by B. V. Larson
“And by really nice, I mean, you’re such a pussy.” Vango put up his arms to block a casual left hook and snickered.
“Speaking of the P word…believe me, as soon as she’s off duty you won’t see me.”
“I hear you. If I had a wife like that, I wouldn’t keep her waiting either,” Vango said.
“Does that relate to her attractiveness or her fierce punctuality?” This time Rick’s jab connected to Vango’s shoulder.
“Umm…no comment?”
Laughing, they turned in to the wardroom, a big space on a populous and officer-heavy ship like this assault carrier. Marine officers were a relative few, but the Aerospace Forces pilots and their partner Weapons Systems Officers, or “wizzos,” made up for them, and the room was filled with swaggering bags.
“Vango!” came a cry. Skipping toward them was a stocky raven-haired woman with an ethereally beautiful face, almost as if someone had stuck the wrong head on her torso.
“Helen!” Vango hugged her and turned to Rick. “Rick, this is my wizzo, Sub-Lieu Troya Portland. Helen, this is Commander Rick Johnstone.”
“Helen?” Rick asked, then answered his own question with a snap of his fingers. “Helen of Troy.”
“Got it in one, Commander wirehead. V told me all about you. Like an uncle?”
“Like one, yeah,” Rick answered. “I’m only twelve years older than he is, but I’ve known him since he was born. We lived across the street from each other most of our childhood.”
Helen looked at the two of them. “So Rick, what was it like growing up with the son of the leader of the whole planet?”
“Give it a rest, Helen,” Vango scolded. “We’re forty years from home and we might never see them again. The Admiral is our boss now and the closest relation I have to him is Uncle Rick here, who’s a bridge officer on Conquest. I volunteered for this mission because I wanted to get away from Dad’s shadow, not live in it.”
“Okay, boss. Mister Rick Sir, I see you wear a ring. Mean anything?” Her face dimpled lasciviously as she ran her tongue over her upper lip.
Rick laughed uncomfortably. “Uh, hey, Vango told me you were gay…”
“And she is,” Vango interrupted. “She enjoys using that face to make men squirm. Just like her namesake.”
Helen responded, “Be glad I am, V, or Daniela would have something to worry about.”
Vango rolled his eyes. “Now I have something to worry about. How’d they ever allow you on this mission, anyway?”
“Because I got no problem with breeding, flyboy, I just don’t like the injector all you guys want to use on me. I’ll raise my quota of bambinos when the time comes. Until then, I’m going to have my fun.” With that, she flounced off to throw her arms around a petite blonde with pilot’s wings on her flat chest.
“Damn, she’s so right, too. With Dannie and all the rest of the colonists staying in coldsleep, looks like no fun for Yours Truly.” Vango shrugged, poured himself tea from the machine against the wall. He motioned for them to sit down out of the press.
“Too bad they can’t wake your wife up.” Rick got a cup of juice and sat.
“Naw, that would just be a distraction, and if I did it everyone else would want to, and where would we cram thousands of civilians? Better they stay where they are…stacked like slabs of meat in tubes.”
“Don’t sweat it too much, Van. They’re deep inside Conquest and if we lose her…well, we’ve lost the fleet. That’s why she’s armored like a battleship and armed like a squadron.”
They drank in thoughtful silence for a moment before Rick reached into his pocket. “Got something for ya.” He slid a pinkie-drive over, with a memory wafer smaller than its plug.
“Software?”
“Finished updating it this morning. I submitted it to the Combat Cyber team for evaluation, but you know they won’t approve it without more testing than we have time for.”
Vango rubbed the drive between his thumb and forefinger. “Is it solid?”
“My friend, it is solid. I did most of it during my waking duty year. It’s based on proven quasi-AI heuristic algorithms. It will give you a variable boost in automated response depending on how much time you give it to learn. Pretty soon it will be flying your ship better than you do, and it will help Helen fight your StormCrow better than ever. But she’ll probably never notice – everything will just work smoother and faster.”
