Planet Wrecker

-88-

The space battle raged as the Julius Caesar bored into the asteroids. Behind it by over one thousand kilometers, the Genghis Khan and Gustavus Adolphus followed.

From his command shell, Grand Admiral Cassius watched the nearest debris-cluster. He’d given orders so the Julius Caesar continued to use the cluster as a shield from the last cyborg asteroids. A grim thought kept beating in his brain, however. He wanted to take his ship past the debris-cluster to entice the cyborgs to turn all their beams onto the Julius Caesar. He wasn’t sure how much longer the Gustavus Adolphus could survive the laser pounding. He had to kill the enemy lasers before they gravely injured a Doom Star.

By what quirk fate had chosen the Gustavus instead of the Genghis Khan Cassius had no idea. Cyborg lasers continued to beam en masse against the targeted Doom Star.

“He’s pumping crystals,” Sulla said.

Cassius held himself rock-still. This was a matter of timing now. Admiral Octavian had just disobeyed a direct order. He’d better succeed.

“His laser has gone offline,” said Sulla.

“Why did he do that?” said Cassius, asking himself the question more than desiring an answer from others.

“There’s an incoming message,” Sulla said.

Cassius ignored it as he studied the situation. Doom Stars could pump crystals and gels at a fantastic rate. Ports had opened on the Gustavus Adolphus as it spewed. The growing crystal-cloud blocked Octavian’s laser against the still-firing asteroid turrets.

“I hope you’ve chosen correctly,” Cassius whispered. It was a Highborn’s prerogative to disregard orders. But if the officer chose poorly, it meant disgrace and likely death by hanging. In Octavian’s place, Cassius would have continued to attack instead of choosing to defend and let others do his fighting for him.

Cyborg lasers chewed through the growing cloud. The Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan sought out the enemy beam turrets, destroying them as fast as they could. Seconds turned into minutes as time ticked by.

Sulla’s oily-bright face turned toward him. “Your Excellency!”

“I see it,” Cassius whispered.

Three lasers cut a hole in the prismatic-crystal cloud. Another beamed and sliced through the Gustavus Adolphus’s nearly nonexistent composite armor. It must have been the perfect spot, or the worst. The reflex shielding behind didn’t hold, and the cyborg laser remained on target for far too long. The deadly laser—the terrible offending beam—burned through a shuttle bay. It continued to drill and smashed through a coolant tank, living quarters, medical facilities, the edge of a coil-chamber and into the meld reactor to the fusion core. That started explosions, and those explosions wrecked vital inner components of the ship. Highborn died in mobs from shrapnel, heat and meld-poisoning and soon from vacuum-exposure.

“Destroy that laser!” Cassius shouted.

“Retargeting,” said Sulla, his big hands roving over his board.

Time ticked by, and growing explosions added to the wounding of the Gustavus Adolphus. Big shuttle-bay doors opened. One after another in a stream, shuttles accelerated out of the stricken warship. Meanwhile, the ultra-lasers of the two sound Doom Stars hunted and destroyed the final enemy laser turrets.

Watching the battle unfold put a worm of doubt into Cassius’s stomach. Torpedoes in waves now accelerated out of the nearest debris-cluster. It meant the torpedoes had been carefully weaving their way through the debris-field. That implied individual cyborgs piloted the one-way craft. Those torpedoes burned hard for the Gustavus Adolphus many hundreds of kilometers beyond them.

“That’s it, Your Excellency,” Sulla said. “Except for the ones behind the debris-fields, we’ve silenced the enemy beams.”

Cassius hardly knew what he said in response. Destroying torpedoes, seeing them burn, absorbed his attention. More kept coming. How many torpedoes did these cyborgs have? Time, distance, velocity and power-levels—that’s all Cassius could compute now.

“The last Highborn shuttles have escaped the Gustavus Adolphus,” Sulla said some time later.

Prismatic crystals like wisps of cloud drifted before the mighty vessel. The warship’s great beam fired, highlighting a cyborg torpedo before disintegrating it. Point-defense cannons fired as the last missiles launched from torn ports.

From in his shell, Cassius swallowed uneasily. The Gustavus Adolphus was like a great wounded beast. It was too tired, too drained of blood to sidestep death barreling down at it. That death came as schools of cyborg torpedoes, missiles and point-defense-cannon-shells converged on the ship. The Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan were using every weapon they had, trying to defend the stricken Doom Star. But now it was too little, too late. The cyborgs simply had too much. They should have used this mass earlier. Why had they saved so much hardware? The mass of destructive weaponry was simply too heavy to completely halt.

“No,” Cassius whispered. He watched on a zoomed portion of his holoimages.

A huge torpedo smashed through the weakened composite armor and drilled its way deep into the Doom Star. It exploded with a nuclear fireball in the guts of the warship. Another torpedo struck as the electromagnetic pulse of the thermonuclear warhead washed outward. An emergency device caused the second torpedo to explode before the EMP blast disabled its systems.

Disbelieving, Cassius watched as a great section of armor blew away from the Gustavus Adolphus as blast holes appeared elsewhere. This part of the fight was over. The Doom Star was dead, as was every Highborn that had remained onboard to fire the ship’s weaponry to the end.