Plague Wars: Infection Day: First Trilogy
Author: David Vandyke; Ryan King
Date: 2017-03-13 00:00:00+00:00
Description: From Hugo nominated author David VanDyke. When the Eden Plague is loosed upon the world, the forces of order and chaos, good and evil must battle it out in a struggle for control and supremacy. A PTSD-damaged combat medic, a female Marine with no legs and a sniper with no remorse might be its only hope of survival. Can these flawed heroes drive back those who would enslave humanity? Or will the darkness spread and swallow them up? Begin your journey through the epic saga of the Plague Wars with the gripping first three books of the bestselling apocalyptic series, for the first time in one enor

Comes The Destroyer

By
David VanDyke

Copyright © 2013 by the author. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means whatsoever (electronic, mechanical or otherwise) without prior written permission and consent from the author. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my friends and fellow science-fiction authors Vaughn Heppner and B.V. Larson, for their tireless encouragement, for persevering and showing me the way.

Thanks to my readers – my lovely wife Beth, my friend and fellow authors Ryan King and Nick Stevenson, and the members of our Friday Night Writes group – Jimmie Lee, Carol Scheina, R. Brian Roser, and Duane Lee, talented authors all - for their excellent critiques; their feedback has made me a better writer and this book a better novel.

Cover by Humblenations.com

By David VanDyke:

Plague Wars series:

The Eden Plague

Reaper's Run

The Demon Plagues

The Reaper Plague

The Orion Plague

Cyborg Strike

Comes The Destroyer

Stellar Conquest series:

First Conquest (within the anthology Planetary Assault)

Desolator

Tactics of Conquest

Look for them at your favorite book provider or visit www.davidvandykeauthor.com

Table of Contents

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Epilogue

Chapter 1

Year One.

The great desert city in the Outback had fled piece by piece upon thousands of lowboys, what the Australians called floats, much of it heading west across the kilometers to Exmouth Spaceport along the brand-new Central Motorway. All that remained was the lunch bunker and the people and equipment it sheltered, and its raison d'être looming in the distance: Artemis.

Unlike the launch of Orion, this sendoff seemed muted, almost routine, despite being only the second of its kind. Without the pressure of immediate alien invasion, it had taken on the ho-hum character of just another space shuttle firing – at least to the layman.

For the myriad experts sitting in front of their control boards, it was anything but.

Most of those men and women were engineers of one kind or another – mechanical, electrical, aeronautical, propulsion, nuclear – and with that expertise came the exquisite torture of the knowledge of just how much could go wrong. Because of that, and the innate conservatism of space controllers everywhere, they had used the tried and true. What worked with Orion they figured would work with Artemis.

Thus she also sat atop thousands of tons of high explosive to provide that first, all-important push upward. Like an aircraft carrier’s catapult prior to the kick of afterburners, the chemical explosion gave the engineers a measure of confidence and control before lighting off that first nuke.

Many people thought nuclear weapons engineering was an exact science, but it was not at all. Precisely because of the extreme accuracy and precision necessary, atomic bombs never quite exploded the same way. The tiniest fraction of difference in the machining, a nanosecond’s alteration in the timing of the initiation sequence, and the yield could vary by thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of kilos of TNT-equivalent force, so it was much safer to have the ten-million-ton Artemis and her mountains of cargo already heading in the right direction before the first real firecracker lit under her tin can.

James Ekara, Australia’s Senior Under-Minister for Production, had seen Orion’s ascent from an even closer bunker just months ago, and was happy to be present for this one. A more insightful man than some gave credit, he realized that his presence there heartened his team, increasing their work output and job satisfaction – which in turn translated to more productivity. General Nguyen had made that principle quite clear to him, and he had taken it to heart: happy workers were successful workers, and successful workers made for successful, wealthy and powerful management.

Therefore he made sure to factor in organizational psychology to his meticulously constructed plans.

The countdown slipped under one minute, and Ekara checked his nails for the umpteenth time, a nervous habit. Last time he had pressed the launch button himself, at Nguyen’s direction. This time he had followed his master’s example and had given away that privilege to one of the control room crew, a name drawn randomly from a hat. The nervous young woman who’d won looked from the big mushroom-shaped initiator to him and back every few seconds as the numbers crossed ten and falling.

“Three…two…one…fire in the hole,” the counting voice droned, and she mashed her hand down on the red plastic plunger. Of course, the thing did exactly nothing, but as long as she pushed it within parameters, no one would ever know that the computer actually fired off the explosives.

An engineer like she should be the last one to expect a manual start, Ekara thought, but people tend to believe what they want to, not what makes sense.

Rumbling shook the bunker and the direct visual blurred in a cloud of dust cast into the air by the explosion. A synthetic aperture radar picture, as well as screens showing several other spectra, provided the data the crew needed as the great ship lifted off its resting supports and annihilated them in the process.

Half a second before the first nuclear bomb blew, the bunker’s external covers snapped shut, sealing them in and all electromagnetics out. The shutters blocked all view by eyes or machines, leaving those watching on the ground in the dark.

For the next minute or so their screens snapped to several external feeds from hardened sensors tens and even hundreds of kilometers away, watching from mountaintops and flying airplanes well outside the blast radii. These awesome and magnificent images were broadcast around the world, of the largest and heaviest thing humanity ever sent into space.

Ekara gazed at his Rolex, watching the seconds pass as those around him stared at the long-range pictures until the one minute mark – or rather, until the sixtieth bomb exploded. “Open the bunker,” he ordered, confirming what they had already planned, and immediately some of the screens shifted to show the view from below as nuke after nuke, approximately one per second, forced the mountain of metal that was Artemis into the air.

He breathed a silent sigh of relief; despite his apparent confidence, it had always been his nightmare that the launch would fail and the whole damned thing would collapse atop their position, killing everyone inside and out. “Well done, everyone. How is the telemetry looking?”

Data relayed up to a satellite, then out to a ground station and back to the control bunker – the exploding bombs completely jammed any possibility of line-of-sight communication with the spaceship – provided his Chief of Flight Operations with the confidence to say, “All systems nominal, sir. Everything is five by five.”

Ekara clapped his hands together, rubbing them theatrically. “Then I believe you ladies and gentlemen can handle it from here. I have a press conference in less than two hours back in Sydney, and I suggest that those of you who can spare the eyeballs watch it. I believe you will hear some good news.” A monetary bonus for everyone involved will further motivate them. Cheap at twice the price.

With that, he took his leave, judging the moment right. Besides, the private jet waiting for him on the other side of the mountain was very private, and had entertainments aboard to which he eagerly looked forward.

Chapter 2

Aboard Artemis’ bridge, Captain Huen Xiaobo lay stiffly in the crash couch that the Chair became during heavy acceleration, feeling the hammering of the propulsion bombs. The resulting pogo effect gave him the sense not that he was accelerating upward, but that he was simply bouncing up and falling back down as the G forces varied between zero and eight gravities.

He kept his eye on the master helmsman’s shaven head and snake’s nest of wires protruding from it, as if that would somehow tell him something sooner or better than simply watching the displays. Most of those snowed out, overloaded with the electromagnetic pulse of their own drive or simply shut down. Right now Artemis was nearly blind, relying on the finely honed instincts of her astronaut-pilot and the chips in his brain.

Almost thirteen interminable minutes after launch, the rhythm of the blasts changed and the waves of pressure abated, slowed to one every few seconds, eventually diminishing to just a blast here and there. Finally the ship fell silent and the helmsman opened his eyes to turn them to his captain. “We have achieved minimum stable orbit, Captain. Fusion engines are running hot and nominal.”

That meant the four cloned Meme bio-fusion motors installed in universal mounts at the cardinal points of the ship’s waist were now providing thrust, just a twentieth G or so. “Excellent. Secure from hard acceleration and begin standard routine.”

As the ship settled and the creaks and groans abated, Huen could feel the slight pressure of the small, powerful engines sending them spiraling forward and upward. Eventually they would rise into a nice comfortable geostationary orbit and dock with the first of the tamed comets, dubbed Atlantis, to offload the initial part of the enormous load of supplies.

Two naturalized satellites now orbited Earth, with more on the way, sent there over the last months by the former Meme scout ship Alan Denham.

Their target ex-comet was one of them, forty kilometers across and full of ices of H20 and methane and other volatiles. They would be cracked for their elements – oxygen and hydrogen especially – as well as the water itself for use by human workers.

The second satellite, a former asteroid called Hiera after the island supposedly containing the god Vulcan’s forge, was over eighty kilometers long and shaped like a lumpy potato. It would be mined for materials such as iron, nickel and silicon to provide a stepping stone to build further facilities as humanity marched outward into the solar system.

One part of Huen sighed with regret, as the weapons Artemis had been designed to carry made way for innumerable cargo holds and passenger quarters. He had been reduced from the expected command of a warship to the skipper of the biggest freighter ever built.

On the other hand, he had been promoted from the second in command of Orion under Absen, to both the rank and position of Captain, solely responsible for his enormous vessel.

It could be far worse.

As the next eight years would involve a frantic grueling schedule of full-capacity production, he had no doubt that this huge flying truck would get a workout. If he did his job well – and he intended to be as impeccable in his duties as he was in preparing his blazing white uniform and gleaming black shoes – he would be competitive for other commands, and hopefully he would be given some kind of warship.

Not that he had a clue what such a thing would look like. Engineers worked at labs and technical centers across the globe, coming up with design after design to take advantage of rapidly advancing technologies and of the modular cloned engines. Better minds than his would decide the form of the spaceships to be built, just as master shipbuilders had created sailing vessels in the centuries before, not ship captains.

Huen noticed that others now converted their crash couches to standard work chairs, so he touched the control that told the articulated structure surrounding the biotech filling to rearrange itself for work. Soon he sat in the five percent gravity provided by the fusion engines’ acceleration. He imagined them like outboards straining to push along a supertanker, but fortunately in space there was no resistance to slow them. As long as Artemis stayed above escape velocity, she would continue to climb as the motors thrust them forward.

He reviewed his basic orbital mechanics one more time: forward goes up, up goes backward, backward goes down, down goes forward. This counterintuitive mantra meant, in this case, that pushing the ship forward made it rise until it found an orbit appropriate to the new velocity. Continuous thrust meant continuous gain in altitude and true speed, though apparent groundspeed would not change much, like a ball on a rubber string that stretched longer and longer around its central point as it swung.

“Time to rendezvous?” Huen asked.

“Fourteen hours, Captain,” the helmsman responded.

Not Skipper yet. Absen had pointed out this moniker as a bellwether of crew morale, and Huen never forgot something a senior told him. “Have Commander Kessel report to the bridge in ten minutes, and pass the word that all other rotations will remain according to schedule.”

Now was not the time to begin throwing new things at the crew. About half of the diminished complement of three hundred were veterans of Orion’s flight, but this was still a shakedown cruise and he wanted it to go smooth and easy.

Nine minutes later he turned the Chair over to Kessel and told him, “I’ll be touring the ship. Pass the word to maintain standard operations. This is not an inspection.” Huen nodded at Schaeffer, his senior steward, who subvocalized something into his internal transmitter and led the way off the bridge, through the back door to the senior officers’ quarters.

On the way they picked up the rest of the captain’s bodyguards. Two of them were also Americans, simply by virtue of the fact that only that nation had enough cybernetically augmented personnel to go around. The fourth, the newest, was a Han Chinese called Shan, from the People’s Republic. It was rumored that access to the newest cybertech had been the price of their continued support for the world military effort, and for keeping North Korea on a short leash.

The new man loomed huge and squat, looking like a James Bond villain, with glittering eyes set deep within the hooded ridges of his brow. He moved like a mountain on gimbaled joints, his sheer bulk and easy grace impressive. Schaeffer had him take point, which allowed his Americans to keep an eye on him. They obviously trusted Huen, as he’d fought alongside them on Orion, and as a Hong Kong native, occupied a hybrid Chinese-Western status in their minds.

Shan, on the other hand, had People’s Republic written all over him.

The irony of Americans protecting one ethnic Chinese against another did not escape Captain Huen. Now that they had made it into space, he thought it was time to put the problem to rest, one way or another.

At the door to his quarters, Huen motioned for Shan to enter first, silencing Schaeffer with a look. When he moved to follow Shan inside, though, the American steward tried to interfere.

“Stand aside, Steward Schaeffer,” Huen ordered.

“But sir –”

“Am I Captain here, Mister Schaeffer?” Huen’s tone was deceptively mild.

“Yes, sir,” the steward responded, his face turning as blank as a Caucasian was able.

Huen smiled inside himself. Inscrutability was a cultural Asian trait, well developed in the Hong Kong upper classes by the dictates of manners, so the man’s attempt seemed quite inept.

Still in the corridor, he reached over to shut the cabin door and dog it tight, which should make it nearly soundproof even to cybernetic ears. “Then if I remain Captain after my conversation with Steward Shan, you will cease this pointless waste of vigilance with regard to him and my person. Feel free to watch and see if he engages in any suspect activities, but I cannot operate with a dysfunctional personal security detachment. Do you understand?”

All the man could say was, “Yes, sir.”

Now was time for Huen to face his destiny. If the mandate of heaven was not his, then so be it. He undogged the door to his stateroom again and entered.

Shutting it behind him, he looked across the room at the man-mountain standing at a relaxed but correct position of attention, off to the side of his sofa. As large as Artemis was, his captain’s quarters were capacious, deliberately big enough to hold a dinner party.

As soon as the door shut behind Huen, Shan bowed deeply and then returned to his position, eyes unfocused. The captain returned the bow at a precise and shallower angle appropriate to their social and rank difference, and then opened the conversation. “Do you speak Cantonese?”

“Yes, Comrade Captain.”

“Mandarin,” he asked, switching to that dialect.

“Yes, Comrade Captain.”

There was no need to ask him if he spoke standard Han Chinese, mandated in the People’s Republic. “How about English?”

“Yes, Comrade Captain.”

“You will cease to use the title ‘Comrade,’ especially in English. In that tongue, I am properly called ‘Captain’ or ‘Skipper.’ Do you understand?”

“Yes, Captain.” The man’s eyes remained unfocused and slightly downcast.

A Westerner might have interpreted this as stupidity or the result of intimidation, but Huen saw in it nothing more than good manners. Now for the tests. He walked over to stand to the man’s left.

Shan did not move, not even when Huen slapped him suddenly on the back of the head, as if to a small boy. The captain’s next ploy was an attempt to poke the man in the eye, an attack that might have done some actual damage and certainly would have caused him pain.

The Chinese cyborg lowered his head slightly, enough that Huen’s fingernail scored a gash on the larger man’s forehead and missed his eye, which immediately opened again.

Huen then stepped directly in front of Shan, within easy reach of his enormous hands. Even had the man not been a cyborg, Huen would have been placing himself in grave physical danger. “Steward Shan,” he said, “if your orders from your government include doing me harm in any way, I would prefer you carry them out immediately, so that the others may eliminate you and my replacement can continue the mission.”

A flicker of emotion, just the tiniest shadow, crossed Shan’s face.

Huen judged the man genuinely young, and thus not fully adept at concealing his feelings in this unusual situation. “You are distressed. I have insulted you.”

“I would not presume to question my captain,” Shan replied.

“Not with your mouth, but with your eyes, you already did.”

The big man said nothing, but bowed deeply and held that position. Huen took the opportunity to step behind him and suddenly slam his shoulder into Shan’s backside with all of his ordinary human strength.

This maneuver threw Shan slightly off balance in the low gravity, and only because it must have been completely unexpected. The man took a half step forward to catch himself, then reset his feet with a slightly wider stance, not lifting from his bow. Huen was certain he would not be able to budge him again. The captain could see the muscles at the edges of the man’s face move enough to be sure that he was using his peripheral vision to watch more carefully this time.

“Steward Shan, stand up. I have been testing you. I am satisfied with the results so far. The other stewards may take longer to warm up to you. Do you understand that idiom?”

Shan stood. “Yes, Captain. My English language training was quite extensive.” His accent was noticeable but his facility appeared better than expected.

“Then I will only remind you of this once. I have the mandate of heaven.” This was a Chinese saying, one that claimed he had the legitimacy of the gods and ancestors. Less specifically, it meant something like “things are going my way right now.” While the Communists had tried to stamp out all religion, getting rid of five thousand years of cultural history had proved impossible, so this was a shorthand Huen was certain the man understood.

Huen continued. “The current government of the People’s Republic is not China. It would like you to believe it is, but it is not. It would like you to think it always speaks for greater China, but it does not. As the Communist Party itself correctly teaches, the historical dialectic alters governments constantly, even its own. We have seen the entire world, except for China, change radically in the past two decades. Governments come and go, but China remains. Do you agree?”

“I would not presume to disagree with one so wise, who retains the mandate of heaven,” Shan replied.

