a quarter pounds.
Next Marten picked up something called a PD-10. It was a passive designator. It looked like a heavy Gyroc rifle, but with a large dish antennae on the barrel. The user needed to keep the dish on target. Through secure communications, the PD-10 sent targeting coordinates to any nearby IML-launched Cognitive missiles.
“We need to recode these,” Marten said. “Forget about tanks or vehicles, and set them to target cyborgs.”
“I’m not a technician,” Osadar said.
“I don’t mean you have to do it. But what do you think of the idea?”
Osadar glanced at the IML and at the PD-10 before shrugging.
“Technicians will reset the Cognitive missiles,” Marten said, “using you as the prospective target. With you, I can also show the troops the capabilities of cyborgs and hopefully find some weak points to exploit.”
“They still hate me for slapping their faces.”
Marten grunted. He’d chosen his space marines, calling them that now instead of ship-guardians. He’d taken the ones, twos and threes. Most of them were doomed to a quick death. He was probably doomed, too. But he’d chosen them. Now he was trying to figure out ways to keep them alive once they reached Carme. IMLs, patrol boats to land them on the surface, what else could he do? The knowledge that he led these space marines to almost certain death was beginning to weigh on him.
“How fast does Carme accelerate?” Marten asked Yakov in his wardroom.
“My information says at one-quarter G.”
Marten nodded. The
“I need to take my space marines outside,” Marten said.
“We’re accelerating,” Yakov said. “No one goes outside the ship during acceleration.”
“That’s why I need to take them out,” Marten said.
“You might lose men.”
“I might lose space marines on Carme,” Marten said. “But I’m still headed there.”
Yakov drummed his fingers on the computer-desk. At last, he nodded.
The next day began the high-G training. Marten and Omi went out with each squad. It was grueling work. Everyone checked his or her vacc-suit twice. They lacked the spikes of shock trooper suits. Instead, they had hammer-jacks, pitons and block and tackle gear. Marten led the way.
He shot a piton into the meteor-rock and attached his line to it. Slowly, he crawled forward. Piton by piton he neared the curvature of the ship. The G-forces began to tear at him. It caused his mouth to become dry.
Stars and meteor-rock filled his vision. His harsh breathing was all he heard. Then he opened his com-link and instructed those following him.
Slowly, with Omi at the end, the squad crawled across the backside of the
It was the fifth time across that the accident occurred. Marten was exhausted. He might have forgotten to give his warnings. There was a scream in his helmet.
“Pelias!” someone roared.
There was a sharp yank on the line. Then there was nothing. Marten’s stomach curled tight. While clutching the gear, he twisted his helmeted head. The sight sickened him.
A space marine tumbled away from the meteor-shell. Her arms flailed as she quickly dwindled.
“Pelias,” Marten whispered.
“Please,” she moaned. “Help me. Send help. I don’t want to die.”
Her flailing form quickly became too small to see. The
“Pelias,” Marten said, recalling her black lipstick, the way she’d walked. She would last for hours out there, knowing that she was soon going to run out of air.
As Marten clung to the rock with the others behind him, he recalled the awful image of shock troopers dwindling into the blackness, those that had fallen off the
“What are we going to do?” a space marine asked.
Marten squinted into the starry distance.
“Group-Leader Kluge?” someone asked.
Marten gathered his resolve. Why had Pelias been the one? He shook his head. Then he chinned on his line. He was the shock trooper. He was the hard case.
“This isn’t a game,” he told them. “This is life or death. Pelias forgot that.” He didn’t know if that was true. But he had to use this to train the others.
He heard someone call him a bastard.
Marten shook his head. He had space marines to toughen. He had to do whatever he could so a few might survive the cyborgs. Probably, they were all doomed to die horribly. Or worse, they would enter a cyborg converter.
“Keep moving, people,” Marten heard himself say. “Don’t make Pelias’s mistake. You have to keep your focus at all times.” Then he began to move again, crawling across the surface of the meteor-ship.
Pelias’s boyfriend went berserk the next day. He attacked Marten with a blade, trying to stab him in the back in the recreation room where they drilled. A shout from Omi gave Marten enough time to whirl, dodge and chop his stiffened fingers into the attacker’s throat. The boyfriend writhed on a mat, clutching his throat.
Afterward, Marten went to his chamber. He broke out a bottle of Yakov’s whiskey, sipping once. It burned going down. He shook his head. He hated this. He hated the Highborn and he damn well hated the cyborgs. What had humanity ever done to receive these twin fates?
Marten took another sip before corking the bottle. He had to keep pushing. Destroying the planet-wrecker—he might be saving Earth or Mars. Either way, billions of lives might be resting on what he did. He couldn’t go soft now. He had to push.
The door opened and Osadar entered. The cyborg stopped, and she looked at him.
He gave her a tired glance before getting up, going to the desk and turning on the computer. He felt a growing need to do everything he could to make sure some of these cannon fodder space marine would survive the battle. He knew they were going to need every advantage they could find, or they were all going to die uselessly.
-6-
The debates raged on Ganymede and in the Combined Fleet stationed in mid-orbit there. Chief Strategist Tan held nominal command of the fleet, but that power was slipping.
The warships near Athena Station waited. There was a meteor-ship heading toward them. The assumption was they were cyborg-controlled. They answered radio calls with human officers, citing ridiculous excuses as to why they remained there. But it was obvious they were cyborg ships now. All civilian and commercial spaceships stayed far away from Athena Station. Counting the approaching meteor-ship, the cyborg fleet there contained one dreadnaught, three meteor-ships and many patrol boats.
The terrible meaning of the genocidal destruction of Callisto finally began to seep into the warship-personnel of the Guardian Fleet. Callisto had contained nearly half the Jovian population and well over half the system’s
