one-way craft. Those torpedoes burned hard for the Gustavus Adolphus many hundreds of kilometers beyond them.
“That’s it, Your Excellency,” Sulla said. “Except for the ones behind the debris-fields, we’ve silenced the enemy beams.”
Cassius hardly knew what he said in response. Destroying torpedoes, seeing them burn, absorbed his attention. More kept coming. How many torpedoes did these cyborgs have? Time, distance, velocity and power-levels—that’s all Cassius could compute now.
“The las
t Highborn shuttles have escaped the Gustavus Adolphus,” Sulla said some time later.
Prismatic crystals like wisps of cloud drifted before the mighty vessel. The warship’s great beam fired, highlighting a cyborg torpedo before disintegrating it. Point-defense cannons fired as the last missiles launched from torn ports.
From in his shell, Cassius swallowed uneasily. The Gustavus Adolphus was like a great wounded beast. It was too tired, too drained of blood to sidestep death barreling down at it. That death came as schools of cyborg torpedoes, missiles and point-defense-cannon-shells converged on the ship. The Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan were using every weapon they had, trying to defend the stricken Doom Star. But now it was too little, too late. The cyborgs simply had too much. They should have used this mass earlier. Why had they saved so much hardware? The mass of destructive weaponry was simply too heavy to completely halt.
“No,” Cassius whispered. He watched on a zoomed portion of his holoimages.
A huge torpedo smashed through the weakened composite armor and drilled its way deep into the Doom Star. It exploded with a nuclear fireball in the guts of the warship. Another torpedo struck as the electromagnetic pulse of the thermonuclear warhead washed outward. An emergency device caused the second torpedo to explode before the EMP blast disabled its systems.
Disbelieving, Cassius watched as a great section of armor blew away from the Gustavus Adolphus as blast holes appeared elsewhere. This part of the fight was over. The Doom Star was dead, as was every Highborn that had remained onboard to fire the ship’s weaponry to the end.
-89-
Chief Coordinator of Earth Defense Scipio read the news with alarm.
The tall Highborn with the prosthetic hand stood before a large screen. It took up an entire wall of the largest room in the former laser satellite. The satellite had once orbited Earth. It was torus-shaped. As the satellite traveled through built-up velocity, the torus rotated, creating centrifugal-gravity.
“There’s no more they can do.”
Scipio barely heard the words of the Social Unity Earthling beside him. To him, the woman was tiny, barely five and half feet tall. She’d coordinated the SU premen, the Earthlings as Scipio tried to call them in his mind. Those Earthlings from Eurasia and Africa had brought engine-machinery and helped install them. Tens of thousands of Earthlings had helped the Highborn repair the least-damaged habitats orbiting Earth. Once, those habitats had contained algae pools and bacteria tanks.
Instead of drifting uselessly in orbit, Scipio had coordinated the repairs and sent the habitats toward the asteroids. As slow as they were, they’d built-up speed. The critical aspect of each was its mass. As constructs, the habitats were huge, many greater in bulk than a Doom Star, although none had as much mass.
Scipio still couldn’t believe the Gustavus Adolphus had been destroyed. The Highborn were down to three Doom Stars, one at the Sun-Works Factory under repairs. Once, they had possessed five of the giant warships.
“The Grand Admiral can do no more,” the woman said.
“You are correct,” said Scipio.
On the wall, the asteroids less than three days away from impact against the Earth appeared as red images.
Cassius had sent the grim message. The Doom Stars had used every nuclear weapon in their cargo-holds. Scouring the captured asteroids—all fifteen of them—the Highborn had found more nukes and used them, too. Highborn had maneuvered some of those nuclear bombs deep into the debris-fields before detonating them. Most of the debris, the rocks, had blown outward, enough that eighty-seven percent of the mass no longer constituted a threat against Earth. That still left a critical thirteen percent of the debris-fields. Other nuclear explosions had deflected smaller asteroids. A few of the biggest nukes had been sunk into the center of the monster silicon-based rocks and detonated. Those asteroids had splintered and separated into pieces, a few of those pieces were still on a collision course for Earth. There were seven major objects left and the lesser remains of the former debris-fields and asteroid-smashed debris. One of the seven major objects was a giant, thirty-kilometers in diameter. The Doom Stars, Orion-ships, Highborn commandoes and SU warships had done all they could. Now it was Scipio’s turn.
“We needed to refit more habitats,” the SU woman said. “We simply didn’t have enough time.”
“We shall see,” Scipio said.
“Have you read the data?” she demanded.
Scipio frowned. The preman, the SU Earthling, acted too familiarly with him. Any other Highborn would have slapped her into obedience. It was such a trying task working with premen.
“Do not query me,” Scipio told her.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, as she cringed. “I didn’t mean any offense.”
