-28-
The hours crawled by. I slept, ate and worried. When you had thousands of missiles coming at you, it was hard to relax.
Marvin did none of these things. He never left his station, working feverishly on the Blue’s interface. He had more hands, eyes and brains than any three of us combined. Plus, he didn’t seem to get tired.
Every ten minutes or so, the ship’s big weapon fired. We’d cleared the surface of nonessential personnel so he could experiment as he liked. We were too far from the enemy fleet to hit them, of course, but he targeted and destroyed various decoys we placed for him, mostly chunks of floating ice from the Oort Cloud.
When he was ready, we began throwing missiles at Phobos. One at a time, the cruisers that followed in our wake launched salvoes with disabled warheads. When they came, Phobos shuddered as the weapon activated.
That alone was enough to keep people from resting. My people were like rocks, but it was hard to take relentless impacts and funny noises when you knew doom was out there, speeding along at a million or so miles an hour in your direction.
In all that time, we didn’t fire a missile, attempt communication with the enemy, or even budge from the Tyche ring. We looked dead, despite our desperate preparations.
The enemy fleet was sailing toward us during this time as well, but they were taking their time about it. They were cautious. They wanted to see if their missiles could take us out. Under optimal conditions, they could have done it without having to lose a single ship of their own.
I smelled Crow’s influence in every action they took. He was probably running this show from his headquarters back on Earth, safely berating his commanders and sipping sherry in his ice cream white uniform.
The thought made me angry. Too often over the long years I’d been dealing with Crow, he’d tricked me or managed to get the upper hand. He’d ordered assassins to kill me and my girl and I was here to return the favor. But I had to stay alive and reach Earth first.
About eight hours before the missiles were due to hit us, I began to get antsy. I went to Marvin and waved my hands around until he turned a single camera in my direction.
“I’m sorry, Colonel,” he said. “I’m very busy just now.”
I’d found him out working on the Blues’ interface directly. He was attaching secondary and tertiary nanite arms to each of the hexes that controlled the weapons system. There were about forty hexes in the weapons panel, and they puffed and sighed as they moved. I watched them for a few seconds before losing patience.
“Are you going to make it, Marvin?” I asked. “If it’s time to withdraw, I need to know now.”
“I’m going to make it, Colonel Riggs.”
“Are you just saying that in order to keep your hopes alive?”
A second camera glanced at me, then returned to his primary focus. “I’m not sure I understand your meaning, sir.”
“I mean that I offered you the cyborgs to experiment upon. I’m worried that you might be willing to jeopardize everything for that opportunity.”
“That would be irrational, Colonel.”
“Yeah, it would. And I’m not putting it outside the realm of possibility. I need some concrete results to prove you can do this.”
“What would you suggest?”
“I’m going to fire missiles at Phobos. Just two missiles, but they’re going to come in five minutes apart. If you can’t stop them, I’m declaring this a mistrial.”
This statement awarded me no less than six cameras. “I think you’re being unreasonable.”
“No, I’m being very reasonable. If you can’t stop two missiles, we haven’t got a chance against thousands.”
“When will this test occur?”
“I’m giving you one more hour. That’s it. I’m scheduling the launch and putting it on automatic. Stop them, or forget about your cyborg doggy-treats.”
“An odd reference. I’ll see what I can do, however.”
I left him to his work. I knew that if anyone could do it, he could. He was motivated and ingenious. I, for my part, had nothing to lose.
An hour later I fired the missiles. I didn’t even bother to give him a second warning.
I watched the screens with arms crossed. Everyone else crowded around, not saying much. They were all hoping, too.
About a minute before the impacts, Marvin came into the command tent—or rather, he crashed into it.
For a split second, I thought one of those missiles had come down the shaft to the surface and landed right on my head. Marvin was in free-fall—he’d gotten a new grav lifter set somewhere—and tore a hole in the smart metal tent we all stood around in.
The ceiling sagged, then ripped open. He came spiraling in, slapped his tentacles on the weapons consoles like a madman doing a drum solo, then flew up and out, back through the same hole.
“Hehe,” I said, gazing up through the ceiling. “He’s really going for it!”
The rest of my people were still ducking, talking in lowered voices and staring after my crazy robot.
I knew what they were thinking. They’d all seen a last-minute-Charlie before. The homework was due in seconds, and Marvin didn’t have his act together.
About then, the first shudder went through the ship. It was a now-familiar sensation. We’d been feeling it for many long hours as Marvin conducted his countless tests.
I pasted on a smile. “There we go,” I said. “I’m sure he’s stopped the first missile with that one.”
I received many doubtful glances. Wincing, I checked the boards.
“Yes,” Jasmine said. “The missile was crushed and destroyed. No damage was sustained.”
“Set a timer. Five minutes to go.”
She pointed to the timer she already had running. There was four minutes and twenty seconds left on it. That may not sound like a lot of time, but when you are as worried as I was, it like was an eternity.
When the clock read twenty-nine seconds, I felt another shudder. I frowned. “Was that…?”
“I think he fired early.”
We looked and the missile kept coming. I frowned as it zoomed right down on top of us and exploded. We didn’t feel it, but the pickups didn’t leave us any doubts. The blast formed a bubble on Phobos that quickly vanished.
Jasmine looked up at me in disbelief. “You fired a live warhead?”
“Sure,” I said. “I didn’t want to hang all our lives on a simulation.”
She nodded. “It looks like a failure.”
“Yeah. Here comes the professor now.”
Marvin bombed through roof again, upsetting the nanites which had been busily repairing the damage from the last time.
“Colonel Riggs,” he said, “let’s go over the status of the experiments.”