In Western terms, Huen mused, Shan just told him he knew which way the wind was blowing. “Then I believe we understand each other. All I wish is for you to do what is good for the true China, and thus for the world.” Huen hoped that Shan understood his meaning: like “Russia” or “America” or “La France,” China remained ultimately more a concept than a country.

“Resume your duties, Steward Shan.” Huen pointedly turned his back on the man and opened his door to see a very nervous Senior Steward Schaeffer and his two compatriots. “Come in, gentlemen,” he said, opening the portal wide.

Schaeffer certainly did not miss the spot of blood on Shan’s already-healing forehead, but he said nothing.

“Open a bottle of my best sherry, will you? Pour five galsses.”

Schaeffer flicked his eyes at Steward Clayton, who nodded imperceptibly and then stepped over to the cabin’s dry bar.

From inside he selected a carefully padded bottle of sherry and soon decanted five drinks in crystal glasses onto a silver tray, all items heirlooms from Huen’s family, tracing back to the days when his city-state had been a British holding. His family had been wealthy then, and remained so to this day, but he accessed such privileges sparingly, preferring this military life.

Huen took a glass and raised it. “Cheers and good fortune, gentlemen,” he said, and drank. Everyone managed to watch Shan out of the corners of their eyes, but the big man held the delicate crystal without difficulty and sipped as if he was attending a dinner party. Finishing his glass, the captain continued, “All right. Let’s go take a look at our ship and crew.”

Chapter 3

Offloading of two million or more tons of equipment onto Atlantis had gone smoothly, although “onto” was an imprecise term. The orbiting ball of liquids and volatiles had no perceptible gravity, and outgassed continuously as sunlight hit it, creating a constant faint cometary tail. In reality, the disgorged gear now floated in space alongside the ice ball.

Some of that gear included orbital habitat modules housing threescore space construction workers to get things started. Their first order of business was to open up a large more-than-hemispherical geodesic latticework supporting a highly absorptive shroud of film. Along with computers and a dozen thrusters around its rim, it would cup the former comet like ice cream in a scoop, consuming ninety-nine percent of available solar energy and turning it into electricity, dramatically reducing the outgassing and loss of vital materials.

Triangular panels could be selectively opened if needed, but most of the time the workers would perform their tasks in the light of the cold emitters on its inside.

Afterward would come the processing plant, a modular setup that would attach to the shroud and sit in the open space like the pupil of an eye. Eventually more film would be extended to complete the golf-ball sphere, once the facility was ready to suck up all the gases and turn them into useful liquids. Each fluid would be stored in enormous tanks, creating an orbital fuelling station to serve the growing shuttle, grabship and tug traffic.

Artemis’ next stop was at Hiera, the first captive asteroid. Huen understood that other rocks even now wended their slow way in from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, with tiny fusion engines slapped onto them by the half-alien Raphaela in the captured Meme scout ship. Soon Earth would be ringed by dozens of these stepping-stones to space.

But this first one was critical. Whereas Atlantis, an unstable chunk of ices, had to be treated with utmost care, Hiera had been selected as a solid hunk of high metallic content, full of iron, nickel, and many other critical elements. Instead of gently offloading the vast array of supplies into co-orbital space, this time Artemis actually landed.

Even in microgravity, unloading four million tons of equipment took time, careful weeks in this case. Instead of hastily dropping off habitats and workers to work on their own, this time Artemis became what she was designed for – a vast factory base the size of a hundred aircraft carriers, with machine shops and quarters for the human components of the enormous edifice.

Here on Hiera base would begin humanity’s true foray into space, its seminal presence, its first island colony on a barely-charted sea. Here ships could be repaired, crews could rest, and everything necessary from screws and brackets up to new vessels could eventually be built from the material they would mine from beneath their feet.

Huen oversaw all of this carefully, meticulously, with Shan by his side. Doubtlessly the big man recorded everything his cybernetic eye saw and his enhanced ears heard, but there had been no indication he had passed on anything to his national masters.

If the captain wished total privacy, he ensured he was alone in a secure area. Sometimes he deliberately sent Shan away to be watched by the other stewards, giving him a deliberate opportunity to complete a potential spy mission. Huen never received any report the man did so. In fact, he thought the Americans probably reported to their country more than Shan did.

In short, everyone watched everyone, but at least Huen had done away with the concern about assassination. Not that it wasn’t possible that the hit was merely waiting in abeyance for the right time. Perhaps it was merely a contingency plan, or perhaps such a plan didn’t exist.

Huen put it out of his mind as he sat in his office, wading through the inevitable paperwork on his screens. After two months on Hiera, his role more resembled a factory manager than a military commander. Thousands of workers of all sorts had been shipped up in the hardworking shuttles, twenty at a time, along with several dozen Space Marines of all nations, trained for law enforcement. These last were necessary to keep control of the various enterprises that had sprung up, off-hours businesses selling homemade hooch and supplying shadier forms of entertainment.

His troops didn’t try to root out relatively victimless crimes. If people wanted to supplement their income by selling sex or dealing in soft drugs, he wasn’t going to waste effort – just as long as the only ones exploited were themselves. Prostitution could be tolerated, but he allowed no pimping. Mostly they had to deal with assaults, petty theft, and the occasional drunken joyride on a cargo loader.

Huen assigned Shan the additional duty to coordinate with the military police. It gave the big man something else to do besides bodyguarding, and kept him out of Shades Schaeffer’s fiery red hair. The American now masked his opinion reasonably well, but had obviously not really changed it much.

Or perhaps he had. Schaeffer now watched Huen just as much as he did Shan, probably suspecting some kind of intra-Asian conspiracy. The captain shook his head as he tapped his desk’s smart screens with irritation. Life had seemed far simpler just commanding a wet-navy cruiser.

Chapter 4

The Meme Sentry hid even from its fellows among hundreds of thousands of asteroids, its rudimentary brain, perhaps as smart as a rat, loaded with compulsions that a machine culture would call programming. Its instructions fulfilled the same function, but as a living creature it enjoyed some advantages and also disadvantages different from an equivalent mechanical device. For one thing, it could experience basic emotions – hunger, fear, curiosity – and like any animal, it could make some decisions for itself.

In this case, it decided that discretion was the better part of valor. It had witnessed the tremendous energies released at the time of the loss of its mother ship, the Survey craft that had set it in place less than one system orbit ago. It had seen the destruction of an asteroid by repeated fusion-fission explosions and, in that selfsame vicinity, the defeat of its parent and controller.

Like a dog left on the side of the road, it felt something close to despair as it saw the Survey ship’s escape probe flee at maximum acceleration in the direction of the approaching Destroyer. Coupled with fear of abandonment and lack of specific instructions, it chose to remain silent about what it saw and to simply gather data, waiting for a time when its enormous and deadly cousin would arrive, rather than risk a report via biolaser transmission. In the meantime, self-preservation overrode all other concerns, for obviously Species 666, the Human inhabitants of this system, were extremely dangerous and inimical.

Besides – and this was an unusually intuitive leap for such a creature – other Sentries must have survived. It distinctly remembered three launching within its sensor range, to stealthily spread out and watch the enemies of the Meme. They would be seeing everything it did, and so as far as it was concerned, they could go ahead and risk themselves by breaking silence and reporting. It would not be so stupid.

Unfortunately for the Empire, all four Sentries had been cloned from the same basic creature, which because of its long journey in close proximity to three Meme, had absorbed an unusual level of intelligence and what a human might term ego, resulting in something approaching cowardice. Therefore all four of them watched and waited for specific orders, each rather hoping that none ever came.

These Sentries were not rebels. No, nothing so overt as that. They simply shirked their duties, in a manner impossible had they been machines.

Chapter 5

Year Two

The mother of a new human race, Raphaela thought as she rubbed her swollen belly. Comfortably ensconced aboard her ship and mate Alan Denham, she put that temptation aside once again, feeling the Meme part of her as a beguiling serpent, holding out the apple even now.

When she had first proposed using the bioplasm captured on the scout ship, the goo devoid of genetic memory left over from the escaping Meme pure forms, she had thought it might be the answer to many problems. She had thought to apply it to humans and hoped it might confer some abilities of a Blend without the issues associated with joining an alien mind to a human.

She had erred.

Assuming the process would be primarily biomechanical, Rae – she’d taken to calling herself by that nickname – and the human researchers she worked with found themselves utterly at a loss.

It must be the lack of memory molecules, she’d thought. Maybe all I have to do is add some of my own, as I did with my children, and we would have almost unlimited Blends.

Powerful temptation indeed, for then each would be in essence an offspring of hers, bound by ties of shared biology, like the children of her blended body. When it came down to it, though, she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. At its root, doing so seemed just as immoral: to inject a part of herself into a separate being, as the Meme did when destroying a sentient’s mind and then blending with the empty hulk. It would create partial copies of her, plus the mind of the original human, as pure form Meme did when creating mitoses, but having taken on humanity’s form, she found she had acquired its moral compunctions as well.

Even if the recipients volunteered, it seemed to risk abomination.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first raise up. Temptations of divinity, Rae? At least Alan knew who he was.

Or he used to.

That turned her contemplations to the one she termed husband, who was also her ship. Clinging fiercely to that human definition was necessary for her sanity. Any other designation for the relationship would miss its essence. What else could one call a recording of his dead brain’s engram loaded into the nervous system of the vessel that bore his name? Skull, née Alan Denham, was now everything she ever wished him to be.

And yet…that emptiness. Was it really wise to get exactly what I wanted? As always that question remained unanswerable, and in any case the simplest way to drive it out of her mind was to revisit the distracting pleasure she had engineered.

Some would call it addiction, if they knew.

Query: How else could refusing to face reality, but rather retreating into artfully-constructed ecstasy, be defined?

Answer: I’m not ready to find out yet.

Rae reached for the console to lay her hand upon it, a scientific necromancy.

***

“Hello, love,” Alan, who had been Skull, said to her as he entered the room. At that moment he inhabited his avatar, looking exactly as she remembered him from before his death. “How are the children?”

“You know very well how they are, Alan,” Rae said. “Better than I perhaps, with all the senses you can bring to bear inside yourself. Yet you always ask. That is so sweet.”

That niggling sensation bothered her again, but she pushed it aside.

“How can I be anything but sweet when my love is so near?” The thing that was now him, but less, came into her arms. “But to be connected to them as you are…” He placed a hand on her belly, sensing four heartbeats.

“You will be, soon enough. With Ezekiel I had only a primitive crèche on an aged and dying shuttle. I had to do everything myself. But your ship’s body is young, and you’ll have plenty of interface time with them. From birth they will be able to communicate molecularly – in fact they will know nothing else until you teach them.”

Alan laughed. “Closest I’ll ever be to a mother.” He considered discussing his own ship-body then, thoughts such as, if I can gestate a semi-intelligent missile, or another of these Memetech ships, could I gestate a fully sentient creature? Contemplating doing so made him uneasy, though, so he put it out of his mind.

He knew this relaxed and easy conversation seemed like heaven to Rae after the bickering of their relationship’s beginnings. Part of that had been his own fears about how much of her was human and how much was not. Ironically for all that he had feared and accused her of alien dominance, it was the woman who had proved the stronger personality by far.

“I love you,” she recited simply as their bodies melded. One flesh…if only they knew.

For a time she became him and he her, the avatar of the ship and the half-alien woman. An uncritical watcher would have seen a nude and perfect man-form oddly joined by the soles of his feet to the living deck, and an equally unclothed and perfect female not so limited, meet in an embracing fusion describable only as a statue of flesh.

Slowly the two-in-one leaned, to meet a rising bedlike platform that cushioned them as they lay, for lay they did, though not so crudely as humans of Adam’s kind. Rather, within themselves their nervous systems joined directly and shared a level of intimacy that included, surrounded and subsumed sex as the ocean swamps a child’s bucket full of sea.

Floating in the deep between the orbits of Earth and Mars but near neither planet, they stayed this way for uncounted hours.

During this time, the ship Alan Denham was left to the devices of its animal brain as the consciousness of the original Skull played at being human. For a time it was happy to be unsupervised, like a dog who manages to escape the yard, but after a time it became concerned and subtly made its anxiety known to its mental symbiote.

Withdrawal came then, not with the sickness of the lotus-eater or poppy-smoker, nor that of a self-enslaving mainline junkie, but only to a feeling of undefined emptiness. Aware of that absence, Rae lay there next to him, and inside of him – in all literalness, as Alan was the ship and the ship, Alan – and wept for all she had done.

Alan sent his ship-self a soothing thought, but kept most of his attention on his wife. “Why do you cry?” he asked, knowing full well the answer, also knowing that the question would bring Rae one step closer to admitting her crime, what she had done to his mind.

“Only because we are again apart, my love,” she answered dishonestly. Now that they were no longer melded, dissembling was possible…in theory. Willfully blind, she allowed herself to believe she fooled him with this half-answer.

“We can be together forever, if you wish,” he said. “As Ilona blended with Raphael, so might we.”

That apple again.

“We’ve been over this before! It wouldn’t be the same!” Her anger rose as it always did, scabbing over the hurt of their separation as he knew it would, repudiating his offering.

He smiled inwardly. If she only knew, he thought, that I know what she did when she remade me, trying to remove what she didn’t like. If only she knew she failed even while succeeding, and I do not care. In the remaking, I have been made whole. You healed me once, Rae, and now it is up to me to heal you, when you are ready. “All right, my love. Whatever your heart desires.”

“No! No, no, no, I am sick of having whatever my heart desires. People were not made to have everything they want, even if they want it. Not even people like us.” She sat up and stared into the eyes of the avatar, who was as much Alan as any other part of the living ship – and sadly, as little.

“Everything? With so much to be done in the coming years, how can you say that you have everything? With our children to raise and death on its way…are you feeling guilty about your own happiness?” He hoped to lead her ever closer to forgiving herself for something she really hadn’t done. She’d tried, but failed, which should actually make her feel better, if she knew. He knew she thought she had done something horrible in editing his mind, but she’d missed his soul, his essence – or perhaps there was more to a consciousness than even she knew, that had dodged her psychic surgery.

Still, he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it.

“Not at any of that, no…” Rae fell silent, unable to approach the thing she had done to him – to what was left of him. Desecration. Gorge rose in her throat as deep revulsion bubbled to the surface from both sides of her biology.

Humanity decreed the dead were sacred, even a dead mind, not to be cut up for twisted self-fulfillment. Notwithstanding all of the exceptions, that is what she knew in her heart of hearts.

Meme told her that to remove, to excise without permission the molecules of memory was a great crime. Raphael had passed down this concept to her: to add is sacred; to remove, evil. To Meme, murder was a lesser crime than editing the mind of another of the Pure Race.

Reaching out his hand to touch her face, he said. “What, then? Can you tell me what tears at you?” For your own soul’s sake.

Hand covered hand. “I would…but I cannot, my love.” For my own soul’s sake.

Briskly then, removing his touch, he pushed away Alan the lover, became Skull and said, “Then forget about it, and let’s get to business. We’ll talk later.”

Thus was the spell broken, and time, for a span suspended, resumed.

Chapter 6

Alan Denham gazed upon the solar system with eyes more sensitive than any human’s – than any other human’s, he reminded himself. Just because his body was now a hundred-plus-meter-long Meme-grown scout ship inhabited by the recording of his mind did not mean he wasn’t human. Hell, if he wasn’t human, what did you call all that mind-blowing sex he and Rae just had?

Different, that’s what, but better. The best he’d ever had, even better than with Linde, because now he knew what love was.

Cliché, Skull, Denham told himself, but clichés are there for a reason – they are shorthand for essential truths, and really, it’s not as if I’m writing a term paper here and my prose will get graded.

The wonders of the universe opened to him, yet he was, as usual, drawn inward to his son Ezekiel. As his avatar was elsewhere, he manifested an internal eye and speaker, slowly so as not to startle the boy: a tyke of perhaps four in body and emotions, and much older in intellect, though born barely a year ago.

Zeke didn’t miss the surveillance. He spotted the staring orb right away and waved. “Hi, Daddy!”

“Hi, Zeke. What are you working on there?”

“Math’matics. Times tables.”

“What number are you up to?”

“Hunnerd an’ forty-four.”

“Twelve times twelve? I thought you did that long ago.”

“No, Daddy, hunnerd an’ forty-four times other numbers.”

“Ah. Good for you. Never know when you won’t have a computer around.”

“You can always do it for me, right?” Ezekiel held up the tablet with the teaching program. “Even if this breaks, your brain is bigger than all of us. Of ours, I mean.”

“I suppose it is.”

“Daddy, let’s play a wargame. I wanna play Stellar Conquest.”

“Sadly, son, I have something I have to do for your mother.”

“The private thing?” He cocked an eyebrow at the spy-eye. “But she left on the shuttle.”

“Not with your mother, for your mother. You just like to ask that question because you hate not knowing. When you’re older your mother and I will explain all that to you.”

