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Someone must be farthest forward, Lieutenant Jacques d’Lorenz thought as he watched the march of thousands of rocks closing on Weapons Array 887. No, be honest, Jacques, only one or two actually aim at you. The rest seek to crash themselves into God’s good Earth, into Europe and most particularly into Belgium, where mother and Claude and Henri work our farm just outside of Jurbise.
Giving up his citizenship had not given up his heart for the land of his birth.
That is why you are here. You fight and die so they can grow the food and live.
Two enlisted men accompanied him. All three wore survival suits and sat in crash chairs in a small control room a thousand meters deep inside an asteroid fortress. Cables carried command and sensor data to and from antennas and weapons on the surface – two railguns and a beam array, and transceivers to control the six other, smaller automated guns planted on nearby rocks.
The seven floated far enough off Jupiter to be little affected by its gravity. Located directly between the enemy and Earth, they expected to draw first blood.
Probably the blood will be ours. I volunteered, and I have made peace with my maker. For the honor of the King and the life of my family, I stand here and I will not yield passage. Mother Mary and the saints preserve us all.
“All is well?” he asked in his accented English.
“Si, jefe,” PO2 Esteban Mercadez replied. “We approach the ten minute firing mark.”
“It is the enemy who approaches, not us,” rumbled PO3 Sven Waldner in his clipped Teutonic tones. “Or one could say, the ten minute mark approaches.”
Mercadez rolled his eyes at the German’s hairsplitting, and d’Lorenz shrugged and smiled. “No matter what the words,” he soothed, “the effect is the same. Prepare to fire on primary target.”
The common display screen filled the front of the room. Most of it showed a game-like graphic of icons representing inbound rocks. One in the center pulsed redder than the rest.
“Ten minutes, Señor.”
D’Lorenz nodded. “Invite our friends to launch missiles.”
Ten million kilometers back from his small weapons array, the broad swath of Aardvarks in formation began firing missiles as they received his request. Each attack ship launched one of its sixteen weapons.
The control room’s screen filled briefly with the evidence of sixty thousand Pilums maneuvering before Waldner cleaned up the display, simplifying everything to a manageable level.
Behind them, the missiles found their targets and lined up, approximately six per rock. They formed themselves into trailing formations hundreds of kilometers apart, to explode in strings as the rocks passed through their zones, more like mines than missiles. Though launched first, they would engage after the direct fire weapons.
“Callisto base is firing.” Waldner pulled back the display to show plotted lines of railgun shot arcing out from the moon of Jupiter, intersecting enemy rocks about a minute before they were due to fly through the asteroid fortresses’ area. Other arrows reached out ahead and faster, enormous ground-mounted beam weapons of collimated coherent energy – lasers and masers and particle beams, streaking at the speed of light to begin their work of heating, warping and fragmenting the speeding chunks.
D’Lorenz looked over the broad display once more. “I find it interesting that so few rocks aim for Callisto. How many?”
“Nineteen,” Waldner replied.
“With their massive weapons, they will likely take no damage at all. This seems odd.”
Waldner only grunted, and Mercadez gave a very Spanish shrug.
D’Lorenz put curiosity aside and ordered, “Commence weapon array firing, primary target only.”
Up on the surface the beam array fired, a sustained ten-second burst that drained its capacitors. Simultaneously the energy guns on the other rocks threw their power along similar axes, all aiming for one rock.
Immediately afterward, all seven asteroids’ railguns vomited dense streams of ball bearings, accelerated to ten thousand kilometers per second by the megajoules of electricity in the systems’ capacitors. Stabilizers struggled to keep the lines aimed at the primary target, the one incoming rock aimed directly at the command center. Recoil from the guns affected their aim and even made the asteroids yaw fractions of degrees. Fusion thrusters fired, trying to compensate.
That tiny amount of movement was enough to cause the streams to miss at the distances involved, thus the extreme number and density of shots to compensate. Within a minute the railguns had exhausted their capacitors and shut down to recharge.
D’Lorenz watched as the power on his weapons slowly rebuilt. They would be ready just a minute before the rocks arrived, giving his array one more set of shots at close range.
“Herr Leutnant,” Waldner said, jarring d’Lorenz out of his thoughts. The petty officer gestured at the screen. “We see hits on the rocks. Callisto base’s beams are powerful.” He worked to sort out the thousands of targets, showing a small but increasing number broken up. That readout climbed to two digits and then, barely, to three as it totaled more than one hundred.
