Bio-Weapon (Doom Star 2), page 21
Admiral Sioux twitched off the VR-monocle. In her gut, she wanted to gather all the SU spacecraft and try to hit one lone Doom Star. Look at what the Bangladesh had done to the Sun Works Factory. The Highborn weren’t invincible.
This called to mind that strange call five days ago from Director Gannel, asking her opinion about gathering the Fleet. She’d decided to play it safe and had wanted to know what the Supreme Commander thought.
“Never mind that, Admiral. We want your opinion.”
“Who are we?”
“I speak for the Directorate of all Inner Planets.”
Arrogant politician, she hated their power games. She had not been able to avoid such games on her way to the top, but she hated them all the same.
“I would of course obey a more aggressive policy,” she’d finally said.
“I’m not asking you about your loyalty, Admiral. I want to know what you think about hitting the Highborn harder.”
“If the correct safeguards are taken, it could be very beneficial to Social Unity.”
There had been a pause, much longer than the transmission time. Then, he’d said, “I’d thought better of you, Admiral.”
And that had been the end of that. It meant a power struggle was going on, she was certain of it. But of whom and over what she didn’t know. When General Hawthorne had beamed his message, he’d said nothing about new policies, but he had ordered this gathering. What did it mean?
She frowned. Better to concentrate on matters at hand, on things she could actually affect.
“Tracking,” she called.
“Yes, Admiral,” said the officer in the Tracking module.
“How soon until the HB missiles reach beam range?”
She wanted to know how soon until the enemy jinking and ECM drones wouldn’t so adversely affect the proton beam that it wouldn’t be worth firing. Usually, that began anywhere from 100,000 to 80,000 kilometers for a moving target, depending on the intricacy of the enemy’s electronics.
The Tracking Officer studied her board, studied the HB mass of missiles that had converged toward them, closing hour by hour.
“Soon now, Admiral. Say, two hundred and fifty minutes.”
Admiral Sioux rose and walked carefully toward the tracking module. They fled from Mercury, building up speed at one and one-half gravities, which played havoc with her knees if she moved around too much. They had burned at eight Gs for several hours, with everyone in the acceleration couches, but now they slowed and jinked. Zigzag jerks and starts and slowdowns and sudden accelerations were a matter of course during combat flight.
The Gustavus Adolphus had given chase ever since the Doom Star had dumped masses of lead-impregnated aerogel and prismatic crystals near the Sun Works Factory. Social Unity had discovered this with an optic observer carefully hidden these several months between Mercury and Venus. The small ship with its powerful telescopes was sheathed in the latest stealth technology. The Gustavus Adolphus had no chance of hitting them at this range, but with those masses of missiles fast approaching, the Bangladesh’s choices had been narrowed. Its cones of probability weren’t as large as before.
The Tracking Officer sucked in her breath.
“What’s wrong?” asked Admiral Sioux.
“This can’t be right,” said the Tracking Officer. “It must be Highborn ECM playing tricks on us.”
Admiral Sioux hurried to the module, a bad mistake. She had to step down to reach it. The one and one-half Gs caused her to twist her leg and put too much force on her left knee. She hissed, and collapsed as pain shot up her thigh.
“Admiral!” shouted the First Gunner, shucking off his VR-gloves and moving out of his module to assist her.
“Never mind me,” she said, using the tracking module to help her stand. Then she groaned. She couldn’t put any weight on her left knee.
The Tracking Officer looked pale as she kept rechecking her board.
“What is it?” said the Admiral, as she peered into the module.
“The missiles,” said the Tracking Officer, shaking her head.
“What about them?” They were small red blips on the officer’s VR-screen.
The Tracking Officer looked up, her thin lips trembling. “They just began hard deceleration. And I count twice as many missiles as before.”
Shock swept through Admiral Sioux. Twice as many missiles as before? The idea made her dizzy. “Battle stations!” she shouted. She shoved the First Gunner’s hands off her—he tried to help her to the command chair. “To your post, mister,” she said. She threatened to twist her right knee too, by hopping on her good leg back to the command chair. With a groan, she sank into the cushions.
