Marten sipped Jovian coffee as he leaned forward, staring thoughtfully. The ice-asteroid heading fast for the Inner Planets was too much like Carme. They had found little cyborg data in the ruined machines on the tiny Jovian moon, but the action had spoken loudly enough.
The problem finding more data now was that space was vast. It was hard for Marten to grasp the immensity of the Great Dark. AUs, light-years, those were just fancy terms. The human mind couldn’t really understand them.
Analogies helped. Take the Earth or Mars and make them the size of a period at the end of a sentence. Then hold the period up in a large room. At the closest approach, Earth and Mars would be four meters away. The tiny speck of Earth with its teeming billions and its clouds, oceans and breathable air orbited through billions of cubic kilometers of empty space. A Doom Star would be like a microbe in an ocean. How did you spot it if it was trying to hide?
Marten took another sip and rubbed his eyes. You found it like this: days and nights of observations. The computer searched for a small glitch against the empty void that would point to movement. That movement might be an enemy vessel or planetoid.
They used thermal scanners, broad-spectrum electromagnetic sensors, neutrino detectors and mass detectors. Hour after hour, they sliced through carefully selected sections of the Great Dark, looking for anomalies.
Normally, an enemy ship emitted radiation, especially if it used a fusion or ion engine. The Great Dark seethed with radiation, however. The radiation came from the Sun and from Jupiter and Saturn. If a black-ice asteroid moved from simple velocity—having gained it around Saturn—then it would emit no radiation and no heat signature.
The Earth’s death might have been launched months ago. It was their task to discover if there were more asteroids coming. The lone ice-asteroid suggested that there were more.
“Why would the cyborgs launch such a thing?” Nadia asked.
“They’re aliens,” Marten said. “They want to eradicate humanity and populate the Solar System with themselves.”
“But they originated from humans,” Nadia said.
“It’s probably what makes them so deadly. If they were just machines—” he shrugged.
“It’s so cold, so ruthless.”
“Tan should have sent more ships with us,” Marten said. He took another sip. “But she couldn’t. What if the cyborgs have already launched another attack at Jupiter? There are hardly enough warships left as it is.”
“Maybe the cyborgs launched the ice-asteroid to focus our attention on it.”
“For what reason?” Marten asked.
“You’re the military man,” she said. “You tell me what else the cyborgs could do.”
Marten frowned at the screen. “What would you say if I ordered the
“To where?” she asked.
“Neptune.”
Everyone in the command center looked up.
Marten was too engrossed in the screen to notice. “What if we went to Neptune and searched for Osadar’s ice hauler there?”
“What ship was that?” Nadia asked quietly.
Marten told her about the experimental ship.
“That’s interesting,” said Nadia. “But wouldn’t the cyborgs already have confiscated it and made it part of their Neptune Fleet?”
“Possibly,” he said.
“We should run from the asteroid and flee out of the Solar System?” asked the sensor-officer.
“What?” Marten asked. He turned around, and he noticed everyone hanging on his words. He scowled, stared into his coffee cup and shook his head. “It’s a stupid idea. You’re right,” he told Nadia. “The cyborgs would have already converted the ice hauler to their own use. This is the battle, and we’ll choose our ground and fight now.”
“Where exactly?” asked Nadia.
Marten slotted the coffee cup into a holder on his chair. “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” he said.
-33-
Thirteen days after the initial sighting of the ice-asteroid, Commodore Blackstone of the Mars Battlefleet received an emergency request to report to the bridge of the
He raced out of his quarters as he tucked in his shirt. While riding the lift, he buttoned his uniform. Fitting his cap on snuggly, he strode through the hatch. Commissar Kursk was already there by the map-module. She looked up, and there were lines in her face.
“What is it?” Blackstone asked.
Kursk opened her mouth, but no words came. The look in her eyes….
Blackstone felt a cold pit in his stomach. Resolutely, he approached the map-module. Highlighted in red on the screen was a larger object. At least, it was larger than the original ice-asteroid.
“It’s a big one,” he said.
Kursk shook her head. “That isn’t just a single asteroid.”
He began to fiddle with the module’s controls.
“It’s an asteroid-cluster hundreds of thousands of kilometers behind the first asteroid,” Kursk said.
Blackstone nodded. He could see that by the readings.
“The cluster is moving faster, however,” she said. “The tacticians say the cluster will catch up with the first asteroid.”
“When?”
“It isn’t
He heard the bleakness in her voice. He saw it in the lines on her face.
“They’ll merge as the cluster nears Earth,” she said.
“Give me full magnification,” Blackstone said. On the map-module, he watched as the red-highlighted object became many asteroids in close formation. “How many are there?” he asked. This was worse than he’d expected.
“We’re working on it. There could be thousands.”
“What?” he said.
“There’s a possibility that some of those asteroids are really debris fields.”
Blackstone adjusted the controls, but couldn’t get any better images. Were they using the debris as a mass shield? He shook his head. The debris wasn’t as important as the bigger asteroids, many of them.
“They mean to wipe out every living thing on Earth,” Blackstone declared.
“The cyborgs are insane,” Kursk whispered. “They’re inhuman.”
“They’re aliens,” Blackstone said. He tried to envision what this all meant. “Did these objects originate in the Saturn System? Well?” he shouted.
“We’re still working on it,” the sensor-officer said by her board.
Blackstone leaned against the map-module and found that he was breathing hard. Total annihilation of everything on Earth—the cyborgs meant to smash the most critical planet to Social Unity and the Highborn. This had to be from the cyborgs. The Highborn could have dropped the former farm habitats on Earth if they’d wished for planetary obliteration.
“Prepare a message for Supreme Commander Hawthorne,” he said.
“We already have,” Kursk said. “What are you going to add?”
