Sir John smiled, humourlessly. “Alien-1.”
He keyed a hidden control, activating a holographic starchart. A hundred stars appeared in front of them, each one surrounded by a halo of smaller icons representing British - and human - military installations and deployments. Stephen leaned forward, studying it with interest. A sizable number of icons were orbiting Falkirk, while other - darker - icons were positioned near Alien-1. He sucked in his breath as alerts flashed up on the display, reminding them that some elements were hours or days out of date. Some of the icons on the display might already have been destroyed. The aliens could have begun their advance already.
If they’re coming, Stephen thought. He shook his head. He was morbidly sure the virus was coming, if only to expand into a whole new selection of host bodies. Humans, Tadpoles, Foxes, Cows, Vesy ... not to mention all the animals and planetary biospheres. No, it will be coming. The only question is when they’ll be coming.
“Right now, we have established a multinational blocking force at Falkirk, under the command of Admiral Jimmy Weisskopf,” Sir John said. “He’s a good man - I served with him during the Second Interstellar War. The Chinese were irritated that an American got command of the joint fleet, but the Russians - for some reason - refused to back them and their protests got nowhere. That’s something we may have to watch, but” - he gave a thin-lipped smile - “it should remain well above your pay grade.
“What we don’t have, Captain, is any accurate intelligence on our foe. We know the location of one of their bases, but we don’t know anything else about them. How much territory do they actually control? How many starships do they command? How aggressive are they actually going to be? Frankly, I’m astonished they haven’t launched a major attack already.”
“So am I, sir,” Stephen said.
Sir John nodded, shortly. “Getting that intelligence will be your job, Captain,” he said, lifting his eyes to the chart. “Your ship - and a small flotilla under your command - will be tasked with probing alien space and covertly gathering as much intelligence as possible. Ideally, we would like you to remain undetected ... but we would also like you to capture an alien ship for analysis. That, I’m afraid, will not be conducive to remaining undetected.”
Stephen nodded, slowly. The First Space Lord was right. If they jumped an alien ship at the edge of an inhabited star system, they might be able to capture and dissect it before alien reinforcements arrived ... but it was unlikely they could keep the alien from screaming for help before it was too late. The virus would be alert to Invincible’s presence and do everything in its power to stop the assault carrier from making her escape. He would have to give the matter some thought.
“We’ll think of something,” he said.
“I hope so,” Sir John told him. “You won’t have any valid timescale for the mission. I can’t put any sort of time limit on your deployment. However, if they do mount an offensive into our space, your orders will switch from sneaking around to doing as much damage as possible to the enemy’s rear. Do everything in your power to hamper their thrust into our space. Take out supply dumps, smash cloudscoops, etc ...”
Until we get hunted down and destroyed, Stephen thought. He had few illusions. The virus wasn’t likely to let him raise havoc indefinitely. It will send everything it has after us ... which will ease the pressure on Earth.
“We won’t let you down, sir,” he said.
“I have no doubt of it,” Sir John said. He picked up a white envelope and passed it to Stephen. “Your formal orders, Captain, to take command of Task Force Drake. You’ll note that you have two survey ships - HMS Magellan and HMS Raleigh - as well as two destroyers and four support freighters. You also - and this is the bit where you’re going to have to be diplomatic - have a Russian ship under your command. Yuriy Ivanov is, apparently, a cruiser.”
Stephen lifted his eyebrows. “A cruiser?”
“More like a small battlecruiser, according to our long-range sensors,” Sir John told him. “The Russians haven’t said very much about her, save for the barest handful of details, but we’ve been able to establish that she’s quite large for a cruiser. I think she might have been an experiment that was not a complete success, but they’d done too much work on her to simply scrap the hull and start again. I think they probably class her as expendable.”
He shrugged. “In any case, the Russians have insisted on deploying her to look for Dezhnev.”
Stephen winced. Dezhnev had vanished, sometime during the mission to Alien-1. No one had been able to establish what had happened to the Russian destroyer, although there were no shortage of theories. The virus might have caught a sniff of Dezhnev at some point, tracked her down and jumped her. She’d been so far from Invincible, watching the alien system from what had been supposed to be a safe distance, that her sudden destruction had gone unnoticed. Or ... she might have been captured. The only thing anyone knew for sure was that Dezhnev had never returned to the human sphere.
Unless the virus took the ship intact and sent it creeping through the tramlines, Stephen thought, grimly. How much did it manage to recover from the ship’s datacores?
It wasn’t a pleasant thought. Dezhnev and her crew hadn’t known about the virus. They might not have realised they needed to take extreme precautions to keep their crew safe from infection. And if they had been captured and infected, they’d be sharing everything they knew with the virus soon enough. And then ...
They may know everything about human space, Stephen thought. We have to find out what happened to that ship.
“The Russians do have a point, sir,” he said, slowly. “We do need to know what happened to Dezhnev.”
