by B. V. Larson
“Get a corpsman up here,” I said. I turned back to Marvin. “Are you hitting anything?”
“I believe so, but we won’t get confirmation for another four minutes. The enemy is too far out for us to observe them in real time due to the limitations of the speed of light—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, rubbing my skull. “Switch targets every time and keep firing. The rest of you, hold on. Get nanite arms to tie your feet down if you—”
The deck bucked again at that moment. My chin slammed down on the command table this time, and I came damned close to biting my tongue off. Fortunately, I’d snaked it back in and stopped talking about a quarter of a second before my face hit the table.
“Okay,” I said, getting up painfully. “New idea, Marvin: sound a warning klaxon on the ship’s PA system precisely one second before you fire from now on. When that klaxon stops going, hit the trigger.”
“An excellent idea, Colonel.”
I opened my mouth to relay the new system to the crew over my com-link, but then I heard a loud klaxon going off. My brain was slightly rattled, and I actually didn’t realize he’d already enacted my suggestion for nearly a full second. When I finally caught on, I gripped the command table for dear life and took the shock with bent knees. For the first time, I remained standing and uninjured.
“Keep firing!” I ordered. “Don’t stop!”
The cycle went on and on. Before it was done, I felt like a mouse caught in a dryer, but I was grinning through my bloody, split lips by that time.
The Macros were getting nailed. One after another Marvin took out their drives. As far as I could tell, he never missed. Each shot took out a drive and a ship. Sometimes, the entire vessel exploded. Other times, they were just damaged and forced to slow down.
The first ships he took out were their big dreadnaughts rather than their cruisers. We feared those ships the most, and fighting them one at a time was infinitely preferable to doing battle with them all at once.
After six grueling hours of being bounced around Potemkin, the rest of my fleet came within range of the first of these cripples. We weren’t kind. We overkilled the dreadnaught. Every gun and fighter unleashed hell, destroying the ship before it could do more than fire a few salvoes. Our losses were minimal.
The Macros changed course after the tenth hour. Counting tonnage, we’d reduced their force by more than half.
“They’re finally going to react, sir,” Jasmine said. Her face was bruised and her left eye was almost sealed shut, but she was on-duty and clinging determinedly to her command table.
“Finally turning to face their tormenters, eh?” I asked. “This is it, people. We’re going to have to make our stand right here. We’re pretty evenly matched at this point. I want everyone aboard to take heart. Even if they destroy the last ship in this fleet, they’ll never get through to Earth. Our sacrifice will never be forgotten by the people of—”
“Colonel?” Jasmine interrupted.
“What is it?”
“They aren’t turning to face us. They’ve changed their course, yes—but directly toward Earth.”
I put my hands on the command screen and zoomed in. The course arcs were changing; the data was clear. They were going to try an end run. I knew what this meant the moment I saw them do it. I’d seen this behavior before.
Macro Command had realized they were going to lose, so they’d done the math. They were going to take out Earth and ignore my harassing fleet.
They were going to destroy my home planet or die trying.
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We kept after them, doggedly pursuing and shooting them in the ass with our makeshift cannon. The enemy wasn’t going to be allowed to park in orbit over Earth and bomb it to dust without losing a lot more ships first. After we did what we could, it would all be up to the bases on Luna.
“Colonel, the enemy have changed their behavior again,” Jasmine said with concern three hours after we’d begun taking them out one at a time.
I nodded grimly, unsurprised. “They’re going to turn and fight, aren’t they? They’ve finally had enough of us pecking at their hindquarters.”
Jasmine shook her pretty head. There was still a trickle of blood on her cheek, but she ignored it.
“No sir,” she said. “That’s not it—they’re accelerating and no longer cruising toward Earth. They’re heading on a collision course with the planet and increasing speed.”
I frowned and looked over her numbers. She was right—it was undeniable. The Macros weren’t going to take out our fleet after all. They were going to take out Earth.
“They can’t destroy the planet by ramming it!” I said.
“Maybe that’s not the plan,” Jasmine said.
I frowned at her, then I caught on. “Increase speed. Keep up with them!”
“Our engines are at maximum capacity now, sir,” she said. “We can’t keep up.
I ran my hands and my eyes over the screens anxiously.
“They’re going to reach Earth first. Without gravity cannons we can’t stop them.”
“Why didn’t we put gravity cannons on Earth itself?” she asked.
“Because that would be too late. Once the enemy got within range, they would already be dumping their bombs and missiles on civilian targets. The strategy has always been to stop the enemy, to destroy them all before they reached Earth.”
She was quiet for a moment. Both of us knew that our strategy had clearly failed.
“As they’re accelerating,” she said thoughtfully, “they’ll only have time for a single pass at Earth. They won’t be able to sit in orbit and pound the planet.”
“They can still do a lot of damage,” I said. “Let’s run the numbers. How many ships will they have left when they reach bombardment range?”
“Hard to say. Depends on how many our lunar bases knock out.”
“Let’s assume they get the same number per gun as we did at Saturn. We have to assume the Macros will knock out our guns as they did before.”
