Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest) (20 page)

Melissa Scoggins walked over to Ezekiel to put a hand on the younger man’s head, and he leaned against her like a child with a mother while she stroked his hair. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

The tableau held for a moment longer, and then broke as Ezekiel let go and leaned back, wiping his face on his sleeve. Throats cleared and people turned back to their boards, leaving him to his remembered grief.

Absen caught Scoggins’ eye. “Let the display run, but pause it if anything particularly decisive starts to happen.” He got up to depart the room.

“The fleets should engage in around twenty minutes, maybe more,” she informed him, tapping at her controls.

“Thanks.” The captain walked out, and then hopped into an electric cart for the fastest transit possible. Tobias leaped aboard even as the thing began to move, flipping on the flashing red light and
bee-boop
siren sound, a signal to clear the passage, though few of the crew remained outside the flight deck.

Less than two minutes later the two men arrived at the cybernetics laboratory where Michelle lived. Her holographic avatar snapped to attention as he entered the room even as the lone civilian tech working there stood up in response to the nearby Marine guard’s roar of “CAPTAIN ON DECK!”

“At ease, everyone. Chief,” he turned to Michelle, “I’d like to apologize for leaving you out of what’s happening on the flight deck.”

“No problem, sir. I am watching all of the screens here, and making my own analyses.” Michelle seemed relaxed and confident, as usual.

“Even so, in not inviting you, I am playing into the fear of AIs that we all have. Instead, we need to start reducing that tension.” While Absen wasn’t completely confident in his own assessment, Ezekiel Denham’s words about his father had resonated. It was time to take a leap of faith: faith in another human being, even if she was one made of optical processors and quantum memory states.

“Would you please clarify, sir? What do you want me to do?”

Absen cleared his throat, looking over at the tech. “If I authorize you access to the necessary maintenance bots, how quickly could you set up holoprojectors, such as you have here, on the flight deck?”

The tech replied, “With Michelle’s full involvement, we could install a limited three-part system within nine minutes, sir, and transfer this avatar. In a few hours the entire area could be done.”

“That quick? All right, let’s do it. Then you can join the crew where they are.”

Michelle seemed to suppress a smile. “This will be interesting. I’ve never met anyone except the technical team, you and a few others who visited my quarters.”

“Quarters?”

“What I call my holographic room and workspace.”

Absen grunted, thoughtful.

The tech tapped at his board. “You’ll have to enter your authorization code, fingerprint and retinal scan here, sir,” he said. Absen quickly complied, accepting that he was now signing off on whatever the technician had set up. Even though he was captain of the boat, he had to trust everyone to do his job honestly and correctly, hundreds or thousands of times each day.

Trust. That’s what he had to do. Choose to trust this new human being that had been created, or copied, or programmed, and now lived inside the systems of his boat.

“Thank you, sir!” When Michelle’s enthusiastic salute dropped to her side, she disappeared, leaving the captain standing, bemused. The tech had plugged in his link and closed his eyes in the manner of modern CyberComm personnel. Absen glanced at Tobias, who merely turned back to the cart, this time slipping into the driver’s seat.

As they drove at speed through
Conquest
’s wide corridors, thankfully almost deserted because most of the crew were on the flight deck, Absen triggered his internal radio. Though something he seldom used, it seemed convenient now, and he passed on instructions to Bull ben Tauros to have Marines make sure the maintenance bots were given plenty of space to do their work.

“Let’s take a quick diversion. I haven’t seen my two favorite engineers lately.” Absen used the next several minutes to make quick appearances in Engineering and Weapons Control, greeting the skeleton crews there. He saw the battle displayed on their screens as well.

By the time he arrived back at the flight deck control room, a dozen spider bots zipped around at high speed in one corner, mounting holoprojectors and laying optical and electric cable. By the end of the predicted nine minutes, the avatar of Warrant Officer Michelle Conquest appeared. The machines continued to install projectors outward, expanding the network toward the area where most of the crew milled around or sat.

This caused a small stir among the milling crew on the flight deck. Cybernetics specialists familiar with Michelle clustered protectively around her hologram, as if to keep others away, but the AI simply walked through them and began introducing herself to as many curious ratings, noncoms and officers as possible.

