“Would you please clarify, sir? What do you want me to do?”
Absen cleared his throat, looking over at the tech. “If I authorize you access to the necessary maintenance bots, how quickly could you set up holoprojectors, such as you have here, on the flight deck?”
The tech replied, “With Michelle’s full involvement, we could install a limited three-part system within nine minutes, sir, and transfer this avatar. In a few hours the entire area could be done.”
“That quick? All right, let’s do it. Then you can join the crew where they are.”
Michelle seemed to suppress a smile. “This will be interesting. I’ve never met anyone except the technical team, you and a few others who visited my quarters.”
“Quarters?”
“What I call my holographic room and workspace.”
Absen grunted, thoughtful.
The tech tapped at his board. “You’ll have to enter your authorization code, fingerprint and retinal scan here, sir,” he said. Absen quickly complied, accepting that he was now signing off on whatever the technician had set up. Even though he was captain of the boat, he had to trust everyone to do his job honestly and correctly, hundreds or thousands of times each day.
Trust. That’s what he had to do. Choose to trust this new human being that had been created, or copied, or programmed, and now lived inside the systems of his boat.
“Thank you, sir!” When Michelle’s enthusiastic salute dropped to her side, she disappeared, leaving the captain standing, bemused. The tech had plugged in his link and closed his eyes in the manner of modern CyberComm personnel. Absen glanced at Tobias, who merely turned back to the cart, this time slipping into the driver’s seat.
As they drove at speed through Conquest’s wide corridors, thankfully almost deserted because most of the crew were on the flight deck, Absen triggered his internal radio. Though something he seldom used, it seemed convenient now, and he passed on instructions to Bull ben Tauros to have Marines make sure the maintenance bots were given plenty of space to do their work.
“Let’s take a quick diversion. I haven’t seen my two favorite engineers lately.” Absen used the next several minutes to make quick appearances in Engineering and Weapons Control, greeting the skeleton crews there. He saw the battle displayed on their screens as well.
By the time he arrived back at the flight deck control room, a dozen spider bots zipped around at high speed in one corner, mounting holoprojectors and laying optical and electric cable. By the end of the predicted nine minutes, the avatar of Warrant Officer Michelle Conquest appeared. The machines continued to install projectors outward, expanding the network toward the area where most of the crew milled around or sat.
This caused a small stir among the milling crew on the flight deck. Cybernetics specialists familiar with Michelle clustered protectively around her hologram, as if to keep others away, but the AI simply walked through them and began introducing herself to as many curious ratings, noncoms and officers as possible.
Satisfied that his decision seemed to be working out, Absen turned back to the AV team and signaled he was ready.
“I’ve brought us back up to realtime, sir,” Scoggins said. “Or as real as it gets, by which I mean, we’re watching a synthesis that’s as up-to-date as I can make it with the actual light and sensor data as it comes in.”
“Got it, Commander. Let’s see.”
Absen saw the main picture show the sixty-four enemy ram-bodies broken up into a cloud of rocks ranging from sand through gravel up to pieces a few hundred meters wide, much of it still inbound toward the home planet. “Not much of that will hit Earth, I presume,” he said.
“Correct, sir,” Scoggins said. “As the asteroids were broken, most of the material deflected enough to miss the planet. About forty of our orbital facilities remain, and some slower ships that weren’t worth sending with the fleet. They’ll clean up or break up the rest.”
“Look at that.” Absen walked over to tap an icon on the console screen. “Orion. After a century of use, sixty years after we left home, the old girl’s still there for the fight.”
“Amazing,” Johnstone said, and the others echoed the sentiment, especially those such as Okuda and Scoggins, who had fought aboard her.
Far beyond the inbound swarm of meteoroids Absen could see the outbound line of EarthFleet asteroid fortresses and ram-bodies, the ones that had missed. Slowly, they were decelerating to eventually return. Calculations next to their icons showed days or weeks.
