Then again, no one had ever been stuck in a coffin for a year with a plug in his head, until now.
The shower chamber door folded into one wall to make a small room about two by two by one meter. Aardvarks did not have much spare space, though not because the fuselage wasn’t large enough. Rather, this was all the room engineers could find by rerouting and rearranging systems that had not originally been designed to accommodate it, not to mention adding more gravplates to make sure the somnolent occupant wasn’t turned into jelly under hard acceleration.
A standard attack ship had a cockpit barely big enough to squeeze into, which had been designed to keep the pilot alive for several days. Theoretically it could have been modified to perform the function of the coffin. In fact, debate had raged about the need to put in the sleep cabin, but in the end the psychologists had convinced the bean counters that the people would function better, significantly better, for not waking up and having to fight in the same place they had been breathing, being fed through tubes, urinating and defecating for a year.
Vango was very glad of it now.
He did some knee bends and stretched. While his muscles had been electrostimulated and his joints had been moved in the coffin, he still felt weak and stiff. The doctors had postulated unknown effects, and so they had been on the side of the head-shrinkers in supporting the extra space.
Once he had worked the kinks out, he turned on the cabin’s screen, which took up one entire wall. It came to life showing a mountain meadow scene, designed to communicate placid openness, with wildflowers waving in a gentle breeze. He left it on as he dressed, taking his time. Wherever they were, the ship systems would have woken him at least twenty-four hours before anticipated combat. Had there been some emergency or other timetable, the ship’s computer would already be hounding him about it.
A few minutes to get his head together wouldn’t hurt.
Skinsuit, G-suit, then exosuit, though if the ship was damaged badly enough that he needed the latter to resist hard vacuum, things would be very bad indeed. Still, he was happy for any edge he could get.
Boots came next, sealing themselves to the exosuit, but he didn’t put the helmet on just yet. Instead, he opened the door to the cockpit.
Movies usually showed such spaces as large, with room to move around. Virtual control obviated any need for that. In this case, Vango turned as he stepped through the door and backed up into his seat that appeared to be bolted to the wall. With no up or down except as dictated by gravplates and acceleration, this arrangement made the most sense.
Now he put on his helmet as he leaned against the vertical seat. Once he’d sealed it and attached his suit to its various feeds – air, water, cooling, sewage, and the all-important electronics – he closed the cockpit hatch and started on his checklist, running down all of Lark’s systems manually, according to the book. Some pilots took the shortcut and skipped this step, relying on the cybernetic systems to tell them if anything went wrong, but he doggedly stuck to the manual.
Soon he found something…odd. Two of his sixteen Pilum missiles had been launched during his long sleep, and he’d not been notified. It must have been a command override, some kind of change of plan.
Also, that niggling feeling was becoming a full-blown jones to link, confirming his suspicion; VR space was addictive, even when subjective time was slowed. Being connected for that long hadn’t done him any favors, and he wanted to find out just how bad it would get.
It got bad. He’d long since finished the checklists and so just sat there, alone in his suit in his tiny cockpit, another kind of coffin: one in which he might die. Waves of anxiety washed over him, and he doggedly ignored his medcomp when it suggested administering something to take the edge off.
Over a half hour went by on the clock before an incoming message pinged its alert. He took it on audio only.
The voice of Vango’s squadron leader, Richard “Dick” Hiser, spoke calmly. “Two Sierra Thirty-three, this is Two Sierra Thirty. What’s the trouble, Vango?”
Vango reached out to switch to a private channel. “I’m here, boss. Feeling some kind of psychological effects. Trying to see what the limits are before I plug in.”
“What kind of effects?”
“I think it’s some kind of VR addiction.”
“Yeah. Some others have reported it too. You just have to link up and it will go away.”
Vango licked his lips. “I don’t like adding to the problem before I even know what it is.”
Hiser’s voice took on an edge of irritation. “If this were training, I’d agree with you, but we’re twenty-two hours out and I need you in the link. You’re the last one in the whole damned armada, and you’re holding everyone up. Plug in now.”
“Yes, sir.” Vango couldn’t keep a certain sulkiness out of his voice, but the young pilot forced himself to be professional. Hiser was right anyway, Vango thought. The possibility of addiction or scrambling his brains was far smaller than the threat of being killed.
Or of failure. He plugged in.
Immediately all the negative emotions went away with his physical self. Instead, he now felt as if he occupied the body of a hundred meter long machine equipped with the best systems humanity could build. Cameras, radar and lidar were his new eyes, radios his ears. Lark’s hull was his skin, his legs his engine and thrusters, and his weapons, fists with which to smite his enemies.
Glorious.
Around him he saw a handful of attack boats on optical, none closer than ten kilometers away. Tiny comm lasers painted these nearest kin, and Vango knew theirs painted him and their neighbors in turn, connecting all thirty-thousand-odd ships in a vast web. As none of the vessels pointed their beams forward, none would be detectable to the enemy they now presumably approached.
