“Vive le Roi. Vive la Belgique. Vive le monde.”
Chapter 65
Senior Steward Shan watched from his impromptu landing site atop one of the Aardvark pads as Artemis sped toward the horizon to hide behind Callisto. Once she had dropped out of sight, he carefully lifted the shuttle he had borrowed using only thrusters and hopped it the short distance to the base’s ground vehicle hangar, and then keyed in the external opening code.
Once the large doors had opened, he gingerly hovered the tiny spaceship into the spot between a hopper and a crawler and let it fall to the deck with a grinding clang, doing a bit of cosmetic damage to the deck and the ship but nothing important. Besides, it was unlikely he would need it again.
After telling the doors to close, he stood up and stripped off his outer clothing, revealing an outfit of the finest yellow silk. It is fitting, he thought, that I fight and perhaps die properly attired. The time has finally come. “Treason doth never prosper,” he quoted to himself aloud. “What’s the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
But how can I be loyal to something I left a thousand years ago, and help destroy my adopted people?
Quickly he donned his outsized vacuum suit, the only one aboard either base or ship that would fit him. While he did not strictly need the covering, it would extend his capabilities somewhat, and he could always discard it later. It would also keep the Marines scattered around the base from shooting him on sight, as a clearly human EarthFleet artifact. It would also provide him access to the comm net.
Once he’d sealed the suit, he used his HUD to establish a datalink with the base network, giving himself access to everything it knew – Marine deployments, heavy weapons status, external and internal sensors – while at the same time using his steward’s override codes to make himself appear as a maintenance supervisor to anyone else using the same system.
Fortunately for him, the Marines used their own encrypted net, and would likely just accept the evidence of their eyeballs that he was a human wearing a Fleet suit, and not bother him.
The last thing he did before putting the shuttle into standby mode was to open its large rear cargo door, feeling the air rush out of its interior as he did so. In the back bay he took hold of the two handles he’d spot-glued to the casing of the heavy device and carefully lifted it in the low gravity. Its weight was no problem, but its mass remained. Ripping the handles loose by mistake would cause delay.
Carrying the awkward two-meter-long cylinder, he walked down the ramp and out into the vehicle hangar, and headed for the doors to the interior of the base.
In reality he could just place the device here in the capacious hangar, or even leave it in the shuttle, but to do that would be to invite certain anomalous possibilities, not the least of which was the potential for the thing to be destroyed by some stray chunk of incoming rock. Alternately, Meme ground troops might indiscriminately destroy any piece of human technology they could not identify.
Shan wanted to make sure that any such attackers were welcomed in the best way he could.
Then there were the Marines to think about, spread out and dug in throughout the base, intending to make any attackers pay in blood. The timing of things would be fine indeed, what a speaker of English would call “tricky.” For his purposes, he needed a place unlikely to be destroyed by either incoming debris or by ravaging Meme ground troops, whatever their chosen form.
He considered broadcasting some kind of instructions or plea to the Marines to withdraw to the bunkers, but no matter what he said, he was sure they would confirm it with Huen himself, who knew nothing of his friend and bodyguard’s plan. Unless by chance the admiral would take a leap of faith, doing so would probably cause more harm than good.
Then there was always the chance that the EarthFleet ground forces would win the fight, would hold off the enemy and even destroy all the attackers, capturing valuable Meme technology in the process. He had to incorporate all possibilities into his plan, so he lugged the massive thing, looking like nothing so much as a vitamin capsule swollen to the size of a coffin, through the door and down a corridor.
Plotting his route carefully, he proceeded to the area everyone called the Quarter, cleverly built and painted to look like a New Orleans cityscape. Deserted now, he half expected papers to tumble like weeds down the street, but without atmosphere not even a rat disturbed the stillness. Perhaps after mankind had been in space long enough, some kind of pest larger than a microbe would adapt to vacuum and inhabit such abandoned places, but that time was not yet come.
