I was out with the fourth platoon, burning rocks, when Charlie called and asked me to come back in, urgent. I left Heimoff in charge.
“Another one?” The scale of the holograph display was such that our planet was pea-sized, about five centimeters from the X that marked the position of Sade-138. There were forty-one red and green dots scattered around the field; the key identified number 41 as Tauran Cruiser.
“You called Antopol?”
“Yeah.” He anticipated the next question. “It’ll take almost a day for the signal to get there and back.”
“It’s never happened before,” but of course Charlie knew that.
“Maybe this collapsar is especially important to them.”
“Likely.” So it was almost certain we’d be fighting on the ground. Even if Antopol managed to get the first cruiser, she wouldn’t have a fifty-fifty chance on the second one. Low on drones and fighters. “I wouldn’t like to be Antopol now.”
“She’ll just get it earlier.”
“I don’t know. We’re in pretty good shape.”
“Save it for the troops, William.” He turned down the display’s scale to where it showed only two objects: Sade-138 and the new red dot, slowly moving.
* * *
We spent the next two weeks watching dots blink out. And if you knew when and where to look, you could go outside and see the real thing happening, a hard bright speck of white light that faded in about a second.
In that second, a nova bomb had put out over a million times the power of a gigawatt laser. It made a miniature star half a klick in diameter and as hot as the interior of the sun. Anything it touched it would consume. The radiation from a near miss could botch up a ship’s electronics beyond repair — two fighters, one of ours and one of theirs, had evidently suffered that fate, silently drifting out of the system at a constant velocity, without power.
We had used more powerful nova bombs earlier in the war, but the degenerate matter used to fuel them was unstable in large quantities. The bombs had a tendency to explode while they were still inside the ship. Evidently the Taurans had the same problem — or they had copied the process from us in the first place — because they had also scaled down to nova bombs that used less than a hundred kilograms of degenerate matter. And they deployed them much the same way we did, the warhead separating into dozens of pieces as it approached the target, only one of which was the nova bomb.
They would probably have a few bombs left over after they finished off Masaryk II and her retinue of fighters and drones. So it was likely that we were wasting time and energy in weapons practice.
The thought did slip by my conscience that I could gather up eleven people and board the fighter we had hidden safe behind the stasis field. It was pre-programmed to take us back to Stargate.
I even went to the extreme of making a mental list of the eleven, trying to think of eleven people who meant more to me than the rest. Turned out I’d be picking six at random.
I put the thought away, though. We did have a chance, maybe a damned good one, even against a fully-armed cruiser. It wouldn’t be easy to get a nova bomb close enough to include us inside its kill radius.
Besides, they’d space me for desertion. So why bother?
Spirits rose when one of Antopol’s drones knocked out the first Tauran cruiser. Not counting the ships left behind for planetary defense, she still had eighteen drones and two fighters. They wheeled around to intercept the second cruiser, by then a few lighthours away, still being harassed by fifteen enemy drones.
One of the Tauran drones got her. Her ancillary crafts continued the attack, but it was a rout. One fighter and three drones fled the battle at maximum acceleration, looping up over the plane of the ecliptic, and were not pursued. We watched them with morbid interest while the enemy cruiser inched back to do battle with us. The fighter was headed back for Sade-138, to escape. Nobody blamed them. In fact, we sent them a farewell-good luck message; they didn’t respond, naturally, being zipped up in the tanks. But it would be recorded.
It took the enemy five days to get back to the planet and be comfortably ensconced in a stationary orbit on the other side. We settled in for the inevitable first phase of the attack, which would be aerial and totally automated: their drones against our lasers. I put a force of fifty men and women inside the stasis field, in case one of the drones got through. An empty gesture, really; the enemy could just stand by and wait for them to turn off the field, fry them the second it flickered out.
Charlie had a weird idea that I almost went for.
“We could boobytrap the place.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “This place is boobytrapped, out to twenty-five klicks.”
“No, not the mines and such. I mean the base itself, here, underground.”
“Go on.”
“There are two nova bombs in that fighter.” He pointed at the stasis field through a couple of hundred meters of rock. “We can roll them down here, boobytrap them, then hide everybody in the stasis field and wait.”
In a way it was tempting. It would relieve me from any responsibility for decision-making, leave everything up to chance. “I don’t think it would work, Charlie.”
He seemed hurt. “Sure it would.”
“No, look. For it to work, you have to get every single Tauran inside the kill-radius before it goes off — but they wouldn’t all come charging in here once they breached our defenses. Least of all if the place seemed deserted. They’d suspect something, send in an advance party. And after the advance party set off the bombs—”
“We’d be back where we started, yeah. Minus the base. Sorry. ”
I shrugged. “It was an idea. Keep thinking, Charlie.” I turned my attention back to the display, where the lopsided space war was in progress. Logically enough, the enemy wanted to knock out that one fighter overhead before he started to work on us. About all we could do was watch the red dots crawl around the planet and try to score. So far the pilot had managed to knock out all the drones; the enemy hadn’t sent any fighters after him yet.
I’d given the pilot control over five of the lasers in our defensive ring. They couldn’t do much good, though. A gigawatt laser pumps out a billion kilowatts per second at a range of a hundred meters. A thousand klicks up, though, the beam was attenuated to ten kilowatts. Might do some damage if it hit an optical sensor. At least confuse things.
“We could use another fighter. Or six.”
“Use up the drones,” I said. We did have a fighter, of course, and a swabbie attached to us who could pilot it. It might turn out to be our only hope, if they got us cornered in the stasis field.
“How far away is the other guy?” Charlie asked, meaning the fighter pilot who had turned tail. I cranked down the scale, and the green dot appeared at the right of the display. “About six light-hours.” He had two drones left, too near to him to show as separate dots, having expended one in covering his getaway. “He’s not accelerating any more, but he’s doing point nine gee.”
“Couldn’t do us any good if he wanted to.” Need almost a month to slow down.
At that low point, the light that stood for our own defensive fighter faded out. “Shit.”
“Now the fun starts. Should I tell the troops to get ready, stand by to go topside?”
“No … have them suit up, in case we lose air. But I expect it’ll be a little while before we have a ground attack.” I turned the scale up again. Four red dots were already creeping around the globe toward us.
I got suited up and came back to Administration to watch the fireworks on the monitors.