by B. V. Larson
“So this is a Meme ship?” Shades said, zipping his glasses into a breast pocket in the dim light. The room was blank-walled and organic, containing nothing but three sarcophagi that sprouted from the floor.
“More or less,” Ezekiel responded. “He’s descended from the original Meme scoutship that came to Earth in the early twenty-first century. We Blends made some improvements using Earthtech, and he’s adapted for human use.”
“I notice you say ‘he’. Is the ship conscious?”
Ezekiel nodded. “Absolutely, and he grows slowly more intelligent over time. Right now he is perhaps as bright as a rather stupid dog. Eventually he should attain intelligence similar to a dolphin, perhaps even more.”
“I guess we’re lucky one Meme decided to help humanity.”
Ezekiel bowed his head reverently. “Raphael, he who blended with my mother Sofia Ilona, saved Earth by his defection from the enemy. If we have time as our colony grows, I intend to write a biography.”
“Sounds fascinating,” Spooky broke in, “but we must launch soon. The longer we wait, the longer it will take to reach our destination.”
“All right. Remove all clothing and get in the cocoons.” Ezekiel demonstrated by stripping to the buff and hopping into one. Spooky climbed nimbly into the second biotech construct, feeling it conform to his naked body. Beside him, Shades did the same. Living cowls rolled around their heads like bizarre parka hoods before sealing the three men in. They all felt the questing probes of biomechanical plugs slotting into their cranial connectors.
Ready? Ezekiel asked through his link. The other two answered affirmative, and a moment later the cocoons vanished from their consciousness. All three stepped into a comfortably-appointed cockpit, rather old-fashioned and steam-age-themed, brass and wood as in a Jules Verne story. Transition to virtual space had been smooth, and now the three seemed to stand looking out a large window into space.
In the real world tubes extruded, filling all of their body cavities, a distinctly unpleasant sensation that they were glad to avoid. The conduits to their mouths and nose pulsed and abruptly ran with liquid, and soon their lungs filled with oxygenated fluid, necessary to keep them from collapsing under the heavy Gs to come.
Out their virtual window they saw an artificial representation of the battlespace, with Afrana, its moon, and the enemy and friendly fleets represented for convenience in ridiculous proximity. Ezekiel reached out his hand to move a round-knobbed lever and their ship shot forward, mimicking its real actions. “We’re outside Conquest now.”
“Why don’t you just show what space really looks like?” asked Shades.
“Because there’d be little to see,” Ezekiel answered. “This simulated picture is better than the real thing, believe me.” He moved more levers forward and they accelerated away from the Earth fleet, diving toward the back edge of the planet. Some of the acceleration sensation leaked over and the VR bridge wobbled.
“Are you sure they won’t see us?”
“Our initial burn was one among many in the midst of our fleet, so the Meme won’t notice. Once that ends, we will be on a ballistic course until we near the planet, so we are nearly undetectable. Once we reach the planet, Steadfast Roger will mimic a Meme signature as we maneuver.”
“So that means yes.” Shades crossed his arms in amusement.
“Yes that means no, they won’t see us, I believe. Sorry, just proud of my ride.” Ezekiel caressed the console. “He and I have been a lot of places together.”
“Weird to think we’re inside a living ship.”
“All right, enough small talk,” interjected Spooky mildly. “Let’s go over the plan again.”
“Don’t you ever relax?” Shades asked.
“He does,” interjected Ezekiel, “at least once per decade whether he needs it or not. And he’s right. We’ll be in planetary space in an hour.”
***
Task Force Conquest cruised planetward now, having swung around this system’s sun in a punishing arc, under continual thrust. By brute force Master Helmsman Okuda had dragged them through a tight half-orbit to arrive at Afrana well out of the moon-based laser’s arc.
“What do you think?” Chief of the Boat Timmons stood beside the admiral’s chair as they both stared at the holotank. His question was less about eliciting information than about getting his commander to talk. Absen had been brooding silent for the last hour, and it was making the bridge watch nervous.
