Conquest and Empire (Stellar Conquest Series Book 5)

by David VanDyke

  “Oh, yes, sir, we shall. Our tank divisions are one hammer. They will be supported by the other, our atmospheric drone wings. These are to be based in locations the analysts have deemed least likely to attract landing forces – rocky islands, deserts, areas of cold and little life. Once we see how the ground battle progresses, we will apply close air support as necessary to annihilate the enemy.”

  “And our aerospace fighter wings – the StormRavens?”

  General Bahadur turned to Lieutenant Commander Dychauk, who said, “Sir, those are a Fleet asset and will operate within the Earth-Moon system with the goal of destroying as many craft as possible before landing. If and when the spaceborne threat is neutralized, they will descend into the atmosphere and provide pinpoint weapons fire.” The woman smiled. “I am certain your son will acquit himself with excellence.”

  “Yes, that’s my primary concern: my son’s feelings and reputation,” Markis said with more than a hint of sarcasm. “His mother might disagree, however.” The more these new, unblooded military people made breathlessly optimistic declarations of easy victory, the more irascible he became.

  And yet, he hoped they turned out to be right.

  ***

  Lieutenant Victor Fyedorovich Bokorin nervously clutched his pulse gun, a privilege of his rank. His platoon of militia, given the grandiose name of Fortress Infantry on the operational plans, carried brand-new assault rifles not so different from the Kalashnikovs of his forefathers. The guns would kill individual Scourgelings, but the enemy Soldiers were much tougher, armed with weapons as powerful as an armored fighting vehicle.

  The mobile divisions have the best of everything, he thought bitterly. They have tanks and artillery, and if things get too hot they can run away, while we must wait here to be slaughtered where we stand.

  Abruptly he felt ashamed, remembering the lectures by the Imperial Political Officers instructing him on the nature of proper and victorious thought. Defeatist thinking led to failure on the battlefield, they’d said, and so he forced himself to his feet, once more to walk up and down, handing out precious cigarette halves and bolstering the courage of his troops.

  “Good day, Lieutenant,” they called with smiles, some forced, some genuine. It was no surprise they would be struggling with their fear, but he was an officer and a graduate of one of the newly rebuilt Moscow Military Academy’s many 60-day commissioning classes. Education banished fear, he’d been taught.

  Then why was he so afraid?

  Mastering himself, he slapped backs and said, “Good day to you, brave sons and daughters of Mother Russia. The word from our captain gives us still more than thirty hours, so relax. Clean and check your weapons, sleep if you can, and make sure you eat. We have plenty of food, even fresh meat, so enjoy it while you can.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant. We will enjoy!” The speaker, a corporal, hefted a bottle of vodka, still allowed until the twelfth hour before the predicted landings.

  “I will enjoy as well,” A private said with a sideways grin as he grabbed one of the female soldiers from behind, his hands on her breasts. She squealed and slapped him but did not seem overly offended, and the scene drew a gale of laughter. Probably they would soon slip back into a darkened corner of the trenches to copulate, and he couldn’t blame them.

  A month ago, when he took over the platoon, he might have tried to suppress such…unprofessionalism. But now, on this eve of the imminent landings, he let it go. Anzhelika had a reputation as a cheerful slut, after all, and as long as she did not object, what did it matter?

  They might all be dead tomorrow anyway.

  ***

  Brigadier Kragov stood atop his newly painted Troll, binoculars pointed out across the recently created steppe north of the city of Moscow in what used to be Russia – and still is, in the minds of her sons and daughters, the man thought.

  His 4th Guards Tanks, Kantemir division – a formation of almost 1000 armored vehicles named for the location of its first major battle against the invading Germans in World War II – spread out around him, frantically digging in.

  Vehicle crews plied shovels to create holes in the drying ground of summer, ramped pits sufficient to allow tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery to wait hull-down for the arrival of the Scourge. Such positions would reduce casualties from the direct fire weapons of the enemy while still allowing them to move quickly up and onto the surface for an armored attack.

