The Orion Plague

by David VanDyke

  Looking back over his shoulder he saw his escape route sealed by white cells. Running awkwardly to the right in the unexpected gravity, he hurried toward the back of the control center away from the Meme and his bomb. Pseudopods reached for him as he slapped frantically at the wall. Somewhere he had dropped the metal bar, and so he rolled a pair of balls into his hands, one bio and one nano, and tossed them at the goo as a hole opened behind him.

  Skull threw himself backward just as the explosive charge detonated, launching him into the next room like a shell from a mortar tube. He would have been fine in the suit, had not a new force like the hand of a demented demon suddenly picked him up and slammed him backward. He felt his bones break, and then he felt no more.

  -55-

  Ford at Weapons stabbed at a key several times, the heavy pogoing making him miss twice. “Firing on automatic.”

  Beams blazed out and Behemoth railguns threw tons of steel shot in the seven seconds it took for the enemy frigate to charge toward Orion. Desperately Okuda struggled to keep the ship’s tail pointed toward the alien ship in controlled but all-too-justified fear of whatever it would launch at them. He had no choice but to ignore the missiles incoming from four other directions.

  On the screen the enemy frigate wobbled, then began to tumble as its drive winked out. Flashes of coherent light blazed off its length as it rotated end for end. Thrusters flared in spots, slowing its spin, but it was clear to Absen that the alien ship was not entirely under its own control. We must have hit it someplace vital, he thought. He felt the railguns continuing to fire.

  “Incoming!” The enemy missiles screamed in, accelerating at nine hundred gravities. They struck Orion at much lower velocity than the earlier five, only about twenty-five kilometers per second, but they appeared to be much better targeted. Each approached from a different angle, easily avoiding the bomb drive, and with incredible precision each slammed through a narrow railgun port. They tore swaths through Orion and only stopped when they struck the opposite side armor.

  More casualty and damage reports flowed across the secondary bridge screens, and more red icons flared on the control boards of its officers. While the first five enemy missiles had been spears driven through Orion’s breastplate, these were arrows fired into the gaps in her armor. Captain Absen watched the readouts with horror, then pushed them from his mind in the age-old way of the warrior. Be sick later, grieve for the dead later. For now just fight and win.

  “Salvoing!” called Ford, launching another score of missiles. “Hits from the railguns.” Screens confirmed his report as parts of the enemy’s snow-colored skin turned spotty with steel balls impacting at ten thousand meters per second. Numbers on the range readout fell to below twenty, then below ten kilometers with the enemy’s headlong spinning plunge toward them.

  “Keep hammering him!” Absen yelled into the intercom, a pointless exhortation as the computers were running the show now. He noticed Johnstone with that link wire plugged into his board, and he wondered what the cybernetic Comms specialist was doing. Whatever it was, at least he wasn’t getting in the way.

  -56-

  “This situation is impossible!” Commander blasted communication molecules in all directions, echoing off the walls. “The asteroid is destroyed, we have infections in the ship, we cannot control our observers, our drive is damaged and unsafe to use, and the human weapons injure the ship faster than it can heal.”

  “Sir, we must initiate escape protocol.” Executive keyed in the sequence without confirmation.

  “Agreed,” Commander said swiftly. “Set the ship on automatic to maneuver for maximum damage to the enemy. I will enter the life-probe first, then Biologist, then you, Executive.”

  “Confirmed.” Executive frantically issued instructions to the semi-intelligent ship, so that in its absence it would sacrifice itself to maximum effect.

  Commander touched a control, then forced his mind-molecules to bind closely together in a compact mass, which flowed to the bottom of its pool. From there it oozed through a short pipe, abandoning most of its protoplasmic body, to dump itself into the tiny life-probe.

  Biologist was next to join Commander.

  Just as Executive concentrated his mind at the bottom of his pool, a creature came in – an alien of some sort, horrifying in its form – and threw an object. It did not stay to find out just what sort of thing the object was, but hurried down the short tube to cram itself into the life probe, thence to launch.

