As he was returning from taking a look at the ring of lasers circling the forward edge of the fuselage, the lights went out in the passageway. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence; there were still plenty of power fluctuations throughout the ship, and lighting panels were getting to be in short supply already.
“Crap, not again,” cursed Jill Repeth, snapping on a mini-light from her belt. Her counterpart, Schaeffer, pulled one out as well, and he reported the anomaly through his implanted comms. “Repair crew has it now, let’s move on.”
When the pressure hatch in their direction of travel slammed shut, however, Absen knew it was no accident. He was about to warn his two Stewards when he heard the hatch behind them slam as well, leaving them in flashlit darkness.
“Lights out,” hissed Jill. “Switch to night vision.” The Stewards snapped off their flashlights and activated their ocular implants, allowing them to see in the near-dark.
A smell of pine came into the enclosed space. “Gas!” Schaeffer barked, and reached into his cargo pocket to pull out a mask. Instead of pulling it on himself, he handed it to Absen. “Put it on, sir!” he urged.
“What about you?” Absen said with his last breath, not using it.
“I have internal oxygen, remember! Now put it on!”
Absen pulled the thing on and the pine smell went away. Slightly woozy, he remembered his recent visitor, and lunged for the wall intercom, but it was dead. They were cut off. Then he remembered his Stewards’ implants. “Can you get through to the shipwide channel?”
“I think so,” Repeth answered.
“Put this out, then, just as I tell you.” He read the reference number from the bulkhead. “Now hear this, emergency, Mister Winter, report immediately to C-4-13. Repeat it at fifteen second intervals.”
Puzzled, Repeth did as he told her, then briefly switched channels to call for the other Stewards. Out of the corner of her eye she saw someone standing at the hatch behind them, peering in through the tiny window. “Get down, sir, on the deck. Lay down. Act like you’re overcome by gas. Schaeffer, watch the other end.” She slipped down the darkened passageway to wait in a short dead-end side passage.
She heard the hatch open, and a rush of feet. I can’t open fire, or they’ll fire back, and the Captain isn’t even an Eden. In this passageway, automatic fire will ricochet down and probably kill him.
As the attackers came abreast of her she snapped her leg out at the first one, a roundhouse kick that folded the figure up like a taco. She felt ribcage crush under her shin and, holding tight to a standing pipe, used its stability to reset the leg and kick again, and then again, three strikes within the space of less than a second.
Screams followed, and gunshots, then she was among them. Bullets slammed into her chest, and she felt them penetrate her body armor and skitter off her ferrocrystal ribs. Something heavy and armor-piercing, she thought as her forearm chopped across a masked face. The man dropped to the deck, poleaxed, and she snatched weapons out of others’ hands and tossed them behind her. Then she unsheathed her claws.
Tiny blades extended from her fingertips, razor-sharp, piercing her own skin with cold pain before she healed around them. She dragged them across enemy flesh, not going for kills. She needed some alive. Instead she raked a man’s masked face, ripping flesh from bone, and blinded another.
They didn’t go down easily. Must be nanos, she thought as she fought the three that remained on their feet.
Jill felt a burning in her calf and looked down to see one fallen attacker had stabbed her from the ground. She stomped on the hand and was rewarded with a scream. Then came another loud boom, and she staggered with a pain in her gut. The round had come up under her armor and penetrated her abdomen.
Dimly she heard Schaeffer in the midst of his own fight. They must have come from both ends, she thought, and put up her arms as she saw a gun muzzle come up. This is going to hurt, then it did. Submachinegun rounds tore into her arms as she covered her face, trusting to her armor and bones to defend her vital organs. Some slipped past, or through muscle, to bounce off her ferrocrystal-coated skull, but one found its way to her throat, and agony shot through her as it tore out her esophagus and part of her carotid.
The weapon clicked empty, its thirty-round magazine expended, and the gunman expertly popped it out to insert its taped twin. Jill’s systems flooded oxygen into her bloodstream to compensate for the blood loss but she felt herself going under. She barely noticed it when her head hit the deck. Despair was more painful than bullets. I’ve failed, she cried to herself as the grey mist took her.
