The Killing of Worlds (4 page)

And they were getting through.

Another image occurred to Marx. On his home planet lived a species of rat that could break down its own bones, funneling itself into a thin sack of jelly to climb through even the narrowest of cracks. He shuddered at the thought.

Marx’s surprise cost him a vital moment of attention. He didn’t immediately notice the ten flockers that burst from the line, having detected a transient gap in the sand between his scout craft and the column. By the time the master pilot reacted, the flockers were lined up on him at three thousand gees. Although they had less than a second of reaction mass at that acceleration, Marx’s twisting evasive pattern came too late, his larger drone twisting like some slow-footed mastodon brought down by a pack of small predators. Synesthesia filled with lightning, sputtered for a moment, then dumped him into the calming cerulean wash of a dead signal.

He cursed. And cursed again.

Gathering himself, Jocim Marx signaled ExO Hobbes.

“I saw,” Hobbes said. She’d been watching over his shoulder.

He bit his tongue as a wave of shame struck him. In a Class 7 trans-light drone on a scouting mission, and he’d been beaten by a handful of pilotless drones.

“They’re getting through the sand!” he shouted. “The
Lynx
is—”

“We’ll be briefing the captain in forty seconds,” Hobbes interrupted. “I want you on the bridge in virtual.”

Forty seconds? An eternity in this battle, a dozen opportunities lost to delay.

“And what should I do for forty seconds, Executive Officer?”

A dead pause: his audio muted as Hobbes attended to one of the other dozen conversations she was no doubt juggling. Then she was back.

“I suggest you reflect thankfully upon the fact that you fly remotes, Master Pilot. See you in thirty seconds.”

Her voice left him alone in his blue, dead universe.

As he waited, Marx’s fingers twitched, aching to fly again.

“In short, the flockers are getting through the sand,” Hobbes concluded.

Laurent Zai nodded.

“They always do. What’s the projected attrition?”

Hobbes swallowed. These nervous ticks were unlike her, Zai thought. She had lost some confidence since the mutiny.

“Perhaps a tenth, sir. The other ninety percent are coming through.”

“Ten percent!” Zai glared down into the bridge main airscreen, where the long, thin needle of flockers hovered. Normally, the small and expendable drones were reduced to a small fraction of their initial numbers. He and Hobbes had expected the sand to be especially deadly at this speed. But instead, it had proved useless.

There were almost five thousand flockers in the first wave alone, more than enough to tear the
Lynx
to pieces. And they would arrive in some sixteen minutes.

“Did they use this single-column tactic in the last war?” he asked.

“No, sir. Perhaps a new evolutionary—” Hobbes began.

“Begging your pardon, Captain,” interrupted the disembodied head and shoulders of Master Pilot Marx. His image floated in the captain’s private airscreen, projected from a flight canopy in the
Lynx
‘s core.

“Yes, Master Pilot?”

“In a normal battle, forming into a single column wouldn’t give flockers any advantage. Sand is ejected outward from hundreds of small delivery canisters, so any given sandstorm contains hundreds of different trajectories. The relative motion between sand and flockers is chaotic.”

“So a column would offer no protection,” Hobbes said.

“Correct.” Marx’s fingers came into view, gesturing through calculations. “But in this battle, our two drone fleets are moving through each other at three thousand klicks per second. The lateral, chaotic motion of the sand is erased by its relative insignificance to the overall motion. The flocker column punches through even the biggest sand cloud in a few thousandths of a second.”

Zai closed his eyes. He’d been foolish not to see it. Perhaps not this specific tactic, but the basic flaw in his plan: The
Lynx
‘s high speed of attack flattened events.

A quote from Anonymous 167 came to him too late.

“‘Against a simple tactic, a simple response is often effective’” he muttered. The Rix had found that simple response.

“Pardon me, sir?” Marx said.

Hobbes nodded vigorously, translating the aphorism for Marx. “The high relative velocity between our two ships channels relationships into a single dimension: that of the approach axis. In effect, we’ve made this a single-variable battle.”

“And the Rix have countered with a one-dimensional formation,” Captain Zai concluded. “A line.”

