If those two lasers had been ready when the SU Battlefleet began to gather at far orbit, Chavez likely would have ordered strikes against the individual spaceships. Those two laser cannons were ready now and the fusion plants were online. They targeted SU Battleships over 350,000 kilometers away, but held their fire.
Almost two days ago, an aerosol cloud had begun forming before the massed Social Unity Fleet. The commander of Phobos had considered firing then. A stern order from Chavez had halted the thought from turning into action. The moon station was still under high alert, however. The SU Battlefleet had taken an unusual formation, but otherwise, had remained inactive since the building and dissipation of the light aerosol cloud. Martian military planners were still arguing over the cloud’s significance.
* * *
The forty-five black ice-chunks drifting at two kilometers per second neared Mars and neared Phobos.
That the black ice had remained hidden was due to the vast volume of space. That volume was unlike anything on a planet. Even something like the mighty Pacific Ocean on Earth shrank into insignificance compared to the lonely expanse of outer space. If any of the ice-coated pods had been orbitals using chemical fuel, spotting them would have been simple. Space was huge, but space was also cold. An orbital’s chemical-fuel rocket would have blazed its presence with its heat signature. The ice-coated pods were cold like the immense volume of vacuum around them. The inner pods gave a miniscule heat signature, which was masked by the surrounding ice.
So, even though a planet-bound human would expect someone to spot the forty-five ice-chunks barreling straight at Phobos, the probability of that was low. Teleoptic scopes were like a person’s eyes. To see an object they had to be looking in that direction. Just as it would take many people standing all around the moon to watch every quadrant of space, so it would take many teleoptic scopes pointing everywhere to do likewise. Radar would have a better chance picking up the icy chunks once they were near Phobos, as radar could more easily cover broad sections of space.
That radar-probability had entered Supreme Commander Hawthorne’s original plan and Toll Seven’s adjustments to it. Therefore, two critical elements now affected the success of the cyborg assault. First, the arrival of the ice-embedded pods near Mars was timed with Phobos’ orbit around the planet. The moon circled Mars three times during the Martian day or once every 7.3 hours. The pods used Mars as a shield and reached Phobos just as it came around the curvature of the planet. The radar stations on Phobos thus had less time than otherwise to spot the approaching ice. Deimos could still catch the pods by radar or one of the laser or orbital platforms in close-Mars orbit could. Yet Toll Seven had suggested that those stations would be less likely to radar-spot the ice as Phobos would, since the ice-coated pods came at the moon and not at those platforms. Still, the probability existed. And to lessen that probability, Toll Seven, with Commodore Blackstone’s agreement, had decided to add one more factor. They would inundate Martian space defense with data, giving the Martians something else to worry about than faint radar signals.
* * *
Commodore Blackstone’s gut churned. He had slept poorly, knowing that the next wake cycle would either begin the end of everything he knew or begin the end of Highborn arrogance. Because of the cyborgs, there was also the possibility it would do both.
Blackstone now stood in the cramped command center of the Vladimir Lenin. Commissar Kursk and General Fromm stood with him around the holographic map-module. For once, Toll Seven was absent. The cyborg remained in his command pod, he said overseeing the moving of the pods to the safest location in the Battlefleet. It seemed like a strange reason, but perhaps it made logical sense to a cyborg. Whatever the reason, Blackstone appreciated Toll Seven’s absence and would have liked to make it permanent.
“It’s time,” Commissar Kursk said. With Toll Seven’s absence, she had regained some of her composure. She even wore lipstick, and her stance was more aggressive, more like the commissar Blackstone remembered.
Blackstone stared at the holograph, his thoughts weighted by his responsibility.
Months of lonely waiting out here, months of dodging the Doom Star a half-a-year ago and then weeks of gathering the Battlefleet now came down to this moment. The sneak attack on Mars orbital defense had begun nearly two days ago. Before that, the warships had received much needed material. The supply convoy from Earth had brought new coils, missiles, foodstuffs, cloths, laser parts and sundry other items that humans needed to survive in cramped quarters in outer space. Each of the warships had come in ragged. Months of running from Doom Stars or floating uselessly in deep space had badly affected morale. These last few weeks had changed much of that, but not all. The Battlefleet wasn’t as sharp as it could be. If he lost too many warships in the coming hours and days, it would mean disaster.