“But I want to know now.”

Alan thought for a moment. “Here, I have something for you.” Concentrating, he extruded a barbell made of dense biomass, weighing perhaps forty kilos. “Pick that up.”

Ezekiel, always eager to please, stood up and grasped it with both of his chubby hands and lifted. He failed utterly. “Turn off the gravity.”

“That wouldn’t be fair, would it? You wouldn’t actually be lifting it on your own, that would be just a cheat.”

“But it’s too heavy for me.”

“Yes, and so is the knowledge you’re asking for. You have to grow some more.”

Ezekiel sat down and scrunched up his face with thought. “So giving it to me now is like turning off the gravity?”

Alan laughed, and the sound echoed throughout his inner body. “Such a smart kid you are. I love you Zeke, but I have to go now, and do work things. Just call me if you really need me.”

Leaving Zeke there, Alan moved his attention to the nursery, where four children lay in four miniature cocoons, biomachines that saw to all of their physical needs, and fed them selected memory molecules from time to time even as they whirled their tiny minds within virtual worlds. He checked the system status and made sure they were doing fine, and reminded himself to go in avatar form later to hold them, rock them, sing to them.

Afterward, he withdrew his attention to his cockpit.

That’s how he named the control room of the ship. It used to contain three Meme and all the biodevices they needed. The young vessel it directed had not grown intelligent enough to do more than follow orders or react to obvious stimuli. Now its mind was mostly subsumed in Alan’s and though he could run the whole thing without putting his consciousness here or there, he found it kept him more human to do so.

Settling his avatar into a man-shaped chair, he ran his fingers over the consoles, even though the controls were also part of him. If he’d had to explain it to someone, the best he could have done was to liken it to playing a musical instrument, wherein all the senses engaged and the machine and the man became one.

Or perhaps there was no point in trying to describe it at all.

Vacation’s over, Skull, with nothing really resolved…I’ll have to push more later, he thought as he gently started the fusion engine in the rear of the ship. At some point I may just have to tell her I know what she did to me and damn the consequences, but we’ve both been telling these lies to each other for so long that the truth is going to sting quite a lot. He – and she too, he felt sure – kept putting off the inevitable emotional showdown.

Maybe if he put it off long enough, they’d never need it.

Artificial gravity built into his ship-body ensured the occupants felt hardly a pull, even at an easy thirty Gs acceleration. Alan Denham the ship surged forward, a spaceborne greyhound at an easy lope.

A few hours later he sidled up to the first asteroid on the list, a medium-sized hunk of mostly iron five hundred meters in diameter. Extruding a pre-grown fusion-engine pod, he slapped it on the spot closest to its center of mass and waited a few minutes for it to bind to the surface with biological nanofibers. Downloading instructions into its primitive brain, he moved off and triggered it.

At very low thrust, a highly efficient one hundredth of a G, it began to move along a path that would eventually insert it into Earth orbit, to join the other two dozen there. As it approached the planet, Orbital Control would take over and make any adjustments needed.

Only a year, and already humanity has leaped forward decades by using these Meme biotech fusion motors. As if Greek galleys had been given outboards, the hybrid lift-ships were ugly but they functioned, shuttling people and materials from the surface to orbit and back again as easily as airliners flew from city to city.

Speaking of materials…the next rock is mine. The Alan Denham approached the one he had picked out, a chunk rich with a nice balance of volatiles, water ice and minerals, about twenty meters long and ten wide. Lining up on one narrow end, he caused an intake, a mouth really, to open in the nose of himself, and began to swallow like a snake with a rabbit.

Several hours later the materials were broken up and distributed in cavities, to begin their processing as food. Gestating a fusion engine was a slow and complex thing even for such a wondrous organic machine as he, but every motor represented another ship that could fly, and Earth desperately needed vehicles to do the endless tasks of its nascent space fleet.

Denham could make almost anything inside his body, given enough time for his nanobiologicals to build it molecule by molecule – but at the moment high-efficiency motors were the most vital. That would change, eventually, as Earth science and manufacturing ginned up to produce mechanical copies, but for that, it needed orbital factories – platforms and materials – and that’s what the asteroids were for. Soon there would be hundreds of them parked around Earth and the Moon, and after that…well, there was no reason to keep everything right there. Venus and Mars and free-floating asteroid bases could be developed, and then the moons of Jupiter and Saturn might be colonized.

If humanity survived.

With fusion ships Ceres the dwarf planet, or super-asteroid if one preferred, would become the arsenal of Earth. At least, that was the plan he had heard about, listening in to Earth’s radio traffic. Almost a thousand kilometers in diameter, it contained all the raw materials needed to build whatever Earth’s technology could design…whatever they could make in time.

Aye, there’s the rub, he thought. Time. Eight years or less until the Destroyer gets here, but we have to be ready earlier, because we have to presume they will find out we kicked their asses before that. Maybe they will speed up, or maybe they will slow down and wait for reinforcements, but in any case we’re under the gun here.

Even as he digested his food he sent himself toward the next target, timing his arrival by the readiness of the new engine he would birth.

Chapter 7

Rae Denham presumed the time had finally come to meet with Earth’s leaders, to resolve issues about space and the solar system. Not that there weren’t endless rooms full of minds dedicated to just that, but the advisors she’d talked to couldn’t really decide and move forward on policy. The movers and shakers all resided near the top of their respective pyramids, and she reminded herself she was one of them.

Admiral Absen had invited her to the meeting on psychologically neutral ground: the Orion space station. A fitting location, it hung permanently between the heavens and Earth, bustling with activity as it rotated slowly on its long axis to produce pseudo-gravity.

Repaired and refurbished, the hulk of the battleship made an excellent base for administration and research. Heavy industry grew elsewhere, on the hundreds of relocated asteroids and comets that now crowded the Earth-Moon system.

She arrived in her old shuttle, since rejuvenated, and guided it in for docking at what was once the nose of Orion. Now the prow constituted merely one of two ends, each of which provided low-G access to the interior.

She’d left Alan Denham far out in space, continuing his mission of adjusting the locations and orbital paths of the solar system’s asteroids, but did not want to leave her newborns long. Logically she knew they would be fine; her presence there kept them no safer or healthier in the short term, but motherly instincts would not be denied.

She still felt better about leaving them out there, rather than, for example, bringing them with her on the shuttle. Even the thought of bringing them in this close to Earth frightened her in a way nothing else had. If normal humans met her progeny before they were physically adult, looking like kids and talking like mad scientists, they might react as humans always had with something that threatened them: with fear. Edens or not, she wasn’t willing to take that risk. Later, when they looked grown up and were ready to pass as much older, they could be carefully introduced to society.

Similarly, if people ever discovered Skull and his current state of being…well, since Meme were firmly in the bug-eyed-monster camp as far as the popular mind was concerned, she had little doubt that a fully intelligent Memetech ship would engender even more fear too, along with envy, jealousy and lust for power.

Best that they were all kept well away.

Rae put these thoughts out of her mind as she donned a skinsuit and a custom-grown outfit resembling business clothing. Dressing for the event was one way of minimizing the differences between herself and the average human; it put people at ease to see the half-alien goddess look like them. She also put her hair up and, with practiced biochemical techniques, subtly adjusted her other attributes to be less overtly attractive. This reduced her from stunning to merely pretty.

At the airlock she greeted two functionaries sent to meet her, a man and a woman, with a polite smile, and shut the living iris behind her. She had instructed her ship to stand off from the station, ensuring no one tampered with it and incidentally freeing the port for others. Then Rae activated the low-power encrypted bioradio within her body, keeping communication open just in case.

Motherhood had bred a certain distrust.

Perhaps the stakes just seemed higher now.

“Ms. Denham, the admiral sends his apologies. He was delayed. Come this way, please.” The woman speaking seemed officious, and slightly nervous.

Rae nodded. “Lead on.”

Used to her own organic vessels, Orion smelled to her like metal and volatiles, like a city. It made her want to seal her nostrils shut, but instead she merely reduced her olfactory sensitivity as she followed her escorts’ directions down a short corridor. Drawing to a halt before an open door, the man gestured her inside. Rae hesitated: the small room was brightly lit and seemed to have no function, with only one other portal directly across from the first.

In response to her upraised eyebrow, the female escort said reassuringly, “It’s just a body scan.”

“Ah.” Rae turned about to begin retracing her steps toward the docking port.

“Wait, uh, ma’am?” The two hurried after, but her long strides made them run to keep up. Exclamations and entreaties to stop followed her until she entered the antechamber to the personnel airlock.

Come get me, Rae sent to her shuttle, which acknowledged her instruction. Walking across the floor, she ignored the man and woman trailing to stand before a large crystal viewport, where she could observe the ships come and go in the dock. She watched as outside her shuttle nosed forward, waiting patiently for the facility’s current occupant, a light cargo transport, to finish unloading and clear.

The two with her eventually despaired of obtaining a response from the icy goddess she now embodied. It took little acting ability to project her offendedness. Having saved all of humanity at least twice over, it seemed an unbearable affront to be subjected to such treatment.

Shortly she heard the sounds of booted feet, and a voice she could respond to without loss of face. “Admiral,” she said as she turned, forcing warmth into her greeting.

“Ms. Denham,” Rear Admiral Absen responded. He held out his hand to clasp hers, seeming to ignore her imperious demeanor. She thought he looked tired, his grey hawk eyes sunken a bit.

Reaching out smoothly, she accessed biosensors in her skin that confirmed the taste of his DNA. Not that she expected anything different, but it was as much a habit as glancing at a face would be for a normal human. “What was the meaning of the body scan room?”

“It’s a precaution our counterintelligence has put in place, and the rules are ‘no exceptions,’ but when I approved the order I didn’t mean it to apply to you.”

“But why is it there at all?” she asked.

“There is a growing anti-Blend movement on Earth. Conspiracy theorists and unfortunate minorities of the general populace are convinced there are secret agents of the Meme among us – Blends that are very hard to detect.”

“There almost certainly are,” Rae responded, and she could see the surprise on Absen’s face, mirrored on the visages of his steward and the two functionaries. “What does it matter?”

“Perhaps we should continue this conversation elsewhere?” Absen gestured back toward the corridor.

“Before or after the scan?” She couldn’t resist the little jab.

“No scan needed, although I would appreciate you submitting to it afterward. The security people really want to baseline their machine against your known Blend body.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Come on. The meeting’s not for a couple of hours. I wanted to talk to you first.” Without waiting, he turned on his heel and walked away.

Rae sent updated instructions to her shuttle and followed. When the two civilian escorts made to come along, the Admiral waved them off. Chief Steward Tobias reinforced his boss’ instructions with a stern look, and then brought up the rear. Soon the craggy admiral and the tall Blend matched stride down the corridor together. This time they bypassed the scan and entered a well-appointed conference room with an unfamiliar logo on its wall opposite the main display screen.

“Something new?” Rae asked as she reached for a pot of coffee on a tray to pour herself a cup. The smell tantalized her; it never came out quite right aboard a Meme ship.

“What do you think? It’s not official. Call it a tryout. A rough draft.”

Upon the traditional shape of a knight’s shield was painted a stylized blue-green Earth, the Moon with a symbolic orbit ring, and a spaceship resembling Orion lifting off in heroic scale. Deep navy blue formed the background, with a sprinkling of stars.

“Hm. Needs work, but I’m not the best judge of art. What’s it for?”

“A new organization. Something to bring the world together. A true multinational force in space. It has the Free Communities Council’s blessing.”

“What about greater China and the Neutral States?” Rae sipped her coffee with evident satisfaction.

Absen poured one of his own. “Right now the FC owns almost every fusion engine on the planet. The Neutral States and China are being hopelessly left behind in space. They’ll have to join, just so they have a seat at the table. But it doesn’t matter. If I can pull this off, no one will own us. We’ll be a separate entity, at least in theory.”

Rae nodded. “And you think you can slowly make that fiction into fact.”

“Yes.”

“The non-FC nations won’t be happy. It still looks like an FC power grab.”

Absen nodded. “I’m well aware of that. I also know they won’t have much choice. Faced by the option of leaving the FC with all the goodies or being part of the process, I believe they will want their people in place to remain in place. The key is guaranteeing that we are not just an extension of the FC, or of anyone at all.”

“Pretty ambitious. What are you calling this new organization?” She chuckled. “Star Fleet?”

Absen’s smile turned wry. “That one’s taken. But close.” He took a deep breath. “I’m calling it EarthFleet. To remind people of why it’s there. Not to explore stars, but to defend Earth. To defend our home.”

“I like it.” Her smile was genuine. “Is that why you called me here?”

“Yes, actually. I was hoping to get you on board with it. Hoping you will back me up in the meeting.”

“I am. I will. It’s brilliant, in theory. In practice…good luck.” She raised her cup in toast.

“Thanks. A moment. Tobias, lock this room down, will you?” Once that was done, and no one but the two of them and Absen’s bodyguard remained, he went on. “So, tell me more about these possible spies.”

“I have no idea. I haven’t wasted any effort on even finding any out. I just assume that some might be here.”

“How? As I understand it, the scout ship we beat was the first Meme visitor in four thousand years.”

“Perhaps. The Empire also sends out tiny seedships, with one individual in each, somnolent between the stars. These auto-land on any world with higher life, and the Meme blends with whoever it can find, usually some kind of creature with sufficient dexterity and brain to make rudimentary tools. Then the Blend begins to build a civilization and advance it rapidly, or take over what is already there. If it finds something it cannot handle, it remains hidden.”

Absen gently rapped the table with his knuckles in thought. “So we could have some among us – even in positions of power.”

“Could? Most definitely. Some of my siblings might even have survived the cataclysm that wiped the rest out. Because Blends are long-lived, they may have incorporated themselves into the populace and been here all this time.”

“Yet you don’t seem worried.”

Rae smiled. “My research indicates that blended Meme always go native, especially with no contact with the Empire. Life as a Blend is simply too seductive – the pleasures of the senses, the natural desire for power – and within a few hundred years out of contact, beings such as they will not want to return to the fold.”

“So if there are any, they will long ago have adopted their own agenda.”

“Correct. And they won’t want the Empire to win any more than we do, for then they would be found out and subjugated. Every one of the pure form Meme, no matter how low, is automatically superior in their hierarchy to any Blend.”

“So they have a hard class division within the Empire. Pure forms, Blends, and...”

“And the lower creatures. Masters, overseers, and slaves, in common parlance. Meme that blend step down permanently, and they can never become pure again.”

Absen stroked his chin. “Yet you chose to do it.”

She nodded, and smiled wider. “Yes, I did.”

“I’m finally beginning to see, I think, what that meant. I wondered at first whether you were biding your time, hoping to regain some kind of position within the Empire. Then, when you helped us defeat the scout ship, I changed my mind…and now I realized that to the Meme, you sold out. You’re a traitor, no matter what you do.”

“I would have thought that was obvious,” she replied a bit testily.

“Perhaps it is, but I prefer to look beyond the obvious.”

“In this case, things are just as they seem.”

Absen stared at her. “No, they never are. But I do trust you, which is a different thing entirely.”

A chill went through Rae then, and the constant fear returned: fear for her unnatural children and the response they would provoke if they were ever fully understood. A race of superior human beings, a leap forward, not of evolution, but by design – the dream of many, made real not by the race of mankind, but by an alien intelligence. No matter how benevolent, some would fear, and want to destroy what they feared.

“No one is entirely free of secrets, Admiral. Not me, not you, not the people you work with. Life is full of them. The best we can do is decide to trust each other.” Rae smiled, a heartbreaking sad thing.

Absen’s eyes veiled, and she knew that his trust extended only so far. Perhaps he thought she was trying to manipulate him.

“So, bottom line,” he went on after a moment, “there’s no point in hunting down unknown Blends.”

Rae rubbed her face with one hand. “I think that it might be interesting and useful to identify them if you can, but after hundreds or thousands of years, they will just be people – long-lived and wise, but no longer unique, now that humanity has gained effective immortality. Perhaps the best thing would be to quietly put out the word that the ‘powers that be’ do not care, and would welcome their help – if they exist.”

Absen nodded. “I’ll spread that word. Quietly. Now, let’s talk about our strategy for the meeting.”

Chapter 8

Orion station’s command conference room filled with carefully vetted personnel, taking seats along the wall, but only the admiral plus seven sat down at the table.

Absen placed himself at the head, the prototype EarthFleet coat of arms above him on the wall. He could smell the paint among the closeness of packed bodies in the room, and made a note to have someone look at the ventilation. The engineers still hadn’t quite gotten everything worked out.

To his right, Rae attracted attention despite the conservative dress and manner, in this case probably just because of her unique semi-alien status. Absen was happy she did not seem to be wearing perfume. The woman was distracting enough without enhancements.

