Mech 2 Read online

  Nuclear weapons—all explosives in fact—worked differently in space. There was no blasting cloud of high-pressure air, just the initial shockwave and that was it. In order for even a one megaton device to be effective, it had to be within about a kilometer of an enemy ship at the point of detonation.

  Both the Vlax and the Nexus used Grimmel-8 kinetic force missiles for long range attacks. The Grimmel-8s had no need to be nuclear-tipped to be effective if they achieved a direct hit. The kinetic energy released when a missile struck while moving at a rate of only three kilometers per second faster than its target, for example, was equivalent to its weight in TNT. The Grimmel-8 was drive-based, like a miniature robot ram-ship. Given time to build up enough velocity, and accurate guidance, they simply smashed themselves into enemies at high speed. No warhead was required.

  The main problem with the missiles was their extremely slow speed when compared to lasers and their vulnerability to defensive systems. Missiles might move at fifty klicks per second, given enough time to get up to speed, but light traveled at 300,000 kilometers per second from a cold start.

  Lasers, however, had their own problems. While effectively infinite in range, they were not infinite in effective range. In order to damage an enemy vessel the beam had to focus its energy as tightly as possible upon a given spot on the enemy hull. In order to strike with enough energy to burn through metal, even the best chemical lasers in the Nexus patrol fleet had to be within half a million kilometers.

  It was with utter shock and dismay the first of the patrol ships discovered it was under attack, nearly a million klicks from the enemy line. At first, the licking beams of heat were not strong enough to do real damage. A few pilots had their retinas burned out of their heads and were permanently blinded. Quickly, as the reports of effective strikes came in, the orders went out to lower blast shields and begin countermeasures. Panicked, the captains reported their situation back to Nexus Command.

  Droad and Commodore Beauchamp viewed the data relayed up to them from Nexus. They were grim-faced.

  “This is unbelievable,” said Beauchamp. “How could the Vlax have managed a breakthrough in optics? They have twice our effective range.”

  “How long until we can shoot back?” asked Droad.

  Beauchamp stared at him for a moment. “You’re not even surprised, are you?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “No, no. You think these are your crazy aliens and their super-science. When you faced them, they never came at you with a fleet, did they?”

  “No sir.”

  “Then why aren’t you surprised?”

  “Commodore,” said Droad slowly. He looked at the man. He could see a very different look in his eye now. The man was scared. Good, thought Droad. That’s the only way we have a chance. “Okay, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. I didn’t expect this, exactly. I expected something. I’m not even sure whether we are fighting the Vlax or aliens or something else entirely. But neither the Vlax nor the Skaintz are in the habit of throwing away fleets. They had to have a way of killing our ships. It makes perfect sense if they outrange us. What difference will our numbers make if we can’t get close enough to fire a shot before they burn us out of the sky?”

  Beauchamp chewed on his thumb. “Let’s work on this together then. We’ll run some numbers, as I’m sure they are doing down at Nexus. Combined, the enemy and our fleet are moving toward one another at a rate of about fifty klicks a second. At that speed, it will take our ships over two hours to get close enough to fire back.”

  “What kind of defensive measures do they have?”

  “We have the usual, chaff, aerogels, reflective surfaces. We can spin the super structures, like a twirling umbrella. But nothing solid. The vessels don’t have any mass shields. Just their hulls. Nothing that can stop thirty incoming beams. That’s what they’ll do, you know. Whoever they are. They will all fire on one of our ships until its dust, then go to the next.”

  Several of the bridge crew, eyes round, listened closely. They were no more sure what to do than were their commanders.

  “Can we recall them?” asked Droad gently.

  “Negative. They are moving too fast. They rushed out there, to meet the enemy and destroy them before they got in close. We figured we had the advantage. Ships don’t just pivot, you know.”

  “Yes, of course they can’t. I’ve spent the last two years coming into the Kale system decelerating. You would think I would know what it takes to turn around in space. They are committed to this battle, then.”

  “There’s nothing anyone can do but fight it out. By the time either side reduced their speed significantly, they’ll be on top of each other. Like two bullets fired on a collision course. There is no turning back.”

  “What will they do?”

  The Commodore squirmed in his command chair. “They’ll probably speed up. The faster they get into range the sooner they can fire back.”

  “Sir,” said the com officer. Everyone looked at him. “We have vid feed now.”

  The big domed roof of the bridge lit up like an old-fashioned holographic planetarium. Two groups of tiny flares moved toward one another in the ocean of nothingness between Neu Schweitz and asteroid belt Alpha.

  “Zoom us in on their fleet,” ordered Beauchamp.

  The enemy line grew into a line of almond-shapes. They were metal rooks—but something was strange about them.

  “What the hell is all that crap on their hulls?” asked Beauchamp aloud.

  Droad took a step toward the raised foredeck, then another. He climbed a set of steel stairs and reached up. The image wavered at his touch. He squinted at the substance covering the rook ships. The ships looked, indeed, like almonds. Not just in shape, but in texture. There were faint traceries, like veins, growing over the vessels.

  “These ships have a living covering of some kind.”

  “Your aliens?”

