One held onto his control with every molecule of his being and replied, “That’s good news, not bad, Three. If we do not need to fire, we are not being attacked.”
“Oh. That’s true.” Mollified for now, Three shut his pores.
This proved little consolation as the hammer blows of exploding Human missiles shook their compartment again. One ignored Three’s accusatory stare.
Chapter 55
Just when Vango thought the Meme had put their heads well and truly in the noose, the game changed again, and he had to remind himself that these creatures had conquered thousands of star systems, and were at least as smart as humans, if in a very different way.
He watched as the two footballs rolled once more, this time angling sideways, their drives still on full. Immediately the computer updated their projected courses, and if he had been able to see and feel the cockpit he would have likely pounded something in frustration, for now the future path line curved away from the missile cone. It would skim the edge. The Pilums adjusted their courses to intercept.
Vango watched as updates flickered through the system with the differing time-late information. Lark’s computer was only as good as its input, and every time something changed tens of light-minutes away, it had to recalculate vectors and situations, making really accurate predictions almost impossible.
However, the fleet was inevitably getting closer. Now it swept in from an increasing angle, following the enemy’s turn. They had begun nose on and now were almost at right angles. The Aardvarks and the missile cloud in front of them aimed not directly at the enemy but at a point in front of him, a place predicted by extrapolating from the Destroyers’ current course, speed and thrust vector.
Unfortunately, now it appeared that if the enemy were willing to burn at maximum, as long as their fuel held out they could dodge around the fleet and get away.
It might be a race to see who would run dry first.
Vango reflexively checked his own tanks, and his heart slammed into his throat, a fear-phantom he could feel even linked. Lark was already coming up on bingo – the point of no return. In about three minutes he would no longer have enough gas to make it home alive.
That time revised itself constantly, and actually began creeping upward. This confused him for a moment until he realized it was due to the fact that the fleet was bending its course around, no longer accelerating away from the solar system but rather coming to a heading that was roughly tangent to the orbits of the debris cloud. In layman’s terms, they were going sideways, and so the computer did not have to allow for double the fuel to bring the ships back.
Now Vango watched as the Destroyers passed through the edge of the missile cone. Apparently they were not able to avoid it entirely, and the projection for the fleet showed that they would get at least one good shot at the enemy as well.
The Aardvarks’ armor could stand up to fusors better than missiles, but they would still die like flies in a flamethrower. Long before, they would have expended their Pilums.
All that assumed they actually would be able to engage the enemy.
Vango felt like a wolf in a giant pack, chasing two fleet-footed gazelles, except the canines had been unable to encircle the prey and now had to run them to ground from the side and then rear. Closer and closer, he could almost feel his feet blurring and his jaws closing. It took an effort of will to snap himself back from near-daydreaming, to concentrate on the actual situation.
Is this what VR confusion does? If I’m already having problems, what must the general be feeling? He just couldn’t imagine.
Sparkles flashed along the perimeter of the Pilum formation, following the Destroyers’ path as they skimmed the edge of the cone. Zooming his view in, Vango could see plasma clouds blossoming in front like old-fashioned flak bursts in a World War Two air combat movie. This time, though, the “bombers” flew directly through the shockwaves, with no chance to dodge or fusor them. The Meme did not even try.
Instead, Vango noticed, the smaller, more beat-up Destroyer shielded the larger. The one in better shape had snuggled up to the other, angled precisely so that the blasts they flew through struck the more-hurt ship and not it.
Clever, he thought. I bet when they mated up, they took most of the crew and supplies aboard the less damaged Destroyer, and planned this all along. If they can’t get both away, then one ship will act as an enormous blocker for the other, virtually tripling its armor on that side. Vango uploaded that observation.
It took mere seconds for the enemy to sweep through the danger zone and out the other side, the remaining missiles turning to curve into the enemy’s wake, but with so much velocity to overcome, the computer predicted the Pilums would run out of fuel before they caught up. A moment later Vango saw their thrust reduced to minimum. The general, or whoever was controlling them – one of the wing commanders that was in better shape perhaps – had obviously decided not to waste them. Perhaps in the swirl of battle they could be brought back to do some good.
The fate of a few thousand missiles fled from Vango’s mind as the Aardvarks drew closer. When they crossed the intercept minus fifteen minute mark, he couldn’t help himself. For the first time since childhood, he prayed a prayer. For victory first, and for survival. His agnostic mother Elise might have laughed at him for doing so. No, he reconsidered. She might not agree, but she would understand. His father Daniel would probably shrug, or nod in guarded approval. “Can’t hurt, and it might help,” he’d probably have said. Something about Pascal’s Wager.
Dad was a practical kind of guy.
As the nearest part of the fleet crossed intercept minus ten minutes – Lark’s readout read eleven minutes five seconds – orders came over the net to launch all remaining missiles. As close as they were, the computer predicted that more than one hundred thousand Pilums should get near enough to have some effect.
