Battle Cruiser (38 page)

“Never mind, Ensign. Helm, hard to starboard. Put our forward shield between us and those missiles. Activate all our point-defense cannons, and override their friend-or-foe programming!”

The rainstorm of pellets changed pitch even as we wheeled to face the new threat. The pellets became a deadly hailstorm. I knew they were chewing into our armor and damaging our exterior systems.

But I didn’t know what else to do.

-53-

“Our point-defense systems are firing!” Yamada said.

Her statement was unnecessary. We could all feel the vibration of the small guns hammering at the incoming missiles.

I activated the ship-wide address system with my implant.

“All hands, this is the captain speaking. Prepare for impact. All damage crews be ready to report to the forward sections.”

Twenty seconds crawled by. At the last moment, the missile contacts merged with our ship. A moment after that, the deck heaved below our feet.

Bridge power cut out and emergency power took over. Only the most critical systems were active.

Worse, the inertial dampeners had died somehow. I could feel a sickening sensation as my stomach was pulled in two directions at once.

“Engine one, out!” Yamada shouted.

“We’re in a flat spin, Captain,” Durris complained. He was holding onto his console for dear life.

The wisdom of our spinning gyroscopic seats was now clear. Durris, Zye and myself were being thrown around, but we weren’t being dashed onto the deck.

“Helm, get this spin under control. Damage report, Yamada.”

“The impact of the missiles buckled the forward shield,” she said. “I think Engine One was knocked out by pellets, but it’s hard to be sure. We’re getting hammered, sir.”

“I’m well aware of that. Durris, get us straightened out or I’m giving the helm to Zye.”

“Yes sir,” he grunted uncomfortably.

Over the next thirty seconds, he managed to get our bow aimed at the enemy formation again. The forward shield was blinking red, but at least it was aiming in the direction of incoming fire.

“Have we got any primary cannons left?” I asked Zye.

“Yes Captain. One bank.”

“Well, why aren’t they firing?”

“They couldn’t lock on while we were spinning…we’re back in position.”

I felt that now-familiar bucking that indicated a heavy weapons stream was on its way to the enemy. It made me feel good. As long as we still had effective armament, we weren’t out of this fight.

“Who the hell hit us in the butt with our own missiles?” Yamada demanded. “That’s what I want to know.”

“I want an answer to that as well,” I said.

Grimly, I ordered the lieutenant Durris had replaced himself with at the communications boards to connect me with CENTCOM. They were going to hear directly from me.

When I finally established contact, however, it wasn’t with Admiral Cunningham. Instead, when I activated my implants, it was Halsey’s face that stared at me.

“Admiral Halsey,” I said. “Are you aware that, in the middle of a critical battle, Luna launched missiles at my ship?”

“Yes, Captain Sparhawk,” he said, gritting his teeth. “I…” he lifted a hand and looked at it. Blood coated his fingers.

It was then that I noticed he was injured and standing oddly. He’d been shot or cut in the side. But he was still on his feet.

“Sparhawk,” he said. “Keep flying that ship. I’ve been watching you handle her like a pro. I’m very impressed.”

I frowned in confusion. “You’re injured, Halsey,” I said. “What’s going on? Can I speak with Admiral Cunningham?”

“No, you can’t. She’s dead.”

“Dead? When? How?”

“That depends on your point of view. I would hazard to guess that the real Admiral Cunningham died a year or so ago. She was a Stroj, Captain. An infiltrator. I should have suspected it. She’s made countless poor decisions over the last year.”

I stared at him in disbelief. “So, she put me in command of this ship to screw Star Guard? Is that what you’re saying?”

Halsey nodded. “Yes, I believe so. She thought a junior officer—well, she was a Stroj. Who knows what she thought? About twenty minutes ago, after it was discovered that Luna had launched missiles in your direction, she broke cover. Two of her closest staffers were Stroj, too. Taranto is dead. So are seven other officers here at CENTCOM. We finally took them down, but it wasn’t easy.”

I swallowed hard. I’d counted on Admiral Cunningham’s support. It was difficult to accept that she’d helped me gain command of
Defiant
because she thought such a move was the worst possible one Earth could make. It was, in fact, humiliating.

“Sparhawk,” Halsey said, “I think we both owe each other an apology. I underestimated you, and you probably thought I was some kind of monster hell-bent on derailing your career. Let me assure you, all I wanted was to put the best man we had in command of that ship.”

“I see.”

“Yes, you’re right. That means I thought you were a poor choice. I was wrong. Keep fighting. Report back to us when you can. Halsey out.”

I found myself back in my chair, on the bridge of
Defiant
. I was stunned. Cunningham had been the Stroj? I’d felt an inkling, a faint suspicion, that it could be Halsey, but I’d never suspected…

“Sir?” Yamada said. “Sir, the enemy is changing formation again. They’re going into a wedge formation, and they’re increasing speed.”

Taking a deep breath, I forced all my looming self-doubts away. “Increasing speed? On what course?”

“Directly toward us, sir.”

“How many ships do they have left?”

“One hundred sixty-two now,” Yamada said. “About fifteen percent of what they started with.”

I shook my head. “Why don’t they break off? They can’t win now. Surely, they can see that.”

Zye shook her head. “No, they can’t,” she said, “and it wouldn’t matter if they could. The Stroj never give up. They never surrender, and they very rarely run from battle.”

“Cease fire. Let’s contact them. Open a channel, Durris.”

After a few seconds passed, the Stroj I knew as Kaur appeared on our screen.

“What is the purpose of this communication?” it asked.

“Admiral Kaur,” I said, “I believe this battle is over. You have lost, sir. Surrender, and you will be treated well.”

Kaur looked around our bridge again. Our faces were haggard. There were signs of damage, but he couldn’t help but notice we were still very much in command of our vessel and still in this fight.