  -57-

  Inside the bizarre world of virtual space Rick fought his own battle with the enemy telemetry link. He and the piece of the KimPark not needed for weapons control had been grinding away at the hexadecimal encryption, adding his own intuition and expertise to the raw power of the supercomputer. Then, thirty-six seconds ago, that telemetry had changed. From a relatively small number of data packets, suddenly it had ramped up to a thousand times as many, all transmitted from the frigate to the four recon drones.

  Immediately, the drones had launched missiles, clearly commanded by the mother frigate. With a flash of insight he knew the enemy frigate was wounded, perhaps damaged by the pounding it had received in the surprise attack, and was now reaching for every weapon at its disposal in a desperate bid to survive. The drones might have more missiles, or they might simply turn themselves into much larger missiles. If the aliens’ biotechnology was as advanced as the intel team thought, it was entirely possible that their ship could heal itself if given enough time.

  Reaching out with his cyber-senses, he seized half of Orion’s powerful phased-array radars normally under the control of the Sensors board, and poured power into them. Focusing the electromagnetics on the four drones, he threw an avalanche of their own encrypted signals at them: recorded, chopped up and remixed, amplified hundreds of times. In simple terms he yelled at the drones louder than the frigate could, using its own recorded, garbled and boosted voice, and kept yelling.

  The drones responded by scattering jerkily in all directions, leaving their quadrilateral stations, thrusting randomly. No one but he noticed this as the rest of Orion’s crew had their hands full dealing with the frigate’s lunge for the Earth ship.

  Rick kept the radars locked on the drones, jamming the alien signal, deafening them out of the fight. He felt the frigate change its signals, hop and skip frequencies, and boost its signal strength. Unknown and unsung, he grimly fought his electric battle, countering each move of the aliens with human intuition, cybernetic clarity and supercomputer speed.

  Back in the jungle of the real, the bridge crew saw the alien frigate stabilize itself suddenly with its fusion thrusters, then spit a missile from its flank. But instead of turning toward Orion to attack, the thing accelerated at hundreds of gravities, shooting toward deep space. The crew had no time to wonder about it now as, less than one kilometer away, the alien frigate played its trump card.

  It swapped end for end even as the Orion’s beams, guns and missiles converged on it, pummeling it. The motion, though jerky and imprecise, lined up its fatter rear end on the battleship.

  Its drive end.

  One last time it fired, in fact overloaded, that perfect fusion engine, now hopelessly damaged by shock and sleeting hard radiation and the impact of thousands of hard-driven low-tech projectiles. Magnetic fields that once elegantly controlled the perfect conversion of matter into energy now stuttered and failed, but not before one last stupendous blast of starfire flared blazing, reaching orange-white for its Earth-built tormenter.

  Reacting on instinct, Master Helmsman Okuda initiated the drive without warning, throwing a bomb into the way of the belching jet of sun-hot plasma, ionized gas and naked particles, but the weapon barely detonated before it was overwhelmed by the incoming firehose of energy a hundred times as large.

  The Meme frigate came apart about a third of the way from its stern, its bow and waist flung brutally away by the shattering of its own rear piece. Like a lizard shedding its tail, the main portion of the alien s
hip had ditched its damaged drive section in hopes of living to fight another day.

  Orion’s thick hydraulic shock plate, made to withstand the heat and pressure of nuclear weapons, vaporized just slowly enough to save the life of everyone on board. The one drive bomb carved out a bubble that deflected enough of the jet of energy that much of its ravening fury expended itself along the cylindrical length of the battleship’s fuselage. Like a candle lowered into a blowtorch, Orion melted; she burned, and she howled in agony.

  All weapons, sensors and equipment on the back half of the skin of the great ship simply vanished in the wash of plasma. That gaseous jet slammed into Orion’s Belt, the external ring of box-shaped missile launchers, and ripped them away, throwing them spinning at high speed past the battleship’s nose and into space. In so doing the gas imparted enormous thrust for a moment, approaching twenty gravities.

  Orion groaned and, in places, buckled. Inside, any crew not in their maneuver couches or at least flat on the rearmost bulkhead fell and broke every bone in their bodies as the new floor rose up to smash them like flies. Most died instantly, and those who survived conscious lay in horrible pain, hoping their bodies could heal before the next blow struck.

