“There,” he said to his officers, indicating the place with a claw tip. “Send half my forces to the enemy firing location via a spherical route. Spread the other half out and away from the star. Where…” He quickly examined the first planet in the system, a small barren world, then the second, shrouded in hot clouds, neither of which showed signs of abundant life. But the third teemed with it.
It also swarmed with infestations of war machines.
Of interest, the eight annihilated motherships were all closest to the third planet’s current orbital position.
“Sir, I have detected another biomass cluster, here, near us. Eight large nests.”
Yort examined his primary display. Life readings beckoned opposite the infested planet, but closest to his own mothership, a stroke of luck. If he moved quickly, he could seize and eat this prize himself, then move on to join in the main assault as other swarms took the brunt of the casualties.
Chapter 38
While they waited the interminable seconds for the next antimatter missile to load, Scoggins asked, “Results on the first Exploder?”
“Vaporized them, hon,” Commander Ford said with a wolfish smile.
She let him get away with the familiarity this time. He was her husband, after all. Right now the elation of the plan’s success had her in its grip, and she forced herself to concentrate. “Where’s that second Exploder?” she growled.
“Coming up now.”
Scoggins cheated with her time sense, tweaking it so the seconds passed quickly, though that caused the swarms of enemy looming in front of Conquest to deploy even faster on the screen. Suddenly, witch-lights flared among the enemy, ripples of color and brightness in complex waves and densities.
“What the hell is that?” Scoggins asked.
Lieutenant Fletcher replied, “Some of it’s laser fire. No threat at all at this range. A little is some kind of plasma discharges aimed at us, but we’re too far away. The majority seems to be communication lights among themselves. Millions of them.”
“James –” Scoggins said to Ford in a tone of warning.
“Firing now,” he replied hastily. “Exploder and missiles away.”
“Pulse, mark,” Okuda said immediately, and the displays blanked as Conquest bolted. “Dropping, mark.” Scoggins mentally counted this pulse as the ship’s third capital action of the five their capacitors allowed them, a convenient shorthand.
Another mothership, looking much like the first, appeared in front of them, only this one was surrounded by its enormous, already expanding swarm. The enemy now resembled the biggest hornet’s nest Scoggins had ever seen.
“Alpha strike. Target the mothership.” Fourth action, and an Exploder would get intercepted by that mess.
“Aye aye, Skipper,” Ford said with relish. This time he got to fire with his own hands, or at least it would feel that way in VR.
The swarm was already turning and firing thousands of weapons toward Conquest when her primary weapons array speared death into the mothership core.
First, the three gargantuan Desolator-built particle beams bored a hole through the intervening thousands of boats to touch the mothership. Attenuated by the interfering escorts, the energy blew through the organic resin of the latticework and barely singed the armor of the enemy core, but it cleared three cylinders of space.
Space for a million ferrocrystal spheres to pass and strike the target at 0.3c.
The streams of railgun shot slammed into the mothership’s hull and each immediately fused, every one releasing power equivalent to a tiny nuclear blast. The inexorable tide of sun-like heat quickly ate its way through the core’s heavy armor in three separate places. Once the lines of shot chewed through, the resulting plasma, stripped ions and superheated gas propagated throughout the interior of the flattened sphere very much like the sledgehammer had done to the Io base, but more so. Ironically, the mothership’s heavy armor became a liability, holding the expanding hell within the vessel it was supposed to protect.
Inside, everything ignited as lines of blasts marched through its structure in a ruler-straight line. Even substances not normally flammable – foodstuffs, metals, even ceramics – burst into flame and consumed themselves in a firestorm that snuffed out every living thing within.
Gutted, the core spewed a blazing jet of gases from its entry wounds and spun broken through the void like a firework pinwheel.
“Yes! Yes!” Ford slapped his console with fierce joy, echoed by others on the bridge.
“Well done,” Scoggins said with a pleased shudder. It was one thing to launch SLAMs or deploy Exploders and run, not seeing the results, but quite another to witness the kill with a warrior’s dark satisfaction. “Mister Okuda, take us out of here.”
“Pulse, mark. Dropping, mark.”
Fifth action.
“Capacitors at two percent,” the Engineering station reported. “Full charge in sixty-three minutes.”
Now the holotank and flatscreen displays – really just images in her head, Scoggins reminded herself – showed Conquest hanging in space twenty million kilometers out from Sol’s south pole, exactly opposite from where they had launched the SLAMs and well away from any action. This position allowed her, and the admiral, full visibility of the theatre of battle.
Drained of stored power, Conquest waited. Had they not been in VR space, Scoggins would have ordered everyone to take a break. Instead, she toyed with the idea of using the AI’s control of VR time to skip forward but decided against it.
Beside her, Admiral Absen paced about the bridge, looking at the holotank from all angles and issuing terse orders to his forces strewn around the solar system. “Captain, take a look at this mothership,” he said after he was done. He pointed to one Scourge carrier separated from its fellows, on the opposite side of the sun from Earth.
Scoggins nodded. “That’s the one we left alone, heading for the Meme Destroyers.”
