Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer

by David VanDyke

  Ruchek’s hand came out of his uniform pocket, holding a set of shoulderboards with senior warrant officer’s insignia on them. “I was told you had turned down a commission and several warrants, but this time, you don’t get to turn this down. This base needs you. Admiral Huen needs you. I need you, and you have to have the rank to go along with it.”

  Signaling to Captain Miller to assist, Ruchek slipped the rank insignia onto Repeth’s shoulders, and then brought his fists firmly down on them as if to seat them in place. “Congratulations, Chief Warrant Officer Repeth. I’ve looked over your record. If you do a good job, as I am sure you will, you can keep them, with the retroactive pay grade of W-4.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Chief Repeth said, saluting her commander to the unprompted applause of the room. “But I’d rather lead troops, if you’ll have me back.”

  “Spoken like a true Marine. I have no doubt I will.”

  Ruchek joined in the applause, and for a moment, Jill Repeth basked in her colleagues’ appreciation, knowing full well that she would earn every bit of it over the next year.

  Like Rick said…there’s a new sheriff in town.

  Chapter 43

  Year Eight

  Admiral Absen was sleeping as soundly as he ever did when his door intercom beeped at 0417. “Yes?” he called into the air, reaching up to turn on the reading lamp over the head of his bunk.

  “Flash traffic for you, sir.”

  “From who?” he asked as he pulled on his trousers.

  “Header says EarthGov Intel, passed through Fleet. The rest is Eyes Only.”

  “Right.” He opened his door, taking the tablet from the steward on the other side and closing it again. Setting the thing down on his smart desk linked it and brought up a prompt to sample DNA, scan retina and input codes. They’d never yet caught a Blend trying to break in to a secure system; there was no guarantee those theoretical leftover entities even knew what they were, much less worked for the Meme Empire, but counterintelligence organizations were paid to be paranoid.

  Whether those measures would be effective was another story.

  The message unlocked and presented itself. Ten minutes later, Absen put out the word to wake up and gather his senior staff in his command conference room, along with Red Team, at 0700, and he went back to bed. Flash traffic it may be, but its subject would not manifest for at least six months, perhaps a year. He could afford to give his people their sleep.

  He, on the other hand, lay awake the rest of the early morning thinking, and then took a good hot shower and ate a leisurely breakfast, telling his stewards to make sure they brought in enough strong coffee for everyone in the meeting.

  “Received this flash message last night,” he said loud enough to carry to the fifty or so people packed inside. “Several large Earthside radio telescopes just picked up fusion emanations along the same track the scout ship’s escape pod took. They retasked orbital and deep-space opticals to take a look and have confirmed the presence of a Meme ship half a light year out, in the Hills Cloud, the closer and denser piece of the Oort Cloud. Johnstone?”

  Rick Johnstone had held up a hand and now said, “Sir, that must mean they decelerated, or we probably wouldn’t be seeing them. They must be intending to make use of the bodies there.”

  “I concur, but we’ll just have to keep watching to see whether they are merely refueling, or are going to send something our way.” Absen paused. “Any word from the stealth probes?”

  Colonel Myrna Zolen, his chief of intelligence, cleared her throat and lifted a tablet of her own. “We’re processing some reports now, but remember, the light from the enemy itself is getting here soonest. I’ve got a bit more info since the first ExecSum, sir. The emanations are interesting in that they varied a lot, as if the source was spinning, and they seem far too weak to represent a Destroyer-sized spacecraft. Doppler shift shows it decelerating at usual Meme noncombat rates. Collating all data, TECHINT says whatever it is masses no more than a tenth of what we expected.”

  “Good news, then,” Absen responded in surprise. “Are they sure?”

  “Confidence is medium to high, sir. There is a minority report that points out they could somehow be deliberately masking their emanations.”

  “I’m not going to endorse anything that minimizes the danger,” Absen said firmly. “We proceed as before, in overkill mode, got it?” He looked around to receive assent from all of his staff. “Stallers? You got something?”

