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XV

"Chris, what's the colonel trying to pull?" Rick asked. He'd left Hague to continue monitoring the Phinons alone—not a word had come out of the genanite-exposed ships for some minutes now; those were the ones that Hague was focusing on. Hague continued to listen, headset on, cable getting tangled as he walked around his squirrel cage slipping nuts to Sarobi, Sammi, and Bixy.

"Colonel Knoedler took the basic design perfected at Slingshot by"—Dykstra nodded to Sammi—"Steve MacTavish and his crew, and added small versions of the new drive to each kinetic kill vehicle. With mass converters for power, they're orders of magnitude better than they would have been."

"But why all the secrecy?" Sammi wanted to know. "I thought my bugs were our only hope, and here Knoedler's had this in the works all along."

"Several reasons," Dykstra replied. "Recall the original purpose for the KKVs—to destroy military assets in the Belt. Had they discovered what he was doing, some elements in power there would not have been willing to lay down arms and make common cause against the Phinons. They wouldn't trust us, because these really are now a weapon that the Union could use to clean out the Belt for good. Also, look at the trajectories. The KKVs were shot out of the cannon on Mercury." At this Sammi drew a blank, but Rick understood. "But they're coming from a wide arc of the Belt. This way they can double their velocity doing close approaches, and it also has the advantage of the KKVs not initially heading straight for the fleet just in case the Phinons could spot them. But how do you think the BDF would have responded if they'd seen several hundred thousand projectiles coming at them at forty percent of light speed? They would have thought we were attacking them. They probably don't even know yet what just went through the Belt to disrupt all those asteroid orbits they're likely noticing about now."

The specks on the screen were nearly to the Phinon column; they all fixed their attentions on the scene. The KKVs ignored the first hundred or so Phinon craft. Many of these were the infected ones, and Knoedler had not wanted them to be targeted. But immediately following, Phinon ships were starting to die.

They winked out, one after another, in a pattern reminiscent of popping popcorn—first a few kernels pop, then more and more until there's just one continual sound. Within seconds the occupants of the tracking room were witnessing the same "burning fuse" of sparks that Bob had described, only he'd seen it minutes earlier.

"Message incoming from Colonel Thomas Knoedler," suddenly blared out on the PA, unusual that, but no doubt planned by Knoedler and his superiors. His message also followed, except it was Nikki who was talking.

"This is Lieutenant Commander Nikki Knoedler of the System Patrol ship Honeymoon," they heard. "So, she landed him," Rick and Dykstra heard Sammi comment under her breath. "You are witnessing the interception of the Phinon fleet by a salvo of 630 thousand kinetic kill vehicles. We anticipate and expect the destruction of fully half of the enemy fleet. . . ."

The rest of the message went on to discuss what Dykstra had already told the others, and Nikki included a formal apology to the Belt for keeping them in the dark.

"Half their fleet," Rick said. "Pretty damn good. But we're still going to have to hope they decide to flee."

It had taken less than half the fleet to destroy the Jovian system.

* * *

"Wow, look at 'em go!" Bob exclaimed as the sparkler of dying Phinon ships continued.

"Yes. Very . . . pret . . . ty," Paula agreed. It sounded like she was talking through clenched teeth, so Bob tore his eyes away from the scene and redoubled his efforts to move the skiff back to the docking ring.

He had to go slow. Power suit or not, the skiff was very massive and he couldn't risk losing control of it and damaging the Hyperlight II. It also wouldn't do to jerk it around too much and add to Paula's discomfort, though at the moment Bob was so angry at her for holding out on him about her condition that he wouldn't have minded eliciting a few grunts and groans of additional pain.

He carried the skiff along the top spine of the ship, then gently moved it into docking position.

It wouldn't fit.

"Dammit!" he said. "Looks like the ring's been damaged, the female unit on the skiff. I'm going to have to lift you up again and see if I can hammer it back into shape enough to fit."

"What . . . ever," Paula said.

