“All right. If you feel a mallet upside your noggin, it’s me telling you to pull your head out of your assets.” Token’s lame double-entendres had become more frequent lately.
In his VR simulation, Vango ran several possibilities forward and backward in time, varying the Destroyer’s path. Sure, others on Orion or one of the cruisers or even other Aardvark pilots were doing the same thing for sure, but some of those were almost a light-hour away, and might not even have seen the enemy’s change in course yet.
Mars. Something about Mars was bothering him. As Token had asked, why would the enemy be heading toward Mars, with all of space around. Its facilities were bare bones, because it was off the direct path to Earth. Except now it was on that path, because the enemy had turned to go behind it.
Behind it. Could it make a sudden course change behind the planet? But in terms of the speeds involved, it would flash past Mars in mere seconds, not enough time to pull any surprises.
Sure, dragging the Aardvarks so far off the direct path had made them burn fuel, and they’d lost a few dozen birds to unplotted asteroid strikes and mechanical failures, but not enough to be tactically significant. Tankers shadowed the attack fleet, well back, and grabships and repair craft traveled alone and unafraid in the areas of low danger, searching for surviving pilots and repairable A-24s. No, all that wasn’t significant enough.
What was the enemy’s game?
Course change. Course change, planet. Planet, course change.
Course. Of course. Change course.
Vango modified the VR sim, running his theory several times in different ways. All of them worked out. “I got it!” he cried.
“What?”
Vango frantically packaged his data up with text notes, fearful it would not be soon enough. The attack fleet was spread out over more than a light-minute, and then there was the system’s time to process, and the human time to react. Once he fired it off at flash priority, he explained to Token. “Open up that package and follow along. Look at the Destroyer’s path.”
In the shared VR sim, the enemy’s projected track dove toward Mars, skimming its outer side, away from the Aardvarks, just above its thin atmosphere. At the same time the virtual Destroyer rotated to point its drive almost directly toward the planet, forcing itself in the tightest partial orbit it could without striking Mars air and burning up.
Pulling the view back out, Vango showed Token how the Destroyer’s future path had changed. “This maneuver gets it a completely free course change, along with an unexpected burst of speed. A slingshot maneuver, like a footballer briefly grabbing another player as he goes by. It will give him enough velocity to get past us.”
“How long do we have to change course?”
Vango shook his head, unseen. “We can’t. I mean, it’s already too late.”
“Can we fire missiles?”
“Let me see.” Vango quickly had the VR launch missiles and aim for a point to meet the Destroyer on its new, faster track. “Yes we can, but it will be a high-deflection shot for some, and a stern chance for others.”
“How many missiles will engage it?”
“Umm….about seven thousand.”
“Dammit, Vango,” Token said, shocking his wingman with even this mild profanity, “we fired over a hundred thousand missiles at the first two smaller Destroyers and we barely got one of them. How can seven thousand take down this monster?”
“They are Pilum IIs. They should be a lot more effective. And there’s the cruisers, and their escorts. And the planetary defenses.” Even to his own virtual ears Vango’s words sounded hollow.
Vango felt Lark shift under him as a command override turned the entire fleet. He watched the orders propagate at the speed of light, the simulation doing its best to reflect reality, as the mass of attack craft turned and blasted at emergency maximum acceleration in an attempt to intercept.
At the same time, all but two of his missiles launched themselves. Apparently Hyser had wasted no time in getting the Pilums on their way. Once they had launched, Lark’s missiles came back under his control, more or less. The network constantly assisted him, creating a kind of man-machine feedback loop that, once he was used to it, allowed him to fly them as effectively as possible.
Token said, “Maybe the ones that do intercept will slow the bastard down, or knock him off track. Force him away again.”
“Maybe,” Vango said doubtfully, “but it looks like we’re going to miss the fight by about twenty minutes.”
