“Destroy that laser!” Cassius shouted.
“Retargeting,” said Sulla, his big hands roving over his board.
Time ticked by, and growing explosions added to the wounding of the Gustavus Adolphus. Big shuttle-bay doors opened. One after another in a stream, shuttles accelerated out of the stricken warship. Meanwhile, the ultra-lasers of the two sound Doom Stars hunted and destroyed the final enemy laser turrets.
Watching the battle unfold put a worm of doubt into Cassius’s stomach. Torpedoes in waves now accelerated out of the nearest debris-cluster. It meant the torpedoes had been carefully weaving their way through the debris-field. That implied individual cyborgs piloted the one-way craft. Those torpedoes burned hard for the Gustavus Adolphus many hundreds of kilometers beyond them.
“That’s it, Your Excellency,” Sulla said. “Except for the ones behind the debris-fields, we’ve silenced the enemy beams.”
Cassius hardly knew what he said in response. Destroying torpedoes, seeing them burn, absorbed his attention. More kept coming. How many torpedoes did these cyborgs have? Time, distance, velocity and power-levels—that’s all Cassius could compute now.
“The last Highborn shuttles have escaped the Gustavus Adolphus,” Sulla said some time later.
Prismatic crystals like wisps of cloud drifted before the mighty vessel. The warship’s great beam fired, highlighting a cyborg torpedo before disintegrating it. Point-defense cannons fired as the last missiles launched from torn ports.
From in his shell, Cassius swallowed uneasily. The Gustavus Adolphus was like a great wounded beast. It was too tired, too drained of blood to sidestep death barreling down at it. That death came as schools of cyborg torpedoes, missiles and point-defense-cannon-shells converged on the ship. The Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan were using every weapon they had, trying to defend the stricken Doom Star. But now it was too little, too late. The cyborgs simply had too much. They should have used this mass earlier. Why had they saved so much hardware? The mass of destructive weaponry was simply too heavy to completely halt.
“No,” Cassius whispered. He watched on a zoomed portion of his holoimages.
A huge torpedo smashed through the weakened composite armor and drilled its way deep into the Doom Star. It exploded with a nuclear fireball in the guts of the warship. Another torpedo struck as the electromagnetic pulse of the thermonuclear warhead washed outward. An emergency device caused the second torpedo to explode before the EMP blast disabled its systems.
Disbelieving, Cassius watched as a great section of armor blew away from the Gustavus Adolphus as blast holes appeared elsewhere. This part of the fight was over. The Doom Star was dead, as was every Highborn that had remained onboard to fire the ship’s weaponry to the end.
-89-
Chief Coordinator of Earth Defense Scipio read the news with alarm.
The tall Highborn with the prosthetic hand stood before a large screen. It took up an entire wall of the largest room in the former laser satellite. The satellite had once orbited Earth. It was torus-shaped. As the satellite traveled through built-up velocity, the torus rotated, creating centrifugal-gravity.
“There’s no more they can do.”
Scipio barely heard the words of the Social Unity Earthling beside him. To him, the woman was tiny, barely five and half feet tall. She’d coordinated the SU premen, the Earthlings as Scipio tried to call them in his mind. Those Earthlings from Eurasia and Africa had brought engine-machinery and helped install them. Tens of thousands of Earthlings had helped the Highborn repair the least-damaged habitats orbiting Earth. Once, those habitats had contained algae pools and bacteria tanks.
Instead of drifting uselessly in orbit, Scipio had coordinated the repairs and sent the habitats toward the asteroids. As slow as they were, they’d built-up speed. The critical aspect of each was its mass. As constructs, the habitats were huge, many greater in bulk than a Doom Star, although none had as much mass.
Scipio still couldn’t believe the Gustavus Adolphus had been destroyed. The Highborn were down to three Doom Stars, one at the Sun-Works Factory under repairs. Once, they had possessed five of the giant warships.
“The Grand Admiral can do no more,” the woman said.
“You are correct,” said Scipio.
On the wall, the asteroids less than three days away from impact against the Earth appeared as red images.
Cassius had sent the grim message. The Doom Stars had used every nuclear weapon in their cargo-holds. Scouring the captured asteroids—all fifteen of them—the Highborn had found more nukes and used them, too. Highborn had maneuvered some of those nuclear bombs deep into the debris-fields before detonating them. Most of the debris, the rocks, had blown outward, enough that eighty-seven percent of the mass no longer constituted a threat against Earth. That still left a critical thirteen percent of the debris-fields. Other nuclear explosions had deflected smaller asteroids. A few of the biggest nukes had been sunk into the center of the monster silicon-based rocks and detonated. Those asteroids had splintered and separated into pieces, a few of those pieces were still on a collision course for Earth. There were seven major objects left and the lesser remains of the former debris-fields and asteroid-smashed debris. One of the seven major objects was a giant, thirty-kilometers in diameter. The Doom Stars, Orion-ships, Highborn commandoes and SU warships had done all they could. Now it was Scipio’s turn.
“We needed to refit more habitats,” the SU woman said. “We simply didn’t have enough time.”
“We shall see,” Scipio said.
“Have you read the data?” she demanded.
Scipio frowned. The preman, the SU Earthling, acted too familiarly with him. Any other Highborn would have slapped her into obedience. It was such a trying task working with premen.
“Do not query me,” Scipio told her.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, as she cringed. “I didn’t mean any offense.”
Scipio squinted at the wall, at the red images representing the seven major objects and debris. Blue dots were the advancing habitats, eight of them.
Curtly, he nodded. It was time to put in the final coordinates and drive the habitats against the asteroids. The question that plagued him was this. How many should he send at each? Or should he send all of the habitats at the four biggest rocks and ignore the rest? Let the Earthlings use their merculite missiles and proton beams on the remainder. What was the best decision?
Scipio touched his prosthetic hand. It was better to be certain with a few. If the Earth were to survive, let its occupants defend it. Otherwise…maybe the planet and the premen weren’t worthy of life.
-90-
With iron control, Cassius held his brooding in check as he stood on the bridge of the Julius Caesar. Efficiently, his officers went about their tasks. Toggles clicked, uniforms rustled and images flickered on the screens.
Since the Gustavus Adolphus’s destruction, Cassius had grown weary of his holoimages. He presently watched over Sulla’s shoulder. The Ultraist’s screen showed a nearly futile picture. Two Doom Stars stayed ahead of the two biggest asteroids headed for Earth. The warships alternately beamed their heavy lasers at the largest object. They sliced off surface-areas one tiny section at a time. It was tedious work, and both lasers had entered the danger zone more than once before being shut down for cooling.