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"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 Joa
"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 ma
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 Chirdan 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.