Annihilation (Star Force Series) (46 page)

Jasmine caught up with me on the flight deck. I heard her feet running lightly after me. I turned around, knowing it would be her.

“This is unnecessary, Kyle,” she said.

“I knew you guys had talked about something before I got to the bridge. I also knew you two had to make a concerted effort not to call me back up there when this data came in. It took me a few minutes to figure it out, but I finally did.”

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“Yeah, I do. I screwed the Crustaceans. The Macros are going all out to kill them because I gave them the excuse they needed. I talked them into attacking the Macros. Their extinction is all because of me, and you and Miklos know it as well as I do. The sad thing is that we didn’t even need their help down on Yale. We would have won without them.”

She bit her lower lip and nodded. It was an unusual, vulnerable moment for her. I could see she was conflicted.

I sighed. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, you know? Since Sandra died again—for the last time. I’ve been thinking of all the people who’ve tried to take me out, and why they did it. Remember Barrera? He was a good, solid officer. But he turned on me. He did it because he thought it was the right thing to do for humanity. Maybe he was right.”

“No, he wasn’t,” she said with sudden emotion. “He was full of himself. Crow was too. Always, these smaller, meaner men come to hate you. They don’t understand that you might not do things by the book, but you
win
. In the end, that’s what humanity needs out here in space. A winner.”

“I’m still going.”

She looked defeated, then took a deep breath. “I know.”

I chuckled. She hugged me and we kissed lightly. I felt a dozen eyes on my back, but I didn’t much care right then. Let them talk. Let them say Jasmine really poisoned Sandra, to get to this moment. I couldn’t stop them, because they were going to say crap like that anyway about any woman I touched.

So I kissed her back, more firmly. Then I let her go and looked at her face.

“I thought I might have bruised you,” I said.

“I’m fine,” she said with a smile. “Go kill the machines.”

I nodded, turned, and marched to a bird they had ready for me. I saw Commander Decker standing there beside it.

“Is this your fighter?” I asked in surprise.

“Yeah,” she said. “I figured you already knew how to fly her, so…why make any of my other pilots miss out on the fun?”

“Thanks!” I said, climbing into the cockpit.

“Good luck, Colonel,” she said seriously, looking up at me.

Across the hangar, Jasmine was still lingering at the elevators. Then I frowned down at Decker.

“You’re a survivor,” I said. “That’s why you’re staying here and I’m making this flight, right?”

Decker opened her mouth, then closed it again. She gave me a little shrug.

I laughed, put on my helmet, and began the launch sequence. I really liked the feel of the fighter under my butt. It felt like power, speed and trembling potential.

-39-

I have to admit, I was roaring almost as loudly as the engine itself by the time the tiny fighter fired out of the end of that tube. I felt like it had been too long since I’d flown a ship solo, and this one was the most vibrant piece of machinery I’d ever had the pleasure of piloting.

Now that Commander Decker wasn’t around to temper my judgment, I felt free to fly the bird the way Miklos had intended—violently. I had little choice in the matter, as I was the last one launched. The rest of the squadron was already en route to rendezvous with the first squadrons we’d launched over an hour earlier.

Meeting up with the other fighters wasn’t as hard to do as it may sound. The first wave of fighters only had to coast, while we kept accelerating all the way in. The tricky part would be the deceleration. We were going to have a rough time of it to get our speed down in time to make a single mass and meet the machines as an organized strike force.

Captain Sarin and Miklos had worked hard on the math. We were going to rendezvous only minutes before meeting the enemy. In fact, we’d be inside their gun range when we did mass up. That was cutting it closer than I would have liked, but we didn’t have any choice at this point.

For their part, the machines had so far ignored our fleet entirely. They hadn’t even bothered to ping us. We knew they could see us; we were making no effort at stealth. Moving at flank speed with blazing tails of flame behind every vessel as we accelerated and decelerated, we looked like a swarm of comets, visible with the naked eye from just about anywhere in the star system. Despite all that, they hadn’t targeted us with missiles or sent us so much as a warning message. It was almost disturbing, how focused and cold the enemy could be. It was when they behaved this way that they seemed entirely alien to me. Even the Blues would have said
something
as we charged to war.

The joyride of the fighter lost some of its thrill after the first hour of hard acceleration followed by hard deceleration. My teeth ached in my head, and I could taste blood. It rolled down the back of my throat in a steady trickle, and with every swallow I felt like gagging. I knew the other pilots had to be experiencing similar side effects, but none of them mentioned it. Perhaps it was my presence that kept them from complaining. Fighter jocks were a proud bunch. I could almost hear their thoughts:
If this old man who barely knows how to fly his bird can endure the Gs, then we can damned well do the same.

I had time to think, unfortunately. Time to think about Sandra’s dead face, Marvin’s excited probing of her body and Kerr’s expression as I’d let him die in space. I thought about Jasmine’s kiss, Dr. Swanson’s whispered proposal and a dozen other pleasant things as well. In a way, I was disappointed. I’d partly volunteered to go on this flight so I wouldn’t have time to think about recent events. In that regard, I’d miscalculated.

But as with all things, the journey came to an end. The water-moon we’d dubbed Harvard came into view. It was blue, white and purple. The waters here weren’t pure, I knew, but the beaches were. They’d told me to expect the purple, as there was a lot of
manganese garnet particles in the water of this strange moon. The colorful parts were the shallow areas, or the regions dotted with islands. The spectrometer readings from Fleet had given me the heads up, but really, you couldn’t understand what you were going to see until you saw it with your own eyes.

