“And then what?”
“What do you mean?” Vango asked.
“After the cruisers do their job on the rocks, what about the Destroyer? There’s nothing left in the way except the planetary defenses.”
“The asteroid fortresses and the cruisers will combine on the Destroyer, along with the last few squadrons of Aardvarks. And the laser batteries on the moon. It has to be enough.”
“What if it’s not?”
Vango thought about that for a minute. “I dunno. Keep fighting, keep trying…or maybe we become Meme slaves.”
“I’d rather die.”
“You might get your wish.”
Chapter 77
“Command trium impresses me,” Two said. “The slingshot maneuver around the red planet exhibited a high degree of competence.”
“One doesn’t get to be a Destroyer commander without high competence,” One replied.
“We didn’t have much to do. Just destroying a few hundred missiles. Nothing compared to the fight in the outer ring,” Three said nonchalantly.
Two and One turned their eyeballs to stare at Three. After a moment, he cringed a bit and ceased communication.
“I for one am happy to have easy duties and certainty of outcomes,” Two said.
One bobbed his eye stalk, happy that Two had put Three in his place. Every time I think Three has grown a genuine mental molecule, he convinces me otherwise. Perhaps his life code is defective.
“If you are so eager for difficulty,” One said sarcastically, “be of good cheer! We are approaching a force of enemy cruisers and supporting small craft. Perhaps they will do us enough damage to satisfy your stupid desire for a fair fight. After all, the ethos of the Empire will certainly reward us for giving the poor little enemy a reasonable chance to kill us.”
“All right, all right! I withdraw my observation. I was just passing the time with conversation.”
“Oh, now you are bored,” One pressed Three. In truth, so was One, which was why he entertained himself by browbeating his subordinate. “How sorry I am for you. Perhaps you should go in person and check the fuel conduits for leaks.”
“That will not be necessary,” Three replied hastily, now thoroughly chastised. “I apologize. Please forget I ever said anything.”
“Perhaps I will. If you earn such consideration.” One felt better after again emphasizing his dominance. “Now see to your controls. We approach the enemy.”
Chapter 78
Captain Vernon “Deke” Deaker sat in the Chair on the bridge of the cruiser EFS Innsbruck, staring at the shaved head of Master Helmsman Jennifer Macduff. He’d never seen her with hair; she wasn’t vain enough to wear a wig off duty. Besides, the little cruiser didn’t have enough space for a lot of personal gear. He supposed she’d used her allotment for other things. He’d never seen her with makeup on either.
No matter; he still thought she was attractive. Maybe it was her confidence, the direct way she looked in his eyes when she spoke. He knew he wasn’t a handsome man by most standards, with a narrow face from his Norwegian side and an overbite bequeathed to him by his Somali ancestors, but he could dream.
Funny how his mind went to the possibilities of the future during these minutes, these tens of minutes in the middle of even the most intense space battle where nothing could be done. Speeds so great and distances so huge made interactions quick and preparations slow. They said that in the presence of death, the body and brain brought sex to the fore in one last attempt to pass on the genes.
He resolved that, if he survived, he was just going to ask her out. Once she wasn’t under his command, anyway. The worst she could say was no.
“Entering extreme range for rock engagement,” Lieutenant Chuks on Sensors said.
“What’s our ammo state?” Deke asked.
“Forty-one percent, Skipper,” Chief Warrant Tsing on Weapons replied.
“Wait, then,” Deke decided out loud. “Misses don’t do anyone any good.” He knew the big Behemoth railgun that ran the spine of the ship could burn up ammo pretty fast, and they’d need it when the time came.
Numbers on the clock crawled, until finally Chuks spoke. “We’re getting close enough to guarantee hits.”
“What does the commodore say?” The cruiser squadron commander, Captain Blackhorse, was given that title by courtesy.
“Last orders were to engage at our own discretion. Calgary has started intermittent fire.”
