by Jake Elwood
He touched a button on the arm of his chair. "Missile bay."
"Wong here."
"Mr. Wong. I'm going to need nine missiles." He thought for a moment. "Better make that eighteen. Two per target."
"Right, Sir. What am I aiming at?"
Bloch looked over Horowitz's shoulder. "Check your tac display. Your targets are marked with white triangles."
"Got it," Wong said.
"Immediate launch, if you please."
"Aye aye, Sir."
Data flashed in the corner of Horowitz's screen. "Missiles are away," said Wong.
"Good. Stand by."
"Four minutes until the first strike," Horowitz said. "Nineteen minutes, thirty seconds until the last one."
Bloch nodded, wondering how sturdy the enemy Gates were. Would conventional explosives destroy them? He had no nuclear warheads in the missile bay. Spacecom had offered him one. They told him it had an eighty-five percent chance of exploding on impact, and just under a one percent chance of exploding on its own. It was very old. He'd been tempted, but ultimately he'd decided to keep the stupid thing off his ship.
Well, the Theseus had taken the last Gate down with rail gun rounds, so conventional missiles would probably do the job. He still wasn't sure if he was pleased by Hammett's stratagem. He didn't care for being stranded, but if he could unleash all the destructive fury of the Cassandra without a swarm of Hive ships destroying her, it would be worth it.
"First impact," Horowitz said, hunching over his console. When he looked up, he was beaming. "The Gate's completely destroyed, Sir!"
"Good," said Bloch. He made himself return to his seat. Peering over someone's shoulder was undignified. "What are the aliens doing?" His own screen showed an eruption of activity, like an anthill poked with a stick. He wanted Horowitz's analysis.
"Well, we sure got their attention," Horowitz said. He tapped at icons, looked from screen to screen, then said, "A dozen or so ships are heading for the destroyed Gate. They're flocculating." He glanced at Bloch, who scowled. "That is, they're coming together. Forming one ship. To move faster, I suppose." He peered into his display. "Scratch that. They're turning back." He looked up. "I guess they figured out it's too late to do anything about that Gate."
Bloch drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, then made himself stop. The enemy swarm still looked like nothing but boiling chaos to him.
"Second impact," Horowitz announced. He couldn't keep the glee from his voice. "The second missile's still going. The first bird smashed the Gate completely. The second bird didn't have anything to hit." His fingers flew across the surface of his console. "I'm telling it to swing back and target the biggest piece of wreckage it can find. Make it harder for them to do repairs."
Some of the tension left Bloch's shoulders. It was working. Even if the Hive destroyed all the remaining missiles, he and Hammett had smashed three out of ten Gates. At the very least it should throw the enemy into disarray.
"Uh-oh," Horowitz said. He pointed at the surging dots on his display. "They're thinking about what they're doing, now." He paused, checking two different screens, then said, "I think we'll get three more Gates. They can't intercept in time. There are ships on their way to intercept the other missiles, though. They'll save the Gates closest to the settlement, and the ones on the far side. They can get to those in time."
We've done what we can. Staring at the missile paths on the screen won't help. "Listen up," he said, looking around the bridge. "Our little vacation is almost over. We're about to strike the biggest blow ever struck in this war." He swept an arm in the general direction of the alien settlement. "The Cassandra is about to get its first-ever field test. We're going to unleash Hell on the Hive."
A less disciplined crew might have cheered. A few people gave him fierce smiles.
"Right now they're keeping an eye on us, but they're staying back," he continued. "That's about to change. As soon as they see rocks starting to fly—and they realize they can't stop the barrage—they're going to come after us. So be ready."
All around the bridge people nodded and turned back to their consoles. Bloch nodded as well, satisfied that his people were as ready as they could be. They can't stop the barrage. He shook his head. They better not be able to. If they can survive the Cassandra, we've dropped ourselves in the fire for nothing.
It was an unproductive line of thought, and he abandoned it. He would do as much damage as he could in the time that remained to him, and then he would die.