“Stroj do not surrender,” it said. The screen went blank.

I stared at it wonderingly. “What are they doing now?”

“They’re still speeding up, as I said. They’re getting tighter, converging…Sir, I think they mean to ram us.”

“Time until impact?”

“Eighteen minutes.”

“Eighteen minutes? They’ll never make it to us.”

“Your orders, sir?”

For a time I sat there quietly, staring at the screen. The Stroj were colonists, after all. They were creatures that were partly human, or who had once been human. To order the deaths of a thousand Stroj…

“Seventeen minutes, sir.”

“Destroy them,” I said, in a voice that seemed not to be my own. “Destroy them all.”

Defiant’s
cannons began firing again.

Six minutes later, the last Stroj ship was annihilated.

* * *

The return journey to Earth was a slow one in comparison. To give all the injured a chance to heal, I ordered that we proceed with no more than half a G in applied acceleration.

The multi-armed repair-bots were ubiquitous, but I noted some of them were damaged. I asked Zye about it when she returned to duty on the second day. She’d been lying in medical, fuming, since I’d relieved her at the end of the battle.

“The bots don’t repair themselves,” she said, her tone indicating I was a half-wit for asking.

“Why not?”

“Because they weren’t programmed to do so.”

“You can’t change their programming?” I asked.

“The repair bots were purchased from the Stroj before war broke out. Only they can reprogram them.”

Thinking about that, I wondered if the “trade-good” known as a repair-bot was perhaps a form of trick played upon the Betas. Maybe the Stroj had planned to make the Betas reliant on these robots. Then, when they broke down, they could refuse to repair them.

I decided not to reveal my thoughts on the matter to Zye. She would only think I didn’t understand the way of things, or worse, she might take offense. After all, the implication was the Betas weren’t too smart in their dealings with the extremely dangerous Stroj.

When we docked at last at Araminta Station everyone aboard was worn out and happy to be home. There was something about a combat mission that was utterly unlike a dull patrol cruise through local space. After facing the unknown and possible death, all the energy had drained from my crew.

The first order of business at the station was to hold services. Many had died. My crew had numbered two hundred and sixty-five when we left home. Thirty-nine had not returned.

As the captain, I found myself in the unaccustomed position of officiating over their funerals. Many prominent guardsmen came to the ceremony, which was held on the uppermost level of the docking wheel.

When Admiral Halsey himself arrived, I thought perhaps he’d take over the speeching—but that didn’t happen. Instead, he insisted on allowing me to say whatever words of comfort came to my mind to the families and crewmembers that had gathered.

I chose a traditional route. I quoted Lincoln, Samos and Tacitus. The group listened closely, and when we were done, the bodies were draped in the midnight-blue flags of Star Guard and shot into space. Their orbits would decay within hours, and the bodies would burn up in the troposphere. It was a tradition that was two centuries old, and predated the Cataclysm itself.

Asked to make closing remarks, I took a deep breath and stepped to the lectern again.

That was when I saw a new group come into the echoing hold. They were civilians, surrounded by wary agents. Three people in the center of the group caught my attention, and they froze my heart and mind briefly.

Lady Astra the Younger moved like a radiant queen at the left of the trio. I was captivated by her eyes, her smile and the beams cast off by the jewels in her hair.

Forcing my gaze from her person, I was gratified further to note that my father was riding a drone, which ghosted over the floor making a whispering sound. At my father’s side was my mother. Both of them nodded to me. There was pride in their eyes, I thought. I could not recall having seen that emotion on their faces before.

Turning back to the waiting crowd, I began to speak.

“Today we honor our fallen. It’s only natural to suffer grief at such a moment, but I would argue that none of us here should lament the sacrifice of these guardsmen. Each of my crewmembers who died in space saved millions of lives. Think upon the significance of that.

“Why, you may ask, did this day have to come? Why did our colonists, the long-lost children of Earth, return to attack us? I would argue that they’re no longer the same people. At least, not all of them. Time, technology, and countless dark desperate days have transformed them. They’ve descended into a new form of savagery.”

The group stared at me. Some, particularly the admirals, were taken aback. Perhaps they’d thought I would stick to a mundane script praising the Guard, the constitution, and Earth in general. I felt I’d done enough of that during the eulogy.

“People of Earth, we must wake up,” I said. “Today was a close call, and it will not be the last. We must rebuild our defenses so the light that is Earth never again comes so close to being extinguished. As the Romans said, ‘
si vis pacem, para bellum’
which translates to: if you want peace, you must prepare for war.”

I concluded my speech, and the gathering broke up into small knots. As soon as I was able, I moved to the trio at the back of the chamber.

My mother’s face was hard, but she hugged me. “I’m glad you lived, my son,” she said.

“And I’m glad my father still breathes!” I said, falling to one knee beside him.

His medical drone buzzed as he drifted closer.

“William,” he said in a wheezy voice, “that was a fine speech—even if it was a refutation of my entire career.”

“It wasn’t meant to be, father,” I said. “It was spoken in earnest.”

He put out a trembling hand and clasped mine.

“These are difficult times,” he said. “A war has been thrust upon us. There are times when peaceful behavior will not save the lamb from the lion. I think this is such a day. It will rip my party to pieces, but I’m going to push for the budget you and the rest of Star Guard must have.”

A smile lit my face. My mother still looked tense, but I was rejoicing inside. I had my father convinced. It was a day I’d never thought would come.

“Now,” my father said, “give your attention to the member of this party who interests you most. Hell, she’s even got my eye and I’m half dead.”

My mother slapped him lightly on the shoulder and urged the drone into a buzzing retreat.

I approached Lady Astra. My face was beaming—but I saw in her a sadness. A pain unspoken.