Storming Heaven

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Ozzie Allen saw it clearly from his position. He had been outside the asteroid in a mechanical bug when the Killers arrived and had chosen to remain outside, rather than returning to the dubious safety of the asteroid. If the Killers opened fire, he had reasoned, he would be safer in the harmless bug — so tiny that no one could consider it a threat — than in the asteroid, which was almost certainly their primary target. He had been staring at the Killer starships, so large that they were visible with the naked eye, when a new gravity wave had picked up the bug and tossed it hundreds of kilometres from its former position.

The wormhole opened in a brilliant swirl of light and disgorged a massive Killer starship, already far too close to Ozzie for his liking. He almost panicked and triggered the bug’s drives to escape, but caught himself in time, knowing that an active drive field would be detected and destroyed automatically. The Killer starship ignored him and charged right at Sparta Asteroid. It looked, to Ozzie, as if it were committing suicide… and then the horrifying truth dawned on him. The kamikaze ship was undamaged. It possessed an intact, impregnable hull… and it was closing in rapidly on the nerve centre of the Defence Force. He keyed his radio to scream a warning, but it was already too late. The Killer starship, moving at several thousand kilometres a second and packing more mass than any other known starship, struck the asteroid dead centre and battered right through. The asteroid seemed to shatter under the impact.

Ozzie watched in stunned disbelief as the Killer starship, utterly unharmed by the experience, pulled away from its target, bright white lights flaring over its hull. A moment later, it opened fire, sweeping bolts of white light out at every conceivable target. The other Killer starships, closing in rapidly from their prior position, opened fire as well, bombarding every human installation within range. The battle had lasted barely twenty seconds… and the Killers had already struck most of the important starships. The defending ships closed in rapidly, bombarding the Killer ships with implosion bolts, energy torpedoes and particle beams — joined by the still-formidable defence platforms located near the main asteroids — but it was too late. The Killers had already inflicted decisive damage on the entire star system.

System Command, what was left of it, was shouting instructions to the small fleet of support craft, trying to organise a rescue mission, but Ozzie suspected that it was hopeless. The remains of Sparta Asteroid were more intact than he had dared hope, but the entire asteroid had been torn open to the vacuum of space and most of the emergency systems had to have been knocked out by the unprecedented attack. He brought the bug’s drive systems online — he wasn’t going to leave his fellow officers in space at the mercy of the Killers — but knew there was little hope of finding many survivors. They would all have been killed by the impact alone.

“They’re going to hit us,” someone shouted, and then the entire asteroid rocked violently, so violently that Brent could have sworn that it was on the verge of coming apart completely. The lights flickered and went out as consoles exploded, warning that massive power surges were running amok through the asteroid… and all the emergency systems had failed. As the command centre was plunged into darkness, he could hear, faintly, the sound of escaping air.

If Sparta Asteroid had been a rotating asteroid, using its spin to generate artificial gravity rather than gravity generators, the Killer attack would have killed them all. The combination of the spin and damaged sections would have completed the task of ripping the asteroid apart. As it was, they were alive — barely — even if they were out of the fight. Brent brought up his command-level augmentation implants — he detested using them, but this was an emergency — and tried to ping for a working computer processor. There was no response, even when he made a general broadcast on the emergency frequency; the asteroid’s emergency system had been completely knocked out. He pushed aside the thought of how much redundancy had been built into the system — failure shouldn’t have been a possibility unless the asteroid had been completely destroyed — and struggled to pull himself together. The noise of escaping air was growing louder and the command crew were starting to panic. That could not be allowed.

“Quiet,” he bellowed, half-wishing that he had a chemical weapon to fire into the air. That would have assured him of their attention, although perhaps not reassured them of his sanity. “All right, the asteroid has taken a hit and we’re out of the fight. We have to concentrate on survival and not panic. Bring up your implants and prepare to activate your internal force fields.”

There was no argument, although he heard the sound of snivelling in the background. He didn’t blame the person who was on the verge of breaking down — they had anticipated a quick death from Killer weapons, not death by exposure to hard vacuum — but there was no time to panic. The internal force fields they all had as part of their combat augmentation would provide limited protection, yet he knew all too well that they would last — at best — an hour at most. Force fields drained power like a small black hole.

He felt his feet leaving the deck and realised that something else had failed. The gravity generator had been knocked out as well. He considered it for a moment and decided that it probably worked in their favour. It would be easier to rescue anyone trapped under falling stone. He triggered his augmented vision as well and peered around the command centre, marvelling at the strange view in front of him. The seventeen men and women in the command centre were clinging on for dear life, hanging on to their useless consoles or chairs. A handful of men were drifting in the air, unmoving; they’d been killed when their consoles exploded. The survivors were lucky that the compartment hadn’t caught fire.

