Nebula (35 page)

At the first burst of arrows, Judith, Ludmila, Doug, and Nigel linked with the four gun control systems and began the fast download of software to give them total control. They knew that the process would take more than ten or fifteen seconds, and they listened intently to Harry’s report on the diversionary attack as they executed all the commands and watched the data load into the systems and begin to activate. Time seemed to slow down as their mental processes sped up due to the adrenalin surge. They were almost ready to fire when Milo’s second torpedo detonated, taking Milo, the battleship, and one of the heavy cruisers with it.

At this point, the aliens on the ground finally realized what was happening. The two who had escaped sent an emergency message to the ships above, telling them of the attack and requesting heavy fire on the base. The alien deputy commander on one of the fighters directed that all ships fire at the base with all their weapons. Harry could see in the robot systems that they were all swinging their ships around to fire down at the surface rather than at the direction from which Milo had come. He yelled to the others that they needed to fire now and to make it fully automatic.

Nigel’s system went on line first, and he quickly set the gun to automatic and maximum power and hit the fire control button. Ludmila was next, followed by Judith and then Doug. The four guns lit up the sky, so bright that the video cameras were blinded, and Lu’s team had to shield their eyes. The guns continued to fire for about a minute, sweeping across the alien ships as the four controllers moved the aim levers to cover the entire formation plus a good bit of empty space around it. They could have stopped firing after about twenty seconds, but they were so keyed up that it took a loud command from Brad to get them to hit the “off” button. Nothing created by humans or aliens could have survived that intense fire, and when it was over, everything in the field of fire had been vaporized. Even one of the Martian moons had been hit briefly by one of the bursts that scanned a bit too far from the targets. It now had one new crater.

“Well done,” Brad announced as everyone relaxed after the minute-or-so intense battle. He had Mikio put the communication terminal into its speaker-phone mode so he could talk to both the people in the bunker and to Lu’s team. “Let’s get back together and review status. I want the four of you on the gun controls to stay with it. Lu, have one of your team stay with the gun control stations until we can set up for permanent physical presence there. I’ll send our soldier robots out to back him up. Two very angry aliens are somewhere out there and I don’t want to risk having them disable any of the guns. We’re going to need them. But everyone else meet in the planning area. We still have work to do.”

Four of Lu’s team returned, this time by the front entrance. They left Sally Jones behind to guard the gun control stations. As they entered, the rest of the team applauded, and all of them exchanged signs of victory. But they knew that it wasn’t over yet. The most important objective had been accomplished. They now controlled a very important fire base on Mars and could prevent the attack on Earth that the aliens had planned.

But there were still two aliens loose on Mars, and there were many other paths toward Earth that could avoid the region of space that Nebula’s big guns now controlled. On the plus side was the fact that without a strong fire base on Mars, they wouldn’t be able to bring the platform ship in without risking its destruction. Any other approach toward Earth would probably have to be done without the support of those big guns.

“OK,” Brad began. “We have two aliens somewhere on the planet, and we need to get them before they can cause trouble. Any suggestions?”

“I think that they’ll go after the guns,” Harry replied. “If they can disable them, they can send more ships and try to retake Mars. They still have some big ships back at their main fleet, including that fourth battleship. The information on the robot net and in the archives is that they have a couple of heavy cruisers that are almost ready for action. They’ve managed to decontaminate them, along with some fighters. They’re also working on the battleship, but it may take another day to get it decontaminated, and they don’t want to turn it over to robots. Two light cruisers were docked at a repair ship that wasn’t affected by the pathogens, so they’re still operational. I think they’ll be able to launch a major attack in another day or two.”

“That’s a good bet,” Brad agreed. “We need to keep those two aliens from disabling the guns or the next attack could have a clear path to the other side of the planet, and they could land a heavy assault force. This time we won’t be able to surprise them.”

He looked at Lu. “Can your people track them down?”

“We should be able to. We can’t search an entire planet for them, but we can cover the five locations where the guns are, and that’s where they’re likely to head. They can’t stay out there in those suits for too long, so I think they’ll go to those locations without any delay. We can use the alien shuttle craft that’s still here and our sensors should be able to see their ship once we get close enough. Their gravity engine emits a pretty detectable signal. I’ll take Bob and Ave with me. The three of us can handle them when we find them.”

“OK, get started.”

Lu, Bob, and Ave were still partially suited up. They put on the rest of their gear and headed out.

Brad then called Nebula Ops and advised them of the situation. “We need to clean things up here, and then I want to get back to Ops to go over things with you. We’ll destroy the robots that Yuri disabled. I don’t want to take any chances with them. And we need to finish off those two aliens before I leave. Lu is going out with two of her troopers to handle that problem. Can you send a fighter here to take me back to Earth?”

“It’ll be on its way in about ten minutes.”

“Also send some reinforcements to give my people a break and to establish a permanent position at the gun control stations. We’ll need to erect more living quarters for an extended stay here, so you’ll need to get a transport ready to make the trip.”

“Roger that,” Haverford replied. “Your people did a great job. Seduro and Billingsley are relieved that things went so well. They were very worried.”

“Well, things went well enough, but we still have the cleanup to do, and the aliens aren’t out of business yet. They still have a pretty formidable force, and they seem to be cleaning up some of the contaminated ships, including their fourth battleship, so we may still have a big fight on our hands. They won’t be able to attack along a path from anywhere near Mars as long as we hold onto the fire base here. But there are a lot of other paths to Earth, and at some point they may realize that our defenses aren’t as strong as they’ve feared so far. The good news is that without the fire base, they can’t risk bringing their platform ship into the combat zone, so you won’t have that one to worry about. But you’ll still need to deal with the battleship and cruisers.”