Lifting the skiff again, Bob inspected the ring, and to his relief saw that it had only been dented in on the side, and a few pushes and twists with his powered hand set it back into fairly round shape. He put the skiff back into place. "I'm going back inside now," he told Paula. "I'm going to have to scrounge up some emergency sealant to pack around the docking ring from the inside though, before I can get in there and pull you out. It'll leak otherwise."

This time she just grunted a sort of "uh-huh" and let it go at that.

Before reentering, Bob turned again to look in the direction of the Phinon fleet. The fuse had gone out, he noted, and since he didn't know what the cause had been, he didn't know that the last of the KKVs had done its job. But he had only been looking for a few seconds when he did see something he recognized.

"Oh shit. Oh, man! Thank God Almighty, we did it! Paula, we did it!"

Though from a greater distance away, it was a scene Bob had observed once before, with Rick, out near the Hague Limit.

That of hundreds of thousands of drive flames, all burning brightly at once.

* * *

"Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes!" Hague said, bouncing in his seat, almost unable to contain himself. "Yes, oh yes, oh yes!"

"Arie, what is it? What did you hear?" Rick asked, concern but perhaps a note of hope in his tone. No one had been paying attention to Hague because they were all watching the screen. The last KKV had killed its ship and everyone wondered what would happen next.

"They're going to flee, oh yes, oh yes! Run away, run away! Oh yes, yes, yes!"

Rick turned to the others. "Arie says the Phinons are going to—" he began, but then his eye caught the view on the screen and he just pointed. "Look!"

Sammi and Dykstra turned just as the ensign at the control board leapt out of his seat. "Drive flames! God dammit, those are drive flames!"

The admiral kept a cooler head. "What are their vectors, Ensign? That does make a difference."

"Sorry, sir," Rick heard the ensign say. "I'm on it."

By now everyone on the main floor had moved to prime viewing position of the main screen. Rick, Sammi, and Dykstra were all clutching the rail and leaning over. Dykstra's cane suddenly slipped from where it was leaning against the rail and clattered to the floor. Nobody noticed.

A minute went by where the general buzz of people whispering and hoping and praying was nearly deafening all by itself. Then the ensign said, "Got it, sir. Confirmed. They're accelerating at over nine gees. They're going to miss us!"

And now it was a time for cheers. Sammi threw her arms around Dykstra and kissed him soundly on the lips. Rick threw his arms around the both of them and was surprised, but then amused, to find himself crying. The hell with it. They were all crying, or laughing, or both. Even the admiral down below was saying, "Man! Oh, man! Oh, man!"

"Chris, oh God, I can't believe it! I can't believe it!" Sammi cried. "The nightmare is over. We're going to make it!"

"We owe it all to you, Chris!" Rick said. "Good job! Great job!" He knew how inane that sounded—Dykstra's singular brilliance had just been responsible for saving the planet. But what other words were going to be adequate?

"Has anyone thought to send a thank-you to the colonel?" Dykstra suddenly asked. Forgotten in the excitement was that Nikki was still sending them information from the Honeymoon. She had been taken off the PA, but Rick was able to switch her message through a separate headset from Hague's station. He was surprised to find that the little genius, though he'd been the first to discover and register delight at the good news, was now intently listening to Phinon chatter again.

Rick held one side of the headset to his ear. Nikki was saying, " . . . will have data on density and expansion characteristics of the debris cloud." Rick smiled at that. Yeah, there'd be one hell of a lot of mangled Phinon hardware falling to Earth for the next few days. Fireball city for watchers in the Northern Hemisphere. She was continuing. "We have confirmed kills on five point five hundred K ships and counting. Many of them never had time to raise their shields. This was a real—" There was a brief burst of static and the link went dead.

"What the hell?" Rick muttered. He looked at the channel indicator: DOWNLINK LOST glowed at him in red letters. "Uh oh," he said. "Chris, I—"

"No, no, no, no, no, oh nooo!" Hague burst out. "Oh, no! They're not all going, not leaving, oh no!"

Dykstra and Sammi heard that and promptly came over. Rick's other news had to wait as they tried to calm down the diminutive scientist enough to explain.

