already?”
“We’re in trouble,” she said.
I took one look at her face and stood up with a grunt. I dragged my vacc suit back on while she explained. She was already dressed. I got the feeling she had been for some time.
“Everyone was looking for you,” she said. “Calling over the com-link-then I realized I was the only one who knew where you were. So I sprinted down here to get you.”
I picked up my helmet and saw it was indeed full of flashing lights. “I must not have heard the buzzer,” I said. “What’s up?”
“It’s the Worms,” she said.
I snapped my head around to stare at her.
“They have ships,” she said. “They are small ones, but they are coming up here.”
“Up here?”
“Yeah, heading right toward us.”
“Are they firing? Are they in range yet? How long do we have?” While I asked these questions, she shook her head and we hustled together along corridors and access tubes to the bridge. When we arrived, everyone looked up. I realized we’d made a grand, hurried entrance together. Every eye in the place stared at us. A few smirked.
Only Major Sarin avoided looking at us. She kept her eyes down on her computer. Internally, I felt a twist. More discord. I couldn’t seem to stop messing up my staff. It was obvious Sandra and I had been together, and Jasmine felt hurt.
I decided to go commander on them. No apologies. No explanations. Nothing. When I wanted to get the minds of my marines off gossip and hurt feelings, nothing worked like a pile of snappy orders.
“Have we got a big situational screen hooked up yet?”I demanded.
Heads shook.
“No?” I asked. “Sarin, you are on screen ops. Feed the data to my tablet, clone our screens. Gorski, give me verbal numbers on the situation. Enemy strength and range first.”
We soon stood in a group that resembled a football huddle, with everyone tapping at small portable computers. The situation was not yet dire. We had no sign of Macro ships in the Helios system or Alpha Centauri. Instead, we had exactly fourteen small vessels coming up from Helios. The unusual configuration of the ships and the fact they’d come from Helios led us to believe they were Worm ships. They looked vaguely like the old NASA shuttlecrafts to me, but a bit larger. They had stubby wings and a pointed snout. They were clearly designed for atmospheric travel.
“It looks like fourteen frigate class ships against one cruiser,” I said, “and we aren’t fully operational. I don’t like the odds. Where did this Worm fleet come from?”
“As far as we can tell, Colonel,” Gorski said, “they’ve been hiding them underwater. They lifted off from beneath those muddy seas of theirs.”
“Makes sense. I’m not surprised they’ve been hiding them. They aren’t very big. I would bet two Macro cruisers could take all of them out. I suppose whatever fleet they may have had in the past was wiped out by the Macros. So they hid what they had left-or built new ones in secret.”
I’d never been able to say I liked the Worms, but I did find them worthy of admiration at times. They were the beaten down people in this game. But they were determined, and never seemed to give up. I suspected their population was even lower than the Centaur herds had been. They could be snuffed out after another few bad battles. Everywhere we went, it looked as if the machines had already won. We were still struggling, but like the Worms we’d really been beaten long ago.
“Should we fight or run, sir?” Gorski asked.
I ignored him. I could feel every eye on the bridge on me. I didn’t look at my crew, but instead studied the small Worm fleet, knowing it was all they had. I sighed as I looked at the screen. Fourteen Worm ships, coming up to do battle with what they must have figured was a single, damaged Macro cruiser. I couldn’t blame them. I could imagine they’d argued hard amongst themselves whether this was the time to make a counterstrike. If they were anything like human commanders, some had wanted to keep hiding and building. Others had urged action, taking the position that they must act. If they didn’t take the chance to win this small battle, how could they ever going to take the initiative?
“We’re not going to fight them,” I said. “But we’re not going to run right away, either. What have we got if we are forced to fight?”
Everyone stared at me for a second before turning back to their screens.
“We’ve got an operable main battery,” Gorski said. “Unlike our last ship. And we’ve managed to build a number of missiles that will fit the tubes on this cruiser.”
I looked at him with my eyebrows raised high. “You’ve been busy,” I said.
He nodded proudly. I looked around the group. Welter was standing at the helm with his fingers uplifted, twitching almost. He wanted to work that board in combat, I could tell. Gorski wanted to fire his new missiles. The fact he’d put them into the Macro tubes showed he’d gained some level of control over the ship’s weapons system. I suspected he only knew enough to open the external ports and allow our brainbox-driven missiles to launch on their self-guided path.
Major Sarin was looking at me now, waiting calmly for my next order. She didn’t look anxious to do any killing-but it was hard to tell with her. She guarded her feelings, rarely letting them show on her face.
Sandra just looked worried. She didn’t like any of this. I could hardly blame her, she’d already died in combat twice that I was aware of. Maybe she wasn’t certain I could pull off a third miracle and find some new alien technology to put her cells back together today.
“How long do we have until they get in firing range?” I asked.
“Hard to say,” Gorski replied. “That depends on their armament, which we haven’t seen yet.”
“Assume they have the equivalent of two Nano-ship lasers each.”
Gorski tapped for a half-minute. “I’d say we have three hours in that case.”
I nodded. “We’ve got every marine living or dead we could find aboard now, correct?”
“Yes sir.”
“In three hours,” I said, “we’ll be out of here. I’m not going to destroy another biotic people’s fleet just because we can’t talk to one another. They are naturally assuming we are a damaged Macro vessel. I’ll try to convince them we aren’t, but if it comes down to it, we’ll run rather than fire on them.”
Gorski raised his hand with his palm open. “Hold on, sir,” he said. “I didn’t say we had three hours to sit around. They are building velocity. They could follow us through the ring. We have to start moving much sooner if you want to avoid a fight.”
“How long?”
“Less than an hour.”
I sighed. “All right. Has anyone seen Marvin?”
Sandra had seen him, of course. She knew exactly where he was. She had, in fact, belled him like a cat. I realized I should have done that sooner, but just hadn’t gotten around to thinking of it. She had put one of the transponders on him she’d put on me long ago in happier times-back before the Worms, Centaurs and Macros had managed to kill ninety percent of my marines.
I followed Sandra through the ship. To my surprise, I had to struggle to keep up. Even wearing my powerful exoskeletal battle suit over my vacc suit, enhancing my muscle contractions and magnifying them, I found it hard to keep her behind in my range of vision. She leapt and sprang like a cat. I recalled watching a documentary on red kangaroos once. At full gallop-or whatever you called a kangaroo’s gait when it was hopping like mad-each bound took them a good thirty feet. Sandra reminded me of a kangaroo moving through steel passages in flying leaps.
We found Marvin pretty fast, and I had to smile grimly at his reaction. He was definitely disturbed by our approach. We found him in a data closet full of flexible hosing-similar to the one we’d made into a love-nest so recently. His primary arm was probing the tubes. He had one open, and looked to be doing some kind of exploratory surgery on the glowing contents. Liquid spilled on the decks like oily blood. Three of his four cameras were canted at various angles, staring at the open tube. But the fourth eye was on lookout, staring at the hatch behind him as we crashed it open.
