Annihilation (Star Force Series) (42 page)

“Jasmine,” I muttered.

“What’s that, Colonel?” Becker asked.

“Nothing Commander. Thanks for the wild ride!”

“I think I should be thanking you.”

I laughed and clapped her lightly on the back. Unfortunately, it was difficult for me to measure such contacts. Nanites and all, she was staggered. I was used to Sandra, who could take more punishment than anyone I knew—with the exception of myself and possibly First Sergeant Kwon.

“Damn,” I said. “Sorry!”

“Didn’t hurt, sir,” she lied, rubbing at her shoulder.

In a great mood, I headed down the winding passages toward medical. I could feel the stares of everyone on the flight deck behind me, but wasn’t bothered. When you’re in high-level command you have to get used to things like that. The troops naturally stare. I’d long since stopped worrying about it.

I headed back to my quarters and took a shower, as I’d just worked out and then followed up with a thrilling ride in the fighter. Not even nanites could take the stink off a man; we still needed soap and water.

After my shower, I felt good. I headed for medical to check on Marvin, Dr. Swanson, and whatever it was they were doing to Sandra.

I didn’t make it all the way to medical. A series of unexpected events began when a klaxon sounded, signaling all hands to report to battle stations. I did an about-face and I headed for the bridge. Marvin and Sandra would have to wait.

I could tell
Gatre
was already changing course and speed. First, I felt the engines cut out entirely. This threw me and everyone else onto the floor of the passage. We’d been leaning without thinking about it, and now that the G forces were gone, we were disoriented. I sprang up again and brushed myself off, muttering curses.

Then the ship began a slow spin, and I knew Sarin was bringing the engines around to the rear. We had been decelerating, preparing to dock with Welter Station. When decelerating, our ships had the main engines pointing forward in order to apply thrust in the direction of travel.

This new move confused me. Could we be there already? I didn’t think that much time had passed. After another ten paces down the central passage, a new application of force assaulted me. This was a lateral motion that made me walk at a slant.

All around me crewmen were walking on the starboard corner of the ship’s passages. Everyone had been caught by surprise by the all-hands klaxon, and they were scrambling in their haste to reach their stations. To get past one another, we had to run up the walls. We looked as if we were playing some kind of bizarre game of leapfrog.

I reached the command center wearing a deep frown. The ship had to be making a hard, prolonged turn to cause such a shift in our center of gravity. We had stabilizing systems to prevent that sort of thing, but they were clearly overwhelmed. I knew that if Miklos could see me now, he’d laugh and remind me yet again that stripping components out of his designs had consequences.

“What the hell is going on?” I demanded as I reached the bridge and found myself crawling on my hands and knees to my command chair.

All around the bridge staffers wore harnesses. They were rooted to the deck by the ship’s safety tentacles, which the nanites grew up from the floor on these occasions. None of them looked happy; some were white-faced and ready to barf.

“I’ve plotted a new course,” Jasmine told me unhelpfully.

“I can see that,” I snapped, sitting at an uncomfortable angle in my chair. “Are we in some kind of spin? What’s the deal with the centrifugal Gs?”

“This is a high-speed course correction, not a spin,” she informed me. Her hands were clamped onto the navigational table. Her legs were wound up with supportive black tentacles, and she looked as if she was standing in a nest of rigid snakes.

“Commodore Miklos informed me before I took command that this may happen under heavy maneuvering thrust—” she began.

I sensed a lecture, so I cut her off.

“Yes, yes,” I said, “I know all about the stabilizers. We removed them for good reasons. Maybe when we get to the station, we can throw in a new generator and wire additional stabilizers into the lower hold.”

“Negative, sir,” she said, still not looking at me. Her eyes were glued to her navigational screens. “We’re not going to dock at Welter Station.”

“Where are we going, then?” I asked. “Give me a sitrep.”

“One moment, sir,” Jasmine said.

Anyone else who tried to shush me when I was in the kind of mood I was currently in would have gotten an earful of invective. But I knew Captain Sarin very well, and I trusted her judgment more than most of my commanders. I waited quietly for her to brief me.

While I waited, I became increasingly concerned. Something big was going on, and I was only in on half of it. I worked a tablet, paging through reports and incoming streams of data. Apparently, the Macros were on the move, and they were not behaving in an expected pattern.

“Can you talk to me yet, Captain?” I asked when she’d stopped spouting orders to her task force.

“I think so. We’re coming about now. We’ve made the course correction.”

I could feel the G forces fade. It was a relief, even to me. I got up and approached her table. Excited nanite snakes reared up to clamp onto me. I cursed and slapped them away. I’d taught them to accept such admonishment and to back off unless it was an emergency.

“Sorry,” said Jasmine. “We can turn those off now. Ensign? Lower the alert level to double-yellow.”

I glanced over the table. There was Ensign Kestrel, looking disheveled and worried. She worked her part of the shared command console and the nanite tentacles and smart harnesses retreated reluctantly.

Jasmine turned to me. Her eyes met mine, and they were deadly serious. “The Macros have gathered their fleet and gone to flank speed. We can’t beat them.”

“Beat them? Beat them where?”

“They’re headed for Thor-6, the Crustacean homeworlds.”

I frowned, looking at the big picture of the Thor system. I examined the screen carefully. A large cluster of red contacts were indeed heading from the far side of the Thor system toward the Crustacean gas giant and its three, life-giving moons.

“So, they’re not coming to smash their heads into our battle station again,” I said.

“No, sir.”

“What’s Miklos doing?” I asked, paging back to the Eden system. I almost coughed when I saw the entire fleet had launched from the station and was advancing on the ring to the Thor system.