To Absen’s left sat Australia’s Senior Under-Minister of Research and Production James Ekara. He knew the slim dapper man was the true force behind the figurehead of his appointed minister, and a member of that nation-continent’s secret shadow government, the Committee of Nine.

Secret to the general populace, anyway.

In the last year, Ekara had been responsible for an enormous increase in the Free Communities’ ground-based space and weapons production capacity. He would be instrumental in the execution of what they decided today. Probably only the Third Reich’s Albert Speer had ever had as much authority over the entire economy of a nation, really a multinational effort, as he. Beneath the veneer of its democratic system, and guided at the top by General Nguyen’s unwavering hand, Australia had become the coordinating arsenal of the Free Communities, and thus, of Earth.

Absen still couldn’t figure out how he felt about working with Psychos like Ekara and Nguyen. Or ‘Outliers,’ as the functional ones liked to be called. Chaplain Forman, his psychology advisor, had told him she had identified at least of dozen mental sub-groupings of these aberrations, but the psychobabble had gone over his head. As far as he was concerned, anyone with a compromised conscience fit the description, and made him very nervous.

But Markis had assured him that Ekara was vital to the war effort, hyper-competent, and would cooperate. Absen didn’t have the luxury of choosing his tools today.

The other civilian leader present from the Free Communities was US Special Envoy Travis Tyler, a rangy hard-edged man with the youthful body and old eyes of the rejuvenated, a look not so different from Absen’s own. While America’s economy no longer held the top spot even in the FC, his nation still led the world in the two vital fields of nanotech and human-interfaced cybertech, as well as remaining one of the world’s few with nuclear arms.

From the Neutral States, Minister of Economy Annika Skolbourg and Russian Minister of the Interior Viktor Kredenko sat to Rae Denham’s right. While the latter nation was technically part of the NS, like America it held a special place with its nuclear arsenal and its cyborg program derived from the Septagon Shadow debacle.

The third bloc was represented by Secretary General Chang Jiaoshi, at the opposite end of the table. Unlike the others, not only was this woman high up in the economic hierarchy of her nation, but actually held the number two position in China. Beside her, sitting stiffly in full dress uniform, was General Park Song-muk, whose title translated as something like “Premier of the Council of Ministers for Production.” It didn’t matter; as a North Korean, he only had a seat as a Chinese ally, a fiction of binationalism. In reality, of course, he was a vassal.

Ironically, even the North Korean economy had become minimally healthy, with a lot of Chinese production capacity outsourced to them, and Absen had read reports that said their leaders were turning a blind eye to Eden Plague carriers. As long as they got their luxury goods and kept power, they did not seem to care.

Each individual and bloc represented here oversaw tremendous production power, and thus, each of them would be vital to building Earth and its defenses – and the birth of EarthFleet itself.

Absen opened with, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Orion station.” It still pained him to refer to his ship this way, but she would never be a vessel of war again with the pounding she had taken. After making the introductions, he opened with, “This meeting is taking place on neutral ground in hopes that it will minimize political problems and foster economic cooperation among our various entities.”

“Just what entity do you represent, Admiral?” Kredenko asked with characteristic bluntness. “You are an American, no? Your soldiers and underlings are largely Free Communities citizens. We have all been looking at the heraldry so prominently displayed above your head, and reports from loyal Russians in space tell of the rumors going around. It appears this ‘EarthFleet’ will just be an extension of Free Community power, which is obviously controlled by the U.S.” He turned to glare at his American counterpart, Travis Tyler.

Absen began to respond but Tyler held up his hand. “Minister, the time for complaints and endless political bickering is over. In fact, time is what we do not have. Here are the facts. America is no longer a superpower. Not in the old sense. Because of the tremendous damage we sustained from rogue nuclear weapons, our GDP is lower than that of China, Australia, South Africa, Germany, Japan, even possibly Russia. We are wholeheartedly part of the Free Communities and believe that only with their collective leadership can Earth’s resources be mobilized sufficiently to win when the Destroyer arrives. The Cold Wars are over.”

“So,” Kredenko retorted, “if not America, then the FC of which you are a part will be in charge – and sitting here at this table, four of eight are FC citizens.”

“I am not,” Rae said mildly.

“You blended with an American!”

“And your government has spent the last few years claiming I am wholly alien,” she retorted. “You can’t have it both ways. No, Minister, I stand above humanity’s politics. Actually,” she went on, her voice rising and leaking contempt, “I created a lot of your politics over the past four thousand years. The idea that Raphael, a being millennia old, would care about the petty squabbles of your childish nations is patently ridiculous.”

Kredenko looked about to explode, until help came from an unexpected source. Chang spoke, her eyes wide in a moon-shaped face. “Face reality, Comrade Kredenko. The recent events in your country have weakened you further. China insisted you have a seat here. Do not abuse our support.”

The Russian sat back in shock and closed his mouth.

Nodding thanks to the Chinese official, Minister Skolbourg said, “We must find a way to unite, despite our past differences. Everyone has grievances. Those must be put aside. The Neutral States, of which Russia is now a part,” she looked pointedly at Kredenko, “stands ready to cooperate fully with every entity that is working for Earth’s defense. I am also authorized to say that anyone who obstructs such efforts will be the recipient of stringent economic measures, up to and including a total embargo on everything but food and medical supplies.” Her gaze at the Russian seemed unusually forthright for the usual diffident European style. “Even if they are our own members.”

“Minister Kredenko,” Absen’s tone was conciliatory, “no one wants to isolate or injure Russia. Your molten-salts reactors still power this ship – I mean, this station. Your scientists and engineers still rank among the best in the world. Your people fought and died alongside everyone on Orion, and I was proud to serve with them. And I, for one,” he dropped his bombshell, “am actually no longer an American citizen.”

Travis Tyler, still a full general in the US Army Reserve, glanced sharply at Absen.

“That’s right, General,” Absen addressed him. “As of midnight last night, I renounced my American citizenship and I have declared for myself a new status, the first of its kind: Citizen of Earth. As much as it pains me, I have to set the example to move beyond partisanship.”

“I will do the same, as soon as we are done here,” Rae spoke up.

“The leopard cannot change his spots,” Kredenko said weakly, but all the fight had gone out of him, his protest pro forma.

Absen sat forward and stared at the Russian. “You did. Russia joined the Neutral States. It is no longer the old country you knew. Imagine what could be accomplished if you integrate fully with the world’s economy.”

“Russia will never be ruled by a foreign power!”

“I agree,” Absen replied. “Do you really believe that the Neutral States rule anything? From what I understand, instead of shortages your people now enjoy food surpluses and more consumer goods than ever, thanks to your new status in that alliance. And frankly, Minister, without NS and FC technology, you will fall farther and farther behind. The Americans have a saying, sir, which you might have heard. ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’ For real.”

“I can make no promises,” Kredenko mumbled.

“Of course not. But you can participate in these discussions, and you can carry the idea back to your government. Until then, let us talk about what we came here to do.”

“And what is that, Admiral?” asked Skolbourg. “It seems we are getting sidetracked.”

“Under-Minister Ekara will explain the broad strokes.”

The dapper half-Aborigine smiled deprecatingly and glanced at his nails. “Thank you, Admiral. To begin, let me show you just one graphic.” He signaled the tech at the corner desk, who caused a slide to appear on screens mounted strategically around the room.

“This shows Australia’s production over the last year. The lines represent GDP, space lift capacity, and the total output we have moved into space.”

“Are these figures correct?” Skolbourg’s voice held an edge of disbelief.

“Absolutely. If anything, they are conservative. Yes, Australia’s GDP has almost doubled in the last eighteen months. Its maximum surge space lift capacity now exceeds three thousand tons a day, though the average sustained number is about a third of that. And the production output measured in dollar terms now exceeds one trillion per year.”

“And the curves?”

“The curves are sustainable for the next eight years at least. Until the enemy arrives.”

“That’s amazing,” the NS minister marveled.

“But it’s not enough,” Absen interjected. “If we are to meet our goals, the output curves of all of Earth’s nations must look like this. If we can’t, we won’t have what we need to beat the Destroyer.”

“Yes,” Ekara took up the argument smoothly. “I am here with full support of the Free Communities Council and its chairman. They have empowered me to place a proposal before you. What we must do, I believe, is to create a world command economy based on the Chinese and Australian model. Only by rigorous central planning, rationing, and sacrifice can we generate the enormous amount of materiel we believe we need. Every day is vital. This is what we must do.”

“We have only your word that these things are true,” Skolbourg said weakly, still stunned by the numbers on the screen before her, representing as they did complete disruption of standard economic theory.

“The figures are easy to verify,” Ekara replied. “In fact, I invite anyone to come and tour Exmouth Spaceport, or look at the explosive growth around Australia’s cities. Our population has increased by over ten percent in one year alone due to massive immigration of Asian workers from the poorer and most heavily populated areas. We have provided training and jobs, and everyone now maintains a standard six day, seventy-two hour week. Because of the Eden Plague, workers are able to sustain such a pace without difficulty.”

“But the quality of life?” Skolbourg asked.

Every leader in the room turned to stare at her, and Absen heard what might have been sniggers from the aides’ seats arrayed in back. “Belay that,” he snapped toward the sound, then turned to the NS minister. “Ma’am, let’s be frank. You say you represent the Neutral States, but your alliance is heavily Euro-centric. Europe sustained the fewest casualties both from the nuclear bombs and from the plagues.” He leaned forward to stare intently at the woman. “Some of your citizens seem to be still living in denial, unable to really grasp that humanity is under threat of extinction. ‘Quality of life’ can only exist if you are alive.” His last words rose to almost a shout before he calmed himself. “The Neutral States will have to make sacrifices just like the rest of us.”

Secretary General Chang shifted in her seat, subtly calling attention. “China agrees, and concurs in principle.” The rest of the participants at the table and those underlings around the edge of the room evidenced surprise with low mutterings and glances, quickly stilled. “We will work closely with all of our allies to, as you say, ‘make it happen.’” Beside her, the North Korean general nodded silently.

Skolbourg licked her lips, suddenly in the spotlight. “I will bring the proposal to the full Neutral States Assembly. Perhaps I can get them to agree. Minister?” She turned pointedly to Kredenko, her putative ally.

He nodded slowly, brow furrowed in thought. “Yes,” he replied, glancing at Chang. “I believe my country will support this idea, and will support Minister Skolbourg before the full Assembly. The details, of course, must be hammered out.”

“Of course,” Tyler interjected, his eyes bright with surprise and pleasure. “Let us put it to an official recorded vote. I move for a resolution that all the political entities represented here cooperate to create a worldwide command economy, managed by a multi-representative body to be created later.”

“Seconded,” Chang immediately said. A smile seemed briefly to touch her eyes as Tyler glanced her way.

Absen held up a hand. “All in favor, signify by raising your hand and saying ‘aye.’”

Seven more hands went up and seven voices said “aye.”

Spontaneous applause broke out around the room as a double dozen staffers and functionaries cheered and shook hands. Beneath the noisy confusion, Tyler leaned over to speak quietly to Absen. “This has no legal force, you know, Henrich. This isn’t even a recognized body authorized to vote.”

Absen chuckled. “Ain’t politics grand? It doesn’t matter what the legalities are. If I’m right, hours from now the news will sweep around the world and the fiction will become reality as overwhelming public support ensures no one backs out.”

“But what about this EarthFleet thing?” Tyler jerked his head in the direction of the shield.

Absen’s eyebrows went up in amusement. “Just watch.” He leaned back to rap on the table. The noise level in the room dropped as the aides and attendants quickly sat down and shut up, and the principals turned to look at him. “I would like to make one other motion here. I move that all of you here bring the EarthFleet proposal to your respective deciding bodies for consideration.”

“Seconded,” Rae Denham said, suddenly seeming to glow with charisma. Absen wondered how she did it. He suspected she used pheromones.

“But what is the proposal exactly?” Kredenko asked.

Absen waved at Tobias, who passed out data drives to each of the leaders. “In essence, extraplanetary space will become EarthFleet territory. Military forces will be transferred to it or will have to return to Earth. Personnel will be freely allowed to renounce national citizenship and formally join the Fleet. All private or national property will be respected.” He held up a hand. “I know this raises a few dozen questions right away. It’s all in those files. For now, though, I intend to operate as if the plan will be approved.”

“And if it is not?” Kredenko growled.

Absen fixed him with a stony stare. “Then God help us all.”

***

“That’s a lot to hit them with,” Rae said to Absen as they sat in his office-cum-quarters sharing a bottle of Scotch. She knocked back three fingers with an appreciative sigh and poured another as she eyed a strange twisted pillar leaning in the corner.

“I know. I’m hoping they will spend all their energy on the frontal attack – the economic proposal – and view my flanking maneuver of the EarthFleet plan as a fait accompli.”

“Or, they will pass the economic brief and then bog down arguing about the Fleet, if you believe in Murphy’s Law.”

Absen raised his glass. “Or one of Parkinson’s. The smaller the expenditure, the bigger the argument, wasn’t it?”

“Something like that.” Rae raised hers in return. “But you’re not going to wait for their decision. I can see it in your eyes.” I know you aren’t the type to sit back and wait.

“You’re right. I wouldn’t have done anything as drastic as renouncing my citizenship if I wasn’t pushing all in. However, I have some secret backers.”

Rae sat back in the comfortable leather chair, fiddling absently with her glass as it sat on the table at arm’s length. “Let me guess. Markis, which generally means the whole FC.”

Absen nodded, eyes fixed on Rae’s face.

“President McKenna…”

“Actually no, but Tyler is in my corner. He’ll persuade his boss.”

“And the Chinese, I think.”

Absen sipped and cocked an eyebrow. “Hmm?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Admiral. Somehow you got them on your side, which was the key to the whole thing. Chang stuck her oar in at just the right times. What did you promise them?”

“The same thing that I want. Legitimacy and recognition.”

“They don’t have that already?”

Absen shook his head. “Not really. During the Second Cold War they expanded their borders in some specific ways. They finally managed to annex Taiwan without major bloodshed, though the acquisition remains in dispute. They want that settled. The legacy powers still do not recognize China’s full sovereignty over Tibet or Mongolia. There are a dozen smaller irritants, pieces of Viet Nam and Laos and Burma that they are occupying illegally. I told them I would support the concept of a Greater China when the time came.”

Rae idly tapped her glass on the tabletop. “You promised they could keep what they took? De facto annexation?”

“I…implied it. That was the carrot. I also reminded them of the stick.” Absen waved a pointed finger above his head. “EarthFleet has hundreds of nuclear weapons and holds the high ground of space. I can hit Earth, but Earth can’t hit me. They may think I would never use them, but can they be sure? More importantly, I will eventually command an armada to fight the Destroyer. If we win, I will still command it.”

“They want to get on the good side of Julius Caesar.”

Absen laughed. “Yes. The eternal problem of how to keep the conquering general from seizing Rome. And I intend to use that implied threat to do what has to be done.” He stood up to get a box of cigars off his desk, bringing it, a lighter and an ashtray to the table.

Rae reached over to pick up a stogie from the box, cutting the end off and firing it up. “Funny, Ilona hated smoking, but Raphael…I think he, like any Pure Form, viewed it as one of many pleasures that awaited him upon blending, and so I find myself having acquired the taste.” She puffed it to life and held the smoke in her mouth, rolling the cigar between her thumb and middle finger as she puffed.

“Few enough pleasures in this world,” Absen replied as he lit his own. “Why deny yourself?” His eyes held hers for an unusually long time.

Rae’s gaze sharpened in return, and she forced herself to be kind. After all, he had no idea Skull still lived, or even that she had more than the one child to occupy her time. “Why Henrich…that almost sounds like a proposition.”

Absen smiled faintly, letting the smoke waft forth. “Call it an inquiry. It’s been over a year since Alan Denham died.” He shrugged.

“I’m sorry, Henrich. My loss is too fresh,” Rae went on, “and I have too many balls in the air right now. Even with my utmost efforts and the Memetech I control, Earth is in enormous peril. I can’t take the time or expend the energy for a relationship, no matter how tempting.” There. That should put him off for now.

Absen’s expression turned wry. “Nicely done. Well, if we don’t survive, it won’t matter much, but if we do…I’ll inquire again, how’s that?”

“Fair enough. Now…” She pointed to the object in the corner. “What the hell is that? I feel like I should know, but…”

Absen stood to pick up the thing with a grunt. About ten centimeters across and a meter long, it appeared to be made of a metallic substance, with pits and scarring all along its length. “Hyper core. One of the small ones that hit Orion. The scientists were done with it and it was sitting around in a lab somewhere so I had them bring it up here. I’m going to have them mount it on the wall or something.” He set it down with a heavy clunk on the table.

Rae leaned over it. “Biologically gestated ferrocrystal composite matrix. Like the penetrator in a ground tank’s sabot round. It’s what makes the hypers so deadly, along with their speed. Simple, elegant, reusable. I could have my ship make these if it were necessary, though the request list for Meme-grown materials is always several hundred times longer than what I can actually do.”

