The Orion Plague

by David VanDyke

  He told her what, and she hated him for it. But in the end, tearful and grudging, she agreed to do as he asked, because she loved him, and because she loved her son.

  -35-

  Orion proceeded slowly outbound for a week after launch. We are the lumbering rhino, Absen thought to himself for the hundredth time. Earth is their target, but the Asteroid Belt is their arsenal.

  All the analyses agreed that the most devastating and simple tactic the aliens could use was to throw rocks. Push them with their ship’s drive, or perhaps slap fusion engines and a guidance system on them and it was goodbye humanity.

  The rock that hit Tunguska, Siberia in 1908 was only about one hundred meters across, yet it struck with the force of a thousand Hiroshimas. A one-thousand meter asteroid would devastate a small country. A big one, perhaps ten kilometers across, might wipe out all life more complex than cockroaches.

  Absen’s nightmare scenario was that the Meme were as clever at war as they were at biology. If he was in their shoes he would come in slowly, watch for enemy, move laterally along the plane of the solar ecliptic, and send in the rocks all at once and from unexpected angles in a coordinated bombardment. There was no rational reason he could think of that the aliens would engage his ship in combat. Perhaps a bullfighter and a rhino was an inapt metaphor; it was more like a Zeppelin and a fighter plane. How could the dirigible catch the airplane?

  He had to hope for a break. Perhaps they would be stupid, or single-minded, or overconfident. Perhaps they had no kinetic weapons and relied exclusively on plagues to do their dirty work, though he knew the Raphael alien had contradicted that notion. Perhaps they could be enraged.

  Perhaps the aliens would be the rhino and charge the bullfighter if they waved the right red flag.

  His only chance then was to proceed with eyes wide open in hopes Orion could spot the enemy before being seen, to sneak up on them and launch a surprise attack. It sounded preposterous, but space was enormous. There were thousands of asteroids in the solar system larger than Orion; perhaps she would be mistaken for one of them.

  Absen wished again he could broadcast a hail to try contacting the Raphaela alien, but that was too risky. As a submariner his instinct was to run passive. Orion possessed powerful phased-array radars but they were all shut down, and other electromagnetics were minimized. Instead, they listened, and looked. Meter-wide telescopes probed outward, computers comparing known backgrounds with observations, looking for anomalies. Communications dishes collected the signals of the universe, sorting out the noise of stars, looking for…something else.

  “Sir! We’ve got something.” Rick Johnstone, Comms officer on watch, typed in a command and a low sound filled the bridge, a machinelike whirr and series of pops, rising and falling rapidly. “It’s machine code.”

  “Where away?” Absen leaned forward, then stood up to loom over the young man. “What’s your rank, anyway…Johnstone?” he asked, reading Rick’s nametag.

  “I’m a civilian expert, sir. They gave me a Reserve commission as a lieutenant but I don’t know anything about rank insignia really –”

  “Never mind. Where’s the signal coming from?”

  “Uh…”

  “I got it, sir.” The Sensors officer, Scoggins, tapped rapidly at her controls and a moment later the main screen showed a representation of the ship and its surroundings. She made adjustments and the view pulled out rapidly, until Orion was just a blue dot near the orbit trace of Mars. A red icon flashed, out beyond Uranus’ orbit.

  “It’s telemetry, sir,” Johnstone said, one ear pressed to a headphone. “I’ve heard it before.” He touched a control and the sound slowed, then looped. “You see, it’s hexadecimal. The third and fourth grouping –”

  “Good work, Mr. Johnstone. You too, Lieutenant Scoggins,” he interrupted, nodding in the direction of the Sensors station. “Stay passive, work together and collect everything you can. Pass it to SIGINT and Crypto, see if it can be cracked. Put that Korean supercomputer to use.”

  Chief of the Boat Ray Timmons, his senior enlisted man from the USS Tucson, stepped up beside him, catching his eye. Absen glanced over, then withdrew to his captain’s chair, the COB following after. “Crew’s talking already. Might be a good idea to calm them down, sir.”

