Troy Rising 2 - Citadel (34 page)

Or thirty seconds to run at a sprint, trying to tuck in your shirt the whole way.

“Status?”

“Emergence,” Captain Sharp said. He had had the midwatch Command Officer slot. He always had the midwatch because, as he put it, a smart enemy would attack during midwatch. And he liked smart enemies. “Rangora. I make it sixteen Aggressors, four Cofubof class cruisers and six smaller consorts. Single emergence. Tight formation. They are engaging.”

“Light them up, Captain,” Kinyon said, taking his station.

“Missiles positive lock on that task force!”

“SAPL is in the net,” the Laser Tech said. “We have beam.”

“Open fire,” Sharp said.

Nineteen Ung mirrors were scattered across the firmament at four light seconds from the Troy.

Four light seconds is a very long way in general. The moon is two light seconds from earth. They were, in other words, twice as far from Troy as the moon is from Earth.

Which meant that hitting the two meter collectors on Troy was a bit of a tough business. The point was that it was even harder for an enemy to hit the mirrors. They were quite small by celestial standards, barely larger than a tractor-trailer. They moved around a bit to throw off fire. A laser was going to take four seconds to reach them. They'd have moved by the time it arrived. There were more mirrors, hundreds at this point, scattered across the system. But if you could take out the final targeting mirror, all the power in the universe didn't win battles.

Which was the whole point of Troy. It was, in effect, nothing but an armored final targeting mirror.

Hitting the collectors on the Troy was tough, not impossible. Six of the mirrors very carefully lined up on pre-selected vectors, angled slightly to catch the incoming rays of other mirrors, and bounced a tiny, teensy, minor, fraction of the sun's total energy towards the embattled station.

The SAPL boys had been busy. Despite the fuel shortage they had found some work-arounds. They had never quite shut down business. And since they had fuel again, they'd been cranking up their production.

The Horvath fleet had run into seventy petawatts of power.

Each of the Ung mirrors bounced twenty petawatts of power, apiece, into the six fully prepared collectors on the backside of Troy. One hundred and twenty petawatts, very nearly twice the previous output.

The lasers hit the collectors, which were massive sapphire constructions that were a bit like a magnifying glass, bounced off more mirrors scattered through the walls of the battlestation, were split, merged, folded, spindled and mutilated and finally emerged on the far side through a mere three emitters. Each sending out forty petawatts of power at three selected Rangora ships.

✺ ✺ ✺

“Shields at maximum, Captain!” Commander Qathecuk shouted. The ship was humming so loudly from diverting power to shields that it sounded like a drum. “They're holding, but . . .”

“That beam is split,” Bacajezh snarled. “Split and it is still hammering our shields? Missiles?”

“We saw some incoming,” the defensive officer replied. “But the shields have most of our sensors shut down topside.”

“Launch capital missiles on off-side,” Bacajezh said. “Full spread, target pattern Vact.”

“Captain, with all due respect,” Qathecuk said. “Don't you think we should concentrate fire on the battelstation and leave the planet?”

“We aren't going to scratch that thing!” Bacajezh said. “This plan is toast, we are toast. So we do what we can. Which means devastate their populations, Commander!”

“We're not getting their shields down on split,” Sharp said. “These babies are tough. They're also countering most of our missiles with counter missiles. The SAPL has to have most of their sensors jammed, though. We're breaking through but not fast.” The floor shuddered slightly. “And we're taking some hits. We really need more defenses.”

“Any idea which is the flagship?” the admiral said.

“Pretty good, based on emissions,” Sharp answered.

“Targeting change,” the defensive technician said. “Missile fire inbound track to earth.”

“Boot don't piss on them,” Kinyon said. “”Concentrate full power of the SAPL on the flagship!"

Commander Qathecuk didn't even have time to scream. The flight of thousands of penetrator missiles, by awful coincidence, broke through at the same time as the SAPL concentrated fire on the Zhiphewich. One hundred and twenty petawatts of power punched through the failing screens, through the massive battlewagon and back into space. Since the beam was pointed at one particular point and the ship was moving, it sliced it neatly from midsection through its engine room, damage control, crew quarters and out the drive section.

