Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest)

by VanDyke, David

  Ekara’s frown deepened, even while nodding reluctantly. “I understand.” When Absen made to move on, he raised a hand. “One more thing. I’d like to use Michelle. WO1 Conquest, that is. She can help test components. Speed things up a bit.”

  “All right. She’s assigned to you. Now, maybe this will help explain about the power system setup.” Absen nodded to Commander Nightingale.

  “Sir, weapons are excellent, performing beyond spec in fact, except for the Letoi gear. At under 1000 kilometers, a coordinated alpha strike delivers enough of a wallop to kill a Destroyer in one salvo. I can’t guarantee it will be vaporized like with an Exploder, and it will still be available as biomass for other Meme ships to eat, but my calculations show that it and every other living thing on it will be killed.”

  Absen smiled. “Excellent. That falls in line with the tactics I intend to use.”

  “Sir, can you explain those tactics from start to finish?” Lieutenant Fletcher said. Absen had put a bug in the man’s ear to ask just that question at the right time.

  “Yes, I can.” The admiral stood up. “Whereas before we had a fleet, each ship with its role, this time we will be acting independently. Most of you know I started out in submarines, which seemed at the time to naturally transfer to spaceship command. I hope it’s not just an old man’s folly, but I envision Conquest as a new kind of attack submarine.”

  “Pretty damn big sub, sir,” Ford mumbled.

  “Subs were pretty big for their time, too, Ford, and the ocean was also huge. Now, this ship is big, but space is far bigger. The key analogy comes in the way we move, hide and fight. Like a sub, we have weapons big enough to sink ships with just one of them – one Exploder, one alpha strike. And like a sub, we will approach undetectably, make our kill, then run and hide – and do it all over again, and again. Subs don’t stand and slug it out. Subs hit and run.”

  “Conquest was built as a dreadnought, to go toe to toe with a Destroyer and win,” Ford objected.

  Absen shrugged. “Yet she became a colony carrier and a flagship. Also, we found even greater threats than Destroyers, things that could beat us. The system Guardian, for example, and the moon weapon. Throughout the history of warfare, man has built bigger heavier warships and gained a temporary advantage, only to have the weapons increase in power to counter. If we try to stand and deliver, we may encounter a new Meme technology, or find ourselves overwhelmed by sheer numbers the way Desolator was long ago. And if you don’t like the sub model, think of us like a powerful surface raider. Anything big enough to beat us, we can run from.”

  He paused to let that sink in, waiting for comments. Silence reigned until Timmons asked, “Does that mean we can call her a boat now instead of a ship? Please?”

  “By all means, COB, if it makes you happy.”

  “Oh, it does, sir. It does. I’m a COB, not a COS.” Chuckles swept the audience. Timmons was well liked, for all his gruffness.

  “Tactics?” Fletcher prompted again.

  “Yes, back to tactics. Generally, as I said, we attack and run. Specifically, we do what we have been practicing. Charge all capacitors fully, especially the TacDrive. Use the first pulse to race in at lightspeed, stop and launch an alpha strike, and use the second pulse to get away. If we have enough intel and can execute precisely enough, we might be able to use pulse two to move into a second attack position for another kill, and use the third to run far enough that no one can catch us before we recharge.”

  “That’s it, sir?” Ford said. “So simple?”

  Bless you, Commander, for challenging me, and for feeding me straight lines.

  “Sub warfare also sounds simple when described, Mister Ford. Just sneak in, fire torpedoes, and sneak away. In war, everything is simple, but even the simple things are difficult. And, the sub analogy is fine as far as it goes, but Conquest is more capable than any sub ever built. We have an Aerospace squadron on board. We have Marines. We have manufactories that can make spare parts and replenish our ammunition – in fact, we can build almost anything as long as we get raw materials from asteroids and comets. We have an AI on board that most of you met, with a lot of unrealized potential. We have laboratories and three different races, including Blends.”