“I guess that’s the signal, then,” Deke said. “Guns, start firing small bursts at best targets. Minimize the frat.” He stared up at the big front display, at the Destroyer to the side of them, still boring in toward Earth. “Helm, plot me a squadron track, optimum burns, to engage the rocks, and then to swing back toward the Destroyer in time to hit it with whatever we have left.”
“With or without the cladding?” Macduff asked.
“Give me both plots. Also…run a max burn intersection plot.”
“Intersection?” She turned her smoky green eyes back to him and his breath shortened. “You mean ramming?” The rest of the bridge crew turned to look at their captain.
“If we have to. Just in case. If the Aardvark pilots can do it…how can we refuse?”
Tsing nodded first, gravely, and then the rest.
“Has to be without the cladding, then,” Macduff said briskly, as if discussing bad weather instead of their imminent deaths. “Unless we can get a perfect nose-on aspect, we can’t maneuver well enough with a million tons of rock attached to us.”
“Whatever it takes, Jennifer.” Realizing he just used her first name for perhaps the first time ever, he turned his eyes to the display to conceal his lapse.
“Aye aye, Skipper,” she said in a firm voice, turning to look forward again.
So what if they noticed. Deke found that impending death reduced the small stuff to complete insignificance.
“Taking position,” Macduff said after a few minutes. The cruisers had reached a point in front of the rocks again. Each lateral swing of the squadron had brought them closer to Earth, blasting back and forth on shorter and shorter arcs, the major advantage to their present position.
“Optimum fire patterns, Guns. What does the computer say?”
“Projections show less than a thousand rocks will reach the planetary defense zone, Skipper.”
“And will the fortresses take out the rest?”
Tsing turned from his board to answer. “More than ninety-nine percent, but statistical variance at that point makes it impossible to say. We might get them all, or as many as ten might get through to strike.”
“And then there’s the Destroyer. All right, people, do your best. Get as many as you can. Stay sharp, and if anyone gets any bright ideas, let me know, no matter how crazy.”
Innsbruck shuddered now, the vibrations of bursts of hundreds of railgun bullets at a time flung forward along the two-hundred-meter-long accelerator, leaving at over a hundred kilometers per second. Still a crawl at interplanetary speeds, but because each rock was coming straight on at seventy-five thousand klicks a second, the combined impact would be enormous, like a bird strike on a jet fighter.
“Chuks, what happens if a rock hits us?” Deke asked conversationally.
“Um…let me run the numbers.” A moment later the lieutenant answered, “Anything over about a ton will probably crack the cladding and do us some damage.”
“So letting a rock ram us is not a very effective tactic,” he mused.
“Not in the grand scheme of things, Skipper,” Chuks replied.
“Then let’s not do that. If we’re going to kill ourselves, we’ll take some Meme with us.” Deke sighed and reached into a pocket for a ration pack, activating the heater and then sipping the hot thick soup-like stuff through the attached straw.
“Here they come,” Chuks said after a few more minutes. Deke looked up at the big screen to see the wave of enemy rocks approaching the squadron. “Cladding is taking some hits from gravel.”
Of course, the millions of bits and pieces of the asteroids that had already been hit kept going toward Earth just as fast as ever, and now that cloud of debris had reached them. “No significant effect.” The screen fuzzed and whited, and then shifted slightly. “Except for losing some sensors,” Chuks corrected himself. “Activating reserves.”
On the surface, Deke knew that armored clamshells were opening up and tiny robots were emplacing cameras, lidars and phased-array radar emitters and receivers to replace those that had been vaporized by the speeding pieces. Without good sensors, of course, the Behemoth was useless.
“Final fires, point-blank.”
“Dodging.” The bridge seemed to tilt as Macduff threw the ship sideways to avoid a medium-sized rock that had altered course toward them. “Good thing they can’t turn much at their speed,” she said.
“Just keep us alive, Helm,” Deke said. “We have a Destroyer to meet.”
On the screen the cloud of rocks, much reduced, flew serenely onward. “Less than an hour to impact on Earth.”
