by B. V. Larson
I nodded. “Probably. We didn’t put them inside our defensive umbrella, remember. They’re sitting out there in an open system, without a significant fleet, while in the next system Star Force is busy covering our own rear ends. They watched us conquer the Eden system, and in the process we destroyed a lot of Nano ships they thought of as their navy. From their point of view, we’re quite possibly worse than the Macros. Certainly, we’ve done them more harm than the Macros have. They don’t get the big picture. They don’t know that eventually, the Macros will come for them too.”
Sandra frowned, nodding. “I still won’t forgive them for this. They attacked us pretending they were sending a diplomatic mission, under a flag of truce. They may be fellow biotics, but that was underhanded, dirty. They have no honor.”
I chuckled. “Apparently, you haven’t been to many faculty meetings,” I said. “But let’s focus on what we can control. Because of Marvin’s foresight, we aren’t as crippled as they might think we are. Their entire plan was to sucker punch us while keeping the Macro fleet out of sight. Now that they’ve done that, they’re racing forward to slip past this battle station, or maybe destroy it while it’s weak. Then they’ll have shot at retaking the Eden system.”
“What are your orders, sir?” Welter asked.
“Let’s get the holotank working for planning purposes.”
We dumped half a barrel of nanites into it before it finally began operating properly. The big problem was the connected sensory systems. The tank had long nanite-cables that led out through the layered armor to the sensor pods on the outer hull of the station. Unfortunately, the nanites that made up those cables were all dead. Partly to save nanites, I ordered that only the passive sensors should be activated for now. When they came in on us, I wanted the station to look as dead as possible. With enough weaponry at close range, it wouldn’t matter if we could see the enemy clearly or not. I only had to see their emissions; that would be enough to lock on and blow them apart with railgun fire.
I had Welter put up the projections of the approaching Macro fleet. We couldn’t see it directly, of course, as it was in the Thor system. We could see the recorded data from Becker’s scout ship and the brainboxes were able to project their flight pattern. If they slowed down enough to come through the rings at a cautious pace, we had about sixty hours before they were on us. If they came on faster, more recklessly, we had less time than that.
We counted the enemy ships and classified them, then I ordered another report from the scouts and another recount. The data solidified, and it wasn’t good. There were better than sixty cruisers coming at us and, worse, the enemy appeared to have a dreadnaught—a supership of vast dimensions.
After frowning into the tank for several minutes. I heaved a sigh. “Sandra, could you relay a recall order to the other commanders? I want them to pull half their forces and send them to us. We’ll have a skeletal defense everywhere else, but we’ll have to take that chance. How long until they can join us here?”
“If they take off now, they’ll all be here in forty hours,” Welter said.
“That should be fast enough.”
“But Kyle,” Sandra said, “I’ve seen the numbers. You’re betting the Macros will slow down and take a cautious approach. If they’re smart, they’ll come in on us at full throttle, taking us out before we can recover.”
I stared at the situation quietly for a moment, then cursed for a while. “Clever metal bastards. They set this all up. Sandra, relay the recall. We’ll need the ships, I think. Ask for a full marine squad on each of the destroyers that respond. I’m not sure how badly this is going to go.”
Commander Welter stepped to my side and we gazed into the holotank together. He fiddled with the control screens, running his fingers in complex patterns.
“We’re recovering faster than they can know,” he said.
“Yeah. But Macros play with thick margins for error. They like three to one at a minimum. This time, they should have had a hundred to one, but they don’t. The bad part is Sandra is right. Since they think they have the overwhelming advantage they will come on recklessly, at full speed. That’s bad for us, as we need every second to recover.”
“What can we do to delay them?”
I glanced at him. “Not much. We’ve only got two active ships, and I want the battle station to play dead until the last minute.”
“What about the minefields?” Sandra asked me, having finished her relaying my requests for reinforcements to all the sub-commanders. “If they come in fast, they’re going to lose a lot of ships to mines.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. They will fire a barrage of missiles to blow a hole in the field when they get closer. Worse, they have a dreadnaught. That thing will provide cover-fire for their ships as they come in.”
Sandra looked at me. “What are we going to do then?”
“Let’s go down to the pool deck.”
“You’re thinking of playing around now?”
“Yeah. Humor me.”
She muttered something about having to humor me too often, but followed me out into the corridor. We had poured out all the nanites we could into the critical systems and they were functioning on their own now. Nanite streams had formed by themselves, crisscrossing the walls, decks and ceilings of every chamber we passed through. The streams were different than those I’d seen in the past, as there were two types. One was brighter and more silver-colored, while the other was duller and closer to the luster of lead.
Sandra was as fascinated by the nanite streams as I was. “It’s like they’ve formed arteries and veins,” she said.
“Which is which?”
“The arteries are the bright ones, bringing up fresh nanites from the factory as fast as they are produced. The veins are the leaden ones, taking away the spent dead to be recycled.”
I nodded, liking her analogy. As we made our way to the pool room we were careful not to disrupt the streams with our stomping boots. The boots themselves felt odd on my feet. I’d been wearing nanocloth for months now, and good, old-fashioned leather boots seemed oddly clunky on my feet.