What was left looked something like a smoking metal wishbone. Until the missiles hit.

✺ ✺ ✺

“Shift fire,” Kinyon said. “Full power shots to each battlewagon. Status of their capital missiles?”

“Entering Athena's basket,” the defensive tech said as the battlestation shuddered again. “Paris got some launches with the BDA clusters but they've gone dark.”

“Up to Athena,” Kinyon said. “God help Earth.”

Ninety-three missiles all pushing seventy-ton Kinetic Energy Weapons, made it through their boost phase alive and unharmed and went dark, headed for Terra to enact doom on this new species that thought it could defy their Rangora makers.

They were “brilliant” missiles, the best the Rangora could make. Even as they boosted they sent out spurious gravitic messages, radar and lidar jamming and they were solid black with small lights on them that mimicked the stellar background. Any way you looked for them they were tough to find.

It was the understanding of the human commands that Athena was the defender of the solar system. The goddess Athena was the patron goddess of Athens, the goddess of intellect and wisdom and, notably, the goddess of Victory. For all those reasons, the name was chosen for the US SpacCom AI.

She also handled space traffic control.

The truth was, in situations like this, Athens left most of the grunt work to her buddy: Argus.

Argus wasn't part of the US or nascent terrestrial government. Technically, it was the SAPL control AI and “owned” by Apollo Mining. But some of those missiles were bound to be looking for the system defense AIs. When it came to things like survival, AIs tended to cut some corners. And whereas Athena had been optimized for defense and space management, Argus had been optimized for searching.

Argus, in mythology, was a giant with a hundred eyes. Also called Panoptes: The All-Seeing. One of the tiny little codicils built into SAPL early on was that every secondary mirror, the thousands of BDAs, VSAs, VDAs and Ungs, had a small but very high resolution camera.

Resolution in optics increases with the square of the mirror area. A ten meter mirror is not 10 times as good as a one meter mirror, it is 78 times as good.

The whole SAPL was, in effect, a now six hundred square kilometer telescope. It couldn't just spot pretty girls on a beach in Sao Paulo. It could pick out the tiny individual hairs on their stomach.

Many of the mirrors still had to be used for moving power. The rest became the thousand eyes of Argus, Panoptes the All-Seeing.

Managing those thousands of mirrors—which required very precise targeting and orbits—Argus often had to deal with the effect of gravity on his carefully programmed plans. When you're bouncing a ten centimeter beam of power from the orbit of Venus to the asteroid belt, trying to hit a mirror that is only ten meters wide, you have to be somewhat . . . detail oriented.

There were thousands of minor gravitational effects in the system. These included asteroids if the object was passing close enough—and Argus was very picky on what it considered “close enough”—to the gravitational effects of shipping, which was starting to seriously annoy it, to the, by its count, one hundred forty-nine planetary scale objects, which it defined as being of a high enough gravitational constant to form a sphere. Argus included seventeen in the Kuiper Belt that human astronomers had not yet detected because, in Argus' opinion, they were lacking in ambition.

When Argus first went online, human astronomers were still unsure if they had categorized all near-earth minor planetary objects over one meter.

Argus could have told them the answer after a week. No. But he was done by then and in general Argus didn't chit-chat.

In addition to the SAPL array, Argus had two other systems to use to find the missiles. One was the various human planetary telescopes all of which, in an emergency, Athena could and would commandeer. The humans had radar telescopes, x-ray telescopes, radio telescopes and, for all Argus cared, fart detector telescopes. The lack of ambition in human astronomers was most evident, in Argus' opinion, in the quality of their telescopes. He took the data and processed it but it wasn't exactly his main focus. Even the large orbital space radar system that SpacCom was pouring over. Puh-lease.

The next was the Gravitational Anomaly Detector array. The US government had scattered thirty-six gravitational detectors in orbit between the gate and Earth specifically to keep an eye out for an attack like this. They were pretty good, for human systems, and they gave good take on gravitic anomalies. If you could sort out all the clutter.