Commodore Blackstone’s gut churned, his mind shying away from that brutal thought. If he lost too many warships, Social Unity would never get another chance to make a new fleet. He could lose the future of Inner Planets here in the next few hours. If he won, the gamble for survival continued.
“Toll Seven is on line three, sir,” the communications officer said.
Blackstone continued to stare at the holograph, switching views so he could study the many spaceships that made up his fleet. This was it. This was the moment of decision.
“Commodore Blackstone,” the communications officer said. “Toll Seven is insistent.”
Blackstone felt warm flesh touch his wrist. He looked up into Commissar Kursk’s brown eyes. They stared with worry, while the brim of her cap was low over her eyes. The curve of her cheekbones—the commissar was quite beautiful. She still held his wrist as she touched his skin. His wife’s touch had felt like that. Blackstone glanced at the commissar’s hand. What if he twined his fingers with hers? What if they lay on his bed together, naked?
“Commodore Blackstone, are you well?” Kursk asked.
Blackstone squeezed his eyes shut and then snapped them open. “It’s time,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Open a channel to all ships,” he told the communications officer. “It’s time we began the Mars Attack.”
* * *
Burn-scarred Commander Zapata, the orbital launch officer and the Martian with an eye-patch, had been busy the past two hours. The strange, SU Battlefleet maneuver almost two days ago still bothered him. It had been bothering him ever since the klaxons had wailed that day.
Then, Zapata had ordered a layer of prismatic crystals sprayed from the containers and between the SU Battlefleet and his satellite. He had given the order to protect his station from sudden laser-strikes. Then he had launched probes to keep an eye on the Battlefleet. The layer of prismatic crystals had blocked his teleoptic scopes from watching the SU warships. The probes had therefore radioed their data back to him. He had been certain then that the layer of aerosols laid by the Battlefleet had been a prelude to a sneak attack.
Now, almost two days later, he had been proved wrong. They had all been wrong. Most of the strategists now believed it had been a maneuver to upset them and to make them waste prismatic crystals and aerosol gels. The new SU Battlefleet disposition had also started endless debates.
Commander Zapata hadn’t accepted any of those explanations. He had ordered a radar and teleoptic sweep on the Battlefleet. Those sweeps had discovered nothing other than the new formation.
“There has to be something more,” he said.
He stood on his command bridge. It was more spacious than Commodore Blackstone’s command center. Space was a premium on the Vladimir Lenin. On the orbital launch station, they had extra room.
Zapata stared up at a main screen. Other officers and personnel behind consoles faced the same way, but most of them studied their smaller vidscreens.
“The Battlefleet is accelerating!” someone shouted.
That created a babble of noise.
“Put it on the main screen,” Zapata ordered.
With powerful teleoptic
scopes at full magnification, the commander was able to view the SU Battlefleet. Over one hundred spaceships engaged their engines. It created a bright burn behind each vessel. The majority of those vessels were the convoy supply ships from Earth. The huge battleships and missile-cruisers led the way.
“Where are they headed?” Zapata shouted. He wanted to speak in a quiet, confident voice. He was too excited for that, too scared.
“For Mars, sir!”
The babble of noise intensified.
“Sir,” someone else shouted. “I’m picking up strange readings.”
“From the Battlefleet?” Zapata asked.
“No, sir. It’s in near orbit.”
“Show me.”
On the main screen came the blackness of space, with a vast number of stars.
“Is this a joke?” Zapata shouted angrily.
“I’ll freeze it, sir, and color it orange where the stars are blotted out.”
Zapata gaped at the new image, with over two dozen small orange globs on the screen. “What am I looking at? What are those? How big are they?”
