by B. V. Larson
The Lithos were almost two hours outside of their own effective range, which meant over ten thousand mega-AP shots would boil away the surface of the combined enemy before they could strike back. As beam impacts tore deeper and deeper into their guts, I hoped the Lithos would yield to the urge to break up and race toward us as fighters or missiles—or better yet, as snowflakes. I watched eagerly, hoping to see them break like barbarians and lose their formation. I wanted to see them attack in a wild mass.
Unfortunately, their discipline held. An hour passed during which time we’d boiled off the first mile of armor, but we had at least four more to go—perhaps five. “Open fire,” I told Hansen as the Lithos were finally coming into Valiant’s effective range.
Valiant rang and hummed with the vibrations of power, and I watched the capacitors empty and then almost immediately refill. We were like a beached naval vessel with truckloads of ammunition delivered from the land. We couldn’t use all the juice we could access. What I couldn’t do with generators like this!
But that was a false dream because the reactors that provided us so much power were as large as our ship itself, and they would gulp more fuel than we could carry if we tried to make them a permanent part of the ship. In ship design, nothing comes for free.
“Aim at areas that have been hit before,” I told Hansen, who passed on my instructions to the front-line gunners. As we were locked into place and no longer needed a pilot, I’d turned him into my gunnery officer. “Try to keep digging deeper.”
“Yes, sir. But at this rate, I don’t think we’re going to destroy them before they get here.”
“Concentrate fire,” I said.
“It’s not working,” Hansen said. “We’re reaching the edge of their effective range now. Incoming fire expected.”
I watched grimly as the enemy mass of ships came closer to our station. As large as this fortress I’d built was, we were vastly outmatched in mass if not in firepower.
“Hansen,” I said. “It’s time to start taking chances. Begin the shield-rotation protocol we talked about. Switch on the sectional shields between shots. We’ve got the power to spare. Power down each shield just before the AP behind it fires.”
“Script is in and locked,” he said, tapping at his console rapidly.
“Cancel the script if and when we disconnect from external power.”
“Exception list updated, Captain.”
Now the various indicators on the console really started to flash. They changed state every time one of our eleven heavy APs fired, recharged, or its associated shield switched off or on. I could have let the gunners control the shields, but as they were performing static, repetitive firing, I didn’t want one of them to accidentally fire an AP into the back of an active shield. I wasn’t entirely sure what would happen, but I doubted the result would be pleasant.
I activated the intercom. “Sakura, how are we doing below decks?”
“Five by five, sir,” Sakura responded. “I’m keeping the firing rate down enough to cool between shots and not overload the system.”
“Hmm. I need you to push this system to its limits now, Chief. We’re going to start taking return fire, but the enemy is coming into close range where we can hit them harder as well. Put more power into the weapons. Push their tolerances and shorten up on the heat-recycle times.”
“How hard should I push the guns, sir?”
“That’s for you to judge.”
Sakura sighed. “Yes sir.”
I spoke to Valiant’s com system. “Connect me with Adrienne—Turnbull, I mean.” When Adrienne came on the line, I said, “How are we doing with the repeller mines?”
“Over six hundred are finished and ready to be deployed.” This had been the factory’s primary occupation during the final hours. Once the APs and other systems had been finished, mines were the only munitions I figured we could use to defend the station from close-combat attackers. With all the materials from the Raptors and the enemy coming on like an unswerving freight train, the simple little nukes seemed like the best use of factory time.
“Six hundred is enough,” I said. “Switch to producing constructive nanites and smart metal. We may have to do emergency repairs. Riggs out.”
I turned to Hansen, who seemed less than confident with his job as gunnery officer. “Have the missile launching systems take control of the stealth repeller mines we’ve deployed. Spread them out and start them on their way, but not at full speed.”
I reflected that I could get used to this business of having unlimited power and materials at my fingertips.
“Why not throw them out there at full speed?” Hansen asked.
“Trust me,” I said.
Hansen gave his head a shake then shrugged and followed orders. I liked that. He’d changed, no longer questioning my every decision. I wanted feedback and helpful objections, but Hansen had been a contrarian from the start. I was glad to see he did trust me to some degree now.
-38-
The repeller mines were ten minutes out when we began taking some hits from the Lithos. Then I got the word I was waiting for.
“Ground-based missile launch alert,” Valiant said. In the holotank, I could see over a hundred contacts lifting from bases all around the planet beneath us.
“That’s all they have?” I wondered aloud. “They must have fired everything they had into the ring battle. These missiles probably represent their reserves, or what they produced in the final days.”
I stood to peer in the holotank. A few minutes went by as I watched the barrage climb out of the atmosphere and accelerate toward the Lithos. “They aren’t even fast-moving. But they are a threat…”
Lights blinked all around me, and my frown changed into a slight smile as almost a hundred more missiles joined those flocking up from the surface. The Raptors had fired another barrage from their orbital fortresses and Klak’s ships. Together, the bright exhaust flares made easy targets as they accelerated at high Gs toward the enemy.
“Increase the repeller power on the mines,” I said, zooming in close to observe and working some quick calculations. I estimated the Raptor missiles would overtake and pass our mines three quarters of the way to the enemy.