  The EarthFleet Marine liaison officer, or LNO, looked even more sour and hatchet-faced than usual, as if he’d forgotten the tequila and gone straight to bitter lemons. “Just thinking about politics, sir. Anything that gives the whiners ammo…”

  He meant the scattered opposition movements on Earth, which constantly questioned the austerity and massive defense expenditures that years of wartime economy had imposed on the populace. Some were crazies, disbelievers and conspiracy nuts. Some just thought the threat must be overstated, not believing the aliens to be as dangerous as claimed. Some thought the whole thing to be a lie, calling for Raphaela to be detained and interrogated until she “finally told the truth.”

  “It will come out soon enough, but that’s not our problem. That does remind me: set up a videoconference with the Combined Council at their earliest convenience, would you, Tobias?” Make the politicians handle the politics, he thought.

  His chief steward nodded and made a note.

  “I want more steal probes out there,” Absen commented, inviting any disagreement to surface. “Send out four more, looping out then in to cross the enemy’s predicted position. This is the first we’ve really seen of them and we need all the intel we can get. Zolen, I want all your assets on this thing ASAP. You have carte blanche to retask the deep space sensors according to your best collection plan. We need to know what it is and what it’s doing, top priority.” He knew he was stating the obvious, but he was also communicating his explicit intent and ensuring unity of effort.

  It was amazing how many military SNAFUs arose just from well-intentioned misunderstandings.

  Ford from the Red Team raised his hand. “What if this is a deception ploy? Have some small decoy ship decel while the big one cruises straight on or even accelerates, hitting us early and unexpectedly?”

  “Yes, good point,” Absen agreed. “That means Red Team goes into overdrive. It’s not theoretical anymore. Start adjusting your COAs and coming up with new ones based on the fresh information as it comes. Zolen, make sure Red Team has everything they want; no green door crap, period dot end of story, got it?” He pointed a finger at her to emphasize his order.

  “Aye aye, sir,” she replied. Though she was Aerospace, she’d learned the important traditional Navy difference between yes, meaning “acknowledged,” and aye aye, which meant “I understand and will comply.”

  “Great job, everyone. Keep up the good work.” Motivational duty done, Absen left them to their tasks and headed for the communications center, his stewards shadowing him as always.

  For most things he did not mind working from his desk; he had ninety-nine percent confidence that his missives remained secure between there and the computers that processed and triple-encrypted all of his orders to EarthFleet. However, to be even more certain he preferred to go to the heart of Orion’s network and pull strings from there.

  Absen handed Tobias his tablet, the signal to log his boss in with the comms officer on watch, while the admiral entered a small shielded room with nothing but a terminal atop a table, and a chair. No media port existed here; nothing but the Mark One Eyeball could receive, and the human fingers send, information. The room’s doorway scanned anyone entering for electronics of any kind.

  Seating himself, he logged in and composed a message to Major General Yeager, Commander, First Aerospace Fleet. Its text field contained only these words: Initiate Attack Plan Bravo. Good luck and good hunting. –Absen.

  Chapter 44

  The recall code caught Vango at a fort
uitous time, already returning to base in his Aardvark Lark after a very routine training run, blasting pebbles. Jupiter’s rings shone faint and unimpressive compared to Saturn’s but they still contained millions of individual pieces to shoot with his inline maser.

  Following the IFR glide path in, Lark’s automatic system guided him to a landing among the thousands of craft lined up in neat rows on Callisto’s surface. Actually, the Aardvarks rested on individual platforms, slightly concave and set on insulated pylons a meter above the ground. The moon’s surface was so permeated with ice that any significant amount of heat would cause melting of the mud and potential surface collapse.

  By the time he had finished his post-flight checks and shutdown, the hopper had landed atop his bird. A tiny vehicle compared to the jumbo-jet-sized A-24, it flew on cold compressed gas, jumping from platform to platform as it picked up and dropped off pilots.