  “To explore strange, new worlds…” Scoggins mused.

  “Et cetera; yes, Commander. Where we find Meme, we will disrupt and destroy them. Where we run into others, we may find allies, new technology, knowledge…or unknown dangers.”

  “Sir?” Master Helmsman Okuda spoke up. “I think everyone would like to know, and the scuttlebutt’s been all over the map. Where are we going first?”

  Everyone shifted in their seats, leaning forward as one as if straining to hear as a silence fell over the conference room.

  “Officially? I’m not saying.” Absen showed his teeth in a grimace. “But I think you all know there’s only one possible answer to that question for any human being. What we find when we get there…everyone needs to prepare themselves for the worst.”

  Chapter 11

  Jill Repeth sat across the table from her husband, Rick Johnstone, and took his hand. “You’re working too hard, hon,” she said.

  “No more than you,” he replied. “I want to finish up the new algorithms before…”

  “Yeah. Before. But we still haven’t decided.”

  Rick stood up to pace, not meeting her eyes. “You mean we haven’t come to terms. That’s not a decision.”

  “You know how I feel.”

  “And you know how I feel!” He turned toward her and raised his voice from across the room, throwing up his hands. “I just can’t understand how you can even think of leaving before our children grow up!”

  Jill deliberately did not get up. “I didn’t say it was easy. It’s just what I need to do.”

  “There are more than enough Marines for Conquest. In fact, there are three times as many volunteers as they need. Let someone else go in harm’s way this time, please. Just for a few more years.”

  She sighed. “Rick, the kids…they’ll be fine. Our crèche group has ten mothers and five or six involved fathers. They’ll miss us, but the ones you call ‘our’ kids are hardly more ours than the other forty or fifty are. In fact, with them living communally, they are each others’ family far more than we are.”

  Rick threw himself into his chair. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. This communal-family thing is unnatural. We’re raising a generation of kids with no strong ties to their parents.”

  “To their biological parents, maybe, but they love all the mothers and fathers, and in some cases they find better matches among the others. Cassie, for example, really likes Howard.”

  Tears sprang into Rick’s eyes. “I know,” he whispered.

  “Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” Jill moved to sit in his lap.

  Rick looked up into Jill’s brown eyes and put his arms around her. “It’s hard to watch my own kid love a surrogate parent more than me.”

  She kissed him gently. “Your namesake likes you the best, though.”

  Rick chuckled, masking his pain. “Ricky Markis. I love the little guy like he was my own. How can I leave him, and the others?”

  Jill pulled away slightly, and then stared into his face. “You don’t have to go.”

  “You think that’s a better solution? Stay here while you go? Keep them but lose you?”

  “Only for a few decades,” she said with false lightness. “What’s that to immortals?”

  “No one is immortal. We’d hardly know each other after that long.”

  “I’d know you.” She seemed to be willing him to understand.

  Rick gulped. “Only a few weeks or months will pass for you, while all those years pass for me. We don’t even know where Absen is going, do we?”

  Jill cleared her throat. “Not officially, but…there’s only one place that makes sense to me.”

  “Yeah. Earth. We have to know what happened.” Rick dropp
ed his hands from around her waist and wiggled, prompting her to get up off his lap. “Drink?”

  “Sure. Beer is good.”

  He got two out of the fridge. They popped the tops, toasted silently and drank the first swallow together.

  “Rick, if it’s what you want badly enough, I’m okay with you staying. Not happy, but…”

  He set the bottle down. “It comes down to this,” he said harshly. “Who loves who more? Or less? You love me more than you love the kids, that’s obvious. You’re going to go, no matter what I decide. I can see it in your eyes. Now I have to choose between you and them.” Rick held his hand up. “I know, just for a century or so, right?” It was supposed to sound funny, but instead he heard the bitterness in his own voice come through.

  Jill didn’t answer for a time, just sipped her beer and watched him stew. “The only way we would all be together is if we all go, or we all stay. I don’t see Absen letting people bring kids on a warship.”

