Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series)

by David VanDyke

  “But now the Scourges are gonna do it to us,” Bull ben Tauros said from across the table.

  “Yeah, so what’s the plan, Skipper?” Ford asked, turning to Absen.

  “That’s what I called you all here to talk about. We’ll get into specifics later, but I need to hear all your ideas about our overall course of action.”

  “We gin up and fight!” Ford said. “Worst case, we can escape with the TacDrive, go get Desolator and his buddies, and then come back and kick their asses.”

  “And leave Earth to its fate? There won’t be anything left to salvage,” Absen said, “and if they can tell where we went, they might actually be able get to Gliese 370 ahead of us. No, we have to try to beat them here and now. These Scourges will wipe out all life. This isn’t about winning a fight. It’s about preserving humanity. If they show up here, they’ll show up at Gliese 370 and maybe anywhere else.”

  Commander Ekara cleared his throat. “We have to get ahold of the FTL technology. Assuming their fleet doesn’t totally outclass us, it’s their strategic mobility that spells our doom. If we can reverse engineer it, we can use it or defeat it. That has to be our number one goal.”

  “No, our number one goal is to defeat their first beachhead and buy time,” insisted Ford. “If we can rebuild EarthFleet’s industrial capability, we can deploy enough weaponry to kill each successive wave. Soon, probably within seven to ten years, one of the Desolator ships will arrive and he can help us. With enough firepower, it won’t matter what appears. We’ll just keep slaughtering them until they give up.”

  “You know,” said Doctor Egolu, the lone civilian in attendance other than Leslie, “we seem to be ignoring the Meme problem. They still hold almost a billion humans hostage on Earth. But they also must fear these Scourges as much as we do. Is there any way to join forces with them, or at least get them to get out of our way while we defend ourselves? This would seem to be a rational compromise for them.”

  “I can’t believe we’re talking about working with the Meme,” Ford protested. Scoggins and several others nodded in agreement. “They’ve been screwing with us for thousands of years, and oh yeah, killed billions of people. How can we let them off the hook?”

  Absen fixed Ford with a gaze of steel. “There’s an apocryphal quote from Churchill that seems apt. ‘I’d make a deal with the devil himself if it would defeat Hitler.’ If you don’t like that one, how about, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’? Let me tell you something – all of you.” He stood up and looked from face to face. “I want the Meme to suffer for what they did to us, and I’m skeptical about this Scourge thing. But even if there are no Scourges, if we can scare the Meme into leaving, and by doing so save human lives, I’ll put aside my feelings. Killing a few Destroyers is meaningless. Desolator showed me a record of a battle against thousands of Destroyers. That’s the strength of the Empire, which we’ve never had to face. And if there’s something out there that can beat the Meme, it will beat us. Hang together or hang separately.”

  “If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, why are we sure the Scourges aren’t the friends we need against the Meme?” Quan Ekara asked. “How do we know this information isn’t completely skewed and that the Scourges aren’t a race that the Meme attacked and pissed off long ago. Maybe now they’re just doing what we are – waging war against an evil empire?”

  “We don’t know. But somehow, we have to find out.”

  Leslie cleared her throat. “Sir, this just shows how badly we need evidence. That means talking to the Meme. Getting access to their records.”

  “Records can be faked,” Ekara said with the wave of a hand.

  “Not molecular memories. Not if I can see them for myself – or my brother Ezekiel can do it, if you don’t trust me.”

  “Do you think the Meme would go for that?” Absen asked.

  Leslie pursed her lips. “The Meme never talked to EarthFleet before. To them, we’re savages. Just getting them to respond, to open a dialogue now, would show they’re terrified, I would think. That in itself will prove something. We have to try.”

  “Removing them from the equation would give us a fighting chance. Getting them to actually work with us against the threat would be ideal,” Absen said.

  Leslie nodded. “I think it’s our best shot.”

  “Then start figuring out how to do it…Ambassador.”

