Troy Rising 1 - Live Free or Die (40 page)

So if the Horvath armor was, as all intelligence indicated, fullerene matrix, there was no
way that BDA 12 should have penetrated. Fullerene was bound together complexes of carbon
that were like geodesic carbon spheres. It was vaguely similar to diamond but
far
stronger. Two hundred centimeters of fullerene, which was what the Horvath claimed their
armor consisted of, was beyond even the power of the VSA.

As it turned out, though, the hull of the ship was, in fact, carbon fiber over steel. And
steel was not much more than the stuff the BDA had been blasting out of Connie for the
last year. Carbon was even less refractory.

The beam swept across the opening at nearly six thousand kilometers per hour, which
reduced its absolute power input even more.

It didn't matter. Four terrawatts of power hit the thin steel of the Horvath ship and the
'invulnerable armor' flashed into gas. The beam was attenuated more by the gaseous carbon
and iron than by the armor. But it was still moving at the speed of light and cut deep
into the ship as it swept across.

***

“Holy hell,” the admiral said. “That was a solid hit!” Sensors were quickly picking up
spectroscopy of water and oxygen being released by the ship.

“I'm retargeting BDA twenty-four to visual,” Dr. Foster said. “And...”

Most of the Horvath ship was a mirror-like shield across which the BDA beams could be seen
as bright as the sun that gave them birth. But one portion was clearly open and the
telescope revealed a thick gash in the side of the cruiser that was pouring out water and
air. As they watched, there was a flash of light and more damage was done.

“I think that was twelve,” Foster said. “It's at nearly three light seconds. If it can do
that... Permission to open fire with VSA. It'll take about... three minutes to set up.”

“Do it,” the admiral said. “Oh,
yeah
!”

***

“Fire has ceased,” the defense technician commed.

“Compartments fourteen, fifteen and twenty-six are open to space,” damage control commed.
“Breach is sealed but another hit like that is going to take out our forward reactor and
all forward screens.”

“Are they calling for us to surrender?” the Horvath battle manager commed. “Increase power
to engines. Come about. We are leaving the system.”

“No call to surrender,” the communications technician replied.

“Shall I open fire on the laser clusters?” the tactical tech commed.

“Negative,” the battle manager said. “We do not know why they have stopped firing. We
would prefer that condition remain until we can return with more forces.”

***

“Can the VSA target it?”

“We were moving it out system,” Dr. Foster said. “It's been cruising along, laying low,
through the whole battle. It's got better anti-jitter controls, better targeting, better
everything. So it's in a great position. The question is only how long it will last.”

“Full power coming to the BDA cluster... now,” the laser tech said.

“Permission to open fire, Admiral?” Dr. Foster said.

“Granted,” the admiral said, his jaw flexing. “Do it.”

***

The VSA cluster consisted of seventy-two BDA mirrors, each taking retransmissions from
dozens of other BDAs, many of which had been attacking the Horvath cruiser up until a
minute or so before. Now they gathered about half of the Very Large Array, even the VSA
couldn't handle the
full
power, and concentrated it on those BDA mirrors.

The cluster then took the power, bounced it around twice until the power was gathered into
thirty-six narrow beams and pointed
all
that raw power at the single VSA mirror. It, in turn, sent out the standard coffee mug
beam at the Horvath ship. The difference being it was not four terrawatts in a three inch
diameter circle. It was
one hundred and forty-four
terrawatts.

And it missed. Instead of hitting the small patch of missing shielding, it impacted
directly on the powerful forward shields of the Horvath ship.

***

“Shields are fa... !” the engineer tech wailed.

***

The beam of coruscating energy punched through the forward shield, through the forward
compartments, through the command center, through the engine room, jittered around cutting
compartment after sealed compartment and only really stopped because the beam wandered off
the target. Every portion that it hit the shields not only failed, the beam went right
through
the Horvath cruiser.

The immense swath of damage caused every gravity plate, every power system, to fail in
near simultaneity and the powerful Horvath cruiser came apart in a flash of gas and
plasma. Which the VSA continued to shred until Dr. Foster, delayed due to light lag,
realized he was just cutting up scrap.