“They’re not much bigger than orbitals, sir. The computer suggests they’re all made of ice.”
“Ice?” Zapata asked.
“That’s why our radar never picked them up.”
Commander Zapata took a step back. His good eye grew wide. “Where are those ice-orbitals headed?”
There was a tapping of computer keys. “It looks like for Phobos, sir.”
“Orbitals,” Zapata whispered. “Orbitals—those aren’t orbitals!” he shouted. He remembered Marten Kluge and the stern Korean. Those two had storm assaulted the Bangladesh. Could those ice-orbitals contain the SU version of storm assault troops?
“Get me Phobos!” he shouted.
“What about the Battlefleet, sir?”
“Get me Phobos!” Zapata screamed. “Get them online now!”
-15-
The black ice-chunks neared Phobos. They were less than ten thousand kilometers away from target. From Phobos speared an incredibly powerful laser. That giant laser completely encompassed an ice chunk. The ice vanished in a puff of steam. The exposed pod slagged and then disappeared. The cyborg in the pod no longer existed. The beam switched to a new target, to a new comet of black ice and began the fatal sequence all over again.
* * *
OD12 was jolted awake. It took her a nanosecond to realize she was in a battlesuit, in a pod, surrounded by black ice. She stirred, and the internal computer ticked off the seconds as it urged her to greater speed.
OD12 moved her battlesuit fingers. She pressed a switch. That switch caused her pod’s outer shell to overheat. The heat caused the ice around the pod to soften. Then explosives blew off the ice. Several seconds later, the pod decelerated hard. OD12 easily endured that, having greater tolerance to high Gs than even a Highborn possessed. A second after deceleration quit, the pod exploded. It sent metallic shards hurtling in precise directions. Toll Seven and Web-Mind had configured those directions to ensure the safety of the attacking cyborgs. It wouldn’t do to kill your own cyborgs with your own shrapnel. The metal shards were meant to bounce radar and provide the Mars Rebels with many easy targets of opportunity, useless targets. Those shards acted as chaff to hide the attackers.
OD12 now hung alone in space, encased in her battlesuit and with a hydrogen thruster-pack to supply her motive power. She used side jets to correct her position, using huge Mars below her as a reference point. Phobos was much smaller and pockmarked. It was ugly and dark compared to the beautiful Red Planet.
The internal computer still ran its censor program. Warning! It shouted at her.
Within her helmet, OD12’s elongated head twitched. Couldn’t she even enjoy a planet’s beauty for a few seconds? She might die soon.
This is your second warning! The third warning will begin the override sequence.
Apparently, enjoying a planet’s beauty was bad for a cyborg. It fulfilled no useful function for a combat machine. OD12 made a quick calculation. She decided in the next second that inhaling the beauty of Mars was best left to another life. There was no room for frivolities in this existence. Besides, she had a mission to complete and a bastard of a computer censor to please.
Salient information now flooded her as thirty-seven cyborgs counted off. Eight cyborgs didn’t, maybe couldn’t. A frightful beam stabbed through the darkness of space. OD12’s visor blackened to protect her costly eyes. That beam was close, a mere one hundred meters to her left. It slagged pod-shrapnel and then, like a conjurer, made the shrapnel disappear. Information from Toll Seven’s Web-Mind fed her mind. The laser had destroyed eight pods during their frozen ice-cycle. The attack had been prematurely spotted.
The terrible beam switched off and then stabbed again, this time to her right by one hundred and twenty meters. It originated from the approaching moon. OD12 focused on the moon, using her helmet’s imager. She had been through a hundred such sequences in the simulator. She knew exactly what to do and she did it much faster than a human could. Faster even, than Highborn.
The moon hardly fit the description of one. It lacked a pleasing, perfectly spheroid shape, but looked more like an asteroid. Phobos was an ellipsoid with three axes about 27, 21 and 19 kilometers long. It had craters and most resembled the lunar highlands. The surface was very dark, and was one of the blackest objects in the Solar System. Phobos reflected 2 percent of the light shined on it. Luna reflected 7 percent.
