But there was a certain beauty to it, the longer I considered it. We didn’t have to have a knock-down battle with their newly built defensive units. We could bypass them and possibly many deaths and end the fight in one fell swoop. The more I thought about it, the more I started liking it.
I looked at Captain Sloan. He looked alarmed.
“Are you thinking of taking me with you, Colonel?” he asked.
I almost laughed. Sloan’s death-avoidance radar must have been going off at full tilt.
“No, I want you in the ships-with Miklos here. You two will run ops and fly our destroyers around, shooting every harvester they have. In the meantime, Marvin, Kwon and I will be dropped on the battlefield. We’ll take a squad into that hole.”
“What if the Macros realize who you are?”
“Then I’m dead. I’ll go under a code name. Call me Condor. I’ve always liked big buzzards.”
Sloan nodded, looking relieved. Kwon was in the opposite mood, he pulled down the corners of his mouth into an appreciative grimace. “Will we get to fight, sir?”
“Hopefully not much. The mission is to get in there and take out the production system.”
Miklos finally spoke up then. He asked his first question of the meeting, and it was a good one. “Sir, what about after you take over the dome? You will have every Macro in the hole reevaluating their targets. I doubt we can hold their attention at that point. You will be swamped in enemies.”
I nodded, considering. “That is a major flaw,” I admitted.
Marvin’s cameras swung to every face in turn, and quickly judged his plan was in jeopardy. He’d stayed cagily quiet until now, letting us convince ourselves it could work. Now, he sensed the need for more input and jumped back into the conversation.
“Sirs,” he said. “I have good news on that front. I will immediately put the dome back up, protecting the commandos inside.”
“What if you can’t do that, Marvin?” Miklos asked. “We are betting on you twice now, not just once.”
Marvin began to answer, but I put up a hand. “We can’t know if he can do it or not. But if he can take over the entire facility, it stands to reason he can maintain the dome. At that point, if Star Force can destroy the machines outside, we can clean out this entire nest and make it our own. The possible gains are enormous, gentlemen. We could churn out undreamed of levels of production with one of those systems. Instead of a hundred huge robots, we could build a fleet of destroyers, or a thousand laser turrets. We could even build the battle station I’ve been working on for weeks.”
I massaged the stubble on my jaw, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I found myself feeling a powerful emotion that I rarely experienced. Greed, that’s what it was. All those raw materials, just sitting around the dome. Millions of tons of matter ready to be turned into whatever I wanted.
Most importantly, it would double the production capacity of Star Force. That was worth some risk, wasn’t it?
— 12
Even before we launched the new ground assault, things got complicated. The Macros started it, by launching missiles at every one of the Centaur satellites. They did it all at once, and they did it by sending a full barrage of sixteen surface-to-space weapons toward each target. Every missile was loaded with a nuclear warhead and a Macro technician at the helm. Macro missiles were essentially small ships-suicidal spacecraft on a one-way mission.
I didn’t have much time to wonder if they’d built these long ago, or only just now in response to our attack. Whatever the case, it was clear they’d reclassified the system from “peaceful” to “contested”, and they’d also decided the Centaurs had broken their deals sufficiently to be directly attacked. I couldn’t blame them on that score.
Fortunately, I’d had a large number of automated turrets installed on every Centaur orbital habitat. They weren’t foolproof, but they should stop a small missile attack like this. Still, watching the weapons rise up in red arcs from the surface had me bearing my teeth in a grimace inside my helmet. What if they had some fresh trick to play? What if my laser defenses weren’t fully operational? It would only take one hit to inflict many millions of Centaur casualties. All told, billions of lives were under direct attack.
I looked at the timer. We had a little under seven minutes to wait before they hit us.
“Miklos, status report,” I said.
“All enemy missiles on target. They will be within range of defensive fire in-four more minutes.”
I did some quick calculations, and I didn’t like my answers. “Are you telling me we’ll only have two minutes to shoot them all down? Why is our range on these systems so short?”
“We put up what we could, Colonel,” he said unapologetically. “The systems are what they are. Remember sir, this is not open space. The missiles are coming up through the atmosphere in every case. There is cloud cover and the like to get in the way.”
I nodded glumly. It was going to be a long wait.
When the missiles were three minutes out, I took a deep breath. “Are they hitting everything at exactly the same time?”
“Yes,” Miklos said. “All six habitable satellites have an identical attack incoming… Apparently, the enemy didn’t want us to have time to adjust to their assault. Their precise timing indicates they must have missile reserves on some worlds. On the Centaur homeworld, for instance, the enemy only had two factories to produce the missiles. It only makes sense the other worlds would have produced more munitions in the same amount of time.”
“You’re saying they are probably holding back? That this could just be a probe? A taste-test attack?”
“Something like that, sir.”
I looked back to Barbarossa’s big wall-screens. Things just kept getting better and better. I wondered how many Centaurs would die if a single missile got through. Had I screwed up by getting them into this war? They’d proven to be fairly ineffective ground troops. Perhaps, I should have stuck with my own marines and done the job the old-fashioned way, without trying to glue laser packs onto a herd of mountain goats.
Self-doubt was very natural in a helpless, deadly situation. Fortunately, I didn’t have to endure it for long. The next minute passed and our lasers started firing. They did pretty well at first.
“A hit sir-another!” Miklos said, excitement creeping into his voice.
“Put up a tally for each world, Captain.”
“One moment, sir,” he said. He began tapping and sliding his fingers over the screen in front of him. As an operational wingman, he wasn’t as good as Major Sarin. I did trust his judgment, however. And I didn’t have to worry about him making a pass at me, either.
“Give me a verbal count, man,” I said after a full minute went by. I could see we were firing, but didn’t really know if we were hitting the enemy or not. Missiles were winking out-but how many?
“I’ve got it, sir.”
The screens displayed readouts under every planet’s image. Here on the Centaur homeworld, we’d done pretty well. There was only one missile left. Judging by the number of hot beams it had tracing it, that one was doomed as well. This was due to the fact our own destroyers were stationed here and they had moved to engage the missiles themselves, increasing our defensive fire capacity.
On the other worlds, the numbers were less certain. Two planets had four missiles incoming, two had five, and the one closest to the sun had-eight?
“Is that right?” I asked, my voice raising as I spoke each word. “Eight missiles are still coming at Eden-6? We’re going to lose a hundred million civvies out there, Miklos!”
“Possibly, sir.”
I took a deep breath. Eighty-eight seconds to go before impact. These situations had come to haunt me, they were my personal nightmare. To have made choices that cost millions of clueless unarmed beings to be killed… I thought hard.