The Orion Plague

by David VanDyke

  “That’s the asteroid?” Absen asked.

  The Helm’s smile was wintry, superior, her eye-roll definitive. “In common parlance.”

  Absen had had enough. He straightened, speared her with his eyes. “Miss deLille, call for your relief,”

  “What?”

  “That’s what, Captain. I said call for your relief. I want you off this bridge immediately.”

  “You can’t do zat! I will report zis to my government, I will…” Her excellent English began to break down under stress.

  “COB, do you have your sidearm?” Absen flicked his eyes at his Steward Tobias, who suddenly quivered with alertness like a hound spotting a squirrel. He shook his head minutely at the man.

  Master Chief Timmons patted his holstered pistol.

  “COB, remove this insubordinate officer from the bridge and confine her to quarters. Cut off all comms and net access, post two Marine guards and arrange for a rotation. Bread and water. If she resists, shoot her, treat her, restrain her, and sedate her.” Absen turned to the steward. “Mr. Tobias, get me a new Master Helmsman please. Weapons – what’s your name?”

  “Ford, sir.”

  “Lieutenant Commander Ford, slave Helm to your board until the station is occupied.”

  The COB took the stunned helmsman and frog-marched her off the bridge. A few snickers from the younger officers echoed around the hemispherical room.

  “Secure that garbage, people, unless you want to follow her down,” Absen snapped. From then on he heard nothing but professional chatter.

  Seven minutes later the new helmsman stepped onto the bridge, Steward Tobias behind him. “Master Helmsman Okuda reports for duty, sir,” he said, his midnight-black face impassive. His accent was also tinged with French, and the sounds of Africa. One of the former French colonies, then – Mali, Congo, Chad?

  “Take your station. Sensors will brief you. Everyone back to work.” Absen sat back, putting his chin on his fist, a calculated pose, and stared at the main screen. He quivered with anger within, but showed nothing but dead calm. It had been ages since anyone under his command had tested him like that. He knew the story would scuttlebutt fast, and hoped it had been the right play.

  -38-

  Raphaela lifted the shuttle gently away from the comet to avoid creating any signature visible to the incoming Meme. She had used up much of the residual biomechanical capability of the base to refurbish the shuttle, so it responded well to her touch on the controls.

  She tapped a thruster and turned the craft into a trajectory that would keep the comet itself between the shuttle and the Meme spaceship, then ramped up the fusion drive until she was well away from the mile-wide planetoid. Then she cut the thrust, eliminating the telltale hot flare of her engines. Now she was just one more drifting chunk of rock as far as sensors were concerned, and a small one at that. The shape of the shuttle was naturally stealthy to radar, curved and low-reflective.

  She reached over to draw Zeke gently out of his cradle-cocoon. He cooed and smiled, waving his arms in the zero gravity. Letting him go, she watched as he flapped and wiggled, instinctively trying to swim around the room. He got as far as arm’s length before she snagged a toe and reeled him in, to feed him at her breast.

  Knowledge flowed into him with the milk. Raphaela had simplified her explanation of the physical processes for Skull. In reality he did not have all of Raphael’s knowledge firehosed into his little brain; she was feeding it to him in his milk, drink by drink. The millions of RNA-like carrier molecules made their way through his digestion and into his bloodstream, eventually to deliver their memories directly into his developing mental structure. It was a very efficient system, much better than that of ordinary humans.

  For Raphaela had, of course, emphasized her humanity and minimized her differences, in hopes that Skull would overcome his stubborn resistance and love her as a woman. And for a few brief days, perhaps he had.

  She rubbed her belly, inhumanly certain that more of Skull’s children grew inside her even now.

  -39-

  “How close is our nearest approach to the asteroid, and when?” Absen asked.

  “We are more than a week away, and assuming no change, we will pass it at approximately thirty thousand kilometers, sir.” Helm replied. Okuda seemed highly competent, and also seemed to understand his captain’s mood. He put on no airs. He’d probably already heard about deLille.