There was a massive pillbox on the dark moon. It was in the Stickney crater, the largest on the moon and 10 kilometers in diameter. Out of the pillbox protruded a huge focusing system. From that focusing system shined the dreadful laser. OD12 yearned to launch smart missiles at it. It was possible that all the cyborgs wanted to. Unfortunately, that was against the mission’s parameters. Their attack was supposed to capture the moon for Social Unity. They were to capture it intact, with as many functioning weapon systems as possible left in working order.
OD12 was close now. They all were—the cyborgs in their battlesuits hung in space like lethal fruit. OD12 and many other cyborgs rotated using small side jets. She applied hydrogen-thrust from her pack, braking. A nearby ECM pod crackled interference waves, hopefully throwing off enemy tracking radar.
The giant beam burned into space again and another cyborg stopped broadcasting.
OD12 glanced over her shoulder. The moon loomed before her. She applied more thrust. Then she rotated again and detached from the thruster pack. It automatically burned hydrogen spray, flying elsewhere.
A missile rose from the moon. It tracked the thruster-pack, zeroed in on it and exploded on impact. Since there was no atmosphere, it was a silent hit. And because there was no atmosphere, there was nothing to carry the shock wave. There was heat, but not enough to bother OD12 in her battlesuit. There was radiation, but it was negligible, since the missile had not been nuclear-tipped.
OD12 now readied herself for moon-impact. Her analyzers said it would be a hard landing, barely within the tolerable limits of her graphite-bone legs. The moon expanded with startling speed until it was everything to her. She couldn’t see the beautiful Red Planet anymore, just this dark, pitted surface. She wished for another thruster-pack. She was coming down too hard. The surfaced rushed nearer. She clenched her teeth together so she wouldn’t accidentally bite off her tongue. Retro-rockets on her legs fired a last burst to slow her just another fraction. Then she hit the moon hard.
OD12 had trained a hundred times for this in the simulator. If she hit too stiffly, it might bounce her off the tiny asteroid-like moon. If that happened, it would send her spinning away from Phobos and with no way to return. The moon’s escape velocity was minuscule. She would drift around Mars and eventually fall onto the planet. Long before that, however, she would have run out of battery power and air.
OD12 crumpled and rolled and rolled. Dust floated up and seemed to hang there. Then the particles slowly began to fall.
The internal
computer blanketed her pain sensors. Pain would only interfere now. OD12 rose and tested her legs. She might have grinned in ordinary times. But she was a cyborg. It took something fantastic to awaken the deep “I” of her old self, fantastic things like a beautiful planet hanging right there below her feet. Now she was on this dark, ugly moon with a mission to perform. So instead of grinning at her impossible achievement, she began to move over the moon’s surface.
It took most people a lifetime to learn how to move fast on an asteroid that had a minuscule escape velocity. The subjective years in the Web-Mind simulator had given OD12 those ‘years’ of training. She was an expert, likely one of the greatest in the Solar System. Her only equals in asteroid-gliding were the other cyborgs in the attack team. Thirty-six of them had made it. That was less than Toll Seven had computed they would need to storm and capture the moon intact.
The internal computer listened to emergency instructions messaged from the Web-Mind on Toll Seven’s command pod. The internal computer computed and injected enhancement drugs into OD12’s system. The agenda had been set and Web-Mind had decided to risk possible burnout to heighten cyborg functions.
Thirty-six, machined-enhanced humanoids in battlesuits converged on the first bunker in the Stickney crater. The Martian Planetary Union was about to experience the first Inner System battle with the nightmare called cyborgs.
-16-
Lisa awoke for the last time as the clone of Madam Blanche-Aster.
There were odd humming noises around her and the light was an eerie, dark green. A harsh chemical odor made Lisa scrunch her noise. She wanted to spit, as a rusted taste was on her tongue.
Lisa frowned. The last thing she remembered was Toll Seven pointing a finger at her. The cyborg had shot her with a dart.
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