“Admiral!” shouted the Shield Officer.
“Calmly,” said the Admiral. “I can hear you quite well, thank you.”
The Shield Officer stared at her, nodding a moment later. “Yes, Admiral,” he said in a quieter, more professional tone. “Ship’s AI suggests that we get into the acceleration couches.”
She checked her own compulink to the AI.
Several seconds later, she opened intra-ship communications. “Attention crew, this is the Admiral speaking. Prepare for extended acceleration. I repeat, extended acceleration.”
2.
Needles stabbed. An, awful, smothering feeling threatened Marten’s sanity. It made him recall a story of his mother’s, the way they say a dying man sees his life flash before his eyes. She’d been a strong-willed woman of faith, a Bible reader, and she’d often spoken about the story of Jonah and the whale.
Marten felt like Jonah right now, diving into the depths. The pressure was awful. He moaned as he heard Vip raving over the comlink, and as their Storm Assault Missile began hard deceleration.
Vip’s screams broke through to Marten. The small man’s cries were hoarse and wild, desperate beyond dementia.
“Vip!” shouted Marten. “Listen to me, Vip!”
More screaming and sobbing.
“We’re going to make them pay, Vip. Hang on. Fight it. Resist. I promise you, we’re going to make the HBs pay as they’ve never believed possible. So, we’re the subhumans, eh? We’re nothing but dung beneath their feet? Their lord highnesses, Highborn, lofty ones, arrogant bastards! We are men! Do you hear me, Vip? You and I are men. Omi, Lance and Kang are men. The shock troopers are men. Hang on, Vip. Because once we have that beamship… oh Vip, we’re going to surprise them. Ha! Surprise, Vip. A really big surprise is what the HBs will get when we subhumans take over the Bangladesh.”
Kang hissed, “You’re raving.” Then, the maniple leader groaned in misery and could say no more.
“Not raving, Kang,” whispered Marten. “I’m promising. Do you hear me? Promising!”
The crushing pain, the nausea and Vip’s screams became too much. Like a dumb beast, Marten endured the horrible deceleration.
3.
The HB missile barrage didn’t intersect the Bangladesh in one vast clot. They came from around a 60-degree arc, from all their various original cones of probability. Nor did they all fly at the same speed. Some had been programmed to travel much faster than others.
In front sped ECM or electronic countermeasure drones. They scrambled and jammed the Bangladesh’s radar. They had kept secret the true number of missiles, hiding and halving the actual amount. Now they created electronic ghost images. They sprayed aerogel with lead additives, shot packets of reflective chaff and they worked around the clock to break the beamship’s ECM. AIs, ran the drones. Predictive software, battle-comps and probability equations gave them a seeming life of their own. One thing the drones didn’t have was biocomps like the New Baghdad cybertanks. The Highborn loathed biocomps. They felt such things to be unholy and monstrous. Life shouldn’t be mated to a machine, not in such a way—although they found nothing hypocritical about hooking the shock troopers to the G-suits and packing them into the missiles as biological bullets.
The masses of cocooned space-warriors suffered in the crushing grip of deceleration. Many screamed. Some stared dully. Others wept. A few laughed. Only thirty-nine died from heart failure, strokes and panic seizures. The rest simply longed for an end to their agony. The entire time, the missiles remorselessly closed as the Bangladesh fled.
At 80,000 kilometers separation, their quarry’s proton beam stabbed into the eternal night. It slashed through a ghost image. Immediately, HB radar and optics detected the beam’s existence and that the enemy had at last tried to hit them. Most of the incoming missiles decelerated hard. Twenty others seemed to leap ahead because they decelerated less. Each of those mounted a single laser. In three seconds, they were pumped and ready to hotshot, a special process that burnt out the tubes faster but delivered a stronger initial punch. ECM drones locked on target and fed the battle data to the missiles. Twenty lasers flashed at the Bangladesh.
4.
Everyone aboard the Bangladesh lay on acceleration couches or were assigned to damage control parties, where they piloted special repair vehicles that could move about under eight Gs. VR-goggles supplied information, although ship’s AI made the majority of the decisions while the Bangladesh was under eight gravities acceleration.