“Launch our salvoes,” I ordered. “We might as well gut-punch them now.”
From Valiant’s tubes we fired thirty-two missiles in two waves of sixteen. I watched as Hansen flew the birds. They glided up to the mass of Raptor missiles and joined the flock.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Send ours in first. Get them up to max acceleration, pass the Raptor missiles, and detonate ours early. But make sure they don’t take out any friendly weapons.”
“Detonate ours early?” Hansen asked. “Why, sir?”
“They aren’t going to damage the Lithos, but they’ll overload their sensors with flash, plasma and EMP. That will allow the main mass of the barrage to get closer.”
“You’re the boss.”
Imitating a man who’s completely calm and in charge, I watched the battle unfold. In my gut, I knew it wasn’t working. It was a simple case of mathematical tyranny. They had too much mass, and we weren’t going to be able to reduce them to zero before they reached us and overwhelmed us.
We continued to boil away their substance. Our blowtorch shots struck ever more heavily as they got closer, but we were taking losses as well. While Valiant had received minimal damage due to her shields, the Raptor fortresses that formed most of our composite structure had no such advantage. They took the brunt of the return fire and had already lost four mega-APs—whether that was due to Litho fire or overheating I didn’t know—and I barely cared. Either way, the guns had been lost.
Time grew short as the minutes ticked down. I considered ordering my crew to decouple and run. In fact, as the clock kept going the urge became almost overwhelming. Why die fighting a hopeless battle for ungrateful, unpleasant aliens? I’d made a huge mistake, and my mind was racing to resolve it.
To my credit, I
kept my outward mask rigid. I don’t think anyone aboard suspected. They had faith in me. They believed in me—and as a reward, I was leading them into a slaughter.
“Missiles detonating in three…two…one,” Valiant’s voice droned. Our thirty large warheads created flashes of light, radiation and plasma in the void directly before the Litho arrowhead. Green Litho laser beams and antiproton weapons abruptly became visible, hundreds of them probing through the temporary dust cloud. They were searching for more incoming targets—the Raptor missiles.
In the end, the sacrificial smokescreen allowed many Raptor missiles to detonate much closer. Some even reached the enemy hull, carving huge pieces out of the rocky cladding with thermonuclear blasts. But the total tonnage lost was still small compared to the vast weight of the combined enemy fleet.
“I think we’ve stripped away close to half their mass,” I said, looking closely at the readings. “Now, the mines…”
The missile blasts and the beams flashing in both directions had served to obscure our six hundred tiny repeller-powered mines. More than three quarters of them made it through the miasma to detonate against the enemy hull. Our viewscreens whited out as Valiant shut down the video pickups to protect them from overload.
When our vision cleared, I could see that only about a third of the mass of the Litho rock-fleet remained. The smoldering hulk was perhaps four miles in diameter. It still continued to fire hundreds of short-range beams, which probed forward looking for targets.
“There must have been successive layers, with more weapons beneath,” I said. “Instead of structuring the super-ship to break up, they created a defense in depth like an onion.”
“That onion is still putting out a lot of firepower,” Hansen remarked.
It was true. The Lithos continued hitting us almost as hard as they had from the start. That was probably because we’d been killing armor and redundant beam weapons up until now. Every time we peeled off a layer of this ship, we exposed another weapon beneath it. We weren’t getting through to the generators or the engines.
“Keep firing. Pass the word to allow as much overload as we can. We only have about five minutes left to win this.”
“Klak’s making his move,” Hansen said, noticing before I did that the seventy-odd Raptor ships had begun advancing like a squadron of hawks. Much more graceful than the now-ugly Valiant, they made a fine sight, but I knew that this would be the final glory for many of them. They were simply not built to go up against the thing that lumbered toward us.
“Cease fire,” I said as soon as our allies’ ships threatened to obscure our lines of sight. “Top off our power supplies and cast loose the cable.”
An audible groan issued from the gunners who’d been reveling in the endless ammunition provided by the abundant power. Now we were back on our own.
“Shut down the shields,” I ordered. “We need to conserve power now. Hansen, take the helm. Maneuver us out into the clear and let’s take up a flanking position opposite the Raptor fleet. As they engage, we’ll try to come around to the stern of that flying mountain and hit its engines. Valiant, pass a message to the Raptors suggesting they swing around on their side and hit the engines as well.”
What I didn’t mention to my crew was my reserve plan, but I thought Hansen suspected. As he laid in a circuitous course, he gave me a small nod.
I was almost thankful for his quiet approval. If this battle went as badly as I now suspected it would, we could slip out the back and run. There was no reason we should die for our new allies in a hopeless battle. I told myself we’d do the Raptors more good alive than dead. We could warn other systems and maybe even get this news back to Earth where the intel people would be grateful for our deep scouting.
The Raptor ships either took my suggestion or had already been planning to do as I’d hoped. They swung around in a wide path to the flank and then the stern of the Litho mass. Now we had it surrounded on three sides. The Raptors began to make swooping, strafing passes on the enemy stern, blasting in with their forward weapons and then turning tail to dump a storm of point-defense shots at dead close range before zooming off.