Shan stumped up to the entrance to the grandest casino and, after entering, kicked open the door to its equally grand bordello and extralegal drug parlor. While the crackdown that First Sergeant Repeth had masterminded had cleaned up a lot of corruption, nothing had shut down the Quarter; there were just too many people that wanted, perhaps needed, some place like it.
Still it seemed appropriate that he bring his cleansing machine here to the center of sleaze. If he did not have to use it, perhaps he would nevertheless break it open and scatter its contents around, discomfiting the denizens of the night for a time. At least it would make a statement of sorts. And if he did have to, it would begin its sterilization here, symbolically satisfying at least.
Chapter 66
Rear Admiral Huen drummed his fingers on the arm of the Chair in irritation. “Steward Schaeffer, I do not mean to imply you are in any way complicit, but you did know Shan well. Can you think of any reason he might have taken a shuttle and deliberately not told you or me?”
“No, sir, I don’t.” Turning to the CyberComm officer, Schaeffer asked, “Do we have any video of Shan or the shuttle? Anything that might shed light on this?”
“Give me a few minutes, sir, while I run through it.”
The bridge crew watched the big picture display for several minutes, the Destroyer arcing around toward Earth and the incoming rock cloud heading directly for the home planet, incidentally passing near Jupiter and Callisto.
Finally the CyberComm watchstander spoke. “Here’s the best I could find, sir. It looks as if he took some pains to override or avoid the internal cameras, but this is from a cleaning bot with its own independent vid, downloaded when it secured itself for launch.” The front view was replaced by a low-res shot of a corridor deck and a pair of legs. While the scale was hard to tell it did seem as if those could be Shan’s.
“What’s that blob?” Huen asked. The object in question was obvious, if difficult to identify: the lower half of a grayish cylinder hovering next to Shan’s feet, as if being carried.
“Not sure, sir.”
“Clean that up and send it out to all stations. See if anyone can identify it.”
A short time later a call came through to the bridge. “Chief Prochaska here, sir,” the voice on the other end identified itself. “That thing you want to know about? It looks like a drive bomb, sir. And we’ve got one missing.”
Huen sat back, stunned. “A drive bomb? A nuclear weapon? How could he have gotten away with that?”
“I have no idea, sir,” the chief replied, sounding anguished. “I take full responsibility. All I can think of is he used a command override code, because no alarms went off.”
Schaeffer chimed in, “With all the cyberware in his body and as long as he’s been on this ship he could have easily obtained override codes. Hell, sir, he might have just overheard or seen someone punching them into a keypad and recorded them with his cyber-eyes or ears. He must have been planning something like this for some time. But I just can’t believe…”
“You and me both, Shades,” Huen replied. “Even getting married…I wonder if his wife is in on it.”
“In on what, sir?” Schaeffer asked with a certain subdued hostility. “Whatever he’s doing, he must believe it’s necessary and right.”
“Yes, I want to believe that too, but I must be realistic. It hardly matters, though. What can we do?”
Schaeffer licked his
lips, and then spoke as if the words were being dragged from his lips. “We could radio the Marines to arrest him and stop him.”
Huen shook his head in negation. “If he really does have a drive bomb, doing so might cause him to trigger it. He might blow up a whole battalion of Marines and the base with it. And, what if what he’s doing turns out to be necessary? I vetoed the idea of setting a fusion bomb on the base. What if he disagreed with me, and is willing to die for that belief? What if he’s right?”
Schaeffer nodded slowly. “He’s given you an option you weren’t willing to take yourself, knowing full well what might happen. Gotta respect that.”
“Yes. We must.” Huen turned to the CyberComm station. “Record and relay this through the spy drones to the whole base in the clear, please.” He switched to Han Chinese. “Shan: now we will see if you retain the mandate of heaven. Good luck, my friend.”
