Chapter 49
Two large fusion burns announced the presence of EarthFleet’s target ships, shining beacons of energy that grew and grew, pointed at the center of the Aardvark armada. With practiced calculations and special senses, using the power of the flares and their sources’ observed acceleration, Vango determined that they faced two ships of roughly fifteen billion tons each, a significant deviation from the expected twenty billion ton single ship. He uploaded his estimation to the net, knowing it would be passed and synchronized with others that did the same.
Because the fusion drives pointed directly at the center of the fleet, it was obvious they were running directly away from the blanket of ships and at an angle to the most direct route to the solar system. We’ve already won a small victory, Vango thought. No matter what, they had interrupted the two Destroyers, if that’s what they were, in their feeding, and had driven them farther outward from home.
As soon as the enemy drives lit, those of the fleet’s advanced missile ring did so as well. With the lightspeed delay in all directions, some of the weapons would take longer than others to see their enemy and react, or get orders, and the actions of some would take longer than others to be seen by the fleet. It was very hard to keep in his head, even with the VR aid.
While the concave blanket of pursuing Aardvarks had canted itself toward the enemy as they ran at an angle, the green circle’s edge marched implacably forward. Eventually all of the missiles marked in that ring began to converge toward the enemy. Yeager’s gambit had succeeded so far: at least some of the weapons would reach the Destroyers sometime in the next hour.
A swarm of new bogeys now appeared in his tactical VR, two distinct groups of about sixty each, accelerating at frightening velocity toward the fleet. Hypers, Vango thought. Destination lines appeared as his computer extrapolated the individual enemy missiles’ courses toward friendly ships. As his squadron was well off to what the common display called “right” of the center, none of them came near him.
He wondered why so few, for such large ships. Intel had theorized Destroyers could launch thousands of hypers at a time. On the other hand, the living weapons took time to be created within the ships, to gestate. Perhaps the enemy was, after all, caught flatfooted without weapons ready, and now ran away to buy time to make more.
Vango watched as the six score missiles accelerated toward the middle of the fleet. On the display they crawled, but considering the distance between the two sides, they must be moving at awesome speeds. Given time, Intel theorized Meme hypers could achieve half of lightspeed before they ran out of fuel, although to do so would mean any evasion by their target would cause them to miss.
That highlighted the eternal problem of missiles in space: fast was great against fixed, nonmaneuvering targets, but made terminal guidance against smaller ones – like the Aardvarks – almost impossible. On the other hand, slower meant less damage and more time to react, but more time for the hyper to guide. The armada was getting a firsthand lesson in their enemy’s actual tactics, for which it would certainly pay in blood.
Eventually the plots intersected. According to the numbers, the hypers had boosted to just under .1 c and then coasted, maneuvering violently as they tried to strike their targets in their terminal phase. Of the one hundred twenty-eight missiles, only three had connected with Aardvarks. Each attack ship had been utterly vaporized, but Vango thought those casualties surprisingly light.
He could hear an odd sound through his comm net, eventually realizing it was cheers picked up by the voice-activated mikes of his squadron mates. Although he didn’t feel like celebrating at the deaths of three of his comrades, he understood their sentiment; the fleet had gotten off easy, and the enemy wasn’t ten feet tall anymore.
And EarthFleet had learned something. Already no doubt watching sensor drones were pumping data back toward the solar system, important intelligence about how the enemy employed their weapons.
Vango wondered what became of the hypers that missed, and queried the net. His display showed that, rather than trying to swing around and chase the Aardvarks, they were gradually turning on minimum thrust in the direction of the solar system. Smart, he thought. Might as well send them cruising in to hit something of ours. Maybe they would double as some kind of sensor drones, too.
He uploaded that observation to the net as well. Every computer was supposed to store and distribute the pilots’ various ideas and lessons learned, and every minute or two one of the surviving ships would automatically burst-transmit them back to EarthFleet. With no big ships and no intelligence staff, this was the best they could do.
It had long ago occurred to Vango that one important reason they were out here was to provide live combat testing of the Aardvarks and their tactics. Even if they all died, the A-24s being built back home would be piloted by people with a better understanding of what they faced.
A few minutes later he began to sense increasing tension throughout the net. Given their shared VR space, echoes of the pilot’s feelings, subvocalized unconsciously or bleeding into the cybernetic systems, were always an issue. Damping software, like the squelch function on an old radio, kept it manageable, but the stronger the emotions, the harder it was to suppress without losing chunks of connectivity or dropping out entirely.
Vango figured the bleed-over was due to everyone watching the converging missile ring so intently. The Pilums overtook slowly, so slowly, as the enemy sought to stretch out the engagement from the rear, gaining themselves more time to pick them off.
Most of the missiles had locked on to the nearest, rearmost of the two ships. In the general’s place that’s how Vango would have programmed them: chase and kill only one target. Half a loaf…
Clusters of green merged together, and Vango swooped his virtual viewpoint in closer and closer, until it seemed he rode along with the missiles. Even though intellectually he knew all of this data was half an hour old from the lightspeed delay and what he was seeing had already happened, he felt the rush of the kill, and found himself yelling and cheering the Pilums on.