“That’s what we need to plan for,” Haverford agreed. “I’ll see you when you get back. Good luck with the cleanup. Lu’s people are the best.”

*

The two aliens were indeed heading to the five guns arranged around the planet. They knew that they couldn’t get back to the one at their base. The humans had control of that area, at least until reinforcement ships could arrive. Their job now was to disable all the other guns so that there would be a clear approach path, shielded by the mass of the planet. Once assault troops could land, they could attack from multiple directions and retake the base. They knew that the humans would figure this out, so they wanted to act fast, disable the guns, and then try to escape in the shuttle craft.

They reached the first gun and started the delicate work of disabling it without completely destroying it. Once the reinforcements took back the base, they’d want to get the guns back on line without having to do major repairs, so they decided to attack the computer memory and the fire control circuits. The memory could be dumped and some of the integrated circuits in the fire control module could be blown. All those things could be repaired by skilled technicians in only a few hours. They sent a message to the fleet, advising them of what they intended to do, and then they got to work.

The first gun was disabled in about ten minutes. In addition to the two things that they planned to do, they also decided to destroy one of the circuits in the radio link to the control systems at the base. Now the humans wouldn’t be able to work the gun at all. When reinforcements came, they could set up initially to work them from the local controls while the radios were repaired. They looked at their work one last time, were satisfied, and got back into the shuttle to fly to the second gun.

The work at the second gun went as smoothly as the first one, but as they arrived at the third location, they saw that they would have a problem finding a landing spot that was close enough for them to do the work without having to make a long trek. The problem was that the cannon had been erected in a slight valley between three small hills to its north, a plateau to the east, a deep gully to the west, and a ridge to the south. The terrain immediately around it was uneven and cluttered with large boulders, some of which had been piled up when the installation team prepared the site. They were annoyed at the idiots who had put it in such a bad location but resigned themselves to landing in the only good spot nearby. It was on the plateau to the east of the cannon, about one hundred meters away. They would have liked to land closer, but they settled for the plateau and hiked the hundred meters.

They started to remove the access panel to the fire control electronics when Lu’s shuttle appeared. They were surprised to see that the humans had come in the shuttle rather than one of their own ships, but they realized almost immediately what that meant. The humans were only a small group and probably without any ships or other support. They quickly sent that information back to the fleet and then returned to the task of removing the panel. They were in clear view from the ridge where the humans’ shuttle was headed, so they needed to work fast or be exposed to fire from that location.

Lu had already been aware of the aliens’ presence at the site long before they came into view. The sensors that she brought onboard detected the alien ship’s gravity engine emissions before the aliens had touched down, and Lu saw the local topography and decided to land near the top of the ridge, just beyond line-of-sight to the aliens. Bob and Ave were ready to jump out and start to fire at the aliens as soon as she brought the shuttle down. They had the hatch open even before it reached the ground, and they bolted to the top of the ridge and began to fire their pistols at the two aliens.

The panel wasn’t off yet, and the aliens had to retreat behind the cannon to avoid being hit. Now they had a problem. The side of the cannon that they were on was one that had little of value except for a heavy electrical cable that carried power to one of the plasma generation units. They were soldiers, not engineers, so they weren’t certain of what would happen if they cut that cable, but it would obviously do something to degrade the gun’s performance, maybe even create an imbalance that would cause it to destroy itself if fired. So they cut it and then tried to figure out what to do next.

They were clearly in a difficult situation. Their shuttle had more weapons in the storage locker, including a plasma gun and a couple of x-ray machine guns, but the shuttle was too far away and too exposed for them to reach it.

Lu, Bob, and Ave saw that they had the upper hand, and they began to deploy to give them the best shots if the aliens tried to reach their shuttle. They were aware of the heavy weapons in their shuttle’s locker, but they didn’t want to use anything that could damage the cannon, so they decided to try to get to a vantage point where they could hit the back side of the cannon, where the aliens had taken cover.

Lu quickly devised the plan. “Bob, you stay here and use your rifle to keep them pinned down. Ave and I are going to move around to that hill where they landed and see if we can get a good position to pick them off. We can also disable their shuttle so they’ll be stuck here even if we can’t stop them from damaging this cannon. If anything goes wrong, use the plasma gun in the locker to destroy their shuttle, and get back to base. We can expect Colonel Haverford to send help pretty soon, and alien reinforcements won’t get here sooner than a day or two. I’ll take one of the communicators and you keep the other one so that we can keep in contact.”

With that, Lu and Ave took off, crawling along the ridge and keeping low to the ground as they made their way toward the plateau where the shuttle was parked. The aliens saw them as they dashed across the twenty meters of open space near the plateau, and they managed to fire a few shots from their x-ray pistols before Bob’s covering fire drove them back. So far, no hit from either side, but the humans’ tactical position was improving, and the aliens had no practical options left. They cursed again at the idiots who had put the cannon in such a terrible location.

“What now, boss?” Ave asked as they both ducked into cover of the plateau.

“I’ll go to the top where the shuttle is. I can take cover there and have good position to fire at them if they try to move in this direction. You try to work your way around the hill and see if there’s a good firing position on its north side. I should be able to see you when you get there. I think that the shuttle is in a good spot to look down in that direction. When I know that you’re there, I’ll fire a shot in the direction of the cannon. That will let you know that I can provide covering fire if you can work your way toward them. It looks like there are a lot of those big boulders that can give you cover.”