Conquest

-43-

The first barrage exploded just short of the ring, punching a hole in the minefield we had waiting for them in front of the opening. The second barrage charged through that pall of vapor and vanished. Presumably, those missiles exploded on the far side of the ring to destroy the twin minefield we had placed in the Alpha Centauri system. Macro Command had learned a thing or two about our tactics, and responded accordingly.

I now felt sure this was one of the reasons they’d managed their missile supplies so closely. They knew they needed the missiles to destroy our minefields, if nothing else. It was enough to make me grind my teeth in frustration. These Macro ships weren’t dying. They were slipping away, and I knew that the further they got from Earth the greater the temptation would be to let them go, to allow them to leave us and slip away into the vast dark of space. The problem with that was they could return at any time, with fresh ships and fresh ideas on how to defeat us.

“Colonel,” Captain Miklos said. “If we are going to slow down, or change course, we need to do it now.”

I didn’t look at him. I sighed instead. Things were not going as planned.

“Sir?” Miklos prompted. “Any orders? Or are we just going to blast right through after them?”

“I should have maintained my velocity.”

“What?”

“I made a mistake,” I said. I didn’t add by listening to you, but I was thinking it. “I should have caught them before they reached the ring and engaged them. Now, they’ve made it through the ring first. They could be laying mines in front of us on the far side.”

Miklos looked alarmed. He nodded, acknowledging the possibility. “They could be,” he agreed. “Or maybe they will hit the brakes, wait for us to zoom through, and fire every missile they have left into our faces.”

I nodded slowly, but gave no orders.

“Decelerate, Colonel,” Miklos said urgently. “We’ll pull up to the ring and send through a few scouting ships. When we know the situation on the far side, we can fly after them safely—if that is the best course.”

I drummed armored fingers on the command chair. Metal struck metal in a repeating pattern, making a rhythmic, ringing sound. The helmsman turned and frowned at me in irritation. I ignored him. The drumming helped me think.

“No,” I said at last. I stopped drumming, and watched the helmsman relax in visible relief.

“Helmsman, reduce speed by ten percent. Relay that to the fleet. Tighten up the formation more. We’ll fly through in a column.”

“Fly through, sir?” Captain Miklos asked nervously. “I thought we—”

“You thought wrong, Captain. I know the Macros. I know how they think. If they want to ambush us, they’ll do it by firing a barrage in our faces. They’ll do it by timing us, so we can’t get out of the way. Slowing down by ten percent will make us hit the ring several minutes late. Their missiles, if they fire any, will come through the ring to hit us at our last projected speed and course. If we don’t see them show up, there aren’t going to be any.”

Miklos flopped back into his chair in defeat. He relayed the orders without further complaint. Did he think himself a doomed man with a mad commander? It was quite possible he was right on both counts.

“Let me explain myself, Captain,” I said. “I know we are taking a risk, but the enemy can’t be allowed to escape us if at all possible. This force of cruisers knows our tactics. They may well do a great deal of damage to our biotic friends in the Helios and Eden systems. Almost as importantly, we have to press home the advantage we have now. I don’t want to fight these ships again as part of a larger force at a later date. I don’t want them to rearm, form up with another dreadnaught, or even report home. I want to knock them out while they are weak. I want to get the most we can out of this victory.”

“We’ve driven them from our home system,” Captain Miklos said reasonably. “Isn’t that enough?”

“No. It really isn’t. We need more. We need to hurt them, and we must take risks to do so. We are the underdogs in this war, Captain. Don’t ever doubt it. Possibly, the entire affair is hopeless. What if they have thousands of systems and millions of ships? Perhaps we are fleas on a T-Rex.”

“What’s the point then, in that case?”

I shrugged. “We don’t know the truth. But I’m pretty sure they are stronger than we are, far stronger. In order to have a chance, we have to get lucky. You get lucky by going for opportunities when they present themselves. I think the destruction of this enemy task force is just such an opportunity. I’ve read every book I can find on strategy lately—including the writings of many historical figures on the subject, from Caesar, to Napoleon, to Sun Tzu. We must turn this marginal victory into a decisive one. Not only to hurt the enemy’s fleet, but to worry them. The Macros are conservative, and they like to attack with overwhelming force. They might not attack again for years after this beating, convinced we are stronger than we really are.”