  “And how long until they match up with the rock?”

  “About fifteen more minutes, sir.”

  “All right. Comms, sound general quarters. Secure for high-G maneuvering. Reduce spin to fifteen percent using gyros only. Maintain silent running. Make all ready for nuclear drive. Maneuver only on my order.” Absen waited as his instructions were relayed in terse tones and the thrumming of precessing gyros set their teeth on edge.

  “Mister Okuda, give me your expert opinion on what they might do.”

  The former astronaut nodded, closing his eyes to commune with his computers through implanted cybernetic links. “They are reducing deceleration smoothly. Approach curve shows they will come to rest relative to the asteroid in approximately twelve minutes.”

  “Does it appear they will pass behind the rock?”

  Okuda blinked. “Behind? Relatively speaking, sir…I do not know. They are too far away to tell.”

  “I want to know the instant you have a prediction. Is the spin off the ship?”

  “Fifteen percent, sir.”

  “With gyros only, compute and orient for a course that will intercept the asteroid.” He rubbed at his cheek. “Mr. Okuda, as a sub driver I could keep maneuvers in my head, but now I’m out of my depth.” He waited a beat, and a couple of the bridge crew got the droll joke. “I’m going to rely on you to interpret my orders and make this ship do what it needs to. Do we understand one another?”

  “Perfectly, Captain,” the African said with a thin, white smile.

  “So if that frigate goes behind the rock, completely behind it, mind you, I want all ahead standard – what’s that, eight Gs? – in hopes they won’t see our drive flares. Otherwise we just keep drifting.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” The gyros vibrated the ship again, dragging the Orion’s nose to the correct orientation using nothing but stored kinetic energy, the same principle that allowed a child’s toy gyroscope to seemingly defy gravity.

  The alien frigate’s drive abruptly flared out, and Sensors pulled the display back to show it and the asteroid designated minor planet 2005UP460. Colored circles sprang up around the two now-tiny dots as they slowly grew closer. Every few minutes the Sensors officer adjusted the screen, bringing magnification back up, until eventually the shapes of both objects could be seen again.

  The asteroid seemed enormous compared to the enemy, fifty times as long and thousands of times as massive. “Opinions?” asked Absen.

  “Pulling in for fuel?” responded Weapons.

  “They’d probably use a comet for that,” Rick Johnstone demurred. “They might be getting ready to push it at Earth.”

  Absen asked, “Helm, if that 300 gravities was their max power, how long would it take them to launch it to hit Earth?”

  “Within what time frame, sir?”

  Absen raised his eyebrows in puzzlement.

  “If they have a year, they will only need a nudge. If they want it to strike within, say, a week…perhaps a full day of that acceleration would do it. Do you need a more precise answer?”

  “No, that’s fine. How quickly can we get there?”

  “It depends on how many drive bombs you want to expend, sir.”

  “Say…one hundred. Leaving us…”

  “Two thousand one hundred and nine. About five days if that is all used for acceleration. About seventeen days if we use part each direction and intend to come to relative rest at the asteroid.”

  “Five days!” Absen cursed. “Mr. Okuda, I am putting us in your hands. We need to intercept the enemy. To do that we need to lung
e in his direction when he’s behind that rock and can’t see us, then coast to get silently within range. We also have to be close enough for our Tridents to chase down and nuke the rock, deflect it from hitting the Earth or break it up. If he sees us, he can run away – hell, he can run rings around us and go find another asteroid halfway across the solar system.”

  “I understand, sir. Please allow me to concentrate.” The Master Helmsman put his head back against the padded rest and closed his eyes.

  Absen paced the bridge for long minutes, then realized he would just cause needless delay if Helm had to fire the drive, so he sat back down. Breathing deeply, he tried to relax, musing on how many subtle and gross differences there were between a sub and this spaceship, none of them favorable as far as he could see.

