“Ah,” said Cassius, “I see. If you decelerate, we shall re-supply you.”
“That’s a generous offer, Grand Admiral. But I cannot. I’ve been given my orders straight from Supreme Commander Hawthorne of Social Unity. I dare not disobey him.”
Cassius adjusted the transmission. Everything was turning against him at once. Did the universe mean to test his greatness to the limit? Somewhere, he needed events to move in
“What if I said that I shall fire on your ships unless you decelerate?” said Cassius.
Mandela glanced about as if for moral support. There was whispering around him, maybe directed at him. Mandela nodded and took a tentative step forward. “Speaking theoretically, sir, it would mean our alliance was at an end.”
“Ah,” said Cassius, “speaking theoretically. Go then, preman. I grant you leave.” The ultra-lasers were still under repairs. He would never forget this preman’s treachery, however. After he had fought so hard for them, they acted like ingrates and ran away.
Hours passed. In time, the three SU warships accelerated far away from the asteroids.
From Earth, the first salvo of merculite missiles ignited off the blast-pans and headed for the stratosphere, rising to do battle with the mass of potential kinetic death to every living organism on the planet.
Cassius watched the lone planet, and he wished in that moment he possessed the ancient premen superstition of a belief in God. He would have liked to ask someone to help him for a change. But if God was real, He kept silent. God had never spoken to the Grand Admiral of the Highborn. Therefore, because he was alone, Cassius desperately hoped the dice of fate rolled in his favor. He needed the Earth intact, and then he needed to outmaneuver his Highborn enemies.
-100-
Supreme Commander James Hawthorne stood with his hands clasped behind his back. Deep underground in the Joho Mountain Bunker, he watched the screens. Around him, officers and operators murmured among themselves. It had been calculated that the planet wreckers would likely smash into South America. They had to stop that. The many screens showed many different things.
In Bavaria Sector, giant ferroconcrete bays opened. Slowly, giant merculite missiles appeared. Seconds ticked by. The image shook as one after another, the merculite missiles began to lift off. Yellow flames burned behind them as they moved slowly and then quickly accelerated to escape-velocity and faster.
Another screen showed the outskirts of Kiev, the flowing wheat fields with their critical food growth. A giant tube poked out of the main proton generating station. The tube aimed into the heavens. Below it underground and out of sight, the city’s deep-core mine supplied power. Then a milky-colored beam lanced into the sky.
Other proton beams flashed. More merculite missiles flew. On other screens, cannons began to spew defensive shells. Highborn orbitals flew up from North and South America. Everything Earth possessed in way of space- defense exploded, beamed or kinetic-force smashed against the incoming asteroids and the masses of meteor- debris.
The rocky chunks of matter launched long-ago in the Saturn System now approached near-Earth orbit. The long journey was almost over. They had passed through vast reaches of empty space and survived ultra-lasers, Highborn-fashioned nukes, ricocheting habitats and magnetic-induced shoves. The cyborg trajectory calculations had proved flawless. Now these objects headed straight for South America at immense velocity.
Sirens wailed in the Joho Bunker. Warning bells rang. Men and women stood up as they watched the possible end of life on Earth.
The proton beams were devastating, consuming the smaller objects one after another. The merculite missiles held upgraded warheads. They nudged the big asteroids, and finally caused them to crack, splinter and burst apart. All the while, however, the objects came closer, closer.
A big chunk of the former fifteen-kilometer rock stubbornly shrugged off a nuclear missile. It had a solid nickel- iron core. A proton beam washed it and burned away mass, but the nickel-iron took time to destroy. The object obliterated a cylindrical habitat maneuvered into its path, sending a spray of metal toward Earth.
“Sir!” a woman shouted.
“I see it,” said Hawthorne. “What’s its mass?”
“It’s just under four kilometers in diameter,” a man said. “If it keeps on this course, it will hit in upper South America.”
“That ought to keep Colonel Naga happy,” Hawthorne whispered.
“Sir?” the man asked.
Hawthorne shoulders slumped. “Never mind,” he said.
On the screen, more objects kept coming. Some smashed through other habitats, a few of the smaller meteors deflected from the atmosphere.
“Milan has gone offline!” a woman moaned.
“There’s a deep-core burst in Cape Town. They pushed too hard.”
“Help us!” Hawthorne shouted, as he threw up his hands and implored the Unknown One.
“Here it comes,” a woman said. “Nothing can stop it now.”
-101-
There were various objects under thirty-five meters. Each burned through the upper atmosphere. The first one became visible to the naked eye at one hundred and five kilometers high. Air friction began to heat the rocky object. Gasses burned off the meteor and the denser air turned it white hot. The increasing friction and heat caused the Saturn-rock to break apart into seven different pieces. Those burned faster, creating a glowing tail visible in the daylight to those craning and watching the doom of Earth. Because of its rocky nature, this object burned up at fifty-seven kilometers above the surface.
The other small meteors also burned up in the atmosphere.
There came one big object, the nickel-iron asteroid slightly under four-kilometers in diameter. Its velocity had taken it from Saturn to its destiny here over South America. It appeared at one hundred and five kilometers above the surface, smashing down through the thin atmosphere. Soon, gasses boiled off the increasing heated object. A gigantic tail appeared and remained like a jet’s exhaust as a streak of grim finality. Still the massive object sped down. At seventy kilometers from the surface, it blazed at four thousand degrees Fahrenheit. At fifty-five kilometers, the ear-splinting booms began. It roared and blazed like a projectile from Hell as it headed for the Amazon Basin in Brazil Sector. At twenty-two kilometers, it cast a shadow on the surface like a targeting dot.
Soon thereafter, the terrible asteroid struck the surface of the Earth, releasing incredible kinetic energy. A circular shock wave of obliterating proportions flattened everything for half the continent. Trees, buildings and even mountains blew down, apart and often into the air. Earthquakes shook the planet. Billions of tons of debris billowed upward in a vast cloud that dwarfed anything ever seen on Planet Earth.
In South America, moments after impact and continuing in a ripple-like wave, over five billion people died in the crumbling underground cities. Billions more were going to die as the planet entered a new era of weather patterns and cycle of seasons.
The cyborgs had made their annihilating mark, creating the hugest crater on Earth. Likely, it would become a new lake in the middle of South America. The cyborgs had also achieved a first: the greatest single death toll of any one particular action.
Some time later in the Joho Mountain Bunker, Hawthorne slowly picked himself off the floor.
“What happened?” someone asked nearby.
