Nebula (23 page)

“OK,” Brad said. “Let’s get Gladys in here and then get those bodies and robots out of sight. We don’t know if the battle group will send an advance ship to inspect the area. I don’t want anything to look suspicious. Put the aliens into their bunker. You can probably fit most of the robots in there too. The rest can go into the storage facility. Close all the doors. Make everything look like the aliens and robots went into their ships as ordered.”

Nigel started on the cleanup work while Doug and Judith carried Gladys back to the base. Then, once Gladys was inside, they came back out to help Nigel. The aliens were easy to move. They were very small and light, especially in the reduced gravity of Mars, and by the time Doug and Judith returned, Nigel had already taken two of them into the alien bunker. They quickly disposed of the other four and then started work on the robots. That was a bit harder since the robots were heavier and more bulky, but Harry directed Robby, Igor and the three workers to help them. Within a few minutes, the area was cleared of the bodies and debris from the ambush.

Now that this phase was completed, the next job was to load the pathogens onto one of the robot ships and have Robby and the two old model workers fly it as quickly as possible to the alien fleet. But Brad wanted Nigel and Mikio to inspect the containers to make sure that they were still in good condition. It wasn’t clear what they could do if something was wrong with them, but he wanted to check anyway.

“I can check them myself,” Nigel radioed back when he got the order from Brad. “There’s no need for Mikio to suit up.”

“OK, but be quick about it. I want to get that shipment off as soon as possible.”

Nigel did a quick inspection. He went into the storage facility, opened the storage cabinet, and looked at each of the pathogen containers. Everything looked good. He then took a small shaving from one of them and placed it on a small piece of specially treated cloth that he took out from one of his suit pockets. He’d been prepared to do this test before even suiting up since he too wanted to be sure that the composite material and its special chemical-biological matrix were unchanged. The cloth turned the proper color of red within seconds of touching the shaving, so he knew that everything was as it should be, and he closed the cabinet back up and told Brad that they were good to go.

Harry was in charge of this next part of the operation. He gave directions to Robby and the two workers and monitored them as they loaded the pathogens onto the ship. It took only five minutes for the containers to be moved from the storage unit to the robot ship. The workers were able to take the entire cabinet instead of taking the containers one at a time. It had been constructed to hold the containers during transit, as Harry had noticed when he made his first visit to Mars with Milo and Brad. The workers secured the cabinet in a cargo area in the ship.

Then Harry verified that the flight plan from the alien fleet’s earlier message was properly stored in the robots’ memories and that they understood it. He directed them to follow those orders and to travel at maximum speed and then to obey the commands from the aliens at that end. He also inserted an override code that he could use later to take control away from any aliens if that was necessary. Since the three robots would be a full light day away, he doubted that this would be useful, but it didn’t hurt anything and was an insurance policy against something that might bring them in close proximity again.

Robby and the two workers then boarded the ship, closed all the hatches, and prepared for departure. Once they were underway, there was almost no chance that the aliens would be aware of anything wrong until after they reached the fleet and unloaded the containers. Within a few hours, it would be too late for them to do anything to prevent the pathogens from infecting all the places where the containers went. Within a day, the plague would probably spread to at least 90% of the ships in the fleet since all of them were linked together and shared the same circulating air supply. They never did consider the spread of airborne pathogens when they designed this efficient way to deliver life support when the fleet was docked. Now their systems would deliver death as well. At least that was the plan.

Harry gave the final command for the robots to take off. The ship rose slowly to about three hundred meters and then accelerated quickly in the direction of the enemy fleet. It disappeared from view in less than two seconds and was out of sensor range in about two minutes. The pathogens were on their way.

Now the task for the team was to get Gladys back to Nebula and to prepare to deal with the battle group, especially that battleship and heavy cruiser. Nebula’s fighters might be able to handle the light cruisers, and they were even matches with the alien fighters, but the heavier ships were a concern. They had to be eliminated as soon as they arrived, and that called for another ambush, to get them before they had a chance to shoot back. Fighting dirty definitely had its advantages, hopefully enough advantage to overcome the “David versus Goliath” mismatch.

Milo arrived less than nine minutes after Brad sent the message. He piloted one of the latest model fighters and was accompanied by a large utility ship. Haverford and several soldiers were in Milo’s fighter and the medical team was in the other ship. They had two surgeons and two nurses and all the medical equipment that they would need until they reached the hospital at Nebula Ops.