"Yes, some ships with the bugs never relinked, yes, never started talking again, no, oh no," he said, and now he was sobbing.

It did not take long for the news to filter through the crowd, and the tracking center crew went to work to confirm Hague's claim.

Four Phinon ships had not changed course. Four of the ones at the front of the column. Four of the ones that had suffered the ravages of Sammi's genanites. One of those ships would pass close to the Moon. The other three would likely drop their bombs on Earth.

Earth-Luna had been saved from annihilation. But multigigaton bombs are hell on biospheres. Though saved from annihilation, the Earth still faced a global catastrophe.

* * *

The skiff wasn't likely to disconnect from the Hyperlight II, Bob decided, but he was certain the docking ring would leak like hell once he opened the inner hatch. For that, he got a can of leak-stopping foam, sprayed up a sphere of the aerogel goop roughly a meter across, then pulled open the hatch. There was a violent hissing but the floating glob moved up to the leaks and soon had filled all the gaps, solidifying into a seal nearly as tough as the hull metal itself. Now they'd have to remove the skiff in a dockyard, but that was okay—the ship had accomplished her mission.

"Have you out in a few minutes," Bob told Paula as he opened the hatch and stuck his head inside.

"Thank God," she said. "I'm feeling . . . really, really woozy." Bob could see a tear in her flight suit and dried blood crusted along the edges of the rip. What her leg looked like inside the suit he didn't want to think about.

He looked around at the interior damage, then dropped back into the ship to retrieve the tool kit. After that it was, fortunately, only a matter of minutes until he had Paula cut free and delivered into the aft stateroom. He rolled the traumabot out of its closet, stripped Paula naked, then stepped back to let the machine's hands and expert system sort out what to do about the girl.

He could hear the radio chiming like crazy in the control bubble. "I'm going to go up front to get that," he told Paula.

"I understand," she said. "It's my looks. But I usually look much better than this when I'm naked. Ask Rick," she said weakly, attempting a smile.

Bob took that as a good sign and went up front.

The call was coming from the High Command.

The Hyperlight II was light-minutes away from Luna, so there was no way for Bob to have a back-and-forth conversation. What came over the screen and through the voice channel was the entire account of what had happened since the KKVs hit the Phinons. Bob found himself grinning through most of it, right up until the end when he saw the images and trajectory plots of the four remaining ships.

"Damn. Dammit!" he cursed.

The anonymous narration continued. "Though no communication has been detected from these ships, minor course correction bursts have been observed. It is assumed the crews are alive and intend to carry out their original mission.

"Your ship is the only one in a position to attempt an intercept."

"Son-of-a-bitch," Bob said.

Along with the exodus from Earth of the citizenry with the means to do so came, later, the exodus of the System Patrol fleet. Those ships needed to attack the Phinons had been the last to depart Earth-Luna. If they failed, there seemed little point in having the remains of the fleet hanging around to be decimated along with the planets. Instead, all ships were sent into the myriad of tiny worldlets that was the Belt, most of them carrying vast quantities of equipment to set up spacedocks to convert over every available ship to mass conversion power and Dykstra-Hague impellers. This included the planetary defenses of the Earth. In an era of cheap artificial gravity, there was no reason to build huge orbital battle stations and not add a powerful propulsion system "just in case." The case had come, and these stations, too, had departed for the Belt. That meant that the only defensive systems left in the Earth-Luna system were the ground installations on the Moon.

Had things gone as planned, Bob would have been whisking his ship out to the Belt right now, too, along with all the others that had attacked the fleet. Paula's plight had slowed them up.

The Moon might be able to take out one or two ships. But not all four, Bob thought. I don't think I can get all of them either. They don't know back there that I have a skiff stuck on the back of my ship. 

Bob ran the coordinates and trajectory data of the ships through his navigational computer, then did a scan through the structural data on the construction of the Hyperlight II. He had to know what kind of acceleration he could do before the skiff would rip off—it lay outside the effects of his ship's compensation fields. One thing was certain—he didn't have time to cut the skiff away. The Phinon ships would be past the Earth long before he could get there if he took the time to do that.