  “No, sir. Not me. You don’t know me and don’t trust me fully, and I was born a Blend. There’s only one person you’ll trust, that really knows how to deal with the Meme, because she used to be one. Mother.”

  “We haven’t been able to find her,” Scoggins said.

  Leslie smiled. “Let me broadcast, and I’ll get her to show herself.”

  Chapter 17

  Captain Absen stood looking through the thick glass of the flight deck control room, the same chamber his staff had used to display the lost battle that so grievously damaged his home planet. This time the room was sealed and pressurized, as the vast space held no air, its outer doors open and its clamshell armor folded back to allow access to the torpedo-shaped Meme-style living ship that now landed.

  Absen laughed at himself internally as he wiped his sweating hands on his uniform trousers. He could coolly fight a battle from his bridge like Fletcher at Midway, but meeting this woman he hadn’t seen in almost a century made him nervous.

  Maybe death was easier to face than the promise of a life. Maybe dealing with equals wasn’t something he was used to anymore.

  Or maybe he still had trouble forgiving her for what she’d done all those years ago.

  The doors closed and soon the controller seated in a chair nearby signaled that atmosphere had been restored. Absen opened the pressure door, descended the metal ladder to the deck and walked alone across the wide expanse.

  Not entirely alone, of course. Conquest herself would be watching with a thousand mechanical eyes, and Absen was sure he saw guns in the internal defense emplacements twitch. They wouldn’t be needed, he was certain, but the AI wasn’t so trusting, and that was fine. After this long, he might be wrong.

  An opening irised in the living ship before him, and then she stepped through. Dressed simply in utilitarian trousers and tunic, to him she still embodied perfect beauty. His heart flipped within his chest. Not for the first time he wondered if she had that effect on everyone, or did she tailor it for him? He never could get a definitive answer from the others who met her.

  “Hello, Admiral.”

  Absen cleared his throat. “Just Captain today, though as soon as we’ve built a fleet I’ll have to promote myself again.”

  “I’m glad to see your skill at comedy is as weak as ever.”

  Staring, eyes level with hers – I forgot how tall she was – he found himself unable to move, unable to speak. It reminded him of when he’d first seen Kathleen across the floor of a Naval Academy dance. Funny, it was hard to remember his dead wife’s face anymore.

  His lungs locked up and his throat closed. Swallowing convulsively, he finally croaked, “Hello, Rae.”

  “Took your time, didn’t you?” Raphaela’s smile grew slowly, and he found himself echoing it helplessly.

  “I’m sorry,” he found himself saying, though he knew he’d done nothing wrong. Something about this woman…

  And then she stepped forward into his arms, a moment he’d envisioned, contemplated, but never experienced. “Welcome home, Henrich. I missed you.” Rae’s cheek touched his and he realized she might be manipulating him with her biochemistry, but if so, he didn’t care. He’d yearned for her a very, very long time.

  As they embraced, all the anger he had felt melted away. “Me too,” Absen husked, forcing himself to step back from paradise. “We can catch up later. For now, my crew needs to see you. They don’t trust Leslie…if that’s who she is.”

  “How do you know I’m who I say I am? Only another Blend could tell for sure.”

  “We’re working on that, actually.” Absen led Rae o
ver to an electric cart and hopped on.

  “There’s no biochemical test. Given enough time, Blends can replicate everything but memories.”

  Absen just smiled, and then said, “Auditorium.”

  “Where’s my daughter?” Rae asked as she rode. “I haven’t seen her in several years.”

  “I’ve made her the Jupiter system’s administrator. She’s down on the Io base, overseeing repairs and reconstruction of our industry.”

  “A suspicious woman would wonder if you didn’t want me to see her yet.”

  “A suspicious man would be right to feel that way. Until we establish your bona fides for sure, I’m not letting you anywhere near another Blend.”

  Rae lapsed into silence at this declaration, and Absen contented himself with riding along, waiting on the word from the AI that the woman next to him was likely who she claimed to be. He knew Conquest was running Rae’s speech and biometric patterns against every record in the database, for the AI believed Rae was incorrect: memories weren’t the only thing impossible to fake. The habits of a lifetime, displayed and compared thoroughly enough, should provide an answer.