The two ships landed near the alien fighter and the remaining robot ship. Haverford, Milo, and the four medical personnel were already suited up and went immediately to the AFO bunker. One surgeon and one nurse went through the airlock first, followed by the second surgeon and nurse. Haverford and Milo followed last, and by the time that they got through the second door, Gladys was already getting emergency surgery.

“We should be able to save the arm,” the head surgeon reported, mainly to Gladys, but clearly for all to hear. “It’s a pretty bad wound, but your friends did a good job, especially keeping the arm warm enough and under enough air pressure while you were still out there. There’s quite a bit of bone and muscle damage, but the remarkable thing is how little damage there was to any of the nerves.”

“Will I be able to play the violin?” Gladys said, with a grimace that was about all she could manage in the way of a smile.

“That’s an old one,” the surgeon replied, and everyone chuckled. It was good to see that Gladys was handling things well, especially given that she was a chemist and not a soldier. “You should be almost as good as new. I expect that there’ll be some numbness in your hand and fingers, at least for a while. But the nerves look like they’re in pretty good shape, and we have ways to deal with minor damage that they may have sustained. The main thing is that the shoulder and arm are going to be OK. It may take a few months, but you’ll be back with your chemistry set and whatever else you want to do. But I think that you’re going to miss the rest of this war.”

“She already did her part,” Brad said to the surgeon, as he walked over to Gladys and gave her a thumbs-up. “Now it’s up to the rest of us to follow up.” He patted Gladys on her good shoulder. “You take care of yourself, and we’ll see you back at the ranch.”

Then Brad went over to Haverford and Milo, and he motioned to Nigel, Doug, Judith, Mikio, and Ludmila to follow them as they went into the conference room, off to the side of the main ops center where Yuri and Harry were still connected to Igor and the remaining worker robot. Brad went over to them and told them to hang up the headsets for now and join the others. This action was concluded, and it was time to plan and coordinate for the next action, likely to come within the next few hours.

“Our first problem is the battle group that’s going to get here in a few hours,” Haverford began, as they all gathered around the conference table. “I think that our new class of fighters is almost a match for the light cruisers, but we’ll need to take out the battleship and the heavy cruiser before they have a chance to react. Here’s what I plan to do.”

Haverford then outlined the battle plan. It was straightforward and started with the alien fighter, piloted by Milo, waiting in a position that the aliens expected and with Igor piloting the robot ship, also on station as the aliens would expect. When the battle group arrived and approached Mars, the plasma cannon that the aliens had erected would fire at the battleship and hopefully destroy it or at least take it out of action. Milo’s alien fighter would have to hit the heavy cruiser at the same time.

“If Judith is right about the weapon on it being a very high power EMP cannon, it might be able to fry all the electronics in the cruiser and any other ships nearby. Since it was intended to disable most electronic systems world-wide from over a hundred thousand kilometers away, it should be able to penetrate the alien ships’ defensive shields and take down most of their systems at the range that it would be when it fired on them. That’s what you’ll need to do, Milo. If possible, you would attack with the fighter’s other weapons at the same time as you fire the EMP cannon. I assume that they’re more or less the same as ours, so they should be pretty effective against the light cruisers and fighters at these ranges. But you’ll only get a chance to fire one or two bursts before you’ll need to get out of there. You need to figure that they’ll return fire within less than ten or twenty seconds, even if they’re taken completely by surprise.”

“There are a few problems here,” Judith replied. “First off, we don’t know if I’m right about that weapon yet. I need to go out there and try to figure out exactly what it does and how to use it. Then there’s the problem that we haven’t even been on the fighter yet, so we have no idea of how to operate anything on it. We don’t even know if we’ll be able to learn to fly the damned thing before they arrive. Your whole plan is based on a lot of assumptions, and we know where that got us already.”

“That’s why we need to move fast and figure all these things out. You should start on that now. I told Sgt. Olivetti and Sgt. Morgan, two of my best tactical system operators, to go into the ship with you and help however they can. They’ll be the ones to use the systems, so they need to have as much time as possible to get familiar with them. Milo will go with you too so he can look at the flight controls. He’s pretty familiar with the controls from the alien ship that crashed in Roswell, and he’s even flown the reconstructed model, so we’re hoping that this one isn’t too different.”

“That’s a good idea, Judith,” Brad concurred. “Suit up and see what you can do. We’re going to need that fighter and its big gun.”

“OK,” Haverford said as he resumed describing his proposed course of action. “When we make these first strikes, the element of surprise should even the odds a bit. The aliens will probably try to go after the plasma cannon and Milo’s fighter, but it will take them some time to react. The cannon might be able to get off a second shot, but it’s a sitting duck once the enemy starts to take action. So I want our artillerymen to be able to control it remotely, from as far away as possible. Can we do that?”

