Storm Assault (Star Force Series)

by B. V. Larson

  “I mean that I offered you the cyborgs to experiment upon. I’m worried that you might be willing to jeopardize everything for that opportunity.”

  “That would be irrational, Colonel.”

  “Yeah, it would. And I’m not putting it outside the realm of possibility. I need some concrete results to prove you can do this.”

  “What would you suggest?”

  “I’m going to fire missiles at Phobos. Just two missiles, but they’re going to come in five minutes apart. If you can’t stop them, I’m declaring this a mistrial.”

  This statement awarded me no less than six cameras. “I think you’re being unreasonable.”

  “No, I’m being very reasonable. If you can’t stop two missiles, we haven’t got a chance against thousands.”

  “When will this test occur?”

  “I’m giving you one more hour. That’s it. I’m scheduling the launch and putting it on automatic. Stop them, or forget about your cyborg doggy-treats.”

  “An odd reference. I’ll see what I can do, however.”

  I left him to his work. I knew that if anyone could do it, he could. He was motivated and ingenious. I, for my part, had nothing to lose.

  An hour later I fired the missiles. I didn’t even bother to give him a second warning.

  I watched the screens with arms crossed. Everyone else crowded around, not saying much. They were all hoping, too.

  About a minute before the impacts, Marvin came into the command tent—or rather, he crashed into it.

  For a split second, I thought one of those missiles had come down the shaft to the surface and landed right on my head. Marvin was in free-fall—he’d gotten a new grav lifter set somewhere—and tore a hole in the smart metal tent we all stood around in.

  The ceiling sagged, then ripped open. He came spiraling in, slapped his tentacles on the weapons consoles like a madman doing a drum solo, then flew up and out, back through the same hole.

  “Hehe,” I said, gazing up through the ceiling. “He’s really going for it!”

  The rest of my people were still ducking, talking in lowered voices and staring after my crazy robot.

  I knew what they were thinking. They’d all seen a last-minute-Charlie before. The homework was due in seconds, and Marvin didn’t have his act together.

  About then, the first shudder went through the ship. It was a now-familiar sensation. We’d been feeling it for many long hours as Marvin conducted his countless tests.

  I pasted on a smile. “There we go,” I said. “I’m sure he’s stopped the first missile with that one.”

  I received many doubtful glances. Wincing, I checked the boards.

  “Yes,” Jasmine said. “The missile was crushed and destroyed. No damage was sustained.”

  “Set a timer. Five minutes to go.”

  She pointed to the timer she already had running. There was four minutes and twenty seconds left on it. That may not sound like a lot of time, but when you are as worried as I was, it like was an eternity.

  When the clock read twenty-nine seconds, I felt another shudder. I frowned. “Was that…?”

  “I think he fired early.”

  We looked and the missile kept coming. I frowned as it zoomed right down on top of us and exploded. We didn’t feel it, but the pickups didn’t leave us any doubts. The blast formed a bubble on Phobos that quickly vanished.

  Jasmine looked up at me in disbelief. “You fired a live warhead?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I didn’t want to hang all our lives on a simulation.”

  She nodded. “It looks like a failure.”

  “Yeah. Here comes the professor now.”

  Marvin bombed through roof again, upsetting the nanites which had been busily repairing the damage from the last time.

  “Colonel Riggs,” he said, “let’s go over the status of the experiments.”

  “Looks like there is no need, Marvin. The test failed.”

  “A misfire only, Colonel. Let’s do another test.”

  “Marvin, I told you—”

  “But sir, we’ll have enough time to escape if it fails. Plenty of time.”

  “I had other tests planned, but they were predicated on the success of the first one.”

  “I understand, sir. One more try. I’ll be ready in…seven minutes. The trouble was I miscalculated the reset time. When automated, it took less time to engage the firing sequence than I’d anticipated. It ended up being too fast—”

  “That’s not good news, Marvin,” I said. “If the best you can do is about four minutes, we’re dead anyway. It has to be one minute apart. No screw-ups.”

  “One more test?”

  I sighed. “All right. Go.”

  He moved over to the consoles, but did nothing. He just looked at data and flipped through various planning scenarios. I followed him to his station.

  “Aren’t you doing the test?”

  “That’s all preprogrammed.”

  “You mean you set it all up before you asked me? Were you that certain I would approve a second chance?”

  He looked at me from several angles, trying to discern my mood. I was incredulous, but I think he has a hard time detecting that one.

  “Is my answer going to prejudice you against this endeavor?”

  I sighed. “You’re right. Keep it to yourself. I don’t want to know how big of a patsy you think I am.”

  “Very well, Colonel Riggs.”

  The next test went perfectly. We shortened the time down to three minutes, then two. It was hard to break the two-minute barrier. We went all the way down to the wire on that one. He finally managed to nudge one of those hexes just the right number of millimeters to get the precision he needed.

  He tried to explain to me that the analog system of the Blues was giving him fits. I understood, knowing analog technology could be a pain. What he was doing was akin to trying to perfectly tune in an old-fashioned AM radio in an ancient car. The slightest tap could bring a station in loud and clear, or make it a scratchy mess. Only in Marvin’s case, he was tuning a radio with hundreds of mysterious buttons that an alien race of cloud people had designed. It wasn’t easy.