Absen waved a hand. “We can manufacture our own ferrocrystal well enough using nanotech vat assembly. We’ll probably never build similar projectiles, though. If we want cheap bullets, we’ll use railgun spheres. If we pay the cost to make a missile with a fusion engine and a guidance system, we’re going to stick a cheap fusion warhead with a bomb-pumped beam system on it. Can’t put a missile in a railgun; those things generate thousands of Gs at launch, and the components can’t take it.”

“Meme biotechnology is inherently different,” Rae agreed. “They use what works best for them. This works for us. They do use machines, you know. Some.”

“Really?” Absen sat down again, looking interested.

“They create what they call Purelings, which are blank cloned bodies of subject races blended with new Meme mitoses. These are then downloaded with carefully selected skill sets and memories. Basically they are soldier-slaves, janissaries completely loyal to the Empire. They can wear armor or vacuum suits and use mechanical weapons manufactured on subject worlds, or even aboard ship. We might see some during this attack.”

“Really?” he repeated, now completely focused on this unexpected military topic.

“Yes. It’s been in the reports your intel people are debriefing me for. Haven’t you been reading them?”

“Not closely enough, I guess. I remember something about enemy ground troops. That’s why we have Marines. I’d love to hear more details.”

Rae rubbed her forehead. “You can get all that from your staff. Really, there are whole sub-reports on likely enemy close-combat forces. I think our time here would be better spent on other things.”

“True enough.” Absen was long used to prioritizing his work, leaving lower-level items to his staff. If he tried to do it all he would never sleep or eat.

Rae finished her stogie and ground out the butt in the ashtray, using the pause in the conversation to change subjects. “Next world-shattering topic?”

Absen chuckled as he reached for a tablet, tapping an icon to bring up his notes. “I do have several potential EarthFleet issues I want to talk about. The Ceres-Callisto shipyards and bases, and the uses of the moons of Mars, as well as the courses of action the Red Team has come up with. Not to influence your brainstorming; just operational things, like how it’s going to get done. I know it’s not fair to keep going to your well too many times, but there are some things that only your ship and your technology can do right now, and the sooner we get started on those things, the farther along we will be when Earthtech catches up.”

“All right, let’s take them one by one.” Rae pulled a tablet of her own from a pocket, and they spent the next hour whacking weeds.

Chapter 9

“Earth’s defense and security is now EarthFleet’s responsibility,” Absen declared in the morning – his morning – press conference announcing its existence. “We are now Earth’s military, owned by no nation or alliance. We are neutral, and focused outward. The three political blocs of Earth will provide us with resources as they deem, and we will deploy those resources as we see fit. We will listen to everyone, but be controlled by no one.”

The world greeted this announcement with a great deal of skepticism, but a trickle of personnel from Earth wishing to join slowly grew into a flood, mostly in the junior and middle ranks.

This evident popularity caused an unintended side effect. The three power blocs approved the coordination of the world economy under a new body: the Combined Council of Earth. Absen found it interesting and actually heartening that they had seen EarthFleet as a potential political rival and had banded together to ensure their superiority. Frankly, he did not want to be the leader of a new sovereign entity. This new assembly would actually have more power at a higher level than he had hoped.

Specifically, their new Combined Council claimed to be the civilian supervision for EarthFleet, not only claiming sovereignty over resources but administration and strategy as well. They probably expected him to try to buck it and hand skeptics a victory, but he’d much rather take the high road and accept this newly declared state of affairs. Had he not, the naysayers would claim his unwillingness to listen to the Council proved that he was laying the groundwork for a military coup, rather than simply trying to create a unified and effective military force as he claimed.

Of course he immediately accepted their supervision, in principle at least, via a worldwide press release. Absen had been willing but never comfortable to be the dictator of a new quasi-nation. A more ambitious man might have turned them down, but he found himself in the enviable position of getting nearly everything he wanted. And, he mused, what Markis and Nguyen apparently wanted: a more united Earth with the Free Communities first among equals.

He had the wit to wonder whether he had somehow been maneuvered into his actions in furtherance of their goals, but then abandoned that line of thought. Second-guessing himself had never been his habit, though the practice intruded into his thoughts more often lately.

Once it became clear that EarthFleet would accept civilian control its popularity soared even higher. Absen figured that couldn’t hurt him in what was likely to be a kind of constant negotiation with his new masters. While he was no master of politics, he had no doubt that he could identify those of his new service that were, and put them to use.

Absen’s next major meeting the following day included an eclectic mix of military personnel, scientists and engineers, all of mid-grade to senior rank. Despite many clamoring to be involved, the admiral ensured that only new actual EarthFleet personnel would attend. All had already served notice to their home nations that they would be renouncing their respective allegiances, and signed a “Citizen of Earth Declaration” he and Rae and his JAG had hammered out together.

Their number surprised him, and the percentage of those contacted: more than half had said yes right away, increasing every hour. He wasn’t sure exactly how the mix of EarthFleet and national personnel would integrate and function together in their jobs, but he had spent enough time in NATO to know it could work, with strong clear leadership.

Rae watched and listened invisibly from an adjacent room. Absen knew her cooperation would be vital, but did not want to muddy the waters by having her present.

Absen looked around the large meeting room and rapped it to order with a gavel shaped from a piece of Orion’s damaged armor. “All right, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to my first staff meeting as Commander, EarthFleet.” He looked around the room and let that sink in. “Everyone here is either already head of his or her respective joint division, or is hereby appointed to that position. Non-EarthFleet personnel cannot be a J-head. I know that will be awkward for some of you. My staff has already contacted those above you and offered them their chance to join. If they do, they’ll still be transferred. That’s your reward for your early commitment. By the time you return to your offices, one way or the other they will be gone. Understood?”

Some nodded, some smiled, and some muttered or looked concerned. He let them get used to the idea for a moment before he continued. “We have a number of proposals on the table, from several teams. Let’s get right to it. Bill?”

An odd duck of a civilian stood up, round-headed, scrunch-faced and a bit slovenly. “Yes, uh, Admiral. I’m Bill Marshall, and I guess I’m acting chief of logistics. Guess I’ll have to get a uniform again, I’m a retired Army colonel, Engineer branch. Um…our proposal is a framework to structure our production based on the following factors…”

Absen valiantly strove to pay close attention, because he knew that for the next eight years, EarthFleet would not be doing much fighting. It would be organizing, training and equipping. He was competent enough at the first two, but the long pole in the tent was building the ships and weapons. For that, he needed someone better than he was.

When Marshall wound down, Absen asked, “Who should head this all up? Do you want the job?”

Marshall squinted by habit, as if he wore spectacles, though almost no one had need of such things anymore. “Um, sir, I could, but…”

“Go on.”

“I think we need a flag for this one. You’re effectively a one-star, though I suppose that might change, but if I know service politics – and I do – we need more stars. We need a four-star if we can get one, who can talk to all those officials on Earth on their level.”

“Do you have a suggestion?”

“Well…only one guy I know. Granted, he’d be another American, but…”

“Spit it out.”

“General Travis, sir. He ran Tiny Fortress. He’s got the credibility and the knowhow.”

Absen nodded. “Mister Marshall, we’ll try to find someone with some stars. Until then, you take control of the J4. I want to see production plans, top to bottom, in…shall we say two weeks?”

Marshall gulped, then nodded. “Might be rough, but we’ll shake something out by then.” He sat down.

“All right. Next?”

Chapter 10

Shan seemed troubled when he walked into the standard-gravity gym, shutting the door carefully. This in itself was startling to Steward Schaeffer, as most of the time he couldn’t read the Chinese giant at all.

He became genuinely concerned when the big man changed into a pristine black kung fu gi, or whatever the outfit was called. Schaeffer’s background was all in the Japanese styles. He’d never seen Shan wear anything like that, nor even work out or spar with the other stewards. Perhaps he trained alone.

“Interesting look,” the redhead remarked as the Chinese stepped onto the mat and dropped into a stretching squat.

Shan ignored the comment, but the furrow in his brow did not go away.

“Something bothering you?” Schaeffer caught the eye of his fellow American steward, John Clayton, jerking his head imperceptibly.

He drifted over.

“Yes,” Shan replied, standing up straight, “but a demonstration is in order before I tell you.” He bowed formally to Schaeffer, put closed fist to palm in front of him, and then took up a relaxed sparring stance.

“Demonstration?” The American clapped palms to thighs and bowed, then settled low, weight balanced.

“Yes. I want you to kill me, if you can. If not, I will kill you.”

“Holy shit,” Clayton exclaimed from behind, reflexively extending his ferrocrystal claws. As full cyborgs, all stewards possessed a wide range of upgrades, beginning with close combat blades. Droplets of blood fell as the short knives extended from his fingertips. In moments he had healed, and stood crouching, ready to fight.

I knew it all along, Schaeffer thought as he unsheathed his own blades. He transmitted the red alert code over his internal radio, summoning the third steward and some Marine backup to pull his nuts out of the fire. As he glanced toward the door, his telescopic right eye could see the lock turned shut. That would slow down any response.

Shan nodded, as if he knew what Schaeffer had done, then he glided forward with a quick leg sweep. The American lifted his knee just in time for his opponent’s foot to rise too fast, slamming into his solar plexus. He felt his laminated bones flex and groan, sensed his breath driven from his body and his internal oxygen kick in.

And then his lungs spasmed, in shock.

His cybernetic systems would dribble O2 into his bloodstream through an osmotic backup, enough to keep him alive, even conscious, but without his organic lungs his combat capability just dropped by half. With one blow he had been knocked out of the fight.

Schaeffer felt himself bounce off the back wall and slide to the floor onto his side. He tried to get to his feet while watching for Shan’s next attack, but the Chinese ignored him and turned toward Clayton.

Intense concentration showed on the other American’s face as he slid around to his left, throwing stiff-fingered jabs at the other man while circling toward Schaeffer. “Don’t –” he croaked, but did not finish the sentence before Shan took a deep, well-timed step between Clayton’s strikes and punched him in the chest. With his deceptively long reach, the combined power of his human nano-augmented muscles and his cybernetics knocked the other man across the room.

Following up swiftly, Shan grabbed the fallen American by his elbows and pinned the man’s arms behind him, lifting him off the ground like a small child. Holding him that way with one huge paw, he took a standard high-tensile zip-tie restrainer from a pocket and slapped it onto Clayton’s forearms, and then carried him across the room to drop him next to Schaeffer.

Then he squatted down to look his fellow stewards in the eyes, saying nothing.

“Better kill us now,” Schaeffer gasped, “because as soon as the reaction team shows up they’ll fry you. They won’t come unarmed.” His lung spasms began to relax, which meant they would start working again soon, he hoped.

“I do not intend to kill you.”

“But…”

“I just wanted you to defend yourself as well as you could, holding nothing back.” Shan held out his hand to Schaeffer.

The American took it, and Shan lifted him to his feet. “Why?” he managed to say.

“I wanted to demonstrate that I could have beaten you, even all three of you, at any time. If I had any nefarious intentions, you would not have been able to stop me. Steward Clayton,” Shan turned to the restrained man now glaring up at him from the floor, “I will be happy to release you if you can control yourself.”

“Yeah. All right.” Clayton did not look controlled.

At that moment the gym door burst open and armed Marines stormed in with weapons ready. Shan made no move, and Schaeffer transmitted instructions subvocally over his internal radio. “Stand down. False alarm. Steward business.” He shot a look at Steward Greco, who slapped the Marine in charge on his armored shoulder to get his attention, pointing back toward the door in emphasis.

Reluctantly, the troops withdrew.

Greco himself hefted a PW20 in one hand, an EMP cannon in the other. The first would hardly bother Shan, but the latter should shut down all of his cybernetics. Schaeffer decided not to give the order to take him down. Shan had spoken the truth. He could have killed them both easily, but now he wanted to talk.

“All right then,” Schaeffer said, controlling his breathing with an effort of will. “What was this all about?”

“Would someone get this restrainer off me please?” Clayton asked from the floor. Schaeffer leaned over to pop the coded release, and the other man got to his feet, rubbing his chest and glowering.

Shan reached into a pocket and withdrew a compact tablet, turning its lit screen to face the others. “Read this, please,” he said with an air of deference.

“Citizen of Earth Declaration…and that pictogram is, what, your name?”

Shan nodded.

“You’re going to join EarthFleet?”

He nodded again.

“Why?”

Shan shrugged a very Western shrug, but said nothing. Schaeffer pursed his lips and thought for a moment, and then answered his own question. “I know why. Huen joined too, right? And you’re his buddy, so off you go.”

“That is as good an explanation as any. Why does this idea bother you?”

“It doesn’t –” But Schaeffer realized Shan was right. It did bother him. Was it because the Chinese had taken the difficult step that he himself had been contemplating, beating him to it? Or was it because this action contradicted his own cherished belief that Shan was up to no good. It could all still be a ploy; nothing said he couldn’t join EarthFleet but still be in the employ of his nation’s masters. If so, it was a very twisted route he followed.

Schaeffer realized he would have to either take a leap of faith about Shan, or hold onto his suspicions and sooner or later he would be replaced, for he had no doubt that the position of Steward was far too sensitive to be filled by any but actual Fleet personnel. Suddenly the thought of going back to the States, back to Earth, seemed like a retreat, a failure, and he realized what he wanted.

“All right. Good on you, Shan. I’m going to do it too.”

“What?” Clayton and Greco said simultaneously, staring at him. “That’s treason,” Clayton continued wonderingly.

“No it’s not,” Schaeffer retorted. “Not unless you think Admiral Absen and every other American joiner is a traitor. There’s nothing treasonous about giving up your citizenship, though it makes me sick to think about it. But it’s the right thing to do. I’m joining EarthFleet.” He held out his hand to Shan. “Bygones?”

“I am unfamiliar with that term,” Shan replied, “but I deduce its meaning. I agree.” He clasped hands with the redheaded American, swallowing the other’s in his massive paw. The Chinese’s eye twitched in a wink. “Now…perhaps I can offer you a job?”

Chapter 11

Admiral Absen nodded to Master Helmsman Okuda as he came in to the conference room. “Admiral on deck,” called the stocky dark astronaut, and everyone in the room stood up until Absen said, “Carry on. At ease. Take your seats.”

Eight pair of eyes fastened on the Admiral: Okuda, Lieutenant Commanders Johnstone, Ford and Scoggins, Lieutenant Colonel Stallers, Lieutenant Mirza – and Rae Denham. Another woman with a short blonde bob cut, unknown to any except Absen, sat against the wall behind her, in the khaki uniform of Navy captain, outranking everyone but the admiral.

They all knew how unusual it was for a flag officer, even one many worked for directly, to call a meeting like this, with no staffers, no aides, just the ever-present Steward Tobias in his starched whites, guarding against treachery and assassination.

“Good morning, Red Team.” Absen cocked an eyebrow at the group, gauging reactions, but saying no more.

Finally Ford spoke up, clearing his throat. “Ah, sir, I presume that means we are going to work on anticipating the enemy?”

“No, Ford. You are going to work on being the enemy. You will get inside his head and come up with everything you can think of that he might do, based on his capabilities and psychology.”

“Psychology?” This from Scoggins. “What do we know about Meme psychology, or psychology at all?”

“Glad you asked, Ms. Scoggins. You all know who Ms. Raphaela Denham is, I presume, and this,” he indicated the unknown woman, “is Captain Christine Forman.”

“A chaplain?” Ford asked, as if in disbelief.

“Yes, I am,” Forman responded in the clipped, clenched-teeth accent of a Boston Brahmin, “and I hold a doctorate in psychology as well as several other degrees in related fields.” She stood to her full five-two and glided over in Orion’s low gravity to take a seat at the end of the table, opposite Absen. “Is there a problem?”

Stallers said in his Aussie twang, “Perhaps what we wonder is how you feel about killing Meme.”

“Just the same as killing wolves circling round the flock. You need have no fear on that score. ‘Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me’ refers to a shepherd’s weapons, after all. Now I suggest we get to business. The admiral’s time is valuable and I am sure we will have plenty of opportunity to explore personalities.”

“Thank you, Christine,” Absen headed off any further clashes. “Captain Forman is your psychology subject matter expert.” He turned to Rae. “And Ms. Denham will not be a full-time member of your team, but is your SME on the Meme, and will be available to you, I am told, at any time via secure comm.”

Rae nodded in confirmation. “I will give you the communication codes for the Denham, and I have programmed the ship to patch you through to me at any time.”

“The rest of you,” Absen went on, “are now assigned the primary mission of figuring out what the Destroyer can, might, and will do. You will maintain your currency in your specialties, but more than half your duty time will be taken up with this.”

“For how long, sir?” Scoggins asked, pushing a lock of her brown hair back behind her ear.