“Skipper, a message from Commodore Blackhorse,” the CyberComm watchstander said.
“Throw it up for everyone to see,” Deke replied. Once Blackhorse’s chiseled face appeared on the big display, Deke said, “Commodore. What can Innsbruck do for you?”
Blackhorse did not respond, even though the squadron was close enough for comms to be effectively realtime. Instead, his eyes flicked to his right for a moment, then he took a deep breath and spoke.
“First Cruiser Squadron, this is Blackhorse. Our job shooting rocks is done. Others will have to finish them off. Our Aardvark escorts have given their last full measure. Admiral Absen has ordered all surviving EarthFleet ships with any offensive capability to head toward the enemy and do whatever they can. We were going to do that anyway, but I just wanted to let you know that we aren’t alone. No matter what happens, whether we live or not, we’ll do it together, in the company of brave warriors. I can think of no better way to die.” He raised a hand, palm out, in a kind of blessing, or salute. “Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.” Then his image winked out.
Deke cleared his throat. “I second the commodore. It’s a good day to die, but the day’s not over yet.”
“Squadron nav data coming through…programming,” Macduff said. Deke could feel the ship moving under him, heavy acceleration mitigated by the gravplates on the gimbaled bridge. “Here’s the tracks.”
On the display, Deke could see ten cruiser plots following the rocks toward Earth, but off to the side, intersecting the Destroyer’s path just as it got close to the planet. “Will we make it?”
“Yes, Skipper. When the Destroyer slowed down, the system calculated that in. We won’t be late to the party.”
“Even if he accelerates?”
Macduff’s eyes blanked for a moment as she accessed her VR world, and then replied, “If he goes balls-out right now, he could beat us, but…I doubt he has the fuel. He’s got to be getting low after all the fusor use, the things that hit Callisto, the hypers, and the hard maneuvering.”
“Unless he intends to ram Earth itself. What would that do?”
Macduff replied, “The same as an asteroid. But the Red Team reports all say Meme are not suicidal like that. They don’t sacrifice themselves for their race or empire. They always run away to try again later.”
Deke looked over at the intel watchstander, who nodded her agreement with the helm’s assessment.
“But he could speed up and fly by, and we’d never catch him?”
“Possible.”
Deke nodded. “So we just don’t know. How about us? What if we go to emergency acceleration? Keep just enough fuel not to fly off into space forever?”
Macduff answered, “Skipper, it would make a hell of a lot more sense to blow the cladding. Then we can accelerate and have plenty of fuel. It’s all this rock that’s slowing us down, making it a race.”
“Right.” Deke stroked his chin in a moment of thought, then said, “Tell the rest of the squadron we’re blowing the cladding and will fight without it. Give them a concise summary of our reasons, and transmit it…ten seconds before we do it.”
Macduff grinned. “Just enough time to claim prior notification, but not enough to countermand?”
Deke just smiled and lifted his chin at the CyberComm officer. “Set it up.”
“Aye, sir. Ready.”
“Ready to blow the cladding.”
“Give me the PA, please.” Deke cleared his throat to address the crew. “Captain Deaker here. Great job, everyone, but now it’s time to hurry back to Earth for the final fight. We’re going to blow the cladding to do that. Damage control parties stand ready. Blowing in one minute.” Sixty seconds later he turned to the CyberComm station. “Transmit.” Then to the helm. “Initiate.”
The ship shuddered as chemical explosives shattered the rock at preselected points. “Spinning the ship.” Macduff hit the thrusters, beginning a rotation that would throw the broken rock off into space. “I got one piece stuck amidships,” she said.
“I think I can get a point defense laser on it,” Tsing called. A moment later he said, “It’s cutting. Give it a minute or two and most of it will be gone.”
“Can’t you handle a few cling-ons?” Deke asked with one eyebrow raised. The bridge crew groaned, but with the weight of the moment they welcomed a little bad humor.
