The Orion Plague (30 page)

Skull dodged another of the things he
thought of as white cells, gloppy masses with ropy tentacles that
chased him here and there. He had killed a couple of them with his
metal bar, and a few more he had to throw bio-bombs at and run.

The things were mindless, and not very fast,
but they were relentless and more were showing up all the time.
They must be automatically generated and were clearly converging on
the irritation within the Meme ship body – that is, him.

That all changed when he felt the next shocks
– fainter ones this time by far, but with an interesting and
unforeseeable side effect.

The ship screamed.

That was the only way he could describe it as
a clear sound of agony came through the thin spots over his ears.
Things that before remained still, jerked and snapped, lashing this
way and that.
Something sure pissed it off
, he thought with
vicious joy, and continued to plant his irritants.

In the next room he switched tactics. The
plan had been to wait, but he wanted to see what the results would
be, and perhaps now, when the ship was obviously hurt, would be the
right time. He prodded another part of the suit until it activated
and another type of ball fell into his hand, extruded by the thick
suit surrounding him.

This one had a solid, hefty feel to it, and
had a compact core of metal dust composed of millions of nanobots
that Raphaela had filtered out of him over the months he had been
in stasis. All it would take was exposure to the warmth and
moisture of a living thing to activate them.

She had been unable to reprogram them in any
way – there was simply no facility or technology available to work
with the microscopic machines – so it was really a gamble what
effect they would have. Nothing? Perhaps. But they were programmed
to heal and augment human physiology. It was a crap shoot what they
would do to Meme cells.

Skull hesitated holding the nano-ball. What
if it helped heal the ship? He might be helping their enemies. But
Rapaela had assured him that at the very least it would not be
beneficial, based on her own experiments with pieces of her ship.
She’d said there was an outside chance that, if its replication got
going, it could cripple the whole thing.

Despite being strung out from the change of
parameters, the
Orion
’s two hundred missiles detonated with
admirable regularity, carefully timed to minimize the chance of
nuclear fratricide, which was the effect of too-close warheads
consuming each other as they detonated.

These explosions occurred on the sides of the
rock as seen from the
Orion
, set to slap the backside of the
asteroid as they crossed its equator at high speed. Unfortunately
very little of the blast effect reached its dark side, as the speed
of the missiles receding actually exceeded the speed of the
physical shockwave.
Orion
’s main hope with this salvo lay in
the hard radiation and EMP that the two hundred warheads poured
into the frigate from a range of mere football fields. If the enemy
ship had a lot of biotechnology aboard, the theory went, then
pumping it full of radiation might damage it badly.

“Results?” Absen asked.

“More debris, sir.” Scoggins at Sensors
changed the view, moving the schematic to a secondary screen, then
zoomed in on the asteroid and its surrounding space. They could
still see nothing but a misshapen and pummeled rock floating in
space. “Do you think we got it, sir?” she asked.

“Let’s hope we did, and act like we
didn’t.”

“Permission to go active?” asked Scoggins on
Sensors.

Absen chewed the inside of his lip. “Not yet.
They still may not have spotted us. How far are we out?”

Okuda responded, “Four minutes, passing
eighteen thousand klicks, sir. Deceleration can commence any time.
The sooner we do it, the gentler the Gs but the longer it will
take.”

“As soon as we do, they’ll see us anyway. All
right, Scoggins, at twelve thousand go active on all sensors. How
much time will you need for a scan?”

“At least fifteen seconds, sir.”

“All right. Ping for twenty seconds, then
secure the radars, call it out. Helm, as soon as that’s done you
may start your deceleration.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Okuda responded as Scoggins
initiated the
Orion
’s powerful phased-array radars that
until now had sat idle.

Helm reached for his controls, hands
poised.

A shrill alarm cut through the calm. “Conn:
Sensors, I have bogeys. Four maneuvering tracks.” The main screen
jumped to show a nose-on schematic with flashing yellow icons
depicting the contacts, set in a rough square about five kilometers
from the sides of the asteroid.

