Spinebreakers

by Mitch Michaelson

  Lord Muuk took an officer aside, an eager young lieutenant whose martial pride was well known. He gave him orders to collect volunteers, load them on skimmers and attack the Eye of Orion.

  “There may be no coming back from this,” he warned.

  The lieutenant stood straight, with a proud gleam in his eye. “For humanity, sir!”

  Steo, Yuina and Renosha returned to the Eye of Orion in their escort ship. They saw flashes over the horizon before they got there. Yuina lifted the ship to get a better view as they approached.

  The Eye of Orion moved only slightly. Skimmers swarmed around it, firing pintle-mounted lasers and light cannons – rotary ones that fired thousands of rounds per second, and single-shot ones that fired rounds capable of punching through a building. The shields of the starship couldn’t hold much longer.

  Steo opened a comm channel. “Hawking, report!”

  “Ah, um, welcome back Captain Steo,” the science robot replied. “As you can see, I am currently unable to drop shields and open the docking door.”

  “I noticed. Why haven’t you fired back?”

  “There are no people on board the Eye of Orion sir, so no life is in danger. Additionally, you didn’t give me orders to return fire,” the robot explained. “The shields have held so far. I have channeled enough energy to them to avoid them going below 50%.”

  “Keep the shields up,” Steo said. “Yuina, perform a pass over the battlefield. The skimmers still probably think this escort ship is on their side. Renosha, use the guns, spray the skimmers.”

  “The skimmers can fly too sir,” she said. “Just advising.”

  “I see your point. You two engage them.”

  The escort ship swept over the battlefield, its guns blazing. Streams of yellow fire lit up a skimmer. When the dust settled, the skimmer thumped to the ground. Men jumped from it but it exploded before they could get away. Another skimmer was riddled, and it crashed. The skimmers divided their firepower between the Eye of Orion and the escort. The Eye of Orion’s shields began to tick upward.

  Just then a sizable explosion rocked the Eye of Orion. A skimmer sat far away on a ridgeline with a launcher. Its rockets were powerful enough to be used against armored vehicles and cities, and constituted a threat to the starship.

  The little escort was a match against a few skimmers, but it was definitely a fight. However the rocket launcher was a deadly foe.

  In the rush of battle, Steo contacted Hawking. “My orders are to fight back! They mean to kill us, so use the ship to fight back!”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Steo didn’t consider that the ultra-intelligent science robot didn’t have a good understanding of actions and consequences though. The escort attracted fire away from the Eye of Orion, but its shields were weakening too. Hawking swiveled the rotary cannon and fired it. The bullets were meant to travel at millions of miles per hour in space, not in atmosphere. What erupted from the barrel was nothing more than a spray of molten metal. The globs traveled a hundred feet from the ship and splashed on the ground, no threat to anyone.

  “Not the cannons,” Steo said, then realized he hadn’t hit the comm link to speak.

  Hawking said to himself, “My, but I wish the captain had given me the correct applications for this endeavor.”

  Hawking tried the kinetic cannon next. Again the projectile wasn’t meant for this environment. It exploded as it journeyed down the barrel, producing a shotgun-like effect. The cone of shrapnel didn’t hit anything.

  Steo found the comm link. “The atmospheric missiles! The small ones!”

  “Ah, I understand now, Captain.” Hawking located the controls and fired one as a sample. The missiles were intended for ship-to-ship combat or destroying large targets, not skimmers. One blew up in spectacular fashion.

  The rocket launcher hit the Eye of Orion again. Just then another skimmer arrived over the ridge and stopped next to it. The new skimmer fired a point-blank broadside, and didn’t stop until the rocket launcher’s shields collapsed and it burst apart.

  “Captain sir,” came Governor’s voice. “You are most welcome for the assistance. I should tell you that there are more enemies on the way. Many enemies.”

  The troops had returned to the AndroVault and as soon as they unloaded, many were sent off to overwhelm the Eye of Orion.

  Steo brought up a link between the Eye of Orion (with Hawking alone in the bridge), the skimmer (with Governor flying and Cyrus and Glaikis battered and bruised) and the escort ship (piloted by Yuina, with Renosha and Steo aboard).

