SystemLord kept four eyes in his hemiscreens and several pseudopods in continuous chemical link with Monitor as he watched the enemy through his living ship’s senses. He damned the Humans for suspecting the existence of the Weapon; and he damned himself for not using his Sentries to search for spy drones. Expending them in the initial close-range trap had been a mistake, he now saw, but all war was risk.
No matter, the Humans are prisoners of momentum now, he thought. They cannot alter course fast enough to avoid being targeted, and there is nowhere to run except, possibly, behind the planet. When the Weapon destroys most of them, the Underlings will recognize the inevitable and take action with their orbitals.
***
“Conn: Sensors. All bogeys accelerating!” Scoggins wiped the main holotank of the moon’s image, replacing it with the fleet display. Flashing red icons with short tails showing their direction of movement began to crawl forward. “They’re coming out to fight!”
“Helm, get us onto as tight a tangent to the planet as you can, I want to shave it close. Ford, shift all the long-range beam fire to pick off some cruisers, before the alpha strike.”
Okuda nodded, too busy to speak. The fleet lined up and pumped full fusion thrust to the side, driving each ship, from the largest to the smallest, onto a course that would nearly skim the planet’s atmosphere on the side opposite the moon.
With his expanded senses the helmsman experienced the enemy closing in from all sides, but mostly from what seemed to him like the left front as the fleet skimmed to the right. To the left the virtual eye of the unknown moon anomaly flashed redly with a computer overlay, and between it and the planet, that double-ringed bullseye of enemy cruisers. The enormous Guardian occupied the center and hung slightly back.
It was now a race to see whether the main enemy fleet could get to within fusor beam distance before Conquest and her flock got past the point of intersection and behind the planet. Of course, the enemy could easily follow them around, using brute acceleration to force themselves into their wakes, then overtake.
“One enemy cruiser destroyed with beams,” Ford called, then: “Initiating alpha strike.” Missiles blossomed from the frigates, and Conquest’s launchers opened their quadripartitioned outer doors, enormous slabs of armor shifting like puzzle boxes, for just long enough to release salvos before closing. The bridge crew could hear the groans of their ship’s structure when acceleration came off for a moment, then resumed, as the weapons cleared their launch tubes. Gravplates whined as they transferred loads to compensate for the crushing forces.
The three remaining battleships and Conquest began continuous railgun fire, near-solid streams of hundreds of thousands of stealthy high-tech cannonballs per second, all aimed to blanket the unknown moon installation. Okuda skillfully adjusted for their enormous propelling forces, his fingers and his mind playing battle-music across the pipe organ of thrusters.
Twenty-eight seconds after the last shots left the rails, Ford shifted the beams of the task force cruisers off their enemy counterparts and onto the moon base. Coherent electromagnetics very nearly caught up with the solid ammo before both struck home, and directly behind came the first wave of heavy nukes.
Staring at the holotank, an almost real-time feed from near-space sensors, Admiral Absen thought at first the alpha strike had obliterated ten thousand square kilometers of the moon’s surface. The display showed an enormous energy release at that location. Shining like a laser bonfire it blazed forth, represented on the 4D tank as a dome of red light.
“What the hell is that?” he barked.
“Full-spectrum coherent EM pulse in the exawatt range, continuous duration,” Scoggins gasped.
“Shift targeting, continuous fire on that location!” Absen yelled, something he seldom did, but the implications of an enemy laser of such magnitude had overridden his calm.
“Retargeting!” Ford called, and passed the orders to the fleet weapons officers.
The dome of burning light reached out in a hemisphere as an almost-solid wave, defeated only by its exponential dispersion in three dimensions – every time it doubled in radius it dropped roughly fourteen-fold in power. This still allowed it to utterly vaporize the incoming shot and missiles at one hundred kilometers range, imparting temperatures greater than a star’s corona to anything it touched. It kept pumping vast energies into the void, creating in essence a dome of destruction through which nothing could pass, not even other electromagnetics.