  “Right you are, COB.” Absen knew with this green and mixed crew the scuttlebutt would race around like shit through a goose, triggering misunderstandings and mistakes. He put on his headset.

  “Now hear this. This is Captain Absen. We have detected an alien signal. Maintain silent running, obey your officers, do nothing to let them detect us. The closer we get to them, the more likely we will beat them. I say again, no signals, no emanations, no ranging lasers, no radio-telescopy, no radar, nothing. That is all.” He released the button and nodded at the COB.

  Timmons raised his ever-present coffee mug of lifer-juice in salute and faded back to his niche.

  Absen felt a thousand times better now that he had a target. He hoped it was really the alien, and not some forgotten relic of one of Earth’s space programs.

  They were headed in roughly the correct direction, but one problem loomed and grew. Use of the nuclear bomb drive was painfully obvious, impossible to hide. They had launched when Earth was turned away from their line of travel, then whipped around in orbit and adjusted course with a few bombs, hoping that the explosions would not be connected with a ship heading the aliens’ direction. But setting even one off this far out would surely alert them to the presence of something manmade.

  No, Absen had to keep thinking like a submariner sneaking silently up on his target, only revealing his presence at the last moment.

  -36-

  If he’d had to say, Skull would have sworn he’d never get back into his cocoon, the one in which he’d slept away the nine months of Raphaela’s pregnancy.

  Technically, he hadn’t – the thing that encased him now had been so heavily modified it was more of a biomechanical space suit. He could move in it, eat in it, excrete in it, and fight from it – more or less. It was Raphaela’s final gift, a project that had occupied the several long days until the base’s sensors had at last detected the Meme scout ship decelerating toward the comet.

  Fortunately the forward-facing fusion flare from the decelerating enemy masked its sensors, and Raphaela and little Zeke flew away in the other direction, themselves hidden by the bulk of the comet. The fusion wake blasted the comet even from thousands of miles away, kicking dust-sized particulates into a cloud. The accelerated helium atoms also knocked water molecules and contaminants off the naked ice surface. The combination obscured the base, the comet, and their escape.

  Skull saw most of this as the base fed him visuals and passive sensor data. He watched as the Meme scout ship, a dirty grey teardrop, matched velocities with the comet and detached some kind of shuttle from a hundred miles out. As she said, they are being cautious.

  It maneuvered carefully closer, agonizingly slow taking hours. After a journey of hundreds of years, the Meme were apparently in no hurry to find out what had happened to their forward base. Yet another difference between us and them, Skull thought. In their place humans would be screaming with impatience. Like I am now.

  He wanted to get it over with, wanted to come to grips with the enemy. The old prebattle bloodlust hammered at the hatch of his iron will and he clamped down on it. Not now, he crooned silently to himself.

  The last days and weeks were all forgotten now as he slammed shut the compartment where Zeke’s precious face resided, and behind it, Raphaela’s. The very fact that it was his child, rather than his…mate, he could call her – that obsessed him, proved to himself that his so-called love for her was merely a reflection of his perfect paternal pride in his son.

  And so like any good father, Skull prepared to put his body between the ravening wolf and his family.

  Finally the landing shuttle docked at the base, and commenced boring into the outer surface. Raphaela had ensured that the
base itself would not cooperate with the Meme in any way – in fact, it would appear nearly dead, with just some random residual bioelectrical signatures to mask Skull’s presence and activity.

  The thing cut its way slowly and carefully in through the roof of the base, which on the inside served as the floor because of the comet’s spin. This was all to Skull’s advantage; the scout ship could only observe its lander for about half the comet’s fifteen-minute rotation period.

  Skull and Raphaela had argued desultorily about whether one of the Meme crew would come down personally or send some kind of teleoperated probe first. Raphaela turned out to be right. The thing that crawled into the base was no Meme.

  It was a crab-shaped biomachine, with at least ten appendages fit for grabbing, grasping, cutting, sampling, and manipulating. It searched the base room by room, finding nothing but dead or inert Meme machinery.