“The flockers will reach us in fourteen minutes, sir,” the watch officer interjected.

Zai nodded calmly, but inside he seethed. The
Lynx
‘s rate of acceleration was pitiful compared to that of the tiny flockers. There was no way to maneuver out of this. They were defenseless.

He clenched his real hand. To have chosen life, to have thrown away honor, only to be extinguished by an idiotic mistake. Zai had broken his oath to see Nara again, but it looked as if his betrayal would come to nothing. Perhaps this was natural law in action: On Vada, they said that a knife found its way easily to the heart of a traitor.

He looked again at the airscreen representation of the flocker attack. The column was not exactly a knife. It was too long and thin, like some primitive projectile weapon. An arrow, or maybe …

An old memory surfaced.

“This has become something of a joust,” Zai said.

“A joust, sir?”

“A pre-diaspora military situation. More of a ritual, really. In a joust attack, a very long kinetic-contact weapon was propelled toward the enemy by animal power.”

“Sounds unpleasant, sir,” Hobbes said.

“Rather.” Zai allowed his mind to drift back in time. He saw the constructs battling in his grandfather’s great pasture on Vada. The horses were spectacularly rendered, their flanks gathering loam as the hot afternoon went on. The brightly festooned knights rode toward each other. Their steeds’ hooves drummed the ground with a rhythmic shudder that rattled the nerves like the overflight of an armored rotary wing.

The long sticks—lances, they were called—striking against…

“Hobbes,” Zai said, seeing an answer. “Are you familiar with the origin of the word shield?” Hobbes’s Utopian upbringing had provided her only patchy knowledge of ancient weapons.

“I’m afraid not, sir.”

“A straightforward device, Hobbes. A two-dimensional surface used to ward off one-dimensional attacks.”

“Useful, sir.” Zai could see Hobbes’s mind struggle to follow him.

“Captain,” Marx interrupted. “The first formation of flockers will reach the
Lynx
practically at full strength. More than four thousand of them! Our close-in defenses can’t cope with so many at once.”

“A shield, Hobbes. Prepare to fire all four photon cannon.”

Marx began to protest, and Zai cut the man’s sound off with a gesture. Of course—as the master pilot had been about to complain— capital weapons like the
Lynx
‘s photon cannon were useless against flockers. It would be like hunting insects with artillery.

“What’s the target, sir?” Hobbes asked.

“The
Lynx
,” he said.

“We’re firing at… ?” she began. Then, even as her fingers moved to alert the gunners, understanding filled her face. “I assume we can target the heat-sink manifold directly, sir?”

“Of course, Hobbes. No need to test the energy shunts.”

“We’ll be ready to detach the manifold on your order, Captain.”

“Exactly, Hobbes.”

He turned his attention to the flailing, voiceless Master Pilot.

“Marx, get back into the foremost scout,” Zai commanded, then gave the man back his voice.

“And my orders, sir?”

“Attack the Rix receiver array. With a sandcaster if you can find any alive.”

The Master Pilot thought silently for a moment. Then he said, “Perhaps if there were an unexploded canister—”

“Do it,” Zai commanded, and erased the man’s image from the bridge.

“All cannon ready, sir. Targeting our own heat-sink array at twenty percent power.”

Zai paused, wondering if there were yet another factor he hadn’t considered. Perhaps he was making another idiotic mistake. He wondered if any Imperial shipmaster had opened fire on his own ship before, without self-destruction in mind.

But the war sage’s words reassured him.

If you fail, fail dramatically. At least you will prove the error of your tactics to your successors.

Zai nodded; this diversion would get into the textbooks one way or another.

“Fire.”

Banished from the bridge, Marx leaped back into the forefront of battle.

He chose another scout craft, displacing a sensor officer who was flying it at one remove. She’d been running three scouts at once, coordinating their efforts through a high-level interface. The Master Pilot kicked her off, settled in, and flexed the machine’s muscles. He informed all Imperial drones within ten thousand klicks that he was assuming control of them.

Marx accelerated his impromptu battle group into a cone-shaped collision formation focused upon the Rix battlecruiser. He brought the scout’s fusion drive, which doubled as its primary offensive weapon, out of stealth mode. He would need some serious power.

