The Orion Plague

by David VanDyke

  Picking up the metal bar again he ran to the opposite wall and slapped himself another hole. He knew the necrotizing disease Raphaela had engineered would eventually be contained by the ship’s internal immune systems, so he had to spread havoc as fast as he could. In rapid succession he visited several more rooms, planting his deadly pestilences.

  -46-

  The three Meme quivered like jelly in their pools as the ground shock transmitted through the rock. “Have you destabilized the asteroid with your ‘engineering’?” Commander asked with the meme version of sarcasm.

  “No, Commander, look at the radiation detector. It is showing readings thousands of times above background,” Executive replied.

  “Is that dangerous?”

  Biologist answered this time. “It is within tolerance though the ship will be stressed with repair protocols.” The shocks increased, but the artificial gravity of the control center kept any harm from coming to the controlling aliens. “I also have an infection of some sort among the digestion-conversion modules.”

  “Infection?” Commander expressed astonishment. “That is…unusual.”

  “The immune system should handle it without difficulty. I will monitor…but from whence come these shocks? They are increasing.” Biologist looked accusingly at Executive.

  “Commander, there are thermonuclear fission reactions occurring all around us at a range of approximately three kilometers!”

  “The human ship! You failed to detect it! We must get free and maneuver!”

  “Initiating separation,” replied Executive. “It will take some time. I am ordering missile formation within the ship and the observer drones.”

  “Why were the missiles not already formed?” Commander asked harshly.

  “I was working to capacity with setting the asteroid on course. Perhaps if one of you would do something instead of remaining inert in your pools, the situation would improve!”

  Biologist was now quite frightened, not having a combative disposition. Still, he loaded his best short-term effort, a metal-eating phage, into the missiles that the ship was growing within it, in hopes his contribution would make the difference. It knew the phage was weak, lacking the usual hardiness of bio-weapons, but after all it had created it from scratch in a very short time.

  -47-

  For the next twenty-four seconds, Absen watched as 288 ravening nuclear fireballs pounded the asteroid. There was no way to predict what the effect of such incredible energies would be – would the asteroid crack in half, break up into pieces, explode or melt? Much depended on the makeup of the rock.

  “Sensors, can you cut through that mess to see anything?”

  “No, sir. Unless the enemy accelerates laterally under full power and gets out of the glare, we won’t be able to see a thing.”

  “What’s he going to do,” Absen muttered. If I were him I’d run as fast as I could, directly away, staying in the asteroid’s shadow before the warheads shatter it. “If we’re lucky, we caught him napping and he’s getting pummeled,” said the Captain to no one in particular.

  The light show ended and the display normalized, showing a much-changed asteroid. Parts of it glowed white-hot and molten, until the computer adjusted for the infrared. Globules and pieces formed an expanding cloud, and the scale thrown over the image confirmed that more than half the rock’s mass had been stripped away by the waves of heat and blast.

  “Conn, Helm: sir, there is one effect we forgot about.”

  “Yes?”

  “The warheads acted much like our drive does. The asteroid has been pushed away from us at a considerable speed.”

  “What do you mean, considerable?”

  “We were closing on the asteroid at one hundred kilometers per second. Now that rate appears to be approximately eighty-five to ninety KPS.”

  “Weapons,” Absen snapped. “What effect will that have on remaining missile targeting?”

  “Computing.” A pause. “Sir…it might actually improve things. Since the missiles are approaching the asteroid more slowly, it will give the proximity fuses a few more microseconds to work, make them more accurate.”

  Absen let out a sigh of relief. He had been worried the change might cause the entire salvo to miss. Unlike beneath the ocean, visualizing the situation in space was still not easily done in his head. “Someone throw up a schematic of the battle as seen from a point above it. Plot all of our weapons, us, the rock, and anything else of significance.”

  A moment later the view on the screen shifted to a place seemingly above their course. Orion’s track now plotted to miss the rock, passing it on the other side from their original intention as they overtook the asteroid more slowly. He knew Helm could easily compensate for that, though. Much more critical were the plots of the weapons Orion had fired.