“Oh, she’ll notice. What she’ll make of it, I don’t know.” Vango put the drive in a pocket and zipped it shut. “What if it glitches?”
“Then pull it out. It runs from the drive, only loads a minimum presence. Reboot if it gives you any trouble after that. Relax, buddy,” Rick said clapping Vango on his shoulder. “If this works, Cyber will have its test.”
“And if it doesn’t, we’ll both be in deep kimchi, except I’ll be merely dead. Remember,” he said darkly, “buddy’s only half a word.”
“And speaking of the other half…” Rick checked his watch. “I have to go meet my own.”
“Lucky dog. I should have married military. I bet she makes you do it in cadence. Hut, two, three, four!”
“You’ll never know.” They clasped hands and Rick hurried off with a definite sense of purpose.
***
Master Helmsman Okuda watched Admiral Absen take The Chair. They nodded to each other, old comrades in arms, and the bald pilot sent out the ready pulse that ensured computer synchronization of all twenty-nine ships. Under control of Okuda’s and Conquest’s central brain, the minuet began. All the war vessels rolled to bring their weapons suites to bear on their first targets, still light-days away.
“Railguns firing,” Commander Ford at the Weapons station called, more to fill the silence than convey information. Everyone could read their screens and 4D displays to observe the first phase.
Four battleships, second in size only to Conquest herself, fed gigawatts of electricity to their Dahlgren Behemoth RL-40s, then poured many millions of one-kilogram steel spheres into their hoppers. One after another, thousands per second, induction rails snatched streams of shot and threw them forward at almost ten percent of lightspeed relative.
They might have gone even faster but the kinetic energy on the ammunition, added to the fleet’s speed, pushed their velocity well into relativistic territory, approaching ninety-nine percent of light. Each metal ball now contained almost as much momentum as Einstein’s physics would allow. Where one struck, it would punch a hole in a mountain, and if that mountain managed to stop its travel, it would convert that incredible force into heat and pressure like a tiny nuclear weapon, lacking only the hard radiation.
Bridge screens showed plotted lines radiating forward toward the Gliese 370 system, each a hyphen aimed at a known target: asteroids and comets, orbital defense satellites, bases on moons, planetary installations.
Movable targets such as satellites would probably survive; if the Hippos or their Meme masters had any sense at all they would issue small course changes at random that would cause these ultra-long-range shots to miss by kilometers, unguided as they were. For anything that could maneuver, it would be sheerest luck to hit. But railgun ammo was cheap, and more could eventually be manufactured from iron-rich asteroids. With enough ammo firing at enough targets, serendipity might take its course.
At least they had these known targets, provided by their dying robot probe, an unsung machine hero.
“Railgun strikes away, all weapons ceasing,” Ford called after almost an hour of continuous fire. More than a billion rounds, a third of the battleships’ ammo, had been expended, and their electrical capacitors showed empty. The enormous ships nudged themselves closer together, magnetic sweep-fields and two-hundred-meter-thick ferrocrystal armor shielding the task force from the possibility of a random micrometeorite strike at .9C.
“Mister Okuda, are the carriers ready?” Absen asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you may initiate separation.”
The assault carriers,
eight thick wheels with dozens of spokelike launch bays aimed outward, unstacked themselves like coins from the back end of Conquest, and immediately began to spin up. Separating in three dimensions like flying discs thrown into the air, they used gyros and thrusters to form a cone behind the dreadnought.
Finally revealed, the shining teardrop of Conquest herself displayed a cluster of fusion drive engines grouped at the center of the fat end of her chocolate-kiss shape. Fully three thousand meters across, she was the largest vessel EarthFleet had ever constructed, discounting the fortified movable asteroids in the home system that could only loosely be termed ships.
Armed and armored to the limits of humanity’s technology, she was theoretically superior to the monster Destroyers the Meme had been sending against the homeworld for decades. A testimony to faith and risk, she was the first of her class, her keel laid down in space in 2069, completed five years later by the gargantuan shipyards of Ceres.