  Three years ago, the rolling hills had hosted dense forests of weeping birch and evergreen, but the first attack of the bugs had denuded the area of life as Scourgelings and Soldiers ate every possible piece of biomass. It had seemed nothing larger than a cockroach would survive, though a few smaller animals – rats, moles, birds – had found someplace to hide and were now filtering back into the hills.

  Grasses and bushes also grew among small saplings, replenished by seeds the Scourges inevitably missed, as well as deliberate replanting efforts.

  One day, Kragov thought, Mother Russia will rise again, as she always does.

  Those men and women that had returned to liberate Earth undoubtedly thought the humans left behind had been broken beneath the boot heels of the Meme and their yellow-clad underlings, but they had reckoned without the Rodina, the Motherland. Over the years, the great Russian people had been beaten, burnt, battered, slaughtered and oppressed by foreign enemies and by its own overlords and oligarchs. Everyone from Genghis Khan to Hitler to the mad Georgian Josef Stalin had taken his shot, and failed.

  Russians adapted. Mother Russia lived on.

  The people were used to living with oppression; only for brief periods of their history had they tasted freedom, but perversely, this legacy had served them well for the last fifty years; the Meme and their Yellows had not seemed so unfamiliar. One master was much like another when existence consisted of little more than work, vodka, food and family.

  Still, Russians adapted. Mother Russia lived on.

  Moscow’s position deep inland had preserved it when the Destroyers sent walls of water hundreds of meters high crashing at sonic speeds onto the shorelines of the west. Kragov laughed with grim humor as he thought of the cities of Britain, Spain, Italy and France, as well as the decadent American metropolises of Washington D.C., New York, Boston and Miami, washed away in an instant, while the capital of Russia, a thousand kilometers from any ocean, had won through with only its tallest buildings collapsed from the ground shockwave.

  And then, the Meme had come and scooped up the mother country’s elite, Blending with those they selected and executing the rest, the better to decapitate the society and short-circuit any resistance.

  Yet, Russians adapted. Mother Russia lived on.

  So deeply rooted in the Russian soul, so strong was this emotion that the Yellows couldn’t help but be influenced by their own underlings. The Meme thought to conquer by Blending, but in doing so, they accepted a subtle counter-conquest that not only made humans into Blends, but Blends into humans.

  Now, we are once again a people with a home and a heart, Kragov thought. As long as Moscow stands, we stand.

  This time, there will be no long retreat until Father Winter takes his toll, no hiding until the enemy has gorged itself on Russian forests, Russian crops, Russian cattle and Russian children.

  This time, they die, or we do.

  ***

  Flight Sergeant Lilja Virtanen settled the demi-VR headset over her eyes, ears and shaven pate, adjusting the induction contacts. While not providing the immersiveness of full virtual reality – which required expensive chip implants and extensive training – the arrangement gave her excellent control of her atmospheric fighter drone while seated in her contoured chair at Air Base 46, eight hundred kilometers northwest of Moscow.

  A Finn by language and culture, she found it ironic that her defense sector included the Russian capital. The intelligence NCO that briefed them twice daily believed the Scourge would hit Moscow the hardest as, unlike St. Petersburg and Helsinki, it ha
d no natural water barriers to help its defense and it was by far the largest population center in the area.

  “Everyone up?” the simulations tech called from his elevated platform looking out over the hundreds of drone pilots in their seated ranks.

  In response, Lilja twitched one of the two joysticks in her hands and pressed a button, signaling that she was ready.

  “Mission start,” the man said more quietly. This time, his words were fed directly into her auditory nerves, jumping the gap from her headset through a few centimeters of flesh. Immediately, his voice was replaced by the rumble of her drone’s jet engine, accompanied by a forward view from the aircraft itself – or it would have been were this not a simulation.

  With a little imagination she convinced herself that she was there, inside the Goshawk drone sitting on the airfield among its hundreds of fellows, deadly birds of prey ready to stoop on the enemy and slash him to ribbons.

