On the main screen came the blackness of space, with a vast number of stars.
“Is this a joke?” Zapata shouted angrily.
“I’ll freeze it, sir, and color it orange where the stars are blotted out.”
Zapata gaped at the new image, with over two dozen small orange globs on the screen. “What am I looking at? What are those? How big are they?”
“They’re not much bigger than orbitals, sir. The computer suggests they’re all made of ice.”
“Ice?” Zapata asked.
“That’s why our radar never picked them up.”
Commander Zapata took a step back. His good eye grew wide. “Where are those ice-orbitals headed?”
There was a tapping of computer keys. “It looks like for Phobos, sir.”
“Orbitals,” Zapata whispered. “Orbitals—those aren’t orbitals!” he shouted. He remembered Marten Kluge and the stern Korean. Those two had storm assaulted the Bangladesh. Could those ice-orbitals contain the SU version of storm assault troops?
“Get me Phobos!” he shouted.
“What about the Battlefleet, sir?”
“Get me Phobos!” Zapata screamed. “Get them online now!”
-15-
The black ice-chunks neared Phobos. They were less than ten thousand kilometers away from target. From Phobos speared an incredibly powerful laser. That giant laser completely encompassed an ice chunk. The ice vanished in a puff of steam. The exposed pod slagged and then disappeared. The cyborg in the pod no longer existed. The beam switched to a new target, to a new comet of black ice and began the fatal sequence all over again.
OD12 was jolted awake. It took her a nanosecond to realize she was in a battlesuit, in a pod, surrounded by black ice. She stirred, and the internal computer ticked off the seconds as it urged her to greater speed.
OD12 moved her battlesuit fingers. She pressed a switch. That switch caused her pod’s outer shell to overheat. The heat caused the ice around the pod to soften. Then explosives blew off the ice. Several seconds later, the pod decelerated hard. OD12 easily endured that, having greater tolerance to high Gs than even a Highborn possessed. A second after deceleration quit, the pod exploded. It sent metallic shards hurtling in precise directions. Toll Seven and Web-Mind had configured those directions to ensure the safety of the attacking cyborgs. It wouldn’t do to kill your own cyborgs with your own shrapnel. The metal shards were meant to bounce radar and provide the Mars Rebels with many easy targets of opportunity, useless targets. Those shards acted as chaff to hide the attackers.
OD12 now hung alone in space, encased in her battlesuit and with a hydrogen thruster-pack to supply her motive power. She used side jets to correct her position, using huge Mars below her as a reference point. Phobos was much smaller and pockmarked. It was ugly and dark compared to the beautiful Red Planet.
The internal computer still ran its censor program. Warning! It shouted at her.
Within her helmet, OD12’s elongated head twitched. Couldn’t she even enjoy a planet’s beauty for a few seconds? She might die soon.
This is your second warning! The third warning will begin the override sequence.
Apparently, enjoying a planet’s beauty was bad for a cyborg. It fulfilled no useful function for a combat machine. OD12 made a quick calculation. She decided in the next second that inhaling the beauty of Mars was best left to another life. There was no room for frivolities in this existence. Besides, she had a mission to complete and a bastard of a computer censor to please.
Salient information now flooded her as thirty-seven cyborgs counted off. Eight cyborgs didn’t, maybe couldn’t. A frightful beam stabbed through the darkness of space. OD12’s visor blackened to protect her costly eyes. That beam was close, a mere one hundred meters to her left. It slagged pod-shrapnel and then, like a conjurer, made the shrapnel disappear. Information from Toll Seven’s Web-Mind fed her mind. The laser had destroyed eight pods during their frozen ice-cycle. The attack had been prematurely spotted.
The terrible beam switched off and then stabbed again, this time to her right by one hundred and twenty meters. It originated from the approaching moon. OD12 focused on the moon, using her helmet’s imager. She had been through a hundred such sequences in the simulator. She knew exactly what to do and she did it much faster than a human could. Faster even, than Highborn.
The moon hardly fit the description of one. It lacked a pleasing, perfectly spheroid shape, but looked more like an asteroid. Phobos was an ellipsoid with three axes about 27, 21 and 19 kilometers long. It had craters and most resembled the lunar highlands. The surface was very dark, and was one of the blackest objects in the Solar System. Phobos reflected 2 percent of the light shined on it. Luna reflected 7 percent.
There was a massive pillbox on the dark moon. It was in the Stickney crater, the largest on the moon and 10 kilometers in diameter. Out of the pillbox protruded a huge focusing system. From that focusing system shined the dreadful laser. OD12 yearned to launch smart missiles at it. It was possible that all the cyborgs wanted to. Unfortunately, that was against the mission’s parameters. Their attack was supposed to capture the moon for Social Unity. They were to capture it intact, with as many functioning weapon systems as possible left in working order.
OD12 was close now. They all were—the cyborgs in their battlesuits hung in space like lethal fruit. OD12 and many other cyborgs rotated using small side jets. She applied hydrogen-thrust from her pack, braking. A nearby ECM pod crackled interference waves, hopefully throwing off enemy tracking radar.
The giant beam burned into space again and another cyborg stopped broadcasting.
OD12 glanced over her shoulder. The moon loomed before her. She applied more thrust. Then she rotated again and detached from the thruster pack. It automatically burned hydrogen spray, flying elsewhere.
A missile rose from the moon. It tracked the thruster-pack, zeroed in on it and exploded on impact. Since there was no atmosphere, it was a silent hit. And because there was no atmosphere, there was nothing to carry the shock wave. There was heat, but not enough to bother OD12 in her battlesuit. There was radiation, but it was negligible, since the missile had not been nuclear-tipped.
OD12 now readied herself for moon-impact. Her analyzers said it would be a hard landing, barely within the tolerable limits of her graphite-bone legs. The moon expanded with startling speed until it was everything to her. She couldn’t see the beautiful Red Planet anymore, just this dark, pitted surface. She wished for another thruster-pack. She was coming down too hard. The surfaced rushed nearer. She clenched her teeth together so she wouldn’t accidentally bite off her tongue. Retro-rockets on her legs fired a last burst to slow her just another fraction. Then she hit the moon hard.
OD12 had trained a hundred times for this in the simulator. If she hit too stiffly, it might bounce her off the tiny asteroid-like moon. If that happened, it would send her spinning away from Phobos and with no way to return. The moon’s escape velocity was minuscule. She would drift around Mars and eventually fall onto the planet. Long before that, however, she would have run out of battery power and air.
OD12 crumpled and rolled and rolled. Dust floated up and seemed to hang there. Then the particles slowly began to fall.
The internal computer blanketed her pain sensors. Pain would only interfere now. OD12 rose and tested her legs. She might have grinned in ordinary times. But she was a cyborg. It took something fantastic to awaken the deep “I” of her old self, fantastic things like a beautiful planet hanging right there below her feet. Now she was on this dark, ugly moon with a mission to perform. So instead of grinning at her impossible achievement, she began to move over the moon’s surface.