  “The trick involves variant pressure on the different angles of the same button. You see, previously I’d been applying equal pressure, causing the button to depress at precisely the same rate on every axis. That was my mistake—”

  “Marvin,” I said, “I’ve got a headache. We’re doing the one minute test now. This is just like tech back home—you live or die by the demo.”

  “Reference unclear.”

  “Shoot down the missiles. All of them. They’re coming in now.”

  I began dropping them on him then, one at a time, precisely one minute apart. I smiled after he got the first four in a row. He was doing it. I turned to Jasmine.

  “This is working. He’s like a tennis player back home. He’s in the zone.”

  “Can I stress the system?” Miklos asked me suddenly.

  I turned to him with a frown. I nodded and stepped from the controls.

  Miklos cracked his knuckles and began toying with the ship’s helm. He put us into a spin, which applied lateral force to everyone.

  Marvin’s cameras perked up, but he didn’t complain. I figured he knew we were going to stop informing him concerning every detail of the tests at some point. We had to go beyond lab conditions. There was less than an hour to go before the real thing hit us.

  I watched the holotank. Miklos was a sneaky bastard. Several of the ships broke formation and positioned themselves in various positions around Phobos. When the next missile was scheduled, it came from an entirely new angle. We were spinning now, too.

  Marvin was making an odd sound. I wasn’t sure if he was humming, laughing or burning a servo. But he did it. He caught them all.

  Miklos nodded when he was done.

  “It might work,” he said. “But you’re risking all our lives on untested technology, sir.”

  “We’ve be
en doing nothing but testing it for the last seven hours.”

  “You know what I mean, Colonel.”

  I turned away from him. I knew exactly what I meant. It was crazy—but it had to work. We had to win this round. If we turned and ran now it was hopeless.

  If the Imperial fleet was so powerful they could stop us while they were still out of our range—well, there wasn’t any point to fighting them. We weren’t going to survive anyway.

  “How many of the enemy ships have fired on us so far?” I asked him, partly to change the subject.

  “That is a strange thing, Colonel. We estimate that only the first rank of ships—the first thousand—have fired anything at all. Even half the ships in that first rank have held their fire.”

  I frowned. “So only five hundred ships out of seven thousand have unloaded on us? That isn’t standard procedure.”

  “No, sir. It wouldn’t be for us, at least.”

  Usually, we fired missiles evenly from every ship in the fleet. If every ship had ten missiles, it made sense to fire five from each, rather than ten from one and none from the next. That way if any of the ships were knocked out the survivors would still have some ammo left for the next round.

  Miklos shrugged. “It isn’t all that odd,” he said. “It may be due to design variations. Maybe all those Imperial ships look alike, but not all were equipped with missiles.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “It’s not like Crow. He likes his fleets to be standardized. I don’t know if it matters, though. Maybe we just came out here while they were shipping out supplies and surprised them. Maybe they had the ships ready, but without full magazines. Production schedules can be optimized by building a lot of one thing at a time. Maybe Crow doesn’t have all those ships fully ready to fly yet.”

  “We just don’t know, Colonel. If we live long enough, maybe we’ll figure it out.”

  We went back to work and I daydreamed about more Irish coffee, but passed. I wasn’t going into my last battle sloshed.

  I thought about a lot of things as those missiles came zooming in. They were so fast! I’d made a mistake there. I realized during the final minutes that we’d never tested against a target that was moving at such speeds.

  Missiles are like tiny spaceships. Our modern units had engines that provided thrust at a steady rate, and the longer they flew the faster they went. Since the Imperial missiles had many hours to build up speed, they were going to hit us very hard and fast. We’d never been in position to test Marvin’s focused shielding system against anything going even one tenth as fast as the enemy birds. That meant they might very well get through, despite all our preparations.

  I gritted my teeth and wondered if I’d killed us all in the end. At least it would be quick.

  -29-

  Even a veteran like me finds it hard to ride out a heavy attack in space. Your guts churn and your bowels cinch up painfully tight. Sometimes I thought it was easier to be in a firefight. You aim your weapon, squeeze the trigger—you’re doing something. If you do get taken out by enemy fire, you probably never saw it coming.

  But while standing on my ship’s bridge, watching thousands of brilliant points of death coming at me, I felt helpless to do more than hope I wouldn’t die. I’ve never liked the sensation.

  The first wave of missiles was easy. We set up the shielded region of Phobos, a couple of square miles of surface area. When the missiles came in, Marvin hit the button, and they all instantly transformed into a shower of wadded-up metal.

  I clapped my hands loudly and hooted. “First rank down, set us up for round two, Marvin!”

  None of this was necessary, of course. But I wanted the staffers to feel the victory, and they did. A cheer went up when that first wave of missiles vanished en masse. I smiled. I still had the touch. Sometimes my job amounted to playing cheerleader.

  It was the second wave, really, that tied my innards into a knot. Marvin wasn’t bantering with us as the seconds ticked by—he was madly adjusting his makeshift controls, slapping and jiggling the consoles. I could tell by watching him this was no science. He looked like he was playing pinball and cheating by slamming his knee into the base of the machine and whacking it on all sides.

