Battle Station (12 page)

I frowned. “Where? I don’t see anything on our planetary surveillance app.”

“No, not here, sir. Something is going on with the ring—and in the next system. The one with the lobsters, sir.”

We hadn’t even named that system yet. I figured I should get around to that, but hadn’t been overly interested in the place since I’d discovered it. Now, however, Sloan had my full attention. He was excellent at spotting danger early—and avoiding it.

“Brief me when you get here.”

Sloan arrived a few minutes later and took his seat. He had a worried look on his face. I tossed my scribbled agenda aside and turned to him. “All right, let’s hear it.”

“It might be nothing, sir.”

I made an urgent gesture.

He nodded. “There was some kind of vibration—a signal maybe—which went through the ring. We detected it only because we have ships sitting at both sides. It was recorded on the logs, and when I compared data hours later, I noticed both ships had detected the same thing at about the same moment.”

I squinted at Sloan. How could something
vibrate
these huge rings? Marvin’s reaction was much more dramatic. At least six cameras on extending stalks rose up and stared at him from every possible angle.

“I don’t get what you are trying to say,” I said. “Something vibrated the rings? The entire thing vibrated? As in making a small motion?”

“Exactly, sir. Both ends did it, at the same time.”

I shook my head. We really didn’t know much about the rings. We didn’t know much about the factories, either. In truth, we were primates playing with technology developed by our mysterious betters. I’d often wondered if one of these days we’d look down the barrel of one of these devices and pull the trigger with our tails. There would be monkey brains on the walls that day.

I began to speak, but I saw Marvin wanted to say something, so I turned to him. “Ask your questions, Marvin. I can see you are dying to.”

“Captain Sloan, was there any form of emission detected?”

“No, none that we could pick up. No light, no radio, no magnetic impulse—nothing.”

“How very odd,” Marvin said.

I smiled. When Marvin called something “odd”, it meant “exciting” to him.

“Is there any information from the Crustaceans?” I said. “Any mention of what it might mean?”

“Nothing. We have detected a large number of their ships, however, forming up in orbit over their primary water-moon.”

“Any hostile intent detected?”

He shook his head.

“All right then, I want Marvin to study the data. Sloan, you are to tell the pilots on station out there to watch for any further anomalies and report them immediately.”

“Right sir.”

“Let’s get back to current combat ops,” I said, bringing up a map of the Centaur homeworld on the screen that all of us sat around. “Our secondary target is here, in the middle of an open slag-heap. It was once a forest, but their harvesters took care of that.”

The screen depicted a black wound in the middle of a vividly green plain.

“I’d originally liked the mountain location better, as it provided us natural cover for our approach. But this one will have to do. At least there is no lake in the area for the dome to hide under. As far as we can tell, it is in the bottom of what looks like a giant sinkhole.”

“I believe it’s a strip-mine,” Marvin said.

“Whatever. They are inside this deep, dark hole. We’ll run down there and take it out.”

“Excuse me, Colonel Riggs.”

“What is it, Marvin?”

“When would you launch this attack—ideally?”

“Right now, but I can’t. The first load of Centaurs we took down there isn’t coming back, and they are about five thousand miles from this target. We have retrieved their weapons kits—about half of them anyway—and we have to put together a new invasion force.”

“What if I told you we could invade today—within the hour?”

I looked at him. I knew he was baiting me. I knew that at the end of this rainbow, I’d find something Marvin wanted. I also knew that the bait smelled pretty good. I took a bite.

“Okay,” I sighed. “Talk me into it.”

“We can’t mount a full-scale invasion force immediately,” Marvin said. “But we could drop a small commando team. All they would have to do it run to the pit, find the factory and once under the dome—”

Kwon was laughing now, his heavy, whuffing sounds filled the room. “Run to the pit and slip under the dome? There is no cover, robot. You are a dumb toaster.”

“My IQ exceeds yours by approximately—”

I cleared my throat. “Kwon has a good point. There is no cover. Macros don’t care about night and day for visibility. They don’t fall asleep on guard, either. How do you propose we sneak in there?”