The planners had predicted that even such a large number of ships would be invisible in the vastness of space, given their small size, stealthy radar-detecting angles and absorptive coatings. As the armada got closer the probability of detection increased, of course, but they hoped to delay that moment as long as possible.
“Go ahead and initiate your briefing package,” Hiser said, and Vango told the computer to comply. Immediately space opened up like a high-res 3D video game. Inside virtual reality he could send his presence swooping to any point, view from any angle, as long as the information was there.
General Yeager’s recorded voice seemed to speak in his ear. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is One Alpha One. We are here.” A vast disc, over two thousand kilometers across, flashed blue in his view, representing all of the armada arrayed like an enormous pizza pan coasting silently through space, flat side to the enemy. Where they thought the enemy should be, that is.
“Here is the enemy location EarthFleet intel predicted. Like all intel tends to be, this is true, but still wrong. The stealth drones have spotted something here.” A point far off to the side flashed once, then turned a steady red. “In fact, two somethings. Two separate intermittent drive emanations, of low power but still easily detectable. Observation data records backtrack them to the predicted location’s vicinity, so we know the readings are associated with the Meme ships, but we don’t know why there are two. Worst case, there could be two Destroyers. Or it could be a couple of auxiliaries doing who knows what. Intel predicted they would graze out here, but they also said it would only take them a few weeks to refuel.”
On the recording Yeager took a deep, ragged breath, sounding tired. That didn’t make sense to Vango; the old man was a rejuv after all, and the Eden Plague should have restored his vitality just like it had his own grandfather David and his father Daniel. He wondered.
“In fact, this whole force is now headed for this position,” Yeager’s voice went on, and a cursor moved to indicate a point midway between the enemy’s original and current locations. “That was the best I could do on cold thrusters alone.”
Cold thrusters meant just liquefied gases, heated enough to use as reaction mass. The ability of
these tiny weak jets was limited, but they had none of the energy signature of fusion motors or chemical rockets. In this case, Vango deduced the general had used them to alter the fleet’s course.
Quickly Vango had the computer run calculations extrapolating backward, using the strength of the cold thrusters and the distances involved. When he saw the numbers, he realized the fleet had begun to turn, very slowly, more than sixty days ago. That’s how early he must have altered course to achieve even that much.
He shuddered. General Yeager had been awake for nine weeks.
Now Vango examined the geometry and realized that they were nearing the point where they would have to light up their fusion engines if they intended to engage the enemy, or go flashing past. Once they went hot, they would be visible for all to see.
Now he knew why Yeager sounded so rough. He’d been living in a box the size of a closet, in and out of VR space, for two months. If he felt the way Vango had, he’d been fighting the effects of VR addiction outside the link, and then making it worse by giving in to the urge. At best he could slow his time sense now and then to make the hours pass faster, but unlike in the coffin, he had to get out of the suit and the cockpit from time to time.
There also wasn’t nine weeks of food and water there, not at normal activity levels. He must have either starved himself, or put himself back in the coffin one more time. There was only enough biogel for two uses – one out, one back. If he had done that, Yeager might have given up his only chance to get home.
Vango’s stomach roiled despite the VR overlay. The man was a legend, a bona-fide hero, from the Second World War on through the time of the space race and into this uncertain future. Rejuvenation had given him another shot at glory, but eventually everyone’s number came up.
Vango rewound the recording once he realized he had stopped listening, and picked up where the general’s voice had left off. “So here’s the plan. At IP Alpha, we begin a maximum burn to fall on the enemy like a blanket.” Lines and diagrams swept through the VR space, showing the proposed routes. The disc of the armada, or blanket in the general’s metaphor, flexed forward at the edges until it became concave, the Meme ship or ships at the center.
“Calculations show that if they react immediately and violently, they can skate out from under our blanket. As far as we know, even big Meme ships can accelerate faster than we can. But they can’t accelerate fast enough to avoid these, not as fast as they are already going. ”
A green ring appeared, off to the side and forward of the armada and centered on the enemy. It was larger than the edge of their circle of ships, and traveled only a bit faster. “I’m sure you all noticed that you lost two missiles each from your load. I launched them some time back, when I was revived. Using their chemical guidance thrusters only, I had them maneuvered into the position you see. I am hoping that if the enemy runs for the edge of the blanket, some of these missiles will catch them. We won’t be that far behind. If the warheads can slow the enemy down, perhaps we can finish them off.”
“That’s the worst case. The best case is that we catch them flatfooted. Maybe they decide to attack us or break straight through us, giving us an opportunity to damage or even destroy them. Whatever happens, though, remember that flexibility is the key to airpower. I can’t control thirty thousand ships, or even thirty wing commanders. Be aggressive and you can’t go wrong.”
“And trading us for them is a win for Earth. We all knew that when we started. Damaging them will mean they are less capable when they get to the solar system, or that they will have to go back to feeding and healing, delaying them significantly. That is also a win for Earth. Every day, week or month we buy means more ships and more weapons at home.”
