No Other Gods (18 page)

             
He listened for a bit, then spoke again.

             
“I’m going to kill this station. You proceed with the backup plan — release those EMPs now.”

             
I’d heard all I needed. The rebels obviously had more than one ship, and he was ordering them to launch now. And then was planning to die by sabotaging the FESS shield, or station integrity, or the output array. Didn’t really matter which one: the outcome was the same.

             
I covered the remaining distance in four strides, catching him still kneeling, swinging up my knee in a vicious blow to the head. My knee connected, but not as solidly as I had hoped. He had seen me at the last second, and whipped his head almost out of the way. Thrusting an arm up as well to try to deflect the blow, he succeeded in tripping me.

             
With a quick roll I was back on my feet and headed right back at him. Danger or not I had to attack as quickly as possible, occupy all his attention. His goal would not be to fight me — it would be to fire an AM grenade or energy weapon at any of the vital machinery surrounding us. One good hit, and the outcome of our little mano-a-mano would be utterly meaningless.

             
Smashing my armored fist into his body, I tried to disable his shoulder launchers. My left fist immediately followed, shattering his faceplate and narrowly missing pulverizing the head beneath it. He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, but I knew that he could target his grenades with simply a thought so, with some regret but no lack of speed, finished the job with my right. He sagged, then dropped.

             
I breathed, settled myself, then, opening his suit, I disconnected the power and destroyed the leads. You never know when someone you think is dead has just a bit left in him. Especially with thought-activated weaponry.

             
Finally, I opened comms.

             
“Everything safed here in Mechanical. Got our last guy. What’s the situation in the cargo ship?”

             
Livia answered, slowly.

             
“We got them all. They … they got Drago.”

             
I sagged. Two of our small team down — definitely not part of the plan. Then picked myself back up and started the walk to the docks.

             
“Livia. We’ll talk more soon. Right now, I need you to alert the techs who re-programmed the meteor defense. The attack is on. Repeat, the attack is on. The rebels have another ship, and they are initiating their EMP offensive. Make sure the techs are monitoring and ensuring their new software works. I’ll be in touch soon.”

             
Then I continued toward the docks. Once there, I met Sama. Helo and Tonia and Kin were at the cargo ship’s entrance, Helo down on one knee, Tonia with an arm on his shoulder.

             
“Status?” I whipped out, catching Sama by surprise.

             
“All bogies gone. One casualty.”

             
“Drago, right?”

             
He nodded.

             
“Livia told me.”

             
I clapped a hand to his shoulder in momentary solidarity, then passed him and approached Helo, Tonia, Kin. Helo was still down on a knee, heaving a little. He saw me approach and rose. He caught my eye.

             
“Drago … Drago saved us. The last one suicided — detonated an AM grenade when we opened the hold he was in. Drago was first in, and instead of trying to escape he rushed, covering the grenade and the enemy.”

             
I nodded, looked down. He would be missed. Deadly, fast, sometimes sardonic, or even surly. But very, very reliable. We both breathed heavily, remembering.

             
After a moment I looked up. A thought had occurred. Called Sama, who was still near the dock entrance, near the controls.

             
“Sama! Get some techs down here right now. Double-sharp!”

             
Turning back to Tonia, Kin, and Helo, I issued a few rapid-fire orders.

             
“We need this ship out. Jettison it immediately. Find out how and make it happen NOW.”

             
Fanatics who were prepared to kamikaze their enemies scared me. They left nothing in reserve. Reserved no room for their own escape or welfare. That meant, almost certainly, the ship itself was rigged to blow — probably by destruction of the containment fields that separated its antimatter fuel from the rest of the craft. If that all blew, no trace of the station would be left — no piece big enough to identify.

             
A tech raced in, followed by a few others.

             
“Get this ship out! NOW!” Sama yelled.

             
They moved like pros. One started cycling the outer lock. Another moderated the grav field in the hull. The station was already reducing the sun’s G-pull to about Earth normal, she just pushed it a little more. A third started up a monstrous loading machine, and simply started pushing the huge cargo vessel out.

             
I laughed. Going into the ship, starting engines, and using the vessel’s own power would have taken far longer. And been much more dangerous — possibly it was rigged to blow on ignition, as well as by timer. This method was quicker and safer. Once the loader passed into the almost-no-G zone, it lost a lot of its ability to push, but the momentum had already been transferred. The vessel was floating out on its own power as the tech leaped away from his loader, crashing down to the deck when he reached the normal gravity area.

             
Twisting slightly as it left on its unconventional exit, the cargo ship barely cleared the open bay doors, screeching slightly, metal on metal. Immediately I ordered the cargo doors to be closed — not that they would help much. Running to a monitor, I asked a tech when the vessel would clear the FESS shield.