  Droad shook his head. “Could be. We never really got the chance to see how they operated in space.”

  “How the hell could they come here with a fleet? Answer me that, Droad. How did they field a fleet of crusted-over rooks so quickly?”

  “They are nothing if not fast, tactically and strategically. If I had to guess, I would say they took over the Vlax habitats some time ago and built up this fleet with hybrid technologies. And, yes, the more I think about it, the more certain I am that they are the same aliens that struck Garm. Their tech is largely organic in nature.”

  “Besides,” mused Beauchamp, “what are the odds we’ve run into another race of hostile aliens in just a few years?”

  “The question is, what are we going to do about it?” asked Droad.

  “Do? We’re going to watch the battle. We’ll watch good men die while our hearts pound and our stomachs churn. And will get this ship ready for fighting as fast as possible. Does that make you happy, Droad?”

  “No sir. Not really. Honestly, I wish I had been wrong. Totally wrong.”

  The alien ships came on. They fired in focused bursts now, targeting single ships as Beauchamp had predicted. After about an hour, the two groups of ships were close enough for the enemy lasers to be deadly. The first human patrol ship burnt up and flashed into nothingness. The reactor had ruptured.

  “How long?”

  “Our ships will be in range for some revenge in less than an hour now.”

  Droad shook his head. “Tell them to fire every missile they have.”

  Beauchamp snorted. “Missiles? If they fire them this far out they won’t hit the enemy until hours after this is over.”

  “Better than getting them destroyed.”

  “Well, I’m not in charge of this battle,” said the Commodore.

  Droad walked over to the com officer. He contacted Brigadier Druzman and relayed his suggestion. Nodding, he headed back to the center of the bridge.

  “Well, what did he say.”

  “They’ve already fired them. All of them.”

  Beaucham
p stared at him. “Do you know what that means?”

  “I can guess. Nexus Command has calculated that none of the patrol ships are going to make it into laser range with the enemy.”

  They watched over the next hour as ship after ship blew up.

  #

  Nicu was sick of his spacesuit. He had been sick of his old one, but things had gone beyond the point of endurance with this new one. The problem was, he couldn’t afford to vent it, to clean it, to allow it to dump out his waste. The suit was like a mini-spaceship in many ways, self-sufficient. It recycled everything he gave off into some form of useable material. His carbon-dioxide exhalations were scrubbed and recycled into breathable oxygen, a technology that had been known to divers on Old Earth centuries ago. His urine was distilled to warm water. However, there were certain wastes that were stubborn. Without true bio-mass recycling tanks, they could not be broken down. In short, after a week inside his suit the paste that the suit fed him began to taste like sludge. He knew even his air and water supplies would soon turn toxic.

  Under normal circumstances, it would be a simple thing to evacuate the suit and the waste system and refill the reservoirs. But he couldn’t do it, not even though the facilities were available aboard the refurbished rook he rode upon. He knew if he showed his nose or even made an odd smell, the aliens onboard would detect him. And then it would be all over.

  Nicu had stowed away on one of the rooks before the aliens had taken off on this insane attack of theirs. He had waited until their guard was down. They had thought him tame. Nicu smiled at the thought. He knew very well, as had his long-suffering mother and his third grade teacher, both of whom had finally given up on him and abandoned him long ago—there was no taming Nicu.

  He had come to regret his hiding place. Possibly, he would have fared better hiding back on the Tyrolia and letting most of the aliens take off on this crusade against the Nexus. It had never been his intention to be caught up in a battle. Quite the opposite. His hope had been he could commandeer the rook and escape Minerva entirely.

  The aliens had taken every last rook that could operate and turned them all into flying pumpkins of some kind. In the main cabin up forward, ropy veins grew across the floor, pulsating with liquids or nerve impulses. Possibly both. The ship was half-alive and completely terrifying. He was sure some of the floating things that hung, rooted in the fleshy walls with curved swaying stalks, were optical organs. Perhaps some of them could hear, taste or otherwise sense his presence if he went up there.

  So he stayed in an unused tool compartment. Inside this box, little more than a cubic meter of space, he had spent uncountable hours. His stolen supplies had run out, and his suit was overflowing with waste products. Something had to be done.

  Nicu sighed. His greatest regret was the aliens had taken his knife from him. He had come to trust his blade and felt even more helpless without it. He decided, after much pondering, to wait another day.

  The battle awoke him. The ship shuddered under him, rocking with impacts. Were they under fire?

  He waited tensely. Every minute or so, the ship shuddered and rocked. It was very rhythmic. He thought about that. It seemed to him that the ship was firing its main weapons systems, which had been altered by the aliens. It was not taking fire, it was firing at something. But what?

  Another hour went by. The firing continued. Nicu decided it was time to peek out of his hole. Perhaps he could use the waste removal system in the next compartment without being noticed. The battle should be distracting the aliens, whatever they were shooting at.

  So he crept out of his cube. He had kept his muscles ready for this. He had stretched and exercised isometrically in any way he could. Still, when he stood in the narrow corridor, his back was bent and his legs ached. Eyeing the waste removal station enviously, he decided to take a chance. He entered and plugged in plastic hoses.

