Storming Heaven (39 page)

“Report,” he barked, as he strode into the command centre.  It was buried within the heart of the asteroid, protected by a kilometre of rocky cover, yet it wouldn’t stand up to the Killer weapons for more than a few seconds.  He took his command chair and stared up at the display.  “What’s happening out there?”

“Four Killer starships, very close to us,” Captain Waianae said, “but they’re doing nothing.  They’re just staring at us.”

Brent pulled up the main display and nodded slowly.  Captain Waianae was right.  The Killers had returned in force; four of their starships sat just outside weapons range, dominating the entire star system by their sheer presence.  The Defence Force starships were scrambling to intercept, but even the ten attack wings that he had reserved for the defence of Sparta were grossly outmatched.  The destroyers would hurt their opponents badly, perhaps even wipe them out if they rammed the Killer ships, but the asteroid system would still be devastated.

“Attempt to hail them,” he ordered, finally.  Perhaps they wanted to talk.  They had eyeballed Sparta before without opening hostilities.  “Inform me the moment you get any response.”

He turned to the communications officer without waiting for a reply.  “Send a general warning out to the other command bases,” he continued.  “Inform Admiral Hawser that he may find himself promoted to Supreme Commander” –
inheriting a dead man’s shoes
, part of his mind whispered – “and that he should start considering contingency plans to meet that eventuality.”

“Yes, sir,” the communications officer said.  He didn’t show any signs of fear, but Brent could hear it in his voice.  It was hard to blame him.  If the Killers bulled right at the human asteroid settlement, they’d punch right through the defences and wreck havoc.  “He’s responding and wishes you good luck.”

Brent snorted.  “And inform the evacuation coordinator that I want everyone not in Category A to start moving off the asteroid now,” he said, silently thanking God that he’d ordered everyone non-essential off the station after the Killers had buzzed past the first time.  “We can try and prevent a massacre.”

“There is no response from the Killers,” Captain Waianae reported, as Brent turned back to her.  “They’re making no attempt to communicate, even in their own internal RF signalling frequencies.  They’re just…watching us.”

Brent glanced up towards the ceiling and saw others doing the same.  They wouldn’t even be aware of the Killer starships without their sensors, but now they knew that they were there, they seemed to feel them at the back of their necks.  The tension in the compartment was rising, not helped by several Category B personnel who insisted in remaining behind and facing possible death along with the remainder of the Category A personnel.  Most of the duty officers were quietly preparing to upload copies of their personalities to the MassMind, just in case they died in battle.  Brent remembered what Chiyo99 had gone through and shivered.  After watching what she had become, he would think long and hard before grasping the immortality the MassMind offered humanity.

He was vaguely aware of new personalities peering out through the sensors; the War Council, come to watch what happened when the Killers went up against humanity’s foremost military base.  He didn’t attempt to talk to them.  There was nothing that they could do to help, but they could distract him at a crucial moment.  He considered ordering the starships to attack, to attempt to drive the Killers away before they carried out another slaughter, but that would merely have started the fighting.  What, he found himself wondering, was so special about the Sparta System that the Killers were reluctant to pick a fight there?  There was no gas giant in the system, no possible cause of Killer hesitation, apart from the human ships.  Could it be that the Killers had finally learned fear of humanity?

Chiyo99 was still peering through the sensors herself, rather than retreating back into the MassMind.  “Tell me something,” Brent subvocalised.  “Is there anything, anything at all, in the data you obtained about this system?  Is there anything here that they couldn’t just take?”

“No, sir,” Chiyo99 said.  Her voice darkened.  “I didn’t get a complete copy of their database, so it is possible that there’s something here to interest them, but I can’t think what it could be.  There’s nothing here, but a lot of asteroids – and Sparta.”

“And Sparta,” Brent repeated.  Perhaps the Killers actually had learned fear after all.  Humans had surveyed the system carefully when looking for a place to locate a military base and hadn’t found anything other than asteroids.  “Perhaps…”

“New gravity surges,” Captain Waianae said, as alarms echoed through the command centre.  “They’re opening new wormholes.”

“Where?”  Brent demanded.  The Killers had been waiting for reinforcements.  “Where are they coming in…?”

“Here,” Captain Waianae snapped.  There was an undertone of panic in her voice as new red icons flashed into existence on the display.  “They’re coming in right on top of us!”

Ozzie Allen saw it clearly from his position.  He had been outside the asteroid in a mechanical bug when the Killers arrived and had chosen to remain outside, rather than returning to the dubious safety of the asteroid.  If the Killers opened fire, he had reasoned, he would be safer in the harmless bug – so tiny that no one could consider it a threat – than in the asteroid, which was almost certainly their primary target.  He had been staring at the Killer starships, so large that they were visible with the naked eye, when a new gravity wave had picked up the bug and tossed it hundreds of kilometres from its former position.

