“Sir?” asked Gorski, “can I make a suggestion?”
“Do it.”
“Maybe we should put all the armament up front, and turn and face the incoming barrage. We’ve got a lot more armor up there, and we don’t want these missiles to knock out our engines.”
I thought about it. I didn’t like it, as it would slow us down and give up on the evasion idea. I watched as the enemy weapons clicked closer. Space combat seemed different to me now, it was slower and more deliberate. I missed the days of massing with a fleet of Nano ships on a surprised enemy. The pixels advanced again, and I came to a decision. “Here’s what we are going to do: we’ll keep running as long as we can. We’ll fire newly built drones as we run at the last two light missiles. You hear that? I want them launched the moment after we build them.”
“That will be tight, sir,” Gorski said.
“I know, Captain. Go babysit the factories. Get those drones out if you have to perform a cesarean on them.”
“Yes sir,” he said, getting up and heading for the exit.
“Kwon,” I said, turning to the hulking man. He frowned worriedly. I looked around, seeing his expression mirrored on a dozen faces. They had been celebrating when the first missiles were knocked out, but anyone who could count knew there were six more we hadn’t touched.
“We’ll turn around at the last minute,” I said. “That will give us maximum time to build counter measures, and we’ll still have a shot at the missiles that get through our drones.”
“Where do I put the turrets then?” Kwon asked.
“Forward. Cluster them around the nose of the cruiser. We’ll turn when the missiles get close enough to hit and whatever gets by we’ll have to ride out.”
After he had left, Major Sarin spoke up: “Those payloads are going to be a lot bigger than the mines we dumped on them. I’m not sure how many hits we can take.”
“I know,” I said, “but it’s the best we can do.”
I stared at the four big, red bastards that were bearing down on us from the cruiser. They were moving much slower than the smaller missiles had been. “We’ll use the drones on the lighter, faster missiles. These monsters we’ll have to take out with our laser turrets up front. Any analysis on this new weapon system? Why are they bigger and slower?”
“Nothing, Colonel,” Major Sarin said. “They are metallic, with more weight and less thrust. The only new data I have is they have jets on their nosecones, too.”
“Like a ship?”
“I guess.”
“How long do we have?” I asked.
Sarin hesitated, tapping. “Twenty-nine minutes,” she said. Then she turned her head toward the hatchway and gave an odd little squeak of alarm.
I’d never heard such a sound out of her. I followed her eyes and saw Marvin walking toward us. His four wiry legs churned. His camera panned and zoomed in on Sarin.
“What is that?” Sarin asked.
“That’s my dog, Marvin,” I said, “I built him, sort of…actually, he pretty much built himself.”
28
I spent some time asking Marvin what he thought of the tactical situation and what kind of presents the missiles were bringing us from the Macro cruiser. I thought maybe he’d seen this sort of thing before. He immediately started complaining.
“Visual input system is inadequate,” he said. He had elevated his single camera eye up to peek over the top of the table-like computer we’d set up. He panned back and forth, but I imagined the angle and the glare of the lights in the room made it impossible to see.
“Major Sarin will hook you up directly,” I said, waving her forward.
She picked up a cable that led to the screen’s external video feed and walked uncertainly closer to Marvin.
“He doesn’t bite,” I said.
She handed the cable to Marvin, fully-extending her arm so she didn’t have to get too close. Marvin tottered forward. He rested his camera on top of his brainbox and took the cable from her hand, connecting it to a silvery thread of nanites. The nanites adjusted themselves to feed the data and Marvin halted for a few moments, transfixed by the input.
“What did you give him access to?” I asked.
Major Sarin’s eyes widened. She tapped at her screen and canceled a connection point or two. I hoped it wasn’t too late. For all my talk of trusting Marvin, it was hard to believe in the good intentions of any machine yet. For all I knew, he was the Centaurs’ walking revenge.
“What are you doing Marvin?” I asked.
“Translating incomplete two-dimensional data into an estimated three-dimensional projection.”
“Marvin,” I said, hoping he was listening. “What do you think the cruiser fired at us?”
“Question imprecise.”
“What are the most likely payloads of the four largest incoming Macro missiles?” I asked, trying to be more precise.
“Macros,” Marvin said.
I grunted, thinking he had not understood, but then I stopped myself. “You mean there are Macros aboard those missiles?”
“Conceptual error: ‘missiles’ is an imprecise term for the incoming vehicles,” Marvin complained.
“Right,” I said, catching on. “You think they are assault shuttles.”
“That is a more precise term. Reference acceptably accurate.”
I thought about it, and it made too much sense. The Macros were going to try to take back this cruiser, just as we had taken it from them. They hadn’t fired their ship-killer missiles yet, because they thought they could recapture our stolen vessel with assault shuttles rather than blowing it up.
“Why didn’t we find any shuttles like that aboard this ship?” Major Sarin asked.
“Maybe because they’d already launched them. Maybe they threw them all at the Worms and failed. Then they decided to go to Earth, pick us up and use us to do the dirty work.”
I remembered the big holds with berths for hundreds of Macros. I recalled too, that taking this ship had been relatively easy. They had about thirty fighting Macros, but apparently that wasn’t a full ship’s complement.
“Marvin, what is your estimate on enemy numbers?” I asked. “How many Macro marines are on each of those missiles?”
“If they are fully occupied, sixty-four,” Marvin said.
“Sixteen per shuttle,” I said. “That figures. The Macros love binary.”
I left the bridge then to see how Kwon was doing with our forward point-defense weaponry. Our main battery had been obliterated during our boarding assault, but I had high hopes now for our new point-defense laser turrets. The boarding shuttles would have to come in braking hard to match our speed or the Macros inside would smash into us and be destroyed. This was good news, as it gave us a much longer time to shoot them down.
While I was thinking hard, Marvin wandered off down the corridor. I hadn’t recalled giving him permission to explore, but I didn’t think he could do much harm. “Go make yourself useful, Marvin,” I called after him.
He swiveled his camera toward me, paused and stared. I ignored him for a few seconds. The next time I glanced in that direction, he was gone.
“Okay,” I told Kwon as I checked on his newly set up point-defense turret command station. “I need the turrets all connected here with nanite-wires.”
Kwon didn’t argue. He rarely did. He got up, clapping his big gloved hands and shouting for marine techs to move. They ran silvery threads of nanites out to every brainbox that controlled a laser turret on the hull.
We hadn’t gotten things organized enough yet to have these controls linked up to my bridge. Someday, if we survived this battle, I hoped to connect my boards up to the external firing systems. The job would have been made easier if the Macros had designed the ship with a command deck in mind. But as best we could tell, they hadn’t. We’d gone through the ship and hadn’t found any section that resembled a centralized bridge at all. The cruiser was built with distributed control systems only, meaning the engine could only be controlled from the engine room, etc.