Doing so also gave him his first good view of the Destroyers. He had no sense of scale, but the two ships looked like footballs, each with one enormous fusion motor at the back and hundreds of fusor ports, large and small, spread over their skins like puckers on ostrich hide.
The flare of the enemy drive swung back and forth, reaching hundreds of kilometers to incinerate several missiles at a time, but those numbers were mere pittances. Sixty thousand Pilums chased the ship, closing at tens of kilometers per second. Smart enough not to try to fly right up the Meme’s engine, the fusion-armed drones blasted on parallel courses, aiming at points ahead of their target.
As the lead missiles drew closer, heavy fusor blasts flared out, directed jets of plasma scores of kilometers long. While inherently inaccurate, they made up for it in destructive power and sheer size, incinerating hundreds of missiles at a time.
But many hundreds among sixty thousand still left a lot of missiles.
Closer and closer the cloud of fusion weapons bore in, still accelerating. Despite the drive and the fusors wiping out great swaths of missiles, it looked like at least half of them would get close enough to damage the enemy.
Given that the Destroyer was about two and a half kilometers across, there was a lot of enemy to damage.
Chapter 50
Rear Fusor One had his pods full, even with the stern fusors in semi-autonomous mode. He controlled half of the available weapons, with Two controlling a third and the less dependable Three with one sixth. Frantically he coordinated the flow of fuel to the fusion plenums, ensuring the gouts of hydrogen were pushed peristaltically through the supply arteries.
Forcing the new and rather stupid Destroyer to function at maximum combat efficiency took pods-on control at all time for the Meme crew. It consumed many cycles for the training to take hold, even though it had the benefit of molecular memories from before its mitosis. There was a known, strange and my
stical effect of consciousness that meant that only one of the two great ships truly carried forward its full experiences. The other, lesser being started sluggish, an animal that had to be goaded and taught.
No matter, thought One. We have enough crew to closely manage its functions.
He had less confidence in the overall combat situation. No one would ever call One a coward, but the tens of thousands of missiles bearing down on the two young Destroyers did not bode well. They would cause a number of casualties, and he began to regret that he had influenced Commander One to divide the original, stronger ship.
More and more Human missiles died, but still more came on. There was simply no way his rear weapons would be able to intercept them all, even with the drive at full power with its aperture widened, like a giant fusor itself.
Then, on the ship-wide network he tasted, “Prepare to spin the ship. All rear fusors to continuous fixed fire.”
For a moment One did not comprehend the order, though his well-trained pods input the molecular control sequences automatically. Spin the ship? Fixed fire? The only reason to spin the ship that he knew was to reverse and unblock certain flows within the body of the great beast, and fusors could hardly be expected to destroy missiles without aiming.
He followed orders, though; as clever as he thought himself to be, he knew that both the Command and the Tactical tria had far more experience, and he wasn’t about to make a fool of himself by asking why.
A moment later he praised the wisdom of his leaders as Destroyer 6223-2 began to rotate around its long axis and his fusors turned from intermittent blasting to continuous hoses of flame sweeping the surrounds with hot plasma. Combined with opening the main drive’s nozzle wide and inducing a certain deliberate wobble, they achieved near continuous coverage of the stern hemisphere, slaughtering the enemy missiles by the thousands, the tens of thousands.
One exulted in his natural Meme superiority, until he noticed the rate of his fuel expenditure. Gluttons at the best of times, now the weapons gulped fuel like ravenous slave-beasts.
Chapter 51
Vango saw the Meme reveal another tactic, a reason that they had run away, gaining them more time to engage. The rear Destroyer began to spin, slightly off center, like a wobbly football pass. At the same time its stern fusors went to continuous fire, blowtorches of pinwheel fireworks swirling through the space behind the ship like a skirt of flame. Added to the cone of the drive as it blasted, whirling, the whole back half of the enemy ship emanated a killing zone for hundreds of kilometers, a hemisphere of destruction.
A groan surged through the net, and Vango was not certain whether he joined them or just heard them. He wondered how long the Destroyer could keep up that prodigious use of fuel; it must be burning millions of tons per second. How much tritium and deuterium must it expend before it was forced to use simple hydrogen, reducing its efficiency further?
Each Pilum datalinked with its neighbors, avoiding collisions and fratricidal explosions, spreading themselves out until the last moment of attack. Some of the missiles had swung wide enough to avoid the blasting wreath of fusion plasma. Even as thousands of missiles dove into the hot sea to die, others arced in before the Destroyer and turned to attack from the front.
Vango had been watching the target Meme so closely that he missed the other one dropping back to help its fellow. As the ten thousand or so surviving Pilums closed in on one, the other ceased its acceleration and rolled to point its own nose to the back. As the rearmost Destroyer still accelerated, this had the effect of allowing it, and the fleet missiles, to catch up.
At extreme range the inverted Destroyer fired all of its forward fusors and kept firing as the distance closed. Had the living ship done so even ten or twenty seconds earlier, it might have succeeded in wiping out all of the Pilums. For whatever reason – Meme are not infallible, Vango reminded himself – it had delayed just long enough.
