Guardsmen of Tomorrow by Martin H. & Segriff Greenberg, Larry Segriff Page A

lens-shaped main hull.
    We’d cut the singleship swarm in half by now, according to the status displays.
    Heidi powered up her tachyon-pulse cannon again; it was risky, with her down to just two engines, but we needed to level the playing field. The discharge from her TCP destroyed one of the two remaining Nidichars : there was now only one big Altairian ship to deal with, and forty-seven single-occupant craft.
    I left Heidi to finish mopping up the singleships; we were going to take out the final Nidichar . I really didn’t want to use our TCP-the energy drain was too great. But we couldn’t risk being hit by another stealth torpedo; we’d left our cloud of expelled atmosphere far behind when we’d gone after the swarm, and-And the Pteranodon rocked again. A structural member dropped from the ceiling, appearing as if by magic as it passed through the holobubble; it crashed to the deck next to my chair.
    “Evasive maneuvers!” I shouted.
    “Not possible, Captain,” said Kalsi. “That came from the planet’s surface; its rotation must have finally given a ground-based disrupter bank a line of sight at us.”
    “Cargo status?”
    “Still green, according to the board,” said Champlain.
    “Send someone down there,” I said. “I want an eyeball inspection.”
    Heidi had already moved the Quetzalcoatlus so that the remaining singleships were between her and the planet; the ground-based cannon couldn’t get her without going through its own people.
    The remaining Nidichar fired at us again, but-Way to go, Nguyen!
    A good, clean blast severed the habitat module from the two engines-a lucky guess about which was which had paid off. The habitat went pinwheeling away into the night, atmosphere puffing out of the connecting struts.
    We swung around again, carving into the remaining singleships. Heidi was doing the same; there were only fifteen of them left.
    “Incom-” shouted Kalsi, but he didn’t get the whole word out before the disrupter beam from the planet’s surface shook us again. An empty gray square appeared in the holobubble to my right; the cameras along the starboard side of the ship had been destroyed.
    “We won’t survive another blast from the planet’s surface,” Champlain said.
    “It must take them a while to recharge that cannon, or they’d have blown both of us out of the sky by now,” Heidi’s hologram said. “It’s probably a meteor deflector, never intended for battle.”
    While we talked, Nguyen took out four more singleships, and the Quetzalcoatlus blasted another five into oblivion.
    “If it weren’t for that ground-based cannon…” I said.
    Heidi nodded once, decisively. “We all know what we came here to do-and that’s more important than any of us.” The holographic head swiveled; she was talking to her own bridge crew now. “Mr. Rabinovitch, take us down.”
    If there was a protest, I never heard it. But I doubt there was. I didn’t know Rabinovitch-but he was a Star Guard, too.
    Heidi turned back to me. “This is for Peter Chin,” she said. And then, perhaps more for her ears than my own, “And for Craig.”
    The Quetzalcoatlus dived toward Altair III, its sublight thrusters going full blast. Its force screens had no trouble getting it through the atmosphere, and apparently the ground-based cannon wasn’t yet recharged: her ship crashed right into the facility housing it on the southern continent. We could see the shock wave moving across the planet’s surface, a ridge of compressed air expanding outward from where the Quetzalcoatlus had hit.
    Nguyen made short work of the remaining singleships, their explosions a series of pinpoint novas against the night.
    And Altair III spun below us, defenseless.
    Humanity had just barely survived five hundred years living with the nuclear bomb. It had been used eleven times on Earth and Mars, and over one hundred million had died- but the human race had gone on.
    But our special cargo, the Annihilator, was more-much more.