The general’s voice strengthened once more. “I’ll leave you now to coordinate with your units. Remember your duty, remember your loved ones behind you. Remember Earth. Good luck, and good hunting.”
Emotions flooded into the silence the general had left behind. Fear, uncertainly, and hatred toward the enemy that threatened his home, but also determination and desire, the joy and eagerness to engage the hated Meme no matter what they looked like or what kind of ships they had. The simulations gave thirty thousand ships an outside chance of beating a Destroyer.
Vango resolved to do his part, or die trying.
***
Vango’s clock crossed T minus sixteen hours, coming up on Lark’s IP Alpha, the point in space where he would start his burn. All systems checked out fully green, especially the internal gravplates that would counterbalance the enormous G forces of the course change. He watched the numbers count down, and then turned over the initiation to his computer.
Lark groaned as she took up the strain, gravplates overloaded to seven percent above rated maximum. At this level they could expect to lose roughly one in a thousand ships to some kind of failure. If they were lucky it would be something small and fixable. If not… thirty losses was an acceptable number, in the general’s estimation, Vango figured. He just hoped he would not be one of them.
Stress meters showed everything green, with a few systems in the yellow. He switched to backup on those he could and brought everything into the green again. Lark was a good, tight ship, and he knew her inside and out.
She’d hold together.
His tactical VR display filled in some holes, and some ships, even whole squadrons, seemed to teleport into new positions as the armada’s net came up to full power and activity. With no more need for stealth, each Aardvark could now use its comm suite.
Only a tenth of the ships went on active sensors, though, to hide their numbers. Return echoes and datalinks filled in the gaps for the others.
Tiny dots began to appear in front of the formation, shooting through it suddenly like dust motes. Occasionally one of the armada’s ships winked out. When Vango queried the computer, it told him what he saw were chunks of ice and rock, the leading edge of the section of the Hills Cloud they approached. Despite the enormous dispersion of ships and pieces, occasionally one would intersect the other, and at the speed they were traveling, any ship that struck something larger than a golf ball was likely dead.
For over five hours they blasted, engines straining to divert the armada’s headlong traveling rush toward the Meme’s old position into a tactical envelopment of the new. As they flew they waited the time it would take for the light of their burns to reach the enemy and then the evidence of his response to come back to the fleet. Vango thought how strange it was that at this distance, several light-hours, each side peered into the past, and would react with information that was, in tactical terms, ancient. He sincerely hoped the general was as good as his reputation, and got the jump on the Meme.
Vango watched as lights continued to wink out one by one. He could have queried why each did so, but he really did not want to know whether they died from stress failure or collision with space debris or some other reason. Some of the tiny dots stayed on but ceased to maneuver, continuing in straight lines along paths sending them out into space. He didn’t ask about those either; they must retain some function but their engines had failed, and no one could do anything for them without abandoning the fight. If the pilots were lucky they could put themselves back into their coffins, eventually to get chased down and picked up.
Sometime. If there was anyone left to do it.
Vango sharpened his attention coming up on the time where they should begin seeing the enemy’s reaction. Unsurprisingly, it was not as expected. In other words, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
Chapter 48
Alarm molecules washed through the new young Destroyer, jolting Trium Forty-One, Rear Fusors, from somnolence into full alertness. In their control chamber the three Meme extended eyeballs and jammed pods into communication ports, absorbing information at prodigious rates.
“What in the Name of the One Above All Ones is that?” Two asked, designating the thousands of point sources approaching their position.
“It appears the Humans have launched very large missiles at us,” One replied flatly. “They must be missiles to be so numerous, and are only now becoming visible. We would have seen real ships, and the evident drive and vector analysis correlates to craft the sizes of a Survey vessel.”
“Such as we used to occupy,” Three said wistfully. “I was happy then.”
“Please try to focus your attention on current reality,” One snapped.
“Is it possible they are not missiles, but small craft?” Two ventured.
“Unlikely. Possible,” One said grudgingly.
“Should we not report our speculation?”
“No,” One replied. “We are still in disfavor. Besides, if we think of it, others will as well. Better to ensure rear fusors are fully healed and fuelled.”
“Understood.” Two and Three busied themselves with bringing their weapons up to optimum efficiency.
“There are many thousands,” One mused, as was his occasional wont, expressing his thoughts. The other two had seen this propensity grown over the years, but it did not seem to impair One’s efficiency. “I wonder how powerful each one is.”
“Shall I calculate how powerful they would have to be to overwhelm us?” Three asked obsequiously.
“There is no point to that,” Two objected. “There are far too many factors to predict – maneuver, distance, velocity, warhead size, radiation yield.”
“Yes,” concurred One. “We must wait for more information.”
Three closed his pores and slumped back in his holding tank, thinking how his existence so often involved boredom. He dreamed of the day he could blend. Then, life would become truly wonderful, not only for its fleshly pleasures, but because no One would lord it over him anymore.
Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer Page 23