I think I’m starting to wonder if we can pull this off, Absen wanted to say. Instead, he cleared his throat. “I think it will work.” He deliberately strengthened his voice. “It’s a good plan. The analysts are to be commended. I assume everyone is ready to execute?” Affirmative noises from his officers helped him feel the confidence he tried to project. “Then sound Battle Stations and you are free to begin sequence by computer mark.” From now on everything was machine-sequenced and timed. Only if something unexpected occurred would the fleet need orders.
“Small craft launching,” Okuda said. “Defense missiles launching.” After long minutes he went on, “Fleet defense posture at maximum. Altering course.”
Now the sweating began. Absen raised the cooling on his suit and watched the holotank as the two parts of his little fleet separated.
All the warships began to diverge from the small craft to gain an angle tangent to the laser base, where they stabilized out of its arc, and inbound. If they did not maneuver, they would skim the surface of the moon above the enemy installation.
But that was not the plan.
The small craft they had launched – more than seven hundred surviving StormCrows, one thousand Marine assault sleds, and a cloud of pinnaces and support boats – floated stealthily forward under silent running procedures, left behind by the fleet. At these distances they were invisible, and would stay that way until they lit their fusion engines for inevitable deceleration.
Ford at Weapons spoke. “Railgun barrage initiating. Nuclear missiles barrage initiating. Blinding barrage initiating.”
Absen hoped the blinding barrage – all of his beam weapons in wide-spectrum mode, aimed at the main enemy fleet – would disrupt and confuse the enemy sensors with a storm of electromagnetics. More particularly, he watched the holotank as the computer icons for thirty missiles trailed a cloud of ten million railgun shot.
Timing was the thing.
“Enemy fleet moving forward,” Scoggins called, and it was so. The Guardian and its cruisers slowly maneuvered up to take positions between the planet and the moon – firmly in the center of the base laser’s zone of control. A faint cone of red showed the computer’s projection of that deadly space, and it appeared as if the fleet headed right for it.
“Decelerating,” Okuda said on the mark, and Conquest thrummed with the powerful forces now slowing it to avoid that fate. Throughout the fleet all of the warships were doing the same.
Far ahead, the railgun cloud and the missiles approached the edge of the enemy base, as if sneaking up on a hilltop. To the Meme it would appear the missiles were coming in under the radar intending to strike on a nap-of-the-earth trajectory, in hopes of detonating as close to the base as possible.
I’d take that, Absen thought, but it’s not the real plan.
Rising from the surface, the six Meme cruisers defending the base moved to meet the missiles, and on cue two EarthFleet beam cruisers shifted their dazzling rays to blast them with electromagnetics. While far too weak to do direct damage, this tactic was more than sufficient to degrade the enemy sensors.
Taking positions directly in the missiles’ paths – by far the most effective way to line up on the fast-moving weapons – the Meme cruisers waited, confident that they could handle a mere thirty projectiles. Of course, they did not know about the swarm of steel death precisely ten seconds ahead of the missiles.
They might have recognized their fate for just a split second, as Absen could have sworn they lit their fusion engines and tried to run – but it was f
utile. Ten million railgun rounds, a shotgun blast worthy of Zeus, flensed the six ships to hamburger. Most of the spheres traveled onward.
A cheer went up from the bridge crew, and Absen allowed himself a smile. “Well done, Mister Ford. A superb trap.”
“Base laser firing, defensive mode,” noted Scoggins. “Shot and missiles impacting.”
Above the moon’s surface the laser converted some thousands of round shot into ferrous gas as they flew into the quasi-solid dome of light. However, most of their number slammed into the edge of the installation, just outside of its reaching blaze. They plowed up millions of tons of surface material, gouging a bite out of the perfect bowl its heat had polished, and briefly obscured the site.
