Commodore Blackstone hunched his shoulders. “Are the lasers firing on us or—”
“Against our missiles, sir!” shouted Wu.
Almost one hundred thousand kilometers separated them from the cyborg taskforce. That meant the information was several nanoseconds old. The missiles launched many days ago were less than nineteen thousand kilometers from the enemy. Surely, the cyborgs lasers could reach farther than that. So why had they waited so long before firing?
“Do you have an estimate of the enemy wattage?” asked Blackstone.
“The readings are coming in now, sir,” said Wu.
“…Well?”
“They’re similar to our heavy lasers, sir,” said Wu.
“Not near Doom Star laser power-levels?” asked Blackstone.
“Negative, sir,” said Wu.
“That’s something at least,” Blackstone whispered to Kursk. “Give me more data,” he told Wu. “What are the other missiles doing?” he asked the missile-officer.
“They’re all firing, sir!” shouted Wu.
“What, our missiles?” asked Blackstone.
“I’m sorry, sir. The cyborgs lasers are all firing.”
“I want precise data,” Blackstone said. “What do you mean by all?”
Wu’s thick fingers blurred across his screen as he tapped madly. “Twenty heavy lasers, sir,” he said a moment later. “No. Make that twenty-two enemy lasers.”
“So many?” said Blackstone.
“I’m surprised there aren’t more,” Wu said. “Given their surface area—”
“Give me power estimates on their fusion cores,” Blackstone said. “We need more information and we likely don’t have much time to get it.”
“We’re in laser-range, sir,” said Wu.
“Ask the other ships if they’re ready to fire.”
“I already have, sir. They are.”
Blackstone moistened his lips. “Take out enemy laser turrets,” he said. “Now!” He made a curt gesture.
As Wu complied, the thrum of the fusion core rose in volume. The Vladimir Lenin built up power and pumped it through the laser coils. The concentrated light beamed through the firing tube. That light struck the mirror, the one outside the protection of the prismatic-crystal cloud. Bounced perfectly, the coherent light sped across the one hundred thousand kilometers at the speed of light. It hit a laser-turret on the thirty-kilometer asteroid, the one designated as A. As the Vladimir Lenin continued to move toward the asteroids, the asteroids continued to move at Earth. In order to keep the laser focused on the turret, the mirror minutely adjusted throughout the entirety of the beaming.
Now the other heavy lasers from the other three battleships began to beam across the immense distance.
“Have any missiles hit?” asked Blackstone. “I want information, people, and I want it now.”
Other devices had moved outside the protection of the cloud, some of them radar dishes and others teleoptic scopes of incredible power. The radar sped to the asteroids at the speed of light, bounced off and sped back just as fast. It took twice as long, however, as directly viewing what occurred through optics.
“Scratch one laser-turret!” shouted Wu, who pumped his fist in the air.
“We can hurt them,” Blackstone told Kursk with a grin.
“We haven’t gotten to them with the missiles yet,” she said. “The missiles hold the nukes, which is the only effective way to nudge the asteroids off course.”
“Allow me to enjoy my victory, as small as it is,” Blackstone said.
Kursk gripped the map-module so her knuckles whitened. Her intense gaze was fixated on the screen.
“I want—” Blackstone said.
“Enemy lasers!” shouted the defensive-officer. “They’re trying a burn-through, sir.”
“How many lasers?” snapped Blackstone.
“Sir,” the defensive-officer said, “they’re focusing ten lasers into a small area.”
“Start pumping more crystals!” Blackstone shouted.
“Emergency pumping engaged!” the defensive-officer said. “Sir, at this rate, they’ll burn through our P-Cloud in twelve minutes.”
“Impossible,” said Blackstone.
“Slag the Leon Trotsky’s mirror, sir,” Wu said. “I don’t know how, but the cyborgs damaged it.”
“We’re too heavily outgunned,” Kursk whispered.
Blackstone said nothing as he stared at the map-module. The Commissar was right. The cyborgs had too many heavy lasers, and it looked as if they had enough power to fire them for hours. Just as bad, none of the missiles had made it near enough the asteroids to make detonation worthwhile.
“How are we supposed to stop them, sir?” asked Wu.
“What I want to know,” Kursk whispered, “is how Hawthorne is going to get any space marines onto those asteroids.”
Blackstone swallowed in a dry throat. He had his orders. Hawthorne had ordered him to break off the attack if the cyborgs proved too powerful. Social Unity had to keep a fleet intact, especially if the unthinkable happened and the cyborgs destroyed Earth as a habitable planet. Yet to have traveled out this far and beamed the lasers for less than a minute, and then to turn and run—it was too galling.
“Now they’ve damaged our mirror, sir,” said Wu. “We can’t fire at them anymore unless we come out from behind the cloud.”
“Or if they burn our cloud away,” said the defensive-officer.
Commodore Joseph Blackstone found himself short of breath. The cyborgs had too much concentrated firepower on those asteroids. The big ones possessed greater tonnage than all the Doom Stars, Zhukov-class Battleships and missiles combined. How were they supposed to stop the asteroids from smashing into the Earth?
“We must ram them,” whispered Kursk.
Blackstone blinked at her. “What?” he whispered.
“We must ram them,” she said. She was pale and trembling.
Shaking his head, Blackstone said, “We lack the tonnage to do more than nudge one. You saw the specs. The asteroids have giant exhaust ports. They’ll just readjust course.”
“We have to do something,” Kursk said hoarsely.
“Yes!” Blackstone said, and he struck the map-module. “We keep these battleships intact.”
“You’re running away?”
“I’m saving our fleet—if I can.” He knew it might already be too late. The cyborg firepower, it was too much. “Break-off,” said Blackstone, “employ schedule three-C.”
Several officers swiveled around to stare at him.
“Now!” shouted Blackstone. “We have to get out of range now. There’s nothing more we can do today.”
“No,” whispered Kursk, and there were tears in her eyes.
“Mister,” Blackstone told the pilot.
The pilot moved as if shocked, and she began to lay in the new course heading. Meanwhile, orders went out to the other three battlewagons.
“More enemy lasers are firing,” the defensive-officer said. “Our P-Cloud won’t last more than a few minutes at this rate.”
“Emergency jinking!” shouted Blackstone. “Then each ship is to head to its own destination.”
“This is a disgrace,” Kursk said, tears freely running down her cheeks.
Had he just consigned billions to their deaths? Blackstone hoped not. He wanted to do more. But the enemy firepower—
“Burn-through in ninety seconds!”
Then everyone aboard the Vladimir Lenin was thrown to the left as the big ship began to accelerate toward a new heading.
-51-
Commodore Blackstone strapped into an acceleration couch as fear boiled in his stomach.
The Vladimir Lenin, the Leon Trotsky and the other battleships accelerated away at emergency speeds. Each battleship had to contend with its velocity that moved it fast toward the approaching asteroids in a length sense. Because of that velocity, none of the battleships could move away at more than a shallow curve in a width sense. The engagement took place on a three-dimensional battlefield, but in this instance, viewing it as a two-dimensional rectangle problem more accurately portrayed the situation. Human endurance levels, battleship structural design and physics limited the possibility of the various headings. Those were known quantities likely possessed by the cyborgs. They had once been allied with the Mars Battlefleet and were therefore intimately aware of Zhukov-class Battleship specs.