  The plasma also found the holes in Orion’s torn skin, reaching with boiling hot fingers to sear her guts, igniting wherever they touched. Several Trident missiles blew in their tubes, propellant crumbling and exploding, gutting everything nearby. One more hybrid reactor broke, its molten salts melting steel like wax and nearby crew like pats of butter.

  The great battleship juddered and stumbled – she wailed in pain as her inhabitants were snuffed out – she fell broken to her knees.

  But she did not die.

  The enormous push threw Orion sideways, then end for end, but instead of being consumed, she found herself tumbling sickeningly through the void. Inside the bridge the harrowing rollercoaster lessened as the gimbaled stabilization system brought their relative motion under control, a tribute to its Japanese engineering. From his sunken seat in its center, Okuda frantically strained Orion’s single remaining gyro and four forward thrusters, fighting to tame the bucking vessel.

  “Sensors, report!” Captain Absen gasped. “What’s our situation?” His eyes roved the screens he could see, half of them showing gibberish, the other half hopeless confusion.

  “Trying, sir!” In fact it was almost a minute before Scoggins was able to put some coherent displays up. “It looks like the enemy is moving away at about one G, using its maneuvering thrusters.”

  “Heading where?”

  “There’s another asteroid about six hours away on their course.”

  “Right. Engineering: report.”

  “Power systems overall at twenty-eight percent, sir. One gyro remaining. Six percent of damage control parties reporting.”

  “Six percent? See what you can do. Helm?”

  Okuda recited, calm as ever, “The drive plate and shock absorbers are destroyed, sir. We have nine hundred thirty-one bombs remaining. We could use a few of them, very carefully, letting the armor take the blast, if we have to. We’d get about half a G out of them, and I’d have to go very slowly, diagnosing the system between every one. We don’t want a catastrophic failure.”

  “Understood. Weapons?”

  Ford spoke grimly. “Forty-six Tridents show operational, though some might not make it out of their tubes…all of our Grackles and SM5s are gone, stripped away in the blast. Four Arrowfish launchers and twenty-four CIWS left. One Behemoth only. And…all but one of the lasers are up, though I can’t guarantee recycling time. Depends on power.”

  “All right, people, it sounds bad, but we still have enough firepower. All we have to do is get in close and pound him to dust.” Knowing that most of the crew, those of them still alive, would have no idea what was going on, he went on, “Comms, put me on shipwide. Comms?” he looked over to Johnstone’s station, saw his head lolling inside his helmet.

  “I got it, sir,” the assistant Comms officer blurted, fiddling with his board. “Okay, sir, you’re on.”

  Absen put on his best Captain’s voice. “Now hear this, now hear this. This is Captain Absen speaking. We’ve almost won. As badly damaged as we are, the enemy is worse. Now we just have to hunt him down and finish him off. I need maximum effort from every one of you to get systems restored. There won’t be any more hard maneuvering,” he said, deliberately leaving out the details of their crippled drive system, “so good luck and get working. Absen out.”

  The assistant Comms officer leaned over to shake Rick Johnstone, but Absen said, “Leave him be, Ensign. Tune your systems for COMINT; if the intel team is still alive they need signals. Every scrap of information about the enemy might be critical.”

  Okuda spoke up. “We are stable, sir, and have three percent spin, bringing that up slowly to five.”

  “Good,” Absen concurred, “that will help people work. Weapons, are we in range of the enemy?”

  “About forty klicks, sir, but increasing. Close enough for lasers.”

  “Excellent. Fire beams at will, no kinetic weapons.” He knew that any mass thrown at the enemy would push them farther away, and with their drive every bit of acceleration was important.

  “Tridents, sir? Enemy’s still going slow enough we might hit them with a megaton warhead.”

  Absen stroked his chin. “No, we wait. Maintain firing solutions, but I’m not ready to destroy that ship yet.” He touched a control on his chair. “Absen to Combat Ops. MacAdam, you there?”