“More bogeys.” Abruptly six new icons leaped
from behind the asteroid, then stabilized close to its image on the
screen. A rapidly decreasing stream of figures accompanied each
one. “Bogeys on intercept. Accelerating at high G, impact in nine
seconds.”

“Helm, fire the drive.”

Okuda’s finger was already stabbing down,
overriding the normal five-second count. Nuclear fire flared from
the forward-facing tail of the battleship, throwing up a screen of
heat, shock and radiation Absen hoped would fend off the enemy
missiles. “Weapons, you are free to counter.”

“On it, sir, computer counterfire on
automatic.”

It won’t matter
, thought Absen
suddenly to himself. There was no way the Arrowfish or Gatlings
would be able to see or fire through the drive blasts. If the
nuclear explosions did not stop them, there would be no time for
the CIWS, and certainly no time for the missiles.

Nine seconds passed with no apparent effect.
“What happened to those tracks?” Absen snapped.

“Too much EMP…scanning…sir, they flew past.”
Scoggins typed frantically and a plot speared on the main screen.
It showed six tracks arcing around the front of
Orion
like a
starburst, then curving inward.

“They dodged!” Johnstone cried as the drive
fell silent.

“Counterfire tracking. Arrowfish away.”
Salvos of five antimissile missiles streaked from each of six
rotary launchers, groups crawling slowly toward the six enemy
missiles on the plot. By comparison the alien weapons moved like
possessed hornets, looping around and lining up on the
Orion
to lunge toward it. “CIWS firing.” A sound like a thousand electric
chainsaws filled the ship as every radar-guided Gatling that could
bear spat thousands of rounds that burst into millions.

Absen watched in horror as the six enemy
missiles sidestepped the Arrowfish like halfbacks around lumbering
linemen.
Too fast, too fast
, his mind screamed. The plot
zoomed in, decreasing its scale as the weapons closed. Rivers of
speckled light representing the CIWS bullet streams writhed lazily
toward the things, overlapping by the dozens.

One track winked out, drawing a cheer from
the bridge, but the rest bored in, overtaking the ship, sandwiching
it between themselves and the frigate, dodging the streams.

“How fast are those things accelerating?”

“I have nine hundred Gs, sir,” Okuda answered
calmly.

“Nine –” Absen nearly choked. “Velocity at
impact?”

“Roughly one hundred kilometers per
second.”

“Holy –” Words failed him.

Helm touched a control and his voice rang
over the PA. “Now hear this, collision alert, all hands brace and
seal.”

Sensors called, “Three, two, one –”

The great ship rang, cried out in agony as
five hypervelocity missiles no bigger than fire extinguishers
punched deep into
Orion
.

Each struck with the force of a small atomic
bomb, lacking only its radiation. Each flattened from its sleek
reverse-teardrop shape as it encountered the ferrocrystal outer
layer, allowing the merely human-developed ceramic and steel
sandwiches to slow it further. Even so, each tore a ten-meter-wide
gap in
Orion
’s skin and bludgeoned dozens of meters deep
into her innards, shredding decks, equipment, and people.

The terrible impact turned the missiles’
substance into plasma as it was stripped away by friction, igniting
every flammable substance along their paths, consuming oxygen,
suffocating and vaporizing human beings, setting to flame even the
aluminum alloys of the air conduits. Five blazing fingers reached
for
Orion
’s heart.

Slapping another opening in a wall, Skull
tossed the nano-ball into the room, half-occupied by some kind of
pulsing hemisphere. The object struck and stuck, then melted,
leaving a greyish smear of nano dust on the surface. He watched for
as long as he could before the white cells started to appear.
No
effect
. Cursing, he went back to running and planting his
bio-bombs.

Several infections later he slapped open a
wall to find something new. It was a corridor, whereas before he
had been wandering from room to room. This wide tube looked to run
the length of the ship, and seemed to have a stable shape. Its
surface was firm and solid, almost metallic instead of rubbery and
organic.