He terminated power to the VSA, which was going into redline after only six seconds, and
looked over at the admiral.

“Mission accomplished, sir.”

“Hell,” the admiral whispered, rubbing his forehead. The ship that had dominated earth for
so long had been destroyed almost faster than an eye blink. “What have you
created
?”

“As I think Mr. Tyler would have put it,” Dr. Foster said, “a little temporary security.
Now let's work on that liberty thing.”

***

“How's your O2?” Steve asked.

“Fine,” Tyler said. “Unfortunately, I can feel my eyeballs starting to pop out. And I now
know what the bends feels like.”

Whether from the damage inflicted by the Horvath cruiser or the damage inflicted by the
gun, the cockpit had developed a leak. It was a small leak and the air compression system
was fighting it, but the onboard O2 was about exhausted and Tyler could feel the pressure
dropping around him.

“I think that slow decompression is going to be worse than rapid,” Tyler said. “I get to
experience it in slow motion.”

“That's going to... suck,” Steve said.

“Puns I don't need right now,” Tyler said. “I'll try to keep my screaming to a minimum.”

A shadow flashed across the small porthole. Tyler was sort of getting used to those. The
rubble of the multi-billion dollar space fighter, in keeping with microgravity conditions,
was trundling along with them. He'd even gotten a look at the separated tail-section. From
the clean-cut look that had definitely been a laser hit. At present he was wondering if
taking a direct hit wouldn't have been better.

But this shadow persisted. Then he caught a flash of gray hull metal.

“Mr. Vernon... ?” a voice said in almost a whisper.

“Hello?” Tyler said. “Somebody there?”

“Stan... y.”

There was a feeling of gravity to the side and the cabin thunked against something.
Suddenly, light flooded in through the porthole. But not sunlight, artificial light. There
was a distant clanging. And Tyler felt the pressure in the cabin start to go up. His ears
popped, hard.

A Glatun face appeared at the porthole. An unsuited Glatun face.

“How do you open this thing?”

***

“The plague is hitting full stride,” Steve said, reading the news feeds. “The distribution
got jugged in Indonesia. They're taking a major hit. And Africa is totally hosed.”

“It always has been,” Tyler said, looking out the porthole of the Glatun shuttle. The
alien docs on the Glatun ship had been able to fix him right up. It was, after all, a
medical
support ship. With, as it turned out, a pressurized shuttle bay. He
had
to get him one of those. And a space suit.

The ship swept around in a bank and Lake Washington was revealed in all its horror. The
Potomac went all the way to 7th. And it was now connected to the Anacostia along the line
that had been Pennsylvania. The actual creeks into the lake were small since they had had
to cut through the wall of rubble around the hole. That looked about a hundred meters
high. About the only memorial he could spot was the Lincoln which had been truncated at
the base. The rest of the city, in a circle about four miles in diameter, was flattened.
And then there were the fires.

Superfires were something that had, prior to the Horvath attack, been stuff of theoretical
studies. Superfires where what happened when a wall of plasma hit a modern city.
Everything in its path caught fire. In a circle six miles on a side. There was no way for
conventional firefighting to manage that, even where there was functioning water. The only
way to fight it was to destroy everything in its path and nobody had had the guts to do it.

The DC superfire had torched practically everything in DC on the inside of the beltway.
There were areas that had survived, but not many. Every major structure had taken at least
some damage and the capital of what was still the most powerful nation in the world, as
well as virtually its entire citizen body, had died screaming.

The hit in Frisco had destroyed every bridge then torched everything from Marina to
Millbrae. Most of the population that was trying to get out was headed across the Golden
Gate or the Bay Bridges when the strike hit. Or, rather, stuck in traffic on the Golden
Gate and the Bay Bridges. Ninety plus percent were now in the Bay.

Manhattan was more or less toast. The same damage had happened to the bridges as in SF and
even most of the ferries were destroyed by the combination of the plasma wave and the very
small, very intense, tsunami that had been kicked up by the strike which centered more or
less on the Chelsea Piers. Then the fires had started and raged across the entire island.
It was estimated less than a million people had made it off.