Chapter 76
Over the next hour and a half Vango watched as the Destroyer did exactly what he expected – swung past Mars, turning a corner and accelerating, cutting back in an arc toward Earth, a predicted path that ended at the planet on nearly a right angle to the line of its attacking rocks, and within minutes of impact.
“Bastard is clever, very clever,” Vango muttered in frustration.
“Bastard,” echoed Token. Now that they were edging toward failure and the potential destruction of humans on the planet, it looked like he was learning to swear.
“The cruisers and Aardvark escorts are moving to intercept. Their missiles will reach just after ours do. Maybe that will do the trick.”
“Bastard,” Token said again. “Dammit!”
Vango remembered that Token had a wife and baby daughter back on Earth, and understood what was going on in his wingman’s head. It must all be getting too real. For his part, all he had to lose were his parents and friends and brother and sister…which once he thought about it seemed just as ugly.
Compartmentalize, Vincent, he told himself. Just like Aunt Jill always said. Wall it off until the combat is done.
With hours more to go still, thoughts of Aunt Jill made him bring up the VR feed of Grissom Base on Callisto, and he got another shock. It was gone. Nothing but a smoking hole five hundred meters deep remained, and he had to zoom out quite a bit before any of the outlying surface platforms could be seen.
Some kind of big explosion or impact. I guess the Meme got them after all, despite the big weapons. Hope to hell everyone got underground into the bunkers. Suddenly he felt sick at the possibility Jill might be dead, and grief on Uncle Rick’s behalf intruded.
Compartmentalize, dammit.
Vango racked his brain for Token’s real name. “Get a grip, Josiah,” he said, actually talking to himself as much as his wingman. “We have to keep fighting, and we have to keep hoping. We beat them once and we can beat them again.”
“Right. Yeah, right. Yeah. Dammit. Dammit.”
It didn’t sound like Token was getting a grip, so Vango kept talking to him, distracting him, for long minutes as they flew onward through the void. Eventually his comrade seemed to calm down to something like his old ice-water self.
“Missiles are entering the merge,” Vango said as the first Pilums reached the Destroyer. In reality they had already done so, the updates finally propagating at lightspeed to their birds, but to them it all seemed realtime. “Detonations.”
Vango watched in the shared link as the edge of the missile cloud touched the Destroyer. Zooming in, he saw the fusors eat missile after missile, or forced them to detonate outside of effective radius. Armor on the great ship blackened and sloughed off as thin waves of hot plasma washed over it, but nothing got close enough to do it the catastrophic damage he hoped for.
Blisters and hot spots showed as well, where some of the bomb-pumped graser clusters had fired their gamma rays deep into the enemy, causing unknown damage, but still the enemy sailed serenely on, its fusors creating a wall of flame that ate everything fired at it.
Now the Destroyer outdistanced the tens of thousands of Pilums remaining, which turned to chase in hopes of catching up by some lucky turn of events. However, because of its great speed, the huge ship could not avoid the much smaller but still potent cloud of missiles launched from the cruiser escorts in front of it.
“Those should have more effect, because they’re coming in head on,” Vango observ
ed. “If he’s smart, he’ll flip over and…yep.” He watched as the Destroyer swapped end for end and used its drive to augment its fusors, creating an advancing plasma cloud that reached out and burned dozens, then hundreds of missiles at a time. Soon the display whited out with plasma and EMP.
“But that’s going to slow him down some,” Token said, and it was true. Using the drive as a forward weapon allowed more of the original flight of missiles to catch up, though slowly. Because they overtook the Destroyer so sluggishly, its fusors easily picked them all out of space. “At least we’re making him burn fuel to power his weapons. Those fusors are horrendous but very inefficient. Maybe he’ll run out of juice…”
“Maybe. Look, something’s happening.” Vango zoomed the VR back in. He couldn’t get much accurate data off any part of the Destroyer, but something unusual was taking place along its leading edge.