             
“Any second now, sir.”

             
It cleared — no explosion yet. Now we were somewhat safer — maybe a ten percent chance of survival. Or one percent. How could I know?

             
“Any way we can accelerate that vessel? We need some space between us and it, now.”

             
“It’s just clearing our grav field now, sir. And it’s not magnetically connected to the Sunflower grid. The sun will take it as fast as we please.”

             
And indeed, the ship suddenly accelerated immensely, from looming in our vision to a small dot. Gravity on the sun is a real bitch: in maybe 20 seconds of free fall the former supply ship probably covered 60 kilometers of distance. Just as it was about to pass from our vision, the dot bloomed. There was no sound, but suddenly we saw a hellish white flower, expanding swiftly, striated with streaks of orange and red as pure energy interacted with the volatile low solar atmosphere. We waited for maybe a minute, anticipating a blast wave, but the station hardly budged. A little shimmy and it was over. We let out long sighs of relief.

             
“Well,” I said, smiling at the techs through my open faceplate. “You’ve saved the station. Now … we have to save the Sunflower.”

             
“Livia, where are you and the techs?” I said, activating comms.

             
“Backup bridge. Come quickly!”

             
Taking the stairs five at a time, I bolted up from the docking bays, heading back to where I had watched the initial assault from.

             
“What’s the status?”

             
One of the techs gestured at his screen, where I saw a schematic of the sun, with the Sunflower superimposed over it.

             
“The meteor defense system was never designed for more than a few objects at a time … perhaps as many as 50 simultaneous. Even that, we felt, was a monstrous over-building of the system. It’s not an individual node capability issue, it’s a command-and-control issue. The software is just not very efficient at massively parallel multitasking.”

             
The other tech took over, directing our attention to another screen.

             
“This is the other rebel ship,” he said, pointing to a small blip on the screen.

             
Near it was a cloudy mass, like static.

             
“What’s that?” I asked.

             
“Our problem,” he replied. “That cloud is the missiles that they’re launching. At least two thousand of them.”

             
He paused for a moment, letting it sink in.

             
“That many EMPs will completely overwhelm the Sunflower, at least on this side of the sun. Once structural integrity is broken over perhaps fifteen percent of its surface, the Sunflower is doomed. Unbalanced, it will sink into the sun from the other side, and eventually be ripped apart as we lose command of the nodes.”

             
I thought fast. Only one chance.

             
“Sama, Helo, Kin, Tonia! Into our ship, now. We need to be ready to leave in sixty seconds.”

             
I turned to the techs.

             
“Stay in contact with us, and stay here. I need an analysis of where those missiles are heading and I need a triage solution for which ones to take out first. Bring in some more engineers and figure out if you can run your new missile defense software on parallel systems to double or triple capacity. Stay in touch, we’ll need your input.”

             
I turned to the door. “Livia, let’s go.”

             
“No. I’m staying. I’ll coordinate here, make sure everyone doesn’t just leave in the lifeboats, and communicate with you.”

             
I looked back, astonished. She was disobeying a direct order, which was unheard of. Worse, she was putting herself in harm’s way — worse danger than a fight. I had no doubt she’d stay on the station to the bitter end, exhausting all options. If I failed, she’d die.

             
“Liv …”

             
“It’s the only way to ensure we get maximum effort from everyone on this station. You know it.”

             
Her eyes met mine, firm. Resolute. And pleading. I stepped toward her, lifted a gloved hand to her cheek, touched gently with my armored metal fist.

             
“Stay safe.”

             
And turned and ran.

We launched at full power: 30Gs. Inertial compensators were at their highest setting, but could not mask all the acceleration. All of us would be under at least three or four times the normal force of gravity for days if we had a hope of pulling this off.

             
“Sunflower,” I called. “Do you have an triage attack solution for me yet?”

             
“We do,” Livia’s voice answered. “It’s not complete but we know the most important nodes to protect. And the missiles that you can most easily destroy, given your position. Sending now.”

             
Tonia and Kin brought it up on the main screen and adjusted course.

             
“First intercept coming up in a few minutes. It’s the nearest one.”

             
“Some good news,” came Livia’s voice. “We’ve been studying the missiles. They’re fairly slow and awkward. The techs are speculating that building thousands that could survive in the near-sun environment was a major, major stressor on rebel manufacturing capacity.”

             
“They use most of their power simply to not fall into the sun. When they reach their designated node, they pretty much fall like bombs, with minimal added acceleration and guidance.”

