Naga Gobo shook his head. “I will drop all pretenses. You are an animal. Thus, it isn’t an insult to speak the truth. Did you build the battlejumper? No, you stole it. Have you risen into space technology through your own intellectual efforts? No. You—”
“I get your point. Maybe it’s time you understood mine. If you kill humans, we come and kill you.”
“Heed me, beast. If you cannot show mercy to our scout, I will not show mercy to your freighters once I demolish the battlejumper.”
“I never expected any mercy from you anyway,” I said.
“It does not have to be this way,” Naga Gobo said.
“A moment, Commander,” N7 said. “May I speak with you?”
I turned to N7, finally nodding.
N7 muted the screen. “Commander,” he said, “I would accept his offer. Show the scout mercy so your freighters may survive.”
“That’s a screwy deal and you should know it. He’s telling me I can’t hit our attackers or he’s going to commit genocide against us. That shows he doesn’t have a conscience. Therefore, why should I believe him when he promises something?”
“You spoke of genocide,” N7 said. “You should accept his promise because the returns are so high and you give so little in return.”
“You’re missing the point,” I said. “He doesn’t get to decide when I can kill his boys or not. Anyone who comes at me with a knife in hand, especially a blade wet with human blood, I kill. There are no deals unless he backs off.”
“Offer him that,” Rollo said.
“Good idea,” I said. “N7, put him back on.”
“Have you finally come to your senses?” Naga Gobo asked me.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “Turn your flotilla around and don’t come back, and I’ll let your scout live. Do we have a deal?”
Naga Gobo didn’t respond immediately. “I am under contract,” he finally said. “I must gather Claath’s stolen property and return it to him. I must finish what I began.”
“The scout crew’s blood is on your head then.”
With a snarl, Naga Gobo made a motion. The connection ended.
Two hours and thirty-three minutes later, our missile’s warhead exploded. The thermonuclear charge sped along targeting rods before annihilating them, beaming gamma and X-rays at the fleeing scout ship. Shortly thereafter, the small craft disintegrated.
“First blood,” Rollo said.
“Second,” I told him. “The android assassins took first blood.”
“First ship death then,” Rollo said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is that.”
“Commander,” N7 said. “I suggest you sleep to regain your stamina. My analysis suggests the battle will not begin for another sixteen hours.”
I felt strung-out like a paranoid addict awake for seventy-two hours. My eyelids kept drooping on their own account. It wouldn’t help us if I couldn’t think straight.
The freighters gathered behind Earth, getting ready to make a run for the Sun. From there they would slingshot to the Pluto portal. I didn’t give them high odds for long-term survival if we failed to defeat the Starkiens. But at least they had odds. That was better than dying right off the bat.
I left the bridge, staggered down the corridors and collapsed in my bunk. I went down hard and slept a solid twelve hours. When I got up, I felt worse than ever. Was that an aftereffect of the toxins? I don’t know.
I searched out Jennifer, and we spent an hour together. It might be the last time we’d ever have with each other.
Later, I went to our makeshift gym and ran a few kilometers, working up a sweat. I showered afterward and ate a big meal. I was finally starting to feel better. On impulse, I put on symbiotic armor and grabbed my Bahnkouv, my laser rifle, making sure it was fully charged. Only then did I head to the bridge.
The second-to-last grounded freighter lifted from Greenland and joined the others in time for the initial acceleration. It was just us now in the battlejumper and Diana and her people down in Baja, California. That was insane. Earth had become a desolate planet. If we beat the Starkiens, could I really turn the world back into a paradise?
Like everyone else, I used to bitch about lousy TV shows, poor fast food and the rain. Before the Lokhars showed up, we Earthers had killed each other in wars, mugged those richer than us and insulted one other for a thousand different and usually petty reasons. Wasn’t that funny? I missed the old Earth. I missed the teeming cities, the fierce political debates, the yelling, the honking…everything that made us human.
In an angry frame of mind, I walked into the control room. The aliens had stolen all that from us. Now they wanted to take the table scraps, too. You know the saying: over my dead body.
“Let’s get the show on the road,” I said. “N7, I have no doubt you’ve been analyzing their attack run.”
“I have,” he said.
“Let’s spread out our mine field then.”
I watched the main screen. The ejectors used hydrogen propellant. That meant they were cold, not hot, and harder to spot by enemy scanners.
We had one battlejumper, with three assault boats ready as escape pods. Our laser could reach ten million kilometers. For good measure, we had a dozen missiles left, the big ones like we’d used on the scout. I hadn’t seen any reason to launch them at the beamships. The Starkiens would just laser them. No. I was saving the missiles for a better opportunity.
On the big screen, I watched the enemy flotilla approach. Naga Gobo had seven beamships. They came in a cluster, four leading and three following. By the orange glows around them, each had an electromagnetic field. The beamships protected three Lokhar teleport missiles behind them. Well, they were liberated ones anyway, no longer Lokhar property.
“Any surprises so far?” I asked N7.
“The teleport missiles are unsettling,” he said.
“Tell me why again?”
“It is an unstable technology,” N7 said. “The Starkiens are a nomadic race. They are therefore cautious and conservative. It is unlike them to take a technological risk.”
