Ah, the glory of it, Yort thought. All we have to do is be bold enough to seize it.
Chapter 34
As he stood on his palace’s balcony looking at the view, Spectre reviewed what he had learned since returning to Earth.
In 2110, when most of Earth’s population had been wiped out by the impact of the two Destroyers, nearly all of the Earthbound heavy industry and agriculture had gone with it, leaving a few locations where the howling winds and thousand-foot tsunamis did not reach. But even with a few cities intact, the Meme who took form as Blends had retooled what they seized. Farm machinery became the height of technology on the ground as staving off famine and then breeding more human underlings became the priority.
Each of sixty-four new Blends became overlords, calling themselves kings or pharaohs or presidents, dividing the spoils among them. Purelings imposed ruthless order, enslaving or killing all they found. For a time, humans were hunted and caged, then bought and sold for their labor, their skills, and the use of their bodies.
Over the next fifty years, human society was remade and reinvigorated, if not restored to what it once was. Survivors endured and were forced to breed, but they remembered and they taught their children about the old days, before the Meme and the Yellows came.
If not for the Eden Plague, the first generation, the breeding stock, would have died out and solved the Blend overlords’ problems for them. But with the longevity the virus conferred, dissenters found each other and formed an insurgency, carefully salvaging what technology they could as they recruited for the eventual day of liberation.
The Blend overlords had children, expanding their oligarchy beyond its members’ easy recognition. Rae and her two surviving children were able to walk among them, or take off the yellow and pass as ordinary humans slaving for the benefit of those above them. A poor Londoner of the nineteenth century or a Russian, North Korean or Chinese worker of the middle twentieth would have felt right at home in one of these feudal-industrial states.
This was the world Spectre had inherited. He’d spent an inordinate amount of effort over the past two months bringing the mishmash of the Blend’s police and military forces to heel, executing at least a fifth of them outright. Once EarthFleet replaced the loyalist orbital defense forces, liberal use of laser bombardment convinced the holdouts their former masters had abandoned them.
The rest the Skulls took care of, mercilessly.
Using the hardcore insurgents as his political cadre, Spectre conducted a terrifying purge, mitigated only by the ability to subject subjects to biological interrogation to confirm their change of loyalty. Without that, he would have ordered killed anyone he was not certain of.
Not surprisingly the lowest classes, the powerless slaves who toiled on the farms and in the factories, were overjoyed at their newfound freedom. They were not quite as happy to learn that they had all been drafted into EarthFleet as militia, but those born after the Third Holocaust had not yet broken the habit of obedience to those who wore the yellow, and so, in less than two months, Earth was once again militarized.
More and more of the children of the original Meme Blends had joined Spectre, multiplying his abilities enormously. Once he had thoroughly ransacked their minds to ensure their sincerity, he put them to work doing the same to others. Eventually he was confident all remaining Blends at least grudgingly accepted his rule.
The others, he executed. He had no time for rehabilitation. The enemy could appear at any moment.
Now Spectre gazed out over what had been Gilgamesh’s palace perched at the highest point of the Protectorate of Shepparton, pleased at the buzz of hundreds of people coming and going below him. The city’s self-titled Lord Mayor had ruled it with a bit more wisdom and benevolence than the average Blend, and had developed it into the largest metropolis in Australia with over one million people. Shepparton had been spared the worst effects of the worldwide cataclysm due to its inland position.
Spectre had taken it for his own, making it his world capital, nerve center of his operations, connected to the other sixty-four former dictatorships by liberal use of satellite communications. Now, Earth had one government again, under martial law.
Still, he shook his head in disgust at how little he had accomplished. In many ways he felt like he was back in one of the Central American countries as a Green Beret, trying to turn barefooted peasants into insurgents against their anti-American regimes or drug cartels. As then, he could call on a limited set of high-tech resources, air and space assets to leverage what he had, but he didn’t have enough of the basics: assault rifles, grenades, rocket launchers, much less lasers or EarthFleet-style pulse guns. Even the PVNs on Ceres had limits. And few of Earth’s downtrodden workers had ever even considered picking up a weapon. They had to be taught a new mindset.
One man’s propaganda is another’s inspirational theme.
Chapter 35
Now came the moment. The dream-maker’s pulsing wave diminished to nothing, and for just a moment null space tugged at Yort’s psyche before the mothership slammed into the gravity limit of the target star, emerging from the inside.
If Yort were describing the procedure in layman’s terms, he would tell a young Archon that the ship within null space tunneled between the stars beneath space, as if it was a worm digging through the dirt. In this way a mothership bypassed the distance between. Therefore, when it surfaced, it did not arrive traveling inward toward the star from any combination of three dimensions, but rather outward, from the direction of another dimension entirely, as if surfacing into normal space, at speed, away.
This process must, however, be accomplished within a gravity well of sufficient power, which meant something with the mass of a star. At the same time, an arriving ship must not exit null space so close to the massive body that it was ripped apart by tidal forces, or blasted by a pulsar’s spinning beam, or irradiated by a black hole’s ravening polar jet…or simply burned up by a star’s corona.
