Maybe Absen’s idea was only a shaky, uncertain hope, and he didn’t want to tempt fate.
“Instead of spreading out over the whole world, they’re going for Asia, especially the heavily populated centers in India and China,” Absen observed. “It’s the largest continent, and is connected to Europe and, functionally, to Africa. Only islands, Australia and the Americas will be problematic for them to reach.”
Scoggins nodded. “And Antarctica, sir.”
“Not enough biomass there to be a target, Captain.”
“Of course. So…they probably figure they’ll take the biggest prize and then load up on their transports again to attack the other continents.”
“Yes.” Absen continued to walk around the holotank with a predatory gleam in his eye like a wolf eyeing a lame fawn. “But as you correctly pointed out, without good leadership they’re just a mob. Note that their fighters and gunships are dropping into atmosphere instead of staying up here in space.”
“Giving up the high ground,” Scoggins replied. “I see.”
“Do you? Do you?” Absen’s eyes burned, and Scoggins could see the admiral consumed from within by a flame – cold rage or lust for vengeance, she wasn’t certain. All she knew for sure was that the man she knew had crossed some line within himself, had gone from ice to fire in the last twenty-four hours.
Everyone had his breaking point, and it made Scoggins’ guts churn to think the rock of a man she’d served with all these years might be showing cracks. She straightened up formally. “Sir, what are your orders?”
Absen licked dry lips. “Signal the fleet to break orbit and hold on this side of the planet.”
“Hold?” Scoggins gaped for a moment and then deliberately shut her jaw.
“Hold. We hold here and watch the Scourges go down and get comfy.”
“But sir – Earth has hardly any antiaircraft weapons, or combat aircraft for that matter. You’re not going to hit them on the way down? You’re going to let them land?”
Absen’s smile was a rictus that reached nowhere near his eyes. “Just for a while. Just for a little while…”
“Admiral, people are dying!”
Absen rounded on her, taking her by the shoulders. “They’re always dying, Captain. The Eden Plague abolished old age, but people still die because war never ends. It just takes a break for a little while, and nobody knows that as well as I do.” His words sputtered to a stop, eyes staring at nothing, hands forgotten on Scoggins’ shoulders.
Scoggins leaned in close to speak quietly. “Admiral, I know you have a plan. If you tell me, I can help you make it happen.” Just because Absen was nearing the end of his rope didn’t mean he hadn’t had an epiphany, and she needed to know what it was.
Just then, Doctor Horton stepped up to Absen with a plastic cup. “Sir, you need to drink this.”
Absen dropped his hands and both he and Scoggins turned to the woman in surprise.
Horton went on, “Admiral, you left this sitting on your desk. Drink it, please.”
“I don’t need that crap,” he replied, pushing the proffered cup away.
The doctor’s expression turned steely. “Sir, you’re suffering from VR withdrawal, and you didn’t drink your brain-balancer. If you don’t take it, I’ll have your Stewards hold you while I pour it down your throat.”
For a long moment the two locked eyes, and then Absen reached out to take the cup, tossing it into his mouth and swallowing it like a shot of Scotch. “There. Happy? Now take your station, Doctor, and stop meddling in command affairs.”
Scoggins nodded gratefully to the doc and waited for the admiral to do or say something, figuring the more she stalled, the more the medicine would take effect.
After a pause, Absen said, “All right, you were saying, Captain? My plan?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You remember during the battle with the Guardian in Gliese 370 when we were hammering it with everything we had?”
“Yes, sir, I do.” Keep him talking…
“You called out that it was targeting us, and as much as I wanted Conquest to take that shot to the face instead of someone else, I had Okuda brake us and York…”
“I remember, sir. They blew York away. That must have been hard, but you had to do it. Conquest had a million colonists aboard packed in the coldsleep tubes.”
