The Orion Plague (36 page)

“Helm, how long until we catch up to the…to
our prize?”

Okuda answered, “Five hours, twenty minutes
at current speed. I’d prefer not to use the drive if we don’t have
to. I’m starting to get some warning signs on my diagnostics.”

“Very well. Comms, sound secure from battle
stations and general quarters, go to normal watch rotations. Pass
the word for Commander Huen, bring the auxiliary bridge crew here
and conduct turnover and relief.”

Absen caught an odd look passing over Okuda’s
face before the man turned away and closed his eyes, to commune
with the computers. He wondered what that was about. Perhaps he
wanted to stay on duty for a while longer, but everyone needed
sleep.
Even me
, Absen thought. He’d long ago learned to
resist the urge to stay awake too long. It just promoted
mistakes.

He was very thankful when Huen arrived
leading a troop of fresh – well, fresher – bridge officers. Okuda’s
relief came in last, a puffy-faced mustached German named Ingold,
and the two Helmsmen exchanged looks, as if possessed of secret
knowledge. Absen put it down to their odd little fraternity of
astronaut-helmsmen; he couldn’t chase down every twitch and nuance
or he could lose his mind.

After a thorough turnover – and instructions
to leave Johnstone alone in his trance – Absen stumbled, head
suddenly swimming with fatigue and stress reaction, to his
bunk.

***

He took his next shift after just enough
restorative sleep. Absen knew everyone was tired. He had taken four
hours to make sure he wouldn’t make any stupid mistakes, then he
ordered Commander Huen to bed for eight. The man probably had been
stimming, but he was an Eden and could take the chemical abuse.

Speaking of Edens
, he said to himself,
I feel a lot better than I have any right to. And I feel like
myself. Perhaps my fears were unfounded
. “Report, starting with
Engineering,” he ordered crisply as he sat down. It looked like he
had a whole new crop of officers on the bridge, except for
Johnstone, who now sat alert and seemingly unaffected.
I’ll get
to him in a moment.

“Power at thirty-six percent. All breaches
sealed, air supplies at nineteen percent.”

“What does that mean, nineteen percent? How
long?”

“Given the current remaining crew, about five
weeks, sir.”

Absen breathed a sigh of relief. He really
had no idea how they would get more oxygen, and it was tragic that
they had five weeks only because they had lost so many people to
breathe it, but that was a problem for tomorrow. “Casualties?”

Master Chief Timmons answered from his niche,
putting down his coffee cup to look at his tablet. How the man had
managed to find hot lifer-juice in the chaos was beyond him, until
he saw the small portable brewer bolted to the deck by his feet.
“Crew, six hundred sixty-four fit for duty. One hundred twenty-two
in the Infirmary. One sucked out into space in her suit, the
pinnace is going to pick her up on the next run to the prize.
Marines, two hundred five fit for duty, forty-five in the
infirmary. In total, nine hundred thirty-seven living souls.”

“Out of an original complement of three
thousand five hundred. Christ, that’s three out of every four
dead.” Absen pressed his palms into his forehead for a moment.

“Hell of a price, sir,” responded Timmons,
“but we won.”

“Yes we did. Helm,” Absen asked the
unfamiliar man in the cockpit, “how long until we park? Dock.
Whatever we call it.”

“We’ll match velocity in about twenty-five
minutes, Captain. Do you want me to bring us close enough to
dock?”

“Can we even dock with another ship?”

“With an Earth ship, yes. With the prize,
unknown. Either way, we would have to take all spin off the
ship.”

“Another design issue for the future. All
right, hold off, just get as close as you think best. Sensors?”

“On the screens, sir. No bogeys.”

“No bogeys? What about those drones?”

Rick Johnstone had been waiting patiently for
this moment, and he cleared his throat. Seeing Absen’s look of
assent, he spoke. “We have control of the drones, sir.” He looked
almost…smug.

Well, the kid deserves it
, thought
Absen,
if he got control of the alien machines
. “What can
you do with them, Johnstone?”

“Anything you want, sir.”

“Fine. Turn them over to Helm and call for
your relief. People as tired as you are make mistakes.”