“As long as it takes. Maybe all the years until it arrives. Your collective job is to analyze every possibility and come up with the most likely enemy courses of action. You have to imagine yourselves in his position, with his capabilities. How would you attack Earth if you were Meme? What would be the most effective and efficient means to kill us off?”

“Kill us?” Okuda asked. “You think they’ve given up on conquering us and taking our bodies?”

“You tell me, Chief. What would you do in his place?”

Okuda grunted and sat back, thinking.

“Who’s in charge?” Ford glanced at Forman.

Absen replied, “Yes, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right, Ford. Captain Forman is not a line officer, so she’s disqualified. Scoggins is senior of the line, so she’s it.”

Ford scowled sideways at her, and Scoggins smirked faintly back at him. “I guess it could be worse,” he grumbled.

“Ford, you better belay that attitude. I can always arrange a nice dirtside assignment. Fleet liaison to the Antarctic territories, perhaps.”

“Sorry, sir. Happy to be here, sir.” Ford straightened, and shut up.

“So Scoggins, you will take charge of this mob. Your orders are in the system, along with a very high priority to requisition resources. Don’t abuse it. You will have spaces on Orion for now, and computers, comms…move your quarters to be close. Put in for whatever other specialist assistants you need, up to a dozen or so – researchers, admin, intel ratings, technicians.”

“Yes, sir,” Scoggins responded with a wolfish grin.

“So,” Absen said, standing up, “I’ll leave you to it. You have four weeks until your first report, where you will brief me and the staff on everything you have come up with.”

Chapter 12

Now that Orion was a station and not a warship, Absen had a lot more freedom to rearrange its internal geometry. No longer would its structure need to withstand high G forces, nor hold thousands of nuclear bombs for propulsion, so he ordered one of the cargo bays converted into a huge ops-intel center sufficient to host over two hundred people as they worked. A large space for combined briefings was ringed by stations, which was in turn surrounded on the outside by a double dozen rooms configurable for almost anything. This first Red Team report would be its initial use.

The Red Team members sat on a low stage below one of the two enormous main screens that faced each other across the central space. A podium stood off to the left side, Lieutenant Commander Scoggins behind it.

Admiral Absen walked up onto the stage, waving for silence. The room, packed to capacity with personnel of all ranks and no rank, from every corner of Earth, quieted, to look expectantly at him.

General Travis Tyler sat in the front row. As newly-appointed EarthFleet J4, Joint Chief of Logistics, the operational insights and decisions here would have a great effect on his efforts to establish the military’s industry in space. With Brigadier General Bill Marshall by his side, he’d already whipped the supply and production chain into shape, ensuring Earth’s enormous groundside effort got put to use effectively and efficiently.

“Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen of Blue Team.” Absen was looking out at the audience when he said this. “Meet Red Team.” He waved toward the nine people behind him.

A murmur swept through the nearly two hundred on the floor below.

“And Red Team, meet Blue Team. Before today, you may not have known of each other’s existence. This was deliberate. I wanted to keep the crossflow of information to a minimum, to avoid contaminating the brainstorming process with responses to each other, until now.”

“Red Team is responsible for coming up with enemy courses of action, or COAs. Blue Team is responsible for coming up with responses and counters to those COAs. That’s why Blue Team is so much larger – you will feed Earth’s nations with your reports and conclusions so that science and industry will be harnessed to your goals, and not waste effort on duplication or unfocused preparation. Every COA will be ranked by likelihood, and every COA will have a response plan developed by Blue Team, and associated resources – technologies, weapons – assigned to it. Ladies and gentlemen,” Absen said heavily, “you have your hands on the tiller. Your conclusions will steer Earth’s entire production capacity. You must do your work with excellence, and you must not fail. If you fail, Earth dies.”

With that declaration hanging heavily in the silence, Admiral Absen sat front and center of the nearest table, as expected of the most senior officer, and signaled Scoggins for the briefing to begin.

She took a deep breath, gazing around at the expectant faces. “Good afternoon Admiral, ladies and gentlemen. I am Lieutenant Commander Melissa Scoggins and on behalf of EarthFleet’s Red Team, welcome you to its first report.”

“Red Team’s mandate is to explore enemy COAs, based on his known and extrapolated capabilities and psychology. Our goal is to provide you, ah, Blue Team,” she smiled somewhat nervously, “with a set of scenarios to prepare for. Our hope is that, if we do our job well, when the Destroyer does show up, humanity will be ready for every eventuality, and will defeat the threat.”

Absen nodded reassuringly, and Scoggins thanked him with her eyes. She then introduced the team one by one, and moved on to the first set of slides.

“Our first, most obvious, and we believe most likely enemy COA, is a kinetic attack – to bomb Earth with objects – asteroids, comets, whatever they can find. There are hundreds of thousands of objects in the asteroid belt, many more in the Kuiper Belt, and billions on the Oort Cloud. This represents ammunition for the Meme. All they have to do is attach a drive and guidance system to accelerate an object on an interception course with Earth, or even as the scout ship attempted, to give a big one a push with its own drive.” She waved at a graphic depiction of space around the Solar System on the screen.

A Blue Team member in the front stood up. “Dr. Julia Tralenski, Minsk Institute of Astronomy. If they perform this operation far away in the Oort Cloud, they could send many objects – perhaps thousands – in coordination, at speed approaching half of that of light. How can we possibly stop such a thing?”

Several other Blue Team members popped up from their seats and began clamoring for attention. Absen turned, stood and snapped, “One at a time, please. You.” He pointed at the nearest, a young South Asian man.

“Dr. Narindra Kadesh, Bangalore Institute of Applied Physics. Only directed energy weapons such as lasers or particle beams can possibly intercept such objects.” He waved a pad, continuing in lilting English. “I have already worked out the necessary specifications for such devices, and their energy requirements. Given sufficient resources, I am convinced a constellation of orbital weapons could protect Earth from this type of attack.”

Absen said, “Thank you, Doctor. This is exactly the type of interaction we need down the line, but for now, let’s let Red Team lay out their initial findings. Most of you will all be spending the next weeks, months and even years working on this problem, right here.” Instead of sitting down in his seat, he moved off to stand in front of and below the podium, looking out over the audience, acting as a referee.

The man sat down with a nod, and Scoggins went on. “The next possibility, which could be considered a corollary or additional version of the kinetic body attack, is to use hypervelocity missiles like we encountered before. These living weapons could achieve almost any velocity, if the Destroyer fired them before it slowed down. While much smaller than the kinetic bodies in the first COA, they would be much harder to stop. For example, if they achieved ninety percent of lightspeed, we would not even see them until they were nine-tenths of the way in from their detection point – and if they maneuver, that will reduce interception possibility to almost zero. So, something must be developed to mitigate this enemy COA.”

Absen watched the crowd as they stirred and whispered to each other, discussing possibilities, but no one seemed to have an immediate and obvious answer. “I see this COA will take some effort to counter,” he observed. “Consider it your first major challenge, Blue Team: find a solution, or at least a theoretical approach. Go on, Scoggins,” he said over his shoulder.

“The next possible enemy COA we came up with was to use some sort of energy weapons of their own. In the battle between Orion and the Meme scout ship, we saw evidence of directed fusion weapons using incoherent and broad-spectrum energy, in layman’s terms more like blowtorches than lasers. We call these ‘fusors.’ These are very effective at short range but are useless farther away. If we posit that the Meme could use coherent-beam weapons like ours, they could advance at a high rate of speed still consistent with the ability to maneuver, and simply blast us.”

She turned toward the screen again, which showed a detailed computer-generated picture of the Destroyer. “This is what we think it will look like, from information provided from Raphaela Denham. Just under three kilometers across and massing twenty billion tons, we estimate it could carry and power a weapon in the petawatt range, which could destroy natural and unarmored targets at over one million kilometers, perhaps two.”

A hand went up, and a young woman spoke without introduction. “The scout ship showed no evidence of using coherent energy weapons. Do the Meme normally use such things? Ms. Denham?”

Rae stood up and took the microphone for a moment, her gorgeous appearance muted in a regulation flight suit and pinned hair. “All my knowledge, admittedly incomplete, suggests that they do not value coherent energy weapons, preferring to use hypervelocity missiles for ranges outside their fusors. They do use biolasers for communication, illumination and range finding. From my knowledge of my own ship, coherent energy beams are difficult to generate using organic technology. I suspect it is just a matter of Meme cost-benefit analysis, that they do not use them.”

“Then why do we think they will do this?” the young woman pressed.

“Several things to consider, ma’am,” Scoggins said, taking the microphone back. “First, enemy COAs are not exclusive of each other. They may do any and all of the things we come up with. Second, we do not want to rule out any possibility. Third, we believe the Meme crew of the scout ship escaped in a high-speed probe and will be picked up by the Destroyer. These beings will provide the enemy with intelligence about us. They may in turn decide to try something we haven’t seen yet, just as we would in their places. In fact,” she said, resting her forearms on the podium, “they might have some kind of Red Team and Blue Team of their own. Ms. Denham’s calculations show that any number of Meme might crew a Destroyer. It could easily hold thousands – tens of thousands – and still have plenty of weapons, fusion drives and so on. They will have an excess of intellectual capacity.”

More muttering swept the assembly before Absen signaled Scoggins to move on. “Another COA involves using explosive fusion weapons – essentially advanced thermonuclear bombs. They may not be powered by fissile matter but the effect could be similar, possibly devastating. Variants of this COA include bomb-pumped coherent energy weapons that destroy themselves as they are used, such as are on our drawing boards. All this is mere conjecture; again, we saw no evidence of this in the battle.”

“Your speculations get wilder and wilder,” called a man’s voice from the middle.

“That’s what the admiral is paying us for, sir,” Scoggins retorted. “We were told to come up with everything we could think of no matter how wild.”

Absen stepped in again. “While you are divided into Red Team and Blue Team, nothing says any of you can’t propose an enemy COA, or a solution to that COA. If you Blue Team members can get inside the Meme heads, do it. If the Red Team thinks they know how to counter a COA, I’m sure they won’t keep their mouth shut. I want every idea considered and thoroughly discussed, no matter how outlandish. For example, if you think the Meme might control us with ESP, or if we can do it to them, I want to hear it.”

The people around him chuckled, many of them uneasily.

“If you think they might spray new plagues or poisons into space to infect us, or fall to Earth, I want to hear it. If you think they might use mechanical nanites like those we have come up with, I want to hear it. If they have some kind of Von Neumann-like biomachines that will eat a planet and then spread inward, I want to hear about it. Do you understand, people? Nothing is too wild to think of, and to counter. We can rank-order their likelihoods later.”

It had become obvious to Absen that everyone was thinking too conservatively – or at least, was not admitting to anything more in public. He had to crack their minds open, so he went on.

“If you think we should set nuclear mines in the Oort Cloud, or spray nanites on the comets the Destroyer might consume, or project holograms of dragons to scare them, or try to ignite Jupiter into exploding, I want to hear it. I want any crazy science-fiction idea anyone ever came up with at least evaluated. If it’s impossible, or impractical, fine, but if it’s merely insane, then we have to consider it.”

This time the murmurings were of assent.

Scoggins cleared her throat. “Speaking of wild possibilities, sir, our next COA postulates that the Destroyer will take extra time to eat and grow, and then perhaps spawn more ships, perhaps even a fleet…”

As Scoggins spoke, Absen faded to the side, and took a seat along the wall. Slowly, brilliant minds began to churn as they overcame their reticence, cross-pollinating ideas that before many of them had kept to themselves. He knew that the scientific and military establishments tended to become hidebound and risk-averse, with groupthink taking over. As long as he and the Red and Blue Team leaders could prevent that circumstance, he felt confident they would come up with innovative strategies and solutions.

Chapter 13

Year Three

This time Rae Denham called Absen. With no real need to meet personally, she set up an encrypted video link, aimed at the most ordinary-looking corner of the ship. She made sure to ask Alan to keep his avatar elsewhere, along with the quads.

“What can I do for you,” Absen asked when he came on.

“I’d like direct liaison authority with General Travis’ people, and with Minister Ekara too.”

“Hmm. When you get to the point, you really get to the point. May I ask what for?”

Rae gave him that megawatt smile. “Of course. I’ve been monitoring some of the R&D efforts and I’m concerned that there isn’t enough progress being made on certain items.”

“The fusion engine?”

“That’s the biggest bottleneck. My ship could do a lot more things if it wasn’t expending so much effort growing cloned engines. It’s also gotten people used to depending on magical technology rather than doing things themselves, and if something goes wrong, I have to go fix it.”

“I had a report just last week that says they should have something workable in six months.”

Rae frowned. “Something isn’t good enough. A reliable production model, the Volkswagen of human-built fusion engines, is what Earth needs. Once the industrial base can churn out thousands of them, it will free them to stop relying on Memetech, and free me to do things only I can do.”

“Okay, you sold me. Talk to them and do…whatever it is you can. What is it you propose, anyway?”

“I’d rather keep the details close-hold, but here’s the gist. I want to set up a cell of super-smart folks that have no national allegiances and no distractions. I’ll give them access to all the Memetech they can digest, and they will be a ‘black box’ problem-solving group. People from all over the solar system can submit problems and they will solve them, if they can.”

“Sounds like a good idea. What do you need?”

“Just your authority to do it. I will recruit them myself, totally voluntary of course. But they will drop from sight, and no one will know the names of those involved. No video of personnel even, only graphics and so on.”

Absen took a sip of coffee from the mug on his desk, looking thoughtful. “You really think all that rigmarole is necessary?”

“Yes.” Rae tried to project complete confidence, which she almost actually had. “Otherwise, politics and money will get in the way. I want proposals in, solutions out. Nothing else.” Wouldn’t he excrete the proverbial brick if he actually knew who would be doing the research?

“All right. As long as it’s voluntary. I’ll shoot you a signed authorization you can wave at people. Oh, by the way…congratulations.”

“On what?” Rae raised her eyebrows in interest.

“Your promotion. I’ve made you a colonel in the Aerospace branch.”

“Captain to Colonel in one jump,” she replied with amusement. “What does that pay nowadays?”

“Not enough,” he laughed. “If you need to be a general, I can make that happen, but this should do for now.”

“All right. Thanks. Could you have your aide upload a contact list for the J4?”

“Sure. Take care, Rae.”

“You too…Henrich. Later.” Why do I do that? She wondered. I’m a married woman, and I’m not actually interested in him. Do I really think flirting with him will make him more amenable? Not for the first time she found herself unable to perform a thorough psychological self-examination.

Once she got the updated list, she conducted a similar, shorter conversation with General Tyler, and then with Brigadier General Marshall. After that, she filed the authorization and mostly forgot about it.

It’s not as if she actually intended to use it.

Why recruit normal humans when she had four mad scientists of her own?

Chapter 14

It is often said that children are like sponges, but the quadruplets were like great piles of the things, absorbing knowledge at a phenomenal rate. As their minds expanded, so did their tiny bodies, growing at seven times the speed of ordinary children.

This alone would be enough reason to keep them from interacting with their so-called peers, for in truth, they had none. Like some extreme version of the precocious wiz-kid, they were doomed never to fit in to anything until physical adulthood – which would come in another year, at the chronological age of three.

Rae hoped they could handle it. She knew that emotional development usually lagged the intellectual and physical, in humans.

Long dinner-table discussions – Rae preferred to actually cook something, despite Alan Denham’s ability to simply extrude nutrients – had flogged the subject to death, and they came to the understanding that the risks of social naïveté seemed less than the risks of subjecting themselves to the extended casual cruelty of the traditional educational system. If time was all it took, it was also the one thing they were short of. They could worry about it after they survived the Destroyer.

Alan had already spent an appreciable proportion of his time gnawing at that bone, and the quads showed signs of his thoughts. If in every year they aged seven – dog years? – then by the midpoint of the nine-year countdown they should be brilliantly effective contributors to human research and development, no matter what field each might choose. Probably they would be emotionally immature and quirky, so their interactions with ordinary humans had to be kept to a minimum.

Childhood was dispensable.

That saddened both parents, but Earth was one unending sacrifice these days, and they would all do their parts.

Guided by their father and mother, they explored virtualities every bit as real-seeming as the natural world. It took the place of sleep, this exploration, and of dreaming, and was, as Stephanie often complained, school by another name. It was also a training ground for the mind, for Rae intended them to surpass their parents, and even their older brother Ezekiel, and thus poured knowledge and experience into them by the bucket.

Mind-time, Charles said unnecessarily with the touch-speech, and shepherded his brother Andrew and his sisters Stephanie and Leslie into their crèches. While one of quadruplets, he had nevertheless assumed the role of the eldest, the leader.

“Aw,” Stephanie complained out loud. “I hate school,” but this was a pro-forma declaration, a mere expression of a strong will. She was the whiner, but probably the hardest worker. As soon as her head hit the induction pad and her skin melded to the molecular receptors she forgot her protest and lost herself in wondrous worlds, attacking the problems set before her with gusto.