Satisfied that his decision seemed to be working out, Absen turned back to the AV team and signaled he was ready.

“I’ve brought us back up to realtime, sir,” Scoggins said. “Or as real as it gets, by which I mean, we’re watching a synthesis that’s as up-to-date as I can make it with the actual light and sensor data as it comes in.”

“Got it, Commander. Let’s see.”

Absen saw the main picture show the sixty-four enemy ram-bodies broken up into a cloud of rocks ranging from sand through gravel up to pieces a few hundred meters wide, much of it still inbound toward the home planet. “Not much of that will hit Earth, I presume,” he said.

“Correct, sir,” Scoggins said. “As the asteroids were broken, most of the material deflected enough to miss the planet. About forty of our orbital facilities remain, and some slower ships that weren’t worth sending with the fleet. They’ll clean up or break up the rest.”

“Look at that.” Absen walked over to tap an icon on the console screen. “
Orion
. After a century of use, sixty years after we left home, the old girl’s still there for the fight.”

“Amazing,” Johnstone said, and the others echoed the sentiment, especially those such as Okuda and Scoggins, who had fought aboard her.

Far beyond the inbound swarm of meteoroids Absen could see the outbound line of EarthFleet asteroid fortresses and ram-bodies, the ones that had missed. Slowly, they were decelerating to eventually return. Calculations next to their icons showed days or weeks.

“Those are out of the fight,” Absen murmured, and then spoke more loudly for the crew’s benefit. “Admiral Huen’s asteroid counterforce did its job, but in doing so, the enemy removed a lot of our close-in defenses from the fight, which was obviously what they had hoped. They traded a bunch of low-cost rocks to get a significant portion of our forces out of the way, but they paid for it when the Exploder kamikazes sneaked in close.”

He picked up a handheld cursor to point at items on the big screen as he lectured for the benefit of the crew. “Now the remaining fifty-six Destroyers have diverted slightly spinward and up, staying well away from the now-useless fortresses, and are curving back inward under easy thrust, conserving fuel. The Home Fleet is pacing them sideways and falling back slightly, making certain that the Meme can’t squeak around them. There’s no Mars, no other planet for a slingshot. Nothing but open space.”

Now everyone could see what Absen described as the time-to-intercept numbers on the screen dropped below five minutes. “Why is our fleet falling back? Won’t that slow the closing speed of missiles and railgun shots, making it easier for the Destroyers to pick them off?” Rick Johnstone asked.

“That works both ways, Commander. It also gives our ships more time to knock down hypers, which should be launching soon. They need at least a few minutes time to get up to effective speed.” As if in response to Absen’s words, a blizzard of pinpricks appeared next to the Meme fleet.

“How many?” he asked.

“Not sure, sir. Give it time…”

A minute went by. “About thirty-five million hypers. Monster size, over a thousand tons apiece, I would say. Bigger than we’ve ever seen.”

“Thirty – I’ve never seen so many. That’s…”

“Almost seven hundred thousand launches apiece.”

“That’s impossible.” Absen cut himself off before he said something even stupider. “No chance that’s a data error?”

“No, sir.” The team in the room exchanged bleak glances.

“That’s almost a billion tons of missiles per ship. They just fired five percent of their mass.”

“That’s what the numbers say, sir.”

“They must have been gestating hypers for months or years to save up that many.” Absen had never felt so helpless as at that moment, and so despairing. With absolutely nothing he could do to affect the battle, he called for a time out. That he could do. “Freeze the feeds.” Then he stared.
“What’s happening to their ships?”

Scoggins and her team rapidly punched keys, some diving into their links for VR overlays. “It looks like they are reconfiguring the Destroyers.” She zoomed in on one, frozen in time with the “pause” function. “Normally they have the shape of rugby or Aussie footballs, fat oblongs. They are thinning and elongating. This one now looks like a plump cigar, and I think…” she let the displays run forward, “…it’s stopped.”

“What do those look like to you?” Absen said, his voice ominous with suppressed horror.

