No one answered. As we watched, the enemy fleet spread out, seemingly in every direction. Ships went, up, down and sideways. They were slowing, too.
“We have them!” I said. “They have decided not to dare another ring. They are going to turn and fight. We’ve run them up the proverbial tree, gentlemen.”
Miklos didn’t answer. He looked less convinced of victory and more worried than I was.
“Full deceleration,” the helmsman said. “Scattered pattern. Could they be running into something?”
I frowned at him, then addressed the ship. “Any answer from Marvin yet, Barbarossa?”
“Incoming now.”
I heard Marvin’s voice next. “Symbol translations vary. The first one indicates a hunting party or comradery.”
“I know that.”
“The second symbol is the image of their sun, the red giant known to humans as Aldebaran.”
“Okay, what does it mean?”
“It means many things. Life, heat, danger. It depends on context.”
“Wonderful. What about the last one?”
“That is an image of a Worm organ. Specifically, the optical organ located in the anterior portion of Worm physiology.”
“Huh,” I said, trying to puzzle that one out. Hunting-partner, sun, eyeball…. No wonder Barbarossa had no clue. “What does it all mean in this context, Marvin?”
“I could only guess.”
“Then guess!”
“Since we are close to combat, I would assume the sun means danger. I would also hazard that the eyeball means either watchfulness, or a forward perspective.”
I suddenly had it. “Are you telling me the Worms are saying, ‘Friends, danger ahead?’”
“Yes,” Marvin said. “That would summarize the concepts nicely.”
“Well,” Miklos said. “The enemy are directly ahead of us. And they are turning to fight now.”
“Yeah, but they sent this even before the Macros started turning around.”
“Colonel,” the helmsman said. “There’s something else. The Macros—one of them just blew up, sir.”
“Why?”
“Nuclear explosive, low-yield. They probably hit a mine.”
I stared at him for a long second, thinking.
“Mines,” I said. “The Worms put a mine field out here in the middle of open space, on the likely path between the two rings. That way, the enemy couldn’t just blow them up the way they’ve been doing with tightly placed fields right in front of the rings.”
“Two more explosions. One more Macro destroyed, another damaged.”
“New message incoming from the Worms, sir.”
Worried, I examined the new symbol-set on the screen. The first and second symbols were the same. The last one, however, was a full-sized worm warrior.
“Tell me what this is, Marvin.”
“Friend, danger, and the raging worm warrior,” Marvin mused. “In this case, I think they are marveling at our bravery. It is a compliment, sir.”
“Our bravery? Why the hell are the complimenting us now?”
Captain Miklos made a strangled sound, then turned to me with a white face. “We must be in it, sir. The minefield.”
I nodded. That had to be it. “Hit the brakes!” I shouted. “Turn us around for full thrust deceleration. Helmsman, give me numbers. How long until we are within effective range?”
“Less than ten minutes sir. They are ahead of us on the deceleration curve. In fact, we are going to plow right into them, even while braking at full power.”
I struggled with my helmet. I clanked back to the troop pods. The door melted away and a platoon of startled marines looked at me. No one was buttoned up, not even Kwon.
“This is it, marines!” I roared. “Suit-up tight, double-time. Check your gear and say your prayers. We’ve got about ten minutes to live.”
-46-
Barbarossa began firing her lasers automatically when we reached effective range. By then, two of our destroyers and four smaller ships had eaten a mine. The only consolation was that the enemy had lost three more cruisers.
I noted with chagrin that the Worm ships remained unscathed. No doubt they had a friend-or-foe recognition system which prevented the mines from detonating against their hulls. Bitterly, I watched my ships vanish one after another in puffs of white brilliance. No wonder they thought we were brave. They’d warned us about the danger, but we’d plowed ahead, determined to battle the machines in the midst of a widespread low-density minefield. I supposed I could have asked them for the code and the signal frequency of their mine-recognition system, but it would have taken days. We could barely communicate at this point, and no doubt they were as puzzled by our symbol translations as we were theirs. Transferring technical information was out of the question. There simply wasn’t time.
The enemy were down to less than thirty cruisers when we came within range of their cannons. At that point, the Macros pulled an unexpected move. They trained their guns on Barbarossa and poured fire into my destroyer.
As closely as I could figure, they must have caught our radio signals and listened in. They clearly knew Barbarossa was the command ship, the one sending out orders to the others. Either that, or it was blind luck when Macro Command picked my ship to concentrate upon. I don’t believe in that kind of luck, so as our ship took a hammering, I cursed wildly in my helmet. Our communications were too open, our encoding weak.
I didn’t get much time for cursing or thinking of any kind. The ship’s hull couldn’t take this kind of punishment. The first burst of fire ripped the roof off overhead. My only thought was it was a good thing we didn’t get hit low. They would have knocked out my marines in the troop pod, which hung in the belly of the ship.
“Eject!” I screamed over the ship’s com system. “All hands eject!”
The ship went into a spin. Barbarossa was already dead, her brainbox must have been hit. I could tell by the behavior of the smart-metal walls. They didn’t bother to twist and reform themselves into smooth shapes. They stayed frozen like splattered solder. I could see star moving by laterally outside, indicating we were in a slow spin.
The helmsman was dead at his post. Something had punched through his relatively thin Fleet suit, probably a piece of shrapnel from the ship’s hull. Captain Miklos shot out of the opening in the roof however, and I followed. When we were outside the dead ship, I saw flashes nearby.
“Keep moving! Head directly away from the ship!”
The Macros were still pouring fire at the crippled Barbarossa. I grabbed Miklos, as his suit didn’t have propulsion power on its own, and I dragged him with my boot repellers at full power. We zoomed away from the ship laterally until we were at a safe distance. The ship blossomed into a flare of brilliance behind us that made my autoshades black out momentarily.
“Kwon, did you make it out?”
“Yes, sir,” Kwon’s signal came to me. His voice was clear and strong.
I smiled, looking around. A dark shape blotted out part of Aldebaran. Silhouetted by the massive blazing orange sphere, Kwon looked small, but he was relatively close to me. I was unsurprised. He seemed to have an extra sense useful only when it came to finding me when we were under fire.
I joined the platoon local circuit, and I could hear Kwon shouting in my helmet. He was working to gather the rest of the men to our position. We were soon flying in a loose formation in the general direction the rest of the fleet was headed.
I let him do his work and had a look around. We couldn’t really see the other ships, they were out there in the darkness, close in astronomical terms, but too distant to make out with the human eye. Occasionally, we saw flares and flashes as ships died to either mines or enemy fire. Most of any space battle was like that, they were generally cold silent affairs. The void felt empty even in the midst of a passing fleet.