The solution to this dilemma, worked out by the Race’s greatest physicists, was to exit as energetically as possible, like an underwater missile bursting from the sea. That way, even as the gravitic limit collapsed the wormhole field and ejected the ship into normal space, it was already moving away from the star.
Yort’s dreams softened as his ship and its fellows emerged from null space.
Automated systems, recovering their abilities more quickly than living things, engaged reaction engines and accelerated twelve motherships away from the hot yellow sun, a starburst radiating outward along the equator of the spinning ball of fusion. Unfortunately it was not possible to coordinate their random departure points, though they always appeared along the plane of the stellar ecliptic, its equator.
The motherships’ computers immediately launched spy drones, which began to gather data about the star system and feed it back to the ships’ cybernetic brains even as they spread out and formed a web of communication. When the machines’ masters fully awoke, they would already have vital information at their claw-tips.
Chapter 36
Aboard Conquest a bridge console alarm sounded, beeping insistently. Lieutenant Fletcher at Sensors brought the alert up and said, “The physics lab reports their instruments are going nuts, Skipper. They say to expect incursion in about sixteen minutes.”
Captain Scoggins swore without heat as her heart suddenly pounded with adrenaline. “General Quarters, Battle Stations. No drill, people: this is the real show. Tell Weapons Control to wake up the SLAMs.” The finicky spaceship-sized missiles floating nearby took several minutes to bring to firing state.
At least we have sixteen minutes of warning. I hope it’s enough, Scoggins thought.
Soon, Conquest’s prime watch hustled in to begin pulling on their suits and strapping into their seats. Scoggins held off on telling everyone to link in. There was little her admiral hated more than stepping onto a bridge full of closed crash cocoons…but she fully expected this battle to be fought from VR spa
ce. The margins were simply too close to give up any potential advantage, no matter the effect on crew brains and nervous systems.
The dead cared nothing about VR syndrome.
Admiral Absen slipped in and sat down at the flag station. “COB,” he said to Timmons as he accepted a battered mug of hot coffee, “how is it my stateroom is a hundred meters closer than yours and yet you always beat me to the bridge?”
“Secret, sir. Master Chiefs only.”
Absen grunted and began pulling on his suit. Once he’d finished and sipped more coffee, Scoggins swiveled around to face the admiral. “Eleven minutes remaining, sir. The SLAMs are hot. All sections report ready. Automated notifications have been sent. Suggest we go to VR at your convenience, sir.”
Absen rubbed his jaw and stared at the holotank. “I hate VR,” he muttered, and then took one last gulp of lifer-juice. “All right,” he said with an air of resignation. “Let’s plug in.”
“All command and staff personnel, link up and cocoon,” Scoggins ordered, reaching for her own plugs. Every now and again someone proposed making the links wireless, but the purity and reliability of the hard lines always won out.
VR space washed over Scoggins as the cocoon closed over her, replacing her view of the bridge with a similar but harder-edged simulation of the same. Now she seemed to sit comfortably in the Chair again, and so did the rest of the watch crew. The virtuality was designed to mimic reality as closely as possible in order to minimize cognitive disruption. Unlike specialists such as helmsmen and pilots, she didn’t live a third of her life in VR, balanced between addiction and the drugs that fought it.
The captain ran through status reports for the entire ship, and then turned to Absen. “Battle speech, sir?”
Absen waved her off. “Mine went out prerecorded to the fleet and the rest of the system, Captain. Conquest is yours now.”
Swelling with pride, Scoggins smiled. “Thank you, sir. I’ll try to keep her in one piece.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
Scoggins cleared her throat – or felt like she did. It was so easy to forget about VR. “All hands, this is Captain Scoggins. We’re just moments from what might be the greatest battle EarthFleet has ever faced. For you veterans who know what it’s going to be like, I say: be the professionals you are, and we will prevail. For you who’ve never seen combat, focus on your jobs, listen to your leaders, and do your best. For you of faith, pray. If not, take heart and have faith in each other, in your brothers and sisters in arms.” Then she took a slow, deliberate breath. “Now let’s go kick some ass.”
Johnstone pointed at his ear. “The crew’s cheering you, Captain.”
“Good speech, Melissa,” Absen said, standing up and clapping her on the shoulder. “Better than mine, actually.”
“Thank you, sir. Worked on it a lot.”
The admiral walked over to stand before the holotank. “One good thing about VR is I don’t have to worry about being knocked around the bridge.” He stood looking over the display as time ticked away, the officers around him murmuring clipped commands and reports.
Abruptly the holotank blazed with new icons.
“Contacts…twelve contacts, twenty-one million klicks from Sol,” Fletcher reported. “On the plane of the ecliptic, as expected.”
In the holotank, the Sun occupied the center with a muted blaze. Now, twelve icons showed in a ragged ring twenty-one million kilometers out from its surface, inside the smooth Jericho Line orbiting at twenty-two million kilometers.
“Ford, target eight motherships with the SLAMs, the ones nearest Earth,” Absen said, reaching his hand into the display to point. “Conquest, launch them as soon as you have firing solutions of sufficient confidence.”
Conquest’s voice spoke after a slight delay. “SLAMs away.”