“Bring up your augmented vision and focus on me,” Brent ordered. A faint draft was pulling him towards a hatch leading out towards the docks at one end of the asteroid, suggesting the location of the leak. He followed it reluctantly, activating his communications implant and ordering a permanent scan for other communicator signatures. If someone was trapped and helpless, they would be using their implants to call for help. “We cannot stay here.”

He skimmed through his memory of the asteroid’s layout and found the location of the emergency supplies, the ones that no one had ever considered that they might actually needed. He altered the map manually — it took longer than having the computers do it for him — and transmitted the altered map to the remaining people in the compartment. They responded, opening up their own communications systems, adding their signals to his broadband call for help. There was an outside chance that they would attract the Killers, Brent knew, but he had chosen to dismiss that possibility. If the Defence Force starships on the outside didn’t rescue them, they would die when their force fields ran out of power.

“Follow me,” he ordered, after a quick check of the survivors. There were a handful of tiny injuries, but no one had been so badly injured that they couldn’t move. The unlucky ones were dead. He pulled himself over to the cracked hatch and hunted for the manual release. Captain Waianae joined him a moment later and added her strength to his, allowing them to slowly crank the hatch open completely. They looked out onto a scene from hell. The air was visible now as it cooled, sucked down the corridor into the distance… the Killer ship, he realised, had to have impacted just a few kilometres away from their position. Who in their right mind would have thought of using a starship to smash an asteroid wide open?

We would have, he thought ruefully, as the cold started to seep into his bones. He shared a long glance with Captain Waianae and then activated his internal force field. The Killer tactic had proven spectacularly successful and now they had either departed or were engaging the Defence Force. He couldn’t do anything about it from his position, he knew, so he pushed it out of his mind and concentrated on the map. If they didn’t reach the emergency supplies, they were dead.

The remaining command staff followed him, struggling against the pull caused by the outpouring of air. The asteroid had enough air to keep generating the current for a few more minutes yet, Brent decided, but they couldn’t wait for it to run out and leave them standing in a vacuum. The emergency force fields that should have prevented more than a tiny outpouring of air had obviously failed as well, not entirely to his surprise. Humans had used kinetic weapons before — indeed, on Earth, early firearms had all been kinetic weapons — but it had been a long time since anyone had used kinetic weapons on such a scale. He pulled himself from handhold to handhold, wishing for a jetpack or some other way to manoeuvre without risking being sucked out by the airflow, and somehow made it all the way through the corridor. It was a moment later when he saw the dead bodies.

They had clearly been caught by surprise; three women, one man, all wearing Defence Force uniforms. They had had no time to raise their own force fields, or brace for impact; the shock had smashed them against the corridor and killed them. The outpouring of air was pulling them gradually towards the breach in the hull; Brent wanted to catch them, to tether them to something so that their bodies could be recovered later, but they had no time. He found himself hoping that the bodies patched the rent in the hull, although he knew that that wasn’t likely. Their problems were far worse than a single tiny hull breach.

“Keep going,” he hissed, as two of the command staff looked as if they were about to give up and wait for death. The outpouring of air was slowing down now, suggesting that the air supply was running out. There were more objects floating in the air now, everything from vital equipment to clothes and supplies; he found himself battering them out of his way as they crawled into the emergency compartment. The young Brent had wondered why the Community bothered insisting that emergency compartments were part and parcel of every asteroid settlement; the older and wiser Admiral was grateful that they were there. He keyed the door and it hissed open, revealing a sealed compartment and enough supplies to outfit all of the command staff.

“Get everyone into suits and equipped,” he ordered Captain Waianae, who moved to obey. Pulling on suits without gravity wasn’t easy, but they would manage it, somehow. The entire Defence Force took classes in how to move without gravity, although Brent knew that most cadets passed the exams and then never went outside a gravity field again. He made a mental note to insist that — if they got out alive — everyone in the Defence Force was exposed to zero-gravity at least once per year. The lesson should have been learned long ago.

“Aye, sir,” she said. Her voice, even though the communications implants, was calm and practical. “Will you be putting on a suit yourself, sir?”

“Of course,” Brent said. It was like having a Mother Hen pecking at him, but she was right. “I’ll activate the emergency systems first, then get dressed.”

