Vaughn Heppner - Planet Wrecker

“Now,” Marten whispered. “Send it now.”

On the board, the five troop-pods began their approach to landing. They drifted over the crater and neared the three domes. All the asteroid’s laser-turrets were destroyed. Marten might have sent out men with Cognitive missiles, but the troop-pods had weaponry to take out such a force.

Nadia pressed a switch on her board. It sent a weak signal, a three-sequence pulse.

Marten turned to the space marines. “This is it, boys. It is do or die time again.” He raised the gyroc rifle over his head. “Death to the cyborgs.”

Metallic sounds were made as the space marines raised their gyrocs and IMLs. Then they roared as one,” Death to the cyborgs!” Afterward, visors clicked shut and armored suits clanged as the men headed for the airlocks.

Osadar Di received the three-pulse signal. She sat at the controls of the least damaged patrol boat. The Jovian spacecraft had never been designed as a space-marine shuttle. That was a secondary purpose. The patrol boats were space-attack craft. Jovian military theory called for them to fight in three-boat formations.

When Nadia had first picked up the approaching troop-pods on her sensors, Marten had made a quick decision. Osadar and a few others had re-crossed the crater-plain and returned to the patrol boats. The men had scourged the more damaged boats for the remaining cannon shells and missiles. These they’d loaded into the good boat.

“Strap in,” Osadar said. Long ago, in her days as a human, she’d trained as a Jovian fighter pilot. Now she was a fighter pilot again, ready to fly her most important mission.

“Ready?” she asked the men.

They gave her the thumbs-up sign, one instituted by Marten Kluge.

Osadar flipped switches. The engine roared into life. She revved it, and with a lurch, she lifted off the lunar-like surface.

Marten peered around the edge of the dome at the troop-pods floating down for a landing. The stars glittered behind them. The oval-shaped craft had stubby anti-personnel guns along the sides. If needed, those guns would fire masses of exploding pellets. The pods no longer floated, but moved down in controlled, jerky bursts. Assaulting a small asteroid like this with its almost nonexistent gravity was delicate work. Unfortunately, the cyborg pilots seemed up to the task.

Encased in his armored vacc-suit, Marten desperately wanted to scratch his nose. Why had no one ever designed a nose or face-scratching suit? He twitched his nose as he leaned against the dome and watched the troop-pods. They had skids on the bottom of the oval craft. As he waited, he wondered if the cyborgs cared that ultimately they were on a suicide mission. Was there some way to break cyborg programming, the way Osadar had broken hers? That seemed like the most cost-effective way to defeat the cyborgs, turning their soldiers the way cyborgs turned ordinary people into aliens.

A space marine stepped past Marten and slid his Cognitive missile around the dome, aiming up at the nearest troop-pod.

“What are you doing?” Marten said, grabbing the missile-tip and yanking it down. “You might accidentally achieve lock-on. That will ping on a troop-pod’s sensors and alert the cyborgs.”

The space marine backed farther behind the dome.

The five troop-pods came down in a strict formation. They were almost to the surface, with stardust beginning to swirl upward in a cloud. The top of the cloud began to hide them.

“There,” Omi said.

Hearing that through his headphones, Marten swiveled around. He followed Omi’s pointing finger. Low on the horizon flashed movement. In a second, a Jovian patrol boat reached the crater-lip. It zoomed upward and swooped down on the five troop-pods easing into the billowing cloud.

“She’s firing!” Omi shouted.

It looked like sparks on the patrol boat’s wings. Bigger blooms were the ignition of missiles.

One troop-pod began to drift. Another blossomed in an explosion, showering metal and machine parts. Something flashed past Marten and plowed into the soil, sending up a puff of stardust. On the third and fourth troop-pods, the stubby anti-personnel tubes moved upward and pellets sprayed in shotgun-like blasts. But Osadar had already passed the pods and began a long banking maneuver so she could come back at them. As that occurred, hatches opened on the troop-pods. One after another, cyborgs jumped, and thruster-packs expelled hydrogen-spray as they began to descend individually.

This was the most vulnerable moment in a space-landing assault. It’s what Marten had hoped would occur.

“Kill them!” he shouted.

Space marines hurried past him. More, he knew, came around from the other side of the dome. Jovians sank onto one knee and raised their infantry missile launchers. Others went prone. A few stood. In moments, a flock of Cognitives zoomed at the remaining troop-pods and at individually exposed cyborgs. Marten knelt, raised his gyroc and sent up one rocket-shell after another. He fired, reloaded and continued firing. Nearby, Omi did the same thing.

In the patrol boat, Osadar passed again, destroying the last functional troop-pod and dozens of thruster-pack-spewing cyborgs. Those cyborgs used laser-carbines. But as they fired, their unattended thruster-packs often took them in the wrong direction. It was far from a turkey-shoot. Cyborgs had uncanny reflexes and abilities. But with surprise and the patrol boat, the odds now lay with the Jovians.

“It looks like we’re going to hold our asteroid,” Omi said as he reloaded.

Marten grunted, even as his rifle pinged with lock-on. On his HUD, a dot centered on a red silhouette of a floating cyborg. Marten fired an APEX shell. The hardened round struck the cyborg and exploded, killing the target.

“What’s troubling you?” asked Omi.

Marten looked over at his friend. He’d been watching the dead cyborg drift into space. “ We’re winning,” he said. “But how are the others doing?”

The space battle raged as the Julius Caesar bored into the asteroids. Behind it by over one thousand kilometers, the Genghis Khan and Gustavus Adolphus followed.

From his command shell, Grand Admiral Cassius watched the nearest debris-cluster. He’d given orders so the Julius Caesar continued to use the cluster as a shield from the last cyborg asteroids. A grim thought kept beating in his brain, however. He wanted to take his ship past the debris-cluster to entice the cyborgs to turn all their beams onto the Julius Caesar . He wasn’t sure how much longer the Gustavus Adolphus could survive the laser pounding. He had to kill the enemy lasers before they gravely injured a Doom Star.

By what quirk fate had chosen the Gustavus instead of the Genghis Khan Cassius had no idea. Cyborg lasers continued to beam en masse against the targeted Doom Star.

“He’s pumping crystals,” Sulla said.

Cassius held himself rock-still. This was a matter of timing now. Admiral Octavian had just disobeyed a direct order. He’d better succeed.

“His laser has gone offline,” said Sulla.

“Why did he do that?” said Cassius, asking himself the question more than desiring an answer from others.

“There’s an incoming message,” Sulla said.

Cassius ignored it as he studied the situation. Doom Stars could pump crystals and gels at a fantastic rate. Ports had opened on the Gustavus Adolphus as it spewed. The growing crystal-cloud blocked Octavian’s laser against the still-firing asteroid turrets.

“I hope you’ve chosen correctly,” Cassius whispered. It was a Highborn’s prerogative to disregard orders. But if the officer chose poorly, it meant disgrace and likely death by hanging. In Octavian’s place, Cassius would have continued to attack instead of choosing to defend and let others do his fighting for him.