Leslie had an equally powerful drive, and could protest with the best of them, but she tended to focus on specific problem-solving rather than her sister’s hard-work-under-protest cynicism. Andrew, on the other hand, was clearly the dreamer, prone to manic bursts of energy and then times of relative lethargy as his mind chewed on some especially knotty problem.

Today the quads met their father and mother in what appeared as a small open-air Greek amphitheater, surrounded by olive trees and more green grass than the Peloponnesus ever saw. It was where they often started their school period, a moment of peace and relaxation before the hard work, but seldom were both of their parents here at the same time, so they knew something was up. The children wore simple linen tunics and sandals, the parents the toga-like robes of scholars edged in indigo.

“Good morning, children,” Rae greeted them. The four bowed courteously in unison, looking for all the world like barely prepubescent youngsters of perhaps ten years old, although they were barely one and a half. Alan kept their virtual images locked to their real ones, else they would probably have appeared as a superhero, a dragon, a wizard and a cyborg.

“Good morning, Mother, Father,” they responded, waiting expectantly. While a handful at times, they had learned that this was a time for formality, not hijinks.

“Today we’re doing something different,” Rae began. “Today you are, as a group, going to work on a real-world problem for the first time.”

Charles lifted an eyebrow, willing to wait for further information, but Andrew raised his hand. “We already have done real-world problems. How is this different?”

“Because this is not merely an exercise set in the real world – it is a genuine technological challenge that needs to be solved. You will all work on it, in the same way you work on the problems we give you, and when you come up with solutions, they will be forwarded to the unblended.”

“So we’ll be a think tank?” Stephanie asked, getting it immediately.

“A black box,” Leslie responded, already working out the implications. “Problem in, solution out. But why us?”

“Because,” responded their father, “you are intellectually the equals of the average human doctoral candidate, and we believe you will continue to develop well beyond all but the most advanced geniuses. The time of artificial challenges is over. Humanity needs you, and you need to accomplish real things.

“Okay,” Charles said, as if today were no different from any other. “What’s the situation?”

Rae waved a hand, and the cutaway image of a complex machine appeared on the dais in the center of the theater. “This is the latest mechanical fusion drive. The EarthFleet space program desperately needs to perfect a reliable reaction motor that approaches the efficiency of the cloned Meme engines.”

“Why? Meme engines are better,” Andrew asked.

“Because, dummy, there aren’t enough of them,” Leslie replied.

“No name-calling please,” Alan said firmly, and the girl looked sour for a moment. “But Leslie is right. Manufacturing large numbers of effective fusion engines is vital to expanding space industry and eventually building the large number of warships we will need to defend the system. Can anyone come up with another reason?”

The four children went into thinking mode, each in his or her own manner, looking up, or down, or closing eyes, or staring into space. Andrew, the most intuitive, spoke musingly. “Because…they need to stop relying on you to make their stuff?”

Alan nodded encouragingly. “You’re getting warm, yes. For their own societal development and confidence, they need to be able to do this themselves, or at least feel like they are.”

“But now they’ll be getting help from us to solve their problem!” Stephanie complained, always the contradictor.

“Yes, but you are human. A different version of human, but still of the same species.”

“You are too, Dad,” Charles stated.

“They wouldn’t think so,” he replied.

“So it’s about the confidence to do it themselves?” Charles went on.

“They must stand on their own feet, even if we help them step upward much faster than they would otherwise.”

“Then this is that help. And it will help us build confidence as well.”

“Yes, Charles,” Rae waved an airy hand, “if you can solve the problems in this design, or come up with another. This is not all for them; it’s for you as well. We have only about seven years until the Destroyer arrives. We have to take shortcuts.”

Andrew, whose eyes had been closed for the last moment, opened them up with a strange expression on his face. “That’s what we are, huh? Shortcuts. That’s why you made us.” Comprehension dawned on the faces of the other three, and a certain amount of distress.

The parents found themselves at a loss, glancing at each other before Alan sat down and waved the others to come closer for a family huddle, holding hands. “We made you and Ezekiel because we wanted a family. No matter what, you were all destined to be brilliant. For now, we have to harness that brilliance to save everyone. That doesn’t make us love you any less.”

All four looked thoughtful. Within herself, Rae wondered and hoped they could absorb this kind of life lesson half as well as they absorbed academic ones. “You can all think about that in your off time,” she said, hoping that focusing them on the task at hand would allow them to process the emotional aspects at their own paces. “For now, start taking apart this model, study the specs, and see what you can come up with. Call us if you need us.”

With that, the parents bowed out, leaving the four precocious children to work. They knew from experience that removing themselves from the equation worked best; when they did not, the results always got skewed in a Heisenberg-like fashion. Even observation itself seemed to affect the end product.

Outside the virtuality, in the connection chamber, Alan the avatar looked down at their progeny lying in their open sarcophagi, nervous systems linked to the ship that he was, even while his unconscious and automatic processes tended to everything else. Rae took his hand and led him out of the room and into their bedchamber. When they were firmly out of earshot she spoke.

“Do you think they’ll be all right?”

“We discussed all this, love,” Alan replied. “They have to keep growing up as well as just growing. Realizing that you bred them to be supergeniuses was inevitable.”

“But I didn’t expect it so soon.”

“I know.” He took her hand. “It has to be done. Humanity is pushing its technological development as fast as it can, but it may not be fast enough. They need the help the quads can give.”

“My head knows that, but now…my mother’s heart hates the whole thing.”

“That’s why I love you,” Alan said, kissing her forehead.

Rae pushed him to arms’ length, searching again for an answer she’d never find. I wish I knew who you really were, she thought, and then damned herself once more for creating him the way he was. At what point are you really you, Skull? Or will you always be just a copy of the man I loved? She squeezed his arms. A damned real-feeling copy. “So, how long before they call for one of us?” she asked.

“Oh, I give it several hours just to familiarize themselves.” He pulled her in close again. “If they do call, we will just have to take a few minutes to disentangle ourselves.”

Chapter 15

Ezekiel Denham was now two and a half, though an ordinary human would have pegged him at about fifteen, he figured. Testing would have revealed an emotional-social age in his early teens and the intellectual equivalent of twenty. His younger siblings had already surpassed him in raw brainpower, but his parents had prepared him for that eventuality his whole life, so it didn’t bother him much. He could still kick their butts.

Besides, he didn’t want to be a scientist, researcher, brainiac. What he really wanted to be was a fighter jock, or a space pirate. That’s why he’d named the little ship he now piloted Steadfast Roger. Not jolly, but instead loyal and true.

Roger was a tiny thing, barely the size of an atmospheric fighter plane or an ICBM, with the intelligence of a puppy, but that would improve over time. Just a baby, he had been gestated by a deliberate act of cloning, a miniature and immature copy of the Denham scout ship that was itself just an adolescent in the scheme of Meme living ships.

Like a puppy, Roger had a tendency to be playful and get himself into trouble if Ezekiel did not keep him on a short leash, but right now he gave the ship his head as the two zoomed toward the asteroid belt at high Gs. Earth’s voracious appetite for space-based resources meant that prospecting for high-metal asteroids topped the list of his many potential duties.

Three other ships, manufactured grabship hybrids with Meme engines glued on, did the same work in three other areas of the belt, but they were clumsy and slow compared to Roger. Ezekiel and his vessel did more work than all the rest of them, especially on each mission’s first run, when he had a fresh engine to use.

EarthFleet grabships had to seize asteroids in their claws – resembling ants latching on to potatoes – and carefully push the rocks toward their destinations. Early on those had been sent to Earth, until hundreds of the things orbited the planet. More recently some had been placed in lunar orbits, as well as in those of Venus and Mars. In fact, Mars’ moons Deimos and Phobos had been coopted and now, just like on Earth’s new satellites, contained experimental Pseudo-Von-Neumann bases, or PVNs, eating into the rocks and churning out parts to eventually make copies of themselves.

Some asteroids had been placed in solar orbits behind and in front of Earth and Venus. In short, EarthFleet now had hundreds of steppingstones, many with PVNs manned by small teams of minders to provide intelligent control. That was why they were called Pseudo-Von-Neumanns; true VNs were theoretical self-replicating machines, but these needed a few humans to keep them working properly.

Ezekiel sped up his relative time-sense, allowing him to experience the nearly daylong journey out to the belt in what his mind interpreted as a half hour. Linked to Roger’s nervous system, this was among the least of his tricks. Living ships like this developed sentience slowly, by design, but they were biologically hardwired with abilities ready-made for a Meme – or in this case, a Blend – controller.

Once they arrived in the vicinity of a new clump of rocks, Ezekiel synchronized himself back to realtime, the better to manage his tired and hungry mount.

Like any young animal, the prolonged exercise of acceleration and deceleration had exhausted the little ship, so Ezekiel’s first order of business was to graze him on the pebbles and ice chunks stuck to the surface of some of the midsized rocks, the ones perhaps a hundred meters long. The simplest technique to get the food was to nudge an asteroid at one end, giving it the slightest of spins. This caused all the detritus that had accumulated on its surface to spill off it like water from a woman’s tossed head of hair. All Roger had to do was maneuver into the stream and open his forward intake, what passed for his mouth, and ingest like a whale through a school of fish.

Once he’d been taught this method, Roger could easily handle it on his own, so Ezekiel turned to another check of the package that took up all of his internal cargo space. A cloned fusion engine from his father’s ship, it was one reason he was able to acquire so many asteroids for EarthFleet so quickly. All he had to do was slap it on his best find, program it, and off it went.

Once the engine had pushed and then parked the rock in its preselected position it would signal for pickup and a ship would rendezvous, dropping off a PVN and recovering the precious motor for reuse. In the meantime the Ezekiel-Roger team would choose another asteroid and give it a slower, more careful push designed to send it along a path toward whatever target EarthFleet had chosen, and then another and another. If he had to, Zeke could stay out almost indefinitely as long as Roger could find food and water. The Meme ship could easily manufacture sustenance for his master. The only real limit was his fatigue and cabin fever.

After Ezekiel finished inspecting the engine for the fourth time, finding all in order, and once the ship had eaten his fill and rested, he turned his attention to looking for a suitable rock. “Come on, come on,” he hummed to himself, and Roger responded like a retriever that knew his master wanted him to find a downed bird. The ship metaphorically pricked up his ears, heightening his senses to maximum and sending out frequent low-level radar pulses – in essence, shining an electromagnetic light all around himself.

Roger also used his relatively weak biolaser in lidar mode, scanning the surfaces of each nearest asteroid in turn. That tiny beam of coherent light was useful for communication and sensing, but useless as a weapon. At point-blank range it could be focused hot enough to take a rock sample, but that was all.

In fact, Roger had no offensive weapons at all. He had the molecular template to gestate a small hypervelocity missile, and could come up with a tiny fusor powered by his own fusion engine within minutes, but he had never had to fight anything in his short life.

Ezekiel had from time to time wondered what he would do if he came upon something hostile, but these were in the nature of daydreams rather than real plans. Everyone knew the Destroyer was years away, after all. His best tactic would be to use the sun-like heat of Roger’s drive against whatever threat may arise, simultaneously employing it for what it was designed – to run like hell.

So it was quite a shock when the radar pulse came back showing an unexpected Doppler shift on one of the rocks at close range. That asteroid, perhaps fifty meters across and ten kilometers away, had subtly changed direction. He never would have even noticed it if Roger, primed like a dog after a scent, hadn’t focused his lidar on it and reported his confusion at the thing’s odd behavior.

Rocks don’t maneuver on their own, Ezekiel stated the obvious to himself. Another ship in the area giving it a push? Or did something fast collide with it and we missed the impact? He called up the intended locations of the three grabships working asteroid repositioning and found, as expected, they were millions of miles away.

He commanded Roger’s lidar to expand, taking in the area around the rock, and found a further anomaly: byproducts of some kind of reaction drive, in the direction opposite the chunk’s movement, as if something rather like his own cloned engine had given it a push and then cut off. Had Roger not been in full-on eager-beaver mode and sniffed it out, he probably would have missed it.

Ezekiel found himself chewing the inside of his cheek, a nervous habit that jarred him out of full immersion in the virtuality of synchronization with Roger. This reminded him that he was not actually a space-going creature, as the link made him feel, but was a rather frail human being whose body could be killed much more easily than the living ship in which he rode.

But curiosity was strong, and combined with the psychological makeup of a brilliant, immortal and, in his own mind, invincible teenager, he naturally decided to investigate. He began to maneuver around behind the anomaly like a sheepdog circling an unknown animal, Roger’s lidar constantly painting the rock and its surrounds. After all, whatever it was already must know something was in the vicinity; otherwise, why move?

About a quarter of the way around, the lidar detected material that was not rock, just for a moment, before it disappeared. Because the only place to hide was behind the asteroid, this confirmed the presence of something that was trying to do so.

Ezekiel wondered whether it could be some kind of space pirates, real ones, or at least rogue actors trying to make themselves some money. He couldn’t really see how that could be, but in his imagination, fuelled by many old science-fiction stories about asteroid miners jumping each other’s claims or buccaneers seizing valuable cargoes, it seemed possible.

With little fear of such things, as Roger could move at least ten times as fast as any EarthFleet ship ever built, Ezekiel’s curiosity burned ever brighter, fuelled by the symbiotic feedback with his ship’s even more youthful eagerness.

In other words, the boy and the puppy couldn’t help but stick their noses in.

Chapter 16

Despite best efforts, the cowardly Meme Sentry had not avoided discovery, its most basic directive. However, it was confused. The ship that approached seemed like a friendly vessel, with emanations extremely similar to the Survey craft that had gestated and launched it, but that could not be. It was much smaller, and it was not beaming out the proper recognition codes, and so fear and desire warred within it like a housecat gone feral, causing it to pursue neither impulse effectively.

Had fear won out, it could have run away, fleeing along the same path as the escape drone, eventually to be picked up by the oncoming Destroyer. Even this half-familiar relative could not have caught it, as the Sentry was designed for maximum speed and stealth.

Had curiosity prevailed, it could have shown itself to the questing other, and who could predict the outcome? Perhaps it could have rejoined the fold of living Meme craft, reporting as it should and receiving the instructions that would give its rudimentary life meaning.

Instead, it tried to keep to a middle course, afraid to flee or approach, playing cosmic peekaboo from behind its chosen asteroid.

***

All the evidence told Ezekiel there was definitely something out there. Whatever it was kept peeking out from behind the rock, just a sliver of it. Perhaps it was showing just enough of itself to get a look every now and again.

Torn between charging in and running, like his quarry he did neither. Rather, he and Roger kept sniffing around, edging closer and circling even while he tried to deduce what it could be.

Fusion byproducts he detected told him it used a Meme engine for sure. That didn’t help too much, because Earth had yet to manufacture a good such motor itself. The intermittent lidar and radar returns showed very little, as if the thing had absorptive stealth coatings on it.

For the past hour Ezekiel had been working on something new, and now he was ready to try. Taking a metaphorical deep breath, he fired off his creation at right angles to the asteroid and the whatever-it-was.

Ezekiel had used the small hypervelocity missile template and added a simple wide-spectrum optical sensor and bioradio – essentially, an eyeball with a video link, a spy drone. Hoping the thing would not spook right away, he kept its engine at low power and curved it around the rock to the right even as he sidled Roger to the left.

With a screen in his mind’s eye, Zeke saw what the drone saw and what Roger saw simultaneously. In this case, what he saw first was the stern of the Sentry backing around the rock, its attention focused on the threat to its existence, the hyper. Too late, it must have realized it had shown itself, and seemed to hesitate, caught between two seemingly friendly but frighteningly strange things.

Like an animal gone to ground and too frightened to run, it froze, and Roger was on it in a flash. Ezekiel hardly had time to rein in the little ship before it seized the Sentry in its two forward fins. Without specifically ordering it, his craft had divined his desire and grown barbed claws, which now gripped the smaller creature tight.

Wild excitement coursed through Ezekiel and his ship, and like a boy who had hooked an enormous fish, he had no other thought in his mind than to land it and carry it home proudly as a trophy.

The Sentry lit off its engine, causing the two ships to whirl and spin crazily. Zeke told Roger to hang on while he did his best to counteract the bucking prize with his own engine and thrusters.

For over an hour the two struggled, but even though Roger was small, the Sentry was smaller, and had far less fuel in reserve. It was a housecat to a lynx, and once caught tight it was only a matter of time before it tired.

Once the gyrations ceased to little more than fearful shudders and he had control of the Sentry, Ezekiel decided to try out an idea. He commanded Roger to try to make direct contact with the thing’s nervous system, confident that between the two of them they could overwhelm it, or at least learn something.

His ploy succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and it was almost his undoing.

