Vaughn Heppner: Battle Pod

“Begin ship-shielding maneuver,” Grand Admiral Cassius ordered. He sank into his chair as the Julius Caesar’s engines engaged hard.

With grim concentration, Cassius studied the battlefield on his holographic display. Radiation, EMP blasts, X-rays, enemy jamming and debris meant his holographic image was fuzzy in places. He lacked full intelligence. But that had always been the nature of the battlefield. Making the right decision with only partial information had been a commander’s lot for untold millennia. They had destroyed countless enemy vessels. Finally, Cassius had come to realize that many of those kills had been shells, decoys. The heart of the enemy fleet remained: the Zhukov -class battleships. Even a Doom Star needed time to take out the most modern of them.

Those SU battleships concentrated on the Hannibal Barca . Admiral Brutus’s Doom Star had taken damage. Now it was time to relieve the Hannibal Barca , to shield it with the relatively intact Julius Caesar .

“A few more minutes, old friend,” Grand Admiral Cassius muttered. “More speed!” he ordered, keeping any worry out of his voice. In another twenty seconds, Cassius was pushed even deeper into his chair as the warship sped for war and glory.

“You’re fighting hard, premen,” Cassius muttered. “But it’s not going to be enough to give you victory over me.”

Aboard the Vladimir Lenin , Blackstone wanted to shout himself hoarse. The fight had come down to two giants grappling for a death-hold, to break the other giant’s back.

His orbital fighters were nearly all destroyed. They had never had a chance against the Doom Stars. It had been a grim order to give and still sickened him. The bulk of the decoy fleet was space wreckage. Now he faced off against the battered Hannibal Barca . He had maneuvered the battlewagons so the first Doom Star shielded his battleships from the other Doom Stars. It might have been a clever tactic, but Blackstone felt too sick at Social Unity’s losses to feel elated.

“We’re beaming into the Doom Star’s hull!” the targeting officer shouted.

“It’s so huge,” Commissar Kursk said. “A super-ship like that will take time to die.”

“It’s rotating!” the targeting officer shouted. “Damn! They’re swinging the entire ship to bring an untouched shield into our line of fire.”

Blackstone wondered if he dared to order a charge. It would likely mean the final destruction of the last battleships of his fleet. If he bored in now and kept chewing the particle-shields, he might actually kill a Doom Star. But the cost, the entire SU Battlefleet, that seemed too high a price.

As he hesitated, General Fromm’s eyes narrowed. “We must accelerate,” Fromm said in his strangely calm voice.

“…no,” Blackstone whispered. “We can kill the Hannibal Barca from here.”

The stout Earth General cocked his head strangely. Then a small dark object appeared in his hands. It was a needler. General Fromm aimed it at Blackstone.

“You will order full acceleration toward the Doom Star,” Fromm said.

“He has a needler!” someone shouted.

Fromm drew a solar grenade from his garments. “One flick of my thumb,” he said, “and I can destroy the command center of the Battlefleet. If you want to live, you must do as I order.”

“Why are you doing this?” Blackstone asked.

“Do not attempt any subterfuge tactics,” Fromm said. “You will obey me or—”

There was a strange sound and then General Fromm crumpled, sliding in an almost boneless fashion from the map-module and onto the floor. Commissar Kursk rushed around the module. She had a stun gun in her hand. She had shot Fromm at full power. The tall Commissar knelt beside the Earth General as Blackstone stumbled to that side of the module. He watched in shock as Kursk picked up Fromm’s needler. She pressed the tip of the needler against Fromm’s head, shooting twenty needles into his cranium, making it a bloody mass of mush and bone. She dropped the needler and snatched the solar grenade, carefully examining it.

Her face pale, Kursk looked up and met Blackstone’s eyes.

“You killed General Fromm,” was all Blackstone could say.

“I’m taking this elsewhere,” Kursk said, hefting the still live solar grenade.

Blackstone was too stunned to respond.

“Commodore!” Kursk snapped in her best PHC voice. “You have a battle to run. See to it and let me worry about security.”

A moment later, Blackstone nodded and turned back to the map-module.

The Hannibal Barca was vast beyond any other class of spacecraft. It contained thousands of decks, chambers, corridors, storage bays, launching tubes, laser coils, reactor space, sleeping quarters, exercise areas, weapons lockers, toilet cubicles, hatches and repair space-ways in a complex maze. The cyborgs propelled themselves through the maze like a metallic infestation. Their memories were flawless. Their execution of attack proved fast, lethal and bewildering.

Out of Hatch ATR-19 shot cyborg after cyborg. During the weightless periods, they magnetized their palms and pressed them against the metal walls to propel themselves like swimmers. When ship acceleration produced pseudo-gravity, the cyborgs magnetized their boots and ran in a clank, clank, clank charge.

The first Highborn to witness them was Third Rank Marco in a damage-control suit. He swiveled toward a strange sound, gawked at the cyborgs for a full second. Then he snatched up his laser-welder, roared a battle cry and died in a fusillade of red laser-light. Each cyborg in turn, including LA31, leaped over his smoldering corpse as they invaded deeper into the Hannibal Barca , seeking the massive fusion cores.

A minute later, interior ship-cameras recorded the slaughter of a Highborn reaction-team.

On the command deck, Admiral Brutus roared, “What are those?”

The admiral received his answer two-and-a-half minutes later. In gymnasium F-7, three Highborn in battleoid-armor opened up with .55-caliber rotating hand-cannons. A cyborg staggered backward before dodging behind a bulkhead. Depleted uranium slugs had slammed against its armored torso, but failed to kill it. Return laser-fire reflected off the shiny battleoid skin.

“The things aren’t human. They’re some kind of battle machine!” the Highborn officer shouted into his mike. “I don’t think they feel pain, and they’re faster than greased death.”

As if to prove the officer’s point, three cyborgs sheathed their laser-carbines and charged with vibroknives. A single cyborg blew backward from more hand-cannon fire. The three Highborn had targeted its head. The .55-caliber Gatling guns were an integral part of a Highborn’s battleoid-arm. The two surviving cyborgs were wasp-fast. Graphite-enhanced muscles drove the vibroknives as the blades whined at high-performance. And in a shocking display of knife-fighting techniques, the cyborgs opened the three battleoid-suits and butchered the giants inside.

Now that they were meeting real resistance, the cyborgs broke into triad teams. They ceased the single concentrated thrust and attacked in a wave-assault. The next ten minutes saw savage fighting as cyborgs clashed with more battleoid-armored Highborn. To the astonishment of Admiral Brutus, it took three Highborn dead to produce a cyborg kill.

“Are they better than us?” Brutus shouted, as he pounded the arm of his command chair.

Three Highborn dead verses one cyborg killed, the honor went to the cyborgs but the victory pushed toward the Highborn. As remorseless as the cyborgs were, the Highborn kept setting up ambushes, taking the losses and killing the alien things.