The holotank display plotted tiny lines that crawled toward the eight target icons more than ninety light-seconds away, the hypotenuse of the right triangle defined by Conquest’s position, the location of its targets, and Sol. Scoggins hoped, as she knew they all did, that the eight motherships would continue along their plotted paths. The Meme intel on the Scourges said they were sluggish during the first several minutes after appearance, with only automated systems coming on line.
“All sensors up and open. Plot a min-range intercept course for the next nearest mothership not targeted by a SLAM,” Scoggins ordered. “Ready one Exploder in the forward launcher, one in the magazine.” If they were lucky, the antimatter weapon would catch the first ship’s swarm before it spread far from its lattice. “Set two secondary targets and initiate the firing run.”
Conquest would be in pulse before the SLAMs reached their targets. Scoggins would just have to hope they hit some of the motherships, and Conquest would deal with the rest. The main question was whether they could get the swarms before they cleared their motherships.
“Firing run set. Pulse in three, two, one, mark.” Okuda’s call had hardly faded in their ears when he said, “Dropping pulse, mark.” Within the relativistic TacDrive field, distances seemed short.
The forward optical screens jumped and then stabilized, the holotank not far behind as it updated, both more smoothly in VR than they would have in realspace. On the displays, expanded for clarity and overlaid with targeting graphics, hung their first glimpse of a gigantic enemy vessel, at twenty kilometers across more of a ponderously mobile base than a ship. Scoggins heard several expressions of shock and surprise before the far more critical firing reports.
This one was waking up, that much was clear. Uncounted small craft, tiny at this distance and scale, spread from the thing’s surface like organized clouds of gnats. Notations appeared as the AI processed the inputs, labeling groups as assault boats. Fighters and gunboats would follow. A rough total of the numbers visible topped four hundred thousand individual craft, almost half. Fortunately they were streaming in the other direction.
“Exploder and decoy missiles away,” Conquest said. Reluctantly, Ford had relinquished deployment of the antimatter weapons to the AI. Precision was just too critical, and even with link and targeting computers, the weapons officer couldn’t be quite as accurate and certain.
“Pulse, mark,” Okuda said immediately, and reality shuddered once more. “Dropping, mark.”
“Waiting to load the next Exploder…” Ford said as soon as they debouched from the TacDrive field.
Scoggins fretted as the antimatter missile levitated up the thousand-meter track from Conquest’s central magazine to the launcher in her nose, but as delicate as the weapon’s magnetic bottles were, rushing the shot was not an option. I should have prepped the Exploder before the pulse, not afterward, she thought. She used the pause to slow her own time sense and examine the next mothership that lay off the port bow.
Okuda had been careful to arrive five thousand kilometers behind the enemy, away from Earth where its swarm was headed. Still, for the first time, academic knowledge began to turn visceral, and a knot of fear grew in her gut as she stared at the numbers on their way to the planet. So many…and each assault boat with a thousand critters aboard, all wanting to eat us.
“SLAM hit. Another!” Fletcher at her old Sensors station suddenly crowed. “The SLAMs are working!” Light from the first two strikes must have just reached Conquest, and Scoggins fervently hoped the other six would connect as well.
Cheers of relief broke out on the bridge with the knowledge that the enemy force had just been reduced by one sixth, sparing the defenders while slaughtering over two billion of the bugs. Scoggins felt no remorse. As far as she could tell, these Scourges had no redeeming qualities whatsoever, making the Meme look positively benign by comparison.
“Mister Ford, where’s that Exploder?” Scoggins snapped.
Chapter 37
Yort’s mind still labored under the lingering influence of null space confusion when his mothership’s sensors shone alarms into his eyes. Exquisitely detailed holographic plots showed a scene of horror with mach
ine precision, even more sickening because of their painful realism using data relayed from his many spy drones.
Of the twelve motherships, eight of them had vanished. In their places he saw balls of expanding plasma and sprays of wreckage. “Emergency power; evasive maneuvers,” Yort blasted through every photo-emitter on his body, his words slurred with residual lethargy. “Begin immediate deployment.” Machines on the bridge echoed the order to his subjects.
“But Archon Third, we have no targets,” blinked one of his officers. “The lower orders will be confused and some will head for the star.”
“Then ensure they do not!” Yort ordered. “Send them outward while I determine what disaster has befallen our motherships.” Playing his digits over the controls himself, he ran the record back to the time of their appearance, and then quickly located the moment when the massive swarm-carriers exploded. First they existed, and then long moments later they exploded, so suddenly that only light-based weapon strikes seemed likely. The direction the wreckage sprayed provided him with a vector, and within seconds he plotted the position the unknown weapon must have fired from, a significant distance above one pole of the star.
Somehow, the infestation had expected them, had waited at a place that allowed them to see all possible exit points, and fire on them. But even light-based weapons took time to reach them, and so as long as his mothership continued to evade, he should be safe from the hideous death ray.
Unfortunately the blazing radiation of the star eliminated any hope of his sensors detecting the exact nature of the enemy. It must be a supermassive fortress to employ such a weapon, a veritable planetoid.
Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) Page 16