“Railgun hits! Those are railgun impacts,” Token crowed, and Vango saw it was true. Dark spots accompanied by bursts of heat appeared all over the enemy’s skin where the metal balls must be slamming into its armor, blackening small pieces that individually were insignificant, but by the hundreds and thousands should cause a great deal of damage.
In response, the Destroyer suddenly vomited forth several hundred hypervelocity missiles, which accelerated at the incredible speed that gave them their name. These spread out into ten groups, aimed at the cruisers.
“Oh, crap. That doesn’t look good.”
“Those cruisers got a lot of rock on their nose. I hear that it was the first fight, where the Destroyer crapped itself in its dead buddy, that gave the engineers the idea of cladding them in asteroid,” Token said.
“Tactic and countertactic,” Vango mused.
“It’s slowing some more. And…it’s aiming at one of the cruisers.”
What Token said was true; the predicted path now intersected the cruiser EFS Innsbruck. The cruiser squadron commander must have seen it too, for Innsbruck fell back a bit as its fellows closed up to screen it in response.
But the Destroyer wasn’t a rock with a semi-intelligent guidance package; it was a fully crewed alien dreadnought almost three thousand meters in diameter, bristling with weapons. Its predicted path flexed in the VR sim and then intersected a different ship.
The cruiser squadron shifted again and again, dancing as the two forces slowly closed on each other – slowly only in terms of the vast distances of space. In reality they all moved at thousands of kilometers per second, though they would take an hour to finally close. When they did, Vango knew from his calculations, they would flash by each other in milliseconds.
Long before that, though, the hypers would do their work. Under hundreds of gravities acceleration, the Meme missiles had leaped ahead, lining up on their ten unmissable targets. Ironically, the unencumbered slender cruisers would have been able to dodge a lot of them, but the selected strategy had been to use the enormous, relatively free bulk of the asteroids as makeshift armor.
More threats, intended to absorb Meme power.
More men and women to give their lives in trade to weaken the enemy.
“Why is it slowing down?” Vango asked. “I would think it would just zoom past and keep heading for Earth. The slower it goes, the easier a target it becomes, and now it’s going to get to Earth well after the rocks do. Don’t they want to coordinate their assault?”
“They can always speed up again.”
“But that burns fuel.”
“Who knows? Look…it’s not slowing anymore. It’s letting the missiles catch up, and it can probably target the ones in front better at slower speed. Maybe it wants to get rid of the threat of the Pilums behind before it goes in for the final battle. Maybe it’s using its drive to shield itself against the railgun bullets.”
“Maybe. Look, more missiles.” A small flight of four hundred appeared, and then the icons of the four hundred Aardvarks accelerated to follow them, head on to the enemy.
“They’re going for suicide runs,” Vango said with a lump in his throat. “We know people in Fifth Wing. Billy-boy. Slammer. Dex.”
“I know. I know.” They watched as the two forces drew inexorably together. “At least the Meme can’t dodge them. They’re too close and going too fast. And hypers won’t take many out. It’ll have to be fusors against Aardvarks, and the new armor should buy them a little extra time to get close.”
“Extra time to get close and die, you mean.”
“Yeah.”
“Hypers merging on the cruisers.” The ten flights of Meme missiles suddenly spread out, like exploding fireworks, before converging again on their chosen targets, having ignored the Aardvarks. Vango had seen this effect shown in intelligence briefings as the hypers performed terminal guidance maneuvers to attack from all sides, like swarming piranha.
Vango zoomed in on the Innsbruck, still the rearmost ship, to watch the impacts. At the speed they were going, the hypers became blurs, the VR sim merely providing educated guesses until they struck.
“Look, they’re lighting their drive!” Innsbruck put on a burst of speed, full engine power. “It made a few miss!”
Dozens of hypers slammed into the asteroid cladding, one after another, separating themselves enough to avoid fratricide. At the speeds they were going, the impacts caused immediate low-grade nuclear fusion, converting a significant portion of both missile and material into hot plasma, which could destroy following missiles. But the hypers were clever, in their bio-programmed way, and those that struck, struck in a pattern that maximized their chances of damage.