Absen scratched his head with both hands as if his scalp itched terribly. “Yes, I had to do it. I had to! I sacrificed a battleship with a thousand crew aboard to save a million. Now we have to do this. The people on the ground are our sacrifice, because, God help me, this ship is the only thing standing between that Swarm and the extinction of humanity. I won’t throw it away. I won’t.”
“I get that, sir,” Scoggins whispered fiercely, “but why don’t we make a fast pass through the top of their formation? Kill some more, take the pressure off the folks on the ground?”
Absen’s eyes sharpened and seemed to clear a bit. “You ever follow boxing, any sort of ring fighting, Captain?” he said in a more normal voice, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Not really, sir. Do we have time –”
“Captain, we have time because I’m waiting for something.” Absen glanced over at the holotank, and then turned away.
“Okay, ring fighting…so?”
“Ever hear of the rope-a-dope strategy?”
“No, sir.”
“I know it, sir,” Ford spoke up, exchanging glances with Scoggins. “Lean back, cover up, the ropes support you. Conserve your strength and let the other guy wear himself out.”
“Exactly!” Absen spun and jabbed a finger at the holotank. “Or, for you history nuts, like Russia did to the Germans in World War Two. Fall back. Conserve strength. These critters have to be getting low on fuel. Their ships are small and they’ve been accelerating, decelerating or fighting just as long as we have. What’s our fuel status?”
“About forty percent, sir,” Okuda replied.
“So,” Absen said with a finger in the air, “if a big ship like Conquest is down more than half, they have to be running on fumes. If they were smart, at least their fighters should stay up in orbit, looping around and around Earth at no fuel cost, performing combat aerospace patrol. But they’re not!” He slammed a palm onto the rail. “They’re gliding down into the gravity well. Maybe that’s their doctrine, or maybe all of the greedy bastards are trying to get their piece of the pie first. It doesn’t matter, because they just made a fatal mistake.”
Scoggins moved up to examine the holotank. “Ninety percent of them have entered atmosphere. Landing craft have touched down all over Asia.”
“And as soon as the other ten percent are de-orbited, they’ll have given up their mobility. Even if they have enough fuel to come back up, they’ll be slow in the air, their weapons will be attenuated, and we’ll have the high ground, shooting downward. Coming to attack us will be like scaling a cliff.”
Ford crowed, “Fish in a barrel, sir! I like it!”
“That’s fine for us, sir,” Scoggins said, “but what about the defenders on the ground?”
Absen held up his fists as if blocking punches. “Rope-a-dope, Captain. Remember Russia and the Germans.”
“You’re going to sacrifice millions just to wear the enemy out?”
“Not exactly. Spectre is having them all pull back to their redoubts, limiting casualties. I’m not trading people for time, Captain. Just the ecosystem, God help me.”
Chapter 54
Spectre stood on a catwalk surrounding the enormous holotank he’d had installed in the palace at Shepparton. His minions, the most senior deposed Blends, gathered around to watch the enemy fall to Earth. As always, a triple contingent of Skulls, now enhanced with combat nano and provided with the most deadly weapons available, lined the walls and stood on balconies overlooking the situation room.
Spectre had never been one to make outward displays of frustration unless they were calculated to impress. He’d long ago decided
that giving anyone insight into his thought processes was a mistake. Except for Ann Alkina, may she rest in peace, the better angels of his nature had nothing to do with it; the issue was presenting an appearance of invincibility and control.
That’s why he was grateful Absen had spoken to him and explained the plan, so his unruffled demeanor wasn’t entirely faked. In truth, he worried. Had he not known the admiral’s plan, he’d have wondered if he and Earth were doomed.
Now, they had a good chance…if he could keep his people from outright revolt.
“My Lord Spectre, I do not understand the orders you have just issued.” Cleopatra, whom he knew only obeyed him out of fear, always seemed to take the opportunity to question him.
Spectre didn’t mind, really; better to have the opposition in the open, and it kept him on his toes. “It’s part of a coordinated strategy with EarthFleet. You know I just spoke with Admiral Absen.”
