The Tracking Officer sucked in her breath.
“What’s wrong?” asked Admiral Sioux.
“This can’t be right,” said the Tracking Officer. “It must be Highborn ECM playing tricks on us.”
Admiral Sioux hurried to the module, a bad mistake. She had to step down to reach it. The one and one-half Gs caused her to twist her leg and put too much force on her left knee. She hissed, and collapsed as pain shot up her thigh.
“Admiral!” shouted the First Gunner, shucking off his VR-gloves and moving out of his module to assist her.
“Never mind me,” she said, using the tracking module to help her stand. Then she groaned. She couldn’t put any weight on her left knee.
The Tracking Officer looked pale as she kept rechecking her board.
“What is it?” said the Admiral, as she peered into the module.
“The missiles,” said the Tracking Officer, shaking her head.
“What about them?” They were small red blips on the officer’s VR-screen.
The Tracking Officer looked up, her thin lips trembling. “They just began hard deceleration. And I count twice as many missiles as before.”
Shock swept through Admiral Sioux. Twice as many missiles as before? The idea made her dizzy. Then she shouted, “Battle stations!” She shoved the First Gunner’s hands off her—he tried to help her to the command chair. “To your post, mister,” she said. Then she threatened to twist her right knee too, by hopping on her good leg back to the command chair. With a groan, she sank into the cushions.
“Admiral!” shouted the Shield Officer.
“Calmly,” said the Admiral. “I can hear you quite well, thank you.”
The Shield Officer stared at her, nodding a moment later. “Yes, Admiral,” he said in a quieter, more professional tone. “Ship’s AI suggests that we get into the acceleration couches.”
She checked her own compulink to the AI. Hmm.
Several seconds later, she opened intra-ship communications. “Attention crew, this is the Admiral speaking. Prepare for extended acceleration. I repeat, extended acceleration.”
2.
Needles stabbed. A gross, awful, smothering feeling threatened Marten’s sanity. It made him recall a story of his mother’s, the way they say a dying man sees his life flash before his eyes. She’d been a strong-willed woman of faith, a Bible reader, and she’d often spoken about this passage.
Marten recalled the story of Jonah and the whale and he felt like Jonah right now diving into the depths. The pressure, oh it was awful, compressing and mind destroying. He raved, as he heard Vip raving over the comlink, and as their Storm Assault Missile began hard deceleration.
Vip’s screams broke through to Marten. The small man’s cries were hoarse and wild, desperate beyond dementia.
“Vip!” shouted Marten. “Listen to me, Vip!”
More screaming and sobbing.
“We’re going to make them pay, Vip. Hang on. Fight it. Resist. I promise you we’re going to make the HBs pay as they’ve never believed possible. So we’re the sub-human’s, eh? We’re nothing but dung beneath their feet? Their lord highnesses, Highborn, lofty ones, arrogant bastards! We are men! Do you hear me, Vip? You and I are men. Omi, Lance and Kang are men. The shock troopers are men. Hang on, Vip. Because once we have that beamship… oh Vip, we’re going to surprise them. Ha! Surprise, Vip. A really big surprise is what the HBs will get when we sub-humans take over the Bangladesh.”
Kang hissed, “You’re raving.” Then the maniple leader groaned in misery and could say no more.
“Not raving, Kang,” whispered Marten. “I’m promising. Do you hear me? Promising!”
The crushing pain, the nausea and Vip’s screams became too much. Like a dumb beast, Marten endured the horrible deceleration.
3.
The HB missile barrage didn’t sweep at the Bangladesh in one vast clot. They came from a 60-degree arc, from all their various cones of probability originally fired at. Nor did they all fly at the same speed. Some had been programmed to travel faster, to reach the target sooner.
In front sped ECM drones: electronic countermeasure missiles. They scrambled and jammed the Bangladesh’s radar. They had kept secret the true number of missiles, hiding and halving the actual amount. Now they created electronic ghost images. They sprayed aerogel with lead additives, shot packets of reflective chaff and they worked around the clock to break the beamship’s ECM. AI’s, artificial intelligences, ran the drones. Predictive software, battle-comps and probability equations gave them a seeming life of their own. One thing the drones didn’t have was biocomps like the New Baghdad cybertanks. The Highborn loathed biocomps. They felt such things to be unholy and monstrous. Life shouldn’t be mated to a machine, not in such a way—although they found nothing sinister about hooking the shock troopers to the G-suits and packing them into the missiles as biological bullets.
The masses of cocooned space-warriors suffered under the crushing grip of deceleration. Many screamed. Some stared dully. Others wept. A few laughed. Only thirty-nine died from heart failure, strokes and lunatic panic seizures. The rest longed for an end to their agony. The entire time, the missiles remorselessly closed as the Bangladesh fled.
At 80,000 kilometers separation the proton beam stabbed into the eternal night. It slashed through a ghost image. Immediately HB radar and optics recorded the beam, the fact of its being and that the enemy at last tried to hit them. Most of the incoming missiles slowed hard. Twenty others leapt ahead because they slowed less. Each of those mounted a single laser. In three seconds, they were pumped and ready to hotshot, a special process that burnt out the tubes faster but delivered a stronger initial punch. ECM drones locked-on target and fed the battle-data to the missiles. Twenty beams flashed at the Bangladesh.
4.
Everyone aboard the Bangladesh lay on A-couches or belonged to damage control parties, where they were lodged in special repair vehicles that could move about under eight Gs. VR-goggles supplied information, although ship’s AI made the majority of the decisions while the Bangladesh was under eight gravities acceleration.
In the armored command capsule, hidden deep within the beamship, Admiral Rica Sioux presided over her officers via comlink.
“Particle Screen 1 is degrading,” said the Shield Officer.
Outside the beamship, sixteen enemy lasers burned into the 600 meter-thick rock-shield. The hotshotted lasers chewed deeper and deeper into the particle mass. If they broke through and breached the Bangladesh’s inner armor the battle would quickly be over.
Ship’s AI aimed giant spray-tubes and pumped an aerosol cloud in front of the beams. At the same moment, the Bangladesh’s mighty engines quit. The enemy beams leaped ahead of the ship. Six seconds later the beams re-targeted and burned through the aerosol cloud. More aerosols flowed out, tons. The engines re-engaged, quit, started and slued the beamship sideways tiny fractions of percentages. At this terrific speed, the Bangladesh was unable to veer very far and stay within the eight G limit.
“Mine the seventh quadrant,” ordered Admiral Sioux, who had carefully studied the incoming missiles. Overlaying her view of the battle on her VR-goggles was a grid pattern to help her better understand locations, vectors and distances.