“Just what we need,” Absen replied. “He’s out of position. Probably figures he’ll be last to the buffet, so he might as well try to grab a snack while his buddies are distracted.”
“You have a sick sense of humor, sir.”
“It’s been said.” The admiral pointed. “Hmm. What’s this swarm cluster? The one that’s heading to the solar north? We can barely see it.”
Scoggins stared, leaning over the railing and putting her nose into the holotank. “Michelle, magnify that, will you?”
The fuzzy icon expanded rapidly until it resolved itself into a swarm of Scourge ships. “What the hell are they doing out there?” Absen asked. “Replay the record and tell me where they came from.” The display reversed time, showing clearly the enemy group had been launched from the lone mothership.
“They’re heading for where we fired the SLAMs from,” Scoggins realized aloud. “Probably thinks we have something permanent there, like a fortress.”
“Clever bug,” Absen said, “but not clever enough. Half his swarm is going for the Meme, where I hope they’ll be savaged badly. The other half is on a wild goose chase…”
“And the mothership’s all alone, heading away from the sun,” Scoggins finished. “Bughouse.”
“Yes.” Absen made one more circuit of the holotank, looking at the display from all angles. “Put me through to Vango and Bull.”
Chapter 39
“Archon, we are detecting pestilence installations between us and the eight spaceborne nests.” On Yort’s screen he could see a river of objects – thousands of asteroids and millions of tiny living creatures all orbiting the star, though only a small fraction of them barred his path, so vast was the orbit.
Yort briefly considered angling his forces and mothership up and over the plane of the ecliptic, but that would use valuable time and fuel already being prodigiously expended by the mothership’s evasive maneuvers. What had he to fear from a few defenses? Even with half his forces on their way to the still-unseen superfortress above the star’s pole, he had over fifty thousand
Claws, an equal number of Lances, and a half-million Mandibles filled with a billion larva and adolescents. His only challenge would be chasing down the fat nests, consuming them, and returning to the infested world soon enough to claim his share.
Abruptly, several of his Claws vanished in first one fusion explosion, then another. Within seconds, blasts flared along the line of his advancing craft, annihilating them in small groups. “The pestilence has deployed orbital mines. Why did the Claws not see them?”
“I do not know,” said his underling officer. “The surveillance technicians are searching for an answer.”
“Spread our forces out to ensure no more than one is killed at a time,” Yort ordered. “The damage is bothersome, but negligible.” Soon, the frequency of explosions waned, still striking here and there, but killing barely one in a thousand of his Claws, Lances and Mandibles.
“The Claws approach the asteroids,” Yort’s underling reported. “They exhibit minimal signs of infestation.”
“Tell the Claws to begin firing plasma torpedoes at extreme range to provoke a response.”
Minutes passed before Yort received the first reports from his staff. “The asteroids are returning fire with beam weapons. They have killed several Claws.”
Yort took a long look at his display, noting how few the armed asteroids were, and how they approached along the solar orbit with significant spacing between. “Order the Mandibles to continue toward the enemy nests. For the good of the greater Hive, swarm the asteroids with Claws and Lances. They can overtake the Mandibles later.”
Soon, thousands of Claws and Lances englobed the leading pestilence, stabbing it to death with direct fire. In short order the asteroid exploded, taking a few more Claws with it before it died. “Maintain maximum range,” Yort ordered. “They have suicide charges aboard.” Clever, this infestation and its pestilence, but not so clever as all that. “Continue to swarm each enemy in turn.”
By the death of the fourth armed asteroid his tens of thousands of Claws and Lances became densely packed, often getting in each others’ way and even colliding. “Order them to spread out again,” Yort said.
Abruptly and without warning, his viewer blazed with a hundred fusion explosions distributed randomly within his swarm. The Archon watched with growing annoyance as he saw the total casualty count top one in ten. “Fools,” he flashed. “Must I do all the thinking for you?”
Control was becoming more difficult as communications lag lengthened due to the growing distance between swarm and Archon. “Continue evading, but angle us downward to avoid the plane of the ecliptic,” Yort ordered after all. “I do not want my mothership to pass through the zone of hidden mines. Then resume course toward the target nests.”
For his swarm, fusion mines held little fear. Each blast would only kill one of millions, as long as the small craft stayed well away from each other. However, one well-placed detonation could cripple or kill his mothership.
“Expand the external structure,” Yort ordered. This would unfold the latticework of girders into a globe of enormous size, deploying gossamer netting into all empty spaces. That way, if a hidden explosive touched the outside of the mothership, it would destroy nothing but material of little worth, and his nest would remain safe deep within. In other words, the extended skin would serve to detonate unseen weapons.
Soon, the mothership’s outer circumference had grown tenfold, leaving vast pockets of space around the comparably tiny central body.
“Archon, something new approaches.” One of his underlings marked a cluster of enemy pestilence on the screen. “It accompanies this group of armed asteroids and is made of the small biomass units.”
Yort strained his eyes. “Magnify.”
“Magnification is maximum, Archon. We are far from the target cluster because of our evasive course.”