Jill came to with Schaeffer’s hands at her throat. She almost clawed him before she remembered what had happened, and froze as she felt his gentle pressure trying to hold her tissues in place to let her body heal itself. She tried to swallow, then to speak, but gave up.
Captain Absen’s face swam into view and she relaxed with relief. Long minutes later a medical team arrived; some expert field surgery later her head was immobilized and her throat was stitched into place. “You’ll be all right in a few hours,” the almond-eyed doctor with the precise British accent said. “Just don’t move and you’ll be as right as rain.”
Then Jill remembered her cyberware and training. “What happened?” she subvocalized carefully through her comm implant.
“I don’t know,” said Schaeffer. “One minute we were getting creamed. The next, some kinda ninja showed up and went through these guys like they were standing still. I never seen anything like it. He made us look slow.”
Jill closed her eyes. Thank you Spooky. “Captain secure?”
“Yeah. Called all the Stewards here.”
“Who?”
“I dunno. Asians. Little bitty guys. If I had to guess…North Koreans?”
“Get intel on it. Tell Tobias check all Asians.”
Schaeffer licked his lips. “Racial profiling?”
Jill snorted painfully. “PC worth dying for?”
“Okay, point taken, but he’ll have to do it quietly or things could get ugly.”
“Get South Koreans to help.” Jill winked at him.
“Oh.” Schaeffer smiled. “That’s brilliant.”
“Thanks. Now I’ll rest.” With that Jill closed her eyes.
-44-
For forty-six hours the Orion echoed with repeated klaxons. Absen had ordered simulations run with bridge and auxiliary bridge crew, as well as exercised every other naval function from damage control to virtual targeting.
In the meantime, assisted anonymously by “Mister Winter,” the combined US-South Korean investigation uncovered another cell of North Korean assassins among the enormous crew. They had initiated suicide protocols when discovered, so Absen might never know why they had been ordered to do it. Did the North Korean government prefer Huen to him?
Absen wondered how many other stowaways, benign or hostile, they had aboard, and blessed Travis Tyler for his foresight in providing the Stewards – and Spooky Nguyen for saving his bacon. He didn’t think Repeth and Schaeffer knew who had helped them, and Absen was determined to keep it that way as he turned his thoughts back to the coming battle.
The operational planners had refined their scheme as much as possible, but they still expected only one crack at the enemy. They had to make it count. Then he made sure everyone got a few hours of sleep before they initiated the attack.
The target asteroid was visibly moving now, accelerated slowly by the hidden frigate, apparently not using its full drive power. Perhaps the ship’s structure could not accept the strain of shoving an asteroid at full thrust; perhaps they were just conserving fuel. In any case every minute brought Orion six thousand kilometers closer to the rock.
The battleship’s plot would pass “behind” the asteroid’s direction of travel. Because they would be decelerating, the nuclear explosions in front of them would create a storm of EMP that might have some effect on the enemy, as well as potentially blinding his sensors. Once they fell past the frigate�
��s axis of acceleration, the battleship’s nose – and thus most of its weapons – would bear on the enemy. It wasn’t too different from the old fighter pilot’s trick of letting the enemy overshoot, except appearances were that they flew backward and the enemy stood still.
The disadvantage of this maneuver was that, once they passed, any kinetic weapons – missiles and railguns – would have to play a mad game of catch-up, overcoming their backward motion before accelerating toward the enemy. It was like throwing baseballs backward off a fast-moving flatbed truck.
Surprise was paramount. If they did not cripple or destroy the enemy frigate on the first pass, they would have to settle for harrying it around the solar system, deflecting asteroids and buying time for the Earth to build more warships.
“Spin at fifteen percent, Captain,” Master Helmsman Okuda reported.