“Those are out of the fight,” Absen murmured, and then spoke more loudly for the crew’s benefit. “Admiral Huen’s asteroid counterforce did its job, but in doing so, the enemy removed a lot of our close-in defenses from the fight, which was obviously what they had hoped. They traded a bunch of low-cost rocks to get a significant portion of our forces out of the way, but they paid for it when the Exploder kamikazes sneaked in close.”
He picked up a handheld cursor to point at items on the big screen as he lectured for the benefit of the crew. “Now the remaining fifty-six Destroyers have diverted slightly spinward and up, staying well away from the now-useless fortresses, and are curving back inward under easy thrust, conserving fuel. The Home Fleet is pacing them sideways and falling back slightly, making certain that the Meme can’t squeak around them. There’s no Mars, no other planet for a slingshot. Nothing but open space.”
Now everyone could see what Absen described as the time-to-intercept numbers on the screen dropped below five minutes. “Why is our fleet falling back? Won’t that slow the closing speed of missiles and railgun shots, making it easier for the Destroyers to pick them off?” Rick Johnstone asked.
“That works both ways, Commander. It also gives our ships more time to knock down hypers, which should be launching soon. They need at least a few minutes time to get up to effective speed.” As if in response to Absen’s words, a blizzard of pinpricks appeared next to the Meme fleet.
“How many?” he asked.
“Not sure, sir. Give it time…”
A minute went by. “About thirty-five million hypers. Monster size, over a thousand tons apiece, I would say. Bigger than we’ve ever seen.”
“Thirty – I’ve never seen so many. That’s…”
“Almost seven hundred thousand launches apiece.”
“That’s impossible.” Absen cut himself off before he said something even stupider. “No chance that’s a data error?”
“No, sir.” The team in the room exchanged bleak glances.
“That’s almost a billion tons of missiles per ship. They just fired five percent of their mass.”
“That’s what the numbers say, sir.”
“They must have been gestating hypers for months or years to save up that many.” Absen had never felt so helpless as at that moment, and so despairing. With absolutely nothing he could do to affect the battle, he called for a time out. That he could do. “Freeze the feeds.” Then he stared.
“What’s happening to their ships?”
Scoggins and her team rapidly punched keys, some diving into their links for VR overlays. “It looks like they are reconfiguring the Destroyers.” She zoomed in on one, frozen in time with the “pause” function. “Normally they have the shape of rugby or Aussie footballs, fat oblongs. They are thinning and elongating. This one now looks like a plump cigar, and I think…” she let the displays run forward, “…it’s stopped.”
“What do those look like to you?” Absen said, his voice ominous with suppressed horror.
Before one of his officers could, Ezekiel spoke. “It looks like my…like the Alan Denham, before he slammed into the first Destroyer.”
“I was afraid you’d say that. Ladies and gentlemen…” Absen’s voice fired as he took a breath, “they are turning themselves into massive hypers. They intend to ram their way through to Earth.”
“But sir…that goes completely against Meme doctrine,” Johnstone objected. “All the lectures from Captain Forman and from Ra
phaela Denham said they would not kamikaze.”
Suddenly, Spooky Nguyen, who had been lounging quietly in a corner chair, bounced to his feet and strode forward to stand beside Absen, staring out over the flight deck at the giant screen. “Commander, please give us a close-up on the last group of Destroyers, the rearmost bunch there. Those eight.” He plucked the cursor out of the captain’s hand and drew a circle around the ones he meant. Absen ignored the impertinence, stepping back, fascinated.
Scoggins did so, and Spooky pointed with his outstretched arm. “Those have not reshaped themselves. Did they launch hypers?”
The sensors officer ran the video back, then forward again, muttering. “No. They didn’t.”
“They’ve changed tactics on us, Captain,” Spooky said. “I’d lay a hefty wager that group of eight contains the only Meme crew in their fleet, probably consolidated from the rest. The other vessels have been made into fireships.”
“Into what?” Johnstone asked.
