Conquest

-46-

Barbarossa began firing her lasers automatically when we reached effective range. By then, two of our destroyers and four smaller ships had eaten a mine. The only consolation was that the enemy had lost three more cruisers.

I noted with chagrin that the Worm ships remained unscathed. No doubt they had a friend-or-foe recognition system which prevented the mines from detonating against their hulls. Bitterly, I watched my ships vanish one after another in puffs of white brilliance. No wonder they thought we were brave. They’d warned us about the danger, but we’d plowed ahead, determined to battle the machines in the midst of a widespread low-density minefield. I supposed I could have asked them for the code and the signal frequency of their mine-recognition system, but it would have taken days. We could barely communicate at this point, and no doubt they were as puzzled by our symbol translations as we were theirs. Transferring technical information was out of the question. There simply wasn’t time.

The enemy were down to less than thirty cruisers when we came within range of their cannons. At that point, the Macros pulled an unexpected move. They trained their guns on Barbarossa and poured fire into my destroyer.

As closely as I could figure, they must have caught our radio signals and listened in. They clearly knew Barbarossa was the command ship, the one sending out orders to the others. Either that, or it was blind luck when Macro Command picked my ship to concentrate upon. I don’t believe in that kind of luck, so as our ship took a hammering, I cursed wildly in my helmet. Our communications were too open, our encoding weak.

I didn’t get much time for cursing or thinking of any kind. The ship’s hull couldn’t take this kind of punishment. The first burst of fire ripped the roof off overhead. My only thought was it was a good thing we didn’t get hit low. They would have knocked out my marines in the troop pod, which hung in the belly of the ship.

“Eject!” I screamed over the ship’s com system. “All hands eject!”

The ship went into a spin. Barbarossa was already dead, her brainbox must have been hit. I could tell by the behavior of the smart-metal walls. They didn’t bother to twist and reform themselves into smooth shapes. They stayed frozen like splattered solder. I could see star moving by laterally outside, indicating we were in a slow spin.

The helmsman was dead at his post. Something had punched through his relatively thin Fleet suit, probably a piece of shrapnel from the ship’s hull. Captain Miklos shot out of the opening in the roof however, and I followed. When we were outside the dead ship, I saw flashes nearby.

“Keep moving! Head directly away from the ship!”

The Macros were still pouring fire at the crippled Barbarossa. I grabbed Miklos, as his suit didn’t have propulsion power on its own, and I dragged him with my boot repellers at full power. We zoomed away from the ship laterally until we were at a safe distance. The ship blossomed into a flare of brilliance behind us that made my autoshades black out momentarily.

“Kwon, did you make it out?”

“Yes, sir,” Kwon’s signal came to me. His voice was clear and strong.

I smiled, looking around. A dark shape blotted out part of Aldebaran. Silhouetted by the massive blazing orange sphere, Kwon looked small, but he was relatively close to me. I was unsurprised. He seemed to have an extra sense useful only when it came to finding me when we were under fire.

I joined the platoon local circuit, and I could hear Kwon shouting in my helmet. He was working to gather the rest of the men to our position. We were soon flying in a loose formation in the general direction the rest of the fleet was headed.

I let him do his work and had a look around. We couldn’t really see the other ships, they were out there in the darkness, close in astronomical terms, but too distant to make out with the human eye. Occasionally, we saw flares and flashes as ships died to either mines or enemy fire. Most of any space battle was like that, they were generally cold silent affairs. The void felt empty even in the midst of a passing fleet.

“How many got out, First Sergeant?” I asked.

“Fourteen sir—including us.”

I nodded, pleased. Really, for having just bailed out of a dead destroyer, we’d beaten the odds.

“Who have you got there, sir?” Kwon asked me.

“Captain Miklos.”

“Is he dead?”

I looked down at the figure in my grasp. I had his suit bunched up in my armored fist, holding him by the scruff of the neck. He was limp. I gave him a gentle shake. His body flopped like a rag doll in the mouth of a terrier.

“Captain? Are you alive in there?” I asked.

I got no response.

“Hmm,” I said, “I don’t think his suit has lost integrity. He’d be frozen stiff if it had. Maybe he lost consciousness somewhere along the way.”

“Very good, sir,” Kwon said. “What are your orders?”

“Keep flying. We need to turn feet first and start braking hard.”

Kwon relayed those instructions and I ordered a radio blackout except for short-range unit communications. I decided I wasn’t going to attempt to command the whole Fleet now, they were on their own. The Macros were gunning for me, and I might as well let them think I was dead.

“I think I’ve got good predictive numbers on the locations of the nearest enemy cruisers. If they haven’t changed course much, we can intersect them at about a half-degree sunward from here.”