If that didn’t do it, whatever portion of twenty-eight thousand Aardvarks remained would have to finish the job.
As the swarm of missiles hurled themselves toward a point in space in front of the still-potent Destroyers, the ships of the fleet leaped forward, now shed of the big weapons’ mass. Even so, the Pilums easily outdistanced the Aardvarks, rushing to cut the enemy off as they skated sideward as hard as they could, trying to curve away and turn the engagement into a stern chase again.
However, now the timelines were too short. Too many Aardvarks with too many missiles spread over too much distance provided enough coverage across the Destroyers’ path that they would not escape unscathed.
Like defensive backs in a football game, the missiles and attack ships shifted with the enemy, who had so much forward momentum that they could not turn sharply enough to get past. Once the enormous swarm had planted itself squarely in the two big ships’ way, all Vango and the rest could do was cross their fingers and hope the Pilums’ programming was up to the complex task of timing their detonations to kill the Destroyers without taking their fellows out in the explosions, a problem known as nuclear fratricide.
Chapter 56
“New orders…” Two’s communication trailed off in a way odd for his normally reliable and precise manner. “Emergency recombination.”
“What?” One trusted Two, but he had to taste this missive for himself.
What he said was correct. Emergency recombination was ordered, in the middle of a battle. It was insane. It was unprecedented.
It was brilliant.
If it could be done. “Initiate fragmentation protocol,” One snapped. “Full emergency mode. Prepare transfer tubes and sphincters.” He watched the automatic process for a moment, seeing the living modules of the complex fusor system unhook from each other and extend their mobility cilia. Tubes formed leading to the largest fusor nozzles, which would soften and become connection ports to the other ship.
One spared one eye to look at the ship-wide information feed, and saw that the two Destroyers flew, for a brief period, through empty space. Human missiles trailed b
ehind them with no chance to catch up, while many more bored in from a forward angle in an attempt to cut them off.
Command had taken the respite to press the two ships together again, but instead of merely transferring fuel, this time 6223-2 split open along one lengthwise seam like a sliced fruit, widening until it partly enveloped the larger, healthier original Destroyer 6223. Then it split again like a four-armed starfish and began transferring all of its guts to its fellow.
Through ports all over the skin of the ship, and sometimes directly between their raw unshielded interiors, subsystems of the enormous living ships crawled, propelling themselves on millions of cilia, tentacles and legs. Ranks of sub-creatures looking something like millipedes, beetles, anemones or octopi poured along tunnels and tubes, racing to the other ship.
Among them came dozens of surviving Meme. Confusion reigned for a short time, but here the superiority of their biochemical communication system showed. Like swarming ants, the connected hive of creatures seemed disorganized but quickly sorted itself out.
Rear Fusor One lost track of the big picture as 6223-2’s ship-wide net dissolved, but he could imagine what was happening. The living skin of the cannibalized ship would spread to cover as much of its fellow as possible before cementing itself into place, while the extra internal systems would augment and replace damaged parts of the remaining Destroyer.
In essence, they would be roughly back to where they were before One’s subtle manipulations had convinced Command to divide into two ships.
One could think of worse situations to be in.
Chapter 57
As the icon representing the enemy intersected the lead missiles, Vango saw the area turn milky again, a translucent representation of the VR processors’ inability to fully detect what was going on. That bubble of pale white marched forward as sparks brightened around it and then extinguished, and still it came on, even accelerated.
Vango checked the numbers and marveled as the Destroyers crept up toward .1 c, an amazing value for a tactical engagement. No doubt that velocity contributed to their survival; the missiles now had to calculate precise and accurate trigger time in finer and finer slices, as the closing speed with the missiles on opposite tracks approached .2 c.
And still the enemy flew.
More than halfway through the missile swarm and the Destroyers continued to accelerate. Over two thirds of the missiles had not even detonated, cruising on past, never getting within their blast radii. Programming reversed their vectors and reduced their accelerations to save fuel, and they began the long process of slowing down to relative rest, to be issued new instructions later or even recovered.
Now the lead ships’ time to intercept crossed five minutes, six minutes five seconds for Vango. All they had left were their centerline masers.
And their suicide bombs, of fifty megatons each. Just one of them, if it could be triggered close enough, should crack a Destroyer. Getting close enough would be the trick.
His whole life, in every tough situation, Vango had always tried to do what he thought his various elders would have done, and in this moment he realized he had only done half. With that prayer launched heavenward, he’d done what his father might have done – certainly what Aunt Cassandra would have. She had an unshakable faith in God’s plans, though she sure seemed to be willing to give Him all the help she could.
Now he thought he ought to do what Grandpa David would do in his place, who’d flown in Vietnam and had taught him, in his opinion, the best piece of poetry ever written: High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Vango opened up his squadron channel and slowly, reverently recited the first line:
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
He felt the surprise through the link, emotional phantoms that the technicians insisted were illusions, as his fellow pilots heard the words and responded –
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
A few echoes seemed to come back to him over the verbal comm as he continued.