“All right sir,” Miklos said thoughtfully. “I understand your reasoning. But at some point we’ll have to give up on killing them all if they keep escaping us. How far from Earth are you willing to go? Once we leave the system, we won’t be able to tell what’s happening behind us. More Macros could come back through the Venus ring and we wouldn’t know we were needed back home.”

“Hmm,” I said, thinking it over. He had a good point. I quickly came up with a partial solution. “How about this? We’ll leave a small ship behind at the ring. Their job will be to dash back and forth through it, every few hours. They can relay messages and scan both systems. If we do that at every ring we pass through, it won’t cost us many ships, and will put us within a few days transmission time from several systems away.”

He nodded appreciatively. “A pony express system?”

“Something like that,” I said, smiling.

“They said you were inventive.”

“They told me you were a hard-ass.”

We both laughed and turned our attention back to the screen. We had just about reached the ring. The time came and passed when the enemy missiles should have showered through, trying to hit us in the face. I had just begun to smile, figuring I had Miklos on this one, when a mass of contacts did appear.

“Evasive action, sir?” the helmsman asked, his voice cracking.

“How many are there?”

“Sixteen, sir.”

“Decelerate! Shoot them down!”

My hundred-odd ships all began firing at once. This time, we were playing the part of the Macro vanguard, leading the way at the head of a column of ships into the unknown. Beams slashed out from hundreds of projectors. The missiles popped one after another, but two got through. There were no direct hits, but the explosions buffeted our destroyer when they went off nearby. I could see by the boards we’d lost at least one small ship—and then everything on the screens vanished and reset.

“We’re going through the ring, sir!”

“I feel it.”

I hadn’t even had time to assess fleet damage. We’d have to figure that out on the far side of the ring. As always it sent a thrill through my body like an electric shock to know I was traveling across lightyears of space in an instant. When we came out on the other side of the ring, however, we got the biggest surprise of the voyage.

“Enemy ships sir!” the helmsman all but screamed.

I scanned the screens in irritation. Of course there were enemy ships. What did the young officer think we had been chasing?

But then I saw the panels shift and shimmer. The new system leapt into life. The three stars were there, Alpha, Beta and the distant, dim red dwarf known as Proxima Centauri. None of this was surprising. What did shock me were the number of enemy ships that quickly populated the scene. There were somewhere around two hundred of them, plus clouds of what could only be debris—fragments of destroyed spacecraft.

“What the hell?” I asked no one. My mind leapt to a dozen conclusions, none of them good.

“The Macros must have known they had supporters out here,” Captain Miklos said. “They weren’t running from us, they were luring us into a trap.”

“Trap?” I asked. “There are a lot of blown-up ships here.”

“Maybe our mines took some of them out as they passed through.”

None of it made sense to me. Things looked bad, but I refused to panic.

“Are we under fire?”

“No sir, no reports of incoming fire. Our ships have locked on the nearest alien vessels—they are quite small, sir.”

“Hold your fire,” I ordered the gunner. “Relay that, helmsman.”

“But sir—”

“Show me the configuration of the new ships,” I demanded. “What are we facing?”

“They are considerably smaller than any Macro ships we’ve ever encountered.”

“Put one up on the damned screen,” I told him. “Give me a close-up.”

The new enemy ships finally came into sight. There was a large wing of them moving after the Macro Cruisers. They looked vaguely like the old NASA shuttlecrafts to me, but a bit larger. They had stubby wings and a pointed snout. They were clearly designed for atmospheric travel as well as voyaging in space.

I squinted at the vessels. The lines were unmistakable.

“That’s a Worm ship!” I shouted. I whooped for joy, and the crew looked at me as if I were mad. “Show me more, what are they doing?”