“All right…” she said, pushing back her hair, which had slipped into her face. It was matted with blood when her hand lifted away from it.
Normally, I would have been concerned by Jasmine’s injuries, but I had to put aside personal worries. We were talking about millions, possibly billions of deaths. She was as capable of regeneration as the rest of Star Force.
“I’d say they’ll have less than a hundred ships left to unload over Earth,” she said.
That didn’t sound bad, but I knew it was bad. They’d come with thousands, and we’d been unable to stop them all. Those last few ships, on a suicidal run, were going to hurt humanity. Cities would be radioactive holes. Oceans would be steaming cauldrons, sending hot tidal waves over the coastlines.
“Tell Earth. Tell them to move everyone to higher ground. Anyone left in the cities should evacuate and seek a bomb shelter as soon as possible.”
“They’ve already—”
“Send it anyway.”
The klaxon sounded again, and the ship heaved under us. We’d become almost accustomed to the abuse. I set my legs and took most of the shock with my knees. When the countering thrusters pushed the opposite direction, I braced my arms on the command table and rode with that motion as well.
“Medical is complaining again, sir,” Jasmine said.
“Too bad.”
“They say we might lose several injured crewmen. They can’t work under these conditions.”
I glared, but it wasn’t her I was angry with. “Ship them out! All of them!”
“The medical staff?”
“No, no—the injured. Have the medical staff load them onto surfboards in vac suits and kick them out of the airlocks. Other ships can pick them up and baby them.”
She relayed the orders. All around us, the staffers had big eyes. They were probably wondering who I’d kick off the ship next.
I didn’t care. I’d kill them all with my bare hands to save Earth. They had no concept of the num
ber of innocents we were about to let die.
We’d failed. I’d sworn to myself I wouldn’t let it happen again after the Thor System, and here I was watching the Macros go into another death-charge.
It’s very hard to stop a suicidal force. You can beat them down, but if they are coming against your most vulnerable citizens rather than your fleet—well, stopping them wasn’t easy. I’d known this possibility was in the cards. I’d done everything I could to prevent it. But here it was, happening all over again.
I straightened my spine after the next bone-jarring salvo from the gravity cannon.
“I’m shipping out, too,” I told Jasmine.
Immediately, she gave me her full attention. “Where?”
“You command this ship. Keep firing. This battleship is the only thing in the fleet that matters now. The rest of these ships won’t even see battle. I should have charged right into them long ago.”
“We’d all be dead if you had.”
“Of course, but they might not have made it to Earth. Instead I played it safe, and the people of my planet are going to pay for that.”
Jasmine’s arms encircled my chest. I was wearing a breastplate so I could hardly feel her, but she was trying to cling to me.
She was pregnant with my child, and she didn’t want to let me go. I knew that whatever she said next, I had to keep that in mind.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I’m going to ship over to the nearest carrier. I’m going to pilot one of the fighters. I heard Yorktown is short a few seasoned pilots. They took a few hits from missiles early-on.”
“A fighter? Why a fighter?”
“They’re the only assets we have left that can catch the enemy before they reach Earth. I plan to fly with them. Set up the orders for me, will you?”
Jasmine nodded. She seemed resigned to my decision and didn’t try to argue.
“Kill them all for me, Kyle,” she said.
She gave me a little kiss and let go of my armor. She went back to her command table and worked the console. She had her head down, and I wondered if she was crying. I didn’t want to embarrass her any further in front of the other officers so I marched off the bridge.
All the way to the airlock, I thought about Jasmine. She wasn’t like Sandra at all. A moment like this was a clear case in point. She’d let me go to do what I had to do—what I felt that I had to do—without complaints or threats. I’d expected a different response from her, but I shouldn’t have.
In-between salvos, I left Potemkin behind. I surfed across open space to Yorktown and surprised the crew there. They were dumbfounded to find old blood-and-guts Riggs on their deck.
I headed directly for the flight hangar after checking in with the captain over my com-link. I didn’t have a lot of time.
Jasmine had already relayed my orders, and everyone in the hangar was running around like the place was on fire. I suppose, in a way, it was.
After shocking the CAG with my request, I found they did indeed have an extra fighter. The rookie who’d been chosen to fly her, instead of an experienced pilot, was disappointed to see me coming. I boarded up and tapped my way through the systems checks as fast as I could.
Mine was the fifteenth bird to leave the gate, and for a brief, exhilarating minute I felt good. Flying a fighter was always fun as long as you didn’t think too hard about the crazy things you were doing.
We came out of the carrier’s snout like a swarm of angry hornets. Altogether, there were close to fifteen hundred fighters from all the carriers combined. We didn’t form up into any complex formations as there wasn’t time for anything that fancy. We looked more like a cloud than an organized force.
The flight wasn’t a long one. Within half an hour, I was so close to Earth she looked like a blue-white marble, and the moon was at her side: a dime-sized white crescent. The enemy ships were pinpricks of flaring plasma. All we could see was their plumes of exhaust from jets that never stopped running at maximum acceleration.