  The simulated voice of the tower called the drones to ready, roll and rotate with metronomic precision, sending four aircraft every five seconds down the runway to launch themselves into space. Such proximity would never be tolerated with manned aircraft, but drones, though valuable, were expendable…especially when their first real-life mission came.

  Intel estimated that perhaps half of them would survive to refuel at the FARP, the forward arming and refueling point located partway to Moscow. Camouflaged and completely automated, that facility sat alone on a desolate hilltop, its hastily compacted runway sufficient for a few days of heavy use before it deteriorated beyond all serviceability. The planners hoped that its lack of life and isolation would cause the Scourge to ignore it as irrelevant.

  By the time its spare fuel and ammo had been depleted, the war would be over, one way or another.

  Lilja’s turn came to launch, and she breathed shallowly as her Goshawk accelerated down the runway. At the proper mark she rotated the nose and retracted the landing gear, transforming the drone from an ungainly land creature into a graceful diamond-shaped lord of the air, its outline broken only by the stealthed inlets and exhaust ports of its variable scramjets.

  This latest simulated mission directed ground strikes on the Scourges besieging the small city of Veliky Novgorod south of St. Petersburg.

  In earlier times, she might have been vectored to the fight by the voice of a controller on an AWACs, but today, everything came over her datalink. That left the pilots free to use their comms to coordinate among themselves in a manner familiar to aviators from World War Two onward.

  “Anna, you copy?” Lilja spoke as if her wingman weren’t reclining in the chair next to her. Only by operating as if inhabiting the fighter could greatest effectiveness be achieved, she’d been taught.

  “Copy, lead,” Airman Anna Niemela replied.

  “Transitioning.”

  “Roger.”

  Lilja ran her throttles forward to max subsonic, and then pressed the detent that allowed her to advance them still farther. The engine’s rumbling sound changed to a dull roar, and the controls grew sticky in her hands as the drone forced itself through the sound barrier into supersonic territory.

  “Ignition,” she said, and punched the button that lit the supersonic ramjet, the scramjet, portion of her hybrid engine. Now, instead of jet fuel burning among rotating compressor blades, the aerosolized petroleum ignited within a plenum chamber, forced backward and out like a rocket by the incoming pressure of the air itself. This created a powerful thrust with no moving parts other than the valves on the dozens of fuel injectors that balanced the delicate reaction.

  During her training, she’d asked why drones didn’t use the more powerful fusion engines of the aerospace fighters. She’d been patiently informed that such powerplants were far too expensive and limited in supply to waste on cheap, expendable atmospheric drones. That had been her first inkling that the Ground Forces ranked near the bottom of the military food chain – though the aviation service was a better place to be than armor or infantry.

  Lilja was no coward, but it seemed far more sensible to fight from a distance than to face the enemy at rifle range like the stupid Russians.

  Within minutes she approached the battlefield. Pulse gun and antipersonnel fire crackled in a ragged line all along the front of the tank division below as they pressed the Scourges. Lasers and plasma bolts came back at the humans. Artillery shells burst among the seething enemy, trapped between the defensive lines of the city and the closely packed Troll heavy tanks.

  Armored fighting vehicles supported the Trolls, their infantry squads deployed among them to put as many small arms on target as possible, creating an impenetrable wall of firepower.

  A line of carets flashed in sequence on her HUD, and she selected the closest one that designated a high-value target, in this case a Centurion-inhabited combat exoskeleton, a battle-cyborg twenty meters across that walked like a spider on four heavy legs. Launching a HellSpawn missile, she immediately shifted to the next target and locked that one up.

  The Centurion picked the first missile out of the sky with a raw plasma discharge, intercepting it at close range and incinerating it before impact. Lilja cursed while launching her second HellSpawn at the next designated enemy, an armored Soldier backing up a ravening mob of Scourgeling infantry.

