Major Osgood shook herself.
“I found the answer, sir,” she said. “Iapetus.”
Her Caribbean accent’s flattened calm frightened Amesbury, for he knew what produced that tone. There was a realm beyond fear, for when no hope remained there was no reason to fear.
“Explain, Major,” he said gently.
“I finally managed to hyper an array out-system and got a look at Saturn, sir.” She met the general’s gaze calmly. “Iapetus isn’t there anymore.”
“It’s true, Ger.” Amesbury’s weary face looked back from Hatcher’s com screen. “It took some time to get a probe near enough to burn through their ships’ energy emissions and confirm it, but we found it right enough. Dead center in their formation: Iapetus—the eighth moon of Saturn.”
“I see.” Hatcher wanted to curse, to revile God for letting this happen, but there was no point, and his voice was soft. “How bad is it?”
“It’s the end, unless we can stop the bloody thing. This is no asteroid, Ger—it’s a bleeding moon. Six times the mass of Ceres.”
“Moving how fast?”
“Fast enough to see us off,” Amesbury replied grimly. “They could have done that simply by dropping it into Sol’s gravity well and letting it fall ‘downhill’ to us, but we’d’ve had too much time. They’ve put shields on it, but if we could pop a few hyper missiles through them, we might be able to blow the bugger apart before it reaches us. That’s why they’re bringing it in under power; they don’t want to expose it to our fire any longer than they have to.
“Their drives are much slower than ours are, but they’ve got the ruddy gravity well to work with, too. I don’t know how they did it—even if they hadn’t been picking off our sensor arrays, we were watching the asteroids, not the outer-system moons—but I reckon they started out with a very low initial acceleration. Only they’re coming from Saturn, Ger. I don’t know when they actually started, but we’re just past opposition, which means we’re over one-and-a-half billion kilometers apart on a straight line. But they’re not on a straight-line course … and they’ve been accelerating all the way.
“They’re coming at us at upwards of five hundred kilometers per second—seven times faster than a ‘fast’ meteorite. I haven’t bothered to calculate how many trillions of megatons that equates to, because it doesn’t matter. That moon will punch through our shield like a bullet through butter, and they’ll reach us in about six days. That’s how long we’ve got to stop them.”
“We can’t, Frederick,” Hatcher sighed. “We just can’t do it.”
“I bloody well know we can’t,” Amesbury said harshly, “but that doesn’t mean we don’t have to try!”
“I know.” Hatcher made his shoulders straighten. “Leave it with me, Frederick. We’ll give it our best shot.”
“I know,” Amesbury said much more softly. “And … God bless, Ger.”
Faces paled as the news spread among Earth’s defenders. This was the end. When that stupendous hammer came down, Earth would shatter like a walnut.
Some had given too much, stretched their reserves too thin, and they snapped. Most simply retreated from reality, but a handful went berserk, and their fellows were almost grateful, for subduing them diverted their minds from their own terror.
Yet only a minority broke. For most, survival, even hope, were no longer factors, and they manned their battle stations without hysteria, cold and determined … and desperate.
Servant of Thunders Brashieel noted the changing energy signatures. So. The nest-killers knew, and they would strive to thrust the Hoof aside, to destroy it. Already the orbital fortresses were moving, concentrating to meet them, but many smaller hooves had been prepared to pelt the planetary shield, driving it back, exposing those fortresses to the Protectors’ thunder. They would clear a path for the Hoof, and nothing could stop them. The nest-killers could not even see the Hoof to fire upon it unless they destroyed Vindicator and his brothers, and they would never do that in time.
He watched his magnificent instruments as Lord of Order Chirdan shifted formation, placing a thicker wall of his nestlings between the Hoof and the nest-killers’ world. Vindicator anchored one edge of that wall.
Lieutenant Andrew Samson felt queerly calm. Governor Horus had shifted his remaining forts to give the Bitch support, but the Achuultani had expected that. Kinetic projectiles had hammered the planetary shield back for days, stripping it away from the ODCs. Raiding squadrons had charged in, paying a high price for their attacks but picking off the battered ODCs. Of the six which originally had protected the pole, only the damaged Bitch remained, and she’d expended too much ammunition defending herself. Without Earth’s orbital industry, just keeping up with expenditures was difficult … not to mention the risk colliers ran between the shield and the ODCs to resupply them.
Andrew Samson had long ago abandoned any expectation of surviving Earth’s siege, but he’d continued to hope his world would live. Now he knew it probably would not, and that purged the last fear from his system, leaving only a strange, bittersweet regret.
The last fleet units would make their try soon. They’d been hoarded for this moment, waiting until the Achuultani were within pointblank range of Earth’s defenses. Their chances of surviving the next few hours were even lower than his own, but the ODCs would do what they could to cover them. He checked his remaining hyper missiles. Thirty-seven, and less than four hundred in the Bitch’s other magazines. It wouldn’t be enough.
Acting Commodore Adrienne Robbins checked her formation. All fifteen of Earth’s remaining battleships, little more than a single squadron, were formed up about her wounded Nergal. Half Nergal’s launchers had been destroyed by the near-miss which had pierced her shield and killed eighty of her three hundred people, but she had her drive … and her energy weapons.
The threadbare remnants of the cruisers and destroyers—seventy-four of them, in all—screened the pitiful handful of capital ships. Eighty-nine warships; her first and final task force command.
“Task Force ready to proceed, Governor,” she told the face on her com.
“Proceed,” Horus said quietly. “May the Maker go with you, Commodore.”
“And with you, sir,” she replied, then shifted to her command net, and her voice was clear and calm. “The Task Force will advance,” she said.
Brashieel watched in grudging admiration as the nest-killers advanced. There were so few of them, and barely a twelve of their biggest ones. Their crews must know they would be chaff for the Furnace, yet still they came, and something within him saluted their courage. In this moment they were not nest-killers; they were Protectors, just as truly as he himself.
But such thoughts would not stay his hand. The Nest had survived for uncountable higher twelves of years only by slaying its enemies while they were yet weak. It was a lesson the Aku’Ultan had learned long ago from the Great Nest-Killers who had driven the Aku’Ultan from their own Nest Place.
It would not happen again.
Gerald Hatcher felt sick as Commodore Robbins led her ships out to die. But the fire control of his orbital and ground-side fortresses couldn’t even see Iapetus unless an opening could be blown for them, and those doomed ships were his one hope to open a way.
“If we get a fix, lock it in tight, Plotting,” he said harshly.
“Acknowledged,” Sir Frederick Amesbury replied.
“Request permission to engage,” Tama Hideoshi said from his own screen, and Hatcher noted the general’s flight suit. They had more fighters than crews now, but even so Hideoshi had no business flying this mission. Yet there was no tomorrow this time, and he chose not to object.