  “We need to get everyone on board the ship and out of here fast.”

  Cyrus said, “Sorry to interrupt, but we didn’t get the bombs attached to the big ship. They’re still able to fly. I’m sorry.”

  Steo grimaced. “I would rather have you back alive. Are you hurt?”

  “Hurt but still able,” Cyrus said. Glaikis’s face was a mess of dried blood from her nose.

  “Then here’s the plan,” Steo said. “Hawking will fire missiles at the farthest skimmers in this area. We’ll focus our fire on the ones near the Eye of Orion. You make a path through the rest toward the Eye of Orion. Ready?”

  “Ready,” Cyrus said.

  “Quite ready,” Governor said.

  “Targeting perimeter skimmers now,” Hawking said.

  They enacted the battle plan none too soon. The skimmers out on the periphery went up in fireballs. Several near ones were incapacitated or demolished by the escort. Governor took a bold route through the carnage while Cyrus and Glaikis fired around them. The swarm of attackers thinned. However a multitude of skimmers approached fast.

  Hawking pull the ship back a bit, and fortified the shields facing the battle. Governor pulled up on the far side of the Eye of Orion. Hawking dropped that shield and Governor, Cyrus and Glaikis boarded. They let the skimmer fall and smash into the ground.

  With a final bombardment, they dispersed most of the nearby threat, and the rest got on board too.

  As they did, the skimmer army crossed the ridge. They fired guns, lasers and rockets at the two ships. Yuina leapt into her familiar pilot’s position and pulled the Eye of Orion behind the escort, using it as a shield.

  Everyone went to their stations. Governor followed Glaikis closely, trying to inject her with healing medicine for her injuries.

  Steo realized they needed more. He calmed down and reached out with his mind, finding the escort’s computer. He took remote control of it and turned it toward the skimmers. He activated the guns on auto-fire, realizing they wouldn’t hit anything and they would run out of ammunition quickly. Then he lowered its shields and sent it hurtling toward the skimmers.

  Yuina turned the Eye of Orion to get out of there. The skimmers could fly just as fast as they could in the atmosphere so they needed a head start. The escort bore down upon the skimmers. Their combined firepower punched holes through its skin and hull. Steo let go of it as they sped away.

  The escort nosedived to the ground and erupted.

  The skimmers flew around it and fired at the Eye of Orion.

  “Shields at 27.5%,” Hawking said.

  The soldiers had returned hot from the fight. They loaded their cargo onto the colossal ship.

  Upon hearing that Councilor Ulay’s killer was on the planet and already joined in battle, many volunteered to go. Lord Muuk only allowed one hundred, with a warning: “If you don’t knock down the Eye of Orion in time, you will die with it. We value your sacrifice, but only you can make this decision.” The hundred soldiers jumped aboard heavily armed skimmers and rushed back into battle.

  The AndroVault sealed up and ascended through the atmosphere, slowly and carefully. Ships waited in near orbit to defend it, including the destroyer Scrag.

  There were few technical engineers still on the ship. Most had been apprentices or journeymen when they went into cryogenic freezing. From the moment the people had awakened though, they had focused on advancing their knowledge of the ship.
With the mercenaries’ help, they had improved several systems. Robots remained and they were put to good use upgrading the ship.

  After Lord Muuk had proposed the Exocaust, it was rapidly adopted. The name meant “outer burn.” It wasn’t intended as a weapon. If a planet was found to have many of the components necessary for colonization but was imperfect, Exocaust was a process the AndroVault could carry out to purify the planet. It was designed to kill off hostile but unintelligent life forms so that it could be terraformed quickly. It replicated a mass extinction event. To do that required enormous power.

  Politicians, supersoldiers and star messiahs all sought power. Even the largest conventional explosives like Ecker bombs were tiny in comparison to the smallest nuclear weapons … and nuclear weapons weren’t free. Certainly any enemy civilization could be destroyed with enough concentrated firepower. One swift stroke, though? That was the ultimate force that power mongers wanted. This was what Lord Muuk had at his disposal.

