“My Lord,” Cleopatra purred, “I am no general, but I have read many of humanity’s books. Isn’t it more difficult to invade across the seas than to defend? Why not hold the continents we have at our borders while EarthFleet builds ships? The Scourge can be wiped out from space and then we repopulate what we lost later.”
“Yes…that was one of my many contingency plans,” Spectre said, giving the woman her due. “But we are being presented with an opportunity too good to pass up. Besides, if we wait too long, the seven enemy nests even now being built will cause problems. Even now, fertilized Archons are burrowing into the ground and laying eggs, while Soldiers gather food for the hatching infants. In two weeks, the enemy’s numbers may double, and then double again. We cannot wait.”
“My lord,” Alexander said, “Conquest is already hunting the nests. We need have little fear on that score.”
“Are you certain?” Spectre asked. “How do you know the seven nests are all they have? Perhaps they are cleverer than we presume. In any case, my point holds. All forces are ordered to wait and prepare to assault onto the Asia-Europe supercontinent, no less than forty-eight and no more than seventy-two hours from now.”
“You’re talking all around your plan, but you are withholding some key detail,” Cleopatra complained. “You are playing with us, my lord, like cats with yarn.”
“An apt metaphor. Usually you’re the cat, but today you’re the yarn.” Spectre held up a hand. “I’m indulging myself, I admit. Let me explain what we must do.” He turned to the holotank and called up a stored intelligence briefing authored by one Commander Ronald Fleede.
Once he’d outlined the proper courses of action and reviewed Alexander’s deployment of forces onto Asia-Europe in order to crush the Scourges there, Spectre spoke with Admiral Absen once again and told Gilgamesh to oversee the minions in their duties.
Now that victory seemed inevitable, he decided to indulge himself in something he had been contemplating ever since he’d arrived on Earth. Spectre sent one of the Skulls to find Major Naomi Alkina and bring her to his private terrace.
Yes, he told himself. A great-great-grandniece is a distant enough relation not to offend the populace when I take her as a lover, perhaps a bride.
Not that a little thing like public opinion would have stopped him anyway.
Chapter 57
Bull concentrated on his HUD as he descended, telling himself that the technology was sound and there was nothing to worry about. The screen inside his faceplate showed over 2600 EarthFleet Marines free-falling into atmosphere, each strapped into an automated parachute rig made to slow the wearer and eventually set him down softly on the ground. Three days of drop training hadn’t been enough to really convince his brain he would be fine.
At least atmospheric heat and friction wasn’t an issue. Conquest had briefly stopped in her orbit and hovered on her massive fusion engines while the Marines lined up and leaped out of auxiliary ports well away from the hot exhaust. Several pinnaces and a few sleds followed them down with supplies and Recluse drones.
The drop wasn’t intended as a hard insertion: it was simply the only way to put the brigade down intact, as most of the sleds had been lost during the mothership assault.
They would land near New Delhi in what once was India. Over the last three days, Conquest and its auxiliaries had used their superior position to systematically exterminate most of the enemy fighters and gunships in that area. With the arrival of the interplanetary tankers, the dreadnought had enough fuel to slow orbit and descend, flying by brute force on fusion engines to engage near-helpless targets below them at a range of less than one hundred kilometers, point blank for Conquest’s massive weapons.
Extensive bombardment from orbit of the Marine landing zone had destroyed all the grounded Scourge craft, the only other source of enemy heavy weapons. With a wing of StormCrows for cover, Bull’s command was probably one of the safest “opposed” landings in Marine history. The only danger was on touchdown – the millions of Scourgelings and thousands of Soldiers that infested the countryside.
As Bull flew his ram-air parachute inexorably downward, he unlimbered his pulse gun and passed his last instructions to his commanders. As he landed, a Soldier popped out of a foxhole and fired its assault cannon, slamming slugs into Bull’s chest and knocking him over. Lucky he didn’t have something heavier, Bull thought as he fell backward and rolled, trying to stay low. For a moment he got tangled in his parachute. When he cut loose and came to his knees to fire, he saw the enemy slaughtered by several nearby Marines.