The purple went in curving streaks, covering the island areas with magenta stripes that extended into the sea until the blue of the water took over. What a lovely world it was. I thought it would be a grand shame to let it be destroyed before a single human had the pleasure of walking one of those warm beaches.

“Sir? Do you read me Colonel?”

I was Jasmine, and by the timing I knew it wasn’t going to be good news.

“Go ahead, Captain,” I said.

“The missile barrage just hit Princeton. The warheads were fusion, as expected. The yields appear to be high.”

I closed my eyes for a second in silent prayer. I couldn’t see the third moon, as it was far from our position on the other side of the gas giant. But I knew those bombs were killing millions.

“Any casualty estimates yet?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“What about the Crustaceans? Are they showing any signs of having a viable defense?”

“Yes sir, that’s partly why I’m calling. They launched a large number of missiles at the approaching Macro ships. They’ve also sent up a flotilla of their own ships.”

“Good!” I said, slamming a hand down on the fighter’s dashboard. A few instruments dimmed in protest, making me wince. The smart metal dash began unfolding itself.

“Unfortunately, the Macro mine-sweeper ship seems to have stopped most of the missiles. We think it operates with some kind of magnetic-pulsing field. In any case, the missiles managed to destroy that ship, but only a few of the cruisers were damaged.”

“What about their own fleet?” I asked. “You said they have ships.”

“We’ve got new data on those ships—they all appear to be transports.”

I frowned, checking my instruments. There wasn’t anything to see there yet on my screens. One weakness of these small, fast ships was their lack of long-range sensors. There just wasn’t room for that kind of equipment aboard.

“We should be meeting up with the first fighter wave soon,” I said. “Where are these Crustacean transports? Maybe we can combine our attack and cover them.”

“I think it’s possible, sir. The transports are all converging on your position—they’re heading to Harvard. I think they’re trying to save that last, untouched world.”

“A brave move,” I said seriously. “They don’t have much, but they’re going to make their play here. Well, we’ll do what we can to help them.”

“As a final point, the enemy ships are now in range—I mean
you
are in their range.”

“Roger that,” I said. “Any sign of incoming fire yet?”

“It might be there, but we can’t see it yet. You’re too far away, about five light-minutes. You’ll know before we do if you’re under fire.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Thanks for the update, Riggs out.”

We’d been communicating with a small ring-resonance unit, which allowed instant communications. It was strange, being able to talk directly to another ship, but having them be so distant their sensors could not yet have picked up what was going on around my position due to the limitations of the speed of light. I imagined that eventually I’d have to invent sensory equipment that could relay its findings instantly using the ring-resonance technology. But that improvement would have to wait for another day—if I should be so lucky as to live to see another dawn.

Now, the excitement of battle finally fell over my mind. This was what I’d been seeking all along by coming out here, I realized: A clear enemy, a clear goal, and a planet that needed saving. No ethical dilemmas were about to present themselves to me out here. Destroying machines was always good.

The first of our fighters was hit about three minutes later. Analysis by my ship-board brainboxes assured me one of my wing-mates had been nailed by incoming point-defense fire.

“Countermeasures!” I ordered. “Everyone spread out. Random pattern on the approach. We’re too far out and too small for them to get a bead on. If we can keep their AI guessing, we can get in close enough for a pass with very few losses.”

It felt like bullshit, but it was good bullshit. The squadrons broke up and began weaving around like drunks. The bolts of light coming at us were invisible until they reached us, but they could be measured as they passed. The machines had finally taken official notice of us.

Two fighters blew up over the next three minutes, and then one more. I looked at the numbers. We were still out of range.

“Let’s put the hammer down, people,” I said. “The enemy have no fighters. They are big, slow targets. Pair off, and make a high speed pass, aiming at their engines.”

All around me, powerful little engines flared in the endless night of space. I followed suit, and we were all plunging forward toward ships we couldn’t even see yet. I checked my instruments every few seconds, but the brainbox had no firing solutions for me yet.

I chose a wingman, and followed him on our first wild pass. We were going too fast, that was obvious to any observer. But we had engaged the enemy before they’d expected it, and I knew I was buying time for the Crustaceans to make whatever play they had up their sleeve. I hoped it would be a good one.

Less than a minute later, the Macro cruisers were in visual range. There were about two hundred of them. They had more cruisers than we had fighters. It was a daunting realization. The main body of my fleet was nearly an hour behind us. I was in this alone with the Crustaceans, about a hundred fighters against two hundred cruisers. For the first time, I felt as if we were doomed.

To their credit, every Star Force pilot followed me into that mess without a complaint, or a moment’s hesitation. My marines often thought of themselves as the braver men, true warriors who fought the enemy as close as the sights of their rifles, but these Fleet pukes were impressing me.

Now that the cruisers were visible, I could see their weapons firing as well. Huge cannons blossomed with round after steady round. All of this pounding went down, down to Harvard itself. None of the big weapons were aimed at us. They were all blasting the helpless planet beneath them.

I bared my teeth, angry with the cold calculation of the enemy. They knew they weren’t likely to hit a fighter with a heavy weapon. Instead, they were going to take out the civilian population below us.

The cruisers swelled in size in my canopy. We were already in the middle of the pass, and I felt all of my insane speed as we drew close. The cruisers looked like they were standing still in comparison.

When my ship finally started firing its primary weapon, it kind of shocked me. The fighters were armed differently than other ships I’d flown. The small hulls didn’t have the size to operate a heavy laser—basically, there wasn’t room for a large enough generator. The only laser aboard was about the size of a marine’s rifle and was useful only for defensive purposes. It couldn’t damage anything bigger than an incoming missile.