  Except for one fascinating piece of equipment.

  The semiautonomous robot tested the heavy cocoon module, probing at it with biological and electrical samplers, trying to find a connection to what humans would call a computer. Finally it found something damaged and confusing in its data, but enough.

  The cocoon contained a human being retrieved many cycles ago, its damaged memory seemed to say. It had been used and kept alive for bio-experimentation to better tailor the Lightbringer phages for the indigenes. Combined with the scout ship’s own observations of the comet – it was clear the ball of ice had been struck by a passing asteroid – the Meme accepted the implied explanation: the base had been slowly dying ever since the impact, and was in its last stages of failure; the three Meme Watchers were dead, or had departed long ago in the missing shuttle.

  Skull watched through his sensors as the crab-shaped thing crawled all over his cocoon, hoping Raphaela’s preparations had been effective. He hated to think that it might get into the module and cut him out like a lobster from its shell. He had bet his life on his belief that they would want him and the module alive and undamaged, to study and learn. They will either bring the cocoon to their ship, or they will land at the base to take a look and to salvage, now that they are convinced it’s safe.

  Either way, they’ll let me come close enough to hurt them.

  Some time later Skull felt the module being loaded onto the shuttle; apparently he would be brought up to be examined before the Meme came down to look at the base. This was another binary they had discussed: would they come down, or bring him up? Apparently they took the safer course, that of tackling fewer unknowns at once. They would examine him and his sarcophagus, then when they had learned enough, they would look at the base in person.

  So now it was just Skull against the enemy again, alone and unafraid. Well. He had to admit to a bit of healthy fear. If you had no fear, they called that a death wish. He’d seen it before in some men, who’d given up on life. They took insane chances and often seemed like heroes, until they became dead heroes. He wondered how many Medal of Honor winners were really such men.

  He tried to doze in the module as there was nothing to do. The shuttle ride took hours. Casting his mind back to his brief nanocommando training, and the exercises he had practiced on the base, he visualized his planned movements in microgravity, going over them step by step in his mind.

  Finally there came a series of thumps and then a slight but pervasive hum. He surmised he must be feeling the normal operational vibrations of the scout ship.

  -37-

  The alien telemetry signal had snapped off abruptly after just a few hours, but provided enormous information to Orion’s crew.

  First, the signal proved easy to crack, an elementary two-level digital control signal encrypted with a simple sixteen-bit key. Once deciphered, the cryptologists and computer experts working in tandem reported their belief it was used to control some kind of remote, a teleoperated robot or probe. Perhaps it had something to do with the comet lazily spinning a hundred miles away from the signal. Intel noted that the Raphael alien had said he had occupied a base on a comet. Perhaps that was it.

  Second and more critical to combat concerns, the signal allowed the ship’s optics, especially its one-meter telescopes, to find and fix on the enemy spacecraft, held firmly in view by NASA-designed computers originally made for orbital space telescopes. As long as it made no sudden maneuvers, Orion’s crew could see the alien ship and, they hoped, it would not notice them.

  Absen stared at the enormous central screen of the CCC as the alien frigate, as he thought of it, hung in its center. Shaped like an elongated and reversed teardrop, it appeared that when under power it would fly with its point forward, its fatter end back. Intel surmised that this would allow it to deflect debris and weapons with maximum efficiency by pointing its needle-nose toward its direction of travel or its enemy, like the armored prow of an oceangoing ship cutting ice or deflecting shells.

  Other than that, it showed an undifferentiated black skin in the visible spectrum. No radar antenna, no structures, no doors or hatches, nothing. It was just matte-black. With infrared sensors it glowed warm enough to be easily tracked, so Absen thought it unlikely the black was a stealth measure. It was probably simply the most efficient color, collecting the tiny bit of solar energy available this far out, using it to maintain power.

