“Rostov,” Repeth commed, “Stinson’s KIA. You’re this company’s CO now. You need to reorganize, redistribute ammo, and get attacking.”
“Sure, Smaj.” The woman’s tone was casual but she immediately began blistering her subordinates with a stream of focused invective that pulled them rapidly out of their post-battle adrenaline fog and into get-shit-done mode. Within one minute everyone had replenished ammo and power modules by taking them from the dead or raiding sled stores, and the company, now seventy percent effective, reported ready.
“Don’t wait for me, L.T.,” Repeth said to Rostov. “I’m just a humble sergeant major, not your commanding officer. I’ll be right behind you with the heavies.”
With a quirk of her lips at Repeth, the lieutenant ordered her company to move, and up and down the line, one hundred forty Marines and a hundred Recluses pushed through the bloody hole and into the interior of the mothership core.
Chapter 45
Vango Markis floated between Conquest and the mothership core like a gnat next to two watermelons. His fighter wing’s task was done for the moment, the Marines lodged inside the enemy’s skin. Every Scourge sensor, every weapon the StormCrows could find had been burned away, and now AI-controlled grabships rearmed and refueled his fighters in place.
Nervously he drummed his fingers on the armrest of his seat – or he seemed to, as his body was actually cocooned tight within a crash couch aboard Conquest.
When the idea of remoting the StormCrows had first been proposed, he’d strenuously objected. Fighter pilots should be inside their birds, not just controlling them from a distance, but the admiral had overruled him. For this mission, the fighters would stay within a few thousand klicks of the two ships, so the control signal delay was negligible. This setup also meant no pilot casualties, and if the dreadnought was forced to withdraw without recovering the Crows…well, Vango liked living as much as the next man.
Refueling completed with minutes to spare, Vango brought his wing around behind Conquest. Unlike a carrier, the dreadnought was armored like a super-battleship; its fighters were auxiliaries, not its main offensive weapons. The big ship would intentionally be the focus of the first, relatively small enemy swarm, buying time for the Marines to do their jobs. Vango’s wing of ninety-six, each strapped with twelve add-on multi-missile pods, would hopefully finish the extermination.
Vango sent his VR viewpoint forward to take a look at the oncoming ships, the remnants of the group that had run into the Meme blowtorches. From half a million in number, now only about twenty thousand Scourges remained, and many of those were clearly damaged. Running the numbers and expected kill ratios, the fighter pilot smiled, satisfied. This one would be easy.
The other swarm, with its half-million ships…that made him nervous.
Conquest opened up with its awesome primary particle beams, deliberately spread cones of accelerated neutrons that slaughtered swaths of enemy fighters and gunships, incinerating them like blowtorches ignite paper flowers. In response, the dwindling swarm spread out further.
Overall enemy count dropped below nineteen thousand before they entered secondary range. Now hundreds of Conquest’s standard dual-purpose lasers, powerful enough to damage capital ships but nimble enough to target small craft, began nailing Scourges one shot at a time. They didn’t always hit, as the swarming craft dodged frantically, but the closing range made losses inevitable.
In the swarm’s place humans might have pulled back or tried some tactic such as moving to put the mothership core between the swarm and its tormenter, but these must have been ordered to return directly to defend the core, so they flew straight into Conquest’s cone of death.
Eighteen thousand, then seventeen, then sixteen, and the swarm closed in on Conquest. As it reached minimum range, the dreadnought’s forward add-on point defense lasers woke up to a target-rich environment. Over five thousand of the weapons, small in ship terms but large enough to knock down a fighter, began flailing at their enemies. Not particularly accurate, still so many shots were bound to hit something and the count fell to twelve, then ten thousand.
Five seconds from Arrow missile range, Vango dialed up his time sense by a factor of twenty. The hundred subjective seconds seemed to drag, but they allowed him to mark targets for his weapons just as the other pilots did. When the closest enemies crossed into range, he said, “All wing elements, Fox One.” He waited a moment, then called, “Fox Two,” and continued reciting numbers up to twelve.