“Kyle?” Jasmine asked in my headset.
“Go ahead, Captain.”
“You’re not going to make it.”
“What do you mean? I can see them now.”
“They’ve already released their missiles. They were holding onto their final barrage. About a thousand missiles are ahead of you, aiming at Earth.”
I cursed and wanted to pound on the instrument panel, but I controlled myself. I needed this ship in operating condition.
“What are their ships doing?”
“Mostly, they’re dying. The lunar base is tearing them apart. They didn’t bother using their missiles against the cannons there. They saved them all for Earth.”
We’d calculated a high probability that the enemy would spend some part of their firepower destroying the lunar guns. We’d been wrong. They’d decided to fire everything at our civilians and let their ships be destroyed.
It was bittersweet watching them pop in cascading blooms of flame. Silently, ship after ship was taken out. Suddenly they moved as one, veering off and upward from the plane of the ecliptic. They were steering away from the Earth and the Moon.
I frowned and contacted Jasmine again.
“We’re still behind them, but they’re breaking off. Where are they going?”
“The course is unclear—there’s nothing out there but open space. Maybe they’re just trying to evade the lunar base.”
“Right,” I said. “But they won’t evade us.”
I plotted a course to pursue and engaged it. On automatic, my brainbox slewed my fighter around and directed it after the fleeing Macros. They only had about seventy cruisers left. We’d destroyed their transports and dreadnaughts long ago.
“Full throttle,” I ordered my squadron, having assumed command. “Don’t worry about a return trip. If we live so long, we’ll either be picked up by friendly shipping or we’ll make an emergency landing on Earth.”
I didn’t mention other possibilities, such as there not being any ground left on Earth that wasn’t too hot with radiation to land on. There wasn’t any point to bringing that up as everyone was thinking about it anyway, and we couldn’t do anything about it other than destroy the enemy before they destroyed us.
The CAG back on Yorktown contacted me and wanted to know where I was taking his fighters. I told him they were my fighters and ordered Jasmine to relay the pursuit command. Soon, our entire force was flying after the enemy.
“Colonel Riggs?” asked a familiar voice.
“What is it, Marvin?”
“I have an incoming message sir—I believe it’s meant for you.”
“What message? I’m kind of busy, here.”
“Of course sir, perhaps it can wait until later.”
I almost disconnected, but then my curiosity got the better of me. After all, I had about ten minutes before we were within range of the enemy.
“All right, all right,” I said. “Who’s on the phone, Marvin?”
“Reference unclear. Assuming contextual reference of highest probability: If I understand your question the answer is: Macro Command.”
That got my attention. I could not recall the last time the Macros had talked to me during a battle. They generally didn’t contact me first, either. In fact, it usually took a lot of begging and cajoling and outright trickery to get them to talk to me at all.
“You’re telling me that the Macros are trying to contact me through you?” I demanded.
“Correct.”
“Patch it through and translate, please.”
“Channel open.”
I waited, listening to my headset. I had to admit, I was curious about what these evil machines had to say.
-42-
“We demand you comply with our stated agreement,” Macro Command said.
This made my lips twitch with a moment of amusement.
“You called me, Macro Command. As you may or may not be aware, we’re fighting a battle right now. Unless you wish
to surrender, we have nothing to discuss.”
“Offer accepted.”
I frowned. What the hell were they talking about? Then all of a sudden, I got it.
“Wait a minute, you can’t just surrender,” I found myself saying. Even to me, it sounded like an absurd statement. I’d been taken by surprise.
“That is precisely what we’re doing. We’re entitled to this privilege due to our prior agreements with Colonel Kyle Riggs.”
“What agreement…oh,” I said, thinking it over. I had, after all, told them in the dead sun system that I would let the last few of them live if I won. I’d even sold it to them as an insurance policy. Well, now the Macros were making a claim against that policy.
A beeping sounded in my helmet. It was Jasmine, so I muted the Macros.
“Colonel, the enemy ships are slowing down. They seem to have all lost power at once.”
“Are you still firing on them?” I asked.
“Of course.”
I gritted my teeth in frustration. Of course my fleet was still firing. To even question this was absurd. What did you do when faced with genocidal robots on the run? Why, you blasted them until the last nut fell off the last bolt.
“Cease fire,” I ordered. “I have to think this over.”
“Cease fire? I’m asking for confirmation, Colonel. You want us to stop firing on the Macros?”
“That’s right,” I said. “They’re surrendering.”
“Don’t buy into any of their tricks, Kyle,” she said. “They’re only doing this to gain time. They’ll kill us all the moment they can. They’ll cheat on any—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Riggs out.”
I unmuted the Macros. They were in the middle of lodging a complaint. I’d missed half of it, apparently.
“—despite the clarity of the agreement reached, your non-compliance—”
“We’ve stopped firing,” I said.
“Excellent. We require your aid. Many of our ships are damaged. Attend to us immediately.”
I began thinking fast. What had I told them exactly…? That when the end came, I would stay my hand, and I wouldn’t take the last of them out. I would spare the last Macros.
