Battle Pod

superiors was beyond him. It was like a child groping to fight an adult. They so yearned to ape Highborn combat efficiency. Inevitably, utter failure was the result.

The Praetor let out his breath as the message was beamed to the Julius Caesar’s probe. If the premen had good equipment, they might spot the lightguide beam, but fail to crack its contents. That meant the premen could theoretically spot the Thutmosis III. It was unlikely, however, as the lightguide beam had been sent in a short burst. If the pathetic premen hadn’t spotted them yet, it was unlikely they would when they had so many other things to worry about.

* * *

The Praetor was correct concerning the SU Battlefleet. Every ship, every piece of detection equipment was aimed toward the Doom Stars and the stellar voids in that general direction. It was a massive volume of space. That the Thutmosis III’s stealth-missiles and drones had only been spotted now was not incredible or surprising. A cold dark object fashioned to give almost no radar signature was a maddeningly difficult thing to find. Radar and teleoptic technicians were trained to search for any telltale clue, but until very near, the stealth-missiles simply hadn’t given those clues.

Almost everyone in the SU Battlefleet concentrated on the Doom Stars and on the fast-approaching missiles and drones. But the radar and teleoptic technicians on the Phobos moon scanned in the opposite direction. Phobos was presently on the other side of Mars as the Battlefleet and thus couldn’t track the Doom Stars. The commander of Phobos didn’t expect to find anything. The commander merely wanted his crews busy because busy people had less time to think themselves into useless nervousness.

One radar specialist, a Corporal Bess O’Connor, noticed a blip on her screen, a flash and then nothing. She ran a diagnostic on it and keyed for a computer suggestion. The computer flashed a single message: lightguide beam.

Even though a lightguide beam out there seemed impossible, Corporal Bess O’Connor logged the blip at the computer’s suggestion and passed it along the chain of command. Others in teleoptics received it and that caused a flurry of excitement. Teleoptics backtracked and used percentage probability analyzers. As they did so, they caught a flash of the second lightguide beam sent from the Thutmosis III.

That created an emergency and triggered several command decisions. First, even though the black-ops enemy vessel moved at extreme speeds away from Mars, the Phobos commander ordered a missile launch. Several minutes later, huge hunter-seeker missiles lofted from Phobos and charged into the void after the last known location of the enemy. With them lofted several specialized missiles whose sole purpose was to find and fixate upon this craft and relay the information to the deadly killer missiles. The second command involved three cargo ships. Those three cargo ships engaged emergency thrusters, hurrying into position. Once there, they would begin spraying a fine mist of aerosol gels. That mist was meant to blind the stealth enemy from observing anything more of military importance around Mars.

* * *

Grand Admiral Cassius closed his eyes, quietly exuding in his brilliance. He loved chess. He loved any competitive game but especially enjoyed those that involved long-term strategy and careful moves. The moves that now brought him this joy had been planned nearly a year ago.

He had received the Praetor’s lightguide messages, which had given them the precise locations of everything they on the Doom Stars couldn’t see because of the prismatic-crystal fields. Now the desperate premen used battleships to kill the Thutmosis III’s missiles. It was the obvious thing to do. The better strategy would have been to let the missiles hit the PC-Fields as the enemy fleet raced to get behind Mars. Nevertheless, Cassius had given the present action a seventy percent probability. Running for cover behind Mars would have meant leaving the moons to heavy laser attacks. It was only reasonable that the premen would have stocked the moons with weaponry, hoping to use the moons as heavy platforms. What it truly did was leave the moons hostage to the Doom Stars and force the enemy commander to shield them. No prismatic-crystal field guarded Deimos yet. Cassius was certain it was in order to try to fool him into thinking Deimos was harmless. Unfortunately for the premen, he wasn’t fooled in the slightest.

“Enemy vessels have left the protection of the prismatic-crystal field,” a Highborn officer said.

“Begin firing,” Cassius ordered.

* * *

The lasers of the battlewagon Fidel Castro speared into the starry darkness. Nearby sister-ships did likewise. From farther away, missile-ships launched anti-missiles. Mars was behind them. A vast prismatic-crystal field like a nebula cloud-system glittered strangely in the vacuum blackness closer to them, but still to their rear.

The commander of the Fidel Castro felt naked and alone out here. His battleship was the oldest in the fleet, but it was still a deadly vessel. The 600-meter thick particle-shields were in place. And the battleship changed positions constantly, jinking, engaging engines, shutting them down and swerving to a different heading. They did all that to avoid the heavy lasers of the Doom Stars one-million kilometers away. All the while, the battleship’s lasers burned the incoming missiles and drones.

Then, out of the voids, incredibly huge lasers stabbed with hellish fury. Those heavy lasers were three times the diameter of the Fidel Castro’s lasers. In them had been pumped five times the killing power. Because the Doom Stars possessed such massive fusion engines, they could afford to pay the energy costs to fuel these lasers.

Nine giant lasers hit the Fidel Castro in unison. It was a display of incredible targeting skill. Three Doom Stars from nearly one-million kilometers away sent nine beams into the SU battleship’s guts. They sliced off huge chunks of the particle-shield. Then the Fidel Castro, which was always moving, changed heading enough that the nine beams stabbed around it. The commander and crew hoped they had time to escape. The Highborn probability computers or maybe the genetically enhanced gunners guessed right again. Six beams chewed off more of the particle-shield. For eight minutes and twenty seconds, the uneven game played out. Then the heavy lasers struck past the ruined particle-shields and slammed into the battleship’s hull.

Titanium and steel burned in nanoseconds. Clouds of heated gas and molten droplets shed from the hull. In another minute, it was over, as the Fidel Castro floated in space, a dead and irradiated hulk.

The forty-year-old battleship had tried to defend the prismatic-crystal field and destroy enough of the incoming missiles. The question was, had it been enough?

* * *

Eighty percent of the Thutmosis III’s stealth-missiles and drones perished under a flurry of SU laser beams and anti-missile missiles. They were winks of bright light in the darkness, sometimes a red glow that died like a shooting star.

Twenty percent of the missiles in layered waves hit the prismatic-crystal field. The nuclear explosions blew vast holes in the field. They opened it up and exposed a portion of the SU Battlefleet behind it. They exposed SU ships to the heavy lasers of the Julius Caesar, the Hannibal Barca and the Napoleon Bonaparte.

The attacked showed to great effect the deadliness of long-rage beams. Blackstone shouted himself hoarse. Ships churned out more prismatic-crystals. But many ships perished under the Doom Star lasers.

“Head behind Mars!” Blackstone shouted. “Hide behind Deimos!”

All around him, battleships, missile-ships, ECM vessels and minelayers engaged their engines and slammed their crews with six Gs of acceleration. Like terrible searchlights, the giant lasers stabbed and killed. They moved so much faster than the sluggish spacecraft. Sometimes they seared chunks of particle-shields off huge