Yet her missiles, her railguns, and her beam weapons remained silent. She was the heart of Task Force Conquest, and as such would withhold her full potency until they came to grips with the enemy, because deep within her structure rested the hope of humanity: over one million colonists, their coldsleep tubes stacked like cells in a beehive, layered with grav plates and robot maintainers.
“Missiles next,” Ford recited. Computer feeds projected simulations of the launch. Intuition might imply such missiles should be fired later and nearer, but in vacuum the guided weapons had nearly unlimited range, constrained only by fuel to maneuver to their targets at the end.
Thousands of phallic objects vomited forth from the disposable box launchers on the frigates, oriented themselves toward the fore using gyroscopes, and fired short bursts of their fusion engines. These tiny suicidal robots slowly followed the railgun streams and did not overtake them. Instead, they maneuvered carefully into a spreading swarm.
Before they entered the Gliese 370 system they would decelerate like descending rockets, for if they did not, they would flash through the area so quickly that even computer control could not maneuver them against targets. Once slowed below .3C, they would cross the stellar wind bubble and begin hunting even while continuing to decelerate. Since everything in the system was hostile, each target engaged would be introduced to a high-yield thermonuclear shaped charge and its bomb-pumped gamma-ray lasers.
“All missiles away.”
Sixteen missile frigates jettisoned their box launchers as single-pilot grabships seized them, shoving the empty cubes forward and away from the fleet, random objects to confound the enemy. The tiny tugs drew forth fresh hundred-round boxes from Conquest’s capacious bays, carefully maneuvering them onto the naked frigates until they were again clothed in weaponry.
“Recalling small craft. Making all secure for deceleration.” Grabships raced back to their docking cradles and the crew of the fleet took their stations, preparing for the long uncomfortable fall ahead. Several minutes later Okuda nodded. “All ships report ready.”
Absen made a casual chopping motion with his hand, as if to emphasize his next order. “Master Helm, you may maneuver the fleet.” I’ve waited as long as I could, he thought, and now when we light these fusion drives we will be announcing our presence with no chance of hiding.
For the first time Okuda reached out with his mind, using fleet comms and his command override codes to control the gyros, engines and thrusters of all thirty-seven warships in one synchronous waltz.
The dance began from the rear, with the lightest of touches on the thrusters from the assault carriers. They fell farther and farther behind, drifting apart even as their engine output ramped up, facing forward. This way they would enter the system last.
Missile frigates came next, fragile and inversely draped vessels little more than maneuvering systems for their box launchers, wearing their weapons like bizarre cubic jewels. They had no need to flip end for end; this design sported one equally powerful engine at each tip, and from their forward extremes fusion fire flared, following the carriers as if falling upward. Their saving grace in Absen’s eyes was their number and their small crews of fewer than twenty people, yet he knew many of their young captains personally and recognized that numbers never told the whole story.
Now it was Conquest’s turn. Ponderously the great teardrop rolled, and the six fusion engines that ringed its axis began to glow. Gently the dreadnought decelerated away from its charges, and Absen couldn’t help feeling like he was abandoning the others. Even after decades in space, the vast separations that fighting doctrine mandated made him feel a lack of control. He consoled himself with the thought that he had one quarter of the fleet’s firepower under his own thumb.
On the other hand, he had all four quarters of its responsibility.
Eight beam cruisers, stubby pyramids covered with raised armor patterns protecting their projectors, now turned over to point their broad bases forward and light off their engines, gently drawing away and to the sides. The computer displays showed them as if they rose from below. Absen remembered the rule of thumb of space warfare, a paraphrase of the visionary writer O. S. Card: The enemy’s direction is down. It meant, roughly, to always visualize falling upon the enemy from above. Do that and everything becomes clear.
The cruisers took position around Conquest in a ring twenty kilometers across and spreading.