Looking to his right he saw enormous tubes
lining the walls for a dozen meters, which then converged to a
place where they seemed to penetrate the bulkhead. To his left, the
tubes thinned and then disappeared, and more corridors led off in
several directions from up there. He went left.

“Report!” roared Captain Absen as red lights
flared on the bridge officers’ boards and the CCC rocked
nauseatingly on its gimbals.

“I –”

“There’s –”

The ship’s drive lit again as Okuda
maneuvered, initiating deceleration. Sound and waves of kinetic
energy from the drive bombs competed with klaxons and the screams
of the dying as he fought to slow the ship before it flashed
uselessly past the asteroid. It was clear to all that they could
not compete with the enemy in a battle of maneuver.
Orion
was the Zeppelin, the enemy the fighter plane.

The Master Helmsman knew they had only one
chance. They must close and bring their armament to bear on the
enemy at point-blank range, where maneuver would mean nothing. No
matter what the cost, he knew that he had to get the ship to within
a thousand kilometers, preferably a hundred or even ten. One blast,
one salvo, one punch was all they might have.

Okuda angled the drive bombs, throwing them
out slightly off center, causing
Orion
to drift and angle
herself in toward the asteroid as she slowed. He varied the
deceleration, leaving gaps of seconds in hopes that the radar beams
could punch through the EMP interference of the drive bombs. The
phased array radars were hardened, and mounted near the front of
the ship, but even so he knew Sensors was struggling. The
computer-generated synthetic plot on the main screen jumped and
twitched as it received sporadic updates, interpolating knowns and
unknowns.

Absen clamped his jaw tight, feeling the
inertial forces build as the bombs exploded. His G-suit inflated,
forcing blood to his brain, and he wondered again whether he should
have given himself the Eden shot. No matter what everyone said, he
still didn’t trust it.
What a hypocrite you are
, he told
himself.
You made the normals in the crew all take it yesterday,
with no problems whatsoever, excepting only the senior officers.
But for them it’s too important to risk some kind of reaction, or
interaction, with the ship’s nano-carrying population.
That’s
what he told himself.

Greying out, he cursed his cowardice.
I
should have done it already
.

Coming to, he heard his crew snapping orders
without pause. Because they were all either Edens or nano carriers,
and of course Okuda was connected with his machines via cybernetic
implants, they continued to function where he had become nearly
superfluous. Absen snarled to himself and made a decision he should
have long ago.

Reaching into his suit’s cargo pocket, he
pulled out an Eden auto-injector. Removing the cap and revealing
the needle, he unsealed his left cuff and stabbed at the exposed
skin. Holding it there for the standard five seconds, he felt
nothing worse than the pain of the horse-sized syringe.
I sure
hope that was the right thing to do
. Thus committed, he put the
empty vial away and focused his mind on the situation.

“Ten seconds to target,” Okuda called in his
imperturbable voice, and the drive roared again. “Weapons, make
ready.”

Absen was grateful the man had taken over
combat operations; he had to accept the fact that
Orion
was
part battleship, part oversized fighter-craft right now, and they
were all learning in her crucible forge. He kept his mouth shut and
watched, conscious that he had to let Okuda do his job.

“All surviving beam and gun weapons free to
fire at their own discretion. Offensive missiles hold fire.” Ford
sat poised with his fingers over touchscreens. “Scoggins, once you
identify the frigate I’ll slave all weapons to a coordinated firing
solution and try to hit it with everything we have.”

“Roger, Weapons. Here we come.”

The plot showed the ship falling past the
asteroid at close range. If Absen read it right, Okuda was shaving
the rock at a range of less than a kilometer, barely two ship
lengths.
Cripes, the man was good.
It was like flying a
blimp backward between skyscrapers.

“Conn: Weapons, beams firing.” Lights on the
bridge dimmed suddenly as all available power went to the
lasers.

Outside, the massive projectors lashed the
underside of the asteroid with coherent light. Chunks of rock blew
off, silent explosions that marched across its surface in the
vacuum.