“He’s heading out there.”

I almost demanded to know why she thought she should make this kind of command decision without orders from me. But I held back, deciding I would have done the same thing. After all, they hadn’t engaged in hostilities yet. They were simply gathering their forces together in the Thor system as quickly as possible. I could see by the dashed lines that predicted the path of every ship in both systems that Sarin’s taskforce was going to blow right past Welter Station and shoot through the ring. Miklos’ force was under hard acceleration, and would beat us into the Thor System. But, since they were moving slower than we were now, we would catch up to them and both fleets would merge about half the way to the Crustacean homeworlds.

“You two made the right play,” I said.

Jasmine’s face is usually difficult to read, but I knew she felt relief when I spoke these words. She had been worried about giving a number of high-level orders without consulting me.

“There wasn’t time for a meeting and a strategic decision,” she said carefully. “What are your orders now?”

“From your actions, I gather that you and Miklos believe the Macros intend to attack the Crustacean homeworlds?”

“What else could their intentions be, sir?”

I nodded. “I agree. They’ve decided to go for the Crustaceans, rather than us. I guess I should have considered this possibility. The lobsters are weak, and the machines already made an attempt to drain their oceans. Just because we stopped them, they haven’t given up on their original prey. They’ve moved on to Plan B: direct assault.”

“There is one more critical detail that hastened our decision to act. Miklos found it first, and insisted on flying out there as quickly as possible.”

“Give it to me.”

She brought up the Thor system again, and zoomed in on the enemy ships. “Notice the enemy fleet composition, sir.”

I did as she suggested, and the anomaly was immediately apparent to me. I took a deep breath and let it out again in a sigh. I felt a new weight on my shoulders.

“They aren’t escorting any invasion ships,” I said.

“Exactly, Colonel,” she said. “The Macros do not intend to invade the watermoons.”

I met her stare with one of my own. “That can only mean...they intend to bomb them, don’t they? To attack the Crustaceans from space, where they can’t be reached.”

“That was our assessment. When we realized what they were going to do, Miklos and I decided that we had to move all our ships toward them. Possibly, they will be distracted by our threatened attack and will attempt to deal with us first.”

I nodded. “A good move, probably the best you could make. But the Macros aren’t easily swayed from a path, once they have decided on a course of action.”

“I know that sir, but we have to try, don’t we?”

I didn’t meet her eyes. I had a hard decision to make. The Macro fleet was equal to our own. We might well beat them, but that wasn’t a certainty.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “We have to weigh our options.”

Her eyes followed me closely. She was looking at me, but I didn’t return her gaze. Instead, I stared at the command map depicting the Thor System.

She took two steps around the table toward me and kept staring at me. I fiddled with the controls, recounting the Macro cruisers. I reached the same frightening number every time.

Jasmine was close to me now. She spoke in a quiet voice. “The Crustaceans attacked the Macros because we insisted they do so. We owe them, sir. Are we going to try to save them?”

I didn’t answer her question. Instead, I asked one of my own.

“What’s our ETA?”

“Twenty-one hours,” she said. “If we arrive as a single force.”

“That’s the only way I’d consider it.”

“I know.”

Now, I had to ask
the
question: “What’s the enemy ETA?”

“Seventeen hours, at current rates of acceleration.”

I massaged my jaw. “It’s the carriers, isn’t it? They’re slow.”

“Yes sir.”

I finally met her pretty eyes. They were big, brown and troubled.

“We’re going in,” I said. “We have to. They’ll get four long hours to work over the lobsters before we get there, but it’s the best we can do.”

“I’ll inform the Commodore, sir.”

“Very good. And tell him that if we have any carriers left after this, they’re getting more engines, more generators, and more damned stabilizers.”

Jasmine gave me a weary smile. “That will make him happy, sir.”

-36-

Charging across space toward an enemy fleet was an exhausting experience. In some ways, it made me envy the commanders of armies past. In a land battle throughout most of human history, you had little to no knowledge of the exact enemy position. You went out marching, and it took a long time. Long enough for you to almost forget that you were walking to what might possibly be your death at the hands of the enemy.

Sailing across the open sea wasn’t all that bad, either. A ship’s captain in the times of the Romans thru the Colonial Era didn’t know where the enemy was or when he might run into him. He could relax and sip wine in his cabin until the lookout spotted something.

It was the capacity for long journeys without too much stress that I missed. In my era, war was often fought in space, with perfect clarity of vision for millions of miles. I could see the enemy with my optics. I was forced, in fact, to watch him grow and grow in perspective as he drew ever closer. I felt the thrill of a baron leading a charge of knights across an open field toward the shimmering line of the enemy—but this was a charge that would go on for hours and days, rather than minutes.

It was stressful for everyone aboard. People naturally tensed up when battle was near, especially when they could see the enemy coming right at them. All around me, crewmen were rubbing their necks, wiping away sweat and taking deep breaths. They were all under a great deal of pressure.

Deciding I’d had enough of it after we’d crossed half the system, I retired to my quarters—or at least I’d intended to. When I reached the door of my cabin, I found Dr. Kate Swanson waiting there for me.

For a few seconds, I misinterpreted the look on her face. She looked vulnerable, almost shy. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that she wanted to talk to me about personal issues. That part was right—but I was mistaken about the nature of these…issues.

“Colonel…” she said.

“Yes, doctor?”’

She looked down and licked her lips. I took a moment to admire her. She was about my age, and I found that appealing. She was a mature, seasoned woman who’d grown up in the era I had. She was also a medical doctor on a ship that had seen plenty of battles. We had a lot in common.