  “Captain, my computers are still working the problem but I predict that the enemy will pass behind the rock within two minutes, assuming no adjustment on his part. However, none of this may matter.”

  “And why?” Absen asked patiently.

  “Because, sir,” Okuda explained carefully, “we are approximately eight light-minutes away from the target. What we see on the screen is already eight minutes in the past. You must decide, sir, if we should risk initiating the drive now, hoping the frigate stays behind the rock. If it doesn’t, but passes to the other side, they will see us.”

  Absen bit his bent thumb knuckle in thought. He remembered another time when he played it safe, avoiding taking the Tucson under the ice for fear of scraping his boat. Two hundred million people might have died because of that caution.

  “Light it up, Helm. We take the risk. Use your best judgment as to method.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” He lightly brushed a touchpad. The bridge crew settled into their couch-seats and tightened their restraints.

  A computer voice filled the ship with rich feminine tones. “Now hear this, now hear this. Acceleration to – eight – gravities in – five – seconds. Five – four – three – two – one.”

  “Thank you, mother,” Absen mumbled as a madman with a rubber jackhammer tried to shake his ship apart.

  Mere minutes of nuclear shuddering seemed like hours to the crew, great soft rubber mallets of pressure pounding over and over again. It ended abruptly, as it must, with no decrease: one moment a bomb; the next, silence broken only by the ringing in their ears.

  “Report.”

  “Intercept in approximately two days, sir. One hundred forty-six bombs expended. The enemy remains hidden behind the asteroid.”

  “Thank God.” Absen dug himself out of the gel-filled cushions. Two days. Right. “Secure from general quarters. Bring the spin up to sixty percent. Return to normal watch rotation. Okuda, schedule yourself so you are Helm when we approach combat. If we engage early, get up here ASAP. You are now my go-to guy.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Okuda glowed quietly with this acknowledgement.

  “In fact, I want all of you back when we go in. Make sure you get your shifts adjusted. Fine job, everyone.”

  Captain Absen saw Commander Huen come down the ladder into the CCC, to stand by the command chair. He checked his watch, saw it was time for relief, and turned the ship over to the Chinese officer. As he left with Tobias following faithfully, he heard the bridge crew reporting their status in turn, and went to his cabin for some rest, confident the ship was in good hands.

  For now.

  -40-

  The radiation scanner changed color, signaling anomaly. Biologist ignored the thing; it was Executive’s bailiwick, not its. It contemplated bringing the readout to Commander’s attention, then decided that would be pointless. Executive was in favor now, and anything Biologist did would be looked upon badly. It turned deliberately away and went back to its own work.

  Executive briefly noticed the radiation anomaly but had its entire attention focused on the asteroid in front of them. Landing on the rock, analyzing it, plotting its center of gravity, setting up the ship to send the massive thing plummeting into the Blue World’s gravity well, all of these things and a dozen more consumed its attention. It had no time for radiation anomalies. It was probably just some fissionable ore within the rock.

  Commander noticed the display, but it would be beneath its dignity to check on it. It contemplated ordering one of its subordinates to do so but that risked either of them telling him it was nothing to be concerned about. Better to remain aloof. Command could be a lonely position.

  -41-

  Raphaela watched the Meme scout ship on passive optics as she drifted, impersonating just one small rock among many. Her cousins were arrogant; they must have been monitoring the television transmissions of Earth, many of which would have mentioned Orion’s construction, even if the operational details were classified. Yet they ignored the obvious implications.

  Then she remembered the loss of Earth’s satellites. Perhaps now that the vast majority of communications went via fiber-optic cable or direct microwave transmission rather than to and from orbiting objects, the danger wasn’t as obvious. Or perhaps they could not conceive Earth’s technology being any threat to them this far out in the solar system.

