The Armageddon Inheritance

  He never saw the ten-thousand-megaton missile coming directly at him.

  * * *

  "Missile armaments exhausted," General Tama Hideoshi's ops officer reported, and Tama grunted. His own feeds had already told him, and he could feel his fighters dying... just as Thich had died. Who would have thought of turning shipkillers into proximity-fused SAMs? His interceptors' energy armaments weren't going to be enough against that kind of overkill!

  "All fighters withdraw to rearm," he ordered. "Launch reserve strike. Instruct all pilots to maintain triple normal separation. They are to engage only with missiles-I repeat, only with missiles-then withdraw to rearm."

  "Yes, sir."

  Earth's fighters withdrew. Over three hundred of them had perished, yet that was but a tithe of their total strength, and the Achuultani probe had been reduced to twenty-seven units.

  The flight crews streamed back past the ODCs, heading for their own bases. It was up to the orbital fortifications, now-them, and the fire still slamming into the Achuultani from Earth's southernmost PDCs.

  Brashieel watched the small warships scatter, fleeing his fire. The Protectors had found the way to defeat them, and he-he, a lowly assistant servant of thunder-had pointed the way!

  He felt his nestmates' approval, yet he could not rejoice. Two-thirds of Vindicator's brothers had died, and the nest-killers' missiles still lashed the survivors. Worse, they were about to enter energy weapon range of those waiting fortresses. None of the scouts had done that before; they had engaged only with missiles at extreme range. Now was the great test. Now was the Time of Fire, when they would learn what those sullen fortresses could do.

  Andrew Samson watched the depleted fighters fell back. Imagine swatting fighters with heavy missiles! We couldn't've gotten away with it; our sublight missiles are too slow, too easy to evade.

  The full Achuultani fire shifted to the Bitch and her sisters, and the ODC shuddered, twitching as if in fear as the warheads battered her shield. Her shield generators heated dangerously as Captain M'wange asked the impossible of them. They were covering too many hyper bands, Samson thought. Sooner or later, they would miss one, or an anti-matter warhead would overload them. And when that happened, Lucy Samson's little boy Andrew would die.

  But in the meantime, he thought, taking careful aim... and bellowed in triumph as yet another massive warship tore apart. They were coming to kill him, but if they had not, how could he have killed them?

  "Stand by energy weapons," Admiral Hawter said harshly. ODCs Eleven, Thirteen, and Sixteen were gone; there was going to be one hell of a hole over the pole, whatever happened. Far worse, some of their missiles had gotten through to Earth's surface. He didn't know how many, but any were too many when they carried that kind of firepower. Yet they were down to nineteen ships. He tried to tell himself that was a good sign, and his lips thinned over his teeth as the Achuultani kept coming.

  They were about to discover the difference between the beams of a battleship and a three-hundred-thousand-ton ODC, he thought viciously.

  Brashieel flinched as the waiting fortresses exploded with power. The terrible energy weapons which had slain so many of Vindicator's brothers in ship-to-ship combat were as nothing beside this! They smote full upon the warships' shields, and as they smote, those ships died. One, two, seven-still they died! Nothing could withstand that fury. Nothing!

  "All right!" Andrew Samson shouted. Six of them already, and more going! He picked a target whose shields wavered under fire from three different ODCs and popped a gravitonic warhead neatly through them. His victim perished, and this time there was no question who'd made the kill.

  "Withdraw."

  The order went out, and Brashieel sighed with gratitude. Lord of Thought Mosharg must have learned what they had come to learn. They could leave.

  Assuming they could get away alive.

  "They're withdrawing!" someone shouted, and Gerald Hatcher nodded. Yes, they were, but they'd cost too much before they went. Two missiles had actually gotten through the planetary shield despite all that Vassily and the PDCs could do, and thank God those bastards didn't have gravitonic warheads.

  He closed his eyes briefly. One missile had been an ocean strike, and God only knew what that was going to do to Earth's coastlines and ecology. The other had hit Australia, almost exactly in the center of Brisbane, and Gerald Hatcher felt the weight of personal despair. No shelter could withstand a direct hit of that magnitude, and how in the name of God could he tell Isaiah Hawter that he had just become a childless widower?

  The last Aku'Ultan warship vanished, fleeing into hyper before the reserve fighter strike caught it. Three of the seventy-two which had attacked escaped.

  Behind them, the southern hemisphere of the planet smoked and smoldered under twenty thousand megatons of destruction, and far, far ahead of them, Lord Chirdan's engineers completed their final tests. Power plants came on line, stoking the furnaces of the mighty drive housings, and Lord Chirdan himself gave the order to engage.

  The moon men called Iapetus shuddered in its endless orbit around the planet they called Saturn. Shuddered... and began to move slowly away from its primary.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Servant of Thunders Brashieel crouched upon his new duty pad in master fire control. He still did not know how Vindicator had survived so long, but Small Lord Hantorg seemed to believe much of the credit was his. He was grateful for his small lord's confidence, and even more that his new promotion gave him such splendid instrumentation.