“Why not tell us what you talked about?”
Spectre smiled and threw her a bone. “A perfectly reasonable suggestion. Here is his plan.” Making Absen the author might allow the blame to fall on the admiral, though it might diminish Spectre’s glory if it succeeded. He didn’t care much about glory right now; fear and force were the foundations of his power. Old Mao was right, he chuckled to himself. All power does proceed from the barrel of a gun…but you still have to have ammo, skill, and especially the will to use it.
Taking a cursor, Spectre spun the enormous globe depicted in the holotank so that Asia showed. Above it all, they could see a million ships spiraling down and spreading out, so many that they were grouped together by the computer in icons of up to one thousand. “Originally I had ordered each city to create a kill zone, a defense in depth, in order to destroy as many of the enemy on the way down. When the Scourges landed, the defenders would escape through extensive tunnels back to the fortified cities, activating millions of inexpensive mines. The goal was to make the enemy pay for every inch of ground regardless of casualties, to buy time for the parts of Earth not under attack to rush reinforcements and attack from the perimeter.”
“Yes. Like the Russians in World War Two,” Gilgamesh said, shifting his great bulk in his seat. “They fortified their cities and turned them into deathtraps for the Germans, gaining time to build up their armies. Eventually those armies came back and crushed the exhausted Wehrmacht.” The Blend was merely fat now rather than ridiculously obese, as Spectre had worked him as hard as any of them. Gilgamesh had proven himself a reliable right-hand man for anything to do with the Blends. “It seemed like a good strategy,” he continued diplomatically. “What has changed?”
“Only the emphasis and timing. My plan had always been to put the least competent fighters – the youngest, the weakest, the least well trained – on the front lines. If they died, they died.” The other Blends nodded, hardly less ruthless than Spectre. “This would leave the best troops to hold the cities. Every mouth to feed or weapon to service must be as effective as possible.”
“And?” Cleopatra challenged. “What changed?” she repeated.
“Admiral Absen pointed out that all the enemy are dropping into the atmosphere. They have ceded space in order to put all their air power against us. That will make our kill zones much less effective. They will bombard us with masses of plasma torpedoes and beams from long range. That’s a losing proposition for us. Better not to engage at all, but instead to simply allow them to land everywhere. Even in the cities, we will only defend locally, not even shooting at their landing craft.”
“But they’ll just bombard the cities instead!” Cleopatra protested.
Ah, a better foil I could not have asked for, Spectre thought, feeding me such setup lines. “The more they bombard, the more rubble they produce. Modern cities become easier, not harder, to defend as they are wrecked.”
“But the countryside! We’ve all seen the briefings. The Scourgelings will eat everything. Even though we have harvested all the crops and hoarded all possible human food, they can consume any biomass. The Russian and Siberian forests alone will let them grow fat, and we will be left with wastelands.”
Spectre grinned, a thing that caused several present to blanch. “Yes. I’m counting on it.”
Chapter 55
“Bring us around in a standard low orbit and get some spy drones redeployed so we have worldwide coverage,” Absen ordered, lounging comfortably in his crash chair at the flag station. “Looks like they’ve all committed to their descents.” He felt much better now that the cocktail the doctor had given him had taken hold. VR syndrome was no joke, especially for EarthFleet’s commander in chief. He felt embarrassed, but was pretty sure he hadn’t completely lost it.
Not for the first time did he feel surprised at how much biology influenced behavior.
“Are we going down after them?” Scoggins asked.
“Not a chance,” Absen replied. “We can’t spare the fuel, especially our fighters. A tanker is coming from Mars and three from Jupiter, but we are on our own for a while. No, we’ll just roll over and strafe them from orbit as we pass.”
“Aye aye, sir. Okuda, make it so.”
“Setting course for low Earth orbit with maximum coverage of Asia and Europe,” the helmsman reported.
