A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [168]
But the human forces had not yet been instructed to engage.
After receiving the General’s endgame orders, the three battered robot Mantas launched all their remaining weapons at once, drained their energy reserves, and still accelerated forward, engines on overload. The hydrogues couldn’t possibly get out of the way in time. The reactors on the compy ships glowed intense and blindingly hot—as each Manta crashed headlong into a chosen warglobe, rupturing stardrive-containment chambers, unleashing explosions like tiny suns.
All three target warglobes broke, burned, and sank out of sight into the deep clouds. Utterly destroyed.
“Thunderhead platforms! Second and final line of defense.” The General’s voice carried an added tone of threat as if to impress any eavesdropping enemies. “Deploy your nukes, and then get out of there as fast as you can.”
The platcoms dispatched their harvest of nuclear warheads, targeting the rising warglobes. As the atomics fell, the cumbersome weapons platforms moved up and away from the clouds, safe from the blastwaves and the damaging electromagnetic pulses.
The wave of nukes went off like newborn stars. Dazzling light and intense radiation ripped through the newly initiated storms. The waiting human-crewed Mantas and Juggernauts hovered above the poles of Osquivel, monitoring the incredible devastation below.
The EDF soldiers cheered and whooped as they saw the atomic flashes. “Yeah, crispy fried drogues!”
“That’ll boil them in their bubbles.”
“They should have stayed home and left us alone.”
Tasia sat like a statue in her command chair, watching the flashes but seeing no cause to celebrate. It wasn’t over yet. But now, the final thread of remaining hope was gone; even if the drogues hadn’t gotten him, Robb could never have survived all those atomic explosions. She felt the power simmering in her Manta, the integral weapons batteries, and the squadrons of combat Remoras parked belowdecks and ready for launch. It was time to do something.
Tasia squirmed restlessly in her chair. “Come on, General, turn us loose,” she muttered under her breath. “I am really ready to hurt someone right now.”
“Damn! Even after all those nukes, they’re still coming,” announced the platcom of one of the Thunderheads. “Look, they’re still coming!”
At least Lanyan didn’t pretend to be surprised. “How the hell do we get rid of those things?”
In the still-glowing afterwash of nuclear detonations, Tasia saw a greater concentration of the enemy than humans had ever faced before. Warglobe after warglobe climbed out of the now-radioactive clouds, like bubbles boiling up from a cauldron.
Lanyan placed his remaining compy-crewed Mantas in the vanguard where they could confront the initial fire. “Showtime! Hit them with everything you’ve got! Remember, these are the same drogues who wiped out Boone’s Crossing.”
“As if we needed extra reasons to hate them,” Tasia mumbled loud enough for her bridge crew to hear. She leaned forward in her seat as her Manta dropped into firing position. Down below, even more warglobes rose into the battle zone, hundreds and hundreds of them. “Here they come.”
87
ZHETT KELLUM
Huddled inside secure bolt-holes within the rubble rings of Osquivel, the Roamers watched as Armageddon blossomed around them.
“I really do feel like a rabbit,” Zhett Kellum said, adjusting her position. Her left leg had fallen asleep, even in the low gravity.
“By damn, the Eddies are going to mess things up for all of us,” Del Kellum said. “Look! Here come the drogues. What did the General expect, after that bombardment?” He toggled through the available screen visuals transmitted by dozens of hidden imagers dispersed around the ring. “Just be glad we’re not a part of this.”
“We’re all part of it, Dad. Those warglobes would be just as happy to fry Roamers as they are to cook the Big Goose.”
Most of the Osquivel shipbuilders had already