The Catalyst

-Chapter 24-


I wanted to pass out in a bunk, but I didn’t have time to rest. I dug out a stim injector and loaded it. After staring at it for about ten seconds, I fired it into my neck, took a deep breath and waited. Within thirty seconds I could feel my heart pounding harder. I hated that feeling.
Moving at a bouncing trot in the low gravity field of the ship, I made my way to the breach and then crawled over the hull to the factories. We were still accelerating, but not at emergency flank speed. Our stalker was following us, but he’d slowed down after the smacking we’d given him. This didn’t really make me feel better, however. It was like being shadowed by a hungry bear in the wilderness. You knew he was waiting for a moment of weakness to strike.
I had to get the factories churning out the correct equipment now to counter the Macros when the next clash came. I didn’t know how long I had, or what would work best, but I had to take a stab at it. The incoming missiles were my number one concern. We’d rigged up a couple of point-defense laser cannons on the aft hull of Jolly Rodger, but the turrets weren’t going to stop sixteen ballistic missiles. They didn’t have the range, in fact, to stop even one of them if the missiles came in at a great enough relative velocity. It took about a second for the laser turrets to sense, aim and fire at an incoming missile. That sounded pretty good, but only if the incoming weapon gave you that second to react. If a missile was traveling at 100,000 miles an hour faster than we were, for example, it would move from being out of range to slamming into our hull in less than one second. It wouldn’t matter how many laser turrets I had at that point, none of them would fire in time to save us, not even if I built a hundred of them. That meant my turrets were an inadequate defense.
I sat in the first factory unit I came to and tried to think clearly. There were many options for production. Right now, they were churning mines, which was a safe play. We’d gone through all the Macro corpses as materials by now and were feeding them deck plates and damaged portions of the ship we didn’t need. It was odd, cannibalizing one’s own ship for weapons materials—but that was how warfare worked when using nanotech.
I was nearly done building mines, I’d decided. I had about half as many as I did last time, and that would be enough to lay a trap at the next ring…if I got that far. I needed something else now, however.  A defensive weapon to stop those missiles. They were going to catch us before we made the next ring. We were crossing the Helios system to the second ring on more or less a straight path. We’d come out fairly near the gigantic red sun, but had to move out a good distance to get to the second ring which was closer to the orbit of Helios itself. I had to wonder again what the Worms thought of this battle going on in their own star system. I hoped if they got involved and took a shot at one of us they chose the right one.
I considered attempting to contact the Worms. We’d made a few attempts before, of course, but we’d never gotten through. I wasn’t surprised. I could barely manage a conversation with the Centaurs, and they were much closer in nature to humans than giant, invertebrate, dirt-eating Worms. If you don’t believe me, try feeding a goat, then try feeding an earthworm from your backyard. I bet I can predict which one will follow you home that night.
My mind whirled with stimulants and possibilities. Strangely, I still felt sleepy. I wondered if too many stims could knock a man out. Either that, or cause his heart to explode.
I came to another conclusion soon. I sensed the nanites were objecting already, filtering the drug out of my blood. My sweat smelled like evaporating hospital chemicals as they flushed my system. I decided not to take another stim dose. Maybe the nanites knew something I didn’t.
The airlock started pumping then. I looked up expectantly. For a horrible second, I expected Sandra to walk in. She often did when she knew I was overworking myself alone in a spot like this. I had to remind myself she was still a turnip in a steel box.
I grabbed up my com-link angrily. At least I could fix one problem. I got Kwon on the link. I instructed him to widen the breach and bring down all the bricks into the chambers below decks, being careful not to disrupt the inertial dampeners. We could build a nice hold right under the breach we’d dug into the cruiser like whale’s blowhole. Living on the exterior hull was dangerous and now we finally had enough time to do something about it. Even if the missiles were going to come and knock us out, it would be a day or two before the caught up.
When I looked up the next time, the person who’d come through the airlock was up against the wall beside me. It was Gorski. He’d never been able to keep away from me when I was programming the machines. He reminded me of some graduate student nerd-groupies I’d known back at the University.
Right now however, I was more interested in what he had in his hand. I saw two squeeze bottles of amber liquid.
“Is that…?” I asked.
“Yep,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone. I found them in one of the salvaged bricks. As far as I know, these are the last two beers in the expedition.”
I seriously considered commandeering them both, but decided that would be too greedy. We popped open one each and fired suds into our mouths. The beer was cool, rather than cold, and drinking it in squirts from a plastic bottle took some of the fun out of it. But it was still wonderful. By the time I’d finished mine, I felt much better than I had after the stims.
“I’ve got an idea, Colonel,” Gorski said. “Want to hear it?”
“Does it involve more beer?”
“Only if it lets us make it home.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“Been thinking about the missiles. We have to stop them, obviously. But I don’t think gun systems are the way to go. They are too iffy. I would suggest we fire drones at them instead.”
“Counter missiles?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But smart ones. Think about them as tiny little spaceships. Complete systems, with one purpose.”
I sat up, getting into the idea now.
“Right,” I said. “Mini-Nano ships. That should be easy, as nanites are good at doing things on a small scale. With the combined kinetic energy of two moving bodies, it should be easy to destroy the missiles with any hit.”
“Yes, the faster they are moving relative to the bodies we throw at them the greater the energy they would release upon contact.”
I nodded, liking the idea more and more. In space, you essentially have infinite visibility. With no atmosphere to obscure a jet flare, and with a cold, dark backdrop, you could see an engine firing from across a star system. The missiles had to show us where they were when they maneuvered. They could not hide.
“What about catching up to them?” I asked.
“We don’t have to. They are coming to us. The mini-drones would only need enough propulsion to get into the path of the missiles and make sure the two collide.”
“We’ll have to aim extremely well,” I said, thinking of anti-ballistic missile problems. It was like trying to hit a bullet with another bullet.
“Not as well as all that,” Gorski argued. “The systems could have their own sensor arrays and propulsion systems. They can adjust their course up to the last few miles.”
I stared at him, liking his idea. “How many of these do you think we would need?”
Gorski shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I would start out with sixteen of them.”
I had to agree with his logic. Sixteen mini-drones and only two factories…I didn’t have any time to waste. Together, we ordered the factories to shut down the production of magnetic mines and began reprogramming them.