  “He did before!”

  “In stasis coffins, sure. Because Conquest’s belly was the safest place to be during a battle. There was no better choice.”

  “There’s no guarantee that they will be safer here on Afrana. The Meme could still show up with a hundred Destroyers. A thousand! Or Desolator could lose his mind again.”

  Jill snorted. “Or they could get hit by a bus. It’s not about whether they will be safe. It’s about being on a ship of war. Who would supervise them? A warship can’t allocate crew to child care. No, that’s out.”

  Rick’s voice went up a notch. “Everything is so simple for you, isn’t it! Black and white, weigh the options, choose a course of action and stick to it. Well, I’m not like that. I can’t just shut down my feelings and fling myself into battle the way you can.”

  Jill moved toward him, but he put a hand up to fend her off. “Uh-uh. Don’t try to charm the mad off me.” He slugged down the rest of his beer and then said, “I’m going for a walk. I need to get some air and think.”

  Outside, at the bottom of the stairs, Rick looked up at the night sky. Already light pollution from the growing human city made it difficult to see the stars, so he zipped up his lightweight jacket and strode off southwestward, aiming for the nearest edge of the savannah.

  The gridded blocks of flats ended abruptly, as if someone had drawn a line in the dirt at the edge of the fenced playgrounds. Beyond that, rolling grasslands beckoned, and Rick set his feet on a well-worn path next to a paved two-lane road.

  The tarmac was a concession to limiting the damage to the grasslands as motor vehicles moved occasionally between the human city of Yeager’s Landing and the Ryss settlement of Juriss, named after Desolator’s captain at the final battle for their homeworld. Brisk wind chilled him so he increased his pace to a jog, both for warmth and to burn off some of his frustration. The smells of alien plants and animals mixed in his nostrils, reminding him once again that this was not his homeworld.

  Perhaps it would never be, no matter how long humans stayed on it.

  Without conscious thought, he’d headed toward the town of the great cats. Maybe I need a different perspective, he thought, or just a friend.

  Rick slowed as the dwellings came into view, things woven of bamboo-like reeds around shells of high-tech alloy against the occasional storm. He supposed they were the human equivalent of log cabin houses, traditional on the outside and modern on the inside.

  As he strode into town he shivered in the chill, making for the center, where the public houses would be open. A man-sized figure detached itself from the edge of a wall, stepping forward to block his way. It spoke in the Ryss tongue.

  “What are you doing here, monkey?” Two more shapes flanked the first, and they sidled left and right to surround Rick.

  Rick answered in the same language. “Seeking my blood brother Trissk. Why do you impede me, kit?”

  The Ryss in front hissed, and his ears flattened. “I should gut you for your words, but for today, you live.” He slunk off sideward to watch from the shadows, and his two fellows followed.

  Rick marched on past, stilling the shaking in his hands. The only way to deal with youngling males was to face them down. The Ryss teenager could have killed him easily, but he had counted on Trissk’s name to back them off. Ryss also had cause to fear human Marines, whose cybernetics made them more than a match for any feline. Probably the three couldn’t tell that he wasn’t physically augmented, and wouldn’t take the chance, not to mention the blood price any attacker’s mother would have to pay under Ryss law.

  Ryss females were not known for excessive sentimentality past the first few years of their offspring’s life. It was not unusual for a mother to snap such a one’s neck and present the body to the offended party’s family by way of apology.

  A rumbling cough from behind him, the Ryss equivalent of clearing the throat, brought Rick around. A full-grown male warrior loomed in the starlight, and then spoke. “You handled them well.”

  Rick reached out to clasp extremities with the other in the Ryss manner, paws and hands facing up and down rather than sideways like a human handshake. “I was looking for you, Trissk my brother.”

  “Who else would you come to see, alone and in the middle of the night, Rick my brother? Let’s go have a drink, and you can tell me all about your problems with your Wife.”