  Not that maniacs didn’t try. Energy weapons like lasers were useless when directed against a planet; the atmosphere would disperse the rays. More importantly, the amount of energy needed to produce a single ray was immense.

  Tests were done with a variety of weapons to set a planet’s atmosphere on fire, but fire needs oxygen and fuel. Air molecules are too diffuse and there isn’t enough fuel to produce an effect.

  Nuclear weapons were used on volcanoes to no avail. It did no good to strike an inactive volcano with no pressure underneath it. Where there was pressure, it was already many times stronger than any nuclear weapon could produce. The crust of a planet couldn’t be cracked by the boiling magma underneath it, and fault lines were already under stresses beyond anything mere mortals could reproduce.

  Put simply, people were capable of killing one another from the dawn of time, before the first stick was picked up. However weapons were insignificant compared to the natural forces in the galaxy.

  That was what made the AndroVault different. The ship was over a mile long and designed to travel for extended periods without stopping to recharge. Therefore the graviton engines and its e-cores were the largest ever built, by any civilization.

  The AndroVault pulled away from the planet, into orbit.

  The bioark flew behind an asteroid that trailed the moon. The natural satellite was over seven miles in diameter. The ship faced away from the rock and drifted close to it, then turned its gravity collectors on. Their directional collectors drew gravitons from a cone, which they pointed at the asteroid. Invisibly, the asteroid lost mass. The AndroVault pushed on the enormous rock. Steadily it settled further into the atmosphere. The ship drew its mass away, and stored it, lightening the asteroid more and more. As it grew lighter, the ship pushed it closer to the planet.

  The ship turned off its collector and flew away from the asteroid.

  Gravitons exist as a general field of particles inside all physical things in the universe. When collected inside e-cores, the vessel doesn’t gain mass and the gravitons can be expended as energy. Just like a battery holding electricity isn’t dangerous to hold, an e-core was a battery for gravity and it didn’t gain weight when it was full.

  When the gravitons are used for energy, they don’t burn. They just release back into the universal field. If an object has its mass changed and then released, it returns to normal.

  The asteroid regained mass from the universal graviton field. Suddenly it weighed the same it did before, but was closer to the planet. It began to heat up … and its orbit decayed. The asteroid plunged into the atmosphere and superheated.

  Skimmers chased the Eye of Orion across the ground at high speed.

  Frustrated that they couldn’t close the gap, several skimmers took the risk and accelerated past reentry speed. Rushing over 10,000 miles per hour, their forward shields glowed white. In that moment, they came within range of the Eye of Orion. There was a flurry of fire back and forth. The skimmers were mostly destroyed, but the shields on the corvette were knocked down.

  Driven on by rage and hope for glory, other skimmers surged forward and fired. The graviton engines in the back of the ship were hit and the hull was punctured.

  Steo ordered an alpha attack with all atmospheric missiles. The resulting blasts wiped out most and disabled the rest, leaving them unable to fly. The wrecked and demolished skimmers smoked as men jumped out of them.

  The corvette sped away from the clash.

  Finally the crew saw on the main panel what the AndroVault had been doing.

  The massive chunk of rock burned its way through the atmosphere, heading for the planet surface. In front of it a wave built up, and it glowed like a fireball descending from the moon.

  When the asteroid struck the planet, the energy of the impact was greater than the Petid Republic’s collection of Ecker bombs. It was more immense than any empire’s nuclear arsenals. It dwarfed any weapon – or collection of weapons – any civilization had ever realized.

  An enormous amount of ash and dust was hurled into the atmosphere. The temperature skyrocketed. Fault lines in the planet’s crust split open. Every point in all lands suffered earthquakes. Volcanoes erupted. Acidic smoke jetted into the sky and rapidly spread. Waves like mountains rose from the seas and rushed toward land.

  Volcanic winter spread over Lazuria 27. Nearly everything died.

  The Eye of Orion was damaged. Holes in the hull leaked air. The temperature outside soared. Gales rushed in all directions around the planet.

  Steo ordered the tiny repair robots out to close the gaps. The thousands of miniature crab-like creatures rushed to do their jobs.