The LA superfire had been the real doozy. The strike hit when the chaparral of the LA
valley was ready to burn, anyway. They had seen the smoke from the LA basin during
descent. You could spot the fire from the moon. There wasn't an LA anymore. What wasn't
crater was a cinder.

“It's just buildings,” Tyler muttered.

“What?” Steve asked. The shuttle was coming down pretty hot and the sound-proofing could
be better.

“It's just buildings,” Tyler commed. “And people. People die. Buildings crumble. Britain
suffered worse in the Blitz. Germany and Japan
far
worse under our tender ministrations.”

“Practicing your speech?” Steve asked.

“Had it memorized when I was nine,” Tyler said. “Honor, duty, country, blah, blah. What
can't be killed is a vision of freedom and liberty.”

“Very nice,” Steve said, clapping. “Very touching. Amazing how decompression can focus the
mind.”

“Yeah,” Tyler said. “I'm not sure about the addition, though.”

“Which is?”

“And a determination that not only will no Horvath ship ever again get more than a hand's
span out of the gate, we're going to pay this back in
spades
.”

“Speak it, preacher,” Steve said.

“Funny thing,” Tyler said as the shuttle was landing. Unsurprisingly there was a
delegation. Tyler was faintly relieved that all the police present were being used to hold
back the crowds.

“What?” Steve said.

“Despite all this horror and damage,” Tyler said, “despite all the deaths, despite a
damned near crippled economy... Earth is probably a better loan risk than at any point
since the gate opened. Maybe now we can
really
get going.”

***

“I wish we'd detected this initially,” Xiy Gigum said. The 'Glatun' doctor was an
Ananancauimor specialist in epidemiological attacks. It was hard to tell body language
with a three foot long beetle, but he looked embarrassed. “We actually did detect it
before we came into the system. But with all the problems with distribution... it didn't
come up.”

“Which is?” Dr. Cline asked, tilting her head to the side.

“There was an additional packet with the last virus,” the Ananancauimor said. “A
retrovirus addition.”

“A genetically
changing
addition?” Dr. Cline said, getting very still.

Retroviruses actually referred to a particular class of virus, the HIV virus being the
most well known, that were simple chunks of DNA or RNA. They didn't have a protein shell,
just a strand of DNA.

But since they were also the type of virus most often used in genetic modification the
terms had become somewhat mixed. Any virus used for genetic modification was generally
termed a retrovirus.

“Yes,” Dr. Gigum said.

“And the nature of the packet?” Dr. Cline asked, trying to stay calm. The earth had
already taken enormous losses from the plagues and the viruses, before being stopped by
the Glatun medications, had spread through some ninety-five percents of earth's surviving
population. She was trying to
not
think of legions of cannibal mutants and failing.

“There is no easy way to say this,” Dr. Gigum said. "So I'm going to tip-toe around it.
This is the probable thinking on the part of the attacker, whoever that might be. They
anticipated success in this attack. They did not think that Earth would detect the viruses
or to spread the word. Most planets are not at this level of advancement when contacted
and most would not have had the ability to respond within a scant seven years of first
contact. They were also under the mistaken belief that if they left a significant number
of workers available to collect maple syrup that the Glatun and other races would not
respond strongly. This is, in fact, the first true epidemic we have had to respond to in
several hundred years. It does not mean we were not prepared, however.

“And all that means?” Dr. Cline asked. "Let me just ask a question. Is it going to cause
us to go insane or something?

“Not... quite,” Dr. Gigum said. “Let me proceed in my estimation. This left, however, the
problem of workers. In pre-industrial conditions, when there is a severe loss of life,
there is a very fast population growth in the aftermath. Populations spring back very
quickly.”

“Noted,” Dr. Cline said. “Various examples. The Black Plague comes to mind.”

“However,” the beetle continued, “in conditions in which a society is sufficiently
advanced to have reproductive
control
, population levels
dip
after severe losses. Individuals engage in recreational pseudo-reproductive activity, if
the species is bent that way. This is a way of dealing with the death.”