  The estimated position of the cloud of railgun projectiles now led off to the side of the asteroid, followed by the larger, slower mass of the Gatling bullets. “How much will the guns miss by?” he asked.

  “Ten to fourteen klicks,” Weapons replied.

  “Damn. We wasted those shots.” It was a one-in-a-billion chance that any of those would strike a target, now that the asteroid and presumably the frigate had moved. Fortunately the missiles’ guidance systems were optically locked on the asteroid as a reference point. “What’s our range now?”

  “Passing thirty-six thousand kilometers, sir. About eight minutes out, if we don’t decelerate.”

  “Damn. I screwed up. Didn’t predict that shove we gave the rock.”

  “It was my fault, sir,” replied Okuda. “I should have known.”

  “It’s a new playing field. We’re all learning. Here come the missiles.”

  The bridge crew watched as dozens of icons, each representing multiple Grackle or SM5 missiles, closed at an angle to intercept the fleeing rock. No sign of the enemy had yet been seen, so they had to hope that the frigate was lying doggo, or perhaps had been damaged and was unable to maneuver away from its shielding asteroid.

  “Come on, babies,” Ford muttered as the first missiles passed the rock. Each would use up the last of its fuel decelerating and positioning itself for maximum effect. As they flashed past, their fuses detonated.

  -48-

  Skull dodged another of the things he thought of as white cells, gloppy masses with ropy tentacles that chased him here and there. He had killed a couple of them with his metal bar, and a few more he had to throw bio-bombs at and run.

  The things were mindless, and not very fast, but they were relentless and more were showing up all the time. They must be automatically generated and were clearly converging on the irritation within the Meme ship body – that is, him.

  That all changed when he felt the next shocks – fainter ones this time by far, but with an interesting and unforeseeable side effect.

  The ship screamed.

  That was the only way he could describe it as a clear sound of agony came through the thin spots over his ears. Things that before remained still, jerked and snapped, lashing this way and that. Something sure pissed it off, he thought with vicious joy, and continued to plant his irritants.

  In the next room he switched tactics. The plan had been to wait, but he wanted to see what the results would be, and perhaps now, when the ship was obviously hurt, would be the right time. He prodded another part of the suit until it activated and another type of ball fell into his hand, extruded by the thick suit surrounding him.

  This one had a solid, hefty feel to it, and had a compact core of metal dust composed of millions of nanobots that Raphaela had filtered out of him over the months he had been in stasis. All it would take was exposure to the warmth and moisture of a living thing to activate them.

  She had been unable to reprogram them in any way – there was simply no facility or technology available to work with the microscopic machines – so it was really a gamble what effect they would have. Nothing? Perhaps. But they were programmed to heal and augment human physiology. It
was a crap shoot what they would do to Meme cells.

  Skull hesitated holding the nano-ball. What if it helped heal the ship? He might be helping their enemies. But Rapaela had assured him that at the very least it would not be beneficial, based on her own experiments with pieces of her ship. She’d said there was an outside chance that, if its replication got going, it could cripple the whole thing.

  -49-

  Despite being strung out from the change of parameters, the Orion’s two hundred missiles detonated with admirable regularity, carefully timed to minimize the chance of nuclear fratricide, which was the effect of too-close warheads consuming each other as they detonated.

  These explosions occurred on the sides of the rock as seen from the Orion, set to slap the backside of the asteroid as they crossed its equator at high speed. Unfortunately very little of the blast effect reached its dark side, as the speed of the missiles receding actually exceeded the speed of the physical shockwave. Orion’s main hope with this salvo lay in the hard radiation and EMP that the two hundred warheads poured into the frigate from a range of mere football fields. If the enemy ship had a lot of biotechnology aboard, the theory went, then pumping it full of radiation might damage it badly.

  “Results?” Absen asked.