“Yes, but right now our priority lies in gathering intelligence,” Sir John said. “The Russians have agreed to serve under your command, Captain, but keep an eye on them. There’s something about the whole business that bothers me.”
“Yes, sir,” Stephen said. “Do you have any other orders?”
“You have standing orders to attempt to make peaceful contact if, and only if, it won’t endanger your ship,” Sir John said. “There are ... politicians ... who believe we should at least try to make peaceful contact. I don’t think we can hope to co-exist with the virus, at least until we develop a vaccine, but hope springs eternal in the minds of the deluded. If you see a chance to try, Captain, take it. If not ... well, there’s plenty of leeway in your orders. I will understand.”
“Yes, sir,” Stephen said, feeling his heart sink. “Why haven’t they attacked us already?”
“A good question,” Sir John said. “And the same question has been asked already, countless times, by a number of politicians. We saw enough ships on active duty to give them a real punch, if they wanted to shove us away from Alien-1. The pacifist side of the aisle believes that the virus responded to our presence, but isn’t particularly aggressive. If we leave it alone, it will leave us alone.”
“Sir, it’s absorbed at least two alien races,” Stephen said. “We have good reason to believe that it is very aggressive.”
“Yes,” Sir John said. “And that makes me think that they’re preparing to hit us.”
Stephen nodded, slowly. No military force in human history could launch a major operation without a great deal of planning and preparation, particularly when caught by surprise. The Royal Navy - and every other military force in the human sphere - maintained a Quick Reaction Force, to deal with any unexpected problems, but it took time to gear up the remainder of the military for war. The virus might be taking the time to lay the logistical framework for a push into human space before actually launching the invasion. God knew the Royal Navy would have the same problem if the situation was reversed.
But Alien-1 has to be quite important to them, he thought. At the very least, they should try to secure the systems between Alien-1 and Falkirk.
“They’ll have to blast their way through Falkirk,” Stephen mused. “Unless they have some drive system we’ve never heard of
...”
“There is the jump drive,” Sir John said. “Incredibly expensive and quite dangerous, but they could use it ... if they have it.”
“Yes, sir,” Stephen said. “And they might have it.”
He sighed. The jump drive had been humanity’s best shot at escaping the tyranny of the tramlines, but - so far - no one had managed to slim the system down enough to cram it into a single starship. Even a battleship or a fleet carrier couldn’t carry a jump drive without stripping everything else out of the hull. There was a framework that could be used to jump a fleet from one star to the next - it had been used, famously, to end the last war - but it was grossly inefficient. It was also a sitting duck.
“We’re relying on you to find out, Captain,” Sir John said. He nodded to the envelope in Stephen’s hand. “Your travel orders have been cut, Captain. A shuttle has been assigned to you at Northolt, which will fly you directly to Invincible. Ideally, I’ll want your squadron assembled and you on your way by the end of the week. The Russian ship will join you when you depart.”
“Yes, sir,” Stephen said, crisply. He’d only brought a small carryall down to Earth when he’d left the ship. There was nothing he couldn’t replace, if he had to head straight back to Invincible. “I won’t let you down.”
“Collect a car from downstairs,” Sir John ordered. “And good luck.”
And don’t go talking to anyone else along the way, Stephen added, silently. It was rare for the First Space Lord to take such interest in a mere captain’s travel arrangements. Normally, one of his officers would take care of it. But Stephen was a political football. His family connections had embroiled him in politics from a very early age. He doubted the First Space Lord liked that. Better to get me off the planet as quickly as possible.
“Thank you, sir,” he said. He stood and saluted. “I’ll be back.”
The First Space Lord’s staff were nothing if not efficient. A car was waiting for him as soon as he reached the door, with a junior officer at the wheel. The Royal Navy had never been particularly enamoured of the concept of self-driving cars, fearing the dangers of what would happen when - if - hackers managed to break into the control network. It had never happened, but the network had been shut down deliberately during the Battle of Earth. Afterwards, Stephen had heard that demand for human-driven cars had skyrocketed. Too many people had been trapped, away from their homes, when their cars had simply pulled to the side and shut down.
They shouldn’t have depended on a computer to do the driving, Stephen thought, as he clambered into the backseat. They were lucky it wasn’t a great deal worse.
Rain was pelting down over London, splashing off the car’s windows, but there was still a small army of protesters outside the secure zone. Stephen watched them for a long moment, wondering if they really thought they’d accomplish anything. It only took one side to start a war and, so far, the virus had been very aggressive. Stephen had even heard scenarios that suggested the virus had sent the generation ship to Wensleydale in hopes of securing a foothold on the colony world, although that would have required precognition. The generation ship had been launched hundreds of years ago and Wensleydale had only been settled for five. But then, it probably didn’t matter. The virus didn’t need a whole new host population to breed.