  He bent his eyes on the vision plate, watching the rocky mass which paced Vindicator. The Nest seldom used such large weapons, but it was time and past time for the Protectors to finish these infernal nest-killers and move on.

  Gerald Hatcher felt a million years old as he propped his feet on the coffee table in Horus's office. Even with biotechnics, there was a limit to the twenty-two-hour days a man could put in, and he'd passed it long ago.

  For seven months they had held on-somehow-but the end was in sight. His dog-weary personnel knew it, and the civilians must suspect. The heavens had been pocked with too much flame. Too many of their defenders had died... and their children. Fourteen times now the Achuultani had driven hyper missiles past the planetary shield. Most had struck water, lashing Earth's battered coasts with tsunamis, wracking her with radiation and salt-poisoned typhoons, but four had found targets ashore. By God's grace, one had landed in the middle of the African desert, but Brisbane had been joined by over four hundred million more dead, and all the miracles his people had wrought were but delays.

  How Vassily kept his tap up was more than Hatcher could tell, but he was holding it together, with his bare hands for all intents and purposes. The power still flowed, and Geb and his zombie-like crews kept the shield generators on line somehow. They could shut down no more than a handful for overhaul at any one time, but, like Vassily, Geb was doing the impossible.

  Yes, Hatcher thought, Earth had its miracle-workers... but at a price.

  "How-" He paused to clear his throat. "How's Isaiah?"

  "Unchanged," Horus said sadly, and Hatcher closed his eyes in pain.

  It had been terrible enough for Isaiah to preside over the slaughter of his crews, but Brisbane had finished him. Now he simply sat in his small room, staring at the pictures of his wife and children.

  His friends knew how magnificently he'd fought, rallying his battered ships again and again; he knew only that he hadn't been good enough. That he'd let the Achuultani murder his family, and that most of the crews who'd fought for him with such supreme gallantry had also died. So they had, and too many of the survivors were like Isaiah-burned out, dead inside, hating themselves for being less than gods in the hour of their world's extremity.

  Yet there were the others, Hatcher reminded himself. The ones like Horus, who'd assumed Isaiah's duties when he collapsed. Like Adrienne Robbins, the senior surviving parasite skipper, who'd refused a direct order to take her damaged ship out of action.
Like Vassily and Geb, who'd somehow risen above themselves to perform impossible tasks. Like the bone-weary crews of the ODCs and PDCs who fought on day after endless, hopeless day, and the fighter crews who went out again and again, and came back in ever fewer numbers.

  And, he thought, the people like Tsien Tao-ling, those very rare men and women who simply had no breaking point... and thank God for them.

  Of the Supreme Chiefs of Staff, Singhman and Ki had been killed... and so had Hawter, Hatcher thought sadly. Tama Hideoshi had taken over all that remained of Fighter Command, but Vassily was chained to Antarctica, Frederick Amesbury was working himself into his own grave in Plotting, trying desperately to keep tabs on the outer system through his Achuultani-crippled arrays, and Chiang Chien-su couldn't possibly be spared from his heartbreaking responsibility for Civil Defense. So even with Horus taking over the remnants of Hawter's warships and ODCs, Hatcher had been forced to hand the entire planet-side defense net over to Tsien while he himself concentrated on finding a way to keep the Achuultani from destroying Earth.

  But he was a general, not a wizard.

  "We've had it, Horus." He watched the old Imperial carefully, but the governor didn't even flinch. "We're just kicking and scratching on the way to the gallows. I don't see how Vassily can keep the tap up another two weeks."

  "Should we stop kicking and scratching, then?" The question came out with a ghost of a smile, and Hatcher smiled back.

  "Hell no. I just needed to say it to someone before I go back and start kicking again. Even if they take us out, we can make sure there are less of them for the next world on their list."

  "My thoughts exactly." Horus squeezed the bridge of his nose wearily. "Should we tell the civilians?"

  "Better not," Hatcher sighed. "I'm not really scared of a panic, but I don't see any reason to frighten them any worse than they already are."

  "Agreed."

  Horus rose and walked slowly to his office's glass wall. The Colorado night was ripped by solid sheets of lightning as the outraged atmosphere gave up some of the violence it had been made to absorb, and a solid, unending roll of thunder shook the glass. Lightning and snow, he thought; crashing thunder and blizzards. Too much vaporized sea water, too many cubic kilometers of steam. The planetary albedo had shifted, more sunlight was reflected, and the temperature had dropped. There was no telling how much further it would go... and thank the Maker General Chiang had stockpiled food so fanatically, for the world's crops were gone. But at least this one was turning to rain. Freezing cold rain, but rain.

  And they were still alive, he told himself as Hatcher stood silently to leave. Alive. Yet that, too, would change. Gerald was right. They were losing it, and something deep inside him wanted to curl up and get the dying finished. But he couldn't do that.

  "Gerald," his soft voice stopped Hatcher at the door, and Horus turned his eyes from the storm to meet the general's. "In case we don't get a chance to talk again, thank you."

  The Hoof of Tarhish pawed the vacuum. Not even the Aku'Ultan could accelerate such masses with a snap of the fingers, but its speed had grown. Only a few twelves of tiao per segment, at first, then more. And more. More!