  Vango climbed into the belly hatch and strapped in to one of the three of eight seats open. Once it was full, it would hop back to Grissom Base, drop everyone off, pick up another group, and off it would fly, over and over. Clicking shut the last buckle was the signal to the pilot to continue.

  “What’s the scoop? Anyone?” he asked the other pilots there. Everyone shook their heads. “Hey, hopper jock,” Vango called to the front, “you know anything?”

  “Nope,” the pilot called as she lifted the dual sticks and hopped the vehicle toward the next pickup. “And if I did, I couldn’t tell you. But I do know one thing.” She paused, apparently for dramatic effect.

  “What!” Vango and the others cried at the same time.

  The pilot of pilots turned her head to grin back at her passengers. “It ain’t no drill.”

  Despite more pleading, the hopper jock kept her mouth shut the whole way back, and the eight passengers hurried out the hatch and beat feet toward the officers’ mess, the most likely source of good scuttlebutt. Once they got there, a bored-looking chief master sergeant holding an official tablet buttonholed them as a group. “Ladies and gents,” he drawled, looking at the screen, “orders from Fleet. You got nineteen minutes to be in your seats in the briefing room for your WARNORD. That is all.” Ignoring their questions, he turned away and headed toward another bunch of pilots that had just arrived.

  “I’m getting some chow,” Vango said to the only pilot in his group he knew well, Josiah “Token” Gaffney.

  “Good idea. Might be a long briefing.” They ate as fast as they could and made the briefing with minutes to spare, taking their seats among the almost five thousand Aardvark drivers assembled in the auditorium.

  “General on deck!” The call showed a Navy officer had been designated to warn everyone when Yeager showed up. Had the sailor been an Aerospace Force pilot, he would have just said “Tench-hut!” Service-specific rivalries and differences seemed to magnify the more some tried to stamp them out, becoming ways to needle each other.

  The slim, intense two-star took the podium and tapped the mike to make sure it was on. “Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen. This a warning order. Approximately sixteen days from now, all of us that are ready will sortie to attack the enemy.”

  A rumble of murmuring swept the room and the general held up his hand for silence. “During that time our ships will be modified, which is the reason for the delay. A bio-stasis pod will be installed in each Aardvark. Everyone will be sleeping for about eleven months outbound to the engagement. Pipe down, people!” Yeager barked at the upswell of disbelief, slamming his hand on the podium. This brought a stunned silence. “Just shut the hell up and listen. You can get used to the idea later.” He took a deep breath.

  “We hope the engagement will take place in the Hills Cloud, the closest extra-system concentration of cometary debris, because that’s where intel has just located the enemy.”

  Conversation swelled again with this announcement and the eagerness of thousands of pilots to know something of what they faced, but not nearly as much as before. Yeager thumped the mike to get their attention. “Here’s the very tentative outline of the plan. I’m only bothering to tell you to limit the rumor mill a bit, and don’t anyone take it as gospel. So here’s the overview.”

  Up on the enormous main display screen a graphic of the solar system appeared, a standard simplification with the eight major planets in rings around the sun, as if seen from above. A blue icon surrounded Callisto. “Obviously, we’re here.”

  The view pulled back, zooming out until the entire solar system had shrunk to a tiny circle in one corner, the blue spot covering a big piece of it. “The enemy is here, decelerating into the Hills Cloud, which is around a quarter of a light year out.” A thin line arrowed from the solar system out to a cloud of tiny white dots, which must be far out of scale.

  “Of course, this intel only shows what they were doing three months ago. I will adjust the op order as new information becomes available. In accordance with established aerospace doctrine, we will remain flexible. Now…” Yeager touched a control and a dotted line appeared. “This is our track. Automated systems will try to adjust our course with the cold jets to avoid our fusion engines being spotted. Our goal will be to put as many Aardvarks into the area as possible and try to catch the enemy napping, striking and destroying him with overwhelming firepower.”