Argus was good at sorting out clutter. If you dropped a handful of poppy seeds mixed with mustard in front of Argus, he'd have it sorted before it hit the ground.

When searching for the ninety-three missiles, Argus first considered what it thought it knew. That is, it had gotten information from Paris, Athena and the scattered GAD circuit about the initial boost phase. Some of that information was, Argus knew, spurious. But no matter how much the missile systems futz with the data, once they stopped boosting they were on pre-programmed orbits headed for Earth. They were somewhere inside of a bucket of space. A large bucket of space, but finite.

Then it considered data points that weren't quite so obvious. Also in that large bucket of space were other objects. NEOs, ships, mirrors. Because Argus was . . . detail oriented, it always was having to keep in mind the corrections for things like shuttle gravity drives working between Earth and Troy affecting mirrors in Venusian orbit, four light seconds out of the plane of the ecliptic. That might mean only a thousandth micrometer of variation in the position of the mirror, but that mattered when you were shooting around beams of power. The beam might fall outside of Argus' standard of .0001 percent accuracy of targeting. It might sound crazy but if you let the little things get away before you knew it some beam was cutting a planet in half and people were asking questions . . .

And Argus didn't care for chit-chat.

When objects move very fast, their mass increases due to what humans would call Einsteinian physics. As an object approaches the speed of light its mass approaches infinity. See E=MC2 which was not quite accurate but a good summation of the principal.

All objects have some gravitational effect. Newton proved that with a couple of lead balls and poorly made springs. As mass increases, gravity increases.

The missiles were not approaching anything like the speed of light, but they were starting to get into the region where someone or something sufficiently detail oriented would notice a slight gravitational increase in their local region.

A sixteen ton BDA mirror suddenly experienced a three micrometer per second square delta v off of its programmed trajectory. This is about the force that a bee uses to flex its knee.

Another BDA shifted slightly in space, received an allocated amount of power.

Zap. Missile down.

Argus was . . . somewhat detail oriented. You have to be to process the view from a million eyes.

But sometimes even a million eyes are not enough.

“Status,” the President said, holding onto the grab bar.

During the Global War on Terror, the vice president was almost always “at an undisclosed location.” The point being that if the President was taken out, there would be constitutional continuity. The VP would step in and things would continue without a major political crisis on top of whatever had killed the President.

First the Horvath bombardments had convinced the government that it needed to disperse. Congress no longer met in one building with a big, easily targeted, dome. The VP went to an undisclosed location.

Then the President went to an undisclosed location. Not, as had been repeatedly pointed out, because he was afraid of being killed. But because he was afraid of the city around him being killed.

The president was currently in a military Blackhawk helicopter moving at a very high rate of speed away from an undisclosed location called Peoria, Kansas. Because the Pentagon knew something about the Rangora missiles. They weren't just smart. They weren't just brilliant. They were scary.

The missiles were not programmed for particular points of interest. The Rangora didn't know which might get through Terra's defenses so what was the point of telling them “gut this city.”

They were each given a list of targets. As they approached, onboard not-quite-AIs studied the known data coming from Earth.

Say the first target was Rio, one of the largest remaining cities on Earth. And say that as Missile X is headed inbound it picked up from the terrestrial internet a couple of hundred bloggers near Rio saying that there was a mushroom cloud. It would go to the next in its target list.

Part of the target list, furthermore, was not cities but leadership. The Rangora Imperium was big on leadership. When the Rangora got a bit questionable about who exactly were the big guys they had a little civil war to settle things out.

SpaceCom wasn't quite sure that the President was at the top of the list of potential targets but he had to be damned close. As was SpacCom headquarters which was situated seventy-three miles outside of Omaha, Nebraska.

“Athena has destroyed sixty-eight missiles,” the colonel from SpacCom said, hovering over his laptop. “Twenty-five left.”

“I can do basic math,” the President said. “”Get us away from populated areas!"

“Working on it, Mr. President,” the Army helo pilot said. The Marines were usually in charge of the President's military style security. But the Army had Blackhawks which were much more deployable, not to mention faster and with longer range, than the CH-47s the Marines still used as helos.