-29-
Even a veteran like me finds it hard to ride out a heavy attack in space. Your guts churn and your bowels cinch up painfully tight. Sometimes I thought it was easier to be in a firefight. You aim your weapon, squeeze the trigger—you’re doing something. If you do get taken out by enemy fire, you probably never saw it coming.
But while standing on my ship’s bridge, watching thousands of brilliant points of death coming at me, I felt helpless to do more than hope I wouldn’t die. I’ve never liked the sensation.
The first wave of missiles was easy. We set up the shielded region of Phobos, a couple of square miles of surface area. When the missiles came in, Marvin hit the button, and they all instantly transformed into a shower of wadded-up metal.
I clapped my hands loudly and hooted. “First rank down, set us up for round two, Marvin!”
None of this was necessary, of course. But I wanted the staffers to feel the victory, and they did. A cheer went up when that first wave of missiles vanished en masse. I smiled. I still had the touch. Sometimes my job amounted to playing cheerleader.
It was the second wave, really, that tied my innards into a knot. Marvin wasn’t bantering with us as the seconds ticked by—he was madly adjusting his makeshift controls, slapping and jiggling the consoles. I could tell by watching him this was no science. He looked like he was playing pinball and cheating by slamming his knee into the base of the machine and whacking it on all sides.
The second wave went down like the first, and I began to smile. To really smile.
“You’re going to pull this off, Marvin. I bet you can taste those cyborgs already.”
“Taste?”
“Never mind, don’t get distracted.”
I’m not sure if it was my comment or just fate, but on the third wave he didn’t catch them all.
Wham! Wham!
I held onto the command table, but it wasn’t that bad. The ship had so much mass, it barely shuddered under the impacts.
“Let’s start spinning to spread the damage,” I said to the people running the helm, but then turned to Marvin, “will that mess you up?”
“As long as the spin is very predictable, with no acceleration curve, I will be able to compensate with a simple application of a mathematical template.”
I winced, knowing that we couldn’t apply thrust in a perfectly even pattern to an object this big, not even with the gravity drive. Using the drive would take energy away from his shielding system, too.
“All right,” I said. “We’ll hold off on the spin for now. Keep swatting down those—”
Wham!
Another one had gotten past and hit us. While I’d been talking to him, the fourth wave had come in and something had slipped past. Phobos shook, and I looked at Sarin.
“How many hits? What mega-tonnage?”
“Just one high yield warhead,” she said. “I’m estimating seven to ten megatons. According to surface monitoring data, we’ve got a pall of dust growing over Phobos.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. Dust was a good defense against lasers—but not missiles.
“Move the fleet forward. The Imperials won’t be able to retarget the missiles on them. They’re too far away now. We need every turret we have to shoot down the missiles.”
“The incoming birds are going too fast, Colonel,” she told me. “The fleet won’t be able to lock on—”’
“Move them up and have them take potshots. If we fail to catch an entire wave just once…”
Jasmine nodded in alarm, visualizing what I was suggesting. She relayed my orders to the fleet commanders, and the situation on the screens changed.
The fleet glided forward into a defensive posture. I hoped none of the missiles were programmed to switch targets in their final seconds—but there was little I could do about that possibility now.
“Start the spin!” I said after the next barrage failed to land a single strike. I’d been looking at the hull damage. It wasn’t severe, but it was noticeable. Each strike had left a blackened crater on the surface of my ship. At the deepest, it was no more than a few hundred yards of penetration, but a half dozen more strikes on top of any of these craters would be enough to break through and kill us all. I wanted to make that a hard goal for the enemy to achieve.
Slowly, the big vessel began to spin. We got it moving fast enough to rotate about once every ten minutes and waited. Logically, the missile strikes would now be spread out over ten times the surface area, vastly lessening the odds they could penetrate our outer shell.
As the next wave came in, I dared a grin. The fleet was doing better than expected. Nearly half the missiles were taken out before they reached Phobos.
“See?” I said. “This is working. We’re getting through this storm.”
One would think that by now I would have learned not to tempt the gods of fate. But obviously, I hadn’t.
I knew something was wrong about ten seconds before the seventeenth wave landed. I frowned at the screen.
“What…why are they shifting course? Marvin, are you on this? Adjust your shield—”
That was all I managed to get out before the impacts began.
Wham! Wham! Wham!
Then more fell, and we all gripped our operating stations for dear life. The walls shook, parts of the inner chamber crumbled and fell. It sounded like a distant avalanche in the Alps.
A moment later, Marvin took flight. He shot up out of our command tent, blasting a fresh hole in the writhing nanites. I’d begun to think the whole smart metal tent idea was a loser.
“Where’s he going?” Miklos asked.
“I don’t know and I don’t care. He’s got his orders, and you have yours.”
“What went wrong, Kyle?”
I stared at the input, searching for the answer to her question. The missiles had shifted with Phobos’ spin, steering toward a specific spot. I zoomed in with my fingers, spreading them, and examined the surface features. There was a large single cluster of impacts. They’d gone halfway through our armor in a single strike.
“The old craters,” I shouted. “Their missiles must be programmed to hit spots that are already damaged. They changed course to hit us there.”
I opened an emergency com-link channel to Marvin, without asking permissions from anyone.
“Marvin, set the next shield right over the most damaged, blackened area.”
He didn’t respond, but I didn’t have time to demand an acknowledgement.
“Captain Sarin, stop our damned spinning! Place our most damaged area right in front of the next wave.”
She looked at me with fear in her eyes. “But if they get through this time they’ll rupture the hull.”
“I know, but Marvin’s been catching most of them until now. We can take a few more hits. We know right where they’re going to strike next. Let’s use that.”
“Sir?” she said, looking at me with real fear.
“What is it?”
“Kyle—Marvin’s leaving the ship. He’s in the shaft now.”
I froze. My mind froze. I didn’t know what to think. Was he truly abandoning us? Running out on a sinking ship? Marvin, the biggest steel rat of all time?
“MARVIN!” I shouted into my headset, firing a channel connection to him he couldn’t easily disable. “I know you can hear me. At least set the system to catch these final waves. We know where they’ll all land now. Just set the controls on automatic, if you’re going to run out—”
“Already done, Colonel Riggs,” he transmitted back calmly. “I’ve done all I can do from my station. Accordingly, I’m heading up to the surface to survey the damage personally. I would suggest you do the same—just in case there is another mishap.”
I thought about it. For a split second, I seriously considered running out on my people, just as Marvin had run out on me. But I couldn’t do it, of course.
There was no time for a real evacuation. No time to save more than a few, if any of them. I would have to quietly run so as not to be caught up in the traffic jam of thousands trying to escape through that single shaft.
In the end, there wasn’t time for anything fancy, anyway. I don’t think even Marvin made it all the way out of the shaft and into space before the next wave hit us.