Data poured in and the reports were good. All good. The Worms had nearly two hundred vessels. They were all small, but they were pursuing the fleeing Macro cruisers and firing on them. I shook my head in amazement. They’d been busy. I had to admit, of all the people’s I’d met in space so far, these creatures impressed me the most. They’d never even considered surrender or peace agreements. They simply fought the Macros and they’d died in their millions, but the moment they’d been given a breather they were back at it, putting up an offensive fleet rather than focusing purely on defense and rebuilding their lost cities. If anything, they were even tougher than we were.

Fortunately, I had had the foresight to transfer translation neural patterns from Marvin for all known species into every brainbox in the fleet. Our ships could talk to these aliens. But I knew from experience such translations were not that simple. The symbolic pictographs of the Worms and the idiomatic poetry of the Centaurs were challenging mediums, even after you had established a means of communication.

The Worms were particularly challenging to communicate with. They used images to communicate remotely and sculptures to communicate in person. They were tactile, rather than audio or optical in their conversations. When using radio communications, they’d fortunately developed a simplified set of pictographic symbols to express ideas. They weren’t words, exactly, but rather images that conveyed concepts. When combined together, they communicated meaning. It was rather like having a pen pal who only understood Egyptian hieroglyphs.

“Barbarossa,” I said, addressing the ship directly. “I need to open up a channel to the Worm ships.”

“Clarification required: Worm ship. Please define.”

“Scan the nearby vessels. Many of the smaller ships are not Star Force ships, nor do they meet the definition known as Macro cruisers. These ships are known to us as Worm ships.”

“Definition complete. Associations established.”

“Good,” I said pausing for a moment to think. “We need to transmit something to them. Access your data on translations of English into Worm pictographs.”

“A one-to-one translation of human speech into Worm pictographs is not possible. It is suggested—”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, interrupting in annoyance. “Believe me, I know all about it. I need the pictograph for hunting together—some kind of fat, sliced-grub thing. Send that along with the images for machine and destruction.”

Captain Miklos looked at me with a bloodless face. We were in the domain of new aliens, and I sensed this crew felt out of their depth. Well, that was just too bad. You had to pick things up quickly in space—either that, or you died.

“Symbol group selected,” Barbarossa said. “Transmitting.”

“Let me know when you get a response from them.”

There were perhaps thirty long seconds to wait. During that time, much of my fleet had flown through the ring after me. They came in two or three abreast and advanced quickly after us. We were not yet in firing range. I squirmed in my chair, and my armor squinked as I did so, the cringe-worthy sound of metal rasping against metal.

“Incoming repeating message from Worm ships: grub, machine, destruction.”

“Good,” I said in relief. “Accelerate to full speed, helmsman. Relay to the fleet, we are going to chase down those Macros and engage them. No one is to fire upon a Worm ship without authorization. Maybe with luck, we can catch some or all of the Macros before they reach the far side of this system.”

I wanted to get into the fight, but it was going to take some time. We’d slowed down before plunging through the ring, and that delay had cost us a lot of momentum. Even with our faster ships, we’d have to accelerate hard for days to catch up and join the running battle.

Captain Miklos leaned toward me and eyed my screen. “What the heck do those symbols mean, Colonel?”

“The grub means hunting, a team interaction. The machine symbol clearly refers to the Macros. Destruction indicates we are going to destroy the machines. The Worms communicate differently than we do. Did you attend the officer’s briefing on alien cultures?”

“Yes, of course, sir,” Miklos said, leaning back into his own chair. “But it isn’t every day you meet a new alien species.”

“Well, get used to it,” I told him.

We pursued, watching the two groups of aliens fight it out ahead of us. We were all heading toward the next ring, which linked the Alpha Centauri system to Aldebaran system, the home system of the Worms. Frequently, the Worms made passes at the Macros, harassing and skirmishing with the larger ships. I grinned broadly. Having allies made the universe a brighter place.

It took time for our sensors to figure out everything we were looking at in a new system after crossing through a ring. The distances were immense, and some of the ships presented little or no radar signature. They were only visible when they fired weapons and could thus be counted optically by our sensors and the brainboxes connected to them. After an hour, we had hard numbers. The Worms had started with two hundred and seven ships when we’d entered the system. The Macros had started out with forty-one cruisers. At this point, the Macros were down to thirty-four ships, while the Worms had a hundred and seventy-nine ships left.