In the pool room, there were no nanite streams. This chamber was one of the few that existed purely for entertainment and thus was classified as nonessential. The room was only dimly lit. In the gloom, I could see the various colored balls hanging in the enclosed space. The room was one of the few chambers on the station with no gravity plates installed.
“Are we really going to play this dumb game?” she asked me.
For an answer, I reached up and took down a bat and a facemask. “It helps me think.”
Sandra chuckled, shook her head, and put on her own facemask. She took a bat from where they floated, tethered to the wall nearest the entrance. She didn’t love the game, but she was better at it than I was. It was a matter of accuracy and reaction time rather than brute force.
We arranged the balls into a tight cluster in the center of the room and I let Sandra have the first swing. She cracked the bat hard against the cue ball and fired it right into the clustered balls. It was a good break, and the balls scattered wide and far.
The pool room was much like any pool hall, but it was a sport that appealed to Star Force Marines more than it would normal humans. First of all, it was incredibly difficult. Instead of landing the balls in pockets on a flat surface, the balls moved in three dimensional patterns that were vastly more complex. Secondly, there were no pockets—only players.
“Sandra in three,” I announced, and cracked the bat onto the cue ball.
The white ball flew true, clacked into the yellow one-ball and fired it upward, toward the ceiling. It zoomed down right into Sandra herself, who snatched it out of the air.
“That was heading right into my skull. Do you hate me today, Kyle?”
I chuckled. “You caught it, didn’t you?”
In our version of pool, the players were the pockets. Hitting your buddy with the ball was the objective, which I thought add
ed a good deal of spice to the game. The target player was not allowed to move once the shot was called, but they were allowed to stop the ball by catching it—if they could.
Since I’d hit my target, I took another shot, calling a difficult bankshot this time. I missed, and it was Sandra’s turn.
“The two-ball into you, banking once! Take it like a man, Kyle!”
I winced as I heard the bat whistle, and the crack that followed reverberated from the walls. I was all hands, knowing what I had to cover. The ball banked and came up from the floor toward my rear. Fortunately, I had a hand in the way. The hard ball smacked into it and jarred my hand painfully. Both Sandra and I had taken a refresher injection of nanites, but they weren’t one hundred percent yet. The ball hurt my palm and, embarrassingly, spun away out of my grasp.
“Ha!” she said triumphantly.
The game went on, and soon there were three of my color left, and only one of Sandra’s. She confidently popped me in the chest with it.
“Game!” she shouted, breathing hard.
I smiled at her. I’d expected her to win. “Now, I’ll show you why we came down here. I have an idea, and I wanted to try it out.”
Her smile faded. I reached into the storage chute, snatched out three balls with each hand, and hurled them all at the wall behind her. Six balls flew with blurring speed, bounced and came at her from behind. She whirled, and gave a small screech of surprise.
“Sore loser!” she hissed as the balls flashed into her. She dodged her head to the left, her hips to the right, and grabbed two more out of the air. The last two, however, made it past her defenses. She woofed as one caught her in the chest and the second thumped into her belly.
“Two hits,” I said thoughtfully.
“You cheated!”
“Yes,” I said. “And that’s the essence of my plan.”
She had a dark look in her eyes. I wondered if she was about to crack me one with the bat. I rather hoped she wouldn’t do it. I suspected I would feel it if she did.
Sandra tossed the bat away and tilted her head to one side. “You’re looking smart to me again,” she said. “I can’t kill you when you’re doing that. It’s not fair, really. You know my weaknesses too well.”
We kissed for a few minutes, then she pulled away. “Tell me your plan. How will you screw the Macros?”
“I’m not sure it will work.”
“It worked on me.”
I nodded. “I got the idea from you, really. You mentioned the mines. We’ve largely discounted them lately, as they aren’t as effective as they used to be. By firing in swarms of missiles and having dense point-defense fire, I’ve seen them defeated recently. Only intelligent delivery systems, such as my marines delivering nuclear grenades, have been effective in recent battles.”
Sandra walked around the pool room, snatched a few balls out of the air where they floated, and rolled them between her fingers thoughtfully. When she suddenly turned around to face me, I winced, expecting the balls in her hands to smack me painfully at point-blank range. But they didn’t. Apparently, she had forgotten about my little trick. I was glad.
“I think I get it. You want the mines to move. You want them to come flying at them, so they can’t knock them out while they’re sitting in space? Something like that, right? But how will you bounce them into the Macros at an unexpected angle?”
I smiled. She was catching on. I took the ball from her hand and held it up between us. It was green, and had the number six printed on it.
“I wasn’t going to bounce them, not exactly. But I do want them to be flying around at high speeds. A moving target is harder to hit, harder to predict. You can’t knock it down as easily as a sitting target. Just like these balls. When you serve and crack that bat into one that’s stationary—that’s easy. But if it is flying hard from an unexpected angle, and there are several of them, a few are bound to get through.”
She nodded and came closer to look at the six-ball.