He ran the data three times, each time giving himself more optimistic assumptions.

There was no way.

"Shit, son-of-a-bitch! The skiff rips off above twenty gees no matter how much wishful thinking I throw at the problem." But there had to be a way. He couldn't believe that they'd turned the Phinon fleet aside, only to have a few ships with huge bombs still manage to kill—what? millions? billions?—on Earth. That's the problem with atmospheres—they're so damn easy to screw up. 

Bob was running out of time. Over twenty gees, the skiff rips off . . . Then what? It will open the ship to vacuum. Wait! 

Did it have to open the whole ship to vacuum?

He had an idea. He also had another passenger. He raced from the control bubble to the aft stateroom.

Paula still looked like hell, but at least now bandages were covering some of the lower circles of the inferno. She had tubes sticking into her in five different places, and Bob knew from personal experience that at least three of those places hurt no matter what the doctors might say.

"Paula, we got a call from the High Command. Some of the Phinon ships didn't turn away. We're the only ship that can intercept," he told her.

She smiled up at him weakly. "But my skiff is glued on, right?" Even in pain and all banged up, Paula was sharp.

Miss Bouncy-wouncy indeed! Sammi, when I get back I'm going to make you buy this girl dinner. "That's right. But I have an idea. Damn risky, though. I want to seal up your stateroom and my control bubble, then open up the middeck to vacuum. Then when the skiff tears away we may hardly notice."

"Don't make me laugh," Paula said. "You don't know what the failure modes are in this situation. We could come to pieces, too."

"That's why I need you to agree that we should try it."

"You didn't honestly think I'd say `no,' did you?"

He closed her door on his way through and hit the button that sealed it against vacuum. Again he ran to the control bubble, sealed himself in, and opened up the airlock to the middeck. He could hear the air whistle out for a few moments before silence descended.

He turned the ship toward Earth, could see the twin planet Earth-Luna system looking like a pair of exquisite gemstones lying on black velvet sprinkled with diamond dust. He ramped up the acceleration. Ten gees. Fifteen. Eighteen. At 19.5 there came a shredding sound and the ship shuddered, then a horrendous shriek transmitted through the hull and the ship was still again.

"Paula, we seem to have survived," he told her through the comm.

The Hyperlight II was still hours from Earth, but now that he was sure he'd get there, he acknowledged the call from the High Command.

"This is Lieutenant Robert Nachtegall of the streakbomber Hyperlight II. Message received and acknowledged. I'm on my way."

* * *

The Phinons were fleeing. This should have been a time of jubilation. The parties should have started. They should have all been shit-faced by now. They're fleeing except for four. And that makes all the difference, Rick thought.

No one had left the tracking room that Rick could see. At least, not permanently. Sammi and Dykstra had gone back to their rooms and returned a couple of times. No doubt others had, too. But now Sammi was pacing back and forth along the rail. Dykstra had finally decided to have a chair brought for him and was sitting with his arms resting on the rail, his chin on his arms, just staring at the main screen. Hague was still monitoring Phinon chatter, but there was nothing new to report. The men down below were busy observing the Phinon fleet, confirming that the main body of ships was still leaving, and also tracking the four incoming vessels and sending the data to Bob.

Thank God Bob and Paula made it. What would I do without her? Or even him? 

To pass the hours before the final encounter, Rick had set for himself the task of analyzing the abrupt ending of the transmission from the Honeymoon. The others had been saddened to learn about that. Reviews of tracking data showed that at the time of LOS, the colonel's ship was still traveling at .42c, seemingly intact. But that doesn't mean they're not dead. And everyone knew it.

But even after the long hours of analysis, all Rick still could say for certain was that their signal had stopped, but he had no idea why.

"Chris, how many of the Phinon ships could Bob possibly destroy?" Sammi asked.

"I've been following the tracking data," Dykstra answered, looking at her and catching Rick's eye, too. "Bob is only some few light-seconds away now. No matter what he does, he's only going to be able to get two of the Phinon ships. Obviously, the second ship will be one of those on its way to Earth. The first could have been either the one headed for us, or another of those going to Earth. But he'll have to pursue the Earth-bound one. The Moon is an airless world—what's another big crater? And even if everyone on her dies, it's only a trivial fraction of those who would die if the other ship makes it to Earth."

