“Understood,” Simon said. He keyed in a command sequence and smiled. It was the sort of moment that should have a soundtrack, one composed by a patriotic composer, perhaps who’d taken a mind-blowing cocktail of drugs. He was almost disappointed that there was no music playing. “I am deploying weapons… now!”
A series of dull thumps echoed through the hull as the hatches opened and the weapon systems deployed out from the cargo hold. The aliens had used their holds to store cargo, but the human designers, pressed to invent as many weapons as possible, had loaded them with racks for weapons. Each of the shuttles had a slightly different weapons load, a trick intended to confuse the aliens, although none of them carried as many missiles as Gary would have liked. The shuttles simply weren’t very large, as far as carrying heavy missiles was concerned, and most of their offensive punch was contained in the lasers and rail guns. The alien parasite ships would have much more capable weapons.
“I have radar sweeps,” Simon said, as warning tones sounded. The display lit up with red waves of light as the parasite ships swept space for targets. The aliens knew that they were there, now, although they could hardly have missed them. He’d planned the engagement, insofar as he’d planned it at all, on the assumption that the aliens would have seen them from the beginning. “They know we’re here.”
Gary nodded. The aliens had swept orbit carefully in their first week at Earth, knocking down or recovering every piece of space junk Earth had launched, which included pieces from the satellites they’d destroyed. The shuttles were flying into clear space, apart from the alien craft, and that would ensure that they wouldn’t be decoyed. The aliens would not be able to trick them into wasting their missiles.
“Good,” he said, accessing the laser link to the other shuttles. “All units, prepare to engage.”
The High Priest stared as the new icons appeared on his display. They looked so much like Takaina shuttles — almost completely identical, at first glance — that he had wondered if they’d all been launched from the Texas Foothold, before the tactical staff realised that most of them had risen from other parts of North America. The humans had built their own spacecraft, he saw now, and had managed to coordinate their actions beautifully. The parasite ships should have been able to knock them all down before they even reached orbit, but they’d been diverted to handle the missiles and their warheads… and had been caught out of position.
It was going to be a close-run thing, he saw, as soon as he realised what must have happened. The humans would have armed those ships to the teeth and, sending them out on such a course, intended to destroy Guiding Star. The realisation wasn’t as shocking as it might have been — the High Priest had known for a long time that that was the only way the humans could actually win — but he’d thought that he’d placed his people beyond all possibility of actual defeat. The attack formation developing in front of him proved that he’d been wrong… and that the time needed to correct matters was much shorter than he had imagined.
His mind traced the orbits of the parasite ships. Half of the force was either damaged or out of position, while the remainder were not armed to the teeth. The designers hadn’t really anticipated the need for real space warships, even through the Takaina could have built them, because of the divine blessing that had ensured they only encountered races that were behind them, technologically. In hindsight, it was a costly blunder and one the High Priest vowed to fix, assuming that he had the time. Guiding Star was bringing up the drive now, preparing to simply outrun the human craft, but warming it up would take time, time they wouldn’t have.
“Order the parasite ships that can engage to get into position and engage,” the High Priest said. The humans couldn’t have stuffed much in the way of weapons into those hulls, no matter how advanced their technology. It was possible that the two sides might be more evenly matched than he had supposed. “Prepare to move us from orbit as soon as the shuttles are onboard and the drive is ready. Do not wait for orders, just ignite the drive and move.”
“Yes, Your Holiness.”
The High Priest turned back to the display. Now that he had issued his orders, and further orders would only confuse the issue still further, something was alarmingly clear. The human shuttles weren’t just similar to the Takaina shuttles, but practically identical. The conclusion wasn’t very pleasant, but the Takaina had seen it before, back during the Unification Wars. There was a reason why females were generally kept away from the danger of being taken prisoner; their tendency to fall into the mindset of the enemy side was well known. It was a survival trait, and not something that the Truth blamed them for — in contrast to some of the more perverted human religions, which blamed women for things they couldn’t remotely help — but something that had had to be taken into account. Someone, down there, had gotten their hands on a Takaina female and brought her into the human race.
The Inquisitors are going to be furious, the High Priest thought. It didn’t take much imagination to know which female had been captured. The reports that the shuttle had crashed and had been destroyed during the battles on Earth had obviously been inaccurate. The humans, so much more practiced at deception than the Takaina, had taken the crew alive… and one of the foremost engineers from the Guiding Star. The recriminations would be dreadful; the Inquisitors would claim that it was his fault, for protecting her from the fate reserved for all whose sterility marked them as sinners.
He watched, grimly, as the parasite ships began to engage. One way or the other, it would be over soon.
“All right, here they come,” Gary said. In theory, they could have engaged the parasite ships as soon as they reached orbit, but their lasers didn’t have the power required to do real damage at such range. The aliens clearly agreed; they might have been pushing their ships around the planet, but they hadn’t opened fire. “Mark your men… and fire!”
The shuttle’s lights dimmed as power was rerouted to the lasers. The parasite ships, targeted, returned fire at the same instant, their lasers burning against the heat shielding and armour the engineers had built into the hull. Gary had seen the specs on the armour — it was designed to provide considerable protection against laser fire — but no one had really tested it in space. A dull series of clunks announced the launch of four missiles from the lower hold, their drives already boosting them ahead of the Armstrong towards the alien craft. The parasite ships would have to switch their lasers to serve in a point defence role, buying time for the human ships to engage them.
“This is Homer,” a voice said. The pilots had been allowed to name their own ships, but after several scatological names had been added to the rosters, and several other names that no one had dared to write down, that particular permission had been withdrawn. “We’re burning up; they’re breaking through…”
Communications vanished in a hail of static. “The Homer has been destroyed,” Simon reported, grimly. The lasers would have burned through the armour, flashed through the cockpit and ignited whatever fuel remained in the shuttle. The parasite ships were learning and concentrating their fire on the human ships. Two more vanished within seconds as the missiles lanced closer. “One direct hit; one parasite ship destroyed.”