  She wished she could transmit to the Orion ship she knew must be even now speeding – or lumbering – out from Earth. To do so would be asking for discovery. The Meme might be ignoring or misinterpreting the myriad signals of Earth; they would not fail to notice something out here with them. She wished she could do anything. But revealing her ship as artificial in this vicinity would bring swift investigation, and disaster with it. She could not risk her children.

  Once the battle began, perhaps she could move closer, though what her tiny unarmed shuttle could do was debatable. So she merely watched as the Meme accelerated with incredible power.

  When she saw this she choked back a gasp of fear for Skull. The Meme had gravity control within their ships, over very short distances and using vast amounts of power, so she knew they would use that technology to keep themselves safe from the crushing of the massive acceleration she witnessed.

  But Skull…she had to hope that they would realize that subjecting a human body to hundreds of gravities would destroy its usefulness, and that they would safeguard it from harm. She had to believe it.

  She observed as it maneuvered toward an asteroid large enough that, were it to impact the planet, would probably erase all their worries along with most human beings. Those remaining would be powerless to resist, and Raphaela was sure that, given the choice, the aliens would accept a devastated ecosystem.

  Now, with nothing to do, she wished she had communicated more with Daniel and Elise Markis on Earth, or with others there. But the risk had been too great. Any transmission directed her way might have been intercepted by the incoming Meme, and once she was committed to Skull’s vision of his mission, she had to make sure that the aliens were not warned.

  This was doubly so now that their children grew within her. She knew without undue pride that she might now be the single most important organism in the solar system. If all else failed, she had the means and the technology to find another home for humanity – a new sort of human – and rebuild Eden on her own.

  She chuckled darkly to herself. Some wondered where Cain got his wife. Maybe sometime in the future they will wonder where Mother Raphaela got her husband. The answer wouldn’t fit the common morality, but survival was a brutal master, and needs must when the devil drives.

  She hoped that scripture would never be written.

  -42-

  Skull remained quiescent but on edge. He knew Orion had been launched; the nuclear explosions would have been impossible to conceal. Hopefully the aliens would not realize what they meant, or if they did, would discount the threat to themselves. After all, at normal rocket speeds it would take weeks to get out this far. Raphaela had told him that a nuclear drive should allow them to reach the enemy in only days.

  But he knew that the Meme would not ignore a series of nuclear explosions marching across the solar system toward them.
Even if by some chance they did not realize the bombs constituted a spaceship drive, they would investigate. They would seek, they would find, and they would easily destroy.

  Earth’s only chance as he saw it was for Skull to pick his moment, some critical juncture, where his attack, his sacrifice, would give Orion a chance at victory. One well-placed nuclear warhead and it’s bye-bye Meme…and bye-bye Skull. To save his son, and Raphaela, and all those others on Earth…he was at peace with that notion.

  Just as long as he had a chance to strike.

  If only I had an atomic weapon, he thought again, but there was no way to make one and even had they been able, it probably would have been detected and not brought aboard. No, he himself, a bio-weapon, a Trojan Horse, was the only thing the enemy would allow inside.

  He’d sensed many different things lying in the coffin. Movements, shocks, noises like the slurping of gustation and the gurgles of digestion. Whines, buzzes, taps, a gamut of sounds impossible to interpret without looking outside. Once he had felt acceleration, first in one direction, then another. Then a shudder went through the ship, something different this time, a feeling as if they had run into a wall and stuck.

  Skull wasn’t sure what it was, and he was tempted to begin his assault right then, but held back. One big impact did not a battle make. He had to know for sure that the alien was engaged, that in the confusion whatever internal defenses it had would not swat him like a bug.

  So he waited.

  -43-

  With two days until arrival, Absen made the best use he could of his time. Rather than interfering with the crew, he did a bit of wandering around, showing himself to his people, shaking hands with Marines and engineers, talking to the officers. This seemingly pointless exercise was actually part of the glue that would hold a complement together in combat, to know that the Skipper cared enough to leave his lofty command spaces and visit them.