We took our own shots as well, making sure not to cause any fratricide. We tried to target the crystalline beam weapons poking out of the soil. Unfortunately, it simply wasn’t going to be enough to save Orn Prime. The Lithos stubbornly refused to break up. By the time they reached the location of the brave Raptor super-fortresses, they were down to a mere mile in diameter and very few functioning weapons. But despite all our efforts, there was simply no way to turn that much mass away from landfall.
The Litho monster plowed right into the clustered super-fortress. I winced as I watched the Raptors I’d abandoned die to the last man. The eight spheres popped like light bulbs. The Raptors fired to the end, but the civilian tugs, less brave or perhaps wiser, fled in their powerful little ships just before impact.
The Litho ship went into a spin with us and the swarm of Raptor ships still dive-bombing like hornets. The burning mass of rock and crushed metal fell inexorably into the planet’s gravity well. We’d knocked out her engines, but momentum and gravitational forces did the rest.
This is what I’d feared. The joined Litho ships themselves became the final killing weapon. They refused to break up, and even though they’d lost their guns we simply did not have the time or firepower to stop them. The Litho juggernaut didn’t try to save itself. I was sure there were thousands of individual templates involved, but to their credit none fled the central mass.
Winning this battle hadn’t been their objective. Instead, like the Macros before them, they’d made a decision in their machine minds to do horrendous damage to their enemies, trusting that their sacrifice would tip the future scales.
As we watched the massed Litho structure turn into a glowing meteor, I consoled myself with the fact that it was much smaller than it would have been had Klak not implemented my plan. I had no doubt we’d saved millions—perhaps even billions—of lives. But now we sat and watched in sick horror as the population we’d sought to protect was devastated.
The kinetic missile made landfall at the edge of one of the planet’s major continents. It would have been worse if it had landed in one of the torpid seas. The holotank showed a hundred-mile-wide mushroom cloud that formed gracefully, rising up through the atmospheric layers. The energy equivalent of at least a thousand megatons of TNT had been released all at once. The shockwave traveled in a perfect circle scouring the land clean of all life for a thousand miles. When it reached the ocean, it continued in the form of a tsunami that looked like it would eventually strike the opposite coast in a wall of water miles high, reaching inland for a hundred miles.
Fires broke out in Raptor cities as the planet-quake, estimated at between nine and ten on the Richter scale, reached them. Every building and structure was leveled, and I could imagine the millions trapped within the rubble. It was a disaster of Biblical proportions, a near-extinction event much like the asteroid thought to have wiped out Earth’s dinosaurs long, long ago.
Even so, our estimates showed that up to half the people would survive the initial damage. With the other colonies to provide relief, the Raptor civilization had not been extinguished, and I doubted whether the Lithos would be able to make another push like this any time soon.
Even better, at least forty ships of the main fleet and the hundred ships of the relief fleet remained intact. Four orbital shipyards and the entire Raptor space infrastructure stood ready to rebuild. With these assets, I thought they should be able to hold the ring against the Lithos for years to come.
* * *
My crew and I stood in good order on the flight deck of Valiant’s launch bay the largest open space left inside. Hansen, Adrienne, Sakura and Bradley stood beside me, with the rest in ranks behind.
Marines were posted around the edges of the big room. They wore highly polished but completely functional battle armor. Kwon told me they were complaining a lot about not havin
g contributed to the fight, and I made a note to give them a pep talk about how much their presence and their work as a damage control fire brigade had meant to me—trust marines to feel slighted if they didn’t get the chance to die in hand-to-hand combat.
In front of us, Klak and a contingent of his warriors had lined up in their military finery. The proud Raptor had insisted on presenting me and the rest of my crew with high awards, and I couldn’t see the harm. All but one of his ships was busy doing relief work. I hoped that afterward I could talk to him about the future and our place in it. We could really use R&R on a friendly planet, and we had a lot of re-engineering to do on Valiant.
Klak, attended by several of his staffers, stuck awards on our chests. The medals reminded me of fishing lures with their colored threads and dangling bright metal symbols. He decorated me first, then the crew, saluting each in turn. I thought it was a classy gesture even though our success had only been partial.
Once finished, Klak took a position well in front of our ranks, facing away from us and toward some kind of civilian video news crew, so we became the backdrop. His comrades moved well away from him, leaving him alone on camera. I figured he was making a victory speech to his people—probably one tinged with sorrowful gravity at the loss of life.
I figured wrong.
“My people,” he said, “I am Klak. With the help of these brave alien allies, what was once my fleet has saved many from death, although the cost was high.”
He reached up and tore off his badges of rank, throwing them on the floor. We watched him do this for a full minute, frowning but saying nothing.
“I hereby give up my position,” he continued when he stood in a plain harness, “because I abused it. Senior Field Director Kleed will take my place. I usurped authority and illegally forced others to obey my will in order to save as many as I could. However justified, my reasons are no excuse. In order that my mother, my sisters, my daughters and the rest of my family are not dishonored, I now atone for my crimes.”