Of course, if the opportunity to survive presented itself he would take it, if his duty allowed. It would be good if someone made it back to Earth. Spacecom needed to know where the Hive was, and what happened during the battle that was about to begin. If he could make it home …
He thought of his family, of his wife who waited so patiently each time he was deployed away from Earth. It would be good to see her again, to see the relief in her eyes when she saw he'd returned to her once more. It would be good to see his children. They didn't live at home anymore, but they would come to see him if he made it back from such a dangerous tour.
After the damage he was about dish out to the Hive, they might even be proud of him. He grimaced at the thought. Both of them had joined the anti-EDF movement. They wore white and marched in protests, and risked death from a vengeful EDF. It was the foolish rebellion of youth, nothing more. When they were older they would look back on these days and be ashamed. For now, though, they were adamantly opposed to their father and everything he stood for.
But they were still his kids. Whatever hostility they nurtured, they would come to see him if he made it back to Earth. The four of them were still a family. They could put aside politics for an evening and be together once more.
"Another Gate is gone," Horowitz announced. "We might even get one more than I expected." He pointed at his screen, as if anyone else could make out the details. "I don't think they're going to be in time to save Gate Charlie." The computer would have assigned names to each target when the missiles launched. "The birds are too fast. They're going to be about twenty seconds too late."
Bloch nodded. "Good." Three Gates would survive the missile barrage, then. If the Hive ships were slow to respond, he might even have the Cassandra take a few shots at the Gates that remained. The system was target-rich, but he decided the Gates would be his second priority, after the destruction of the settlement.
"Missiles Eleven and Twelve have been destroyed," Horowitz said, and shook his head. "They crashed a ship into each one. Crazy buggers." He consulted a corner of his screen. "Missiles Nine and Ten made it past their interceptors, though. Looks like they'll go all the way."
Bloch checked his own screen. The fleet was decelerating as it neared the asteroid field. The Theseus and the Tomahawk were still with him, he saw. Well, under the circumstances he'd accept their help. If he and Hammett were both alive at the end of it all, that would be soon enough to deal with the man. Most likely, the Hive swarm would make their conflict irrelevant. He's a good fighting man. I'm glad he's here. He's got a tough ship. I'd be happier if it was in the hands of a more reliable crew, but Hammett will do.
CHAPTER 9 - HARDY
Ken Hardy sat in the Tomahawk's tiny mess hall, bodies pressing in close on every side. The little room was completely jammed, mostly with crew from the Gideon. It occurred to him that he would have a hard time getting to his fighter if he was called, but he kept his eyes shut, riveted by the feed coming to his implants from the computers on the nearby EDF ships. That was quite a security breach, he reflected. Spacecom was woefully unprepared to deal with civil war.
The fleet was at rest, floating in the thick of an asteroid field. At first he'd thought the asteroids were for cover, but he could make out movement among the rocks. The Cassandra, the mysterious new ship, was drawing in chunks of rock and carving them up with lasers. He had no idea why.
He couldn't wait to find out.
Someone's hip jostled his right shoulder, knock
ing him against the woman on his left. She turned to see what was happening, and caught Hardy in the eye with an elbow. He stood, clapping a hand to his eye. To hell with this. There's just as much room in the cockpit, and I get to be alone. A couple of blinks told him his eye was still functioning. He lowered his hand and pushed himself into the crowd, squirming and wriggling.
Reaching the door wasn't easy, but he managed it eventually. Sailors lined one side of the corridor outside, standing patiently with nothing to do but wait. Hardy hurried past them, suddenly grateful to have a destination, a role to play. Even if all he did was sit in the cockpit waiting for orders that never came, it had to be better than abandoning ship and standing in a corridor, wondering when the new ship would come apart around you.
It took him almost five minutes to reach the hatch leading to his fighter, a trip he could have made in forty-five seconds flat most days. He climbed a short ladder, squirmed his way into the pilot's seat, sealed the hatch in the floor, and heaved a sigh of relief. Alone at last.
