It was a relatively happy moment, and I watched the elated crews with a smile floating on my face. When Major Barrera’s call came in, that smile faded to a memory.
“Talk to me, Major,” I snapped.
“The Macros have a new arrival, sir.”
“Cruiser or transport?”
“Neither, sir.”
I paused for a second, and if I hadn’t known the Nanos in my chest wouldn’t allow such a thing, I’d say my heart skipped a beat as well. “What is it then?”
“Configuration unknown. It is extremely large, however.”
“Just one ship?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m coming to the command center. Order a full alert.”
I wasn’t wearing my battle suit, but I wished I was. I vaulted the wall of the landing pit I was in and ran toward the big headquarters building in the center of the base. I could see the sun glinting from the tall windows of my office even at this distance.
Almost before I knew it, a second figure was running along beside me. My shadow was smaller, lighter and much prettier than I was.
“What’s wrong?” Sandra asked.
“You’re never far from me, are you?” I asked. “Psychologists would call you obsessive.”
“They can kiss my butt.”
“Not without my permission.”
“Why are we running?”
At that moment, the entire base underwent a transformation. A dozen sirens went off. A thousand lights whirled and flashed. A loudspeaker began making echoing statements that no one could understand. It didn’t matter, because they all knew what to do.
Men and women darted by at angles past us, dressing themselves as they ran. Sometimes they slammed into one another or leapt clear of accidents about to happen. One problem with unnaturally fast, excited people is we tended to have more accidents. Fortunately, most of the base personnel were full of nanites and therefore too tough to care. They picked themselves up and ran on. Tucking in shirts, pulling on flight jackets and buckling goggles to their faces, everyone was grim-faced. There wasn’t any doubt in any marine’s mind why we were scrambling to battle stations. There could only be one answer: The enemy was finally moving again.
Marines with full combat lasers appeared here and there at the door of every major building. Even the automated laser turrets lining the base walls and the sea itself seemed agitated. They jerked and tracked racing troops with nervous twitches rather than smooth oscillations.
“The Macros,” I shouted to Sandra.
She nodded back. She’d figured it out by now.
I ignored the elevator and bounded up the emergency stairwell, taking five or six steps at a time. If I’d been wearing the battle suit, I would have just flown up to the top floor. Occasionally, lieutenants recognized me and hailed me, asking me for directions. Sandra and I wordlessly passed them by in a blur. I didn’t have time to hold anyone’s hand today.
When I reached the fourth floor, the bevy of purchasing agents scattered, having learned by now to keep out of the central aisle that led to my office door. Today, with the sirens and loudspeakers blaring, it was doubly wise on their part. I thought I heard the mahogany door crack as I threw it open. I felt a pang about that. The wood was beautiful. I slammed it behind me and walked to the big desk computer, breathing hard.
I opened my mouth to tell Barrera to zoom in on this new ship, but the words died in my throat. He’d already done so. The image swam even closer as Major Sarin made spreading motions with her hands on the central screen area.
It was huge. It dwarfed the cruisers and invasion ships that lined up around it, even as they dwarfed our smallest Nano ship.
“It must have ten times the mass of a cruiser,” Sandra said, staring at it with me.
“We estimate a displacement of a quarter million tons, sir,” Major Barrera said. “That’s a very loose estimate, of course. It largely depends on interior structure, materials used, hull thickness and the like. Roughly, it’s the size of several supertankers, Earth’s largest vessels.”
“What was your basis for the calculation?”
“Due to measurements of wreckage, we have good numbers for the cruisers. They weigh in at about twenty thousand tons. This ship has the volume of approximately a dozen cruisers.”
I touched the screen, rotating our point of view. The thing was shaped differently than a cruiser, which was more or less like an arrowhead in shape. This ship was bulbous. It had a forward section that resembled the head of an insect, with two humps to either side. The bottom was more or less flat, however.
Crow had finally arrived. He stepped up to the desk to join us. He whistled as he eyed the monstrous enemy vessel. The Macro fleet was now leaving orbit in a grand arc of glinting ships. The big new ship was leading the rest. The computer had plotted their course. They would circle around Venus once, then escape the planet’s gravity and begin the long journey toward Earth. Their projected path was visible as a single yellow line that curved off the screen.
“What do we call this monster, a battleship?” Sandra asked.
“Too big for a battleship,” Crow said. “Earth battleships are only about two or three times the size of a heavy cruiser. Let’s call it a dreadnaught. That sounds more ominous.”
“Dreadnaught it is,” I said. I kept my voice neutral. I didn’t look around at my officers’ faces. They were all glum—except for Barrera of course. That man would go to his grave maintaining a professional demeanor.
“Give me a rundown on its armament,” I said.
Barrera reached out to touch various points on the dreadnaught. They glowed blue after his fingertips left the glass. “On the flat belly-side, we’ve counted a series of six rotating cannon emplacements. These appear to be more or less equivalent to the bombardment units on the bottom of enemy cruisers. There is another serious problem, however. These bumps are lighter weapons clusters on the shoulders, here and here. There is another of these bristling pods on the fantail of the ship. They appear to be point-defense systems, sir.”
I nodded, feeling deflated. “How many guns and what kind of range do they have?”
“We’ve counted eight beam-type weapons on each pod. That’s a total of twenty-four light guns. They aren’t powerful—less range and hitting power than the gun on any of our small Nano ships.”
I swallowed. “They don’t have to be big. They are for taking out small targets. It’s as if they knew about my plans.”
Major Barrera looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Impossible, sir. But they might have gotten a report concerning our recent tactics and brought this vessel to correct a perceived weakness.”
“It was more than perceived!” I said, almost shouting. I took a deep breath and forced my mind to cool down. “Do these defensive pods give the dreadnaught complete coverage from every angle?”
“We’ve been working on that for the last minute or two,” Major Barrera said. He brought up another screen with a wire-frame analysis of the giant ship. A series of domed regions grew outward from the ship forming reddish shells around it.
“See these regions?” Barrera asked, touching the three dome-like shells in turn. “They are our projected areas of enemy defensive fire. It appears that the pods do cover the ship from every angle, but it is most vulnerable from the flat underside. Anything approaching from that direction would have to face the six cannons, but the light defensive pods would be relatively ineffective.”
“Six of those big cannons firing at you? That’s suicide,” Sandra said.
No one argued with her.
“Missile ports?” I asked. I was a glutton for punishment.
“There is one accompanying each of the defensive pods,” Barrera said. “I’m not sure how many tubes they have in each grouping. I would assume this ship can fire a large number of missiles, given the enemy’s fixation on them as their primary armament.”