  A nearby Centurion tried to provide antimissile cover, but its plasma burst went wide and her missile slammed into the enemy warrior, which burst from within, spraying body parts as the warhead exploded beneath its tough chitin shell.

  The pseudo-AI targeting computer designated the original Centurion for a follow-up triple strike, but by that time Lilja’s drone had moved several kilometers farther down the battlefield, launching missiles at a different pair of targets.

  “Fish in a small pond,” Anna said as she launched her fourth missile. “If the real battle is this easy, we’ll be partying in the sauna by the weekend.”

  “Don’t get complacent.” Lilja said automatically. “Nothing’s ever as easy as in sims.”

  A moment later her response was validated as a warning tone sounded and a strobe flashed in her cockpit. “Evasive!” she blurted, shoving the stick hard over and aiming for the deck. Anna, with less experience and training, reacted a fraction of a second slower, and the enemy laser locked onto her drone. When it fired, its bolt of coherent light blinded all the sensors and the heat of its impact destabilized the scramjet engine’s delicate combustion.

  In an instant, the swooping bird of prey lost all power. A moment later, it fell apart under the superheating of the enemy weapon as its ailerons locked in place. It began to tumble. As it did, the drone’s overstressed materials slammed into a wall of air and broke apart.

  “Voi kyrpä!” Anna swore. “Respawning.” Her conscious control would be transferred to one of the automated drones loitering a hundred klicks back, waiting for a pilot to bring it to the battlefield.

  “See you soon,” Lilja said distractedly as the ground fled away below her at less than one hundred meters altitude. Once her HUD showed her clear of enemy concentrations, she lifted the nose and began a hard turn that would bring her around to reattack.

  Chapter 20

  “Shit. We’re screwed,” Ford said.

  “Belay that, Commander,” Captain Scoggins snapped.

  Absen kept silent, but felt much the same. In the last three hours they’d taken down two more swarms and two mothership cores. The Meme had wiped out one more, leaving twenty-five swarms, plus the enemy flagship and mega-swarm, of course.

  But now, those twenty-five swarms had each dispersed their individual ships. Instead of occupying spherical areas roughly one thousand kilometers across, the groups now measured at least ten thousand klicks edge to edge, meaning ship density had dropped by a factor of more than one thousand.

  “The good news is,” Absen said, “they can barely sting us anymore. With such a thin deployment, the assault craft can’t get past our defenses and their gunboats and fighters can’t coordinate fire
like they used to. They’re firing the same number of shots, but they’re either missing or they’re hitting armor ninety-nine times out of a hundred. They’ve become skirmishers instead of a phalanx.”

  “And the bad news is,” Scoggins replied, “we can’t kill them fast enough. Projections show it will take four hours to wipe out fifty percent of them, and since they seem to have no morale or breaking point, that means at least eight hours per swarm. At that rate, around twenty swarms will reach Earth. We can’t handle that many.”

  “They’ll have to concentrate when they get there,” Johnstone said.

  “Not enough, and not until the last minute,” the captain replied. “We won’t have time to kill them.”

  “What about the Meme task force?” Ford asked. “The Scourges are attracted to their life signs like bugs to light. Maybe they’ll bunch up for them.”

  “Maybe,” broke in Absen, “but that doesn’t change our situation.” He checked the holotank for estimated time to intercept the diffuse swarm in front of them. Twenty minutes. “Johnstone, pass orders to all ships: close to minimum safe distance. Michelle, slow down time and set up a captain’s conference. Oh, and invite Bull, too.”

  Captain Scoggins looked a question at Absen, and he nodded. “You too, Melissa. Turn the ship over to AuxCon for a little while so everyone here can take a break. It may all be in your mind, but get up and walk around. Grab a cup of coffee or a smoke. You’ll feel better for it.”

  Absen stood and took his own advice, bending over to stretch, and then reaching for the overhead, taking a couple of deep breaths. It always amazed him how indistinguishable the sim was from reality. COB Timmons handed him a battered mug of coffee, and when Absen tasted it, he really couldn’t tell the difference.