Empire Ebook Full (5 page)

Perhaps, I thought to myself, I would just have to accept the kind of friendship I
had with him and not try to turn him into a human companion. If there was one thing
the universe had taught me over the years, it was that sometimes it was best to take
what you could get.

-4-

When I returned to the bridge hours later, two key elements of our strategic situation
had changed. For one, the battle station was about eleven percent operational due
in large part to the judicious use of Marvin’s stash of living nanites. We’d poured
them into every essential piece of equipment, starting with weapons, communications
and power systems. The tiny robots did their duty with relentless efficiency, removing
dead nanites and replacing them with new, living chains. Silvery streams of them flowed
down the roof of every corridor leading from the bridge, working like bucket-brigades
to take the dead nanites below decks for reprocessing. There was only one factory
aboard the ship we could get running again. This single factory ate up a significant
portion of Marvin’s precious nanite supply, but I knew it would pay back very quickly
as it generated fresh equipment. The moment we got it operating, I programmed it to
churn out more nanites. After that, it was simply a matter of distributing the products.
Every hour that passed, the station rebuilt itself and became increasingly viable.
Like liquid metal ant trails, the nanites stretched deeper into the station’s structure
every hour, slowly repairing the damage.

The second critical detail that had changed was the disposition of my scout ships.
Becker, the pilot of the first ship, had returned to our side of the ring. She didn’t
have good news to report to us.

“Colonel Riggs? We’ve sighted a large formation of enemy ships. We don’t have much
information on them yet, but they match the engine signatures of Macro ships, sir.
They’re crossing the Thor system toward the Eden ring. Repeat, the ships are on an
attack approach and appear to match enemy configurations. In addition, squadrons of
small vessels are gathering in high orbit over one of the inhabited water-moons.”

“Which moon is fielding a fleet?”

“Yale, sir,” the pilot responded. “They’re all coming up from Yale.”

As the Crustaceans had an academic hierarchy for a social structure and seemed to
value knowledge above all else, we’d named their water-moons after universities. Harvard
was the largest, while Princeton and Yale were smaller and orbited more tightly around
the gas giant.

“Is it your assessment that these squadrons are hostile to Star Force?” I asked.

“I would bet on it, sir. They could be flying the force to give the Macros a warning
show, but I don’t think so. The Macros are bypassing them completely. Their current
course won’t take them anywhere near Yale, so why launch and risk provoking them?”

“Why indeed?” I asked thoughtfully.

“Because they are working with the Macros,” Sandra said angrily. “They have sold us
out—their fellow biotics.”

“They wouldn’t be the first to do so,” I said, thinking of our own truce with the
Macros some years earlier. We’d worked with them and done a lot of damage on Helios,
killing Worms who really hadn’t deserved it.

“You think the Macros threatened them?” Sandra asked. “You think they’ve been forced
to do this?”

I nodded. “Probably. We didn’t put them inside our defensive umbrella, remember. They’re
sitting out there in an open system, without a significant fleet, while in the next
system Star Force is busy covering our own rear ends. They watched us conquer the
Eden system, and in the process we destroyed a lot of Nano ships they thought of as
their navy. From their point of view, we’re quite possibly worse than the Macros.
Certainly, we’ve done them more harm than the Macros have. They don’t get the big
picture. They don’t know that eventually, the Macros will come for them too.”

Sandra frowned, nodding. “I still won’t forgive them for this. They attacked us pretending
they were sending a diplomatic mission, under a flag of truce. They may be fellow
biotics, but that was underhanded, dirty. They have no honor.”

I chuckled. “Apparently, you haven’t been to many faculty meetings,” I said. “But
let’s focus on what we can control. Because of Marvin’s foresight, we aren’t as crippled
as they might think we are. Their entire plan was to sucker punch us while keeping
the Macro fleet out of sight. Now that they’ve done that, they’re racing forward to
slip past this battle station, or maybe destroy it while it’s weak. Then they’ll have
shot at retaking the Eden system.”

“What are your orders, sir?” Welter asked.

“Let’s get the holotank working for planning purposes.”

We dumped half a barrel of nanites into it before it finally began operating properly.
The big problem was the connected sensory systems. The tank had long nanite-cables
that led out through the layered armor to the sensor pods on the outer hull of the
station. Unfortunately, the nanites that made up those cables were all dead. Partly
to save nanites, I ordered that only the passive sensors should be activated for now.
When they came in on us, I wanted the station to look as dead as possible. With enough
weaponry at close range, it wouldn’t matter if we could see the enemy clearly or not.
I only had to see their emissions; that would be enough to lock on and blow them apart
with railgun fire.

I had Welter put up the projections of the approaching Macro fleet. We couldn’t see
it directly, of course, as it was in the Thor system. We could see the recorded data
from Becker’s scout ship and the brainboxes were able to project their flight pattern.
If they slowed down enough to come through the rings at a cautious pace, we had about
sixty hours before they were on us. If they came on faster, more recklessly, we had
less time than that.

We counted the enemy ships and classified them, then I ordered another report from
the scouts and another recount. The data solidified, and it wasn’t good. There were
better than sixty cruisers coming at us and, worse, the enemy appeared to have a dreadnaught—a
supership of vast dimensions.

After frowning into the tank for several minutes. I heaved a sigh. “Sandra, could
you relay a recall order to the other commanders? I want them to pull half their forces
and send them to us. We’ll have a skeletal defense everywhere else, but we’ll have
to take that chance. How long until they can join us here?”

“If they take off now, they’ll all be here in forty hours,” Welter said.

“That should be fast enough.”

