Worried, I examined the new symbol-set on the screen. The first and second symbols were the same. The last one, however, was a full-sized worm warrior.
“Tell me what this is, Marvin.”
“Friend, danger, and the raging worm warrior,” Marvin mused. “In this case, I think they are marveling at our bravery. It is a compliment, sir.”
“Our bravery? Why the hell are the complimenting us now?”
Captain Miklos made a strangled sound, then turned to me with a white face. “We must be in it, sir. The minefield.”
I nodded. That had to be it. “Hit the brakes!” I shouted. “Turn us around for full thrust deceleration. Helmsman, give me numbers. How long until we are within effective range?”
“Less than ten minutes sir. They are ahead of us on the deceleration curve. In fact, we are going to plow right into them, even while braking at full power.”
I struggled with my helmet. I clanked back to the troop pods. The door melted away and a platoon of startled marines looked at me. No one was buttoned up, not even Kwon.
“This is it, marines!” I roared. “Suit-up tight, double-time. Check your gear and say your prayers. We’ve got about ten minutes to live.”
— 46
Barbarossa began firing her lasers automatically when we reached effective range. By then, two of our destroyers and four smaller ships had eaten a mine. The only consolation was that the enemy had lost three more cruisers.
I noted with chagrin that the Worm ships remained unscathed. No doubt they had a friend-or-foe recognition system which prevented the mines from detonating against their hulls. Bitterly, I watched my ships vanish one after another in puffs of white brilliance. No wonder they thought we were brave. They’d warned us about the danger, but we’d plowed ahead, determined to battle the machines in the midst of a widespread low-density minefield. I supposed I could have asked them for the code and the signal frequency of their mine-recognition system, but it would have taken days. We could barely communicate at this point, and no doubt they were as puzzled by our symbol translations as we were theirs. Transferring technical information was out of the question. There simply wasn’t time.
The enemy were down to less than thirty cruisers when we came within range of their cannons. At that point, the Macros pulled an unexpected move. They trained their guns on Barbarossa and poured fire into my destroyer.
As closely as I could figure, they must have caught our radio signals and listened in. They clearly knew Barbarossa was the command ship, the one sending out orders to the others. Either that, or it was blind luck when Macro Command picked my ship to concentrate upon. I don’t believe in that kind of luck, so as our ship took a hammering, I cursed wildly in my helmet. Our communications were too open, our encoding weak.
I didn’t get much time for cursing or thinking of any kind. The ship’s hull couldn’t take this kind of punishment. The first burst of fire ripped the roof off overhead. My only thought was it was a good thing we didn’t get hit low. They would have knocked out my marines in the troop pod, which hung in the belly of the ship.
“Eject!” I screamed over the ship’s com system. “All hands eject!”
The ship went into a spin. Barbarossa was already dead, her brainbox must have been hit. I could tell by the behavior of the smart-metal walls. They didn’t bother to twist and reform themselves into smooth shapes. They stayed frozen like splattered solder. I could see star moving by laterally outside, indicating we were in a slow spin.
The helmsman was dead at his post. Something had punched through his relatively thin Fleet suit, probably a piece of shrapnel from the ship’s hull. Captain Miklos shot out of the opening in the roof however, and I followed. When we were outside the dead ship, I saw flashes nearby.
“Keep moving! Head directly away from the ship!”
The Macros were still pouring fire at the crippled Barbarossa. I grabbed Miklos, as his suit didn’t have propulsion power on its own, and I dragged him with my boot repellers at full power. We zoomed away from the ship laterally until we were at a safe distance. The ship blossomed into a flare of brilliance behind us that made my autoshades black out momentarily.
“Kwon, did you make it out?”
“Yes, sir,” Kwon’s signal came to me. His voice was clear and strong.
I smiled, looking around. A dark shape blotted out part of Aldebaran. Silhouetted by the massive blazing orange sphere, Kwon looked small, but he was relatively close to me. I was unsurprised. He seemed to have an extra sense useful only when it came to finding me when we were under fire.
I joined the platoon local circuit, and I could hear Kwon shouting in my helmet. He was working to gather the rest of the men to our position. We were soon flying in a loose formation in the general direction the rest of the fleet was headed.
I let him do his work and had a look around. We couldn’t really see the other ships, they were out there in the darkness, close in astronomical terms, but too distant to make out with the human eye. Occasionally, we saw flares and flashes as ships died to either mines or enemy fire. Most of any space battle was like that, they were generally cold silent affairs. The void felt empty even in the midst of a passing fleet.
“How many got out, First Sergeant?” I asked.
“Fourteen sir-including us.”
I nodded, pleased. Really, for having just bailed out of a dead destroyer, we’d beaten the odds.
“Who have you got there, sir?” Kwon asked me.
“Captain Miklos.”
“Is he dead?”
I looked down at the figure in my grasp. I had his suit bunched up in my armored fist, holding him by the scruff of the neck. He was limp. I gave him a gentle shake. His body flopped like a rag doll in the mouth of a terrier.
“Captain? Are you alive in there?” I asked.
I got no response.
“Hmm,” I said, “I don’t think his suit has lost integrity. He’d be frozen stiff if it had. Maybe he lost consciousness somewhere along the way.”
“Very good, sir,” Kwon said. “What are your orders?”
“Keep flying. We need to turn feet first and start braking hard.”
Kwon relayed those instructions and I ordered a radio blackout except for short-range unit communications. I decided I wasn’t going to attempt to command the whole Fleet now, they were on their own. The Macros were gunning for me, and I might as well let them think I was dead.
“I think I’ve got good predictive numbers on the locations of the nearest enemy cruisers. If they haven’t changed course much, we can intersect them at about a half-degree sunward from here.”
We adjusted our trajectory and kept braking. The key difficulty was going to be our relative speeds. The Macros had been slowing down a lot. I hoped we could slow down even faster, matching their speeds. If we were going too fast when we hit the cruiser line, we would crash into them at killing velocity, or shoot right past. If we slowed down too much, we wouldn’t reach them. It was a difficult set of calculations, but I had an officers’ suit on, which had a superior brainbox. Still, I was worried. I needed better intel on the enemy fleet. We’d left our vessel so early in the battle, we couldn’t expect to be perfectly on target.
With about one minute to go before the two fleets were scheduled to clash and fly through one another, I decided to chance a call on an open circuit.
“Marvin,” I called. “Do you recognize my voice? Don’t use my name, just say yes or no.”
The response came several long seconds later. “Yes.”
“Please use binary to upload the coordinates, relative course and velocity of the nearest enemy vessel.”
The signal came in a moment later. I relayed it to my surviving marines. I tapped the green accept