“Our railgun impacts are showing up now,” Mercadez said, zooming in on the primary target. Results of the other strikes were interesting, even important, but the rock coming their way represented a duel to the death.
D’Lorenz could have tried to maneuver his asteroids. Even small movements might have made the enemy rocks miss – if they did not each have a Meme guidance package that would compensate. Also, to attempt that would give up use of their weapons. The same engine that moved the asteroids provided firing power.
So, we stand and fight, he told himself calmly. Perhaps soon I will see Papa in God’s heaven, and will be able to face him with pride.
Suddenly his petty officers cheered as the primary target broke apart under the barrage of steel.
“Firing plan Bravo,” the Belgian said. “Separate target protocol.” Now that the first threat to the three men had been dealt with, they would seek to do as much damage to the swarm as possible, chipping away at the rocks so that defenders behind would have that much less to fight.
Watching the small number climb from one hundred to nearly one-fifty gratified him greatly. His little crew, combined with the Callisto base, had already eliminated more than one percent of the threat, and soon the total would grow to more than two percent.
Mercadez yipped, “Jefe! A rock is turning toward us!” On the display the predicted path of one of the undamaged chunks curved like a live thing and intersected Weapons Array 887 Control – their asteroid.
D’Lorenz gripped his chair reflexively. “Retarget all weapons. Continuous maximum fire.” He stared at the track and the icon as the time to impact counted down past forty seconds. “Give us an optical picture please, Sven.”
Waldner tapped a control and waited, with nothing else to do. The automated targeting systems locked onto the inbound rock already were doing their utmost, and no merely human intervention could improve that. The main screen changed from representative icons to a pure optical feed, a telescope focused on the nemesis bearing down on them.
Lumpy and irregular, the blackish chunk of rock sparkled and glittered under the impacts of coherent energy and railgun balls, but still on it came. “Big bastard,” Mercadez mumbled. “Almost one thousand meters across.”
This assessment chilled d’Lorenz. Even while their weapons blew off pieces of the flying mountain, its very size made destroying it unlikely. “Spare five seconds of railgun power for a burst at point-blank range, minimum distance,” he ordered.
“Jawohl, Herr Leutnant,” Waldner replied while Mercadez stared aghast.
“It will hit us!” the Spaniard protested. “Keep firing, Señor Teniente!”
“We must ensure every hit from the array. Our only chance of survival is to break it apart and for the debris to strike us like a handful of gravel rather than one huge rock. Do as I say.”
“Si, Jefe.” Mercadez turned reluctantly back to his board. “Ceasing fire. Twenty seconds. Ten.”
“Firing array,” the German said with as little inflection as ever. “Ninety-seven percent accuracy assessed. Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine.”
The massive five-second burst from the array’s railguns sent thirty-five thousand steel balls slamming into the rock at a combined speed of eighty-five thousand kilometers per second. In this case, heavier projectiles would have been more effective, as most of the force came from the speed of the asteroid, not the shot. Unfortunately, railguns took one standard size of ammunition.
The first five hundred or so roundshot impacted the rock, flashing into fusion and releasing enormous quantities of energy. As they did, a plasma-filled shockwave formed in front of the asteroid into which more railgun shot poured. Unfortunately that roiling hell devoured the projectiles, adding to its heat and energy but not striking the object body itself.
“Close crash chairs,” d’Lorenz ordered, and their seats reached up to enfold them, automatically filling the spaces with biogel even as mouthpieces for breathing and viewing goggles shoved roughly onto their faces.
Because everything flew through the vacuum of space together, even the expanding fireball, what struck Array Control Center 887 was more a plasma-blanketed glob of molten metallic lava than a hard rock, but at a quarter the speed of light, it did not matter. Nor did the crash couches or gravplates or other pitiful human countermeasures provide any safety.
One moment, three men lived and fought.
The next, they died as a ball of lava and their asteroid met in a collision that left pieces spinning through the void. Though their armored control chamber did not disintegrate, human bodies could not possibly survive the single hammer blow that transmitted thousands of gravities of acceleration to their flesh, exploding their bodies like blood-filled balloons and smearing them across the walls.
Callisto base, and then the rest of the network, heard one last transmission from Weapons Array 887 Control, recorded by Lieutenant Jacques d’Lorenz for posterity.
“Vive le Roi. Vive la Belgique. Vive le monde.”