Dykstra had turned back toward the screen. "Ah, look," he said, pointing. There was a small kink in the line on the display that showed the trajectory trace of the Hyperlight II. "If the question wasn't moot to begin with, it would be now."

The Moon had to fend for itself.

* * *

The Hyperlight II was closing to within range. Flashbacks to his encounters out in the Oort cloud flickered through Bob's mind, but now the stakes, unbelievably high, were readily apparent.

The Phinon ship knew he was coming, too. Bob had already ridden through two blasts of X-ray laser fire. Despite the hole in his ship, the shields were holding just fine.

He kept up a running commentary to the High Command. "Closing. I want to be close. I want to disintegrate the bastard so none of his bomb load is left intact." His superiors at the High Command knew all this, of course. But he had no one else to talk to. Not even Paula—the traumabot had put her into a deep sleep.

Nothing left behind, Bob thought as he activated both the particle beam weaponry and the lasers. He also armed the missiles in the weapons array in case there were any pieces left big enough to warrant destruction.

The Phinon ship was under full thrust, and Bob was closing from above. He remembered the Phinon ship out in the Oort cloud that had self-destructed. Of course, that one had spent itself and didn't have any bigger fish to fry, either.

Bob fired. The Phinon's shields lit up, glowing brightly, an incandescent pearl, her color climbing up the spectrum. Then catastrophic failure and a most satisfying explosion.

"Nothing left bigger than a marble," Bob radioed to the High Command.

* * *

"They're acting differently than they did at Jupiter," Dykstra said, concerned. "But they didn't meet any opposition there. The ship Bob just destroyed was under drive. Let's hope there aren't too many more surprises from them this late in the game."

"We don't understand the Phinons as well as we thought we did, do we?" Sammi commented. She had wearied of pacing and Dykstra had summoned another chair for her so she could sit beside him as they watched the unfolding final Phinon encounters on the screen. She pointed at the screen. "Looks like Bob is close to catching up with the second one now. But when are we going to do something?"

Rick came over. "Arie still hasn't heard anything from the remaining three ships. But all the other ones really are fleeing, including a bunch of those we infected. Looks like we scared the hell out of them," he told them. He looked over the rail. "I see they have guys at the battle console now. Won't be long and they'll go after the lead Earth-bound ship."

This wouldn't be easy. The ground batteries of the High Command were both particle beam weapons and lasers. The particle beams could lance out at nearly the speed of light, but not quite. To have both the lasers and the PBWs hit the swiftly moving target at the same instant from a distance of almost a light-second required a degree of coordination seldom attempted. Nothing the Belt had ever thrown at Luna had required both beams to hit the same target simultaneously. The High Command wanted to kill the ship with one shot. They didn't want to risk needing two.

"They're preparing to fire," Rick said, and then all three just watched the screen, again. The war with the Phinons was in the hands of others now.

A white and a green line appeared on the screen, the white, representing the particle beams, beginning a split second sooner. In one second the two beams converged on the red blip that was the Phinon ship, following it. A few seconds later the tracking data returned and the screen reported the Phinon ship destroyed.

A cheer went up from below.

"That's another one killed!" Rick exclaimed. "All right!"

"But what are those three new little red spots?" Sammi asked. The spots were diverging, but still heading for Earth.

"Oh, shit."

The chatter from the floor brought them the bad news.

"Three bombs survived our attack," Dykstra said. "And these bombs are shielded. We didn't see that at Jupiter, either."

"What do we do now?" Sammi asked, watching the screen in horror.

"They're doing it," Rick said in resignation. "They're aiming our beams at the Moon-bound ship."

There was nothing anyone could do to prevent the Earth from still getting a taste of the destruction the Phinons had intended.

Nothing at all.

* * *

This geometry sucks! Bob thought as he checked the scanner display. He, too, could see the bombs released by the destroyed ship, but there was no way he could intercept them. Dammit! 