  “Take us up!” he yelled to Yuina.

  Even though she was terrified that he was ordering them into space with holes in the ship, she did as she was told. The planet was too hot.

  He ordered Governor down to the quarters, deeper inside the ship. They would retreat there if necessary.

  Cyrus made makeshift repairs on the main hallway, spraying a material into holes to fill them.

  Hawking hovered in the bridge and gave status reports. The planet’s atmosphere turned red.

  Glaikis frantically scanned space to make sure they weren’t headed into an ambush, should they succeed in sealing the ship and making it into space.

  Renosha was in the holobridge, with a large display of the ship’s systems up. The graviton engines were damaged. They had some energy left, but they bled a good deal away.

  Needless to say, the inhabitants of Lazuria 27 died in the Exocaust attack, as did the soldiers whose skimmers had been wrecked.

  The AndroVault pulled away from the fiery planet and met its fleet, who were done ransacking the system and awaited orders.

  Lord Muuk assembled the Reminders and promoted several officers. They now outranked the Reminders, whose roles were as originally intended, he claimed: advisors only. Lord Muuk now wore epaulettes and boots. His back was bent, but he had spent time with the medical robots and wore a brace, so he seemed taller.

  He praised the dead soldiers and made sure Doib, the Reminder of Soldiers, recorded their bravery and sacrifice.

  He looked back at the dying planet. “This place is now a wasteland. It remains as a monument to the worthless ideology of alien tolerance. Let it be a beacon to our cause. We have no use for it anymore.”

  “What of the attacker? The Orion?” said a colonel.

  “There are no signs that it survived the Exocaust maneuver, I assure you. They were at the surface when the sacred missile struck. Look for yourself. The planet burns. The scanners don’t show that hated name anymore.

  We leave with our fleet immediately. We have identified a safe place a few light years away to recoup and gather energy for our final jump. We need to gather energy for weeks to make the long trip to the Tarium spiral arm on our quest for the paradise of Ino. We could do without interruptions.”

  His speech was met with cheering and discussions of the rest of the campaign.

  As the atmosphere g
ot thinner, holes were closed off, but not enough. Yuina held a steady course and watched as they passed through the cover of burning clouds. The air in the ship turned smoky. Ventilation systems worked overtime to clear it. She watched and worried as the front panel darkened. She always thought of that blackness with its tiny pinpoints as safety and the chance to escape her past. Now it might mean an airless death.

  Yuina looked around at her crewmates. She glanced up at the egg-like other half of the pilot’s seat. She realized it might be only her that survived.

  Everyone else did what he or she could to seal the ship.

  They shot out of the clouds and through the thinning atmosphere, into space.

  The graviton engines failed. They were empty. Internal gravity gave way. Lights flickered and went out. People fell unconscious as the depressurized interior knocked them out. The temperature plummeted. The Eye of Orion no longer gave an electronic signature as it went dark.

  CHAPTER 37

  Man-things

  The space stations no longer rotated.

  Orbital bombardment and destructive raids had targeted the other two habitable planets. Filthy black smoke poured from heavy fuel refineries. Radioactive wind blew across the landscape. People cried out from underneath rubble, hoping someone would hear them.

  Monolithic shapes appeared in the solar system and paid them no heed.

  Titanic and strange, the six ships scanned. Their sensors were far beyond anything known by man. They drifted toward the burning orb that was Lazuria 27.

  The Eye of Orion was seared, its surface pitted. It rolled and turned out of control, slowly drifting away from the burning planet. The pressure and temperature had mostly stabilized as they entered space, but it may have been too late for the biological organisms inside. They had all been injured and knocked unconscious. Sudden decompression formed nitrogen bubbles in their bloodstreams and they went into shock from the cold.

  All the doors were sealed shut, and with the engines down, they couldn’t be opened. Renosha was locked in the engineering bay. He tried to repair the graviton engines. Hawking floated in the bridge and stayed in constant communication, advising him. With the ship’s computer down, the science robot was the best computer on board. Hawking also kept an unconscious crewmember from bouncing against the walls of the bridge. Another was locked inside the eggshell of the pilot’s chair.