             
“We’ll take any help we can get,” I offered.

             
“It gets better,” said Livia. “We’ve seen more than one spontaneously fail. The techs are speculating that the rebels could not acquire massive quantities of the required supermetals, and had some difficulty mass-producing FESS shields. The failure rate is less than one percent right now, but we’re hoping it will grow as their operational time increases.”

             
“Approaching first missile,” Tonia interjected.

             
It was child’s play. We approached to within a hundred kilometers, fired a one second burst from one of our particle beam cannons. Scratch another missile.

             
“Shooting fish in a barrel,” laughed Kin.

             
“Plenty of fish in this sea,” I answered. “Now we have to do this a thousand times more.”

             
Livia had been listening in to our conversation. Now, as we vectored to the next closest missile, she cut in. Private circuit, for me only. Couldn’t be good, but I put it on the main speakers anyways. We were all in it together.

             
“G, the techs have been evaluating the missile paths. I’ve got some good news, and I’ve got some bad news. The good news,” she said, without asking which I wanted first, ”is that the EMPs are blasting off sequentially, not simultaneously. Ones that reach their targets are trying to blast it immediately, and not wait for all the missiles to be in position. That means our new defense system has less work at any given time.”

             
“Give me the bad news,” I said.

             
“The bad news is that at a point about 7 hours from now, we’ll enter a period in which easily three or four hundred will be going off within just a 30-minute window. That will crash our defensive systems and overwhelm the Sunflower’s capacity to sustain itself. The way the techs are modeling right now … it doesn’t look like you can be successful.”

             
I considered, silently. Meanwhile, Tonia and Kin continued to find and destroy missiles according to the targeting triage, an average of 3 or 4 every few minutes. Sama and I watched, awaiting our turn when they tired.

             
“OK, some thoughts. Please review yourself and ask the techs their opinions, as well as anyone else on the station who might possible be even a minuscule amount helpful.

             
“First, we’re going to let one missile strike. I want to see the results, and I want to know a few things. Does it knock out the node? Can the node power back up? How quickly? And most importantly, can the neighboring nodes extend their fields quickly enough to catch the failing node?”

             
“Second, get those people to launch their sun probes, any ships they might have, even a few of their lifeboats. They don’t need all of their lifeboats. Get them programmed on routes to intercept missiles physically if needed. Slam into them and destroy them.”

             
“Third, get another set of engineers looking at our current targeting solution. Can we make it more efficient? Should we ignore some nodes, leave them as sacrificial lambs, and focus on other missiles?”

             
“Got it,” Livia said. “Will be in touch.”

             
I turned my attention to the ship I was in. We were already starting to feel the effects of a continuous three gravities of pressure, but Tonia and Kin piloted expertly, wheeling around miniature solar prominences that were big enough to fry the earth’s Pacific ocean, and taking out EMP missiles with precision shots. It was going to get worse before it would get better.

             
“Tonia, can we target these missiles from farther away?”

             
“Well, that would help a lot — we’re currently spending a lot of time running from one to the other. But we’d be less certain of a totally disabling shot.”             

             
“We don’t need the one-shot kill,” interjected Sama, sitting with me in an acceleration couch at the back of the bridge. “We could fire three or four shot bursts, even ten if needed, to give us a higher chance of a kill from farther away. Maybe even twice the range.”

             
“Good call, trying it now,” said Tonia. “Kin, can you ...”

             
But Kin was already in motion. Firing from 225 klicks, he put a tight burst of seven shots right on a missile. Staring hard, we all watched as the bogey disappeared from our screens. Tonia let out a war whoop, and immediately wheeled to the next missile.

             
“Nice work,” Livia broke in. “That’s going to double your kill rate. Still going to be tough, though. G, the latest techs’ analysis says you’re only going to reach maybe three hundred, if you’re very lucky. And there are no other ships nearby that can help.”

             
“Then get those probes launched now! Impact and destroy as many as you can. And get some people on improving the defense software. Scale it up. Put it on auxiliary servers. Something. Anything.”

             
“On it,” Livia said, and signed off.

             
The next five hours were exhausting rinse-and-repeats: vector to a new location at high speed, catch up to the missile, destroy it, and move on to the next. Our only saving grace was the slow speed of the missiles, struggling feebly in the massive gravity well of the sun. And the fact that at least five percent now appeared to be failing — spontaneously exploding, or just cutting out and sinking deep into the sun. We could only hope that number increased as their mission length was extended.

             
Sama and I took our turns piloting and targeting, half hour on, half hour off. All us were ragged and slow now, getting tired and stupid from the exhaustion and strain of constant activity and stress in what was now almost constantly a perceived four or five gravities of thrust. We pushed the propulsion unit and our engine core to the limit, exceeding specs and hitting thirty-five or forty actual Gs.