He'd sat out the last battle, before the mad retreat through the alien Gate. It frustrated him that he'd missed the action, but the truth was, he was pretty sure he'd be dead if the order had come to launch. The little fighter was terribly vulnerable. He'd flown it in combat once, and survived by the narrowest of margins. The odds now were much worse, and there would be no ground-based death ray to save him this time.
The fighter perched on top of the corvette like a nestling on the back of a swan, giving him a panoramic view of the asteroid field through the cockpit windows. He couldn’t see the alien settlement, or any other alien technology, which disappointed him. It was also a bit comforting, he had to admit.
The Theseus was dead ahead, reassuring him with its massive bulk. The former freighter bristled with rail gun turrets of every size and configuration. It looked lethal, and he was glad of its presence. I'll have to give it some space, though. Maybe stay on the far side of the Tomahawk. It's going to be throwing out a lot of flying metal.
Almost directly above him he could see the Cassandra. From his perspective the big ship looked like a gleaming steel tower, painted dark blue. At the near end rocks came drifting in, captured and controlled expertly by the ship's tractor beams and force fields. He caught the dazzle of a laser as hovering robots carved pieces from a rock almost the size of the Tomahawk. Along the side of the tower a wireframe sleeve held half a dozen rocks that had already been cut. Each of the rocks, though smaller than the behemoth currently being sliced up, was still enormous. The Bumblebee, Hardy's fighter, could have sat inside that sleeve with clearance on every side.
The Cassandra was clearly going to do something with those rocks. They were queued up in that sleeve almost like …
Like ammunition in a magazine.
He almost missed the firing of the weapon, even though he was looking right at it. The motion came so quickly that it was over before he registered it. He wasn't sure he'd actually seen anything until he made out the shape of a metal block travelling rapidly from the tip of the tower back to the base.
Rapidly, but much, much slower than it had gone up. He stared, perplexed. The metal block, almost as wide as the tower itself, reached the bottom, and the rocks in the sleeve shifted. He couldn't quite make out what happened, but now there were five rocks in the sleeve, not six.
The metal block vanished. He spotted it a moment later, dropping rapidly toward the base of the tower, and understanding washed over him. It was a giant slingshot, lobbing boulders the size of cottages. His jaw dropped, and his mouth remained open as the Cassandra fired again.
They could smash the alien settlement with that gun. They could obliterate it completely. Good God. It's a doomsday weapon.
And it's in the hands of the EDF. What will we do when they run out of aliens to shoot at?
He pushed the thought from his mind. They would never do that. It would be unthinkable. They wouldn’t fire that thing at our fleet. Or at Ariadne.
Would they?
Well, they won't have the chance. It's not as if we have a way to get back. He craned his neck as the Cassandra fired again, trying to see where the rocks were going. The target was somewhere aft, though. He couldn’t make it out. He closed his eyes instead and brought up a tactical display.
The alien settlement still glittered among the rocks, untouched. Hardy frowned. Did they miss? Do the aliens have some kind of shield?
What kind of shield could stop a rock that size?
The Cassandra was still firing, one rock after another hurtling out into the darkness of space. He instructed the tactical net to show him the path of the rocks that had been fired.
He had underestimated the scale of the system, he realized. The first rock was still on the way to its target. He tried to calculate how many rocks would be in motion by the time the first rock hit, then abandoned the effort and decided just to watch.
The first impact was disappointing. The rock slammed into a much larger lump of stone between two sections of glittering steel. By the look of it the rock from the Cassandra vaporized on impact. It jarred the entire settlement structure, though, and Hardy saw bits of metal and plastic break loose and float away in a cloud.
The second rock was a miss. It whipped past the narrowest part of the settlement, missing stone and steel by scant meters. Hardy gaped, his mouth open, wanting to shout a protest. We finally have a weapon that can hurt them, and it missed? It's not fair!