Johnstone looked like he might protest, but
then nodded. “Yes, sir.” He touched a sequence of keys. “Helm, you
have control of the drones. Codes and instructions are in the first
file. Right now they’re inert and listening.”

“Roger, I haff zem.” Ingold the helmsman
busied himself learning how to give the alien machines
instructions.

“Before you go, Johnstone…what did you do?”
Absen asked.

“Well, sir, when I saw the drones were not
just observing us but launching weapons, I jammed them with the
radars using their own amplified signals. I fed them their own
commands, but all randomized. I figured they couldn’t do us much
harm if I could keep them confused. At the same time I had the
KimPark chewing on their encryption. Once it was broken, I just
worked my way inside and took them over. They’re amazing machines,
sir.” Johnstone started to become enthusiastic, warming to the
topic.

“All right, and you’ll have at least a month
to study them, but for now, your relief is here. Go get some
sleep.” Absen watched kindly as the young man climbed down the
ladder off the bridge, then turned back to his waiting officers and
continued the report. “Whatever happened with that infestation
someone told me about?”

“Medical got it contained, sir.” Engineering
told him. “Some kind of metal-eating bacteria. It cracked one of
the reactors, and destroyed a gyro, along with some other
generalized damage, but once we figured it out…nothing that bleach
won’t kill, they said.”

“Good to hear. Who’s next?”

***

At the end of his shift in the command chair,
Steward Repeth leaned over to whisper to her Captain. “The woman
wants to see you now.”

“Woman?”

“The Blend, sir. Raphaela.” She tapped the
squadcomm in her ear. “She’s waiting in your office.”

“All right.” He walked the short distance to
his cabin in silence until he thought of something. “How did she
dock with
Orion
?”

“I’m told she came over in a spacesuit, sir,
through the forward airlock,” Repeth replied.

“No baby?”

“No baby, sir.”

“Huh. Well, that’s her problem, I suppose.”
He rounded the corner and spotted Tobias standing imperturbably
outside his office. The man gave him an unfathomable look and then
turned to open the door for Absen.

Inside his office Absen stopped and lost his
breath for a moment. The television pictures had been simply unable
to do justice to the beauty and physical presence of the young
woman – alien – Blend – in front of him. A graceful six feet, he
felt like she was even taller, not used to women that nearly
matched him in height. More to the point, she glowed with vitality
and life, though it was a cold beauty now, with grief upon her
face.

And even packed into a shapeless coverall, he
saw she was built like a brick house.

“You can close your mouth, Captain,” she
snapped. “Don’t want to drool on your nice clean deck.”

“Sorry miss. You’re quite striking.”

She stared at Absen in stark disbelief. “What
does
that
matter? Alan is dead.”

“I’m sorry for your loss. Please sit down.”
Absen said, walking around to place his desk between them,
immediately feeling better. “The child’s father?”

“Yes,” she said as she sat. “Marine Warrant
Officer Alan Christopher Denham.” She spoke with obvious pride.
“How did he die?”

“Saving all our lives, it seems. They say he
blew up the Meme ship control center. That threw it out of control,
and may have allowed us to capture it. We owe him a lot.”

Holding back tears, Raphaela nodded. “I will
grieve later. Now you need to let me help you.”

“Help us?” Absen stood up to loom over the
seated woman. “I’m sorry about Denham, but I just lost two thousand
or more people. Now we have five weeks of air, and my helmsman
tells me our prize is on course for interstellar space if we don’t
find some way to bring it back.
Orion
can barely fly herself
home – we hope – at least into Earth orbit, and we are obviously
not set up to tow anything, since accelerating involves throwing
nuclear bombs out our back end. So,” he concluded heavily, leaning
on his knuckles, “what is it that you can you do for us?”

She chose not to stand, instead sitting back
and folding her hands. “I’m the answer to all your problems,
Captain. I can fly the Meme scout ship home, if it isn’t completely
dead from the battle. I can try to save its life, and if your
Marines didn’t kill all the Meme on board, I can question your
prisoners. I’m your
deus ex machina
, but I want something in
return.”

“I’m listening.”