These actions were all likely to draw the attention of the Rix. The scout was blaring across a wide range of EM, making itself known to the enemy’s battle management intelligences, human and machine. They would spot the valuable asset quickly, a drone under human command and at front-center of the
Lynx
‘s satellite cloud, the position most threatening to the enemy battlecruiser. Within seconds, Marx saw distant acceleration traces deep in the Rix cloud, the plumes of hunters vectoring toward his new vessel.

In all likelihood, the master pilot would be losing his second scout of the day inside a minute. But his fingers moved confidently, drawing an ever-expanding sphere of resources into the attack.

Marx didn’t expect to live long, anyway. The nearly full-strength flocker squadron was approaching the
Lynx
too fast. Pilots were nestled in the armored belly of Imperial warships, in the hope that the drones of a dying ship would fight on under human control, damaging the enemy even as their own vessel was destroyed around them. But at this high relative velocity, the flockers would plunge through the
Lynx
like barrage rockets through a cloud of steam. There would be no safety even in the pilots’ armored canopies.

Death—real, absolute, nonvirtual death—was headed toward Jocim Marx at three million meters per second.

So he flew with uncharacteristic aggression. Perhaps he could shed some Rix blood on his way out.

Between his drone and the enemy battlecruiser, the master pilot spotted the distinctive shape of a Rix gravity array. The array was a simple defensive weapon. At its core was a free-floating easy gravity generator—the same device that created artificial gravity in starships, equipped with limited Al and its own reaction drive. Surrounding the generator was a host of gravity repeaters. These small devices were held in place by the easy gravity, but also shaped and controlled it. An array could create a gravity well (or hill) in any configuration, strong enough to halt or deflect enemy drones and kinetic weapons. As he closed, Marx could see more of them, forming a huge barrier before the battlecruiser, perfect protection for the receiver. The gravity array closest to Marx was spread wide, giving readings of only sixty gees, just strong enough to corral the clouds of sand still crashing through the Rix fleet.

It was the Rix device closest to Marx, and he decided to destroy it.

He ordered a nearby ramscatter drone to launch its full complement at the gravity array. The craft spun like a firework wheel, spitting hordes of tiny, stupid flechettes from its flanks, exhausting itself in seconds. As per its programming, the ramscatter drone started to pull back toward the
Lynx
for reloading, but Marx urged it forward. Perhaps he could use the expended drone as a ram. In any case, there would soon be no mothership to return home to.

Marx wondered if the captain really had any plan for defending his ship against the flockers. Zai had spoken as if he’d seen a way to escape destruction, but the captain’s words had been cryptic, as usual. It was probably just an act, the necessary false confidence of command. Some morale-related edict from that long-dead sage that Zai and Hobbes were always quoting.

Well, just as long as they kept the
Lynx
together for a few more minutes, long enough for Marx to hit the Rix battlecruiser. Marx knew he was the best pilot in the Navy. Dying without putting a scratch on the enemy prime would be an unacceptable end to his career.

The flechettes slammed into the array, whipping through the hills and troughs of its gravity contours like a flight of arrows suddenly caught in a wind tunnel. Marx let them spread through the array for a few seconds, then ordered all but a dozen to self-destruct. The invisible contours of the array filled with clouds of shrapnel. The bright reflections of broken metal spread through the warped space like milk dispersing in swirling coffee. The churning shrapnel ate through the gravity repeaters, and the array’s gravity-shape flopped about, then flattened into a simple sphere, a steep, defensive hill of almost a thousand gees. Marx took command of the few flechettes he had left, and targeted the sphere’s center—the gravity generator itself. The remaining flechettes bolted toward it from all directions.

Normally, the tiny machines moved invisibly fast, but they climbed the steep gravity hill with eerie slowness. Marx saw one run out of reaction mass just short of its target; it became visible for a few seconds, spinning at its zenith, a pole vaulter falling short of the bar. Then it fell away.

Then another flechette fell short.

Damn, the gravity generator had reacted too quickly, shifting energy from its repeater array to a defensive posture in a few milliseconds. Had the Rix become unbeatable?