  “More debris, sir.” Scoggins at Sensors changed the view, moving the schematic to a secondary screen, then zoomed in on the asteroid and its surrounding space. They could still see nothing but a misshapen and pummeled rock floating in space. “Do you think we got it, sir?” she asked.

  “Let’s hope we did, and act like we didn’t.”

  “Permission to go active?” asked Scoggins on Sensors.

  Absen chewed the inside of his lip. “Not yet. They still may not have spotted us. How far are we out?”

  Okuda responded, “Four minutes, passing eighteen thousand klicks, sir. Deceleration can commence any time. The sooner we do it, the gentler the Gs but the longer it will take.”

  “As soon as we do, they’ll see us anyway. All right, Scoggins, at twelve thousand go active on all sensors. How much time will you need for a scan?”

  “At least fifteen seconds, sir.”

  “All right. Ping for twenty seconds, then secure the radars, call it out. Helm, as soon as that’s done you may start your deceleration.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Okuda responded as Scoggins initiated the Orion’s powerful phased-array radars that until now had sat idle.

  Helm reached for his controls, hands poised.

  A shrill alarm cut through the calm. “Conn: Sensors, I have bogeys. Four maneuvering tracks.” The main screen jumped to show a nose-on schematic with flashing yellow icons depicting the contacts, set in a rough square about five kilometers from the sides of the asteroid.

  “More bogeys.” Abruptly six new icons leaped from behind the asteroid, then stabilized close to its image on the screen. A rapidly decreasing stream of figures accompanied each one. “Bogeys on intercept. Accelerating at high G, impact in nine seconds.”

  “Helm, fire the drive.”

  Okuda’s finger was already stabbing down, overriding the normal five-second count. Nuclear fire flared from the forward-facing tail of the battleship, throwing up a screen of heat, shock and radiation Absen hoped would fend off the enemy missiles. “Weapons, you are free to counter.”

  “On it, sir, computer counterfire on automatic.”

  It won’t matter, thought Absen suddenly to himself. There was no way the Arrowfish or Gatlings would be able to see or fire through the drive blasts. If the nuclear explosions did not stop them, there would be no time for the CIWS, and certainly no time for the missiles.

  Nine seconds passed with no apparent effect. “What happened to those tracks?” Absen snapped.

  “Too much EMP…scanning…sir, they flew past.” Scoggins typed frantically and a plot speared on the main screen. It showed six tracks arcing around the front of Orion like a starburst, then curving inward.

  “They dodged!” Johnstone cried as the drive fell silent.

  “Counterfire tracking. Arrowfish away.” Salvos of five antimissile missiles streaked from each of six rotary launchers, groups crawling slowly toward the six enemy missiles on the plot. By comparison the alien weapons moved like possessed hornets, looping around and lining up on the Orion to lunge toward it. “CIWS firing.” A sound like a thousand electric chainsaws filled the ship as every radar-guided Gatling that could bear spat thousands of rounds that burst into millions.

  Absen watched in horror as the six enemy missiles sidestepped the Arrowfish like halfbacks around lumbering linemen. Too fast, too fast, his mind screamed. The plot zoomed in, decreasing its scale as the weapons closed. Rivers of speckled light representing the CIWS bullet streams writhed lazily toward the things, overlapping by the dozens.

  One track winked out, drawing a cheer from the bridge, but the rest bored in, overtaking the ship, sandwiching it between themselves and the frigate, dodging the streams.

  “How fast are those things accelerating?”

  “I have nine hundred Gs, sir,” Okuda answered calmly.

  “Nine –” Absen nearly choked. “Velocity at impact?”

  “Roughly one hundred kilometers per second.”

  “Holy –” Words failed him.

  Helm touched a control and his voice rang over the PA. “Now hear this, collision alert, all hands brace and seal.”

  Sensors called, “Three, two, one –”

  The great ship rang, cried out in agony as five hypervelocity missiles no bigger than fire extinguishers punched deep into Orion.

