“They out range us,” I said, watching in panic as they slowed further. “They can sit outside our reach and snipe us to death.”
I heard another beeping in my helmet. “Go ahead, Kwon,” I said.
“Sir, my turrets are falling off the ship when you made that turn,” he said.
“What?” I asked frowning.
“I’ve lost contact with eleven of them.”
I suddenly got the message. “The Macros are knocking out our turrets. They’ll take them all out, then invade. Damn.”
“We could turn around again until they get in range,” Gorski suggested.
I shook my head. “They can see them or sense them somehow. They will just snipe at our engines if we let them. They are in no hurry. We don’t have anything to hit them with.”
“We’ll have another drone in time to fire at them,” Gorski said. “Or we could throw mines.”
“We’re going to need those mines. There’s no evidence the ones we threw at them hit anything, is there?”
“No sir.”
I turned back to the board. Another tiny shock rattled the ship. I realized I didn’t have any choices left. I was out-ranged, and they were stripping away the small armament that I had. I could tell, without Sarin spoon-feeding the data to me, the enemy shuttles had slowed down to a crawl now in relative speeds. I would have done the same. When you outranged an enemy, you sat back and pounded him.
I had no interest in being softened up any further. “Full ahead,” I ordered. “Charge them. Let’s get into range before they destroy every turret we set up.”
I felt the ship move under my feet and had to grip the computer table with my hands. The acceleration had to be tremendous to feel it so strongly while the inertial dampeners were functioning.
“Kwon!” I shouted over the engines, which were thrumming loudly now. “Get your men inside the hull and tell them invaders are likely.”
“Right sir!” Kwon shouted back excitedly.
If I hadn’t been facing sixty-four angry robots I would have laughed. He sounded like a kid let loose in a video game store.
29
We’d lost about eighty percent of our laser turrets by the time we got into range a few minutes later. The ship rocked and shuddered with the impact of the enemy beams. At that point, the four Macro assault shuttles blossomed. It looked like they’d come apart into a mass of red dots.
“Did we knock them all out at once?” I asked in amazement.
Major Sarin shook her head and frowned. “We are close enough for a visual, Colonel.”
She dialed up a close-up of the Macro formation. I watched and immediately felt a sinking sensation. The assault ships were not at all what I’d expected. Rather than being single, sleek vessels with solid hulls, they looked like networks of struts covered with systems and filled with Macros. We could actually see the Macros they carried, exposed inside the cage-like ships.
The Macro marines were self-mobile. As I watched in shock, they began lifting off from the framework shuttles they were riding. They flew under individual propulsion away from the skeletal assault ships, resembling a swarm of wasps. They came at us with their blue-white engine trails glaring behind them.
“The shuttles look like one of those trucks that carry cars,” Gorski said.
I nodded in agreement. The enemy ships did resemble truck trailers. They were little more than thick rails with specialized Macros clamping onto them.
“Zoom in on one of the marines if you can,” I said.
Major Sarin fiddled with the controls. I marveled at her precision. She was much better with these touch systems than I was. Soon our visual was tracking a single Macro. It came in jinking and slewing about from side to side. The head rotated with insectile movements and obvious intelligence. The large nozzle in the face was probably some kind of boring laser.
I watched our beams slide past it, drawing lines flickering lines in space. These should have been invisible in the void, but the beams were hitting something… Then I saw the Macro marine had stopped firing its engines. Now it was squirting material around itself. Whatever the stuff was, it looked gaseous. The image of the Macro marine became obscured behind this growing cloud.
“What the heck is that?” I asked.
“Unknown,” Gorski said. “I would guess it’s some kind of aerosol or gel. Its purpose appears to be defensive.”
“Are you telling me it’s squirting out particles to form a shield against laser strikes?” I demanded. “They are making shields against our beams?”
“It would appear so.”
“Why doesn’t it just fly through it?”
“Well-”
“Never mind,” I said, having already thought it through. The enemy Macro wasn’t accelerating anymore. Anything it threw out in front of itself would move away from it in space, as there was no air resistance to push it back. If you were to hang out your driver’s side window and squirt paint forward on Earth, it would naturally fire back and splatter you. But in space there was no air to push back. Anything thrown forward moved forward forever, unless you accelerated into it. These Marcos were braking for their final landing on the Jolly Rodger’s hull, not increasing their speed, so they were able to stay behind their growing, semi-opaque shields of particles.
“Did we get any of them before they sprayed these shields?”
“I’m not sure…” Sarin said, frowning at her interface.
“Gorski? Do a query, get a count.”
I saw a growing cloud of dots moving away from their assault ships, which I now thought of as assault racks. It was about then that I got the first knot in my stomach. They’d surprised us several times already. How many more tricks did they have in store? I’d thought this was going to be easy. They were coming in slowly, and should have been fat targets. I planned to simply let our automatic systems destroy them all. Now, I wasn’t so sure.
“Colonel, I’m still counting sixty-four bogeys,” Gorski said. “We might have gotten one, but…”
“But we didn’t,” I said.
“At least they can’t shoot us through their own shields,” Gorski sai.
I noticed he was right: I hadn’t felt any impacts for a couple of minutes. Suddenly, I had an idea. It was about time I had one, and I hoped it wasn’t too late. “Come about, bring the helm ninety degrees starboard and apply full thrust!”
Startled, my bridge crew worked to do as I asked. The helmsman brainbox extended an extra two arms to accomplish the task. We were grabbing the edge of the table again, and leaning a bit.
“What’s the plan, sir?” Sarin asked.
“If we swing wide, we’ll be able to fire around those sprayed out shields of theirs.”
“What if they have more spray to make a new shield?” Gorski asked.
I shot him a dark look. “Let’s hope they don’t, Captain. Have you got any ideas?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “But there is one more positive factor: these Macros might not have the fuel or the engine power to keep up with us.”
“We’ll call that ‘prayer number two’,” I said, only half-joking.
On the screen, my fan of fire turned as the helm turned and we accelerated in a new direction. We were still sliding sideways toward the Macro swarm, but moving angularly out to the side as well. They turned with us, following us on an intercept course. I didn’t do the math, but it looked like they were going to catch up with us.
My gambit managed to nail a few of them. Three confirmed kills, in fact. The rest of them turned and