He placed his hand on the emergency systems panel and waited for them to respond to the implant emplaced in his right hand. It took a moment before the emergency system came online — it should have come on automatically when the asteroid was hit — and it couldn’t tell him anything useful. The asteroid’s computer network was all screwed up and half of the asteroid seemed to be gone. Brent wasn’t entirely surprised. The Killer starship might have smashed the asteroid right in half.

“I’m getting nothing on the progress of the battle,” he said, after a moment. The external sensors seemed to be completely down as well, for reasons he couldn’t understand. Most of the systems should have existed independently of the main computer, although it was possible that the sensors were fine and the computer relay system was messed up. “We may not get any help from outside.”

Captain Waianae nodded, her face pale behind the suit’s visor. “That may make escape difficult,” she said, with masterful understatement. The Killer starship had separated them from the docks. The FTL starships would be gone or otherwise inaccessible. “We’ll have to get outside and see if we can signal for help from there.”

Brent nodded. The emergency procedures should have let them all remain inside the shelter until rescue arrived, but few people would want to remain there. The Sparta System had just been knocked out of the war. After the asteroid had been hit so badly, it was possible that there would only be a cursory search for survivors before the Defence Force starships pulled out to other war fronts. They might be left alive to wait until the atmosphere ran out. They couldn’t afford to assume that there would be time to mount a search for them.

And, he thought, in the privacy of his own head, anyone on the outside may not even pick up the distress beacon. Everything else has failed today.

“All right,” he said, addressing all of his people. “Listen carefully.”

He ran through their situation and explained the problem. “We have to get out onto the surface, but only a handful of us have to go,” he concluded. “Does anyone want to stay here? It will not be counted against them.”

No one, much to his private pride, chose to stay behind. “You two are staying behind,” he said, pointing to two of the injured girls. “If anyone else turns up here, get them into a spacesuit as well and prepare them for possible evacuation. Keep in touch via implant communicators and keep heart. We’ll be back for you before you know it.”

He turned and nodded to Captain Waianae. “Let’s move,” he said. “Open the hatch.”

There was no rush of air this time, but only a spooky silence. He called up the map in his implants and found the quickest way towards one of the emergency egress hatches, but decided, after a moment’s thought, to head towards the hull breach instead. The hatch might be jammed, or otherwise inaccessible, and they knew that the hull breach was open to space. He led the way down the corridor, flying the suit as well as he could, bumping off the walls as he moved. It was small consolation to know that everyone else was having just as bad a time; spacesuit drills, too, were a thing of the past. It was something else that he would have to change.

They passed several more dead bodies as they moved further towards the hull breach, both men who had been deemed essential. There would have been more bodies if the Killer attack had been a complete surprise, without the evacuation plans, but Brent couldn’t account for their delay in attacking. Why had they watched the asteroid system without attacking? Why had they waited so long to mount an offensive? The only explanation that made any sense to him was that the Killers had used the first ships to triangulate the location of their wormhole when they had charged through it and into battle, but why would they even need to do that when they could have just opened fire? Had they believed that humanity had duplicated their impregnable hulls?

He pushed that, too, out of his mind as they rounded a corner and saw the hull breach at the end of the throughway. The damage was much greater than he had expected; the Killer attack had bisected the entire asteroid. He accessed his implants and scanned again for any other signs of life, but nothing presented itself for inspection. They might as well have been alone in the universe. He attached a tether to the asteroid hull — that, too, had been taught back at the Academy — and used the suit’s jets to push himself out into space. The stars were still watching him in their silent majesty, but he could see signs of a space battle raging out amidst the system, tiny flashes of light… yet each of those flashes signified the death of a human starship. The Killers were still out there, somewhere…

“This is Admiral Roeder,” he said, concentrating on a full-spectrum distress call. Out in space, the starships should be able to hear them without interference. If they could break contact and come in to pick up the survivors… that, he knew, was a different story. “Emergency; we require an emergency pick-up now, I repeat…”

Ten minutes later, a bug drifted into view. It was hardly the kind of ship normally used for a rescue mission, but Brent had no choice. The pilot managed to take the wounded onboard and departed to deposit them on one of the evacuation systems, while Brent and the remaining command staff waited for the next pick-up starship. It wasn’t long in coming.

“They’re breaking contact,” Captain Ackbar reported, once Brent reached the bridge. The small destroyer had left the combat zone to pick up the survivors; a pitifully small number, compared to the thousands who normally manned the asteroid. “They’re running from us.”

“No,” Brent corrected. He felt very tired and it was all he could do not to slump on the bridge. There were reports flooding in from all over the Community of new Killer attacks. “They did what they came here to do.”