  Soon Absen ushered Rae up to the podium, with most of the off-duty crew seated. “What do you want me to say to them?” she asked in a low voice.

  “Whatever you think you should, but keep it short and sweet. We took a lot of casualties in the assault. For God’s sake, don’t tell them it was for nothing.” What she did say might be instructive, Absen thought. He’d have to chance it.

  Turning on the microphone, he said, “Listen up, people. Some of you remember Raphaela, and some of you have only seen records, but you all know who she is and what she’s done for humanity. I wanted her to give you a quick overview of what the senior staff and I recently learned, and you’ve undoubtedly been hearing rumors about.” With that, he stepped aside.

  Rae took the microphone and smiled, a dazzling thing that seemed to blast the audience with charisma and presence. “Thank you, Captain Absen, and thank you all for arriving to initiate the liberation of Earth. Freedom fighters here have been working tirelessly for more than a century, preparing humanity for a time when a military force like Conquest would arrive to give us top cover.

  “Even now our insurgents, often called ‘Skulls’ after the hero Skull Denham, are stepping up their efforts to regain control of our own destiny. Yes, I say ‘our own,’ because despite what some have always said, I am just as human as anyone here…and more so than some.” She nodded to the contingent of Sekoi and the handful of Ryss who stood off to one side, by their own choice.

  “The Eden Plague changed humanity, and so did the nanotechnology many of you have running through your veins. Then came cybernetic implants, and now I hear tell of genuine, viable artificial intelligence. The Meme who added itself to me was just one more augmentation.

  “This brings me to the subject at hand: the Meme. Some apologists would say they are a force of nature, a predator species that can no more control its own imperatives than sharks can resist the scent of blood. Others, with whom I would agree, refuse to give them that excuse. The Meme are guilty of horrific crimes, unleashing plagues to wipe out the intelligence of planetary natives, stealing, using and even cloning their bodies for no better reason than to indulge themselves, enslaving whole societies just for their own pleasure.

  “But one thing the Meme never did even in their most depraved moments was commit deliberate, premeditated genocide. Does that make them good? No. But it makes them less evil than something new: something Captain Absen has asked me here to talk about.

  “It’s called the Scourge by the Meme. Alternately, the concept could be translated as a swarm, or a pestilence, but the central meaning is clear: this menace, new to us, has been chewing its way through the Meme Empire like locusts. If humanity had faced the Scourge rather than the Meme Empire, we would all be dead, along with every higher life form in the solar system. The Scourge doesn’t want to conquer us. It doesn’t want to enslave us. It wants to eat us, to consume us, to process us, excrete us and then to move on and do it to someone else. To the Sekoi, or the Ryss, and to every other noble species out there.” Rae gestured toward the small groups of aliens, and then upward is if to the stars. “Like it or not we must talk to the Meme. As much as we hate them and everything they have done, we have to put that behind us.”

  Bull ben Tauros stood up then in the front row, and said, “That sounds like a load of crap to me. The Meme killed billions. Everyone here has lost…well, we don’t even know who we’ve lost, most of us, but odds are they’re all gone fifty years ago. We watched those bastards slam two ships into Earth trying to wipe us out. How the hell are we supposed to forget that? Just give them big hugs and call them our buddies? Well, we Marines have a saying: ‘buddy’s only half a word.’ So how do we keep the Meme from screwing us again?”

  Rae lifted her eyebrows and looked over at Absen. “I’m sure we’ll be able to hold them to any deals. Your skipper here doesn’t seem the trusting type, so I think I’ll just place my faith in him, and in the people like you he’s got to help him. If we can work out some kind of arrangement, we’ll make sure we keep the whip hand.”