  Pumps gurgled. He wondered if he would be caught. It would almost be worth it.

  The ship took another shock then. This was a different sensation. Instead of firing, they had been hit. He threw up his arms, bracing them against the close, curving walls.

  Another shock followed the first, this one hit harder. Finally, whoever they had been shooting at was shooting back. Damn the luck!

  The waste system finished the final cleanse. The nano-cloth began working furiously to transport all the final wastes, the ones that had overflowed into his suit, into the now empty receptacles. The nano efforts made his skin crawl and itch, but it was more than worth it.

  Nicu’s plan was simple. He would fill up on fresh water, steal a bit of foodstuffs from the galley, and then pop back into his hiding spot. He had stowed away for a long time, and when something had worked for him, Nicu was not the kind who tried to fix it.

  The next strike changed his mind, however. It was the hardest yet. A screaming sound reached his ears immediately after this impact. The sound was that of escaping gas. The ship was depressurizing.

  He ran his fingers over his faceplate in a panic. It was closed and sealed. What were these crazy aliens up to? They were going to get him killed, after all this suffering. The unfairness of that thought was more than he could bear.

  Nicu crept out of his hiding place and stood on the decking. He walked forward, into the front of the ship where the waving fronds and rippling flesh walls were.

  The flesh he found there had darkened. In spots it was dead, gray. A dozen stalks sagged, their orbs hanging from fluttering cusps. The living portion of the ship was dying. Flesh had grown over the rips in the ship’s skin, but the wound appeared fatal.

  Nicu frowned. He crouched in a ball at the back of the main cabin. Where were the aliens? Was this thing independently piloted by whatever tissues they’d grown over it? Did it have a brain somewhere, attached to the controls? What if they had taken out the manual systems? If the ship died, he could be trapped here, floating in space.

  He crawled over flaccid, quivering veins as thick as fire hoses. He slapped away sensory fronds that brushed against him, shuddering in their death throes. Finally, he made his way up to the front of the ship, to the pilot’s chair.

  Something sat there. Nicu had never seen an arl before, the Imperium pilot-being. It was vaguely man-shaped, but with a head like an octopus and hands like two smaller octopi. The arl worked the controls with skillful precision. Nicu saw with relief the control systems were still recognizable. The normal switches, sliding levers and buttons were still there, but beside them, sometimes overlapping, were a dozen growths. Things that resembled—nipples? Or perhaps boneless pink toes.

  The arl pilot was distracted. The alien battled the controls with intensity. The ship still fired every so often.

  Nicu tiptoed up behind the arl. He quietly detached the fire extinguisher that was still clipped to the back of the pilot’s chair. That sound must have alerted the arl who straightened. One cusp on a roving stalk swiveled away from the flashing displays. The cusp opened widely, spotting Nicu. The orb bulged and the stalk retracted in shock.

  Before the alien could get up or draw a weapon, Nicu brought the extinguisher down upon the orb and followed through. He smashed it into the soft skull beneath. He lifted the metal cylinder and he did it again. He kept on pumping his makeshift weapon up and down until the alien in the chair was a slimy pulp.

  Still, Nicu kept methodically slamming the cylinder up and down. He suspected the thing might have more brains, hidden inside its anatomy somewhere.

  He wanted to make sure.

  Twenty-Three

  The Savant shivered and hissed in vexation. Her modified rooks had destroyed the enemy ships with their long range lasers, but they hadn’t anticipated their counterstroke with missiles. The rooks had little in the way of defenses. It was galling to watch her ships trying to target incoming missiles with long-range heavy lasers. Most of them missed the tiny, fast-moving targets and were battered into debris. She watched as one of her last ships flickered and went dead, tumbling through space
.

  She rearranged her tentacles in a resolute pattern. She had plenty of forces left, and the rooks had completed their task of destroying the enemy fleet. Now, all that stood between her invasion forces and the planet surface was a battery of laser bases on the various moons.

  Even now, the invasion pods were landing on the moons and her killbeasts were bounding over the airless rocks on suicide missions. They could not survive long, exposed on the moons. But hopefully, they would live long enough.

  #

  “Sir? I have some strange distress calls coming in,” said the com officer.

  “What? Did one of our ships live out there? Poor bastards. We can’t even catch them. They’ll be out of the system and dying in open space before—”

  “No sir, it’s not from the deep patrol. It’s from the defense station here on Crom.”

  “Put it through,” said Droad.

  Beauchamp threw him another reproachful glare. Droad met the glance with a bland expression.

  The com officer brought up a strange scene. It took a few moments for them to understand what they were looking at. The camera angle was canted badly, about thirty-degrees off center. Dust dribbled down from the ceiling. Men circled around, they held weapons and were putting on vacc suits as fast as they could.

  “The video pickup has been knocked off its mount,” said the com officer.

  The ceiling ruptured then. A screaming sound erupted. Gas was leaking out. The sudden depressurization sucked a few men into the void. Others died with their blood boiling in their suits, as they had not yet sealed them properly. The base was on the sun-side of the moon now and the surface temperature was well over one hundred degrees Celsius. The surviving half of the gunner crew began firing up into the breach.