“I never said we would
sneak
in. We will run in openly.”

“Under fire?”

“Suicide!” proclaimed Kwon.

“Let me explain,” Marvin continued. “Macros designate targets on the basis of their importance. This is an entirely predictable process. Therefore, if we present them with higher value targets, they will ignore any small party of individuals in the area.”

I mulled this over. I knew what Marvin was talking about. Macros did work that way. Many times I’d sat with a squad near them, and while they had something else to shoot at, an individual was perfectly safe. “What do you suggest we use for a diversion?”

“The only asset we have. Our ships.”

I nodded. I figured he was getting around to that. I turned to Captain Sloan. I could see the worry in his face. Captain Miklos was frowning down at his computer. I knew what they were all thinking. Would Riggs be crazy enough to go along with this robot’s plan? Everyone there knew I just might. I found the thought almost as disturbing as they did.

But there was a certain beauty to it, the longer I considered it. We didn’t have to have a knock-down battle with their newly built defensive units. We could bypass them and possibly many deaths and end the fight in one fell swoop. The more I thought about it, the more I started liking it.

I looked at Captain Sloan. He looked alarmed.

“Are you thinking of taking me with you, Colonel?” he asked.

I almost laughed. Sloan’s death-avoidance radar must have been going off at full tilt.

“No, I want you in the ships—with Miklos here. You two will run ops and fly our destroyers around, shooting every harvester they have. In the meantime, Marvin, Kwon and I will be dropped on the battlefield. We’ll take a squad into that hole.”

“What if the Macros realize who you are?”

“Then I’m dead. I’ll go under a code name. Call me Condor. I’ve always liked big buzzards.”

Sloan nodded, looking relieved. Kwon was in the opposite mood, he pulled down the corners of his mouth into an appreciative grimace. “Will we get to fight, sir?”

“Hopefully not much. The mission is to get in there and take out the production system.”

Miklos finally spoke up then. He asked his first question of the meeting, and it was a good one. “Sir, what about
after
you take over the dome? You will have every Macro in the hole reevaluating their targets. I doubt we can hold their attention at that point. You will be swamped in enemies.”

I nodded, considering. “That is a major flaw,” I admitted.

Marvin’s cameras swung to every face in turn, and quickly judged his plan was in jeopardy. He’d stayed cagily quiet until now, letting us convince ourselves it could work. Now, he sensed the need for more input and jumped back into the conversation.

“Sirs,” he said. “I have good news on that front. I will immediately put the dome back up, protecting the commandos inside.”

“What if you can’t do that, Marvin?” Miklos asked. “We are betting on you twice now, not just once.”

Marvin began to answer, but I put up a hand. “We can’t know if he can do it or not. But if he can take over the entire facility, it stands to reason he can maintain the dome. At that point, if Star Force can destroy the machines outside, we can clean out this entire nest and make it our own. The possible gains are enormous, gentlemen. We could churn out undreamed of levels of production with one of those systems. Instead of a hundred huge robots, we could build a fleet of destroyers, or a thousand laser turrets. We could even build the battle station I’ve been working on for weeks.”

I massaged the stubble on my jaw, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I found myself feeling a powerful emotion that I rarely experienced.
Greed
, that’s what it was. All those raw materials, just sitting around the dome. Millions of tons of matter ready to be turned into whatever I wanted.

Most importantly, it would double the production capacity of Star Force. That was worth some risk, wasn’t it?

-12-

Even before we launched the new ground assault, things got complicated. The Macros started it, by launching missiles at every one of the Centaur satellites. They did it all at once, and they did it by sending a full barrage of sixteen surface-to-space weapons toward each target. Every missile was loaded with a nuclear warhead and a Macro technician at the helm. Macro missiles were essentially small ships—suicidal spacecraft on a one-way mission.

I didn’t have much time to wonder if they’d built these long ago, or only just now in response to our attack. Whatever the case, it was clear they’d reclassified the system from “peaceful” to “contested”, and they’d also decided the Centaurs had broken their deals sufficiently to be directly attacked. I couldn’t blame them on that score.