We adjusted our trajectory and kept braking. The key difficulty was going to be our relative speeds. The Macros had been slowing down a lot. I hoped we could slow down even faster, matching their speeds. If we were going too fast when we hit the cruiser line, we would crash into them at killing velocity, or shoot right past. If we slowed down too much, we wouldn’t reach them. It was a difficult set of calculations, but I had an officers’ suit on, which had a superior brainbox. Still, I was worried. I needed better intel on the enemy fleet. We’d left our vessel so early in the battle, we couldn’t expect to be perfectly on target.

With about one minute to go before the two fleets were scheduled to clash and fly through one another, I decided to chance a call on an open circuit.

“Marvin,” I called. “Do you recognize my voice? Don’t use my name, just say yes or no.”

The response came several long seconds later. “Yes.”

“Please use binary to upload the coordinates, relative course and velocity of the nearest enemy vessel.”

The signal came in a moment later. I relayed it to my surviving marines. I tapped the green accept destination button virtually with my armored finger in space. I couldn’t even see my hand in the blackness, but feedback in the suit allowed me to feel as if I was tapping at the virtual screen displayed on my HUD.

I was lurched around sickeningly as my suit’s autopilot engaged. We had been heading in what was decidedly the wrong direction. In fact, as I swung around and began to accelerate in our direction of travel, I realized we’d been braking too long. The enemy was still ahead of us. I wasn’t sure how far.

We flew on into the night, squinting ahead. Then I saw it, a pitch-black Macro cruiser. There were no running lights, as the machines didn’t believe in safety. The ship looked bigger up close, something like a medium-sized office building in space. I knew we were coming toward the front of it, as we’d have been able to see the blue glow of the engines if we’d come up from behind.

“There,” I said to Kwon, pointing. “How many grenades do we have?”

“An even dozen, sir.”

Normally, it took as many as ten hits to ensure a cruiser was destroyed. They were very tough vessels.

“Throw all of them and break off,” I ordered.

The operation went almost perfectly. We only lost a single man who had some kind of control malfunction at the last moment. I was never sure why, but he drifted too close to the final explosion and was vaporized with the Macro ship.

I didn’t dare communicate with my fleet, but I could read the situation fairly well. The three fleets seemed to be locked in combat, neither side retreating. They’d matched speeds and now sat in space, taking one another out one at a time. The Worm ships seemed particularly effective, flying in erratic, swooping patterns around the enemy ships and slashing them with their particle beams. I hoped they wouldn’t notice us and take a potshot.

A few minutes, we followed Marvin’s second set of coordinates. We let our suits do the maneuvering and approached a second cruiser, which was locked in a fight with two Worm ships that swung around it like moths circling a lantern. The problem was, we were out of grenades and our arm-mounted beamers were never going to cut through that thick hull.

“The missile ports are opening up,” I shouted. “Let’s go for it.”

Kwon relayed the order. A dozen shadows joined us as we tightened our formation, all intent on a single goal. A Macro missile flared brightly as we reached the port. I realized in an instant the cruiser was firing, probably at the Worms that circled the ship. It launched with a gush of hot vapor, and I could see the Macro technician driving the missile as it left its rack.

Macro missiles were not configured the same way ours were. They did not have to be as aerodynamic, as they were normally used in space. They were really small, suicidal spaceships. The pilot was just another machine, a crewmember bent on his own self-destruction.

I’d seen a missile like this up-close in the ground at Andros, where we’d tried to defuse it. Then it had been half-buried in the earth, however, and badly damaged. The nose section of the missile was the warhead, in the form of a metal cone. The midsection held the Macro pilot, enclosed in a framework of metal tubing. Behind him was the engine with its flaring plume of hot exhaust. The entire thing was a strange sight.

I thought, for just an instant, that the machine saw me as well. Then it was gone in the vastness of space, on a one-way journey to strike down one of our ships.

“Get inside the port, full throttle!” I ordered.

I saw men all around me surge forward in response to my order. I joined them.

The missile port closed as we slipped inside. Not all of us made it. One man had lost a leg, two more were trapped outside, thumping on the hull.

“What now, sir?” Kwon said, breathing hard.

We were cramped in the missile magazine. All around us was machinery and two more missiles. Fortunately, no other Macro technicians had loaded themselves into the last two spots.

Moments after we entered the port, we were rocked and tossed about by an explosion outside—very close. I imagined the missile had found one of the Worm ships or gotten close enough and detonated itself. The men we’d left outside stopped sending us signals, and I figured we would never find any remains.

“Disable these missiles,” I ordered. “I don’t want them taking out any more friendly ships.”

“And after that?”

I sucked in a lungful of stale, suit air. “After that, we take this ship.”