Into this inferno plunged thirty undamaged thermonuclear missiles, carefully spaced to avoid fratricide. One after another their blasts bored underground, ripping through the moon’s crust a kilometer at a time, tunneling under the surface. Commander Ford had precisely predicted this phase, and his calculations did not err. In the end a shaft one kilometer wide and thirty long angled downward, aiming toward a place beneath where the laser must be.
Chapter 12
SystemLord’s consternation at losing six cruisers to the Human commander’s cunning trap turned to relief as he saw the failure of the enemy nuclear missiles to destroy the Weapon. A valiant and clever effort, he silently saluted, but I have you now.
Monitor’s brains synthesized data from its senses and displayed it visually on hemiscreens. They showed the Human fleet aiming for the edge of the moon base with obvious intention to finish the job. Should that force reach its beam range, it could probably bore the rest of the way through the surface and begin to damage the installation.
Therefore, this was the time to close with the enemy.
Not without finesse, of course. SystemLord ordered Monitor and his cruisers to remain behind the invisible line in space that marked the farthest traverse of the Weapon. Geometry, like physics, had no mercy; as both fleets approached the base, they must inevitably converge, and this would force the Humans within his weapon range…or they must break off.
Either case should bring victory.
***
“Laser still firing?” asked Absen.
“No, sir, it switched off after the last missile blew.”
“Any chance we got it with the nukes?”
Scoggins shook her head. “I don’t think so, skipper. The surface radius of the laser dome is about forty klicks. The nukes wouldn’t have reached it with blast or radiation, and if this base is as tough as their ships, ground shock won’t have done it either.”
“Fair enough,” Absen responded. “The plan is still on track.”
“Their fleet is moving to get between us and the base, sir,” Ford said, pointing at the holotank while Scoggins was distracted with her analysis.
“As expected. Mister Okuda, just make damn sure we stay out of that thing’s arc.”
“Yes, sir. We are decelerating along roughly the same path as the railgun blast and the missiles, as if we are also going to attack the base from the edge.” Okuda touched a control and their pathway appeared in the tank, showing the enemy coming in from the front side on a converging course.
Scoggins cried, “Conn, Sensors, I have missile launch! Approximately eight hundred.”
“Acknowledged. Stick to the plan.” Absen white-knuckled the arms of his chair, with no orders to give and no way to further influence the battle – as long as the enemy did as expected. The lack of StormCrows is going to hurt, he thought, but at least the hypers won’t have very long to get up speed. Without explosive warheads, the enemy missiles were most effective at long range, after gathering all the velocity they could.
In holotank view, the task force closed up as planned. With no small craft to fill the gaps and pick off missiles, it was imperative to tighten their formation, maximizing mutual support. In fact, they packed themselves in far tighter than doctrine advised, but doctrine had never envisioned a fleet of twenty-seven warships under acceleration absorbing a heavy missile strike with no fighters. Only the hundreds of tiny laser drones would assist, but as these could not maneuver with the fleet they would only be useful for a few seconds after launch, until the hard-driven ships would draw away.
This tight deployment allowed Absen some measure of absolution for what he was about to do, for this was the last cast of the dice, and thus he could afford to trade ship hulls for lives. He watched as his remaining twelve missile frigates, empty of weapons and crew, and under computer control, placed themselves deliberately in the path of the heaviest hyper groups and released their hollowed box launchers. One hundred and fifty-six distinct targets absorbed an equal number of missiles, giving their mechanical all in hopes of preserving the rest.
“Nukes!” Scoggins suddenly cried. “I have nuclear detonations among the frigates and boxes!”
“Damn. I should have thought of that,” groused Ford. “With these hypers launched so close and slow, they could afford to put some nuclear warheads on them.”
“Can you tell which are which?”
“Too late, sir –” …and Ford was right, the incoming wave was only seconds away.
Rick Johnstone listened at the CyberComm station, much of his mind in the link and watching virtually. Most never knew what he did for them but he constantly facilitated computer projections and analyses, pulling information from Intel in anticipation, tweaking certain weapons to make them more effective – in short, he was the unseen grease in the gears. Much of the time what he did went beyond regulations, and he often stepped on others’ authority, always sub rosa. He’d never told them, though he thought Absen suspected.