“What I want to do is set the mines up in an orbital stream around the planet below us. They need to move fast, and come in like a shower from an unexpected direction. Rather than sitting around the ring waiting for the enemy to arrive they’ll be swinging in a fast orbit and will come crashing into the Macros out of the dark, pelting them like a swarm of projectiles. Unlike a missile, they’ll produce no emissions and will be hard to detect and shoot down, hard to avoid.”
Sandra frowned, nodding. She took the six-ball from me and rolled it around in her hand. “There’s a problem. If they’re going too fast they’ll break orbit, won’t they?”
“Yes, exactly. That’s the problem I’m working on. How do I set up an environment like this room? The key difference between this room and space is the walls. Out there, there is nothing for the balls to bounce against, nothing to keep them on target. They’ll fly off into the void.”
She looked around the room thoughtfully. “I have an idea. What if you make a bumper for them out there?”
I snorted. “They’d smash into it and explode, or at least be disintegrated.”
“No, not a physical barrier. I mean another gravity point. Something that will catch them like a hand and throw them in a different direction.”
I stared at her for a second then nodded slowly. “You know,” I said, “that just might work.”
Sandra looked very pleased with herself. I grabbed her then, and she resisted at first, but soon relaxed. Her body was already slightly slick with sweat from our workout. We made love in the pool room, and I was as surprised about it as she was. Our passion was brief, but intense.
“I hope the cameras were off,” she said when we’d finished.
“All nonessential equipment is still dead.”
“What turned you on?” she asked—then she smiled. “Never mind, you’re almost always on.”
I shook my head. “It was more than that,” I said. “I guess you looked smart to me.”
She laughed, and kissed me again. I knew I’d said the right thing and scored some easy points.
-5-
The Macros reached a high cruising speed on their rush across the Thor system and did little in the way of slowing down as they approached our ring. Apparently, they wanted to give us as little time as possible for repairing the station as they could. I cursed as their tactic became increasingly clear. I was ahead of the game due to Marvin’s nanite supply, but I needed every hour.
Forty hours might sound like a long time, but it really isn’t. Especially when most of your systems are knocked out to begin with. Even the basics like communications and life support were sputtering. I kept luxuries like that to a minimum and kept working on weapons systems. The battle station had independent factories, of course. But only one of them was had been spared by the EMP blast. Having been sheltered near the generators, the most heavily shielded section of the structure, this single factory was critical to our strategy.
After about twenty hours of churning out replacement nanites of various types, I switched production up a notch to something slightly more complex: mines. These units and a few more nanites were all I had time to create before the enemy reached us. The only other specialty system I allowed to be built was the space-bumpers Sandra had dreamed up: large generators welded to extremely powerful gravity plates. We launched these when we had less than ten hours to go, and my two scout ships maneuvered them into position. Dark, hulking chunks of equipment, they sat parked in far orbit over Hel, waiting.
Even with Marvin’s help, the math was tricky. We needed to project a new kind of orbit, one that was theoretical in our calculations but which was destined to take physical form. We had to release the tiny, sputnik-like mines in a pulsed stream pattern. They were to orbit Hel seven times before they built up too much velocity and achieved speeds capable of escaping orbit. Hel wasn’t a powerful, tugging gas giant, so at about nineteen thousand miles per hour, they came loose and drifted up into high orbit. Without any further controlling influences, they wou
ld break out of the gravity well of the icy world and probably impact with the distant sun years from now.
But that wasn’t my plan. Instead, I’d placed my bumpers high above Hel. Dumping repellant gravity waves they were able to drive the mines back down into orbit, where they flew with increasing speed around the planet. I fired them off in thick pulses, rather than a steady stream. When they hit, flying out of the cold darkness at blinding speed, I wanted them to hit hard.
“You’ve built a trap for them,” Sandra said, admiring my work as she studied it with me in the holotank.
“Pretty neat, huh?”
“What are you going to call this trick—this new tactic?”
I glanced at her and smiled. “The Sandra Special. A flying kick in the ass when you are least expecting it.”
She snorted and shook her head. “I’m not sure if I’m flattered or not.”
I could tell by the curve of her lips that she was flattered, so I left it at that. “What have we got in the way of working weapons systems now, Welter?”
“Twelve heavy railguns arranged in three batteries. The nanite brainboxes are young on those, and need guidance. We’ll have to have a human gunner in each bunker to help operate the systems. We also have three heavy beam weapons. They have extended range and hit very hard—but there are only three of them. We don’t have the power to operate more.”
“Okay, what else?”
“Six flocks of mines, all flying around Hel in tight groups. I’ve aligned them with the station itself, so they’ll fly over our shoulder every half-hour and shower directly into the face of anything exiting the ring. Depending on when the enemy comes in, they should be in for a nasty surprise.”
I nodded. “What about lighter lasers? Point-defense systems?”
“We don’t have much in that category,” he admitted. “Those systems have to be automated, and the brainboxes are so young I’ve been worried they’re as likely to shoot each other as incoming missiles.”
I shook my head. “Not good enough. You have to have a hundred small PD systems active before the Macros come in, minimum. They love missiles, and we have to knock them down. Get the software for the brainboxes from Marvin. I’m sure he has it stored in his monstrous neural chain somewhere.”