Blasting a frustrated glare in all directions, Yort said, “Those resemble the speedy suicide swarmers of the Jellies. Tell the Claws to attack them vigorously with coherent light while the Lances pummel the asteroids with plasma torpedoes. Alert the Mandibles to activate point defenses while pressing toward the enemy nests.”
Even as he issued the orders, the cluster in question burst outward with the flaring of fusion drives. Thousands of tiny enemy swarmers leaped toward his Claws with acceleration impossible to match. Yort watched as some fell to his energy weapons, but several hundred damaged or destroyed more Claws, while the rest missed their targets. The weapons passed through the Claw screen, disregarded his Lances and aimed themselves at the Mandibles.
While loss of more Claws annoyed him, Yort was pleased by the enemy’s choice of secondary targeting. With more than a thousand defensive beams for every attacking swarmer, he expected very little damage to his many Mandibles.
Yort turned out to be correct. A mere two of his more than half a million Mandibles were lost, the puny thousand or so attackers burned down by even the inept gunnery of the adolescent pilots.
And then the dangers were past, as his swarm and his mothership departed from the pestilence zone orbiting the star. Yort saw he had lost only twelve percent of this half of his swarm, while the other half accelerated toward the origin point of the mothership-killing blasts. Relief flooded him as he realized that his underlings had not detected any sign of the unknown weapon firing at him – no vaporized dust from a near miss, no reflections or ionizations.
Perhaps the threat had abated, but he maintained his mothership’s evasive corkscrew, despite its cost in fuel. Yort had always considered himself a bit wiser than the average Archon, and so he congratulated himself on his care. “Focus a sensor suite on the target location above the pole.”
“I have done so for some time, Archon, but have detected nothing.”
“Nothing? Show me.” Yort heaved himself upward on his weak, seldom-used legs to crane all four eyes toward the screens overhead. “I don’t see anything.”
His underlings remained silent, only waiting. Finally, the bravest of them spoke. “Perhaps whatever fired has departed.”
“Departed? Impossible. Something must be there, or nearby. Nothing large enough to fire such weapons could have moved far. Perhaps your sensors are malfunctioning or being jammed?”
“Unlikely, Archon, or we would detect something, even if we did not understand what it was. But we can see the distant stars through the empty space of the location.”
Yort turned his eyes to take in secondary displays. “Where are our three remaining motherships?” he asked.
“We have lost contact with them, Archon. Spy drone reports show their swarms heading for the infested world, but no motherships. It is possible they have retreated too close to the sun to see, or have re-entered null space.”
“They have not had time to recharge their null space drives.” Yort racked his mind for any reason the other motherships would hide or stay near this system’s yellow sun, but could think of nothing. His thoughts shied from the possibility that they had all been destroyed by the mysterious ship-killer weapon. He knew he was smarter than other Archons of his rank, but surely at least some of his brother-sisters would have thought to evade continuously.
Perhaps he should have suggested it to them.
And their three swarms and portions of the others still existed, a superswarm totaling over eight million craft and seven billion larvae, easily enough to overrun the planet, destroy the pestilence, consume the infestation, establish nests, and then move on to secure the rest of the star system.
On the other limb…if the worst had happened and the other motherships had been destroyed, command would fall to him. His dream of achieving Archon First, of taking this system for himself, might be no fantasy after all.
Perhaps this was not such a disaster as he had thought.
“Recall the half-swarm heading toward the polar location. Ensure our evasion pattern continues,” Yort said.
“Fuel is being depleted at twice the normal rate, Archon. One-eleventh is already expended.”
Yort did not respond. The underling had spoken an important truth, though. Eventually he would have to stop the evasion that spun and shifted the mothership ponderously from direction to direction. It should not matter. When his swarm seized the mobile nests, he would have all the fuel he needed.
Chapter 40
SystemLord watched as the Scourge swarm surged toward his eight fat Destroyers. Half again as large as standard ships of their type, the Meme ships bulged with fuel for fusors and engines, though in his experience one never had enough.
The underlings – the Humans, his new allies, he reminded himself – had been most accommodating when it came to providing an assignment suitable to his capabilities. The situation was nearly ideal, with the one exception of its evident danger. By subtle suggestion, the one called Raphaela had accepted his offer to decoy some of the Scourge away rather than participating in the futile defense of the planet. By SystemLord’s calculations the Humans had less than one chance in nine of not losing their world.
Again.
Such incompetence.
The irony amused him, until he remembered he had also lost the planet for the Empire.
But try as he might, SystemLord had not been able to get the Blend Raphaela to provide the lightspeed drive technology data before the battle. Had he acquired that, he might have yielded to the temptation to depart as fast as his drives could take him toward the nearest Empire-held system, perhaps implementing it along the way. Not only would the technology provide his people an important weapon against the Scourge, its triumphal presentation would ensure he was personally rewarded.
Unfortunately, the Humans had not been so trusting, and had not given him the lightspeed drive technology data yet. However reluctantly, SystemLord would play his part, if only to ensure he received what was promised. Now he turned his considerable intellect to that task.
“Cease gestation of hypervelocity projectiles,” he ordered. “They are not effective against so great a mass. Also cease gestation of stingships. Launch the ones we have and hold them in reserve behind us.”
Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) Page 17