  A woman stood up in the front row, with a star on each shoulder, one of the wing commanders. “Sir,” she said, “how many ships?” Then she sat down.

  “As many as we can modify and launch. Roughly thirty thousand, if the engineers can install that many sleep chambers. The PVNs on Ceres have already shifted to building the modules, eight thousand at a time. They will be sent over on fast transports and dropped into the birds, connected to your cockpits. When we go, you will get in, go to sleep already linked, and you will wake up just before the engagement.”

  More muttering covered Vango turning to Token. “That’s really everyone. All the Aardvarks and all the pilots available. What happens if the Meme aren’t there when we show up?”

  Token turned his dark face and eyes to Vango’s. “Then life sucks, for us and the people here. I’m sure Yeager and Absen have thought about that. Now shut up and listen.”

  Yeager went on. “We will launch and burn fuel to gain as much velocity as we can, then will be refueled by our KCS-20s, who will be launching tomorrow to get ahead of us. We will match velocities, gas up, and burn a little more to attain cruising speed, leaving about ninety percent available for the fight, and to get home.”

  The screen graphic changed to a list of support ships. “Besides the thirty or so tankers listed, Fleet will be building three motherships that will follow behind at a safe distance. They will have grabships and repair docks, and will be able to refuel and rearm us.”

  “Any of us that survive,” Vango muttered darkly.

  Token looked over and rolled his eyes.

  Chapter 45

  Commander One dismissed concerns about the flare of the Destroyer’s great fusion engines decelerating his craft from its increased speed. First, space was vast, and it was unlikely the Humans would even notice. He had given orders to point the drive off center and slowly rotate around the axis of travel, deflecting the direct particulate emissions well away from the enemy star system.

  Second, even if they did detect the drive, they would probably mistake it for a much smaller ship. How could they possibly know what they faced? Of course, they had overcome a mere Survey craft, and might assume they would be the target of a force of one, perhaps two orders of magnitude greater.

  However, the Destroyer’s capabilities reached up to two orders of magnitude beyond that – five to ten thousand times as effective as the scout ship they had defeated with such difficulty. There seemed little to worry about.

  Precisely because there was so little to worry about, Commander One, with the concurrence of his trium, had decided to employ a novel strategy. Doing so would give the crew something to do, decreasing boredom, and might contribute to his sta
nding among other Destroyer Commanders, perhaps earning him an early promotion to Fleet Commander or even SystemLord.

  “We have come to relative rest near the largest concentration of ingestible material that is close to the target system, but still outside it,” External Communicator One said from his tank. This provided a feeding ground of cometary bodies in complete safety. The electromagnetic emanations of the fusion drive would delay any response, and it seemed inconceivable that the Humans could send a force sufficient to threaten them out this far.

  No, the fight, when it came, would undoubtedly take place around the Human home world. Lower species always fought hard for the planets of their origins. That was why they were called “lower orders.” Meme had no need of such sentimentality.

  Every station in the control room was full now. Commander One wanted no one to claim later that they were not involved in the unusual strategy. His senior staff had their opportunities to raise objections, but except for a few carefully-worded questions, they had not.

  Commander One had a good, compliant crew. He was proud of himself, and them. In a race where rebellion always simmered beneath the surface, this was an accomplishment.

  “Begin maximum ingestion processes preparatory to Destroyer mitosis,” he intoned. This statement was analogous to a human captain giving the order to send away half his crew aboard an empty vessel. More precisely, it instructed them to begin the arduous and difficult process of dividing the Destroyer into two, like an amoeba.

  Within half a cycle, more or less, Destroyer Commander One would effectively become Fleet Commander One. He even thought about repeating the process, gorging the resulting duo of ships and splitting once more, but decided against it. Dividing once smacked of hubris; dividing twice would invite even more scrutiny, and if the tiniest thing went wrong, if casualties were higher than average, he might be pilloried and excoriated rather than commended. It would also leave them with three quarters of each crew brand new clones, inviting further inefficiencies.