Lastly the four battleships rolled their wedges to point drives forward, or down. These took stations in front of a point offset from the center. Slowly and in coordination Okuda increased the whole fleet’s thrust.
As the engine forces rose, grav plates placed strategically throughout all the ships ensured that their crews and more delicate machinery were not smashed flat. Eventually the fleet decelerated at over seventy-five gravities, though crew in their bio-gel conformal couches never felt more than five. The Eden Plague virus, the nanites in their bloodstreams, and their cybernetic augmentation kept them alive, healthy, and useful.
Even so, four such days waxed tedious. The fleet decelerated hard for seven hours at a stretch, then reduced burn for an hour to do maintenance and provide relief, and then did it again and again until their velocity had been reduced to less than a tenth of C. By this time the squadron spread out and slowed intermittently, randomly, and violently, to throw off any long-range Meme weapons launched against them.
The whole affair, despite all planning and preparation, cost several dozen lives. A few grav plates failed under the tremendous strain, turning human bodies and structures into smears on the armored deck plates. One frigate’s missile box ripped loose and cartwheeled down the length of the ship, taking two more cubes with it. External fittings on all ships failed randomly under the heavy strain – communications dishes, sensors, optics, antennas – and ripped loose, to add to the cloud of debris, stripped ions, and relativistic helium that preceded the fleet.
Despite these minor losses the force held together and retained its combat effectiveness as planned. When it reached its final cruising speed, it would cross the edge of the system loaded for bear.
Chapter 6
SystemLord ingested the information that his Sentries had detected fusion flares inbound. Wave-shift analysis showed an initial speed of almost nine-tenths light, and the great organic computational brains of Monitor told a troubling tale: depending on how much velocity the enemy was willing to retain, they could enter the system in a very short time indeed.
The commander brought Monitor to full wakefulness; at such a high state of readiness it became a bit high-strung, like a male animal eager for a fight over females. He also issued orders to its spaceborne progeny, in a similar excited state, mitigated only by the materials in their guts, still gestating their full complement of weaponry.
Some of these deadly organic devices also stretched the limits of taboo. Nanobiological weapons were by nature impossible to control; the Meme had long discouraged the gestation of anything that, should it get loose, might damage their own creatures. Yet in t
his case the risk of contamination was less than the risk of annihilation, and so SystemLord ordered the machine-eating bacteria heretofore only authorized for use in Human space loaded into all missiles.
While bioweapons were not unusual, this experimental version of the ravenous monocells had no fail-safes. If it got loose inside a Meme ship it would seek to eat every non-organic element it detected – and unlike previous bacteria, these were engineered to be very hard to kill, even for Meme. Because living ships nevertheless built inorganic structures as their bones and armor, vessels so exposed would rapidly become useless as the disease ate their skeletons and turned them to helpless mush.
Once activated, the phages were ticking time bombs of cellular slime.
SystemLord also alerted the Underlings, those who had passed from purity in order to exploit the rich environments of planets and sub-planets. He ordered them to increase the maneuver of their orbital and sub-planetary bases in expectation of imminent attack.
For all of the Meme commander’s preparations he could not account for one simple fact: though the enemy ships were decelerating so as not to flash uselessly through the system, over one billion railgun balls were not.
In fact the steel streams, now varying widely with inevitable spread, entered the system only seconds after the light of the fleet’s deceleration itself, having been fired before the EarthFleet ships began their burns. Hardly had the instructions gone out than SystemLord began to receive evidence of his mistake.
Ten million clusters of one hundred steel spheres each swept through the system like scourges of a god, and it was only the vastness of space and the preliminary maneuvers of targets that allowed anything to survive at all.
Most things that could not maneuver died.
First to be struck were hundreds of Sentry posts affixed to asteroids. With no engines of any kind, these eyes and ears of the Meme star system simply vaporized as their rocks were pulverized in eyeblinks. One moment the nearest of them transmitted their updates; the next, they had been rendered unto dust. Shattering explosions marched across the solar system over the next eight hours as every one of the outposts were wiped out.