Fortunately for the cruiser, it also spread the damage out, rather than drilling through any one portion. Chunks of rock broke away or were blasted aside by the white-hot plasma bursts, digging craters a hundred meters deep, but after it was over, Innsbruck had survived the storm.
Vango and Token cheered. “Looks like that rock armor was a good idea after all.”
“Not much of it left, though,” Token said. “A few more good hits deep in those craters will probably get through. Oh, look. They’re turning away from the Destroyer and cutting back toward the rocks.” It was true; the cruisers, like the linebackers they emulated, were shifting their defense sideways toward the incoming asteroids.
“Absen’s calling plays like a coach, trying to get the most out of his players. Trying to tire out the Destroyer,” Vango ventured. “You know, this is frustrating, us just watching. We’re chasing this bastard, but by the numbers, we’ll never catch him.”
“What if we do?” Token asked with a bleak tone in his voice. “We’ll be like the dog that caught the semi truck. Then what?”
“A dog with a fusion bomb. That’s our job.”
“We got one more missile each, though. I’d rather ram it right into the bastard than blow myself up, but at least I know I’ll be in heaven.”
Vango replied, “Yeah. You got that going for you.”
“It’s not too late for you,” Token said.
“We been over this ground before, man. I know you’re a pastor’s kid and all, but that’s just not me. Like my old man said, if God wants to save me, he’ll do it. If not, that’s okay too. I did my best.”
“Okay. I kinda hope you’re right about that.”
“But you don’t believe it.”
“I do believe we’ll be judged for what we do here in this life.”
Vango replied, “I can live with that. And maybe our final act will wipe away anything we’re not proud of.” He thought of Stevie then, and how he let her down. “I sure hope so.”
“Fifth Wing is closing. Looks like final missile shots.” Another flight of Pilums appeared and led the four hundred Aardvarks in. It seemed insane to Vango that he was watching four hundred men and women deliberately throwing their bodies into the path of the enemy. He felt as if a cold hand squeezed his chest. Yet he knew that there were probably four hundred crew on each cruiser too, no more or less human than the pilots. Each ship, each squadron represented one more
chance for humanity to live.
One more roll of the dice.
Vango had seen the Destroyer survive so many waves of missiles that the detonations and deaths of several hundred Aardvark pilots merely left him numb, as a little more hope died. “The guys that missed are lucky,” he said, highlighting thirty or forty ships that had failed to either impact or meet the more restrictive detonation parameters.
Suddenly one of the survivors blossomed into fusion fire, then winked out. “What the hell?” Token said.
“I guess he couldn’t live with himself,” Vango replied. “All psyched up to die and then he didn’t.”
“Or maybe it was just a malfunction.”
“Either way, dead is dead.”
“Did they do much damage?”
“Some.” Vango zoomed in on the Destroyer. Its blackened skin seemed shrunken and there were gouges and craters. “Can’t get a decent measurement on it from this distance but it looks like we’re wearing it down.”
“What if it runs away again?”
“Then we’ve bought another year to build and get stronger.”
“Or a year for it to send another hundred thousand rocks at us. Another year to do this all over again. I’m not sure I can take that. I just want this to be finished.”
“You know, Token, you’re starting to sound like you’re giving up. Are you gonna be disappointed not to die and go to heaven? Or are you gonna man up and stay with us and fight?”
Token didn’t reply. They lapsed into silence for a dozen minutes more as they watched the battle unfolding. Finally, he asked, “How’s it going with the rocks?”
Vango pulled his VR view way back and then zoomed in on the cloud of enemy asteroids approaching Earth. “Down to about three thousand, but they’re not killing them fast enough. Pulling the cruisers off rock duty hurt. At least they will be back in time to pick a bunch more off. Those big railguns are designed to break them up.”
Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer Page 35
