Planet Wrecker

-33-

Thirteen days after the initial sighting of the ice-asteroid, Commodore Blackstone of the Mars Battlefleet received an emergency request to report to the bridge of the Vladimir Lenin.

He raced out of his quarters as he tucked in his shirt. While riding the lift, he buttoned his uniform. Fitting his cap on snuggly, he strode through the hatch. Commissar Kursk was already there by the map-module. She looked up, and there were lines in her face.

She’s getting older…no, she was already older. The strain is getting to her.

“What is it?” Blackstone asked.

Kursk opened her mouth, but no words came. The look in her eyes….

Blackstone felt a cold pit in his stomach. Resolutely, he approached the map-module. Highlighted in red on the screen was a larger object. At least, it was larger than the original ice-asteroid.

“It’s a big one,” he said.

Kursk shook her head. “That isn’t just a single asteroid.”

He began to fiddle with the module’s controls.

“It’s an asteroid-cluster hundreds of thousands of kilometers behind the first asteroid,” Kursk said.

Blackstone nodded. He could see that by the readings.

“The cluster is moving faster, however,” she said. “The tacticians say the cluster will catch up with the first asteroid.”

“When?”

“It isn’t when but where. Oh, Joseph,” she said, using his first name. “This is horrible. It’s insane.”

He heard the bleakness in her voice. He saw it in the lines on her face.

“They’ll merge as the cluster nears Earth,” she said.

“Give me full magnification,” Blackstone said. On the map-module, he watched as the red-highlighted object became many asteroids in close formation. “How many are there?” he asked. This was worse than he’d expected.

“We’re working on it. There could be thousands.”

“What?” he said.

“There’s a possibility that some of those asteroids are really debris fields.”

Blackstone adjusted the controls, but couldn’t get any better images. Were they using the debris as a mass shield? He shook his head. The debris wasn’t as important as the bigger asteroids, many of them.

“They mean to wipe out every living thing on Earth,” Blackstone declared.

“The cyborgs are insane,” Kursk whispered. “They’re inhuman.”

“They’re aliens,” Blackstone said. He tried to envision what this all meant. “Did these objects originate in the Saturn System? Well?” he shouted.

“We’re still working on it,” the sensor-officer said by her board.

Blackstone leaned against the map-module and found that he was breathing hard. Total annihilation of everything on Earth—the cyborgs meant to smash the most critical planet to Social Unity and the Highborn. This had to be from the cyborgs. The Highborn could have dropped the former farm habitats on Earth if they’d wished for planetary obliteration.

“Prepare a message for Supreme Commander Hawthorne,” he said.

“We already have,” Kursk said. “What are you going to add?”

Blackstone blinked at the red image on the screen. Had they spotted the asteroid cluster in time? With a start, he began adjusting the controls. There was no telling how little time they had to make the right moves. Weeks from now, the asteroids would approach Earth. If they were going to halt planetary extinction, they had to act now.