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.
By this time he could feel others join in: a few, then a dozen, and then many more as he realized Dick had opened the squadron net to the entire wing. Almost a thousand attack ships now heard the words, and as many as knew them, all of the Aerospace Forces personnel for sure, and a goodly portion of the Navy as well, recited with him, their voices swelling:
Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
The entire array of Aardvarks, awkwardly named and ugly, transformed in Vango’s vision into a sparkling of stardust, pinpricks of light converging on their hated nemeses, the things that wanted to kill their planet, their nations, their hometowns and their families.
The fleet’s nearest edge crossed the one minute mark.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
Open channels carried tens of thousands of voices across space, raised in the unison that only those who put their frail bodies between death and their loved ones can truly achieve: a oneness of fighting spirit that could not be matched or even understood by any hated alien.
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Vango lost himself in the glory of it, surrendered himself to onrushing death even as his senses heightened further.
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
A pause came then, a moment of silence, then a swell of cheering. It lasted for as long as throats could hold it, then the comm nets broke back apart as the commanders rescinded their overrides, taking back tactical control just in time.
At thirty seconds out the lead elements began firing, their puny microwave lasers reaching en masse across the distance, hoping to do damage. Vango, with almost two minutes until his turn came, had the luxury to take a close look at the enemy ships, to try to find out how they had survived the fleet’s missile storm.
What he saw caused him to grudgingly admire the Meme commander, whoever he or it was. Where before the two ships had been rubbing shoulders, now they had done something else entirely, something only two ships that were alive possibly could have.
The football of the damaged enemy had been split at the back and down four symmetrical seams, opening up like a flower from the tail. Wedges of armored skin five hundred meters thick now wrapped over the nose of the healthier ship, extending down to past its midpoint, as if the rearmost Destroyer had been shoved inside the other. In effect, it had just cannibalized its fellow and doubled the armor over its own front half.
A thousand meters of layered bio-ferrocrystal chitin, Vango thought with a shudder. And with these living ships…could one absorb the other? Could they graft together like trees, in time becoming one even bigger, more dangerous ship? Had there originally been one, and it had split into two, explaining the discrepancy in the intelligence reports? So alien…
He tried to recall the briefings he had on the enemy armor’s resistance to heat, blast and radiation and came to a stark conclusion: to have any chance of seriously damaging the enemy, one of the fusion bombs would have to detonate at impact, or so close to the skin as did not matter. In open space, all explosive effects beyond the fireball dropped off by a factor of one over the cube of the distance, which was very steeply indeed.
Looking closer, the VR was now able to show a high-resolution near-real-time image of the combined Destroyer. Great portions of it had blackened, and pits, bubbles and rents hundreds of meters wide and deep showed on the second skin. If that damage had been done to the healthy one itself, it might not have surviv
ed, but like a gunman shielding himself with a dead body, the Meme had made the corpse of one ship work for them.
And then there was no more time to think. With his virtual hands and feet on the controls, he lined up his attack vector to intersect the enemy ship’s future position. By itself the computer would get him close, but in simulations and exercises the value of the human-in-the-loop system had proven itself. Properly trained, a pilot who knew how to use his systems always made better, more intuitive decisions than a computer alone.
The single combined Destroyer bore forward, continuing to accelerate at what must be its maximum, though now less with all that extra mass on it. Instead of turning to use its drive to clear a path and thereby cause itself to slow, it was just bulling its way through.
One unexpected benefit to the fleet of the enemy’s corpse-draped nose was its inability to use its bow fusors. Here and there one reached out from between the flaps of skin around the waist, angled forward as much as possible, but this had very little effect. At the current speeds, all of the incoming Aardvark maser fire struck the Destroyer’s front. Unfortunately that armored area, being dead already, could hardly die again, though it glowed a dull red in places with the heating effects of the microwaves.
Finally the first Aardvark met the enemy.
If it wasn’t General Yeager, then the next one or the next was, as the leading center of the mass EarthFleet formation naturally struck first. Suicide bombs, set to automatically detonate at the closest distance calculable, blossomed like fireworks in the path of the enemy.
Then one did not detonate, apparently striking the Destroyer itself, and a strange thing happened; the enemy seemed to stagger slightly, and chunks of the dead-skin armor peeled away after the impact fireball dissipated.
The enormous suicide device of the Aardvark that actually struck the enemy ship had not gone off. The shock of impact at those speeds had vaporized the ship, pilot and bomb in one titanic blast of heat, but slamming two objects into each other at such speeds created its own fusion blast, much smaller but much more concentrated at the point of intersection, tearing hundreds of meters into the enemy armor. The materials of human and Meme crushed themselves together so powerfully that not merely hydrogen, but all sorts of elements up the periodic table fused and release their energy.
Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer Page 26