“Looks like there is no need, Marvin. The test failed.”
“A misfire only, Colonel. Let’s do another test.”
“Marvin, I told you—”
“But sir, we’ll have enough time to escape if it fails. Plenty of time.”
“I had other tests planned, but they were predicated on the success of the first one.”
“I understand, sir. One more try. I’ll be ready in…seven minutes. The trouble was I miscalculated the reset time. When automated, it took less time to engage the firing sequence than I’d anticipated. It ended up being too fast—”
“That’s not good news, Marvin,” I said. “If the best you can do is about four minutes, we’re dead anyway. It has to be one minute apart. No screw-ups.”
“One more test?”
I sighed. “All right. Go.”
He moved over to the consoles, but did nothing. He just looked at data and flipped through various planning scenarios. I followed him to his station.
“Aren’t you doing the test?”
“That’s all preprogrammed.”
“You mean you set it all up before you asked me? Were you that certain I would approve a second chance?”
He looked at me from several angles, trying to discern my mood. I was incredulous, but I think he has a hard time detecting that one.
“Is my answer going to prejudice you against this endeavor?”
I sighed. “You’re right. Keep it to yourself. I don’t want to know how big of a patsy you think I am.”
“Very well, Colonel Riggs.”
The next test went perfectly. We shortened the time down to three minutes, then two. It was hard to break the two-minute barrier. We went all the way down to the wire on that one. He finally managed to nudge one of those hexes just the right number of millimeters to get the precision he needed.
He tried to explain to me that the analog system of the Blues was giving him fits. I understood, knowing analog technology could be a pain. What he was doing was akin to trying to perfectly tune in an old-fashioned AM radio in an ancient car. The slightest tap could bring a station in loud and clear, or make it a scratchy mess. Only in Marvin’s case, he was tuning a radio with hundreds of mysterious buttons that an alien race of cloud people had designed. It wasn’t easy.
“The trick involves variant pressure on the different angles of the same button. You see, previously I’d been applying equal pressure, causing the button to depress at precisely the same rate on every axis. That was my mistake—”
“Marvin,” I said, “I’ve got a headache. We’re doing the one minute test now. This is just like tech back home—you live or die by the demo.”
“Reference unclear.”
“Shoot down the missiles. All of them. They’re coming in now.”
I began dropping them on him then, one at a time, precisely one minute apart. I smiled after he got the first four in a row. He was doing it. I turned to Jasmine.
“This is working. He’s like a tennis player back home. He’s in the zone.”
“Can I stress the system?” Miklos asked me suddenly.
I turned to him with a frown. I nodded and stepped from the controls.
Miklos cracked his knuckles and began toying with the ship’s helm. He put us into a spin, which applied lateral force to everyone.
Marvin’s cameras perked up, but he didn’t complain. I figured he knew we were going to stop informing him concerning every detail of the tests at some point. We had to go beyond lab conditions. There was less than an hour to go before the real thing hit us.
I watched the holotank. Miklos was a sneaky bastard. Several of the ships broke formation and positioned themselves in various positions around Phobos. When the next missile was scheduled, it came from an entirely new angle. We were spinning now, too.
Marvin was making an odd sound. I wasn’t sure if he was humming, laughing or burning a servo. But he did it. He caught them all.
Miklos nodded when he was done.
“It might work,” he said. “But you’re risking all our lives on untested technology, sir.”
“We’ve been doing nothing but testing it for the last seven hours.”
“You know what I mean, Colonel.”
I turned away from him. I knew exactly what I meant. It was crazy—but it had to work. We had to win this round. If we turned and ran now it was hopeless.
If the Imperial fleet was so powerful they could stop us while they were still out of our range—well, there wasn’t any point to fighting them. We weren’t going to survive anyway.
“How many of the enemy ships have fired on us so far?” I asked him, partly to change the subject.
“That is a strange thing, Colonel. We estimate that only the first rank of ships—the first thousand—have fired anything at all. Even half the ships in that first rank have held their fire.”
I frowned. “So only five hundred ships out of seven thousand have unloaded on us? That isn’t standard procedure.”
“No, sir. It wouldn’t be for us, at least.”
Usually, we fired missiles evenly from every ship in the fleet. If every ship had ten missiles, it made sense to fire five from each, rather than ten from one and none from the next. That way if any of the ships were knocked out the survivors would still have some ammo left for the next round.
Miklos shrugged. “It isn’t all that odd,” he said. “It may be due to design variations. Maybe all those Imperial ships look alike, but not all were equipped with missiles.”
“Hmm,” I said. “It’s not like Crow. He likes his fleets to be standardized. I don’t know if it matters, though. Maybe we just came out here while they were shipping out supplies and surprised them. Maybe they had the ships ready, but without full magazines. Production schedules can be optimized by building a lot of one thing at a time. Maybe Crow doesn’t have all those ships fully ready to fly yet.”
“We just don’t know, Colonel. If we live long enough, maybe we’ll figure it out.”
We went back to work and I daydreamed about more Irish coffee, but passed. I wasn’t going into my last battle sloshed.
I thought about a lot of things as those missiles came zooming in. They were so fast! I’d made a mistake there. I realized during the final minutes that we’d never tested against a target that was moving at such speeds.
Missiles are like tiny spaceships. Our modern units had engines that provided thrust at a steady rate, and the longer they flew the faster they went. Since the Imperial missiles had many hours to build up speed, they were going to hit us very hard and fast. We’d never been in position to test Marvin’s focused shielding system against anything going even one tenth as fast as the enemy birds. That meant they might very well get through, despite all our preparations.
I gritted my teeth and wondered if I’d killed us all in the end. At least it would be quick.