“Good job, diggers. Get organized and start the bug hunt, now. Hustle! Exterminate everything in your area with minimum ammo, one shot per as briefed,” he ordered.
“Bull, this is Reaper,” Command Sergeant Major Repeth radioed. “Did you ever think we’d be walking into this like cake?”
“No. Thought we’d be fighting for our lives, but we still might be if we don’t move fast.” He jogged toward the nearest pinnace, firing a single shot into each Scourgeling cocoon he came across. “We only have two days.”
The cocoons were everywhere, some in clumps, some just scattered here and there. Bull knew that all across Asia and Europe Earth’s ground forces were on the offensive and were winning handily. Like Reap had said, a cakewalk. Instead of a Marine, he felt like an exterminator, though the occasional Soldier kept the troops on their toes. “Conserve ammo,” he reminded everyone. Even if they killed one Scourgeling with every round, the Marine brigade would only get rid of two or three million of them, out of an estimated eight hundred million now on Earth.
Instead of shooting it immediately, Bull put his armored foot on the next cocoon he found and tried to crush it. The tough resin didn’t budge. He would probably have to use his jump jets to leap upward and come down hard on it.
Not worth the trouble. Ryss hotblades might have been an efficient solution. Now would be a good time to have a brigade of the big cats. Instead of worrying about what he couldn’t have, Bull just rested his elbows on his raised knee and thought for a moment about how easy it had turned out to be.
The admiral always amazed him with his insights. He’d spotted what everyone else seemed to have missed in the mad scramble to repel the invasion and seize the FTL tech: that one innocuous mention in Commander Fleede’s briefing about the Scourge life cycle. “As soon as a Scourgeling eats enough, it will go into a cocoon for several days…” the geek had said. Bull remembered only because the admiral had played it back for them when he finally explained the whole thing.
Ninety-nine percent of the Scourgelings had simply eaten themselves into one common coma. Driven by biology and without the distraction of a fight, they had gorged themselves on Earth’s plant and animal life and then cocooned themselves for their next stage. If left alone, they would emerge within days as Soldiers, much more dangerous opponents.
But they weren’t going to be left alone.
Many of the existing Soldiers had cocooned as well, perhaps half of them giving in to the urge to metamorphose into Centurions.
Now, all across the supercontinent, humanity was on the hunt and their enemy was helpless. Bull was reminded of a documentary he had seen of North Africans swatting clouds of locusts, killing thousands but hardly making a dent in the millions that overran and ate every piece of plant life in sight. Now the humans had the upper hand. Probably every teenager on the planet that could carry a gun was out in the fields, making a game of tallying up his kills and hopefully not shooting his buddies.
On his HUD, Bull watched as his Marines moved in extended firing lines as if policing a parade ground for cigarette butts and trash before an important ceremony. Recluses equipped with sensors followed, now and again finding a cocoon the mass of troops had missed.
Bull was less concerned about the formation of the brigade than its ammo supply. The pulse guns Marines carried were actually overpowered for exterminating cocoons. An interim solution occurred to him. He opened the genera
l brigade channel.
“First Brigade, this is Bull. For those formations with Recluses sweeping behind, I want you to only kill half the cocoons you find. Let the Recluses pick off the rest with their lasers. This will conserve your ammo.” Sure, it would run the Recluses out of juice faster, but it was easier to recharge a battle drone off a pinnace or sled than to come up with pulse gun ammo. Too bad they only had a few laser rifles available. Equipping five thousand new Marines had forced some corner cutting.
“Bull,” Reaper commed, “I got locals here on the edge of the city – they just popped out of some tunnels. They’re lucky they didn’t get shot.”
“Yeah, so?”
“They’re armed, and want to be put to work.”
“By all means, Sergeant Major,” Bull replied. “I’d rather expend their ammo than ours. In fact, let them and the Recluses do the cocoon-killing and our people will guard against Soldiers. And watch your backgrounds! Don’t let our diggers get too froggy. This is ripe ground for fratricide.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Bull sighed with contentment. Only a stupid young line doggie wanted a fair fight. Older grunts like him were happy to take easy victories when they presented themselves. Those were few and far between.