Before one of his officers could, Ezekiel spoke. “It looks like my…like the
Alan Denham
, before he slammed into the first Destroyer.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. Ladies and gentlemen…” Absen’s voice fired as he took a breath, “they are turning themselves into massive hypers. They intend to ram their way through to Earth.”

“But sir…that goes completely against Meme doctrine,” Johnstone objected. “All the lectures from Captain Forman and from Raphaela Denham said they would not kamikaze.”

Suddenly, Spooky Nguyen, who had been lounging quietly in a corner chair, bounced to his feet and strode forward to stand beside Absen, staring out over the flight deck at the giant screen. “Commander, please give us a close-up on the last group of Destroyers, the rearmost bunch there. Those eight.” He plucked the cursor out of the captain’s hand and drew a circle around the ones he meant. Absen ignored the impertinence, stepping back, fascinated.

Scoggins did so, and Spooky pointed with his outstretched arm. “Those have not reshaped themselves. Did they launch hypers?”

The sensors officer ran the video back, then forward again, muttering. “No. They didn’t.”

“They’ve changed tactics on us, Captain,” Spooky said. “I’d lay a hefty wager that group of eight contains the only Meme crew in their fleet, probably consolidated from the rest. The other vessels have been made into fireships.”

“Into what?” Johnstone asked.

“Fireships,” Absen said, still staring across the flight deck. “Old wet navy tactic. Fill a ship with explosives and incendiaries, leave just a pilot aboard or control it remotely, and you can turn it into a suicide weapon. They’re using our own methods against us, Meme fashion.”

Johnstone said, “So they evacuated everyone to those eight ships, keeping them back as a command group or reserve. If they fail in this attack, those will go streaking through the solar system and run away. They will have lost a bunch of Destroyers but few if any actual Meme.”

“I believe so,” Spooky replied.

“Damn. Why can’t they be stupid and arrogant like aliens in all the movies?” Absen asked.

“They
are
arrogant, Captain,” Spooky replied. “You might be too if you ruled an empire stretching across thousands of worlds.”

“Point.” Absen stared at the frozen displays a moment more, noticing the restlessness of the crew. He stepped out from behind the clear crystal of the flight control room and onto the catwalk that ringed the great open space, holding up his arm for attention.

Once the crew quieted and turned to look up at him, he addressed them in his best parade-ground voice, without amplification. “Ladies and gentlemen, let me remind you that what we are about to see happened almost twenty-four years ago. No matter how horrifying, no matter how you feel about what you see, there is nothing we can do about it. The light and data transmissions we are using to observe this battle has been traveling that long, and it will take us a similar number of years of realtime to reach Earth. If we win, we can continue as before in the happy knowledge the efforts of EarthFleet have kept the home planet safe. The battle is lost, it has been lost for decades, but we will still continue onward, to take the fight to the enemy.” He swallowed. “Good luck to us all.”

Instead of going back in the booth, Absen signaled through the glass at Scoggins with a spin-fingered motion,
roll it
. He wanted to see what the rest of the crew saw, feel what they felt, as much as possible, with nothing between himself and them.

Displays came to life again, pictures moving slowly at first, and then faster. Knowing he would be analyzing the records for weeks to come as they traveled, the captain resigned himself to just experiencing the next few minutes, without interruption.

Rip the bandage off, quickly, painfully.

The Meme fleet now flared with fusion drives at maximum, turning and burning in an arc that would line them up on Earth within moments. The group of eight hung back, and drifted spinward, in order to flash past rather than impact the planet like their fellows, close enough to fight but far enough off the line of advance to run.

In response, the Home Fleet interposed itself between the forty-eight fireships and Earth, as Absen knew they must. Now he wished Huen had saved more asteroid fortresses, but could not fault the man for what he had done. At the time, the Meme ram-bodies had seemed the greater threat.

One minute remained, and now the millions of hypers entered the engagement envelopes of the human ships. The EarthFleet vessels used Meme tactics against the aliens, turning their fusion drives toward the enemy and blasting at full speed. The massive plasma flares became weapons, burning tens of thousands of closely packed missiles at a time, while holding open the range as long as possible.