Rock Number Three collided directly with one of the structures that connected two chunks of asteroid, and the effect was everything Hardy could have hoped for. The stone blasted a jagged hole in the front of the settlement, and shock waves washed outward. Debris and vapor poured from the entry hole, and the entire settlement shuddered.
Rock after rock slammed into the settlement. Each one moved on a slightly different trajectory, its path altered by irregularities in the shape and density of the stone missiles. This was magnified by the huge distance, so that rocks struck as much as half a kilometer apart. There were several more misses, but most of the barrage found its target.
A nav thruster glowed on the top of the tower. The Cassandra was swinging her nose over so she could rake the settlement from end to end. The destruction was glorious and horrible, and Hardy drank it in. Some of the asteroids that anchored the settlement were breaking apart under the barrage. He could see large manufactured sections that, so far, were undamaged, but other parts were all but wiped out.
The blaring of an alarm jerked his attention back to the Bumblebee. He opened his eyes. Every screen in the fighter was live, and he soon saw why.
The aliens were on the move.
A cloud of ships surged out from the settlement. After a minute or so of indecision the aliens had figured out they only had one way to stop this lethal barrage.
They had to destroy the ships that were causing it.
Hardy spent an intense moment with his hands hovering over his controls, adrenalin sizzling in his blood as the alarm blared in his ears. He sat like that, poised and ready, as the seconds ticked past. Then he shook his head and lowered his arms. The aliens were coming, all right, but they were a long way off. Sure, he was doomed, but there was nothing he could actually do for several minutes at least. He closed his eyes again, this time not viewing anything on his implants, and concentrated on breathing in and out. Massive adrenalin dumps when you couldn't act on them were worse than useless.
The fleet began to move, ships turning and arranging themselves in a kind of staggered grid. The Adamant moved in close to the Cassandra, edging forward so she was ahead of the gleaming tower but well out of the path of the rocks, which were still sailing out at five-second intervals. The EDF corvettes took up positions around the two larger ships. The point, from what Hardy could see, was to protect the Cassandra and keep her firing for as long as possible.
At first there seemed to be no place for the Theseus and the Tomahawk. After a long pause the Theseus began to move below the Cassand
ra and Adamant, the Tomahawk keeping station just behind and above the freighter. Hardy stared up at the gleaming length of the Cassandra, watching as the stone launcher flashed past, then returned.
He could see the alien settlement with his naked eyes now. It was too distant for him to make out the details of the damage—until he saw one end of the long, meandering structure begin to turn, while the other end remained stationary. "We broke it in half," he murmured, hardly daring to believe it. "We busted it in two."
At first he couldn't see the approaching Hive ships. When he spotted them, all he really saw was a red and white haze that blurred parts of the distant settlement. Only when individual ships emerged from the haze, appearing as black dots, did he realize what he was seeing. The Hive ships were plunging toward him, decelerating hard. He saw the glow of their engines as they braked.
There were fewer ships than he'd expected—no more than a couple of dozen at the most—and he experienced a brief moment of optimism. Then he glanced at his display screens and groaned. Each ship was an amalgam, roughly a dozen ships joined together to boost their acceleration.
I'm doomed. I'm a dead man. The thought had been in the back of his mind for a while, solidifying when the Tomahawk went through the enemy Gate. When the Theseus destroyed the Gate behind them, the thought had become a cold certainty. He'd pushed it from his mind, though.
Now it was back. He tried to push the thought away, found it wouldn't leave, and examined it instead.
I'm going to die. I'm dozens of light years from home. Hundreds, maybe. I'm in the Hive's home system. In fact, I'm looking at the Hive itself. I'm guarding a weapon that's demolishing their home. There's nowhere to run, and no way I could let myself run even if there was somewhere to go. This is the day I die.
But I get a rare privilege. I get to die giving the Cassandra a few more shots at those filthy skittering little bugs. We're giving them a good pounding. We might be making all of humanity safe right now. At the very least we're setting them back. Giving every human being alive a chance to recover, regroup, prepare.