Each order launched a bundled pod of a dozen Arrows, putting one hundred forty-four weapons into play for each of the ninety-six fighters. Thus, over fourteen thousand seeking fighter-killers now rocketed toward the faltering swarm.
Vango said, “Follow them in, boys and girls. Remember, you’re not really in your Crows, so crank up your time senses, shut down your interlocks, and we’ll tally the kills up at the bar.” Heeding his own advice, he slotted his Crow in tight behind his own missile cluster and began taking laser shots at anything that no one had marked.
For this mission, the flight deck crews had hastily installed auxiliary power generators into the empty cockpits, so Vango enjoyed a fifty percent faster regeneration rate on his centerline weapon. It still seemed slow, but was an improvement. He felt a slight lag, a stickiness in all of his actions from time it took for signals to make it from the chips in his head to the Crow and back.
As the universe around him slowed to a crawl, Vango watched as the Arrow salvo met what was left of the swarm. About half the missiles perished to enemy point defense fire, but the other seven thousand hammered home, spearing an equal number of fighters and gunships. Vango’s threat count dropped below three thousand, and then he was among them.
Three quick laser blasts knocked down three enemy fighters, and then he was out of main power. His wing weapons continued to pump out shots, but they did not have the punch to do more than inflict scattered damage on the heavy chitin sheathing of the swarm’s ships…and Crows began to go offline by ones and twos, then by tens. Within thirty seconds of realtime, all ninety-six EarthFleet fighters had winked out.
The VR cocoon shut down the link, dumping Vango’s mind back into his body with a sickening lurch. “No!” was his first strangled cry before reason took over. If he’d had his way and flown his own fighter, he’d be dead by now. Sure, he’d have played it differently and not driven in among the Scourges, but still…it was one thing to run the numbers, quite another to face thirty to one odds.
Turns out the kill ratios don’t take suicidal behavior into account, Vango thought as he blinked in the dim light of his coffin. Then the lid popped open and a pretty biomed tech looked down at him from above. “You good, sir?” she asked brightly, handing him a drug cocktail. “Drink this.”
“Ugh,” he said, sitting up and taking the cup, downing the stuff in one gulp. The disorientation and VR-craving subsided as the brain-balancer took hold. “Twenty-second century and we still can’t make medicine taste good,” he grumbled.
Climbing out, Vango handed the cup to the tech and left her standing there with a wistful look on her face. He wasn’t in the mood for pilot groupies right now, especially young ones freshly recruited into EarthFleet. Besides, there was a fight going on and he wasn’t in it, which irked him. He slapped a few backs of other glum pilots emerging from coffins on his way to the medical station. “Can you put up a COP feed on the big screen?” he asked the tech sitting there.
“Sure,” the man said, and soon ninety-six pilots stood grouped around the display.
“The point defense is finishing them off,” one of them said wistfully.
“Wasn’t so tough,” said another with false bravado.
Vango made a strangled sound and waved for attention. “Actually, we screwed the pooch, and it’s my fault,” he said. “My fault,” he repeated, so they understood he wasn’t taking them to task. “I shouldn’t have led you guys in right after the missile volley. Thirty to one odds are stupid. I’d never have
done it if we were inside the birds, and I just wasted ten billion credits-worth of high-tech fighters like a rookie in a video game.”
“It wasn’t entirely stupid, sir,” came a voice from behind him. He turned to see Michelle Conquest in her fresh new lieutenant’s uniform. “I got a lot of good, close-range intel data in the twenty-seven seconds the Crows survived. We have more birds for you. Next time you’ll do better.”
“Next time.” Vango snorted, aware that his pilots had fallen silent and watched the interaction. Many of them were still uncomfortable with the avatar, ignoring the fact that the ship around them was as much the AI’s body as this android. “The only way we’ll be of any use next time is to stay at extreme range and snipe at them. We can’t face that many.”
“You’re right. You can’t.” Michelle’s mouth turned up.
“But you can?” Vango snorted in derision.
