Doom Star: Book 05 - Planet Wrecker (40 page)

“I see the troop-pods,” Cassius said, speaking in a calm voice. It was one of his powers to be able to do so at a time like this. “Continue with the laser-turret destruction.”

The
Julius Caesar
rotated slightly, beamed, destroyed, retargeted, rotated again and shot its laser at yet another hapless turret. Cassius thought to himself that it was hard to defeat advanced technology married to Highborn valor and resolution. The collapsium with the ultra-laser…it spelled victory.

“The enemy lasers are retargeting, Your Excellency!”

Cassius shifted in his shell. He’d hoped the cyborgs weren’t that smart or quick. All he needed was another ten minutes to slag every enemy turret in sight. He’d deal later with the asteroids hiding behind the debris-cluster. The
Genghis Khan
and the
Gustavus Adolphus
had remained well behind the
Julius Caesar
for a reason. It was a calculated risk bringing those Doom Stars so near the enemy. Their armor could not long sustain the enemy lasers at this range. If they were to defend themselves, they would need to pump out prismatic crystals and heavy lead-additive gels. But if they did that, they would be unable to fire their lasers, which he needed in order to finish the fight. The cyborgs might well cripple the
Julius Caesar
otherwise.

Tilting his head, studying the data, Cassius knew that this was the moment of decision. This is what made a commander into a legend or turned him into a loser. The weight of the decision pressed upon Cassius as the squeeze to his heart made his wide face pale. Forty-three percent of the enemy laser-turrets had already been destroyed. Did he gamble with the heart of Highborn power? Every second he hesitated was fraught with risk. He parted his lips to issue the order to spray the protective clouds.

“No,” he whispered.

This was the fatal moment of time, of the Solar System. The asteroids represented Earth’s death. Earth was the great industrial basin. With it and the Sun-Works Factory, the Highborn could out-produce the cyborgs. Without Earth, it became a grim possibility that the cyborgs would out-build them. The cyborgs would then likely send a vast stream of material in a deadly war of attrition the Highborn couldn’t win.

The decision tested him. Cassius knew that. Bold words were meaningless now. It was just his naked soul riding on the outcome of battle.

With effort, he tore his mind from the possibilities and forced himself to take a deep breath. Then he exhaled as hard as he could, expelling the air from his lungs. This time, he sucked air so oxygen seeped to the farthest reaches of his tissues, and he held his breath.

“I am Grand Admiral Cassius of the Highborn,” he whispered, letting the breath go. Color returned to his cheeks. Once more, he studied the holoimages, wondering what the next few minutes would bring.

“Here they come!” shouted Nadia.

Marten stood behind her. He wore his armored vacc-suit. Behind him, the dome was packed with space marines in theirs suits gripping weaponry.

The mass-meter of Nadia’s board indicated shuttle-sized vessels. Five had made it through the blizzard of spewing lasers and radioactive death to reach Asteroid E. Five cyborg troop-pods!

“They’re heading straight for us,” Nadia said.

Marten saw them on her board, oval-shaped vessels coming nearer and nearer.

Nadia twisted around and looked up at Marten. “If those five troop-pods are full of cyborgs, we’re badly outnumbered.”

“I know,” Marten whispered, as he hefted his gyroc rifle. They were going to face more cyborgs. There was no way, by no stretch of the imagination and hard fighting, that his space marines could defeat five troop-pods of cyborgs. The trick, he’d learned long ago, was to change the rules. A barehanded man facing a cyborg had no chance. A man toting a gun versus a carbine-carrying cyborg would lose almost every time, but there was a possibility of winning. A man encased in a tank against a tank-driving cyborg would up his odds tenfold.

“Now,” Marten whispered. “Send it now.”

On the board, the five troop-pods began their approach to landing. They drifted over the crater and neared the three domes. All the asteroid’s laser-turrets were destroyed. Marten might have sent out men with Cognitive missiles, but the troop-pods had weaponry to take out such a force.

Nadia pressed a switch on her board. It sent a weak signal, a three-sequence pulse.