“Claath must have ordered it.”
“I do not accept that,” N7 said. “The Starkiens are contractors. They do not accept orders they do not like.”
“So the missiles are unstable,” I said. “So what?”
“Perhaps the Starkiens will program one wrong, and the missile will reappear among them instead of materializing near us. That would cause grave devastation to the beamships.”
“They need something to beat our laser,” I said. “The T-missiles are it.”
“They already have something,” N7 said, “their shields.”
“Something more than that, I mean.”
“You appear to be correct,” N7 said. “I refer to fact of the T-missiles. But I am not convinced we have the entire answer as to why the Starkiens are using them.”
“What are your suggestions?” I asked.
“None other than what we are already doing,” he said.
“Sure,” I said to myself. “Great.”
Time slowed down. It always does when you want it to speed up. The freighters began their play, accelerating at full throttle for the Sun. I wondered if we’d ever see any of them again. A bad feeling came over me.
I walked away from my station and stood before the main screen. Putting my hands behind my back, I stared at the stars. With the battlejumper, I stood between survival and the apocalypse. It made my gut clench, and I hoped I was making the right decisions.
“Creator,” I whispered. “If you’re listening, I ask for a fighting chance. Don’t let the Starkiens wipe out the human race. Give us another play at life.”
I stood there for several minutes, and finally returned to my station. There was nothing to do now but wait. The Starkiens didn’t launch any missiles and neither did we.
“The enemy flotilla is thirteen million kilometers away,” N7 reported twenty minutes later. “I suggest we run the engines at three qua
rters capacity and begin to warm our laser coils.”
“Do it,” I said.
Soon, the interior ship thrum increased substantially. I felt the vibration under my feet and the noise grew until a loud and sustained whine made my spine uncomfortable. It took gobs of power to make the laser kill at ten million kilometers.
“Targeting,” I said, “are you ready?”
“Affirmative,” Ella said.
“Do we know which one is Naga Gobo’s vessel?” I asked.
“Negative,” Ella said.
“Which ship sent the message?” I asked.
“It may not be that simple,” Ella said. “He may have moved to a different beamship.”
“N7?” I asked.
The choirboy android tapped a finger against his console. “That seems like a reasonable precaution,” he said.
“Yeah, and maybe Naga Gobo didn’t take it,” I said. “Aim at the ship that communicated with us. Let’s make him earn his survival.”
Time passed.
“Eleven million kilometers,” N7 said.
The Starkien flotilla bored in toward Earth. It would appear they planned to do their heavy braking once in their own laser range of one million kilometers. At their present rate, they would flash past the planet and us.
“Do you think they mean to chase down the freighters?” I asked.
“We have not found any more scouts,” N7 said. “I do not believe they know of the freighter maneuver yet. The Earth still blocks the Starkien sight of them.”
“The enemy could have guessed our intent,” I said.
“It is possible,” N7 said.
“Great,” I whispered.
“They’re almost in range,” Ella said.
“Get ready,” I said. “And make sure you destroy the first ship before you start on the next. Better that we utterly destroy them ship by ship than that we damage all of them but leave them intact.”
The next few minutes dragged as if I were a child again sitting beside the Christmas tree, waiting for my parents to wake up so I could open the gifts. Would our laser hold long enough for us to burn through seven shields and seven armored hulls?
“Ten point one million kilometers,” N7 said.
“Fire,” I said. “Let’s do this.”
Ella touched the targeting screen and a new noise burst into existence. Power rushed through the coils, energizing the giant laser cannon. The whine was low-pitched at first. It rose rapidly throughout the ship. Then a huge ray of concentrated killing light stabbed into the void.
The enemy wasn’t in range yet. It didn’t matter. He would be when the light reached its targeting point. Light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second. That was roughly a little over three seconds per one million kilometers. The tip of our laser would reach ten million kilometers in a little over thirty seconds, half a minute. Ella targeted where the enemy beamship would be in that time. It called for fantastic targeting capabilities. It would have been far beyond Twenty-first century human tech, but it was within the parameters of Jelk battle gear.
The obvious question no doubt rears its brainy head. Why not jink, move in random patterns to throw off enemy targeting. The answer was equally pointy headed. Because at the velocity the Starkiens came, jinking caused too much G-force stresses to the vessel itself, never mind the crew within.
I had to wait more than a minute for Ella to yell, “Hit! We’re burning through the electromagnetic field.” Thirty seconds to reach the target and thirty more seconds—roughly speaking—for our teleoptics to see what was happening. The first beamship’s shield turned from an orange glow to a deeper red color. Starkien generators likely pumped power to their electromagnetic field, attempting to hold. Our laser put energy—heat—on it. Some of the power bled away from the point of impact, discoloring the enemy shield in a wave pattern. Where the beam burned, the shield turned from red to black.
Here was the question, a simple formula really. How much energy would it take to burn through a shield, the hull behind it and destroy the beamship? The answer would tell us if we had a chance or not. If we did have a chance, our engineers would have to make sure our laser could beam for the entire battle.