Fortunately, I’d had a large number of automated turrets installed on every Centaur orbital habitat. They weren’t foolproof, but they should stop a small missile attack like this. Still, watching the weapons rise up in red arcs from the surface had me bearing my teeth in a grimace inside my helmet. What if they had some fresh trick to play? What if my laser defenses weren’t fully operational? It would only take one hit to inflict many millions of Centaur casualties. All told, billions of lives were under direct attack.

I looked at the timer. We had a little under seven minutes to wait before they hit us.

“Miklos, status report,” I said.

“All enemy missiles on target. They will be within range of defensive fire in—four more minutes.”

I did some quick calculations, and I didn’t like my answers. “Are you telling me we’ll only have two minutes to shoot them all down? Why is our range on these systems so short?”

“We put up what we could, Colonel,” he said unapologetically. “The systems are what they are. Remember sir, this is not open space. The missiles are coming up through the atmosphere in every case. There is cloud cover and the like to get in the way.”

I nodded glumly. It was going to be a long wait.

When the missiles were three minutes out, I took a deep breath. “Are they hitting everything at exactly the same time?”

“Yes,” Miklos said. “All six habitable satellites have an identical attack incoming… Apparently, the enemy didn’t want us to have time to adjust to their assault. Their precise timing indicates they must have missile reserves on some worlds. On the Centaur homeworld, for instance, the enemy only had two factories to produce the missiles. It only makes sense the other worlds would have produced more munitions in the same amount of time.”

“You’re saying they are probably holding back? That this could just be a probe? A taste-test attack?”

“Something like that, sir.”

I looked back to
Barbarossa’s
big wall-screens. Things just kept getting better and better. I wondered how many Centaurs would die if a single missile got through. Had I screwed up by getting them into this war? They’d proven to be fairly ineffective ground troops. Perhaps, I should have stuck with my own marines and done the job the old-fashioned way, without trying to glue laser packs onto a herd of mountain goats.

Self-doubt was very natural in a helpless, deadly situation. Fortunately, I didn’t have to endure it for long. The next minute passed and our lasers started firing. They did pretty well at first.

“A hit sir—another!” Miklos said, excitement creeping into his voice.

“Put up a tally for each world, Captain.”

“One moment, sir,” he said. He began tapping and sliding his fingers over the screen in front of him. As an operational wingman, he wasn’t as good as Major Sarin. I did trust his judgment, however. And I didn’t have to worry about him making a pass at me, either.

“Give me a verbal count, man,” I said after a full minute went by. I could see we were firing, but didn’t really know if we were hitting the enemy or not. Missiles were winking out—but how many?

“I’ve got it, sir.”

The screens displayed readouts under every planet’s image. Here on the Centaur homeworld, we’d done pretty well. There was only one missile left. Judging by the number of hot beams it had tracing it, that one was doomed as well. This was due to the fact our own destroyers were stationed here and they had moved to engage the missiles themselves, increasing our defensive fire capacity.

On the other worlds, the numbers were less certain. Two planets had four missiles incoming, two had five, and the one closest to the sun had—eight?

“Is that right?” I asked, my voice raising as I spoke each word. “Eight missiles are still coming at Eden-6? We’re going to lose a hundred million civvies out there, Miklos!”

“Possibly, sir.”

I took a deep breath. Eighty-eight seconds to go before impact. These situations had come to haunt me, they were my personal nightmare. To have made choices that cost millions of clueless unarmed beings to be killed… I thought hard.

“Have we got any ships out there?” I asked.

“Two, sir.”

“Get them on the command channel.”

I was down to sixty-one seconds by the time I got the ship captains on the line. “Captain—” I paused to look at his name on the screen. Hiro, that was it. “If those missiles get through, just one of them, we’ll lose a sixth of a biotic species. The seeds to an entire world. I want those missiles stopped.”

“I know sir, we’re firing at the incoming missiles. We’re doing our—”