Thirty minutes later, the squadron crested the horizon and swung over the enemy landing zones. “’You may fire when ready, Gridley,’” Absen misquoted. “Pass the same to the fleet. Priority targets are their fighters, and watch for them shooting back. With this kind of space supremacy there’s absolutely no reason to lose even one of our StormCrows. In fact, open the launch bay and tell the manned Crows to start rotating in as fast as they can for refit to automate them.”
Once his orders were passed, Absen stood and strolled over to the holotank. Conquest floated over old Europe on a roughly west-east track, providing maximum hang time above the atmosphere as they raced the globe beneath them.
All of the small towns along the coasts had been evacuated. The tsunamis the Destroyer impacts caused fifty years ago had wiped away the large coastal cities, and the surviving concentrations of population were well inland and in the mountains. London, Hamburg and Naples had been destroyed back then, leaving mountain cities such as Milan and Vienna to prosper. Those had formed the nucleus of the Blend oligarchy’s city-states, and now they became urban fortresses.
The Scourges landed in swirls and waves, more or less evenly across Europe and Asia. “Not much combat going on,” Scoggins remarked. “Just some ground fire where they touched down within cities. Those beachheads have been wiped out.”
“Yes, and the ones that landed in the surrounding zones died to the mines. That attracted a few more from nearby but generally, as long as the enemy isn’t being shot at, they’re just eating stuff, not turning to attack our defenses.” Ford said excitedly. “Sir, how did you know?”
Absen turned to lean against the railing. “I know because I really do read Fleede’s briefings, Commander. When given a choice between fighting and eating, Scourgelings eat. They only attack things that attack them or smell like food. In fact, if they didn’t see something to eat – like people – they often just walk right by, unless Soldiers drive them to attack. So as much as possible, our forces in the cities are sealing themselves in. If they can’t, they wipe out the local Scourge incursion and then retreat so no more are attracted.”
Weapons fired from the fleet, depicted by lines reaching down toward the clouds of Scourge fighters that still buzzed above the ground, picking them off. In response, many rose to attack, but their small beam weapons couldn’t hurt Conquest, and even the few StormCrows that were hit only suffered repairable damage. The atmosphere sucked all the range out of the enemy’s weapons.
“Concentrate on those coming up after us,” Scoggins ordered, and soon the targets were either dead or left behind, limited by air resistance to mere supersonic speeds while Conquest and her flock cruised along at orbital velocities exceeding 27,000 kilometers per hour.
“You see,” Absen said smugly, “without orders, they just react to local threats, by whatever groupings they use. Perhaps all the critters from one mothership swarm stick together. Anyway, we shoot at them and they turn to attack.”
“There’s no way they can catch us, so we can attrit the fighters and gunships this way, but what about the landing forces?” Rick Johnstone asked. “There’s what, eight hundred million of them on the ground now? That’s more than the population of Earth!”
“Sounds like the fight is even, then, eh?” Absen said. “But no, I don’t intend to fight fair. Crops and forests can be replanted; farms and houses can be rebuilt. The people on the ground will wait and save their strength for a couple of days. Let the enemy have the countryside.” Absen waved airily. “Let the Scourgelings eat. For now, what we have to do is find and kill the nests.”
Chapter 56
“My Lord Spectre,” the Blend called Alexander spoke. He fancied himself a military genius, so Spectre had put him in charge of defense planning. “We have destroyed several minor incursions on the Australian continent. It does not appear more will be arriving anytime soon.”
The holotank had shown most of the Scourges landed in the Europe-Asia supercontinent, with scattered groups coming down on all the other continents, perhaps in the nature of scouting forces. Spectre knew the small infestations outside of Asia and Europe would be easily dealt with. “Good. Order the militia to patrol aggressively for any Scourges that run wild in the countryside, and alert the reaction forces worldwide to begin loading their transports. Give me your best recommendations for our counter-invasions within one hour. I want to be ready to hit them in two to three days.” He made a gesture of dismissal.
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