Rebellion by B. V. Larson

Author:B. V. Larson [Larson, B. V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Published: 2011-08-26T03:49:00+00:00

-27-

“How long until impact?” I asked.

“Less than an hour, sir,” Gorski said. He was working the numbers on his tablet. “I’ll dump the projections to the main screen now.”

A mass of curved lines appeared on the screen. The lines representing the past were blue, and those predicting the future were yellow. Each line had a red sliver in the middle representing the missile, which crept a pixel closer every once in a while. The yellow lines were like the curved spines of an umbrella, and they arced in on my ship at the end of their paths from a wide variety of angles. I figured they’d been fired on such trajectories purposefully. They were not clustered up, but spread as widely apart as possible. By being spread out, we could not take out more than one at a time with any counterstrike. They would all converge at once in the final minutes, hoping to overwhelm our defenses. I nodded as I looked at the situation.

“It’s time,” I said. “Launch the drones.”

From racks we’d set up on the cruiser’s hull, sixteen counter-missiles were fired in rapid succession. An almost imperceptible shiver went through the ship with each salvo. Sixteen for sixteen. I didn’t like the odds. We had to have a hit in every single case. There was no room for error.

“Suggestions?” I asked my crew.

“We could start dodging,” Gorski said.

I shook my head. “No point,” I said. “We would only lose forward velocity and they would overtake us faster, leaving less time for our point defense cannons to pick any of them off.”

“But they might not hit us all at once if we changed course,” Gorski argued. “We could stagger the incoming attacks and have a better chance at shooting them down.”

I still shook my head. “I don’t think so. The Macros know what they’re doing. The missiles will home in and adjust their speed. Look at the pattern, they are interacting. There is some kind of AI in those things, coordinating them. What else have you got?”

“We could throw out more mines,” Major Sarin suggested.

I looked at her. “The enemy ship isn’t in our wake.”

“No,” she said. “I mean at the incoming missiles.”

I thought about it. “Could work,” I said thoughtfully. “They are moving too fast to allow the magnetics to home in, but they should still trigger and detonate if the targets get close enough. Even a near-miss should knock out a missile. Let’s try it. We’ll have the upper arms throw a dozen or so at every missile, into the probable cone of approach.”

I knew it was another long shot, but I figured it gave us something to do. We laid the mines over the next twenty minutes and were back at the board again in no time. When counting down the minutes to your likely destruction, I found that time didn’t crawl; it seemed to move very quickly indeed.

“The Macro cruiser is firing now, sir,” Major Sarin said.

I jerked my head back to the screen. Four new red objects appeared.

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