The wormhole opened in a brilliant swirl of light and disgorged a massive Killer starship, already far too close to Ozzie for his liking.  He almost panicked and triggered the bug’s drives to escape, but caught himself in time, knowing that an active drive field would be detected and destroyed automatically.  The Killer starship ignored him and charged right at Sparta Asteroid.  It looked, to Ozzie, as if it were committing suicide…and then the horrifying truth dawned on him.  The kamikaze ship was undamaged.  It possessed an intact, impregnable hull…and it was closing in rapidly on the nerve centre of the Defence Force.  He keyed his radio to scream a warning, but it was already too late.  The Killer starship, moving at several thousand kilometres a second and packing more mass than any other known starship, struck the asteroid dead centre and battered right through.  The asteroid seemed to shatter under the impact.

Ozzie watched in stunned disbelief as the Killer starship, utterly unharmed by the experience, pulled away from its target, bright white lights flaring over its hull.  A moment later, it opened fire, sweeping bolts of white light out at every conceivable target.  The other Killer starships, closing in rapidly from their prior position, opened fire as well, bombarding every human installation within range.  The battle had lasted barely twenty seconds…and the Killers had already struck most of the important starships.  The defending ships closed in rapidly, bombarding the Killer ships with implosion bolts, energy torpedoes and particle beams – joined by the still-formidable defence platforms located near the main asteroids – but it was too late.  The Killers had already inflicted decisive damage on the entire star system.

System Command, what was left of it, was shouting instructions to the small fleet of support craft, trying to organise a rescue mission, but Ozzie suspected that it was hopeless.  The remains of Sparta Asteroid were more intact than he had dared hope, but the entire asteroid had been torn open to the vacuum of space and most of the emergency systems had to have been knocked out by the unprecedented attack.  He brought the bug’s drive systems online – he wasn't going to leave his fellow officers in space at the mercy of the Killers – but knew there was little hope of finding many survivors.  They would all have been killed by the impact alone.

***

“They’re going to hit us,” someone shouted, and then the entire asteroid rocked violently, so violently that Brent could have sworn that it was on the verge of coming apart completely.  The lights flickered and went out as consoles exploded, warning that massive power surges were running amok through the asteroid…and all the emergency systems had failed.  As the command centre was plunged into darkness, he could hear, faintly, the sound of escaping air.

If Sparta Asteroid had been a rotating asteroid, using its spin to generate artificial gravity rather than gravity generators, the Killer attack would have killed them all.  The combination of the spin and damaged sections would have completed the task of ripping the asteroid apart.  As it was, they were alive – barely – even if they were out of the fight.  Brent brought up his command-level augmentation implants – he detested using them, but this was an emergency – and tried to ping for a working computer processor.  There was no response, even when he made a general broadcast on the emergency frequency; the asteroid’s emergency system had been completely knocked out.  He pushed aside the thought of how much redundancy had been built into the system – failure shouldn’t have been a possibility unless the asteroid had been completely destroyed – and struggled to pull himself together.  The noise of escaping air was growing louder and the command crew were starting to panic.  That could not be allowed.

“Quiet,” he bellowed, half-wishing that he had a chemical weapon to fire into the air.  That would have assured him of their attention, although perhaps not reassured them of his sanity.  “All right, the asteroid has taken a hit and we’re out of the fight.  We have to concentrate on survival and not panic.  Bring up your implants and prepare to activate your internal force fields.”

There was no argument, although he heard the sound of snivelling in the background.  He didn’t blame the person who was on the verge of breaking down – they had anticipated a quick death from Killer weapons, not death by exposure to hard vacuum – but there was no time to panic.  The internal force fields they all had as part of their combat augmentation would provide limited protection, yet he knew all too well that they would last – at best – an hour at most.  Force fields drained power like a small black hole.

He felt his feet leaving the deck and realised that something else had failed.  The gravity generator had been knocked out as well.  He considered it for a moment and decided that it probably worked in their favour.  It would be easier to rescue anyone trapped under falling stone.  He triggered his augmented vision as well and peered around the command centre, marvelling at the strange view in front of him.  The seventeen men and women in the command centre were clinging on for dear life, hanging on to their useless consoles or chairs.  A handful of men were drifting in the air, unmoving; they’d been killed when their consoles exploded.  The survivors were lucky that the compartment hadn’t caught fire.

“Bring up your augmented vision and focus on me,” Brent ordered.  A faint draft was pulling him towards a hatch leading out towards the docks at one end of the asteroid, suggesting the location of the leak.  He followed it reluctantly, activating his communications implant and ordering a permanent scan for other communicator signatures.  If someone was trapped and helpless, they would be using their implants to call for help.  “We cannot stay here.”

He skimmed through his memory of the asteroid’s layout and found the location of the emergency supplies, the ones that no one had ever considered that they might actually needed.  He altered the map manually – it took longer than having the computers do it for him – and transmitted the altered map to the remaining people in the compartment.  They responded, opening up their own communications systems, adding their signals to his broadband call for help.  There was an outside chance that they would attract the Killers, Brent knew, but he had chosen to dismiss that possibility.  If the Defence Force starships on the outside didn’t rescue them, they would die when their force fields ran out of power.