  Rick choked back a laugh. “I didn’t know Ryss could read minds.”

  “No, but we are shrewd and clever. Catlike, even.” Trissk winked his nearer eye, a gesture common to both races. “What else would bring you out here, now, and without adequate clothing, but troubles with a female?”

  Rick merely grunted as he put his head down and buried his hands in his pockets, turning toward the town center. “Some heated grog will be welcome.”

  Soon they reached the middle district, where the structures looked less like grass huts and more like frontier buildings, though they still used the woven reeds to add character. The Ryss had discovered, or rediscovered, neon signs, and flashing colors beckoned them into one of them that Trissk chose.

  Inside, the clientele glanced their way and then studiously ignored them.

  More like cats than they like to believe, he thought. I wonder how apelike we seem to them?

  Once they got mugs of hot sweet alcoholic tea from the bar, they took a booth that gave them the illusion of privacy and sat down.

  Rick sipped the scalding brew and sighed. “That’s good.”

  Trissk shrugged. “It’s adequate. Human tea, as we had no seeds of our own to plant. The Hippos drink worse things, though their cattle’s fresh milk is good. Now, speak.”

  Rick made a face. “It’s simple, really. As I told you when we met, I do not seek war as a vocation, but Jill is a warrior through and through. I want to stay and build, and raise my children. She wants to join Conquest and fight the Meme.”

  “A noble impulse, even if she is female, and I make allowances for you because of different Human ways. I fail to see the issue, though. Warriors, no matter their sex, go to war. What else would they do?”

  “I just don’t want her to go so soon. Not until our kits – our children,” he substituted the human word, “are grown. There are already three times the number of warriors required that wish to go. There is no need for it to be her.”

  “But she is restless, and she is a leader. More even than warriors, leaders feel compelled to be in the forefront of battle, or they do not feel whole.”

  Rick nodded, drinking more grog. “And there’s no battle here.”

  “Shall we start one?”

  Rick laughed, and then stopped as Trissk looked intently at him. “What? You’re not serious.”

  “I am. At least, partially. Our younglings will soon be yearsmanes, and then what? Ryss are a conquering species. For a time, perhaps a generation or two, they can be turned to subduing this northern wilderness that the Hippos care nothing for in their hot swamps, but even then they will play warriors’ games, attacking ea
ch other by ones and twos. There will be deaths, but that is expected. The strong survive.”

  “Does that matter? I mean,” Rick went on hastily, “that appears in line with your culture. Like aboriginal tribes in Human history, in a continuous state of low-grade warfare and raiding, but nothing that threatened the whole.”

  “Yes. Juriss town will become Juriss Nation. Others will split off and form new nations, and spread, and soon enough there will be a billion Ryss with nowhere to go but south, toward the herbivores.”

  “But that won’t be for hundreds of years,” Rick protested.

  “Less than one hundred. You forget how fast we breed.”

  “But you’re a technological people. You’re not savages, even if your ways are rough by our standards. Birth control, warlike games as diversions, education...”

  Trissk nodded. “Those will buy us time. Perhaps we can even change our culture to one of stability instead of incessant expansion, but it will be difficult enough in the long run. In the short…well, you saw the three little thugs. We are breeding too fast, now that the controls have been lifted. But,” he smiled, “how did we get from your female troubles to the Ryss’s future?”

  Rick shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe the other guy’s problems always seem easier to solve.”

  “Yes,” Trissk chuckled. “We have a saying. The other’s prey is always juicier.”

  “Yeah. Well. If my problems really are easier…what do I do?”

  “What do you want to do? Forbid her?”

  “No, convince her!”

  Trissk sat back, idly digging a foreclaw into the wood of the table. “A Wife cannot be convinced. She must either decide, or believe she decided, what you also want. Or you can order her and perhaps gain compliance, though the cost of that is high, and only to be used for the most important of issues.” He reached up to lift his mane, revealing the scars of four sharp claws, then let it fall.

  “Klis?”