Mikio answered. “We’re pretty sure that we can. When the aliens fired the test shot, they used a hand-held device. It’s stored on a bracket at the rear of the cannon and probably can work from pretty far away. Doug and I can go out and get familiar with it. We can do a bit of aiming and fire off a couple of shots to see how far away we can be when we control it. I also want to get a feel for how much time it needs between shots.”

“OK, Mikio,” Brad said. “You and Doug go out there and let us know what you learn. But make it snappy. We don’t have too much time left.”

Haverford continued. “So now that we’ve taken out the battleship and heavy cruiser, and probably some other ships, we need to engage the rest of them with as much force as we can and as fast as we can. That’s where Igor’s robot ship and the rest of my task group come in.”

The plan was to have Igor charge the battle group immediately after the first shots were fired. The aliens might be confused when they see the robot ship approaching since they might still think that it was there to defend them. That would give Igor a chance to hit and run, and it would also provide a diversion to let Milo get the hell out of there. He could retreat at near light speed as soon as he fired his salvo.

At the same time, Haverford’s other ships would come charging in like the cavalry riding to the rescue. “I’ll have twenty-two ships with me in addition to Milo’s alien fighter and Igor’s robot ship. That’s almost one third of our total force. We need to win this one in a big way. It’s probably the last big surprise that we’ll be able to pull. After this, they’ll know that they’re in for a fight, and we want to make them think that we’re a lot stronger than we really are so they don’t just come back here with the rest of their forces.

“If we do it right, it should convince them to use the biological weapons, and that should keep them at bay until the pathogens do their job. What I want is a total destruction of the battle group, and I want their commanders back at their fleet to know that it happened and that we probably took almost no casualties. They should have deployed sensors nearby that will monitor things and report back. We seeded the whole region from Mars out to the asteroid belt with sensors, so I assume that they did something like that too. I want those sensors to report that it was a slaughter.

“My fighters will be parked out of sight, with twenty on Phobos and five on Deimos. They’re pretty small moons, and Deimos is really tiny, but we did some simulations, and we should be able to hide that number of ships on them. They won’t know that we’re nearby until we jump out at them. We should outnumber them, and we’ll still have some element of surprise in our favor. If the EMP weapon is as effective as I think it may be, we should be able to wipe them out without taking too many losses ourselves. Any comments?”

Brad nodded but looked a bit grim. “It’s a good plan, Brendan, as long as everything works right. But have we built in anything to deal with contingencies? We also need to define how we’re all going to coordinate things. It can’t be just a free-for-all.”

“That’s what I want to discuss next,” he replied. “You’re right, Brad. We’re banking mainly on success of the first two shots: the plasma cannon and EMP gun on Milo’s alien fighter. If those don’t do the job, we’ll be in deep shit, but we’ll still outnumber them, and I can get an additional twenty fighters here in nine minutes. We could still win the battle, but we’d take heavy casualties if that happens and if we have to go up against the battleship at full strength. But even if we didn’t wipe them out and took heavy losses ourselves, it would still give them cause to reevaluate the situation. Remember that our main objective is to get them to back away and spend time preparing for the biological attack. I don’t want to lose this battle, but if we can get them to delay enough for the plague to wipe them out, then we’ll have a strategic victory even if the battle here is lost.

“OK, now for coordination. We can use the AFO team and the ops center as our combat information and tactical control center. We’ll all be on the same tactical network. Also, from what you told me, Harry and Yuri can merge their thoughts and senses with Igor’s and be virtually there in the robot ship when it goes into action. If that’s correct, we should be able to integrate the robot ship’s actions with the rest of the force.”

Harry answered. “If I’m working with only one robot, the integration of thoughts and sensory perception is almost total, so you’re right on that. But you know that I’m not a fighter pilot, and I wouldn’t know how to use any of their tactical systems, so what would I do that could help?”

Brad answered. “Igor already knows how to fly the ship and work the systems. I think that what Brendan is suggesting is that the connection of your brain with Igor’s will allow you to control the mission and coordinate with the other ships while Igor does all the flying and fighting.”

“Exactly,” Haverford concurred.

“I guess it could work,” Harry replied after thinking for a few seconds. “It is sort of like when I have a robot doing something but I don’t have to give it all the detailed instructions.”