“Bring it down to five percent.” That was enough to allow the ship’s two pinnaces to launch from their bays if necessary, and to keep people’s feet on the floors they preferred. “Battle stations.” He watched as the bridge crew locked their clear fishbowl-like lightweight breathing helmets down, a final line of defense if the ship were badly damaged. “Helm, roll the ship. Weapons, initiate your program when stable.”
“Aye aye, sir.” The gyros whined and thrummed again, and the crew felt a strange sideways wrench as the great ship twisted to present its broadside to the distant asteroid, still hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. It now appeared to be flying sideways toward the asteroid.
“Conn, Weapons: Railguns firing.”
The massive Dahlgren Behemoth magnetic drivers spat streams of fist-sized steel balls as they bore in turn, aiming at the asteroid. Most were not expected to hit the thing at this range, but if they did, all the better. Any strikes on the rock would fill the nearby space with chips and dust, to the detriment of the frigate thrusting on its other side. More importantly, Absen hoped, the enemy might stick his nose out from behind and catch one as it went past. Winning is about putting yourself in a position to get lucky.
It was critical to launch their first salvo of kinetic weapons now, rather than when closer, for as they approached their target Orion would travel more and more slowly as it decelerated drive-first. Right now, to launch was to gain free energy already imparted by the ship’s own velocity.
Even if the kinetic weapons did not happen to damage the frigate, Absen hoped they would give the enemy fits, forcing him to react and defend rather than bringing whatever offensive systems it had to bear on Orion. Thus he was not happy to hear the weapons officer’s next call.
“Conn, Weapons: failure on DB three and five. Gun crews report power overdraw and scram on Reactor Four.”
“How long to get them back on line?”
“Scram procedures require six hours, sir.”
“Dammit. Tell Engineering to get power to those guns at all costs. Reroute, override, I don’t care how. They have one hundred ten minutes.”
“Aye, sir.” A pause. “Missile salvos. Tridents away,” The shudders of two dozen launches ran through the ship as the fifty-ton weapons ejected from their tubes. “Grackles away. SM5s away.” Two hundred of each single-warhead nuclear-tipped missile salvoed at maximum rate of fire. “Tracking.”
The larger missiles, the multiple-warhead Tridents, would bore straight in after spreading their timing and warheads out to eliminate nuclear fratricide. If all went as planned, each missile’s twelve-warhead load, expanded into a ring like a basketball net aiming to encircle the ball of the asteroid, would detonate one hundred kilometers out. Each ring stationed itself one hundred kilometers from the next with its controller bus in the center, directing the warheads. Since they were all travelling at better than one hundred kilometers per second relative, the asteroid would be pounded by a series of twenty-four multi-megaton-sized thermonuclear wreaths traveling through the vacuum of space, lightning bolts to put Zeus to shame.
On the large screen Absen could see the cloud of his smaller missiles spreading out to the sides even as the railguns continued to fire. Lines snaked forward from the Grackles and SM5s, future plots that took them outward, then curved back in to strike the asteroid from all sides. It was a very tricky problem in physics, as the missiles would still have so much forward velocity that they would in reality rely on their proximity fuses to detonate as soon as they flashed by the asteroid. It was rather like a sword-wielding horseman trying to backhand an enemy as he rode past, only a thousand times faster.
“CIWS salvo.” A long ten seconds of the small Gatling guns threw out millions of aspirin-sized projectiles, a cloud to follow the rest of the weapons and hopefully scourge the enemy from existence. All of this reaction mass sent forward also gained Orion a significant amount of deceleration, saving several drive bombs. “Weapons fire ceasing.”
Absen nodded unseen inside his helmet. “Sensors, I want a sharp lookout for anything happening from the enemy. Helm, roll the ship and orient for deceleration. At the first sign the enemy has noticed us, you are cleared to maneuver. If it throws something at us – missiles, projectiles – feel free to use the drive as a defense mechanism. I can’t imagine a missile that can survive a nuclear fireball.”
Okuda nodded sagely, pleased the skipper had seen what to him was obvious: that as they fell tail-first toward the enemy, the drive itself could become a shield, or a weapon of sorts.
