Indeed, Jorgen watched the screen as the inscrutable motion of the many platforms that made up Detritus’s shells lined them up, providing an opening. The battleships immediately started firing hefty kinetic shots, projectiles that were the size of fighters. Jorgen sent a silent prayer to the stars and the spirits of his ancestors who sailed them. For all his skill and training in a cockpit, he couldn’t fight a battleship.
The fate of humankind rested in the hands of the Saints and the DDF engineers.
The room grew so silent, Jorgen could hear his own heartbeat. Nobody breathed as the rain of projectiles dove toward the planet. Then something changed—one of the platforms at the side of the opening started moving, its ancient mechanisms lighting up. Data started streaming across Nydora’s secondary monitor—reports from engineering and DDF scout ships.
The planet Detritus was no easy target. Nydora’s main screen highlighted the platform in motion, a flat sheet of metal. It seemed to move slowly, but so did the bombs. Jorgen was watching from such a distance that his brain had trouble comprehending the scale of the encounter—that section of metal was a hundred kilometers across.
As the bombs approached, sections of the platform opened up and launched a series of bright energy blasts into space. The blasts crashed into the projectiles fired by the battleships, meeting force with energy, blowing them away and negating their momentum. A shield sprang up around the platform, intercepting the debris, slowing it and preventing it from raining down upon the surface.
Everyone in the room let out a collective sigh of relief. Nydora even whooped. The battleships slowly withdrew, indicating—although they’d fired on Alta itself, and obviously wouldn’t have minded destroying it—that this had been a test of the planetary defenses.
Jorgen patted Nydora on the back, then stepped to the side of the room, breathing in and out to calm his nerves.
Oddly though, Admiral Cobb himself remained in place at his monitor, limply holding an empty coffee cup and staring at the screen, even after all the others had gone to make announcements or offer congratulations.
Jorgen stepped closer. “Sir?” he asked. “You don’t look pleased. The engineers got the defenses up in time.”
“That wasn’t one of the platforms our engineers worked on,” Cobb said softly. “That was Detritus’s old defensive programming. We got lucky that a working platform was nearby, and was still capable of deploying anti-bombardment countermeasures.”
“Oh,” Jorgen said. A little of his relief melted away. “But . . . we’re still safe, sir.”
“Note the power readings at the bottom of the screen, Captain,” Cobb said. “The amount of energy that disruption drained is incredible. These old platforms barely have any juice in them. Even if we get others functioning, it will take months or years to fabricate new solar collectors.
“And even if we get that going, and the countermeasures continue to work . . . well, if the Krell start a sustained bombardment, they’ll cut through these platforms eventually. Our defenses aren’t meant to protect us from a long-term attack. They’re a last-ditch fail-safe meant to stall invaders so that friendly battleships can get to the system and fight them off. Only we don’t
Jorgen gazed back across the room of people celebrating. They looked commanding in their stiffly pressed and spotless DDF uniforms. That was just a front. Compared to the enemy’s resources, the DDF wasn’t an opposing military—it was a group of ragged refugees with barely a gun between them.
“We stay trapped on this planet,” Cobb said, “and we die. It’s that simple. We’re an egg with an extra-hard shell, yes, but we’re done as soon as the enemy realize that they can’t crack us with a spoon and decide to get a sledgehammer instead. Unfortunately, our only chance of escape vanished without a trace. That girl . . .”
“I stand by my decision, sir,” Jorgen said. “Spensa will come through for us. We just need to give her time.”
“Still wish you’d called me,” Cobb said. There hadn’t been any repercussions for what Jorgen had done. He could argue that, under code 17-b, he’d been capable of making the call he’d made, but the truth was that he hadn’t even been the senior officer on that mission. Colonel Ng from the ground forces had been leading the security team. Jorgen should have talked to him, or called Cobb.
It was possible that, in sending Spensa away, Jorgen had doomed them all.
Jorgen took a deep breath. “Sir. I might need to disobey another rule.”
“I don’t know half of them anyway, Captain. Don’t worry about it.”
“No, sir. I mean . . . a family rule. Something we’re not supposed to speak about.”