We might have to start killing entire planets, Stephen thought. If it really can take over a whole biosphere, we’re done.
He leaned back in his seat as the car slipped onto the motorway and accelerated towards Northholt. The streets were clear, with surprisingly little traffic. Wartime preparations were starting to bite, he guessed. He’d caught snatches of a debate in parliament about evacuating the children to the countryside, in hopes of avoiding the chaos of the First Interstellar War, but so far nothing seemed to have been decided. Stephen himself was in two minds about it. The cities would be priority targets, if the virus took the high orbitals, yet scattering the population randomly would tear families apart for years. But if Earth was attacked again, it would be the least of their problems ...
“We’ll be at Northholt in twenty minutes, sir,” the driver said. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No, thank you,” Stephen said.
He opened his orders and read them, twice. There weren’t any surprises, although there was an order to cooperate with the Russians as much as possible. He read the section twice, then guessed that someone was trying to patch up the Great Power alliance that had dominated the world for nearly a hundred years. Stephen suspected that that particular genie had well and truly escaped the bottle - there were quite a few lesser powers making their bid for great power status - yet he didn’t blame the Foreign Office for trying. An alliance with the four other Great Powers might have involved a great deal of holding one’s nose while turning a blind eye to the less savoury aspects of one’s allies, but it had been relatively predictable. A world where there were more than five superpowers would be far less understandable.
And more likely to go crashing down into war, Stephen thought. The Solar Treaty forbade acts of aggression within the solar system, but - with more nations deploying warships and space-based weapons - the treaty was starting to fray. And who knows what will happen then?
Chapter Five
Alice dropped to the deck, braced herself, then started to perform a series of push-ups. Her body started to ache at once, ache in a manner that reminded her of her first days in the CCF, back when she hadn’t been anything like as fit. She cursed under her breath and forced herself to keep going, reminding herself - in the words of her instructors - that pain was weakness leaving the body. And yet, she felt dreadfully unfit. It was all she could do to stumble through a pathetic fifty push-ups. She had the nasty feeling that it would take her a very long time indeed to qualify for active service.
“I’m not giving up,” she muttered, as she sank to the hard metal deck. Her body was covered in sweat. “I’m not giving up.”
“That’s good to hear,” a new voice said. “Captain Campbell?”
Alice looked up, sharply. A middle-aged man was standing there, wearing a grey suit he somehow managed to make look like a uniform. She rolled over and stood, wondering precisely how she’d managed to miss him entering the gym. She was supposed to be aware of her surroundings at all times, damn it. Her eyes flickered over her visitor, catching the tell-tale signs of a military career. She would bet half her paycheck that he was a marine himself. He wasn’t even looking at her chest.
Not that there’s much to see, she thought, ruefully. Her sister had inherited their mother’s chest. Years of constant training will do that to you.
“Yes,” she said, carefully. “And you are?”
“Colonel Watson,” the man said. He held out a hand, which she shook automatically. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
Alice eyed him, warily. “Are you sure it shouldn’t be Doctor Watson?”
Watson smiled. “Ah, you’ve caught me out. I’m also a practicing psychologist in my other life. I got a bit of shell in me, you see, and I didn’t want to leave the marines.”
“I see,” Alice said. She didn’t relax. She could run rings around a civilian psychologist, someone who knew less about the military life than she did about the civilian, but someone with genuine experience would be harder to fool. Not that she wanted to fool Doctor Watson, of course. She just wanted him to clear her for active duty. “Why didn’t you study actual medicine?”
Watson showed no offense at her sally. “A battlefield medic would have to keep up with the rest of the company,” he reminded her. “And that, alas, is beyond me.”
He cocked his head. “I’ve taken the liberty of organising coffee and biscuits in the next room,” he added. “Will you join me for a snack?”
“I’ve been on weirder dates,” Alice said, more to see how he would react to her words than anything else. He showed no visible reaction. “Why not?”
She grabbed a towel off the rack and rubbed herself d
own as she followed Watson into the next compartment. It was nothing more than a small sitting room, with a table made of faux-wood and a pair of comfortable armchairs. A tray of imported biscuits sat on the table, next to a pot of coffee, a jug of milk and two empty mugs. Alice felt her mouth begin to water as she saw the biscuits. She hadn’t tasted proper food since she’d been infected. The asteroid staff did their best, but they couldn't disguise the origins of their food. Their meat and vegetables were as fake as the wooden table in front of her.
“Take a seat,” Watson said. He poured them both mugs of coffee, then sat down facing her. “This discussion is to be strictly informal.”
Alice winced. “I take it that means that the records will only be watched by a few hundred people?”
“More a case of us both speaking freely, without regard to rank,” Watson said. He didn’t bother to deny that the conversation would be recorded. Alice wouldn’t have believed him if he had. There was little privacy on a military base. “I read your application to return to active duty with great interest.”
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