“That’s right,” Haverford said. “You don’t need to give Igor rudder orders, just keep on top of what it’s attempting to do and keep things moving in the right direction. That robot ship will be the last surprise that we can pull after the aliens see that we’ve taken control of the plasma cannon and fighter, so Igor may be able to wound or even take out the remaining cruisers. That’s your main mission. Don’t bother with any of the fighters. My guys can handle them. And make sure that Igor doesn’t revert to alien control.”

“There’s another thing that you need to do,” Brad added, speaking to Harry and Yuri. “We expect the battle group to send the usual notification of its approach and request the acknowledgement and terminal guidance instructions. That has to be done from a sentry on Mars, but since Igor will be in the ship, one of you will have to make sure that the message originates from Igor and is relayed through the worker that will stay here with us. They need to continue to think that their sentries and other robots are still here.”

“Harry is best to work with Igor during the battle,” Yuri said. “He has the most experience being inside a robot’s brain. So I can handle the worker and the relay between Igor and the battle group. What do you think, Harry?”

“Yeah, that part sounds right. I shouldn’t have a problem with that on my end. My main worry is still that I’m not sure what I’ll need to do when the fight starts. I never did anything like that before.”

“Don’t get too wound up over that,” Brad replied. “Igor has all the combat skills and training that you’ll need. Just keep the mission objectives managed to support our other ships. Igor’s brain will take care of the real time execution.”

While Haverford finished with the details of the plan, Judith, Mikio, Doug, Milo, and the two sergeants from Haverford’s crew finished with their work outside. The sergeants stayed in the fighter and prepared it for takeoff, and the other four returned to the base.

“Good news,” Milo reported as he emerged from the airlock and removed his helmet. “The flight controls are identical to what we found in the Roswell ship. I could fly that thing with my eyes closed. Olivetti and Morgan looked at the sensor and weapons controls and displays, and they agreed that they wouldn’t have any problems with them, and Judith says that the contraption that’s installed on top is definitely a type of EMP projector. Here she is now,” he said as Judith emerged from the airlock. “She can tell you herself.”

“Right,” she said. “It’s definitely an EMP gun, and it looks like it packs a real punch. I see why they call it a world crippler. It could fry most of our things line-of-sight on Earth from nearly as far away as the Moon. If we’re going to use it on ships less than ten thousand kilometers away, I think that it will penetrate the hulls and any electromagnetic shields that they have. It should at least dump the memories and force a reboot of the systems and maybe even burn some of the circuits out.”

“Do you know how to use it?” Brad asked.

“Yes, I’m pretty sure I can work it. The controls are pretty simple, and they’re in an auxiliary panel in one of the weapons control stations that Olivetti and Morgan will use. The gun is rigidly fixed to the hull, so there’s no aiming control. Milo will just have to point it by steering the ship. There’s just a button to push to fire it, and there’s a lever next to the button that lets you adjust the power in the beam. The only other things are an on-off switch and two meters. One shows when the gun is charged and ready to fire, and the other shows the power setting for the burst. The aliens wired the gun into that auxiliary panel and used the standard controls and meters that were already there. It seems that they do a lot of plug-and-play customization and make it easy to do the hookups. We should do one or two test firings to make sure that I got it right. So when you give the word, we can get started and then move into position to meet the battle group.”

“We?” Brad responded. “Are you suggesting that you go with them?”

“I think that’s best,” Judith answered. “I can work that EMP gun and let the other two handle the ship’s normal weapons. There’s going to be a lot to do in a very short time, and I’d be just as good at that job as they would be. Milo will have to do all the aiming of the ship, but that shouldn’t be hard for him. My back-of-the-envelope calculation says that the main lobe of the beam will spread at about three or four degrees and should cover a lot of area when it’s ten thousand kilometers away. The sidelobes also should be pretty strong out to about ten or twenty degrees, so there may be enough power in them to take down electronics in a lot of ships that don’t get the full blast. My job will be easy. All I need to do is turn it on, push a button, and monitor the charge/discharge meter to see when I can fire the next shot. Olivetti and Morgan will have a bigger job to aim and fire at the moving targets.”

“OK,” Brad said and then turned to Haverford. “Do you agree, Brendan?”

“If it’s OK with Olivetti and Morgan, it’s OK with me.”

“We already discussed it,” Judith replied. “They’re happy with it. They want to be able to concentrate on the ship’s other weapons. It has two plasma cannons and four x-ray machine guns, and they want to be able to use them to best advantage. They also suggested that you assign two other weapons operators to handle two of the machine guns.”