  But what were its weapons, Absen wondered? Inquiries to Chairman Markis had supplied all the data they had, or so they said, from Raphael and Raphaela, but they had never debriefed him – her – it – specifically about Meme weapons. From some fragments and deductions, Intel believed they would have hypervelocity missiles. That would be an obvious application of efficient miniaturized fusion drives such as had been recovered from the Demon Plague probes.

  Perhaps they would have projectile gun weapons, powered with fusion or superconducting rails. With fusion power, beam weapons were also easily within reach. Some of the wilder speculations included aggressive biologicals – a plague of killer insects, for example, that scurried everywhere and poisoned everyone they stung, or destructive Von Neumann machines that would try to dismantle the ship piece by piece while replicating themselves with the materials.

  In truth, they simply had no way to know.

  The bridge let out a sound of collective surprise as the picture on the screen abruptly altered. The alien ship changed orientation, from half-toward the Orion to pointing almost directly at it. Now the image appeared as a circle with a small point to one side altering its black perfection.

  Cilia deLille at Helm spoke up in smooth French-accented English. “Bogey has turned in our direction.” She adjusted a control with a feather touch, accessing her feeds. “I have fusion flare from behind it. Without active pulse I cannot be certain, but it makes sense that they are accelerating toward us.”

  “Passive Doppler confirms,” the Sensors officer said, “accelerating at…ah…this can’t be right…”

  “Just report the figures, Lieutenant.” said Absen with icy calm.

  “Ah, about three hundred Gs, sir.”

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” breathed the COB.

  “That’s enough.” Absen spoke mildly. “We’re not here to admire them, we’re here to kill them. We all know they have advanced technology. But they can’t outrun lasers, and right now they are coming right toward us. That’s good.” He stroked his jaw, leaning forward in his chair. “How long until they reach beam range?”

  “Uh…” the Sensors officer frantically tapped keys, buttons and touchscreens.

  “If they continue on present vector and acceleration, they will pass us within two hours.” The Master Helmsmen bobbed her shaven pate as she ran her fingers over screens. A moment later a plot appeared that showed the frigate’s course curving past Orion, headed nowhere in particular. “Closest approach will be approximately one hundred thirty thousand kilometers.”

  “Two hours? Helm…are you sure that’s correct? Aren’t they out beyond the orbit of Uranus? That’s…weeks away, normally?” Absen wasn’t sure he should reveal hi
s lack of astrophysical sophistication to everyone but it just didn’t make sense to him.

  “It’s hard to understand for the layman,” deLille said condescendingly, “but that’s what the calculations say. If they continued at 300G acceleration, they would be at fifty percent of lightspeed in roughly fourteen hours.”

  Absen swallowed, letting her attitude pass for now. “Then there will be no way we can catch them. Not a chance in hell.”

  ***

  “Where the hell are they going?” Absen asked to no one in particular, and not for the first time.

  “Forward,” responded Helm as if to a child. “No change. Correction…bogey has reduced acceleration. Doppler feed now shows zero G.”

  “They dropped from 300 to zero G?”

  “That is what I said.”

  Her vowels were liquid with her accent, Quebecois if Absen had to guess. He would have to hear her speak French to be sure. His legendary calm demeanor was starting to fray from her attitude. “Any idea why, Lieutenant?” he asked with deceptive mildness. “This isn’t a guessing game. Come on, people. I need information.”

  “Asteroid,” Scoggins at Sensors spoke up. “There should be one about five kilometers in size two million klicks ahead of them, according to the surveys.” She grinned in satisfaction at having beat deLille to the punch.

  Helm spoke up. “Bogey is changing orientation. Reversing.” The bridge crew saw the frigate turn end for end within the space of seconds, then the screen whited out for a moment. When it came back it was in a false-color representation different from before, with a point near its fat now-front end blacked out by a virtual disc to hide the glare of its drive. “Deceleration. Doppler is not able to cope with the fusion flare, but interpolation of data indicates similar energy expenditure. If I had to guess,” she said, turning her supercilious gaze on the Captain, “I’d say they were decelerating just as fast as they accelerated, in preparation for matching velocities with minor planet 2005UP460.”