“Who’s in there now?” Absen asked.
“Test pilot named Yeager. You might have heard of him.”
“What? You mean –”
“Yup. Courtesy of the Eden Plague, he’s young and fit again. Volunteered to lead the attack on the Destroyer. Couldn’t exactly say no to a legend, could we?”
“Holy crap. Well, who better? I guess I should be glad Bull Halsey isn’t still around or I’d be out of a job.” Absen watched as the A-24 came to life, its fusion engines glowing slightly as Yeager tested them at low power.
“He should do about ten minutes of preflight before taking her up,” Tyler remarked.
“Well, while we’re waiting, why don’t you brief us on her specs?” Absen asked this for the benefit of the others behind him, as he already knew the A-24 pretty thoroughly.
“All right, in brief. Two Rolls Royce F-1244 fusion engines generating about a million kilos of thrust. Between those and the new gravity compensating plates, it can accelerate at about twenty Gs while the pilot only feels five. As its main armament it carries a microwave laser, or maser, up front in that funny-looking nose, optimized against Meme bioplasm. That’s a general-purpose weapon, mainly to try to fend off any hypers coming its way, or deal with any small craft the Destroyer might launch. Kind of like the PT boats carrying a 40mm deck gun.”
“Okay. But how is it going to hurt a ship two or three thousand meters in diameter?”
“Nukes, obviously. Well, technically, hybrid thermonuclear fusion bombs. We don’t have anything bigger or nastier. These are analogous to the torpedoes the PT boats carried.”
“PT boats only had four to six torpedoes, though. How many do these carry?”
“Sixteen. Well…seventeen, technically.”
Absen got it immediately. “The last one being the Final Option bomb.”
“Yes. If the pilot arms it, the computer will continually compare the Aardvarks’ situation with a set of standard parameters and will detonate the bomb at the optimum moment.”
“Such as?”
Tyler cleared his throat. “Such as at the moment of impact against a Meme craft of a certain size or larger. Just in case the COA where the enemy builds a fleet in the Oort cloud comes to pass. The other sixteen warheads are on Pilum guided missiles. We expect the Aardvark to launch a spread, then follow it in.”
“That’s assuming we can even catch the damn thing.”
Tyler nodded. “Yes, I’ve seen the Red-Blue simulations. It’s going to be tricky just to bring them to battle.”
“What else does your baby carry?” Absen asked for the benefit of the briefing.
“Nothing more offensive. We’re having to go for cheap and numerous, so there’s a limit to what we can load aboard. It has a suite of small lasers and some electronic shotguns as point-defense weapons, but those are more in hopes they will be useful against unknowns than out of any belief they can stop an enemy hyper.”
Absen turned to the rest, production officials and staff officers lucky enough to come along on this trip. “Our projections say we will build about ninety thousand of these attack boats.” He paused to let that sink in. Some of them knew it already but others gasped. “We’re going to be like the Zulus attacking rifle-armed troopers at Isandlwana. A shitload will die, but those that get through will close and kill the enemy.”
“How many?” one civilian asked.
Absen pressed his lips together. “Between a quarter and ninety percent. Assuming we win. If we lose…all of them, and all of us.”
“Ninety thousand men…”
“And women. All of them volunteers, all of them psych tested and willing to use the Final Option. All of them heroes.”
The onlookers turned in silence to watch out the window as the prototype’s takeoff thrusters powered up a few more percent and vectored downward. It didn’t take much in three percent gravity to lift the jumbo-jet-sized craft off the deck and send it drifting upward, outward into interplanetary space.
Lockerbie said, “Strap in, people, and we’ll tag along.” The passengers hastened to do that and she lifted nonchalantly after the A-24, using easy blasts of her chemical thrusters. The shuttle was not a high-priority enough craft to rate one of the valuable fusion engines.
“Can we keep up with it?” Absen asked the pilot.
“For as long as he is just testing maneuvering thrusters, sure. If he lights the main engines…not a chance.”
“Well, let’s just watch history from a safe distance, shall we?” General Tyler spoke from the rear.
Lockerbie shook her head in amusement. “Haven’t lost a flag officer yet, sir,” she declared with a chuckle. “Besides, I’m in line to get one of those babies, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
End of Comes The Destroyer excerpt.
***
Books by David VanDyke
Plague Wars Series
The Eden Plague Book 1
Reaper's Run: A Plague Wars Novel
The Demon Plagues Book 2
The Reaper Plague Book 3
The Orion Plague Book 4
Cyborg Strike Book 5 (Summer 2013)
Comes The Destroyer Book 6 (Fall 2013)
Stellar Conquest series:
First Conquest: Book 1 - Contained within the anthology Planetary Assault
Desolator: Book 2
Tactics of Conquest: Book 3 (Fall 2013)
Other Works
Unfettered
Low Justice
For more information visit David’s website: http://www.davidvandykeauthor.com/
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Books by David VanDyke
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Comes The Destroyer Excerpt
Cyborg Strike Page 18