Chapter 67
“Damn,” First Sergeant Repeth said to no one in particular as she watched the displays over the shoulders of Grissom Base’s Behemoth Number Four control crew. Each weapon, ten times as massive as the ones out on the mobile asteroid array, had two humans looking after it, even though many of the targeting commands were automated.
“Yeah,” the senior watchstander, the one with a warrant officer’s insignia, agreed. “They couldn’t have survived that impact. Array 887’s on automatic fire now. Damn, lost another one,” he went on as six remaining icons became five. “Brave buggers.” He sketched a salute toward the ceiling.
“Yeah,” echoed the other, a female sergeant. “Wouldn’t want to be out there floating all alone in the middle of nothing.” The control chamber, buried twenty meters below the railgun itself, thrummed with the vibration of intermittent launches.
“We got our own problems,” said the first. “Nineteen inbounds.”
“We can handle them,” the sergeant replied confidently.
“Yes we can,” the warrant mused. “Wonder why so few. This base has the biggest concentration of weapons in the area. You’d think they would have sent a few hundred to pound us to dust.”
The sergeant glanced over her shoulder at Repeth, standing in the doorway to the control room, as if she thought the Marine would have an answer.
Behind Repeth, a squad of Marines lined the access hallway. All of them were clad in full space armor and carried an array of personal weapons, from caseless-recoilless machineguns to grenade launchers and electromagnetic cannon. She set her helmet camera to pass her audiovisuals back so that everyone could see what was going on. Nothing was more boring than waiting in place for something to happen.
“Maybe they’ll just bypass Callisto,” Repeth volunteered. “Once they pass out of your arc of fire, the ground-based weaponry is pretty much moot.”
“But they’re going to leave us operational. We’ll be able to recover, refuel and rearm Aardvarks once the threat has passed. You’d think they would at least flatten the base to deny it to us for a while.”
Repeth shook her head. “Once the Destroyer passes us, any birds that land here will never catch up to the fight, unless it slows way down. Right now it looks like it’s charging straight in behind its barrage of rocks.”
“Yeah, but –” the sergeant argued, then turned to her board. “Central just released us to local. Ready to engage those inbounds.”
“Roger. Target designated. Fifty-seven seconds to full recharge. Seventy seconds to optimum range. Locked. Set for intermittent burst mode.” The warrant’s hand hovered above the fire button.
“Aye aye, sir,” replied the sergeant as she complied.
With that much time, Repeth felt safe to ask, “We have twelve railguns and nineteen targets?”
“Seventeen now,” the sergeant replied as the warrant officer ignored them, his eyes on the countdown. “The beam array is picking off one rock at a time. They’ll take out their targets and then spread out to help us with ours.”
“Is there any chance we’ll miss?”
The sergeant shook her head. “Not unless something freakish happens, knock on plastic.” She rapped her knuckles on her console. “These babies are rock-steady and extremely accurate.”
“Shut yer gobs,” the warrant snarled, still watching as the numbers fell.
Repeth patted the sergeant on the shoulder with her armored hand, then stepped back to let the crew concentrate.
At time zero the man’s thumb mashed down on the button and control room vibrated with a bass sound as of a dozen train locomotives running over a track joint.
Above their heads, the Behemoth flung thousands of steel balls upward in controlled bursts. As they impacted the incoming asteroid, pieces peeled off in waves. Short pauses between groupings allowed the plasma to disperse and the shot to reach the solid rock, slamming repeatedly into its surface.
Twenty-five seconds to impact, the young sergeant gave a small cheer, pointing at one of her screens. “It’s breaking apart!” she whooped.
“Spread the pattern. Requesting laser targeting,” the warrant said tersely.
The sergeant did as ordered, widening the gun’s narrow focus, turning her weapon from a rifle into a shotgun in hopes of further breaking the large chunks. “Optical,” she said, pointing at a screen.
“We got some light,” the warrant said, and on the visual screen some of the flying gravel flared redly as one of the central array’s massive lasers reached out to turn it into hot vapor. “Getting a few hits from the pattern.”