“No problem, Keptin!” Macduff replied with a wink and a cheesy Russian accent, and the tension lightened. “Heading for our rendezvous with destiny.” The display showed their plot now intersecting the Destroyer well short of Earth, in about forty minutes.
Something caught Deke’s eye on the big screen. “What’s that thing?” He used his arm control to highlight a rogue track coming in at the enemy rocks from the side, well away from the Destroyer and everything else. It seemed to be accelerating at extreme rates that nothing of Earthtech could match. “Another Meme?”
“Let’s hope not,” Chuks replied. “I got no IFF, though. Maybe it’s a missile?”
“Can we get optical?”
“I can try, but this far out…and we’re still getting some gravel impacts. Hard to keep steady.”
“What’s it doing?” Deke asked to no one in particular. “Looks like it’s joining the rocks…look at that thing go.”
“It’s matched velocities, Skipper,” Chuks reported. “It’s coming up behind one of them.” He manipulated the big display to zoom in and watch as the much smaller unidentified craft slipped in behind one of the largest rocks. “It’s closing in pretty tight.”
Closer and closer the blurry ship crept up on the rock from the back. “It’s firing…a fusor! It must be a Meme ship. Holy crap, it just flamed the guidance package. Now it’s nosing up and pushing on the side…”
Deke realized what he was seeing. “That must be the alien Blend woman – one of her ships. It’s the only thing fast enough to sneak up on those rocks like that and kill their engines. Now, with just a little push, it will miss Earth.” He stroked his chin. “How many do you think she can get?”
“Forty or fifty more, I’d guess,” Macduff said. “Better than nothing, but there are still thousands.”
“It looks like she’s going after the biggest ones, anyway.” The bridge crew watched as the little Meme ship flitted from rock to rock at amazing speeds, blasting the guidance packages and nudging rocks off course. “I take back anything bad I ever said about her.”
Chapter 79
Ezekiel Denham whooped and hollered within his VR world as he and Steadfast Roger burned another cloned engine to a crisp, then dove in like a dolphin ramming a whale to give the next rock a steady five-second shove. With tens of millions of kilometers still to go, that tiny push was sufficient to divert the rock enough to miss Earth.
“Good job, Zeke,” he heard his father’s voice over his bio-radio. “Keep doing that as long as you can, but remember to get out of the way before the as
teroid fortresses start firing. You don’t want to take a stray railgun round at those speeds.”
“Got it. Where are you, Dad?” Ezekiel asked.
Minutes passed before the answer came, during which time he knocked a few more rocks off course. “A long way away. You’re probably getting a lot of comm lag. Your mother and the quads are safe on the base, but I’ve got a few things to do to help out the defense.”
“Like what?” he asked, curiosity piqued.
The answer came a few seconds quicker this time, indicating Dad was getting closer, and pretty fast.
“Just like you, son, I’ve got a ship – I am a ship – and I can’t just sit idle while others fight.”
“I get it, Dad. Like when you were a Marine before.”
Of course, Ezekiel was also traveling at a quarter the speed of light in the direction of Earth, so between the two of them they must be closing fast. He wished he could take the time out to fish through all the memory data in Roger, but trying to find out where Dad and the Denham was without any clues would be far too distracting. He put that idea aside for the moment and concentrated on his game of whack-a-rock.
The fusor he’d had Roger create had been his first, but the Meme molecular memory programming made it easy. The only thing that was hard was how fast he was burning through fuel. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t have enough gas to stick around much longer before bingo. That was what the fighter jocks called “just enough fuel to get home.”
Ezekiel hoped one day he could be a fighter jock, but for now, this was as close as he would come.
When the next transmission finally came, it seemed his father’s voice filled his head, reverberating through his consciousness. “When you’re done, son, go back to the base and see your mother and the quads. I love you, son, and I’m very proud of you, and of all of them. Make sure you tell them how much I loved them.”
“What? Loved?” Ezekiel answered as if there weren’t a minute’s lag or more. He hadn’t missed the past tense. “What?”
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