Calculating the loss ratios, I realized the Worms were only barely on the winning side thus far. The Macro cannons were taking their toll each time the Worms drove in close to hit them in a sweeping pass. On two occasions as we watched, the Macros fired two barrages of eight missiles. In each case, a few Worm ships were caught and destroyed by the missiles. The Macros were clearly holding back their firepower, and the enemy cruisers only fired their last weapons when they were too badly damaged to keep up with the rest of the pack.

The tactics of the Worms were effective and impressive. They would make a strafing pass, firing at a particular cruiser at the rear of the formation. Targeting the engines, they sought to damage and slow the vessel. When a doomed cruiser lagged behind the protective cover of its fellow it fired its last salvo at its tormentors. Immediately afterward, the cruiser would be set upon by the Worm ships. Like a cloud of swarming piranha, the Worm ships tore the straggler apart.

The Worm weapons were unlike anything I’d ever seen. They appeared to be particle-beam systems. Gushes of hard radiation flared lavender as we watched from afar. The guns seemed effective, but the beams moved at less than the speed of light and didn’t have anywhere near the range that our lasers had. Still, after witnessing their power, I was impressed. If a Worm ship got in close to one of our laser vessels, I had no doubt their ship would win the duel. That was the trick, though—they had to get in close. We calculated their effective range at about twenty percent of the distance our own weapons could reach.

“Just like back home on their homeworld,” I remarked to Captain Miklos. “The Worms like short-ranged, hard-hitting weapons. If we showed them a sawed-off shotgun, I bet they’d heartily approve of the design.”

Captain Miklos nodded, staring intently at the screens. “The Worms are taking serious losses. Are they always this—vicious?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” I said. “But remember, they have good reasons. This fleet is heading away from Earth, but its flying toward their system. They are fighting to defend Helios, not just to help us out.”

“Ah, right. This is fascinating, sir. Do you ever wonder how many civilizations there are out there? How many races like the Worms or abominations like the Macros might exist?”

“All the time, Captain. All the time.”

“Sirs,” the gunner interrupted. “There’s a new unknown contact out there.”

“Why didn’t you pick it up until now?” I snapped.

“The ship has been hanging low, below the plane of the ecliptic,” the gunner explained. “It hasn’t been firing or using visible thrusters. It’s been shadowing all the other ships. I only just picked it up now.”

“Great, a fourth player at this party,” I grumbled. I didn’t like this news at all. We had this battle in hand. In time, the enemy would be taken apart ship by ship. Once we were able to join in the battle, we’d speed up the process. The enemy would either have to turn and make a last stand like a wounded bear brought down by a pack of wolves, or they would be torn apart bit by bit. Any new elements to the equation were not welcome.

It was several minutes before the brainbox interpreting the data gave us input on the ship’s configuration.

“Uh, it looks like one of ours, sir,” the gunner told me in surprise. “Either that, or it’s an odd Nano-ship design.”

I leaned forward. “Put a close-up on my screens.”

The gunner deftly tapped at his boards and my screen lit up with an odd wireframe image in yellow. Green was for known friendlies, red for enemy, blue for structures and yellow for unknowns. Barbarossa’s brainbox didn’t know how to classify this vessel any more than I did. I looked at the lines of it, puzzled. It had curves in the center, in a pattern similar to our own vessels. But it had a large number of oddments hanging off it—almost like they’d been tacked on. Metal struts, parabolic dishes, chunks of metal that appeared to have no obvious purpose.

“What’s all that crap hanging on it?” Captain Miklos asked. “Is it a junkyard hauler?”

I smiled suddenly.

“Sort of,” I said. “He probably picked up a load of broken pieces from the debris we just flew through. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. Chunks blasted off Worm ships—those would be especially enticing.”

“What?” Miklos asked, looking at me as if I were mad.

“It’s Marvin,” I explained. “It has to be.”