Hard battles would turn up soon enough.
Even though they had beaten the Scourge this time, Bull knew that with the FTL technology, eventually EarthFleet would have to take the fight to the enemy.
When we do, I’ll be there.
Epilogue
Three weeks later.
Admiral Absen sat comfortably sipping Mars-brewed whiskey in his expanded office aboard Conquest. Timmons had acquired some through the Chief’s network to replace the Scotch that had finally run out. Now if only he could get some decent smokes.
The more things change, the more they stay the same was the quote that ran through his mind. Here he was in charge of EarthFleet again, guarding the poor suffering planet against the threat of invasion. Still, things seemed much brighter now that he had Rae by his side. He still wasn’t one hundred percent sure her attraction to him wasn’t partly political, but at this point he didn’t want to spoil a good thing by thinking too deeply about it.
Another difference this time around: no more dealing with a slow-moving bureaucracy. Spectre was the government now, and when he wanted something to happen, it happened. Absen didn’t see how that was going to change unless the Blend stepped down voluntarily. With the Skulls and other Blends serving him, no one was likely to challenge him for some time to come – and Absen wasn’t at all sure he’d want anyone else to take over. Better the devil you know… Besides, anyone with a mind to rebel against authority had already joined the resistance movement and then become the new government.
Absen sighed. Earth’s governance wasn’t his main problem. His problem was getting the orbital industries working and the space-based economy on track. He was short of skilled workers and almost every sort of machine, though he could get simple laborers from the planet and train them himself. Plenty of people were out of jobs with all the damage the Scourges did to the ecosystem.
Somehow he had to cobble together sufficient defenses to repel another Scourge invasion, and he had no idea when that would show up. Probably not for months, but beyond that, who knew? For just a few weeks, from the time he left Gliese 370 until he learned about the Scourge, he’d felt like he was ahead of the game. Now he was playing catch-up again.
Fortunately the Meme had decided to stick around. Absen laughed to himself. What a change in his thinking! He’d fought them for a century. In fact, most of his adult life was defined by fighting Meme, and now he desperately needed their firepower and their ability to grow and reproduce their ships.
Rae had explained to him that their SystemLord was probably staying because of his title and position. If he went elsewhere, he would have to take a demotion. By remaining in Earth’s system, he would automatically take forces under his command as they arrived as long as they did not outrank him. Assuming the Meme kept their bargain, that was all to the good.
In the rock-paper-scissors situation they had now, Conquest and the technology she used could beat the Meme quite handily – but Destroyers were more efficient swarm killers with their huge short-ranged fusors, especially so when they acted as squadrons to cover each other.
That reminded the admiral of something to put on the long wish list: a study on how to optimize weaponry and tactics against the Scourge. Perhaps a squadron-integrated point defense network…but that would have to come after the upgraded SLAMs and the permanent fortress that would sit above the Sun’s pole ready to fire them. The best defense against FTL emergence was to hit the enemy prior to coming out of null space confusion, destroying the motherships whole, before the swarms launched.
Defensive problems were interesting , but Absen’s mind really raced when thinking about how EarthFleet would employ their own FTL drive. The old Ryss physicist Plessk still had a few good years in him depending on how much medical care the cat would accept, and his team had assured the admiral that they could build a working FTL drive within a year or two. They even had some ideas on how to use the effect to communicate faster than light.
With FTL came a whole new ball game. Humanity could send probes to other stars and get intelligence within weeks rather than decades – establish outposts, military bases and colonies.
Take the fight to the enemy.
If the treaty held, maybe humans and Meme could get along well enough to establish some kind of confederation, a new order where all species could help defend each other from threats like the Scourge and share as equals in the wealth of the galaxy. That might be the real, permanent result of all the death and tragedy.
If so, then maybe it was all worth it.
THE END of Conquest of Earth
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Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) Page 25