Marten turned to the space marines. “This is it, boys. It is do or die time again.” He raised the gyroc rifle over his head. “Death to the cyborgs.”

Metallic sounds were made as the space marines raised their gyrocs and IMLs. Then they roared as one,” Death to the cyborgs!” Afterward, visors clicked shut and armored suits clanged as the men headed for the airlocks.

Osadar Di received the three-pulse signal. She sat at the controls of the least damaged patrol boat. The Jovian spacecraft had never been designed as a space-marine shuttle. That was a secondary purpose. The patrol boats were space-attack craft. Jovian military theory called for them to fight in three-boat formations.

When Nadia had first picked up the approaching troop-pods on her sensors, Marten had made a quick decision. Osadar and a few others had re-crossed the crater-plain and returned to the patrol boats. The men had scourged the more damaged boats for the remaining cannon shells and missiles. These they’d loaded into the good boat.

“Strap in,” Osadar said. Long ago, in her days as a human, she’d trained as a Jovian fighter pilot. Now she was a fighter pilot again, ready to fly her most important mission.

“Ready?” she asked the men.

They gave her the thumbs-up sign, one instituted by Marten Kluge.

Osadar flipped switches. The engine roared into life. She revved it, and with a lurch, she lifted off the lunar-like surface.

Marten peered around the edge of the dome at the troop-pods floating down for a landing. The stars glittered behind them. The oval-shaped craft had stubby anti-personnel guns along the sides. If needed, those guns would fire masses of exploding pellets. The pods no longer floated, but moved down in controlled, jerky bursts. Assaulting a small asteroid like this with its almost nonexistent gravity was delicate work. Unfortunately, the cyborg pilots seemed up to the task.

Encased in his armored vacc-suit, Marten desperately wanted to scratch his nose. Why had no one ever designed a nose or face-scratching suit? He twitched his nose as he leaned against the dome and watched the troop-pods. They had skids on the bottom of the oval craft. As he waited, he wondered if the cyborgs cared that ultimately they were on a suicide mission. Was there some way to break cyborg programming, the way Osadar had broken hers? That seemed like the most cost-effective way to defeat the cyborgs, turning their soldiers the way cyborgs turned ordinary people into aliens.

A space marine stepped past Marten and slid his Cognitive missile around the dome, aiming up at the nearest troop-pod.

“What are you doing?” Marten said, grabbing the missile-tip and yanking it down. “You might accidentally achieve lock-on. That will ping on a troop-pod’s sensors and alert the cyborgs.”

The space marine backed farther behind the dome.

The five troop-pods came down in a strict formation. They were almost to the surface, with stardust beginning to swirl upward in a cloud. The top of the cloud began to hide them.

“There,” Omi said.

Hearing that through his headphones, Marten swiveled around. He followed Omi’s pointing finger. Low on the horizon flashed movement. In a second, a Jovian patrol boat reached the crater-lip. It zoomed upward and swooped down on the five troop-pods easing into the billowing cloud.

“She’s firing!” Omi shouted.

It looked like sparks on the patrol boat’s wings. Bigger blooms were the ignition of missiles.

One troop-pod began to drift. Another blossomed in an explosion, showering metal and machine parts. Something flashed past Marten and plowed into the soil, sending up a puff of stardust. On the third and fourth troop-pods, the stubby anti-personnel tubes moved upward and pellets sprayed in shotgun-like blasts. But Osadar had already passed the pods and began a long banking maneuver so she could come back at them. As that occurred, hatches opened on the troop-pods. One after another, cyborgs jumped, and thruster-packs expelled hydrogen-spray as they began to descend individually.

This was the most vulnerable moment in a space-landing assault. It’s what Marten had hoped would occur.

“Kill them!” he shouted.

Space marines hurried past him. More, he knew, came around from the other side of the dome. Jovians sank onto one knee and raised their infantry missile launchers. Others went prone. A few stood. In moments, a flock of Cognitives zoomed at the remaining troop-pods and at individually exposed cyborgs. Marten knelt, raised his gyroc and sent up one rocket-shell after another. He fired, reloaded and continued firing. Nearby, Omi did the same thing.

