No Other Gods by Koetsier John

Author:Koetsier, John [Koetsier, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: sparkplug 9 publishers
Published: 2013-09-07T18:30:00+00:00

We launched at full power: 30Gs. Inertial compensators were at their highest setting, but could not mask all the acceleration. All of us would be under at least three or four times the normal force of gravity for days if we had a hope of pulling this off.

“Sunflower,” I called. “Do you have an triage attack solution for me yet?”

“We do,” Livia’s voice answered. “It’s not complete but we know the most important nodes to protect. And the missiles that you can most easily destroy, given your position. Sending now.”

Tonia and Kin brought it up on the main screen and adjusted course.

“First intercept coming up in a few minutes. It’s the nearest one.”

“Some good news,” came Livia’s voice. “We’ve been studying the missiles. They’re fairly slow and awkward. The techs are speculating that building thousands that could survive in the near-sun environment was a major, major stressor on rebel manufacturing capacity.”

“They use most of their power simply to not fall into the sun. When they reach their designated node, they pretty much fall like bombs, with minimal added acceleration and guidance.”

“We’ll take any help we can get,” I offered.

“It gets better,” said Livia. “We’ve seen more than one spontaneously fail. The techs are speculating that the rebels could not acquire massive quantities of the required supermetals, and had some difficulty mass-producing FESS shields. The failure rate is less than one percent right now, but we’re hoping it will grow as their operational time increases.”

“Approaching first missile,” Tonia interjected.

It was child’s play. We approached to within a hundred kilometers, fired a one second burst from one of our particle beam cannons. Scratch another missile.

“Shooting fish in a barrel,” laughed Kin.

“Plenty of fish in this sea,” I answered. “Now we have to do this a thousand times more.”

Livia had been listening in to our conversation. Now, as we vectored to the next closest missile, she cut in. Private circuit, for me only. Couldn’t be good, but I put it on the main speakers anyways. We were all in it together.

“G, the techs have been evaluating the missile paths. I’ve got some good news, and I’ve got some bad news. The good news,” she said, without asking which I wanted first, ”is that the EMPs are blasting off sequentially, not simultaneously. Ones that reach their targets are trying to blast it immediately, and not wait for all the missiles to be in position. That means our new defense system has less work at any given time.”

“Give me the bad news,” I said.

“The bad news is that at a point about 7 hours from now, we’ll enter a period in which easily three or four hundred will be going off within just a 30-minute window. That will crash our defensive systems and overwhelm the Sunflower’s capacity to sustain itself. The way the techs are modeling right now … it doesn’t look like you can be successful.”

I considered, silently. Meanwhile, Tonia and Kin continued to find and destroy missiles according to the targeting triage, an average of 3 or 4 every few minutes.

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