             
As we worked and rested in turn, we all kept our eyes on a doomsday clock of sorts that Livia had set up, and copied us on: the number of remaining missiles. Starting at 1903 when we had already taken out almost a hundred, it was now at 1457 … we had taken out just over sixty an hour, plus some attrition due to spontaneous failure.

             
Despair was starting to sink in when finally the solar probes came online, reprogrammed to hunt and kill missiles, simply with kinetic velocity. The station had just over fifty probes, giving us the hope that at least that number of missiles could be added to our total. Elementary calculations, however, suggested that we could only maybe do a hundred in our last two hours, and with those fifty, plus the attrition, that number would still be too high. Over 1400 EMPs would devastate the Sunflower.

             
“Good news for a change,” Livia’s voice jolted me out of my musing.

             
“First of all, the techs have rigged the probes to slow immediately before impact, to only a few tens kilometers per hour of relative velocity. They are hoping that this will be enough to disable a missile, but not destroy the probe. They’re thinking they can get three, maybe up to five missiles per probe this way.”

             
“That
is
good news,” I said, mentally revising my estimate, and still coming up short.

             
“The other piece of good news is that we’re adding the already detonated EMPs to the list. You’re going to see that number go down in just a few moments … for the missiles that have either targeted or attempted to target a node. Most of those have been trapped by the defense system, and shuttled safely into the depths of the sun. Thirty or so have made it through and either destroyed a node, or had a close miss.”

             
“What’s the miss rate?” I asked?

             
“About ten percent,” Livia answered. “So, with the spontaneous malfunctions, that makes fifteen percent that we don’t need to worry about.”

             
I kept my eye on the number. Minutes dragged on, and Kin fried another missile, dropping it to 1455. Finally, the number vanished, and in its place 937 appeared.

             
My breath stopped. Perhaps we might yet pull this off.

             
“Well, can we now dare to hope?” I wondered.

             
“The most dangerous time is exactly 347 minutes from now,” Livia said. “That’s when a significant number of missiles are going to detonate within about a ten-minute period. Probably something like 250 of them. That will very likely overwhelm the defense system.”

             
I had an idea.

             
“I haven’t heard from the techs yet on a retargeting solution — updated triage on which missiles to attack. What we need now, Livia, is a targeting solution that focuses on those 250 missiles … not the closest or easiest ones that we’ve been picking off so far.”

             
I paused.

             
“And we need that YESTERDAY.”

             
A new voice came on the comms. Male, one of the engineers, I assumed.

             
“Franco here. We had the same thought, just a few minutes ago. Sorry. Will have in in three or four. If you can get a hundred of those missiles, we think we can hold the Sunflower together.”

             
“Very good, send it along instantly. Also, give us a vector now that we can execute so we’ll be in position sooner. And make sure the solar probes are targeting those 250 missiles as well!”

             
“Understand. Head solar south, directly. Targeting solution will be along in two minutes.”

             
Tonia and Kin changed course immediately. Kin loosed an extreme long shot, 350 kilometers, at the missile we had been chasing, then aimed three or four bursts in its vicinity, scoring a lucky parting shot. One more down.

             
I looked at them, then Sama. We were on overdrive already, but needed more. I boosted the engine cores to 150% of spec, giving Tonia extra juice that she immediately used, putting eight gravities on us. Unmodified original humans would die in just a very few minutes of this, maybe thirty or forty, tops. Fortunately, we were not built ordinary.

             
But eight gravities was eight gravities, and each of us was pressed back in our acceleration chairs, which unfolded to couches, providing the greatest possible soft surface area with which to take our now-crushing weight. Simultaneously, skinsuits tightened on legs and arms, fighting the pooling of blood in the extremities.

             
“Boosting at eight Gs for 5 minutes,” I grunted. Then we would be hunting again, and reduce to four or so.

             
The temperature rose, environmental controls not able to compensate for the sudden increase in power output. The reactor cores seemed to be stable, even operating far outside what must be their normal specs, but I kept a watchful eye on their vitals.

             
Another number popped up on our main screen beside the total number of EMPs left, which was now down to 945. It was 250, and we all knew what that one meant. Then it started to decrease, going down by five. We hadn’t fired a single shot on our new attack vector yet.

             
“Sun probes in position and taking out the most dangerous missiles,” Livia’s voice intruded into the bridge of our sunship, now a pressure cooker with us as the food.

             
“Looks like they are surviving the first hits and retargeting. It’s working!”