Yet this was a defensive use, to preserve whatever enormous engine lurked beneath the moon’s surface from the continuous impact of human weapons. Ford intuited this right away and ordered the strikes spread out so they dribbled in, forcing the thing to remain as a barrier. His new greatest fear was that the projector would have time to focus offensively. Rough calculations showed such a beam could reach out far past the million-kilometer mark with devastating power.
Thus he ignored the chaos around him and any distracting commands in favor of diving into his link – which frankly he hated, no matter how useful – and fencing with this thing, thrusts and parries measured in milliseconds. Time after time he could see it begin to narrow its focus, only to re-broaden to catch the incoming human missiles that Ford now tried to bring in from every side, one at a time but with no gaps. The three-second lightspeed delay felt infinite and he could not react, only stack attack upon attack in patterns that he hoped would suppress the ravening beam.
Angrily he observed a detachment of six enemy cruisers that swept in from the side to bolster the defense of their moon base. These interdicted enough EarthFleet missiles to allow the ground-based beam to focus and lash out at its narrowest for a full second.
Three seconds later the beam cruiser Midas ceased to exist. All of the Meme weapon’s enormous power struck an area on the ship the size of a hoplite’s shield, and the armor in its path was converted from dense crystalline molecules to free relativistic particles within a nanosecond. This jet bored a hole through the front armor and exited the other side, while the heat dump and plasma wave flashed immediately throughout the entire ship. A thermonuclear weapon detonated at the center of the vessel would have wreaked less havoc, and moments later the remains of the kilometer-wide cruiser expanded on the outside of a sun-hot, teardrop-shaped wave of compressed debris.
Commander Ford spouted profanity through those seconds as, steaming with rage, he redoubled his efforts to lay all available weaponry on the hated installation, knowing full well he could do no more than keep it bottled.
With cleverness borne of desperation he targeted nukes onto the surface just outside the thing’s destructive radius, blasting mountains of debris into the moon’s faint atmosphere. Perhaps the detritus will diffuse the laser, he thought, or the ground shock might damage it.
One idea later he began to throw nuke after nuke into the same hole at the edge, waiting only long enough between blasts for each fireball to disperse before sending another deeper, as if trying to drill though the planet’s crust from an angle.
Which he was.
The squadron of enemy cruisers shifted to stop his ploy, – too soon, too soon! – picking off his missiles with their close-range fusor beams set wide. Despite all his efforts, the gargantuan laser licked out again and touched the battleship Nanjing, and that great city’s namesake also vanished in a brief and newborn sun.
A curtain fell then across Ford’s awareness, distinct, rapid, but inevitable. The weapons officer realized Conquest and her escorts had passed behind Afrana, thus shielding the task force with the only thing that could withstand such a weapon – thousands of kilometers of planet.
Unfortunately this brought them within close range of the enormous enemy orbitals lurking on the other side of the planet. EarthFleet weapons strained to reorient, in some cases a full 180 degrees, to try – and fail – to lock on and fire at the huge fortresses as they flashed through near-planet space.
The holotank told the brutal story. For eight full seconds the fleet was caught flatfooted, sailing point-blank under the menacing guns of three Hippo superdreadnought-sized battlewagons. One enormous particle beam on each orbital fortress fired, the blaze of its discharge lighting up surrounding space as it reached out toward Conquest and the others.
And missed.
“Hold fire!” Absen yelled as realization hit him. “All ships hold fire! That was deliberate.”
Surprised murmurs of assent and relief swept the bridge. Seconds later, the task force was clear.
The orbitals turned to follow with their aim, fired, and failed to connect again.
“Are we sure they didn’t intend to hit us? Maybe they just missed,” Ford said.
Absen raised an eyebrow. “Would you have?”
Ford shook his head.
So that moon laser was their surprise, the admiral thought as they cruised away. And probably the Hippos were supposed to close the trap. It should have worked. That Meme commander is one smart bastard. A shudder went through him from the adrenaline of this near-death experience, feeling in his bones how close it had been.