Out of more than sixty thousand missiles, a few hundred got through to within effective blast radius. Sophisticated algorithms in the missiles’ computers selected their detonation times, and they began exploding just before the fusors touched them. The enormous warheads, yielding ten megatons each, also powered bomb-pumped graser clusters that fired deadly beams of gamma rays in tight spreads toward the target.
Because the fight took place at long distance and the nose of the hindmost Destroyer faced away from the fleet, the VR display could not show Vango or anyone else much of the direct effect of the Pilums. Also, with the tremendous energies pouring from the defending ships and the exploding missiles, the whole area of the display turned milky white and showed only ghostly outlines of what the computers guessed was happening.
Representative flashes sparked in VR space, completely understating the ravening energies of the missiles’ fusion warheads. Had one of them been detonated on Earth it would have devastated everything for a hundred kilometers around. In space, though, the zone of effect did not reach so far, lacking any medium to transmit the shock and blast.
Vango hoped the graser beams would be reaching deep into the Destroyers with penetrating fingers, gamma rays slaughtering untold trillions of living cells, and perhaps actual Meme or whatever else crewed the mobile moonlets. At the same time the plasma from the naked blasts would be burning the ships’ armored skin, bubbling and crisping it like bacon in a pan. Unless the armor was too thick. No one knew for sure how strong it was.
Intel had estimated that skin to be at least five hundred meters deep, and made of a chitin-like substance infused with biologically generated ferrocrystal harder than any steel. Only a warhead detonated on its very surface would likely crack it, and that kind of timing was very, very difficult. Vango had to hope that repeated damage, the attrition of multiple blows, would weaken and slow the monster enough to catch up and finish it off.
Slowly the display cleared with the dispersing of titanic energies. Swooping in, probably as many of the fleet’s pilots were doing, Vango could see the less-damaged Destroyer maneuver to fall back behind its companion. That one showed definite deterioration around its waist, which was all the armada’s sensors could actually see. Moving his point of view around to the front of the enemy only yielded a bland, computer-generated simulation of an undamaged surface.
One effect he could see was that the injured ship had reduced thrust drastically. In fact – Vango checked the numbers – the fleet was now slowly overtaking the two. Many hours would pass before they were in direct fire range, but missiles…
Just as this thought entered Vango’s mind, the squadron commander came onto the net with instructions. “This is Two Sierra One. All right people, the general says we’re to fire one more missile each. I’m uploading instructions to coordinate them. We continue to chase in this big fleet blanket formation. Everyone maintain station on me, and wait for my mark.”
Vango acknowledged digitally rather than verbally, else the thirty-some pilots would step all over each other on the net. Datalinks were more efficient for most things, though he was happy to hear the voice chatter now and again. It made him feel less alone.
A telltale flashed, informing him the automated systems were feeding his body, pumping food down a tube in his throat and metering liquid into his veins. He could have chosen to withdraw part or all of his consciousness from the virtuality, but he decided against it. The suite of machinery dedicated to keep him alive showed all in the green. He felt no need to go back to being a little man in a big machine, when he could remain a flying bird of space.
If he lived, he might have to face a hell of VR withdrawal, but for now, he soared among the stars.
“All Two Sierra,” Dick’s voice recited once more. “Launch one missile at target two on my mark. Ready. Mark.”
Vango executed this command with the practiced ease of thousands of launches in the simulators and a few live dummy missiles. Only after he had kicked his loose did he actually think about doing it.
Around him he saw thirty-one other missiles
from his squadron launch and speed away toward one of the enemy ships, and then thousands more from the other Aardvarks. Calculations read that they would catch up in about two hours assuming their targets did not go back to full burn, or six hours if they did. While Meme could outrun ships of EarthFleet, they couldn’t outrun their missiles.
However, these overtaking Pilums would be lucky to get close enough for their fusion warheads to do damage. The two Destroyers continued to stretch out the engagement time to allow them to pick off the incoming missiles. Vango knew Yeager was fighting a chess match with a limited number of pieces – ammo and ships – and playing for the end game.
He checked his own tanks of tritium-deuterium. Except for antimatter, a highly experimental technology at best, this was the most potent fuel known to man. It fused within the ferrocrystal plenum of the best engines humanity could produce, and then flung out the back through a nozzle that accelerated the resulting hot plasma to an appreciable fraction of lightspeed.
About a fifth had been used so far. The Aardvarks had arrived filled by enormous tankers before exiting the solar system. Vango knew consideration had been given to sending more tankers along, but that idea had been rejected. The relatively tiny and stealthy attack ships might be missed in the deep of space, but a bloated refueler couldn’t be cloaked. Instead, three motherships with repair and refuel capability followed more slowly, a month back. Those might be able to save pilots and ships that otherwise wouldn’t make it.
Vango ran through a quick systems check, then took a look at the Destroyers again. They appeared to be cruising under minimal acceleration, perhaps conserving fuel. By the numbers, they should not have seen the next wave of missiles launched at them, and once they did, it would take almost an hour for the fleet to see their reaction.
Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer Page 24