Scipio squinted at the wall, at the red images representing the seven major objects and debris. Blue dots were the advancing habitats, eight of them.
Curtly, he nodded. It was time to put in the final coordinates and drive the habitats against the asteroids. The question that plagued him was this. How many should he send at each? Or should he send all of the habitats at the four biggest rocks and ignore the rest? Let the Earthlings use their merculite missiles and proton beams on the remainder. What was the best decision?
Scipio touched his prosthetic hand. It was better to be certain with a few. If the Earth were to survive, let its occupants defend it. Otherwise…maybe the planet and the premen weren’t worthy of life.
-90-
With iron control, Cassius held his brooding in check as he stood on the bridge of the Julius Caesar. Efficiently, his officers went about their tasks. Toggles clicked, uniforms rustled and images flickered on the screens.
Since the Gustavus Adolphus’s destruction, Cassius had grown weary of his holoimages. He presently watched over Sulla’s shoulder. The Ultraist’s screen showed a nearly futile picture. Two Doom Stars stayed ahead of the two biggest asteroids headed for Earth. The warships alternately beamed their heavy lasers at the largest object. They sliced off surface-areas one tiny section at a time. It was tedious work, and both lasers had entered the danger zone more than once before being shut down for cooling.
“We must save Earth,” Cassius declared.
None of the officers turned toward him.
Cassius straightened, and he held a retort in check. He’d said that too many times already. He knew it, but the words kept bubbling out of him. They had to save Earth, or the war against the cyborgs was lost.
Closing his eyes, Cassius witnessed the Gustavus Adolphus’s obliteration yet again in his memory. He’d risked, and he’d lost the gamble. Now he might lose Earth. He might lose the industrial capacity of billions of premen laboring for the New Order of Highborn supremacy.
“I refuse to despair,” Cassius whispered. He glanced at his officers. Their bearing told him he’d lost status in their eyes. Might he lose his rank, as well?
Moving deliberately, Cassius entered his shell. He must remain calm. He must act as he’d done hundreds of times before. Any deviation in his behavior could trigger their aggression against him. The battle wasn’t over and Earth might yet survive the attack. The asteroids rushed to meet the slow-moving but still accelerating habitats. Social Unity possessed proton beams and merculite missiles. There was still hope.
Turning on the holoimages, forcing himself to study them, Cassius saw the remaining shuttles collecting the surviving Highborn commandoes off the various asteroids. Many had died in the assaults. But more premen dead lay slain on the Saturn-launched planet wreckers. The Jovians—
“Marten Kluge,” Cassius whispered. He needed a diversion, something to do to take his mind off losing a Doom Star. He needed to relax in order to keep his mind sharp enough to keep his high command. The Jovian-captured asteroid continued to accelerate away from its former heading. Kluge had refused the order to space here in a patrol boat. Perhaps the subhuman understood all too well the punishments that awaited him here. But Kluge’s refusal wasn’t going to save him.
Even now, three Highborn shuttles raced after the rogue asteroid. The Highborn commandoes had orders to capture Kluge and bring him to the Julius Caesar. Thinking about that helped divert Cassius. That in turn helped deflect his brooding.
This was the final round in the genocidal asteroid-strike. While he was alive, he would dominate the Highborn and through them the universe.
-91-
“We can’t pull the same trick against the Highborn,” Osadar said.
“So we accept defeat?” Omi asked.
“No,” said Marten. The three of them played cards in a storage locker. Boxes were stacked in the corners. Plastic barrels of water made a wall on one side. They’d taken down the top barrels and made the table with it. Smaller boxes were the chairs. The worn cards were from Mars, stored in Omi’s pocket.
“No,” Marten said. “You take off and leave the asteroid. It’s me they want.”
“They want all of us,” Omi said.
Marten grinned tiredly. “You saw a replay of the message. Cassius all but gloated about the things he was going to teach a mulish preman like me.”
“You have an odd ability,” Osadar said. “It is uncanny how easily you anger those in charge.”
“Yeah,” said Marten. “It’s because I like to be my own man. My mistake, I guess.”
“It is immaterial,” said Osadar. “With the successful strike against Earth, the cyborgs will have clinched victory.”
“Nothing’s clinched yet,” Marten said hotly.
Osadar glanced at Omi and shrugged. “He is incurable,” she said.
“I want you to leave,” Marten said, as he stared at his cards. He had two aces, a ten of clubs, a two of diamonds and a Joker. “Take Nadia with you.”
Omi laid his cards on the table—on the plastic water barrels. “No one is running out on you. One: the shuttles will overtake our patrol boats and we have no ammo left. Two: you’re our Force-Leader. We stand or die with you, Marten. Accept it.”
Planet Wrecker ds-5 Page 30