In this case it took him and the chips in his head only a fraction of a second to identify the nuke-equipped hypers, from the slight differences in their signatures, and override the priorities on the fleet’s integrated defense system. Now, whenever the automatics made a choice, the defense beams, electromagnetic shotguns, antimissile-missiles and laser drones targeted the deadliest threat.
When the hyper storm was over, one more beam cruiser and two assault carriers – along with all of the frigates – were broken, and the remaining ships survived varying levels of further damage. Only the battleship Flensburg, by now with a reputation as a divinely lucky ship, had lost nary a crewman, neither from its original complement nor from those it had rescued from its sisters.
“Conn: Sensors, bogeys closing, sir.”
Absen could see the projected tracks of the Guardian and the remaining seventeen enemy cruisers accelerating to intercept them. Now the calculus reversed: the Meme fusion weapons, powerful as they were, had much shorter reach. Threatening the moon base was forcing the enemy to charge into EarthFleet’s optimum ranges.
Absen ordered, “Helm, adjust course toward the landing force. When they get spotted, the enemy will probably lunge at them. Begin harassing fire with railguns and keep the beams spread to dazzle. Let’s seem weaker than we are.” He kept his eyes on the holotank, where the hundreds of StormCrows and assault sleds showed as a cluster of icons. “When do they start their decel?”
“Coming up right now, sir,” Ford responded. A pause. “There’s the burn.”
Scoggins joined in, “Assault force decelerating. Enemy is reacting…sir, their frigates behind us just went to maximum toward the assault force. Main fleet is still on intercept with us.”
Absen snapped, “Tell the fighters to go after the frigates to cover the landing. Ford, use Conquest’s weapons and support them from long range.”
Ford did so, concentrating the dreadnought’s beam weapons to focus their entire output on the lead frigate. Under that electromagnetic pounding, it sheered off and dove away wounded, perhaps dying.
StormCrow fusion engines flared full as they clawed their way backward, thrusting toward the flanking Meme frigates. Soon twoscore fighters englobed every enemy frigate, diving and swooping, stinging with their masers and tiny close-in weapon su
ites like swarms of killer bees.
***
“Yeehah!” Vango hollered as he stitched his maser along the skin of an enemy frigate, leaving trails of bubbling flesh. The microwave laser, frequency-optimized to heat water just like a microwave oven, instantly turned all H2O in its path to steam, bursting cells a meter deep.
Consciousness expanding as never before, he and Helen became an integrated being, a flying creature with death in its eyes and killing joy in its wings. Skidding sideways to avoid a collision, they clawed Weaver around and fired again as soon as their weapon recharged even while flying backward. The maser, like an old-fashioned fighter gun, aimed by moving the whole ship, but nothing said the ship had to be going forward.
Vango-Helen watched admiringly as one of their squadron-mates made a close flyby, turning to shoot sideways as momentum took them past. Admiration turned to grief and rage as a close-in fusion beam blossomed from a sudden sphincter in the frigate’s hide, washing across the Crow with deadly effect. Melted remains spun onward in a ballistic course, barely recognizable as a fighter. Son of a bitch! Neither was sure which of them spoke in the link.
By then Weaver had come back around. Lining up carefully, they dropped a targeting lock onto an ugly wound on the frigate’s side and fired again. That’s the way to take these bastards down, Vango thought. Keep hitting them where it hurts, don’t let them heal. He thought he saw a shudder of pain ripple through the enemy as they flashed along the length of the ship, under continuous acceleration.
Near space filled with tiny projectiles as Helen strafed secondary weapons fire into the enemy at point-blank range. “Engine!” she screamed through the link and Weaver yawed sideways, gouging a bubbling trench in the enemy skin with her fusion drive. Then they were past.