“But Kyle,” Sandra said, “I’ve seen the numbers. You’re betting the Macros will slow
down and take a cautious approach. If they’re smart, they’ll come in on us at full
throttle, taking us out before we can recover.”

I stared at the situation quietly for a moment, then cursed for a while. “Clever metal
bastards. They set this all up. Sandra, relay the recall. We’ll need the ships, I
think. Ask for a full marine squad on each of the destroyers that respond. I’m not
sure how badly this is going to go.”

Commander Welter stepped to my side and we gazed into the holotank together. He fiddled
with the control screens, running his fingers in complex patterns.

“We’re recovering faster than they can know,” he said.

“Yeah. But Macros play with thick margins for error. They like three to one at a minimum.
This time, they should have had a hundred to one, but they don’t. The bad part is
Sandra is right. Since they think they have the overwhelming advantage they will come
on recklessly, at full speed. That’s bad for us, as we need every second to recover.”

“What can we do to delay them?”

I glanced at him. “Not much. We’ve only got two active ships, and I want the battle
station to play dead until the last minute.”

“What about the minefields?” Sandra asked me, having finished her relaying my requests
for reinforcements to all the sub-commanders. “If they come in fast, they’re going
to lose a lot of ships to mines.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. They will fire a barrage of missiles to blow a
hole in the field when they get closer. Worse, they have a dreadnaught. That thing
will provide cover-fire for their ships as they come in.”

Sandra looked at me. “What are we going to do then?”

“Let’s go down to the pool deck.”

“You’re thinking of playing around now?”

“Yeah. Humor me.”

She muttered something about having to humor me too often, but followed me out into
the corridor. We had poured out all the nanites we could into the critical systems
and they were functioning on their own now. Nanite streams had formed by themselves,
crisscrossing the walls, decks and ceilings of every chamber we passed through. The
streams were different than those I’d seen in the past, as there were two types. One
was brighter and more silver-colored, while the other was duller and closer to the
luster of lead.

Sandra was as fascinated by the nanite streams as I was. “It’s like they’ve formed
arteries and veins,” she said.

“Which is which?”

“The arteries are the bright ones, bringing up fresh nanites from the factory as fast
as they are produced. The veins are the leaden ones, taking away the spent dead to
be recycled.”

I nodded, liking her analogy. As we made our way to the pool room we were careful
not to disrupt the streams with our stomping boots. The boots themselves felt odd
on my feet. I’d been wearing nanocloth for months now, and good, old-fashioned leather
boots seemed oddly clunky on my feet.

In the pool room, there were no nanite streams. This chamber was one of the few that
existed purely for entertainment and thus was classified as nonessential. The room
was only dimly lit. In the gloom, I could see the various colored balls hanging in
the enclosed space. The room was one of the few chambers on the station with no gravity
plates installed.

“Are we really going to play this dumb game?” she asked me.

For an answer, I reached up and took down a bat and a facemask. “It helps me think.”

Sandra chuckled, shook her head, and put on her own facemask. She took a bat from
where they floated, tethered to the wall nearest the entrance. She didn’t love the
game, but she was better at it than I was. It was a matter of accuracy and reaction
time rather than brute force.

We arranged the balls into a tight cluster in the center of the room and I let Sandra
have the first swing. She cracked the bat hard against the cue ball and fired it right
into the clustered balls. It was a good break, and the balls scattered wide and far.

The pool room was much like any pool hall, but it was a sport that appealed to Star
Force Marines more than it would normal humans. First of all, it was incredibly difficult.
Instead of landing the balls in pockets on a flat surface, the balls moved in three
dimensional patterns that were vastly more complex. Secondly, there were no pockets—only
players.

“Sandra in three,” I announced, and cracked the bat onto the cue ball.

The white ball flew true, clacked into the yellow one-ball and fired it upward, toward
the ceiling. It zoomed down right into Sandra herself, who snatched it out of the
air.

“That was heading right into my skull. Do you hate me today, Kyle?”

I chuckled. “You caught it, didn’t you?”

In our version of pool, the
players
were the pockets. Hitting your buddy with the ball was the objective, which I thought
added a good deal of spice to the game. The target player was not allowed to move
once the shot was called, but they were allowed to stop the ball by catching it—if
they could.

Since I’d hit my target, I took another shot, calling a difficult bankshot this time.
I missed, and it was Sandra’s turn.

“The two-ball into you, banking once! Take it like a man, Kyle!”

I winced as I heard the bat whistle, and the crack that followed reverberated from
the walls. I was all hands, knowing what I had to cover. The ball banked and came
up from the floor toward my rear. Fortunately, I had a hand in the way. The hard ball
smacked into it and jarred my hand painfully. Both Sandra and I had taken a refresher
injection of nanites, but they weren’t one hundred percent yet. The ball hurt my palm
and, embarrassingly, spun away out of my grasp.

“Ha!” she said triumphantly.

The game went on, and soon there were three of my color left, and only one of Sandra’s.
She confidently popped me in the chest with it.

“Game!” she shouted, breathing hard.

I smiled at her. I’d expected her to win. “Now, I’ll show you why we came down here.
I have an idea, and I wanted to try it out.”

Her smile faded. I reached into the storage chute, snatched out three balls with each
hand, and hurled them all at the wall behind her. Six balls flew with blurring speed,
bounced and came at her from behind. She whirled, and gave a small screech of surprise.

“Sore loser!” she hissed as the balls flashed into her. She dodged her head to the
left, her hips to the right, and grabbed two more out of the air. The last two, however,
made it past her defenses. She woofed as one caught her in the chest and the second
thumped into her belly.