The weapons-officer bent over his board.
Blackstone touched the map-module.
The four battleships moved on a near-collision course toward the asteroids. Given their present heading, they would pass the asteroids with about seven thousand kilometers to spare. The prismatic-cloud presently glittered in front of the four battleships, acting as a screen in case the cyborgs fired heavy lasers. It also prevented the battleships from directly firing at the asteroids.
Now four large mirrors moved away from the battleships but parallel with the protective cloud. These mirrors had special hardened coating and precise targeting features. Once in position, each tilted at a perfect angle, able to
see
the asteroids because the prismatic crystals were no longer between them and the targets.
The
Vladimir Lenin
began to rotate, so the heavy lasers were pointed at its particular mirror.
“Enemy lasers, sir!” shouted the weapons-officer, a squat Asian man named Wu, noted for his extreme devotion to his weapons.
Commodore Blackstone hunched his shoulders. “Are the lasers firing on us or—”
“Against our missiles, sir!” shouted Wu.
Almost one hundred thousand kilometers separated them from the cyborg taskforce. That meant the information was several nanoseconds old. The missiles launched many days ago were less than nineteen thousand kilometers from the enemy. Surely, the cyborgs lasers could reach farther than that. So why had they waited so long before firing?
“Do you have an estimate of the enemy wattage?” asked Blackstone.
“The readings are coming in now, sir,” said Wu.
“…Well?”
“They’re similar to our heavy lasers, sir,” said Wu.
“Not near Doom Star laser power-levels?” asked Blackstone.
“Negative, sir,” said Wu.
“That’s something at least,” Blackstone whispered to Kursk. “Give me more data,” he told Wu. “What are the other missiles doing?” he asked the missile-officer.
“They’re all firing, sir!” shouted Wu.
“What, our missiles?” asked Blackstone.
“I’m sorry, sir. The cyborgs lasers are all firing.”
“I want precise data,” Blackstone said. “What do you mean by
all
?”
Wu’s thick fingers blurred across his screen as he tapped madly. “Twenty heavy lasers, sir,” he said a moment later. “No. Make that twenty-two enemy lasers.”
“So many?” said Blackstone.
“I’m surprised there aren’t more,” Wu said. “Given their surface area—”
“Give me power estimates on their fusion cores,” Blackstone said. “We need more information and we likely don’t have much time to get it.”
“We’re in laser-range, sir,” said Wu.
“Ask the other ships if they’re ready to fire.”
“I already have, sir. They are.”
Blackstone moistened his lips. “Take out enemy laser turrets,” he said. “Now!” He made a curt gesture.
As Wu complied, the thrum of the fusion core rose in volume. The
Vladimir Lenin
built up power and pumped it through the laser coils. The concentrated light beamed through the firing tube. That light struck the mirror, the one outside the protection of the prismatic-crystal cloud. Bounced perfectly, the coherent light sped across the one hundred thousand kilometers at the speed of light. It hit a laser-turret on the thirty-kilometer asteroid, the one designated as A. As the
Vladimir Lenin
continued to move toward the asteroids, the asteroids continued to move at Earth. In order to keep the laser focused on the turret, the mirror minutely adjusted throughout the entirety of the beaming.
Now the other heavy lasers from the other three battleships began to beam across the immense distance.
“Have any missiles hit?” asked Blackstone. “I want information, people, and I want it now.”
Other devices had moved outside the protection of the cloud, some of them radar dishes and others teleoptic scopes of incredible power. The radar sped to the asteroids at the speed of light, bounced off and sped back just as fast. It took twice as long, however, as directly viewing what occurred through optics.
“Scratch one laser-turret!” shouted Wu, who pumped his fist in the air.
“We can hurt them,” Blackstone told Kursk with a grin.
“We haven’t gotten to them with the missiles yet,” she said. “The missiles hold the nukes, which is the only effective way to nudge the asteroids off course.”
“Allow me to enjoy my victory, as small as it is,” Blackstone said.
Kursk gripped the map-module so her knuckles whitened. Her intense gaze was fixated on the screen.
“I want—” Blackstone said.
“Enemy lasers!” shouted the defensive-officer. “They’re trying a burn-through, sir.”
“How many lasers?” snapped Blackstone.
“Sir,” the defensive-officer said, “they’re focusing ten lasers into a small area.”
“Start pumping more crystals!” Blackstone shouted.
“Emergency pumping engaged!” the defensive-officer said. “Sir, at this rate, they’ll burn through our P-Cloud in twelve minutes.”
“Impossible,” said Blackstone.
“Slag the
Leon Trotsky’s
mirror, sir,” Wu said. “I don’t know how, but the cyborgs damaged it.”
“We’re too heavily outgunned,” Kursk whispered.
Blackstone said nothing as he stared at the map-module. The Commissar was right. The cyborgs had too many heavy lasers, and it looked as if they had enough power to fire them for hours. Just as bad, none of the missiles had made it near enough the asteroids to make detonation worthwhile.
“How are we supposed to stop them, sir?” asked Wu.
“What I want to know,” Kursk whispered, “is how Hawthorne is going to get any space marines onto those asteroids.”
Blackstone swallowed in a dry throat. He had his orders. Hawthorne had ordered him to break off the attack if the cyborgs proved too powerful. Social Unity had to keep a fleet intact, especially if the unthinkable happened and the cyborgs destroyed Earth as a habitable planet. Yet to have traveled out this far and beamed the lasers for less than a minute, and then to turn and run—it was too galling.
“Now they’ve damaged our mirror, sir,” said Wu. “We can’t fire at them anymore unless we come out from behind the cloud.”
“Or if they burn our cloud away,” said the defensive-officer.
Commodore Joseph Blackstone found himself short of breath. The cyborgs had too much concentrated firepower on those asteroids. The big ones possessed greater tonnage than all the Doom Stars,
Zhukov
-class Battleships and missiles combined. How were they supposed to stop the asteroids from smashing into the Earth?
“We must ram them,” whispered Kursk.
Blackstone blinked at her. “What?” he whispered.
“We must ram them,” she said. She was pale and trembling.
Shaking his head, Blackstone said, “We lack the tonnage to do more than nudge one. You saw the specs. The asteroids have giant exhaust ports. They’ll just readjust course.”
“We have to do
something
,” Kursk said hoarsely.
“Yes!” Blackstone said, and he struck the map-module. “We keep these battleships intact.”
“You’re running away?”
“I’m saving our fleet—if I can.” He knew it might already be too late. The cyborg firepower, it was too much. “Break-off,” said Blackstone, “employ schedule three-C.”
Several officers swiveled around to stare at him.
“Now!” shouted Blackstone. “We have to get out of range now. There’s nothing more we can do today.”
“No,” whispered Kursk, and there were tears in her eyes.
“Mister,” Blackstone told the pilot.
The pilot moved as if shocked, and she began to lay in the new course heading. Meanwhile, orders went out to the other three battlewagons.
“More enemy lasers are firing,” the defensive-officer said. “Our P-Cloud won’t last more than a few minutes at this rate.”
“Emergency jinking!” shouted Blackstone. “Then each ship is to head to its own destination.”
“This is a disgrace,” Kursk said, tears freely running down her cheeks.
Had he just consigned billions to their deaths? Blackstone hoped not. He wanted to do more. But the enemy firepower—
“Burn-through in ninety seconds!”
Then everyone aboard the
Vladimir Lenin
was thrown to the left as the big ship began to accelerate toward a new heading.
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.