Battle Station

— 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-”

“Captain Hiro, I can’t order you to block them, but I’m asking you to.”

There was a momentary pause. “Oh…I see, sir. Hiro out.”

That was it. I watched, sweating as the missile count dropped to zero on every world except for the sunward one, that tropical paradise I’d never yet had the pleasure of visiting. There, two missiles were seconds from impact. Suddenly, there was a blinding flash.

“He did it, sir,” Miklos said. His voice sounded troubled. “He’s rammed the missile. Should we contact the second destroyer?”

I shook my head. “There isn’t time left. By the time I explained it to him and he maneuvered his ship…”

We watched as the last missile drove onward, nearing the satellite. I squinted my eyes. I thought I saw a hit with nine seconds to go-but I held my breath. The missile was still on the board. Then it exploded.

“He self-destructed when he took the hit,” I said aloud.

“Who, sir?”

“The Macro pilot. Talk to me, is that satellite ruptured? Order all nearby ships to render assistance.”

Captain Miklos relayed my orders. After a few more minutes, he gave me his report. “Looks like the satellite is damaged, but the hull has maintained integrity. There are leaks, but nothing catastrophic. Most of the Centaurs are going to survive.”

I nodded, and took off my helmet. The attack was over. I smiled at the screens and read the reports. After a while, I caught Miklos staring at me. When I returned his gaze, he dropped his eyes back to his screen.

“What is it, Captain?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, sir. A hard thing to judge.”

“What are you talking about?”

“How many men should die for a Centaur? Is one of our lives worth a million of theirs, a thousand, or only a hundred?”

“Oh,” I said. “I’ve already made those calculations. Depends on who we’re a talking about, of course. In the case of Star Force crews-I put that ratio at about a million of them to one of us.”

With that, I turned around and walked off the command deck. I could feel Miklos’ stunned stare on my back. I smiled grimly and left him wondering if I was serious or not. There were no cold calculations made in these moments, not for me. They were very hot, emotional, gut-wrenching choices.

But I had to admit, I did value one of my marines more than I did a quite large number of Centaurs. I had to. In the end, this was a war for survival, and I was determined that our side would win it. The side of all the biotics, that was.

Hiro had done as I’d asked, because I think he understood this. He’d made the sacrifice for the living. Together, we had to beat the machines-the moving, thinking dead. And we couldn’t do that if we let millions die screaming in space to save our own sorry skins.

But with all that said, Star Force was still the main thing holding back the Macros. We truly were worth thousands of other lives each, because they would all be dead if we didn’t win in the end.