“Fireships,” Absen said, still staring across the flight deck. “Old wet navy tactic. Fill a ship with explosives and incendiaries, leave just a pilot aboard or control it remotely, and you can turn it into a suicide weapon. They’re using our own methods against us, Meme fashion.”
Johnstone said, “So they evacuated everyone to those eight ships, keeping them back as a command group or reserve. If they fail in this attack, those will go streaking through the solar system and run away. They will have lost a bunch of Destroyers but few if any actual Meme.”
“I believe so,” Spooky replied.
“Damn. Why can’t they be stupid and arrogant like aliens in all the movies?” Absen asked.
“They are arrogant, Captain,” Spooky replied. “You might be too if you ruled an empire stretching across thousands of worlds.”
“Point.” Absen stared at the frozen displays a moment more, noticing the restlessness of the crew. He stepped out from behind the clear crystal of the flight control room and onto the catwalk that ringed the great open space, holding up his arm for attention.
Once the crew quieted and turned to look up at him, he addressed them in his best parade-ground voice, without amplification. “Ladies and gentlemen, let me remind you that what we are about to see happened almost twenty-four years ago. No matter how horrifying, no matter how you feel about what you see, there is nothing we can do about it. The light and data transmissions we are using to observe this battle has been traveling that long, and it will take us a similar number of years of realtime to reach Earth. If we win, we can continue as before in the happy knowledge the efforts of EarthFleet have kept the home planet safe. The battle is lost, it has been lost for decades, but we will still continue onward, to take the fight to the enemy.” He swallowed. “Good luck to us all.”
Instead of going back in the booth, Absen signaled through the glass at Scoggins with a spin-fingered motion, roll it. He wanted to see what the rest of the crew saw, feel what they felt, as much as possible, with nothing between himself and them.
Displays came to life again, pictures moving slowly at first, and then faster. Knowing he would be analyzing the records for weeks to come as they traveled, the captain resigned himself to just experiencing the next few minutes, without interruption.
Rip the bandage off, quickly, painfully.
The Meme fleet now flared with fusion drives at maximum, turning and burning in an arc that would line them up on Earth within moments. The group of eight hung back, and drifted spinward, in order to flash past rather than impact the planet like their fellows, close enough to fight but far enough off the line of advance to run.
In response, the Home Fleet interposed itself between the forty-eight fireships and Earth, as Absen knew they must. Now he wished Huen had saved more asteroid fortresses, but could not fault the man for what he had done. At the time, the Meme ram-bodies had seemed the greater threat.
One minute remained, and now the millions of hypers entered the engagement envelopes of the human ships. The EarthFleet vessels used Meme tactics against the aliens, turning their fusion drives toward the enemy and blasting at full speed. The massive plasma flares became weapons, burning tens of thousands of closely packed missiles at a time, while holding open the range as long as possible.
Seconds later, hundreds of thousands of Home Fleet antimissiles, StormRaven fighters, railguns and beam weapons saturated the void with energies. The crew on the flight deck gasped in unison as the dense cloud of hypers met a veritable wall of defensive fire. Multimegaton fusion warheads tore great gaping holes in the ranks of Meme projectiles even as lasers plucked thousands out of space in microsecond bursts.
“We’re winning!” someone said from below him, and Absen shook his head slightly to himself, eyes still fixed on the screen.
No, we’re not, he thought. Oh, the Home Fleet will fend off those hypers, sure enough…but what will they have left to take on forty-eight Destroyer-sized projectiles, each six thousand meters long, a thousand across, and made mostly of ferrocrystal composite rather than mere asteroidal rock? If only Huen had more antimatter weapons, or had saved what he had until now. He might have taken out two or three at a time, now that they are just driving straight for Earth.
Absen realized the Destroyer-bullets’ narrowed cross-sections made them much harder to hit or damage. At speed, they could withstand impact after impact, explosion after explosion from anything less than an antimatter bomb, and still keep their drives and animal brains intact. There was simply no way to target the stern of anything moving that fast. The best EarthFleet could do was to keep hammering on their bows, hoping to damage or deflect each one enough to miss the planet. In short, they would have to chew their way through every ship to kill it. None of them had any weak spots.