“Not at all, sir. It’s simple physics. No pilot, no AI in the world can fight at such a disadvantage.”
Vango put his palms to his face and scrubbed at his eyes. “You came all the way down here in person to tell me we suck?”
“No, sir.” Michelle shook her head and looked around at the rapt crowd of crestfallen pilots. “I came all the way down here in person to tell you to stop beating yourselves up. Good day, ladies and gentlemen.” With that, she turned and walked off.
Chapter 46
Staying behind the lines bugged the shit out of Colonel ben Tauros. He actually envied Repeth, and now understood why she had turned down promotion to the officer corps so many times. With her experience she could have been a general, or at least a colonel.
Flogging his brain, he tried to focus only on the big picture and not the casualty count or the intermittent bursts of chatter that brought the details of the fight right into his suitcomm. On his HUD he could see the assault taking shape as an expanding bubble occupying about a quarter of the circumference of the mothership core, a thousand meters wide and five hundred deep. The front lines described a jagged sine wave, and as he stared at it, something nagged at his tactical mind.
Why was the resistance so evenly spaced, so regular? Easier, harder, easier, harder…
Putting aside the why, he asked himself what Moshe Dyan would have done. The general had always been a hero of his, achieving stunning victories for Israel in the twentieth century against high odds by use of bold attacks and lightning operations tempo.
The soft spots might be a trick, might be a trap to sucker him into overextending himself – but EarthFleet was in a time crunch and he had to gamble. If they didn’t grab what they came for and get out, they were all in deep shit anyway.
All right, Bull. Time to place a big bet.
“Listen up. Bull here,” he said on the command channel. “I’ve marked several lanes of advance associated with the nearest company. Those companies are to advance at all deliberate speed to extend and widen their salients, taking opportunities to attack to the flanks and encircle defenders. Lieutenant Conquest, all the excess Recluses are to assault up those lanes and drive for the center of the core.” Sending only the battle drones controlled by the AI minimized the risk to personnel, and frankly, the bots were even more efficient in pure attack mode, when they were freed from the constraints imposed by having to coordinate with Marines.
Bull checked time to egress: one hour fifty-seven minutes. After that, all Marines left aboard would be on their own in the middle of a bug swarm. He watched on his HUD as the forward thrusts of his formations extended and widened as designated companies went on the attack. Like spreading water, soon the brigade had surrounded several enemy strongpoints. Bull ordered them to be methodically reduced. Ammo was no problem; sleds constantly shuttled back and forth to Conquest, medevacking the wounded and bringing ordnance and power packs by the ton, as well as spare Recluses.
Recluses…Bull watched on his HUD as the spider drones raced forward like cavalry, cutting through the enemy lines and wreaking havoc with unmatched speed. It appeared the Scourges had not set up a defense in depth. They probably had never had to repel an assault on their mothership. “Yes!” he said aloud as the bots spread out and raced for the center of the core.
***
Rick Johnstone’s brain may have been inside his cocoon, but his mind, his eyes and ears and his consciousness roamed the VR landscape. Aided by Michelle’s vast AI mind distributed throughout Conquest, he leaped from Recluse to Recluse aboard the mothership, looking through their eyes for something, anything resembling what he needed.
“There,” he said, pointing a ghostly finger at a junction box exposed by a glancing laser strike. “That has to be a node.”
Instantly, Michelle’s VR presence was at his side. “I agree. I’m bringing a tap now.” In moments, one of the specially equipped Recluses squatted by the electronic device while a dozen of its fellows gathered to provide defense.
“I’m going in,” Rick said as he felt the connection form.
“I’ve got your back, Commander,” Michelle said.
Feeling his way deftly into the electronic control system, Rick found it less alien than he expected. Digital was digital, whether the system used binary, octal or hexadecimal, human-built or otherwise. Physics bounded cybernetics just like they bounded chemistry or orbital mechanics.
In other words, there were only so many ways to skin a computer, and Rick Johnstone knew them all.