All told, Orion expended approximately one quarter of its ammunition in its first throw of the bones. Arguments had raged over the numbers, with some of the officers calling for up to half to be used, others pleading to save enough for a long campaign. In the end, the simulations had decided what numbers provided the best risk-reward ratio. Absen hoped the computers were right.
***
One hundred eight minutes stretched the crew’s nerves to a nail-biting tension. Now his long periods of waiting in submarines paid off for Captain Absen as he sat calmly in his reclining chair. He had long ago found a quiet place within himself for those times when there was nothing to do but wait.
The rest of the crew coped as best they might, talking or making quiet jokes between their routine reports. Throughout the ship, men and women sat or stood at battle stations, most of them blind within the bowels of the great vessel, sharing the lot of all sailors since the days of wooden ships and brass cannons.
Marines in armored spacesuits checked and rechecked weapons, sipped at drinking tubes, wished they had hit the head one more time before battle. Some availed themselves of the capability of their suits to handle urination; others thought to hold it until the battle was over.
At Reactor Four, a Russian engineering team threw its heavy switch and watched the digital displays closely as the molten salts approached critical temperature to initiate the controlled fusion reaction. They had cut corners and skipped steps to ensure the two railguns would be fed the megawatts of power they gulped, and the crew hoped the thing would hold together long enough to fight.
On the bridge, Absen awaited the moment when he would see whether they came up craps, or winners. He watched the digital countdown on the screen as it proceeded toward zero. When it hit that magic null, the fireworks should start.
“Three…two…one…” he counted under his breath, riveted on the display of the asteroid looming large. The lightspeed delay was now negligible, less than a second, so just a moment after the digit zero froze round, the viewscreen whited out. It adjusted under computer control, dimming to show a picture still difficult to comprehend. Brilliant blazing rings entered the screen from the left to impact the asteroid, wreaths from titanic Roman candles.
Growls and cheers filtered over the intercom before Absen heard Lieutenant Commander Ford intone, “Conn, Weapons: Trident warheads confirmed on target.”
-45-
The next shock Skull felt was unmistakable: a wave that shook him inside his cocoon-suit, slamming his head against the crystal faceplate, the only inflexible part of the thing. He saw blood on the surface and fe
lt it run from his nose, to quickly dry up as his nano healed it.
More shockwaves came in close succession, and he knew the time for action had come. He pressed the place on the cocoon to set its conversion in motion. From a sarcophagus shaped more like a coffin than a man, it morphed, splitting to form arms and legs, shrinking away from the faceplate to allow him to see, and molding it to him, a living life-support system and armor that would allow him to survive inside the inimical Meme environment.
Skull saw he was in a kind of cargo hold, with what looked like ore netted by biological ropes, and irregularly-shaped containers of who-knows-what. The crab-thing that had retrieved him sat unmoving in a corner.
That had to be his first target. The shocks had bumped him up into the air as the gravity vanished. He had no idea why that happened and no time to speculate; he had trained in the suit and in microgravity so he had no trouble using his feet and hands, adhesive to the Meme surfaces, to maneuver over to the quiescent bio-robot.
As he approached it, it twitched, and he grabbed a nearby bar of metal, one of a stack of raw materials he presumed, and with nano- and suit-assisted strength he pounded the thing until it was fluid-leaking dead. Then he tried to leave the room.
The mitten-like coverings on his hands, Raphaela assured him, were encoded with the Meme command “open,” and did not fail. Slapping his hand against the wall formed a fleshy iris, and he stepped through.
Organs of inscrutable sorts covered the walls, and some kind of vessels, veins that distributed liquids around the interior of the ship. As good a place as any to start, he thought. Putting down his ichor-covered bar, he touched a control on the suit. A baseball-sized glop of sticky dough rolled into his hand, and he slapped it against one of the organ-things, which immediately began to turn an unhealthy shade of crimson-black.
The Orion Plague Page 21