  Now Vindicator rode the mighty projectile's flank, joined with his brothers in a solid phalanx to guard their weapon.

  They must be seen soon, but the Hoof's defenses were strong, and the nest-killers could not even range accurately upon it without first blasting aside the half-twelve of great twelves of scouts which remained. They would defend the Hoof with their own deaths and clear a way through what remained of the nest-killers' defenses, for they were Protectors.

  "Oh my God."

  Sir Frederick Amesbury's Plotting teams were going berserk trying to analyze the Achuultani's current maneuvers, for there was no sane reason for them to be clustered that way on a course like that. But something about the whisper cut through the weary, frantic background hum, and he turned to Major Joanna Osgood, his senior watch officer.

  "What is it, Major?" But her mahogany face was frozen and she did not answer. He touched her shoulder. "Jo?"

  Major Osgood shook herself.

  "I found the answer, sir," she said. "Iapetus."

  Her Caribbean accent's flattened calm frightened Amesbury, for he knew what produced that tone. There was a realm beyond fear, for when no hope remained there was no reason to fear.

  "Explain, Major," he said gently.

  "I finally managed to hyper an array out-system and got a look at Saturn, sir." She met the general's gaze calmly. "Iapetus isn't there anymore."

  "It's true, Ger." Amesbury's weary face looked back from Hatcher's com screen. "It took some time to get a probe near enough to burn through their ships' energy emissions and confirm it, but we found it right enough. Dead center in their formation: Iapetus-the eighth moon of Saturn."

  "I see." Hatcher wanted to curse, to revile God for letting this happen, but there was no point, and his voice was soft. "How bad is it?"

  "It's the end, unless we can stop the bloody thing. This is no asteroid, Ger-it's a bleeding moon. Six times the mass of Ceres."

  "Moving how fast?"

  "Fast enough to see us off," Amesbury replied grimly. "They could have done that simply by dropping it into Sol's gravity well and letting it fall 'downhill' to us, but we'd've had too much time. They've put shields on it, but if we could pop a few hyper missiles through them, we might be able to blow the bugger apart before it reaches us. That's why they're bringing it in under power; they don't want to expose it to our fire any longer than they have to.

  "Their drives are much slower than ours are, but they've got the ruddy gravity well to work with, too. I don't know how they did it-even if they hadn't been picking off our sensor arrays, we were watching the asteroids, not the outer-system moons-but I reckon they started out with a very low initial acceleration. Only they're coming from Saturn, Ger. I don't know when they actually started, but we're just past opposition, which means we're over one-and-a-half billion kilometers apart on a straight line. But they're not on a straight-line course... and they've been accelerating all the way.

  "They're coming at us at upwards of five hundred kilometers per second-seven times faster than a 'fast' meteorite. I haven't bothered to calculate how many trillions of megatons that equates to, because it doesn't matter. That moon will punch through our shield like a bullet through butter, and they'll reach us in about six days. That's how long we've got to stop them."

  "We can't, Frederick," Hatcher sighed. "We just can't do it."

  "I bloody well know we can't," Amesbury said harshly, "but that doesn't mean we don't have to try!"

  "I know." Hatcher made his shoulders straighten. "Leave it with me, Frederick. We'll give it our best shot."

  "I know," Amesbury said much more softly. "And... God bless, Ger."

  Faces paled as the news spread among Earth's defenders. This was the end. When that stupendous hammer came down, Earth would shatter like a walnut.

  Some had given too much, stretched their reserves too thin, and they snapped. Most simply retreated from reality, but a handful went berserk, and their fellows were almost grateful, for subduing them diverted their minds from their own terror.

  Yet only a minority broke. For most, survival, even hope, were no longer factors, and they manned their battle stations without hysteria, cold and determined... and desperate.

  Servant of Thunders Brashieel noted the changing energy signatures. So. The nest-killers knew, and they would strive to thrust the Hoof aside, to destroy it. Already the orbital fortresses were moving, concentrating to meet them, but many smaller hooves had been prepared to pelt the planetary shield, driving it back, exposing those fortresses to the Protectors' thunder. They would clear a path for the Hoof, and nothing could stop them. The nest-killers could not even see the Hoof to fire upon it unless they destroyed Vindicator and his brothers, and they would never do that in time.

  He watched his magnificent instruments as Lord of Order Chird
an shifted formation, placing a thicker wall of his nestlings between the Hoof and the nest-killers' world. Vindicator anchored one edge of that wall.

  Lieutenant Andrew Samson felt queerly calm. Governor Horus had shifted his remaining forts to give the Bitch support, but the Achuultani had expected that. Kinetic projectiles had hammered the planetary shield back for days, stripping it away from the ODCs. Raiding squadrons had charged in, paying a high price for their attacks but picking off the battered ODCs. Of the six which originally had protected the pole, only the damaged Bitch remained, and she'd expended too much ammunition defending herself. Without Earth's orbital industry, just keeping up with expenditures was difficult... not to mention the risk colliers ran between the shield and the ODCs to resupply them.