“Not enough,” the sergeant mumbled, worried.
“Continuous autofire,” the warrant snapped. “Seal up.” He sat back into his crash chair and it folded over him. The sergeant’s did the same just a moment later.
Repeth immediately passed a similar order. “Seal suits. Everyone back up into the tunnel.” The squad performed an about-face and trotted down the access corridor and deeper into the living rock of Callisto, huddling close, the best defense for armored troops against cave-ins and earthquakes.
Just as she stepped in and crowded up against her troops, a ground shock knocked her off her feet. Fortunately there seemed only one, and then the vibration settled.
Jumbled among armored bodies, Repeth gently pushed upward in the low gravity and triggered a maneuvering jet to shove herself feet-first out of the tunnel and into the corridor. Her troops sorted themselves out and got back on their feet. A moment later she looked into the control room.
As she did, the clamshell crash chairs opened up, revealing the two uninjured crew, who immediately lunged for their boards. “We’re down,” the sergeant said. “Hard impact on number four strut.”
“Requesting emergency repair. Putting our power onto the grid. We won’t need it for a while.” The warrant slapped his console with disgust, sitting back.
“How are the rest of the guns?” Repeth asked.
“We’re the only one that took a significant hit. Shit,”’ the sergeant groused. “We did everything right. Just bad luck.” She turned to Repeth. “Think you’ll see any action?”
“You’d better hope we don’t,” Repeth replied. “If any kind of ground troops land here, you guys just seal up tight, dog the hatch and hope to hell our weapons are effective against whatever they throw at us.”
“You don’t know what they’ll be?” the sergeant asked with surprise. “Didn’t the alien tell us?”
“She gave some guesses, I hear, but remember her information is four thousand years old. And she’s not an alien. Not more than half, anyway,” Repeth replied. “Mostly she just seemed like an impressive lady everyone in sight would like to get to know better.” She waggled her eyebrows within her helmet. Waiting for something to happen always brought out her amateur comedian.
“You’ve met her?” the warrant asked with an edge of disbelief.
“A few times, when I was on Admiral Absen’s security detachment. Seemed pretty human to me.” Normally she didn’t drop names but in this case, she might as well provide some entertainment while
they waited for the repair crew to come up from the deep bunkers and take a look.
“I hear there are more Blends among us, trying to take over and let the Meme in, like that colonel,” the sergeant said. “Traitors.”
Repeth shrugged her armored shoulders. “You know, people say a lot of things. When the Eden Plague was first released, people said everyone who got it would turn into some kind of peacenik zombie pod people. They interned us in camps.”
“Aw, that couldn’t happen today,” the sergeant scoffed. “Society has progressed.”
“So you wouldn’t lock up all the Blends you found? No matter what their loyalties? Just in case?”
The sergeant fell silent while the warrant shook his head, at what Repeth was not sure.
“I guess that answers why she and her son don’t come down to Earth much,” Repeth said.
“Repair crew’s up on the surface.” The sergeant seemed glad to change the subject, pointing to a screen that showed a utility vehicle disgorging several suited figures next to the structure of the railgun tower. That looked like the articulated skeleton of a skyscraper, ferrocrystal and steel framing that held the four magnetic rails in place.
Those rails had to be aligned precisely with one another so the hundreds of ball bearings per second would accelerate properly, shooting upward with the enormous surges of electromagnetic energy. Panning the camera, the sergeant pointed. “See. Strut four.”
It appeared a chunk of rock had struck the ferrocrystal support a glancing blow, bending it sharply as it expended its final energy. The resulting plasma burst had melted the ordinary steel surrounding it. “They’ll have to replace that, and then test it,” the warrant said. “Gonna be more than an hour.”
“You can’t fire with only three supports?” Repeth asked.
“Sure we can. Once, for about a millisecond,” the man replied in disbelief. “Then the whole thing will come apart and the entire external structure will need replacing. Might get five, maybe six rounds through before it fails.”
Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer Page 30