In the patrol boat, Osadar passed again, destroying the last functional troop-pod and dozens of thruster-pack-spewing cyborgs. Those cyborgs used laser-carbines. But as they fired, their unattended thruster-packs often took them in the wrong direction. It was far from a turkey-shoot. Cyborgs had uncanny reflexes and abilities. But with surprise and the patrol boat, the odds now lay with the Jovians.

“It looks like we’re going to hold our asteroid,” Omi said as he reloaded.

Marten grunted, even as his rifle pinged with lock-on. On his HUD, a dot centered on a red silhouette of a floating cyborg. Marten fired an APEX shell. The hardened round struck the cyborg and exploded, killing the target.

“What’s troubling you?” asked Omi.

Marten looked over at his friend. He’d been watching the dead cyborg drift into space. “
We’re
winning,” he said. “But how are the others doing?”

The space battle raged as the
Julius Caesar
bored into the asteroids. Behind it by over one thousand kilometers, the
Genghis Khan
and
Gustavus Adolphus
followed.

From his command shell, Grand Admiral Cassius watched the nearest debris-cluster. He’d given orders so the
Julius Caesar
continued to use the cluster as a shield from the last cyborg asteroids. A grim thought kept beating in his brain, however. He wanted to take his ship past the debris-cluster to entice the cyborgs to turn all their beams onto the
Julius Caesar
. He wasn’t sure how much longer the
Gustavus Adolphus
could survive the laser pounding. He had to kill the enemy lasers before they gravely injured a Doom Star.

By what quirk fate had chosen the
Gustavus
instead of the
Genghis Khan
Cassius had no idea. Cyborg lasers continued to beam en masse against the targeted Doom Star.

“He’s pumping crystals,” Sulla said.

Cassius held himself rock-still. This was a matter of timing now. Admiral Octavian had just disobeyed a direct order. He’d better succeed.

“His laser has gone offline,” said Sulla.

“Why did he do that?” said Cassius, asking himself the question more than desiring an answer from others.

“There’s an incoming message,” Sulla said.

Cassius ignored it as he studied the situation. Doom Stars could pump crystals and gels at a fantastic rate. Ports had opened on the
Gustavus Adolphus
as it spewed. The growing crystal-cloud blocked Octavian’s laser against the still-firing asteroid turrets.

“I hope you’ve chosen correctly,” Cassius whispered. It was a Highborn’s prerogative to disregard orders. But if the officer chose poorly, it meant disgrace and likely death by hanging. In Octavian’s place, Cassius would have continued to attack instead of choosing to defend and let others do his fighting for him.

Cyborg lasers chewed through the growing cloud. The
Julius Caesar
and
Genghis Khan
sought out the enemy beam turrets, destroying them as fast as they could. Seconds turned into minutes as time ticked by.

Sulla’s oily-bright face turned toward him. “Your Excellency!”

“I see it,” Cassius whispered.

Three lasers cut a hole in the prismatic-crystal cloud. Another beamed and sliced through the
Gustavus Adolphus’s
nearly nonexistent composite armor. It must have been the perfect spot, or the worst. The reflex shielding behind didn’t hold, and the cyborg laser remained on target for far too long. The deadly laser—the terrible offending beam—burned through a shuttle bay. It continued to drill and smashed through a coolant tank, living quarters, medical facilities, the edge of a coil-chamber and into the meld reactor to the fusion core. That started explosions, and those explosions wrecked vital inner components of the ship. Highborn died in mobs from shrapnel, heat and meld-poisoning and soon from vacuum-exposure.

“Destroy that laser!” Cassius shouted.

“Retargeting,” said Sulla, his big hands roving over his board.

Time ticked by, and growing explosions added to the wounding of the
Gustavus Adolphus
. Big shuttle-bay doors opened. One after another in a stream, shuttles accelerated out of the stricken warship. Meanwhile, the ultra-lasers of the two sound Doom Stars hunted and destroyed the final enemy laser turrets.