Planet Wrecker

-84-

From his command shell aboard the Julius Caesar, Grand Admiral Cassius rapped out orders. It was hard to shout over the thrum of the fusion core and the beaming ultra-laser. Every time the laser fired, the thrum increased to an ear-piercing whine.

That was the secret to the long-range laser. Power, massive amounts of power pumped through the system. To gain that power, one needed large engines and coils. It was why each Doom Star was so vast. Frankly, he thought the cyborgs should have installed ultra-lasers on their asteroids. But that would have taken much longer than installing regular combat beams. And there was secret technology needed for the one-million-kilometer-ranged lasers.

Cassius studied the holoimages. He clapped his hands over his ears—the whine, the noise penetrated his shell’s buffering. The laser shot from the holoimage of the Julius Caesar. It struck against Asteroid C, down into a deeper than usual impact-crater. The wide beam lighted on the cyborg turret there. The array of focusing mirrors, pumping station, coil-chambers and armored-plating heated to intolerable levels. At the same time, the turret’s beam fired through the Highborn ultra-laser, producing a strange radiance of wavering color. Then one mirror melted into a molten lump, dripping onto the lunar-like surface. Gas began to radiate into a feeble cloud. Before the turret slagged into an indecipherable mound, the Highborn laser retargeted elsewhere, having destroyed its prey.

The battle had turned into a maelstrom of beams, torpedoes and cyborg troop-pods. The enemy was trying to recapture the five asteroids. It surprised Cassius the cyborgs had saved so much weaponry and not employed it during the first phase of the battle. But it wasn’t going to save the aliens, this desperate fighting. The cyborg lasers struck his collapsium-coated ship, the only one in the Highborn fleet. It was their fatal error—one he’d worked to achieve. Given this window of opportunity, Cassius continued to strike.

The ultra-powerful beam from each Doom Star destroyed one enemy laser-turret after another. Most kills took less than a minute. More time was taken retargeting. Though Highborn efficiency, Cassius destroyed the enemy’s offensive capabilities. It was one of the reasons he’d driven straight into their vitals. A laser beam increased its deadliness the shorter its range. So this close the million-kilometer-ranged laser became an annihilating beam of fearsome destructiveness.

Yet there was a risk. Not even collapsium could long sustain the concentrated attack of a hundred lasers. The breakthrough technology had been difficult to make and was incredibly dense. The plating on the Julius Caesar was only a micro-micron thick, but it had greater mass than the normal six-hundred-meter thick particle shield of a Zhukov-class Battleship. The electrons of an atom had been collapsed on the nuclei so the atoms were compressed. The atoms touched, producing a substance that made lead in comparison seem like a sponge.

The Julius Caesar rotated slightly every several seconds, timing its firing of the giant laser. No enemy beam remained on one spot long. Even so, the collapsium weakened under the prolonged mass-attack. The plating grew red and then black in places. The blackness thickened so it appeared as a light-absorbing spot of nullity. During that time, the Doom Stars beamed with immunity, destroying whatever the lasers touched. Then cyborg lasers began to slip through the weakened collapsium. It wasn’t a complete breakthrough, but occasional beams firing through null-spots. For those seconds, the various beams burned into the composite armor underneath. Once through that, the coherent-light struck highly-polished reflex plating. The initial bounce off the reflex gave the Julius Caesar yet more time. The ultra-lasers continued to rave with annihilation.

Then the impossible occurred.

“Your Excellency,” Sulla told Cassius. “There’s damage to the forward coil-banks. I’m also reporting strikes in the number five shuttle-bay.”

Cassius absorbed the message as he glared at the holoimages before him. Those images swirled in a kaleidoscope of movement. It seemed as if space between the Doom Stars and the asteroids was alive with life, with mechanical corpuscles, many containing a deadly virus of gun-toting death. There were beams, torpedoes, counter-missiles, point-defense-shot depleted-uranium pellets, energized sand clouds, hot plasma globules and cyborg troop-pods.

“Enemy pods are gaining on our five asteroids!” Sulla shouted.

Images and words washed over Cassius’s senses, and they would have surely swamped a lesser personage. A ruthless adherence to his victory conditions guided Cassius and helped him see the correct solution in moments of crisis.

“I see the troop-pods,” Cassius said, speaking in a calm voice. It was one of his powers to be able to do so at a time like this. “Continue with the laser-turret destruction.”

The Julius Caesar rotated slightly, beamed, destroyed, retargeted, rotated again and shot its laser at yet another hapless turret. Cassius thought to himself that it was hard to defeat advanced technology married to Highborn valor and resolution. The collapsium with the ultra-laser…it spelled victory.

“The enemy lasers are retargeting, Your Excellency!”

Cassius shifted in his shell. He’d hoped the cyborgs weren’t that smart or quick. All he needed was another ten minutes to slag every enemy turret in sight. He’d deal later with the asteroids hiding behind the debris-cluster. The Genghis Khan and the Gustavus Adolphus had remained well behind the Julius Caesar for a reason. It was a calculated risk bringing those Doom Stars so near the enemy. Their armor could not long sustain the enemy lasers at this range. If they were to defend themselves, they would need to pump out prismatic crystals and heavy lead-additive gels. But if they did that, they would be unable to fire their lasers, which he needed in order to finish the fight. The cyborgs might well cripple the Julius Caesar otherwise.

Tilting his head, studying the data, Cassius knew that this was the moment of decision. This is what made a commander into a legend or turned him into a loser. The weight of the decision pressed upon Cassius as the squeeze to his heart made his wide face pale. Forty-three percent of the enemy laser-turrets had already been destroyed. Did he gamble with the heart of Highborn power? Every second he hesitated was fraught with risk. He parted his lips to issue the order to spray the protective clouds.

“No,” he whispered.

This was the fatal moment of time, of the Solar System. The asteroids represented Earth’s death. Earth was the great industrial basin. With it and the Sun-Works Factory, the Highborn could out-produce the cyborgs. Without Earth, it became a grim possibility that the cyborgs would out-build them. The cyborgs would then likely send a vast stream of material in a deadly war of attrition the Highborn couldn’t win.

The decision tested him. Cassius knew that. Bold words were meaningless now. It was just his naked soul riding on the outcome of battle.

With effort, he tore his mind from the possibilities and forced himself to take a deep breath. Then he exhaled as hard as he could, expelling the air from his lungs. This time, he sucked air so oxygen seeped to the farthest reaches of his tissues, and he held his breath.

“I am Grand Admiral Cassius of the Highborn,” he whispered, letting the breath go. Color returned to his cheeks. Once more, he studied the holoimages, wondering what the next few minutes would bring.