The defensive action gave one last flare of fireworks before it died down to a few remaining sparkles. Several hundred thousand hypers, the ones that had both missed Fleet ships and avoided being destroyed, accelerated onward toward Earth, targeting orbital facilities. In moments they had scoured the twoscore remaining fortresses and artificial satellites.
Absen watched, tremendously saddened, as the Orion station died. He grasped the railing in front of him with hands like claws, and told himself that in the grand scheme, one old rustbucket didn’t matter.
Now the Home Fleet reversed itself, continuing their withdrawal Earthward with momentum but pointing armored prows toward the enemy again, all except the carriers. Those continued to drift backward, still providing aerospace control to their fighter wings, while their gigantic sister ships – dreadnoughts, battleships and cruisers – formed up into a wall of battle.
The largest fleet engagement I have ever witnessed, Absen mused, and at these speeds, it will be decided in moments. Like wet navy fleets before, much of strategy and tactics was maneuver, trying to put the enemy in the worst position possible, and retaining the best for oneself. In this case, the Meme plan was sound, akin to what he had himself used against them in the Gliese 370 system: force them to defend what they valued, limit their options, drive them into certain specific actions, and pound them to a pulp.
Being on the other side of that equation, he realized, brought with it a sickening sensation.
Too fast for human eyes to follow, Conquest’s sister dreadnoughts led the way forward, this time with no million colonists in their bellies to force their captains to sacrifice others. They held the center of a bullseye, a flattened cone like a coolie hat with its point toward the enemy, and sent forth all the death and destruction they could muster.
Home Fleet direct fire weapons blazed, and Destroyer after Destroyer bubbled, burned and crumbled, then exploded as residual fuel ignited in the uncontrolled fusion of their fracturing drives. As the enemy flared with fusors, the Home Fleet picked off Meme like a gunfighter knocking down targets.
Absen discerned their tactic, one he had hoped Huen would employ: sections of the fleet coordinated their weapons fire on one ship at a time, being forced to sma
sh each utterly before turning their combined energies on the next. Configured as projectiles, the Destroyers were not able to strike back with their usual thousands of hypers. Those had all been expended.
Forty-eight Meme became thirty-five, then thirty, twenty-five, twenty and then fourteen before the two fleets interpenetrated.
For a fraction of a second all Absen could see was a mass of ships, like two blasts of birdshot fired directly at each other, slamming together in a cataclysm, and then it was over.
Seven distinct fireballs, massive beyond belief, showed where the seven Conquest-class dreadnoughts had thrown themselves deliberately into the paths of the enemy.
Two more Destroyers spun, broken, where dozens of lesser ships had rammed them.
Five blazed onward, now less than one minute from Earth.
“Dear God,” Absen gasped, whether a prayer or a curse, he did not know. Even though he knew all this had already happened, he could not help but settle the question with his next words. “Dear God, save them…”
But it seemed nothing could stop those five deadly projectiles.
Now past interfering with the five, the remainder of the Home Fleet turned to attack the lagging Meme reserve group of eight, which now skirted the edge of the battle area and employed their own weapons conventionally. Thousands of hypers leaped from those Destroyers, fencing and then knife-fighting with the disorganized remainder of humanity’s naval ships.
Even without the dreadnoughts, to Absen the two groups’ strength looked about equal, and so he dismissed that battle from his mind for now, to turn his attention back to the five. Plenty of time to study it all later. Along with the rest of the crew, now all on their feet below and staring, he gazed raptly at, he was nauseatingly certain, the imminent ravaging of his homeworld.
The view pulled back to encompass the ever-shrinking distance between the speeding death ships and Earth. Nothing near the home planet remained after the hypers, except…one anomalous icon, representing a squadron of fifty Thunderchiefs, appeared suddenly as if by magic. Perhaps they had hidden, powered down and EMCON.
Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest) Page 16