  Each struck with the force of a small atomic bomb, lacking only its radiation. Each flattened from its sleek reverse-teardrop shape as it encountered the ferrocrystal outer layer, allowing the merely human-developed ceramic and steel sandwiches to slow it further. Even so, each tore a ten-meter-wide gap in Orion’s skin and bludgeoned dozens of meters deep into her innards, shredding decks, equipment, and people.

  The terrible impact turned the missiles’ substance into plasma as it was stripped away by friction, igniting every flammable substance along their paths, consuming oxygen, suffocating and vaporizing human beings, setting to flame even the aluminum alloys of the air conduits. Five blazing fingers reached for Orion’s heart.

  -50-

  Slapping another opening in a wall, Skull tossed the nano-ball into the room, half-occupied by some kind of pulsing hemisphere. The object struck and stuck, then melted, leaving a greyish smear of nano dust on the surface. He watched for as long as he could before the white cells started to appear. No effect. Cursing, he went back to running and planting his bio-bombs.

  Several infections later he slapped open a wall to find something new. It was a corridor, whereas before he had been wandering from room to room. This wide tube looked to run the length of the ship, and seemed to have a stable shape. Its surface was firm and solid, almost metallic instead of rubbery and organic.

  Looking to his right he saw enormous tubes lining the walls for a dozen meters, which then converged to a place where they seemed to penetrate the bulkhead. To his left, the tubes thinned and then disappeared, and more corridors led off in several directions from up there. He went left.

  -51-

  “Report!” roared Captain Absen as red lights flared on the bridge officers’ boards and the CCC rocked nauseatingly on its gimbals.

  “I –”

  “There’s –”

  The ship’s drive lit again as Okuda maneuvered, initiating deceleration. Sound and waves of kinetic energy from the drive bombs competed with klaxons and the screams of the dying as he fought to slow the ship before it flashed uselessly past the asteroid. It was clear to all that they could not compete with the enemy in a battle of maneuver. Orion was the Zeppelin, the enemy the fighter plane.

  The Master Helmsman knew they had only one chance. They must close and bring their armament to bear on the enemy at point-blank range, where maneuver would mean nothing. No matter what the cost,
he knew that he had to get the ship to within a thousand kilometers, preferably a hundred or even ten. One blast, one salvo, one punch was all they might have.

  Okuda angled the drive bombs, throwing them out slightly off center, causing Orion to drift and angle herself in toward the asteroid as she slowed. He varied the deceleration, leaving gaps of seconds in hopes that the radar beams could punch through the EMP interference of the drive bombs. The phased array radars were hardened, and mounted near the front of the ship, but even so he knew Sensors was struggling. The computer-generated synthetic plot on the main screen jumped and twitched as it received sporadic updates, interpolating knowns and unknowns.

  Absen clamped his jaw tight, feeling the inertial forces build as the bombs exploded. His G-suit inflated, forcing blood to his brain, and he wondered again whether he should have given himself the Eden shot. No matter what everyone said, he still didn’t trust it. What a hypocrite you are, he told himself. You made the normals in the crew all take it yesterday, with no problems whatsoever, excepting only the senior officers. But for them it’s too important to risk some kind of reaction, or interaction, with the ship’s nano-carrying population. That’s what he told himself.

  Greying out, he cursed his cowardice. I should have done it already.

  Coming to, he heard his crew snapping orders without pause. Because they were all either Edens or nano carriers, and of course Okuda was connected with his machines via cybernetic implants, they continued to function where he had become nearly superfluous. Absen snarled to himself and made a decision he should have long ago.

  Reaching into his suit’s cargo pocket, he pulled out an Eden auto-injector. Removing the cap and revealing the needle, he unsealed his left cuff and stabbed at the exposed skin. Holding it there for the standard five seconds, he felt nothing worse than the pain of the horse-sized syringe. I sure hope that was the right thing to do. Thus committed, he put the empty vial away and focused his mind on the situation.