With the power of the AI behind him, he entered the mothership’s network and began to ransack its myriad databases. He found very little ICE; doubtlessly the Scourges never expected an information attack from a hard line within their own ship. He did find encryption too complex to break on the fly, so he told Michelle, “Copy everything and quarantine it. We can crack it later. Right now, just take it all.”
For minutes in the real world, hours in VR space, Rick and Michelle wandered the enemy’s nearly deserted digital halls, stealing petabytes of scrambled data.
“How long?”
“Six more minutes,” Michelle said. “And I’ve found what I think are the physical components of their FTL drive system. The Recluses are salvaging as much of it as they can.”
Rick jumped his viewpoint to the indicated location, a surprisingly small room near the center of the core. “Doesn’t look like much.”
“This is the field control and generation machinery, I believe. The rest is just emitters and power. I already have a few of those.”
Rick smiled. “Michelle, you’re a wonder. You make information warfare look frighteningly easy.”
“Not so easy for the Marines fighting and dying so we could get in here.”
Stunned, recollection of the real world crashed in on Rick. “Oh my God. Jill’s out there fighting. How could I have lost track of that?”
“Welcome to VR confusion, Rick. It’s addictive. But right now, the best thing is to do your job and let her do hers.”
“I want to see her. Now.”
“Of course.” Abruptly, Rick looked at his wife through the eyes of a Recluse, one still with the Marines, controlled by a sled pilot. While he watched, she moved crouching behind a firing line, pointing out targets, slapping backs and encouraging her troops. “See, she’s doing fine,” Michelle said.
“Thanks, Michelle. You have no idea how good that makes me feel.”
Wistfully she replied. “I wish I did.”
Chapter 47
Archon Yort browbeat his staff with light. “We are being driven back! How can this be?”
“Archon, for every invader we kill, we lose a thousand infants and a dozen cadre. Even the Constructs cannot withstand their fire. It is as if every one of their troops is a Construct. The researchers have recovered a body, and it is implanted with cybernetic enhancements like our Constructs. Also, their materials technology is superior to ours, so their armor is very tough.”
“Impossible. The Fourth Law of Relative Science states that technological advancements cannot occur without sufficient knowledge
base. Neither the Jellies nor this species has the null space drive; how can their materials technology be so advanced?” Yort struck the fool with a backward swipe of his claws.
The officer quailed and scuttled away. “It is not my specialty, Archon. Undoubtedly you are correct. The reports must be wrong.”
“Archon,” the officer in charge of internal networks interrupted, “I am having difficulty with my automated control systems. Some are failing, and I do not know why.”
“Well, repair them!” Yort glared. “Do your job, or I will dispatch you to the forefront of battle.”
“The repairers have been sent to fight the pestilence at your order, Archon.”
Yort cast about with his limbs as if to find a solution to his dilemma, but there was nothing. “I will…you must…the pestilence…”
His officers backed away and exchanged glances, keeping at least one eye on their leader at all times.
Archon Yort’s communications had become more erratic. He knew it but could not seem to control himself. Never had anyone or anything offended him thus, breaking into his home and killing his servants. It amazed him that any species had the effrontery to oppose the Race and him in particular.
“I want them crushed! I want them dragged screaming to the breeding pens and eaten by infants.” Yort continued to rave, heaving his bloated body here and there within his chamber, injuring several servants and smashing machinery. His surprise was total as the resin of the walls began to glow and then vanished in flame.
He still raved as a Recluse laser speared through his brain, ending his tantrum forever.
Chapter 48
“Bull, you’ve got to get your people out of there,” Admiral Absen commed. “We have all the intel and the FTL drive components, and the sleds are standing by.”
Bull panted as he talked. Absen figured he must be running, or whatever they called it in zero G. “Sir, we’re falling back, but all the Scourges just went crazy. They’re attacking suicidally and a lot of these kids are green. If I try to conduct a fighting withdrawal, some of them will break and rout and we’ll get plowed under. Better to hold in place and ride out the storm.”
Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) Page 20