“I want Alan’s body, and the suit he was
in.”

Absen sat back down. “All right. And I’m not
even going to ask why.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Raphaela said with
relief.

“So now, will you go take a look at the
frigate?” Absen saw her look of confusion. “The prize, the scout
ship. We called it a frigate. It certainly fought like one.”

Raphaela’s look turned to distress. “Oh, no,
Captain. I have only limited information about the Meme, since much
of the Watcher Base data was destroyed four thousand years ago, but
I do know that that was no frigate. That was a survey ship.
Like…like what the Navy would call a patrol boat, at most.” She
made a hissing sound through her teeth. “If that had been a
frigate
, you’d all be dead, and I’d still be laying
low.”

Absen leaned back, questions churning through
his mind.
How the hell did Markis let this wellspring of
information get away
, he wondered, then remembered with shame
how the problem until recently had been the alien plagues that had
ultimately killed over a billion people. In that light he could
understand their focus on the biological struggle instead of the
military.

“All right, I’m suitably impressed with the
scary aliens. Any idea how soon they will show up?”

“I may be able to find out from the scout
ship. I suggest we make it soon. If it dies, there won’t be
anything I can do about it.”

“If what dies?” Absen asked, puzzled.

“The Meme ship. It’s alive, just like mine.
Just like the Watcher Base. All Meme machinery is biomachinery.
That’s why you need me. Humanity doesn’t even have the knowledge to
understand the ways to learn the language to talk to the machines
to learn how to control them – are you starting to get the
picture?”

“Okay, we’re outclassed on this bio stuff,
but we beat them, didn’t we?”

Raphaela stared at Absen in silence. Finally
she assented, as if giving him a gift he didn’t deserve. “Yes, you
beat them. Here, in this place, like a caveman jumping a Space
Marine and beating him to death with a club. Well done.” She stood
up to loom over him this time, and he saw in her eyes not the young
woman that had volunteered for Blending, but the weight of four
thousand years staring out at him.

She went on in an emphatic, almost angry
voice. “But you and I are just a culmination of a string of brave,
smart, lucky, self-sacrificing actions by a lot of people, starting
with one courageous Russian biologist, a secret Jew that kept his
Talmud and his Torah behind a false panel in his miserable little
apartment on a bleak biological warfare research base in the middle
of Siberia. One man that had the brains and guts to respond to a
binary message that showed up on his computer, and keep it hidden
from his Soviet masters. One man that talked to me for
eleven
years
and never betrayed himself or me while I fed him
information on how to build a virus that would save humanity from
themselves and from alien invasion.”

Absen shook his head. It was all too much.
“You mean that you created the Eden Plague?”

“No, a man named Aaronovsky did. It seemed
like the best we could do at the time. I didn’t have the facilities
to create it or I’d have just dropped it on Earth myself, so I
taught him how to do it with the poor tools he had,” she said
patiently. “But then the Soviet Union fell, and I lost him in the
chaos. I tried to find people that would talk to me, that would
believe me, but do you know how hard it is to find a competent
microbiologist from beyond the orbit of Jupiter, while not being
detected by SETI?”

Absen held up his hands. “All right, all
right. You convinced me; I’m in complete awe of you. More to the
point, I have to trust you. I can’t see any other way. But I’m damn
wary of Greeks bearing gifts, if you know what I mean.”

“Okay, you can watch me with all your people.
You won’t need those Marines for anything else but security for a
while, after all.”

“So you mean the Meme won’t be showing up
with reinforcements any time soon?”

“Like I said,” she repeated with a hint of
exasperation, “I’ll let you know when I find out. But Meme think in
terms of centuries, not days and weeks. I'd bet the next ship, if
there is one, will be at least a few months or years in coming.
Now, can we get on with it?”

“Fine. Just make sure nothing you do scares
your guards too much. They just lost a lot of their brothers and
sisters to the Meme and some of them might want to take it out on
you.”

“And you wonder why I chose to look like
this?” She gestured at her own body. “Most people respond well to a
beautiful woman.”

“Can’t argue with that,” he said dryly. “All
right. Tobias!”