  She’s good, Absen mused as he stood. “That’s all for now. Intel will be debriefing Ms. Denham and distributing regular summaries of everything we find out. For now, go back to your duties and stick to the rebuilding plan. No matter what happens, turning Jupiter system into a manufacturing powerhouse is our top priority right now. With or without the Meme, we’ll liberate Earth, and we’ll defend what’s ours.”

  ***

  Absen hadn’t said anything to Rae when she followed him to his office, neither forbidding nor encouraging her. Part of him wanted things to stay the way they always had between them – professional, edged with wariness. She’d led him on in their early days together, flirting with him when he was vulnerable and she was still married to Skull Denham, though Absen had thought the man was dead. His deduction that doing so was intended to forward Rae’s political agenda just made it worse. If it had been simple attraction, he might have forgiven her more easily.

  He really didn’t like being used.

  But that was long, long ago, and his anger had been blunted by time and intervening tragedy. So many dead, so much chaos…and just when he thought he was winning, this new menace threatened. It was enough to make a careful man crazy, and Absen had always been a planner, deliberate, calm and exacting in his operations.

  Not one to go flinging himself into anything.

  So when he closed the door on Steward Tobias’ faint smirk and found Rae in his arms again, he pushed her gently away with the discipline of a lifetime’s service to a higher calling. “Not yet. We need to get some things straight.”

  Hurt crossed Rae’s face, and she stepped back. “I’m sorry. Too fast?”

  “We haven’t seen each other in ages, and we never did more than flirt, which by the way…never mind. Yes, too fast,” Absen said.

  “Henrich, can I be forthright with you?”

  “I’d rather you were, though I know it doesn’t come naturally,” he said with an edge of bitterness.

  Her head jerked as if stung, and she turned her face away. “I deserved that, I know. I was wrong to lie to you back then, and I apologize. After all this time, can you forgive me?”

  “I’d forgive you in an instant if I was certain you weren’t playing more games with me.”

  Rae put her face in her hands. “You know, I was a hundred years younger then. How long are you going to hold a grudge?”

  “Not trusting someone isn’t the same as holding a grudge. Trust is like a piece of fine china. Once it shatters, it’s never quite the same, no matter how much glue you slather on.”

  “Maybe instead of dragging up what I did do, you should think about what I didn’t do. I always treated you with respect, Henrich. I never undermined you, I never tried to influence your mind directly – biochemically, that is, which is something you know
Blends can do – and I never worked against humanity. And here’s something else you seem to have forgotten.” Rae took a deep breath, turning back to him. “Skull Denham kidnapped me at gunpoint just a short time after I had blended with Raphael. Some crazy things, things I’ll never explain, happened in the following months when we were crammed together in a tiny little spaceship. I had his child. That was Ezekiel. I ended up loving Skull, but I can’t say I ever fell in love with him. Then he got killed, and I resurrected him, and then I had four more children by him, but he wasn’t the man I loved anymore, and that was my own fault, because I…well, let’s just say I did some things I shouldn’t have, out of sheer arrogance and bad judgment. I was young, I was stupid, and I’m sorry. I’ll never do anything like that again.”

  “Yes, Ezekiel told me about engrams.” After Rae’s face registered surprise, he continued, “Nice speech.” He moved to sit down on one end of his office sofa, waving her to the other. “I would have thought someone with such an intimate knowledge of biochemistry wouldn’t put much stock in the notion of love.”

  “Just because something is biochemical doesn’t mean it’s not real. Love, hatred, anger, addiction, mercy…it’s all rooted in neurology and biology…but I’ve come to believe there’s something more than just chemistry and physics at play. Something…ineffable.”

  Absen snorted. “What, did you get religion?”

  “I didn’t – and by the way, contempt doesn’t become you, Henrich. No, just that I feel like there’s something more than what we usually see. It might be another layer of reality, or it might be a higher order of perception of how everything fits together – or, hell, it might be a manifestation of a greater intelligence. It’s been postulated that the billions of galaxies, each with their billions of suns, are just cells in one vast mind that was birthed at the Big Bang, and we’re running around inside its body.”