In the armored command capsule, hidden deep within the beamship, Admiral Sioux presided over her officers via comlink.
“Particle Screen 1 is degrading,” said the Shield Officer.
Outside the beamship, sixteen enemy lasers burned into the 600-meter-thick rock-shield. The hotshotted lasers chewed deeper and deeper into the mass. If they broke through and breached the Bangladesh’s inner armor, the battle would quickly be over.
Ship’s AI aimed giant spray-tubes and pumped an aerosol cloud to blunt the effect of the beams. At the same moment, the Bangladesh’s mighty engines quit. The enemy beams slewed ahead relative to the ship. Six seconds later, the beams retargeted and burned through the aerosol cloud. More aerosols flowed out, tons of it. The engines reengaged, turned off, restarted over and over, slewing the beamship randomly tiny fractions of arcs.
“Deploy mines in the seventh quadrant,” ordered Admiral Sioux, who had carefully studied the incoming missiles. Overlaying her view of the battle on her VR-goggles was a grid pattern to help her better understand locations, vectors and distances.
Giant rotary launchers poked out of the Bangladesh and aimed between the interstices of two nearly joined particle shields. They spewed mines the size of barrels, firing them by magnetic impulse. Every fifth round was a radar mine. Every tenth contained chaff. The rotary cannons fired continuously. A vast minefield grew in the path of the oncoming missiles.
“I have lock-on,” said the Targeting Officer.
“Proton beam charged,” said the First Gunner.
“Fire,” said Admiral Sioux.
5.
The distances closed rapidly. From their 60-degree arc, the HB missiles swarmed toward the Bangladesh.
Flashes winked in space as the proton beam destroyed HB laser missiles. One after the other, they ceased to exist. By firing, the missiles made themselves vulnerable to targeting. With cold calculation, the HB probability equators had accepted that. Most of the surviving missiles now decelerated. Those that didn’t decelerate moved ahead of the mass.
Twenty new lasers stabbed at the Bangladesh.
HB optic and radar missiles recorded the breaching of the first particle shield. Behind a cloud of instant aerosols, that shield rotated away, and a new one moved into place.
In quadrant seven, as viewed from the Bangladesh, the HB missiles entered the minefield. A signal pulsed from the beamship’s AI, activating the radar mines. Mass and velocity was almost instantly verified. The radar mines screamed on their high-band frequency. Thousands of other mines within listening range detonated. They strewed depleted uranium shrapnel into the path of the oncoming missiles. The missiles’ speed made such particles deadly. When they met, the shrapnel smashed through the missile’s ceramic-ultraluminum armor. Ten HB laser missiles disintegrated, as did several ECM drones and five Storm Assaults missiles, loaded with their biological cargo. Twenty-five shock troopers perished. Their remains became just another part of the debris of space junk.
Ten EMP Blasters now leapt forward. Meanwhile, the bulk of the Storm Assaults dropped to one-G deceleration. Within those that still worked, the three atmospheres of pressurized glop drained into space as needles and special drugs normalized the shock troops.
The EMP Blasters inched toward the Bangladesh, closing the distance, closing—
One vaporized, the proton beam catching it perfectly.
Nine others exploded, sending a nuclear fireball that arced toward the beamship. As planned, they were closer to the ship and farther away from the missile barrage. Heat and blast damage had no effect at these distances in vacuum. In this initial phase of the attack, the nuclear explosions had only one purpose: a focused electromagnetic pulse, the EMP. It traveled toward and soon washed over the beamship, destroying any unshielded electronics and played havoc with the rest.
More lasers then stabbed at the new particle shield the ship had rolled into place, burning into it.
6.
“There are too many of them!” shouted an SU officer. “The missiles closed too rapidly.”
“Kill them one at a time,” said Admiral Sioux, her voice as relaxed as if she sipped coffee.
“Rotating Shield Three into position,” said the Shield Officer.
“Spreading the minefield to quadrant nine.”
“Launch anti-missile torps,” said the Admiral.