Ever since Naga Gobo’s boast our techs had worked, putting in new battlejumper codes and rerouting many of the systems. If he could jam us with a computer virus, we had to know and then foil it beforehand.
The minutes ticked by. The Starkiens kept coming, and the first enemy shield finally overloaded. Our sword of light stabbed the beamship’s hull, melting the outer alloys and digging deeper, deeper—
A silent explosion heralded the first Starkien vessel’s destruction. Like a slow-motion grenade, it burst apart with glaring, flaring light behind it. Sections of hull parted. Water, globs of bubbling steel, plastics, fiery fabrics and pieces of flesh and shattered Starkien bone fragments blew outward from the central mass. Radioactive gamma and X-rays also smashed against the nearest Starkien vessels. Those beamships’ shields glowed red with overload.
“That’s beautiful,” I whispered. “The beamships are like bombs in the middle of their formation. The baboons have kept them too close together in order to shield the T-missiles.”
“The laser, sir,” Ella said.
I went cold inside. “I hope you’re not going to tell me it’s overheating.”
“No, sir,” she said. “I’m retargeting for the next beamship.”
“Commander,” N7 said. “I have run the computations. If we can continue to destroy them at this rate, we will win the battle.”
I shouted triumphantly as if I’d won a jackpot on a Las Vegas slot machine. Rollo and a few others also roared.
“We can do this, people,” I said. “We can beat the aliens at their own game.”
I should have known better than to jinx us.
“Commander,” N7 said. “One of the Lokhar teleportation missiles is appearing.”
I balled my right-hand fingers into a fist and struck my console. “Get ready to ignite the nearest warhead,” I said.
On the main screen, I saw the Lokhar missile, a big bad thing of hostile intent. The missile sped toward us. Soon it got close, well within one hundred thousand kilometers of our battlejumper. That was sharp teleportation targeting.
“What’s happening?” I asked N7.
“Our nearest warhead doesn’t respond,” the android said. “I suspect the T-missile—”
Before N7 could finish his sentence, the teleportation bomb activated. The thermonuclear reaction beat ours to the punch. It went nova, turning into incandescent light.
I shielded my eyes. I needn’t have bothered. Our teleoptic equipment automatically filtered out harmful light.
“It’s huge,” Rollo said.
“Two hundred thousand megatons,” N7 reported.
“Get ready for impact,” I said.
Heat, radiation and a powerful electromagnetic pulse sped toward us. As they did, the combination swept over the other Earth warheads we’d painfully put into position as an atomic minefield.
“The blast is neutralizing our warheads,” N7 reported.
Then it reached us. Temperatures soared on the outer hull. The EMP hit our hardened electronics. The bridge lights flickered. Sparks flew from Rollo’s station.
I kept striking my console. Damn, damn, damn, why couldn’t we have beaten the T-missile to the punch and blown it apart?
“Well?” I asked. “Are we finished? Did they win?”
Ella looked up, her features unreadable. “The laser is still operational, Commander. Our team retracted the main cannon behind an armored bulkhead. We put it away before the T-missile blew.”
“How long until we’re ready to fire the laser again?” I asked.
“Five minutes,” she said.
“That’s not good enough,” I said. “Make it three.”
The lights stopped flickering and came back on as strong as ever.
“Damage report,” I said. “I have to know if we’re still in
the battle.”
“Commander,” N7 said. “I’ve run an analysis. The T-bomb materialized too far for full effectiveness against us.”
“You mean they made a mistake?” I asked.
“Yes, Commander,” N7 said.
“They won’t next time,” I said. “Do we have any ejectors left with warheads?”
“Two,” N7 said.
“Get one of them out there.”
N7 attempted to relay the message to the torpedo crew. He looked up at me. “Commander, the tubes are blocked, destroyed.”
I couldn’t believe this. Everything had been working a few minutes ago. “How long until the tubes are operational?” I asked.
“Not until the battle is over,” N7 said.
“What? No. Tell the crew to haul an ejector to a shuttle bay. They can launch it manually.”
Our N-series android stared at me. “That is an excellent suggestion.”
“Tell them to hurry,” I said. “If the Starkiens are smart, they’ll launch another of those things now and finish us for good.”
A minute later, that’s exactly what happened.
“The laser is almost ready for firing, Commander,” Ella told me.
“N7, do we still have a margin for error?” I asked.
“It is one tenth as large as previously,” N7 said.
After he spoke, I saw wavering space on the main screen. I knew what it meant. We’d just witnessed it a few minutes earlier. As before, a teleportation missile materialized in close range.
“Ella,” I said, “can you retarget the laser at the T-missile?”
“Not fast enough,” she said.
With impotent rage, I watched the teleportation missile solidify. This one didn’t have the same velocity as the approaching beamships. That should have been impossible. How had the T-missile managed such a trick? I didn’t know.
Seconds ticked by. The T-missile had not only materialized, but it sped toward us.
“How come it hasn’t ignited yet?” I asked.
“I’m picking up life readings,” N7 said.
“Come again,” I said.
“Commander?” N7 asked. He hadn’t been built on Earth. He still didn’t know all our idioms.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “What life-readings? Where are they coming from?”
Extinction Wars: 02 - Planet Strike Page 7