  “Here, Captain, and feeling bloody useless. Are we finally to have some work to do?” The colonel’s voice seemed composed of equal parts eagerness and bitterness.

  “Yes you are. Cry havoc, Colonel. Are your people ready?”

  “Those that are left. We’re down about a hundred.” Now it was only bitterness.

  “And there are almost two thousand crew dead, so save it. You’re about to lose some more, but we’re all expendable if that’s what it takes, Colonel.” Absen lifted his finger from the transmit key, spoke to his Master Helmsman. “Mr. Okuda, download nav data to the sleds and pinnaces. Make sure their flight paths stay out of the way of the weapons. Engineering, tell the damage control crews to concentrate on making sure the Marines can launch in ten minutes.”

  He pressed the key back down, and hit another that made the channel private to MacAdam only. “Colonel, you are go for launch in ten minutes, on the mark. The enemy frigate is limping away on thrusters only and our drive is damaged. The safe thing for me to do is blow him out of the water – space, whatever – and we all try to make it home, but we have no idea what kind of enemy ship will show up next, and we need to capture their technology to give Earth a chance. We just barely beat a ship that’s a hundredth our size, and only because we surprised them. Their next wave may be unstoppable. You understand?”

  For a long moment Absen could hear only breathing on the channel. Then he heard, “Right. By Sea, By Land…we’ll have to add ‘By Space.’ My lads and lasses will get it done, Captain.”

  And you understand, Absen did not say, if it doesn’t work I may have to nuke the enemy ship with you in it. But I’ll expend everyone aboard if it keeps Earth safe for a little while longer. “Ten minutes, then.” He clicked off and looked up at the screens, now being restored one by one. Noticing a display with four jittery flashing icons, he asked, “Status of the enemy drones?”

  “All of them are in some kind of random dodging pattern, sir,” responded Scoggins. “Must be a default setting.”

  “At least the enemy isn’t controlling them. I wonder why?”

  The assistant Comms officer spoke up. “Uh, sir…there’s still a lot of telemetry between them and the enemy, but we’re jamming it.”

  “We are?” Absen snapped, leaning forward.

  The Ensign gulped. “I mean, yes, sir, we are beaming strong coded jamming signals at each of them.”

  Scoggins at Sensors poked at keys and touchscreens. “He
’s right, sir. Comms has slaved four of my radar arrays and is hitting them with a shitstorm of electromagnetics.”

  “I’m not doing it!” protested the ensign.

  “It must be him,” Ford snarled, pointing at Johnstone slumped in his chair-couch.

  “You better be glad, sir,” the Ensign shot back at Ford, “because if he wasn’t, those drones might be shooting at us.”

  Ford choked back a reply and turned to his board. “Captain, I could lob a Trident at each drone. Their random jinks are well within blast radius of a pattern burst.”

  “No, Weapons, we’ll let Mister Johnstone keep jamming. If he can break their encryption he might be able to take control of them. We need every piece of tech we can capture, and if I have to destroy the frigate, those may be all we get.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Ford said resignedly.

  “Mister Okuda, what can we do to catch up with the enemy?”

  “The only thing that will do it is the drive, sir. Chemical thrusters aren’t enough.”

  “What about towing with the pinnaces?”

  “That was discussed in the planning…they could perhaps impart one thousandth of a G. Enough for a long slow navigation but not for tactical maneuver. In any case one of the pinnaces is damaged and cannot be launched without extensive repairs.”

  “All right, then we have to risk it. Very carefully, get us moving to catch up with them.”

  “Aye, sir. First drive bomb now.” It appeared he had it ready and waiting, as a second later they felt the push, gentle by comparison with the normal blasts. “Diagnostics running…within limits.” After five or six seconds they felt another push, slightly stronger. “Still within limits. Sir, I believe this will work, if we are careful.”

  “Fine job, Mister Okuda, but take as little risk as you can.”

  Okuda chuckled, a first for him since he had taken over. “Sure, Skipper. Because nukes are so safe.” The rest of the bridge crew laughed, a bit too loud, but suddenly the tension level dropped.