“Firing,” said the Launch Officer. “Admiral! Tubes three through eight aren’t responding.”
“Reroute those torpedoes to the working tubes,” said the Admiral.
“What are those missiles to the rear of their formation?” asked the Tracking Officer. “I don’t recognize the type.”
“Their ECM drones are fantastic. How could there be twice as many missiles as we suspected?”
“Tubes four, five and six won’t respond,” the Launch Officer said.
“Damage control,” said the Admiral. “Check torpedo tubes four, five and six.”
“Roger, Admiral.”
“How are we supposed to beat off all those missiles? There are too many of them!”
“Switch offline, mister, if all you spout is defeatist garbage,” said the Admiral.
“Admiral!” said the Targeting Officer. “Look at those.”
“Re-target the proton beam,” said the Admiral. “Don’t let—”
Flashes showed on their VR-images as enemy missiles fired lasers.
Admiral Sioux clenched her teeth. She suddenly had the gut feeling that maybe it wasn’t possible to beat the Highborn, that the HBs truly were superior in every conceivable way. What a horrible feeling that was. She fought it off and tried to think of a way to defeat these masses of clever missiles.
7.
Ten minutes after the molasses-like glop drained into space, water sprayed into the SA missile compartment. Soon, the water also swirled out.
Hiss—pop!
The first G-suit cracked open.
Pop!
Pop!
Pop!
The others did likewise.
More buckles snapped. A seam in a suit appeared. Someone groaned. Then, a hand, smooth and naked, without any artificial protection, slipped out of the seam and pried at the suit.
“Six minutes to combat acceleration,” crackled an automated voice.
Weak-voiced curses were the only reply, although new hands appeared at the seams of the other suits. Slowly, the shock troopers struggled out of their cocoons.
Marten broke free first. He wrestled through the tangled tubes attached to his suit and dropped heavily to the wet floor. On his hands and knees, he panted, naked and trembling, his hair damp and a scraggly growth of beard on his face.
At the sound of hoarse breathing and desperate struggling, he looked up. Vip, his face bone-white and sweaty, his eyes wide and pupils jittering like rubber balls, fought against the masses of tubes around his suit.
Marten forced himself up. He trembled, but he locked his knees. Willing himself to stand, he lurched to Vip’s suit.
“Vip.” Marten’s voice was scratchy. He cleared it. “Vip.”
The small man stopped what he was doing and stared without recognition.
Lance tumbled out of his suit, to lie gasping on the floor.
Marten grabbed two tubes, yanking them out of Vip’s way. Vip continued to stare.
“Leave him there,” Kang said.
Vip’s eyes widened in fright.
Marten turned. The massive Mongol, as naked as himself, stood to his left.
“You can’t stay in there,” Marten told Vip. “You gotta come out and help me kill HBs.”
Kang elbowed him in the side. “Shut up. I said leave him.”
Marten ignored Kang as he helped Vip. Soon, Vip plopped to the floor and made retching sounds.
Marten knelt by him. “You’re okay, now, do you hear? You’re out of that thing forever.”
“I can’t do that again,” whispered Vip.
“I know.”
“I’d go crazy.”
“We’re all crazy,” said Lance, kneeling on the other side.
The hatch cracked open as Kang twisted the wheel. “We got four minutes,” he told them, “and then it’s more acceleration.”
Vip looked up, sick fear giving his skin a greenish tinge.
“Let’s get dressed,” Marten said, helping him by the elbow.
They filed out of the dreadful compartment and entered the other one. There, they donned brown jumpsuits and climbed into the battlesuits. Marten still had the shakes, so he activated the suit’s medikit. It diagnosed him and shot him with a pneumospray hypo.
In their battlesuits, they looked like mechanical gorillas, huge beasts with exoskeleton power and dinylon armor. They screwed on the helmets with the names KANG, LANCE, OMI, MARTEN and VIP, and they strapped on thruster packs. Oxygen tanks were already part of the battlesuits, while laser rifles and breach-bombs had been packed away for them in the separate torpedoes. For tiptoeing inside here, the servomotors were geared way down to minimum.