“Follow me,” he ordered, after a quick check of the survivors.  There were a handful of tiny injuries, but no one had been so badly injured that they couldn’t move.  The unlucky ones were dead.  He pulled himself over to the cracked hatch and hunted for the manual release.  Captain Waianae joined him a moment later and added her strength to his, allowing them to slowly crank the hatch open completely.  They looked out onto a scene from hell.  The air was visible now as it cooled, sucked down the corridor into the distance…the Killer ship, he realised, had to have impacted just a few kilometres away from their position.  Who in their right mind would have thought of using a starship to smash an asteroid wide open?

We would have
, he thought ruefully, as the cold started to seep into his bones.  He shared a long glance with Captain Waianae and then activated his internal force field.  The Killer tactic had proven spectacularly successful and now they had either departed or were engaging the Defence Force.  He couldn’t do anything about it from his position, he knew, so he pushed it out of his mind and concentrated on the map.  If they didn’t reach the emergency supplies, they were dead.

The remaining command staff followed him, struggling against the pull caused by the outpouring of air.  The asteroid had enough air to keep generating the current for a few more minutes yet, Brent decided, but they couldn’t wait for it to run out and leave them standing in a vacuum.  The emergency force fields that should have prevented more than a tiny outpouring of air had obviously failed as well, not entirely to his surprise.  Humans had used kinetic weapons before – indeed, on Earth, early firearms had all been kinetic weapons – but it had been a long time since anyone had used kinetic weapons on such a scale.  He pulled himself from handhold to handhold, wishing for a jetpack or some other way to manoeuvre without risking being sucked out by the airflow, and somehow made it all the way through the corridor.  It was a moment later when he saw the dead bodies.

They had clearly been caught by surprise; three women, one man, all wearing Defence Force uniforms.  They had had no time to raise their own force fields, or brace for impact; the shock had smashed them against the corridor and killed them.  The outpouring of air was pulling them gradually towards the breach in the hull; Brent wanted to catch them, to tether them to something so that their bodies could be recovered later, but they had no time.  He found himself hoping that the bodies patched the rent in the hull, although he knew that that wasn't likely.  Their problems were far worse than a single tiny hull breach.

“Keep going,” he hissed, as two of the command staff looked as if they were about to give up and wait for death.  The outpouring of air was slowing down now, suggesting that the air supply was running out.  There were more objects floating in the air now, everything from vital equipment to clothes and supplies; he found himself battering them out of his way as they crawled into the emergency compartment.  The young Brent had wondered why the Community bothered insisting that emergency compartments were part and parcel of every asteroid settlement; the older and wiser Admiral was grateful that they were there.  He keyed the door and it hissed open, revealing a sealed compartment and enough supplies to outfit all of the command staff.

“Get everyone into suits and equipped,” he ordered Captain Waianae, who moved to obey.  Pulling on suits without gravity wasn't easy, but they would manage it, somehow.  The entire Defence Force took classes in how to move without gravity, although Brent knew that most cadets passed the exams and then never went outside a gravity field again.  He made a mental note to insist that – if they got out alive – everyone in the Defence Force was exposed to zero-gravity at least once per year.  The lesson should have been learned long ago.

“Aye, sir,” she said.  Her voice, even though the communications implants, was calm and practical.  “Will you be putting on a suit yourself, sir?”

“Of course,” Brent said.  It was like having a Mother Hen pecking at him, but she was right.  “I’ll activate the emergency systems first, then get dressed.”

He placed his hand on the emergency systems panel and waited for them to respond to the implant emplaced in his right hand.  It took a moment before the emergency system came online – it should have come on automatically when the asteroid was hit – and it couldn’t tell him anything useful.  The asteroid’s computer network was all screwed up and half of the asteroid seemed to be gone.  Brent wasn't entirely surprised.  The Killer starship might have smashed the asteroid right in half.

“I’m getting nothing on the progress of the battle,” he said, after a moment.  The external sensors seemed to be completely down as well, for reasons he couldn’t understand.  Most of the systems should have existed independently of the main computer, although it was possible that the sensors were fine and the computer relay system was messed up.  “We may not get any help from outside.”

Captain Waianae nodded, her face pale behind the suit’s visor.  “That may make escape difficult,” she said, with masterful understatement.  The Killer starship had separated them from the docks.  The FTL starships would be gone or otherwise inaccessible.  “We’ll have to get outside and see if we can signal for help from there.”

Brent nodded.  The emergency procedures should have let them all remain inside the shelter until rescue arrived, but few people would
want
to remain there.  The Sparta System had just been knocked out of the war.  After the asteroid had been hit so badly, it was possible that there would only be a cursory search for survivors before the Defence Force starships pulled out to other war fronts.  They might be left alive to wait until the atmosphere ran out.  They couldn’t afford to assume that there would be time to mount a search for them.

And
, he thought, in the privacy of his own head,
anyone on the outside may not even pick up the distress beacon.  Everything else has failed today
.

“All right,” he said, addressing all of his people.  “Listen carefully.”