Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [48]
Lanyan kept studying his chronometer, counting down the amount of time that had passed since he'd received the alarm. He knew how fast those military robots could move. "This is real, dammit! A lot of people have already been caught with their pants down. You're going to do damage control. You're the bloody cavalry."
Lanyan bounded onto the lead transport, chasing the last few soldiers up the ramp--much to the discomfiture of the young pilot. All the ships swiftly launched into the thin greenish sky and out into the emptiness between planets.
The General scratched the rough stubble on his chin and looked over at the still-intimidated pilot. "Let me address our soldiers, Mr. Carrera."
When the trainee pilot activated the troop transport's ship-to-ship comm, the speakers filled with overlapping accusations, warnings, and anxious questions across a range of supposedly restricted frequencies. Lanyan took the microphone and stopped all conversations dead. "Cut the chatter! This is no time for you kleebs to be screwing around." He waited for an appropriately respectful silence. "I don't care how green you are, I expect you all to behave like EDF soldiers. That's not a reminder--that's an order."
With in-system engines pushed beyond the official tolerance specs, the hastily assembled rescue fleet reached the asteroid belt shipyards in less than three hours. Three hours. Lanyan could easily imagine how much damage a horde of berserk compies might cause in that amount of time.
Ahead, spangled with artificial lights, reflections from solar collectors, and thermal venting from smelter operations, he could make out the spacedock frameworks and the reinforced skeletons of new ships under construction. But he saw no sign of the main Grid 0 battle group. They should have been there--over a hundred ships, including a Juggernaut! All gone.
Lanyan switched the channel, pinging the shipyard hub. "Somebody over there give me an update so we know who needs rescuing. Where the hell is my battle group?"
The pilot scanned ahead and got up the courage to say, "Those ships must have taken off in a hurry, sir! Look at the glowing wreckage they left behind."
After a burst of frantic and confused reports, Lanyan focused on one man who seemed cooler-headed than the rest. He told the other voices to shut up. The man on the comm turned out to be only a spacedock supervisor, but he had a good overview of what had happened in the battle group.
"First sign of trouble was when we received scattered reports of fighting aboard the Goliath, the Mantas, and the Thunderheads. Their Soldier compies went nuts over there, sir--on all the ships, all at the same time. They started slaughtering bridge crews."
A gruff female voice broke in. "Our worker compies seem to be fine, but I've isolated them as a precaution."
"Good work. But where are all my ships?"
"About an hour ago, the docked battle group went into radio silence, then the Goliath turned and opened fire on our smelters. Destroyed two of them, wrecked one of my spacedocks. Then the ships just took off--ripped themselves free of moorings and headed out to space."
Lanyan growled in his throat. "Well, where the hell did they go?"
"We tracked them on a vertical vector away from the ecliptic. General . . . I don't think there's anybody left alive on board."
"Are you saying that Soldier compies have control of all my battleships?"
"It appears that way, sir."
Worse than he'd imagined, but to solve a problem you had to look forward, not back. He turned to assess the barely trained men and women crowded aboard this fast personnel transport--his saviors-in-training--then did a rapid tally of the cavalry ships he had rounded up. On a moment's notice he had pulled together more than seventy craft and five thousand soldiers.