  The second wave went down like the first, and I began to smile. To really smile.

  “You’re going to pull this off, Marvin. I bet you can taste those cyborgs already.”

  “Taste?”

  “Never mind, don’t get distracted.”

  I’m not sure if it was my comment or just fate, but on the third wave he didn’t catch them all.

  Wham! Wham!

  I held onto the command table, but it wasn’t that bad. The ship had so much mass, it barely shuddered under the impacts.

  “Let’s start spinning to spread the damage,” I said to the people running the helm, but then turned to Marvin, “will that mess you up?”

  “As long as the spin is very predictable, with no acceleration curve, I will be able to compensate with a simple application of a mathematical template.”

  I winced, knowing that we couldn’t apply thrust in a perfectly even pattern to an object this big, not even with the gravity drive. Using the drive would take energy away from his shielding system, too.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll hold off on the spin for now. Keep swatting down those—”

  Wham!

  Another one had gotten past and hit us. While I’d been talking to him, the fourth wave had come in and something had slipped past. Phobos shook, and I looked at Sarin.

  “How many hits? What mega-tonnage?”

  “Just one high yield warhead,” she said. “I’m estimating seven to ten megatons. According to surface monitoring data, we’ve got a pall of dust growing over Phobos.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. Dust was a good defense against lasers—but not missiles.

  “Move the fleet forward. The Imperials won’t be able to retarget the missiles on them. They’re too far away now. We need every turret we have to shoot down the missiles.”

  “The incoming birds are going too fast, Colonel,” she told me. “The fleet won’t be able to lock on—”’

  “Move them up and have them take potshots. If we fail to catch an entire wave just once…”

  Jasmine nodded in alarm, visualizing what I was suggesting. She relayed my orders to the fleet commanders, and the situation on the screens changed.

  The fleet glided forward into a defensive posture. I hoped none of the missiles were programmed to switch targets in their final seconds—but there was little I could do about that possibility now.

  “Start the spin!” I said after the next barrage failed to land a single strike. I’d been looking at the hull damage. It wasn’t severe, but it was noticeable. Each strike had left a blackened crater on the surface of my ship. At the deepest, it was no more than a few hundred yards of penetration, but a half dozen more strikes on top of any of these craters would be enough to break through and kill us all. I wanted to make that a hard goal for the enemy to achieve.

  Slowly, the big vessel began to spin. We got it moving fast enough to rotate about once every ten minutes and waited. Logically, the missile strikes would now be spread out over ten times the surface area, vastly lessening the odds they could penetrate our outer shell.

  As the next wave came in, I dared a grin. The fleet was doing better than expected. Nearly half the missiles were taken out before they reached Phobos.

  “See?” I said. “This is working. We’re getting through this storm.”

  One would think that by now I would have learned not to tempt the gods of fate. But obviously, I hadn’t.

  I knew something was wrong about ten seconds before the seventeenth wave landed. I frowned at the screen.

  “What…why are they shifting course? Marvin, are you on this? Adjust your shield—”

  That was all I managed to get out before the impacts began.

  Wham! Wham! Wham!

  Then more fell, and we all grippe
d our operating stations for dear life. The walls shook, parts of the inner chamber crumbled and fell. It sounded like a distant avalanche in the Alps.

  A moment later, Marvin took flight. He shot up out of our command tent, blasting a fresh hole in the writhing nanites. I’d begun to think the whole smart metal tent idea was a loser.

  “Where’s he going?” Miklos asked.

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. He’s got his orders, and you have yours.”

  “What went wrong, Kyle?”

  I stared at the input, searching for the answer to her question. The missiles had shifted with Phobos’ spin, steering toward a specific spot. I zoomed in with my fingers, spreading them, and examined the surface features. There was a large single cluster of impacts. They’d gone halfway through our armor in a single strike.

  “The old craters,” I shouted. “Their missiles must be programmed to hit spots that are already damaged. They changed course to hit us there.”

  I opened an emergency com-link channel to Marvin, without asking permissions from anyone.

  “Marvin, set the next shield right over the most damaged, blackened area.”

  He didn’t respond, but I didn’t have time to demand an acknowledgement.

  “Captain Sarin, stop our damned spinning! Place our most damaged area right in front of the next wave.”

  She looked at me with fear in her eyes. “But if they get through this time they’ll rupture the hull.”

  “I know, but Marvin’s been catching most of them until now. We can take a few more hits. We know right where they’re going to strike next. Let’s use that.”

  “Sir?” she said, looking at me with real fear.

  “What is it?”

  “Kyle—Marvin’s leaving the ship. He’s in the shaft now.”

  I froze. My mind froze. I didn’t know what to think. Was he truly abandoning us? Running out on a sinking ship? Marvin, the biggest steel rat of all time?

  “MARVIN!” I shouted into my headset, firing a channel connection to him he couldn’t easily disable. “I know you can hear me. At least set the system to catch these final waves. We know where they’ll all land now. Just set the controls on automatic, if you’re going to run out—”