“Who is broadcasting this again?” Blackstone asked.
“The Highborn, sir.”
Blackstone continued to blink at the startling image.
“Kill it!” Admiral Brutus roared. “Destroy it! The machine is in a fusion core!”
Ten Highborn reaction-teams in battleoid armor clanked through the corridors, each knowing life and death for an entire Doom Star depended on reaching that thing soon enough.
Even cyborgs couldn’t take lethal doses of radiation for long. LA31 could hardly see anymore. Her pain sensors—
It stopped mattering then as the fusion core overloaded. In another three seconds, the former Lisa Aster ceased to exist.
From his command bridge, Grand Admiral Cassius watched in horror as the Hannibal Barca went nova.
The vast bulk of the super-ship absorbed some of the radiation, X-rays and EMP blasts. Then the incredible mass and tonnage exploded outward like a vast grenade. Its bulkheads, cargos, particle-shields, coils, walls and hull became projectiles.
The Napoleon Bonaparte and the Julius Caesar took the brunt of those projectiles. The heavy SU battlewagons received a lesser wave. The majority of the former Hannibal Barca sped out into space and toward Mars in the near distance as a million particles of debris.
The Vladimir Lenin shuddered as its particle-shields took the heavy impacts of the exploded Doom Star. Blackstone was pitched off his feet and he hit his shoulder hard against the map-module. He lay stunned for seconds and in throbbing pain. Then someone was helping him up.
Blackstone stared at the image of the map-module. There were two Doom Stars where seconds earlier there had been three. The SU Battlefleet had destroyed a Doom Star. The other two must have taken heavy damage from the blast.
“Awaiting orders, Commodore,” the targeting officer said.
Blackstone blinked at the map-module. What was the correct decision now? One third of the Highborn fleet was dead. The other two Doom Stars were hurt, perhaps critically. The question was: Could he finish them off?
He listened several seconds to battle reports. The SU Battlefleet was almost gone. He had four battleships left and no missile-ships. The last one hadn’t survived the Doom Star’s destruction. Four battleships could not defeat two Doom Stars, not even badly wounded ones.
“It’s time to run,” Blackstone said.
“Run where, sir?” the targeting officer asked. “We can’t outrun a Doom Star’s long-range lasers.”
Then it hit Blackstone, and he realized this could be his most brilliant move of the battle. “We run for Mars. We head for the outer edge of the atmosphere.”
“Sir?” the targeting officer asked.
“We run toward the proton beam,” Blackstone said.
-21-
Only a handful of the Martian commandos had survived the last firefight. Without Osadar’s swift reactions, the lone cyborg on guard would have slain all of them.
Marten, Omi, Osadar, Major Diaz, Rojas and two other Martian commandos rode a magnetic lift. Everyone else who had broken through the blast doors and seen the cyborg converter was either dead or captured.
Marten was grim-faced and thoughtful. Omi cradled a burned hand, his face white and strained with the pain. Osadar seemed impassive. Major Diaz stared wordlessly at a spot in the elevator.
Diaz finally turned his head. “Did you see those things on the conveyer?”
Marten had been the one to shoot those things. None of those things had possessed skin, only exposed musculature.
“People turned into cyborgs,” Omi whispered.
“Is that what awaits Mars?” Diaz asked in a choked voice.
“Yes,” Osadar said.
Diaz shivered and squeezed his eyes closed as sweat oozed onto his forehead.
Marten checked the lift monitor. “We’re almost there. Let’s get ready.” He flicked off the safety of his gyroc rifle as his thighs tensed for running.
The whine of the lift slowed, stopped and the doors swished open. And each of them opened fire even before they saw the two cyborgs waiting for them. One cyborg went down, his brainpan smashed through. The other lifted its carbine and cut down two commandos before Osadar leaped out and shoved a vibroblade into it.
“Don’t stand around and gawk!” Marten shouted. “Follow me!”
He dragged Diaz with him. Then they ran for the hanger as the sounds in the volcano became unbearably loud.
“The dynamos are pumping the proton beam with power!” Major Diaz screamed into Marten’s ear.
Marten skidded to a halt and dropped to his knees. Then he fired his gyroc rifle in quick succession and took out a PHC security team that stood before a door.
“What if there aren’t any orbitals left?” Diaz shouted.
“Then we’re screwed!” Marten roared.
Osadar swiveled her head to stare at him.
“Come on!” Marten screamed over the rising whine of the dynamos. “Let’s find out the worst.”
Aboard the Julius Caesar, Grand Admiral Cassius was white-faced with fury. But he did not shout any orders or rave at fate. Instead, he chased the SU battleships around the curvature of Mars, seeking to bring his heavy lasers on them.
The premen had destroyed a Doom Star. The animals had managed to kill one-fifth of Highborn space power. That the SU Battlefleet had almost ceased to exist was something, but to Cassius it wasn’t enough. He must annihilate all of it. Four battleships and a few other sundry vessels could still be enough to form the nucleus of another fleet. Other SU warships hadn’t made it to Mars. If those warships joined the four battleships—
“That won’t happen,” Cassius whispered, “because soon these last battleships will be just more space debris.”
In their haste to kill the battleships, the Doom Stars edged nearer Mars. They edged to within range of the deadly proton beam on Olympus Mons. As the Doom Stars accelerated around the curvature of Mars, the huge volcano became visible on the planet below.
The white proton beam stabbed into space. It stabbed at the Napoleon Bonaparte. And as the beam had sliced through the particle shield of the Ho Chi Minh several weeks ago, it now sliced through the particle shield of the battle-worn Doom Star.
Highborn reactions were much faster than Homo sapien reactions. As the Napoleon Bonaparte began to take terrible damage from the proton beam, Grand Admiral Cassius ordered the launching of a Hellburner.
While the Hellburner launched and fell toward the cone of the Solar System’s largest mountain, the Napoleon Bonaparte took critical hits. Admiral Gaius did everything he could think of, but the proton beam proved superior to his actions.
The Hellburner shrugged off the point-defense cannons of Olympus Mons. And it maneuvered too sharply for the proton beam to target it. As the giant bomb neared, a lone orbital roared out of a hanger bay in the highest third of the mountain. The orbital engaged afterburners almost immediately as it shot toward the heavens. The Hellburner slammed into Olympus Mons and ignited. It made sunlight because it was sunlight. A Bethe solar-phoenix reaction began. It would burn for hours and harm those within a five-hundred-kilometer radius. It killed the proton beam. It killed the cyborgs in and on Olympus Mons and it destroyed the cyborg converter deep in the mountain, although it failed to kill Toll Seven and Web-Mind.