Vaughn Heppner: Cyborg Assault

Omi jumped next, and afterward Marten jumped. Using her former piloting skills, Osadar maneuvered toward the pod, keeping the Mayflower between them and the Rousseau .

As he floated behind Omi, Marten studied his handscanner. Using it, he initiated a specially coded program aboard the Mayflower’s computer. The shuttle’s engine thrust particles from the exhaust. Gently, the shuttle eased toward the Rousseau in the distance.

Soon, Marten floated through the open hatch of the cyborg pod. This vessel had one-fifth the space as the Mayflower . They would not be making any intersystem journeys in it. They might not make any journeys whatsoever. Shortly after boarding, the three of them crammed into the pod’s control room. Voices spoke out of the com-unit. The voices spoke in a high-speed chatter.

“Can you understand them?” Marten asked.

From within her helmet, Osadar nodded solemnly.

“Well?” Marten asked.

“They are getting ready to fire on the Mayflower .”

“You have to tell them that everything is fine,” Marten said. “Tell them the other cyborgs are piloting the vessel to the warship.”

“They will never believe me,” Osadar said.

“Do it anyway.”

Osadar sat at the single pilot’s chair. Omi had already shut the hatch and pressurized the cabin. Opening her visor, Osadar opened a channel to the Rousseau .

Marten tore off his vacc-suit gloves and ran his fingers over the handscanner, using its keypad to pilot the shuttle.

Osadar was having a deliberate and unimaginative conversation with the cyborgs. The enemy queries were getting closer to deducing that the assault had failed.

“Engage the pod’s engines,” Marten whispered to Osadar. “Get us out of here.”

Her fingers flew over the pod’s controls.

Marten slid onto the floor and braced his back against a bulkhead. Omi did likewise.

Through the tiny screen of the handscanner, Marten studied the Rousseau . The scanner picked up the feed from the Mayflower’s forward cameras. The Jovian dreadnaught was similar in configuration to a Social Unity battleship, but with a more compact design. It was like a giant ball bearing with asteroid-like particle shields. One of them was locked open, revealing a hanger bay inside. The pod had no doubt come from there. If the bay was still open….

Marten watched the screen. He saw the hanger door lurch and begin to close. The Mayflower could fit through it. The heavy particle shield also began rotating into a defensive posture.

“Give us full thrust!” Marten shouted. His fingers typed over the keypad.

Over three kilometers away on the Mayflower, the warfare pod they had installed back in the Mars System activated. The shuttle possessed five Wasp 2000 missiles. Those missiles entered the launch tubes.

Several things happened at once then on the Mayflower . The engine engaged at full thrust, pushing the shuttle faster toward the much larger Rousseau . The Wasp 2000s ignited from the launch tubes, leading the charge at the Aristotle- class dreadnaught. Almost immediately, the dreadnaught’s point-defense cannons opened up. They targeted the missiles. A Wasp 2000 disintegrated. Another blew into a plume of light, while a third exploded in space, slightly damaging the Mayflower behind it. The fourth and fifth missiles slammed against the warship. One struck a particle shield, harmlessly blowing away asteroid-like rock. The last flew through the closing hanger door and exploded.

The hanger door froze.

The Mayflower closed with the Rousseau . The dreadnaught’s point-defense cannons began to target the shuttle.

As growing G-forces pushed Marten against the pod’s bulkhead, he pressed a button.

The accelerating Mayflower ignited its fusion engine, blowing the atomic pile in a nuclear explosion of obliterating power.

The Highborn Praetor commanded the Thutmosis III , and he was worried as his badly damaged missile-ship sped toward Jupiter.

The giant ship was a stealth vessel, painted with anti-sensor coating and colored as black as the void of space. Almost a year ago, they had circled the Sun gaining terrific velocity. Then they had broken Sun-orbit and shut off the ship’s engines. Like a rock from a slingshot, they had sped silently toward Mars. At the right moment, the Praetor had launched a decisive salvo of missiles and drones. Unfortunately for the crew, they had one other mission to accomplish. Using teleoptic scopes and as they’d passed Mars, the Praetor had relayed precious combat information to the Doom Stars.

It was then that Corporal Bess O’Connor of the former Phobos moon-station had logged a blip of a lightguide message. With it, the SU commander of the former moon-station had launched hunter-killer missiles after the Thutmosis III . Phobos no longer existed. Highborn asteroid busters had destroyed the Martian moon during the battle. As a final quirk of fate, one of the deceased moon’s hunter-killers had struck the Thutmosis III long after Phobos’ destruction. The strike had killed eighty percent of the Thutmosis III’s crew and crippled the missile-ship.

For many harrowing months afterward, the Praetor and the last survivors had labored intensely to effect repairs. Their problems had nearly been unsolvable, as the Thutmosis III had sped from Mars under terrific velocity. The hunter-killer had struck the ship before it had begun deceleration.

With the horribly damaged engines, the Thutmosis III had been unable to decelerate. For everyone aboard ship, it had looked hopeless. Unable to brake, the ship would leave the Solar System like a bullet fired from an inter-solar rifle. The crew would die hundreds maybe even a thousand AUs out of the Solar System of old age, starvation or asphyxiation.

The Praetor had taken their one chance, repairing the damaged engines enough to dare nudge the ship in a path toward distant Uranus. During the journey there, they had labored around the clock, taking stims to keep alert. Using the distant gas giant’s gravity-well as a pivoting post and engaging the engines for a greater length of time, the Praetor had redirected the ship at an angle toward Jupiter. He had also managed to decelerate the vessel slightly.

The vast orbital paths of the Outer Planets gas giants and the extreme distances between them meant that a shallow curve could achieve this last hope.

Now the ship sped toward the largest planet in the Solar System. Unlike the Mayflower that had headed from the Inner Planets outward, the Thutmosis III headed from the Outer Planets inward. It was the reason why the much slower Mayflower had reached Jupiter before the much faster moving Thutmosis III .

The Praetor sat in his command chair on the bridge. It was one of the least damaged sections of the ship. The Praetor had become gaunt this last year. He had washed-out pink eyes, a wide face and a strange demeanor, which had been made stranger by a long and steady diet of stims. There was the tiniest tic now under his left eye.

The modules around him were empty and the bridge lights were dim. A constant whine sounded in the background. It came from deep inside the ship, from its tortured fusion engines. At times, the whine climbed an octave. Whenever that occurred, the tic under his left eye became more pronounced.

The Praetor pushed his big head against the rest of his command chair. Jupiter neared. Soon now, he would retire to the acceleration couches. He would strap in. They would engage the engines and hope the repairs held. If they didn’t—