He continued his pursuit of the second ship, again closing rapidly. The Hyperlight II was nearly two light-seconds from Earth. At her velocity, the Phinon ship would cover that distance in about three minutes. The Moon-bound Phinon was about the same distance from her target. Bob knew that the High Command would be redirecting its firepower at that one, now.

"Ready to fire on target two," Bob radioed to the High Command. Just a little closer. Just like last time. 

A beam shot out from the Phinon ship. Bob could see it as it destroyed the sparse dust of interplanetary vacuum.

All the way down to the High Command.

What the hell? "What the hell!" he yelled. "Tracking center, what the hell just got hit!"

In the several second interval before the reply, Bob let loose with his own weapons. But this ship fought back with all the fury it had left in it.

After it dropped its bombs.

"Oh, God dammit! Bastard! Shit!" Bob screamed to the space outside his bubble as he saw that the bombs were under their own power, shielded, and on diverging courses. We underestimated these devils. 

All Bob could do was to return fire on the ship, using lasers and PBWs of his own. He had no doubt that he would take it, and in fact opened up some distance between the two craft now that its bomb load was gone. He fired a salvo of four missiles which converged on the ship. But the ship self-destructed before they got there and their detonations were nearly unnoticeable.

"High Command to Hyperlight II. The beam hit the PBW batteries, and the explosion took out half of the laser cannons as well," the reply from Luna came in.

Just like with OEV 1. They saw Luna fire and they nailed the spot from over a light-second away. But they ignored me during that time. Why? 

There was no time to think about it. He went after the closest of the bombs.

* * *

It was structured chaos in the tracking room. Men and women were hustling from station to station. Orders were being yelled across the main floor. The big screen had been split—the right side showed the oncoming Phinon ship, the left, the image of Earth as the first of the three bombs approached.

"No, Arie says the two ships were not communicating with each other. They still haven't said anything since the genanites hit them," Rick told Sammi.

"But that had to be coordinated, didn't it? It had to be," she said. "Chris—didn't it?"

Dykstra was slowly tapping his cane on the floor, no doubt obliviously. He couldn't take his eyes off the screen. Still, he heard Sammi's question. "Maybe it was coordinated millions of years ago," he said. "Or maybe `soul' is a more subtle concept than even I ever thought." And then to the Universe in general it seemed, he added, "We were expecting Jupiter all over again. Oops."

"We have a couple laser cannons left," Rick said. "They should still be able to get the incoming ship, now that Bob took out the other one."

"That one's bombs got away, too," Dykstra noted.

"We'll have to hold off firing to see if the ship drops its bombs. Hit the bombs instead," Rick added. "They'll be coming right down our throat. We can probably hit most of them."

"Hold off for how long?" Sammi asked.

Seconds passed.

They watched the left side of the screen as the three bombs impacted the Earth. Two came down in the heart of the Pacific Ocean and one off the coast of China—little actinic arc-welding sparks for an instant, then a spreading wall of cloud, obviously angry even when seen from the surface of the Moon.

"I don't think our ship is going to drop its bombs at all," Sammi finally said. "It's coming right in with them."

Green laser lines on the screen flashed up suddenly to meet the ship. The ship survived the attack.

"They are talking, oh yes, oh yes. They are talking," Hague suddenly exclaimed.

"What?" Rick shouted and raced to be at Hague's side. "What are they saying?"

Hague paused for a moment, listening. "Repeating, yes, yes, repeating." He listened some more, then looked up. " `Good-bye,' yes, oh yes. They are saying `good-bye.' "

"Secure for full shielding," came over the PA. It was clear that even if the Phinon ship was destroyed, bombs would likely make it to the surface. The High Command would be underneath the biggest Dykstra shield in the Solar System when that happened. As long as a bomb didn't land right on them, they'd all likely survive.

" `Good-bye,' " Dykstra repeated.

"Full shields in five seconds, mark," said the anonymous PA voice.

"Maybe the Phinons know about John 15:13, too," Dykstra said, and then the shields went up.

 

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