their scout ships out beyond the shells. The feed showed two enormous Krell battleships moving toward the planet.
“They’re settling into positions,” Nydora whispered, “where they can shoot through an upcoming gap in the defensive platforms and hit Alta Base on the surface.”
“Can we fire back?” Jorgen asked.
Nydora shook her head. “We don’t have control of the long-range guns on the outer platforms yet—and even if we did, those battleships are far enough away that they’d be able to move before our shots arrived. The planet, though, can’t move.”
Jorgen’s stomach twisted upon itself. From orbit, the enemy could bombard the surface of Detritus with a devastating rain of fire and death. With sustained shelling, and with the planet’s own gravity working in the Krell’s favor, those battleships would be able to obliterate even the deepest caverns.
“What are our chances?” Jorgen asked.
“Depends on how far engineering got . . .”
Jorgen felt helpless as he watched the two battleships glide into position, then open gunports.
“No response to our requests to speak to them,” someone down the row said. “Doesn’t seem like they’re going to give us a warning shot first.”
That had always been the Krell’s way. No warning. No quarter. No demands for surrender. The DDF knew—from the information Spensa had stolen—that much of what the Krell had done so far had been intended only to suppress the humans. Six months ago, however, the enemy had moved to attempting full-on extermination.
“Why now, though?” Jorgen asked.
“They had to wait for an alignment of the platforms,” Nydora said. “This is their first clear shot at Alta in weeks. That’s why they’re moving now.”
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. Finally some good news. One of the vice admirals called in over the main comm line to congratulate the engineers on their work.
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