Planet Wrecker

-51-

Commodore Blackstone strapped into an acceleration couch as fear boiled in his stomach.

The Vladimir Lenin, the Leon Trotsky and the other battleships accelerated away at emergency speeds. Each battleship had to contend with its velocity that moved it fast toward the approaching asteroids in a length sense. Because of that velocity, none of the battleships could move away at more than a shallow curve in a width sense. The engagement took place on a three-dimensional battlefield, but in this instance, viewing it as a two-dimensional rectangle problem more accurately portrayed the situation. Human endurance levels, battleship structural design and physics limited the possibility of the various headings. Those were known quantities likely possessed by the cyborgs. They had once been allied with the Mars Battlefleet and were therefore intimately aware of Zhukov-class Battleship specs.

Blackstone knew that several factors worked against these grim minuses. The first was distance, the second was time and the third was particle-shielding six-hundred meters thick.

“I’m engaging the computer!” the pilot shouted. “It will use random vectors for emergency jinking. This could get rough.”

Blackstone glanced at Kursk. A bruised lump welled on her forehead where she’d struck the map-module. She looked dazed, but she clicked the acceleration straps over her torso. Then she closed her eyes and her head lolled to the side. Blackstone gritted his teeth as the ship veered a different direction by a minimal fraction. Under these speeds, however, the G-force strain caused metallic groans from the heart of the ship.

It was a familiar game from the simulators, but this time it was for real. Blackstone secretly hated the computer auto-piloting his warship. He wanted to make the decisions. But this was a mathematical problem now with precise parameters.

The equation was simple. A laser needed to remain on target in order to burn through it. The thicker and denser a target, the greater amount of time heat needed to drill through it or boil away the substance. The distance between the asteroids and the Vladimir Lenin—one hundred thousand kilometers and closing fast—meant that an operator, or cyborg or AI, Blackstone supposed, fired its laser where it believed the object would be several nanoseconds later. The firer had to take into account the asteroid’s movement, the battleship’s movement and the elapsed time. Therefore, in order to remain on target, a laser-operator needed to adjust the beam constantly. That’s why the battleship jinking first one way and then another created difficulties for the enemy lasers, throwing off the beam’s calibration hopefully just enough.

Kursk vomited as her skin turned greenish. And the bruise on her forehead thickened as extra blood welled within it.

“We’re going to make it,” Blackstone told her.

She groaned and threw up again.

“Fight through the nausea,” he said. He didn’t dare unlatch himself to apply a medkit to her. The constant jinking would throw a person off his feet, slamming him against sharp or heavy objects. “It’s for just a little longer,” he said.

He didn’t watch her response, but checked the monitor before him. He used audio-control, switching to outer cameras. The sight made him grimace.

Heavy lasers had burnt-off particle-shielding. There were black marks on the asteroid-like surface, some deeper than others. On some of the shielding, he saw slagged areas where the lasers had melted the surface into a glassy substance. Fortunately, none of the lasers had made deep impressions yet.

Blackstone frowned. He realized no lasers presently burned into the particle-shield. Could the jinking be that effective?

“Sir,” said Wu. “The enemy has changed tactics.”

Blackstone brought up Wu’s images on his monitor. Then he ordered a close-up and shouted angrily. No enemy lasers beamed at them. Instead—he counted them—twenty-three heavy lasers struck the Leon Trotsky. The six-hundred meters of particle-shielding was meant to take heavy fire, but nothing like that. As the lasers beamed across the distance, they chewed away layer after layer of the Leon Trotsky’s shield. Rocks slagged off. Fused glass bubbled and boiled away, and all the while, the terrible lasers chewed deeper into the shielding.

That was one of his battleships, one of the four left out of a once proud fleet. Blackstone’s gut hurt as he thought about the number of warships he used to command. The battle against the Doom Stars, it had cost much too heavily. The cyborgs had been allies then. The cyborgs had reinforced the impulse for Highborn and humans to bleed each other into weakness.

“Re-target enemy turrets!” Blackstone shouted harshly. He was going to save the Leon Trotsky. Social Unity couldn’t afford any more losses. The alien creatures on the asteroids meant to obliterate humanity—he wanted to murder every one of them.

Blackstone roared an oath as a heavy laser took out a cyborg laser turret. These creatures weren’t invincible. It was possible to hurt them. Now he had to kill them, and stop them from pouring that concentrated fire into the Leon Trotsky. Then the second enemy turret on Asteroid A burst into uselessness. He saw that through the battleship’s teleoptics.

A ragged cheer went up on the bridge. It brought life to Kursk, enough that she wiped the vomit from her mouth.

Then they destroyed a third turret, even as the Leon Trotsky took out a fourth.

During that time, the asteroids continued their steady advanced on Earth. And the battleships moved closer to them lengthwise, if desperately trying to put more distance away widthwise from the asteroids. In that time, the cyborg lasers stripped the last shreds of shielding from the Leon Trotsky.

“Captain Jensen,” Blackstone said. The monitor wavered, and Jensen appeared on it. She was an older woman with a hawkish nose. Despite her name, she was of Arab descent and wore a green crescent symbol on her cap.

“Deploy your escape pods,” Blackstone said, as he watched through a spilt-screen.

One screen showed Captain Jensen shouting orders. The red light flashed on and off on the bridge. The other screen showed the Leon Trotsky. The asteroid-like particle-shield had almost completely melted away. In places, Blackstone saw the exposed composite armor underneath the shielding, which was the hull of the battleship. Then the cyborgs lasers struck again.

Blackstone heard shouting. Only vaguely did he realize he was the one shouting. The death of a battleship was a horrible thing to witness. To know he had taken the vessel into combat only made it worse. The lasers struck and burned through the composite armor. In a fantastically short time, the Leon Trotsky became twelve separate pieces. Thousands of little bits of debris spilled out of the broken battleship. Some of those bits were crewmembers.

Blackstone felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. He blinked rapidly, and something hardened in him. That battleship had faced Doom Stars and survived, but now it was gone, nothing more than a bitter memory.

“The cyborgs are re-targeting!” shouted Wu.

Blackstone snapped out of his daze as he studied his monitor.

“I loved you,” Kursk told him.

Blackstone stared at her. “What?” he said, his mouth bone dry.

“I’m entering a different sub-routine!” the pilot shouted.

The enemy lasers continued to beam. The three battleships attempted to jink out of death, pump more crystals and gels and burn more enemy turrets. As the asteroids zoomed toward Earth, they killed another battleship, slicing it apart as they had the Leon Trotsky. Then the full brunt of the cyborg lasers turned on the Vladimir Lenin.

Fortunately for Blackstone and his crew, their own emergency acceleration and new sub-routine helped. Even more important was the steady velocity of the asteroids. It meant the Saturn-rocks reached a point where instead of heading toward them they went away. That distance grew rapidly in a length sense, and even more in a width way as the battleships continued to accelerate away from the enemy. Before the lasers completely stripped away the particle-shielding from the ship, the distance grew too great. At the greater distances, the lasers missed more often and hit with lesser power. The laser beams dissipated their coherence. Because of these various factors, Blackstone and his crew survived the first encounter with the asteroids. But before the Vladimir Lenin entered another fight, it would need a new six-hundred meter particle-shield.