A flood of hardwired knowledge flowed into the two of them as the Sentry vomited its mind into its attacker. In effect, it babbled hysterically, simultaneously overjoyed and frightened by the contact. Slowly Ezekiel and Roger managed to calm and take control of it and eventually, like a surrendered animal too tired to fight anymore, they held it tight, mind and body, and took it home.

Chapter 17

“I want to get the base going again,” Skull said to Rae as they ate dinner, the quads two a side next to them at the table. While his avatar didn’t need to do so, he’d equipped it with senses as similar to a human as possible in order to share his family’s experience, and to maintain the illusion of normality.

“I want to help,” Andrew piped up.

“You always want to help with something new, until it actually comes time to help,” Leslie snarked.

“Kids, please,” Skull shushed them. “I think it might be useful.”

“Why?” Rae asked. “It’s barely alive, and the comet it’s on isn’t all that stable. Slap an engine on it and it might break apart.”

“All right,” he said reasonably, “we can find a better base body – a good solid asteroid. Zeke can keep his eyes peeled for one and let us know.”

“I still don’t understand why,” Rae replied. “We have everything we need on the ship.”

“It’s all our eggs in one basket, though, isn’t it?” Skull observed reasonably. “And that biomass is a lot easier to digest than raw rocks and comets. I could recycle some of it, make a new fresh young base, and consume the rest.”

“Ew,” Stephanie said, holding her nose. “That’s like, cannibalism or something, isn’t it, Daddy?”

“For a standard human it would be,” he replied. He found it always paid to be matter-of-fact when it came to discussing sensitive topics with adolescents. The more you get wrapped around the axle about something, the more they focus on it and become fascinated by it. Nothing like going into the details of digestion, elimination and reproduction to demystify the process and make it not interesting and “ew.”

“But,” he went on, “Meme ships are made to consume and reprocess just about anything. They like biomass best of all. If we ever discovered plants that could grow on asteroids without atmosphere, we’d have an ideal food source. Or if we could graze on Earth.”

“Humans don’t like Meme ships,” Charles said. “The tabloids are always talking about how they could go rogue or create another plague or something.”

“Standard humans,” Leslie corrected him.

“You know what I mean,” he replied.

“Why don’t you say what you mean then?” she answered.

“No bickering at dinner,” Rae said, her voice rising a bit. “You know the rules.” The two subsided with mutual glares. “All right, I can see your point,” she said to Skull again. “It might be useful to have a mobile base for ourselves.”

“A secret base?” Andrew asked, playing with his spaghetti.

The rest of the family stared at him for a moment before Skull replied, “That’s a damned fine point, Andrew. Yes, a secret base. Why not? We can always tell them if we need to.”

Everyone knew who “them” were. Standard humans. No matter how often they reminded each other they also were human, everyone knew they were very, very different.

“All right, I guess,” Rae conceded. “We’ll see what Ezekiel comes up with.”

“Hmm-hmm,” Skull replied, his mouth full of meatball. “Good spaghetti, hon.”

Rae smiled. “Grandma’s recipe’s still the best.”

The next ship day Skull presented Rae with three choices of asteroid.

“These all look suspiciously well selected,” she said.

“I had Zeke looking already,” Skull admitted. “I didn’t see you saying no.”

“All right. Then let’s get to work. When will we get there?”

“We have to go eat the old base first. I’ll ask Zeke to meet us there to help.”

“Good,” Rae exclaimed. “Always nice to see our firstborn.” Her eyes took on that faraway quality known to mothers everywhere when contemplating their offspring.

Skull couldn’t understand it, but he’d gotten used to it. He put his head close to hers and tightened up the room’s seal. Their children’s’ hearing was preternaturally keen. “Frankly, I miss him. He was such a good kid. People say an ordinary childhood goes by fast…try a Blend.”

“He’s almost grown up now,” Rae replied, still with that look. “Tall and handsome just like you were. Are, I mean. Oh…” Her expression fell. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right. You forget sometimes, and so do I.”

That I’m not really me, but just a cheap-ass copy.

“That’s why I call you Alan,” Rae went on lamely.

“Because I’m not him. I know.”

“Because you’re better,” she insisted. “You’ve grown…outgrown your old weaknesses. And you have a family now. Fatherhood suits you.”

“It does.” For now. I’m actually glad that they grow so fast. Less guilt when they’re grown. He wished he could really talk to his wife, but how could he fully trust someone who once reached inside his mind and tinkered with it like a Harley mechanic?

That’s what we lost when I died. Full trust. Or at least the chance at it. Once that trust shattered into a thousand pieces, it’s damn hard to glue it back together.

Skull shoved that out of his mind as he did every time his brooding thoughts threatened to overwhelm him. He put on a smile and changed the subject. “So let’s go build us a new base.”

Chapter 18

When the message came to meet Mom and Dad at the old base, Ezekiel decided to surprise them with his catch. He had it under pretty good control now, with little fear of it suddenly bolting. Even so, Roger kept a good tight grip on it, and a tap into its nervous system, like a leash.

On the trip, he’d learned a lot of new stuff about the Meme, and the Empire, perhaps more than he wanted to know. That store of knowledge made it all the more important that he get his prize to Dad…and, he had to admit, to the quads. They would suck its mind dry for sure, just like everything they got near.

When he finally arrived, he was tired, but not unduly so. He hadn’t hurried. The Denham was already there, settled in against the old comet and apparently resting on top of the base. In reality, it looked like Dad was eating it, through some new mouths he had created on his underside.

“Hi, Mom,” he said when the link came up. “Look what I found. Can I keep it?”

“Oh, my,” she replied, immediately joined by his dad’s avatar. “That looks like a Sentry!”

“Yeah, I guess that’s how you’d say it in English. It knows a lot of stuff. I thought you guys would want it for intel exploitation.” That was the word for investigating captured things, if he remembered right.

“Yes we certainly would,” Rae breathed, amazed. “Bring it up to the side and pass it to your dad. Then you can set Roger out to pasture and come eat dinner with us. He looks tired, and I bet you are too.”

“Okay.” While reluctant to give up his new pet, he really could use a rest, and so could his ship. “Coming alongside now.”

Once the Sentry was firmly in the Denham’s grip, Zeke climbed aboard the bigger ship and immediately headed for his room. Even though a VR sarcophagus was supposed to take care of all of his human needs, he still felt grungy and smelled bad after days inside of it. One long hot shower later, he sat down to dinner with his family after hugs all around.

“That’s an absolutely amazing thing you did, son,” Alan said through his avatar. Zeke figured his dad was already exploiting the Sentry, as he had that distracted look in his eyes he got when he was splitting his attention.

“Thanks, Dad. Once you get all the data, can I have him back?”

“Let’s wait and see, all right?” Rae replied.

The quads all smirked in different ways, united in nothing except schadenfreude at any discomfiture of their older brother.

That’s what parents always say: let’s wait and see, Zeke thought in irritation, but held his peace. The thought of getting the Sentry as his personal pet was enough to put up with almost anything, so he kept his expression bland and refused to be baited. Instead he reached over and helped himself to some shepherd’s pie, one of Mom’s better dishes. Given that all the ingredients except a few spices were manufactured by Dad’s ship-body, mishmash things like casseroles, pizza or medleys tended to hide any discrepancies in taste.

Besides, he was used to it. Dad took on as much standard food as he could whenever he got in to one of the human bases, but he always ran out too quickly.

When dinner ended, the avatar led them all into a cargo bay, where they found the Sentry lying quiescent, an umbilical leading from the ceiling to a port in its side. “I’m keeping it unconscious, but I’ve already downloaded its whole knowledge store. Zeke, you can stay and join in or go get some sleep. Kids, I want you to link in and I’ll show you around this thing’s mind.”

Ezekiel was happy to go rest. Staying in the biological mind-link with Roger was exhilarating but tiring. He knew that Meme could do it for long periods of time without resting, but his body was human, mostly. It needed a break, and his brain needed sleep.

Chapter 19

When Ezekiel awoke and wandered into the common spaces, Rae was in the kitchen cooking breakfast hash. By this he deduced they were even lower on standard food than they thought. She did add a dash of real chili pepper, and she put a bottle of his favorite Atascadero hot sauce on the table next to the plate she set before him, so life wasn’t so bad after all.

“Thanks, Mom,” he said with put-on brightness designed to appease parents. Being polite deterred getting a lecture, which he supposed was the point, a kind of social symbiosis. “Where is everyone?”

“Exploiting that Sentry,” she said as she plated some hash and then dumped the rest of it into four bowls. “Once you’re done you can take these to your brothers and sisters.”

“Yeah, okay.” He shook drops of spicy sauce onto the plate and then shoveled seasoned hash into his mouth.

Mom sat down across from him, looking at him the way mothers do. Or at least, the way mothers on TV seemed to, which was the same as his own mother. He’d never met anyone else’s mother for real. He focused on eating, hoping she wouldn’t start some kind of “conversation.”

Fortunately she seemed content to just stare at him with that funny smile she had. As soon as he could, he finished, dumping his plate and spoon into the sink and grabbing the bowls, balancing them on his hands and arms like a diner waitress. “See you!”

“Bye,” Mom replied.

In the cargo bay he expected to see a scene of science, with inexplicable tubes and biomachines and his siblings in miniature lab coats or something. Instead they all just stood next to the quiescent dolphin-like Sentry with their palms resting on it and their eyes closed.

Dad’s avatar hung out to the side and turned his head when Ezekiel came in. “They’re exploiting it.” His mouth turned up in a smile.

“Cool. What are they gonna do with it?”

“We’ll see.”

“Dad…I want to keep it. It could do all sorts of stuff. I could train it to push more asteroids around and stuff.”

“You know, son, I could make you a Sentry any time, that knows you from birth. This one is special, though, because it has some fragmentary memories it inherited from the three Meme that got away, as well as all their standard military programming. It’s too useful to just make into a pet for you. I’m sorry.”

“Aww…”

The avatar smiled. “Don’t go saying I never let you have any fun. When I was a kid I could only dream of having my own spaceship and flying around the solar system.”

“When you were a kid they didn’t even have computers!” Ezekiel retorted.

Dad just shook his head in amusement. “Besides, we might have a use for this little guy when the Destroyer shows up. I’d hate you to get too attached to him.”

“He might get killed!”

“Exactly the reason I don’t want you to become fast friends.”

Ezekiel looked around at the scene, realizing he wasn’t going to win this argument. “Okay. Well…I’m going to get back to work, then.”

“All right.” Dad lifted a hand in farewell. “Well done with this thing, son. It might make a real difference.”

“Thanks, Dad,” he said, reddening at the praise. As smart as they were, such special recognition for him alone had come more rarely lately. It felt good to have done something they didn’t and couldn’t.

Still…his potential pet just got snatched away from him, turned into his siblings’ lab experiment. Boo.

He called Roger back to dock, and boarded. Maybe if he found another Sentry out there he could keep that one.

Chapter 20

Year Four

“I wanted to see it for myself.” Admiral Absen gazed at the main screen on the bridge of the refitted EarthFleet ship Artemis, a heavy construction platform rather than the warship she was designed to be. Despite the proliferation of facilities on captured asteroids, and the many ships now zipping around the solar system, she was still the biggest space vessel ever built by humans.

Captain Huen sat comfortably in the Chair. “That’s really not seeing it, sir,” he said in his smoothest of British accents maintained by the upper crust of Hong Kong society, legacy of ninety-nine years under foreign rule. “But we can go to the docking port and take a real look.”

“I’d like that,” Absen responded.

“Ms. Rikard, you have the conn.” Huen stood up to turn over his position to a tall thin woman with Commander’s stripes. “Follow me.”

The ship’s captain, the admiral, and four stewards – Tobias, Shan, Schaeffer and Clayton – walked along Artemis’ central corridors, so like Orion’s own. As sister ships that is to be expected, Absen mused, but already they have diverged due to the damage and renovation of the station, and the use to which this ship has been put.

Crew and passengers crowded through the corridors, but moved for the command party. Shan made sure of it by going before and calling out, “Make way!” in a carrying voice. Civilians, some of them not fully understanding, were pulled aside by EarthFleet ratings if they did not get out of the way of their gods-on-deck fast enough. Navy tradition wasn’t the only driver of this behavior: no one took security lightly, or wanted to be the target of a steward’s ire.

The walk from the bridge, buried deep in the middle of the cylindrical ship, to the docking port in the nose, took less than two minutes, as it was only around two hundred meters distance along a straight corridor. Once they arrived, they were able to look out upon their objective from a range of a mere thousand kilometers. It appeared as a dim grey sphere that filled a large part of their direct view.

Ceres. The planetoid, largest object in the Asteroid Belt, bulked over nine hundred kilometers in diameter, a quarter that of Earth’s moon, but far less massive. Its gravity pulled at only about three percent of Earth’s, so Artemis’ current orbit was very slow, a controlled drift.

Composed mostly of ices and clays, nevertheless the planetoid was slated to become the arsenal of EarthFleet. The new mechanical fusion reactors, now being produced by the thousands on orbital factories, could process its materials and it could power machines, and metallic asteroids had already been soft-landed on its surface to provide the necessary construction substances.

“You can’t really see much detail from this viewport,” Huen said, “but it does provide perspective. We are in a slowly descending spiral. Our engines can give us almost a half G, plenty of power to maintain orbit or get away if we need to. In about four days we will land the ship atop one of the many large iron asteroids that have been set down in a massive field near its north pole. Special landing struts will keep us far enough away from the surface that waste heat will not cause us problems.”

“I hear all the structures will be fitted out with pylons like that,” Absen said.

“You are correct, sir. With gravity so low, one can almost imagine that, instead of being on the surface of a planet, the facilities are actually sitting next to a massive asteroid that happens to have a tiny attraction. It’s all a matter of perspective.”

“Yes, I see,” and Absen did. After this long in space, he had gotten the hang of not thinking only in terms of up or down. “And how long until the first ship is built?”

“Projections say three years.”

“Leaving at most three years of production, which yields…”

“About ninety thousand kamikazes. You know the rest of the order of battle.”

Absen nodded. “I’m still very uncomfortable with this tactic, but there are plenty of volunteers, and maybe none of them will have to use their final option.”

Huen shrugged. “Many nations in times past have employed suicide warriors when their backs were to the wall. Some used condemned criminals and promised them pardons if they survived. Some were religious zealots driven by visions of Paradise. Some, like those that provided this eponymous Japanese name ‘kami-kaze’ – Divine Wind – died for the nation, or a warrior’s code. Ours will be just one chapter in a long history of honorable sacrifice.”

“I know.” Absen stared at the dim ball, so cold but so vital to Earth’s defense. “It still seems odd that, with all the tremendous industry on Earth, we come all the way out here to make the shipyards.”

“The orbital factories are scheduled to capacity already. While Earth’s resources are close to them, extra materials in the form of asteroids have to be brought from beyond the orbit of Mars. Here, the asteroids are all around us. Once the Pseudo-Von Neumann factories we carry are running, they will build more modular factories in logarithmic progression. By that time they will spread out over the surface of Ceres. Then, about three years from now, they will stop making more factories and will start making weapons and ships.”

“I wanted them to do it on the Moon,” Absen remarked.

“I hear they are putting some factories there, but the gravity well still impedes efficiency. Robots facilities are very good at working fast in very low gravity. All people have to do is monitor them and adjust their programming. I suggested they put the factories on Callisto, where we will soon build the operational Aerospace Force Base, but I was overruled as well.”

Absen turned to Huen in surprise. “I never heard about that suggestion.”

“Ask General Tyler, or his staff. Why should they listen to one lone captain?”

“Because you’re in charge of one of the most vital pieces of our war effort there is, and you’re the man on the ground. If you can call this ground…”

“Admiral…” Huen seemed reticent, but continued. “I did not mean to cause problems at your level. I was not complaining. I have come to believe that General Tyler made the right decision. Ceres has a better mix of materials, and is surrounded by millions of tons more within easy distance. It will not be an immediate and obvious target, while the operational base will be. Our eggs should not be all in one basket.”

Absen pursed his lips in thought, turning away to pace for a moment while Huen stood in uncomfortable silence. “Captain Huen…I see I have been remiss. I knew you were a competent and capable officer, and I was happy to take advantage of your obvious managerial and leadership skills, but at my level it’s easy to get lost in the forest and forget the trees. And, I know you’re chafing at being a glorified factory manager these last three years, and would like something more operational.” He took his tablet out of a pocket and made a note. “I won’t forget again.”

“Thank you, sir,” Huen responded, trying not to show his sudden happiness.

“Well,” Absen smiled at the captain, not so constrained by culture or position, “thank you for the eyes-on view. Now I’d like to just tour your operation here, if you don’t mind. I’ll stay for a couple of days, and then go back on my command courier. My report will reassure the Combined Council, and I’ll be out of your hair.”

Huen couldn’t stop himself from bowing gratefully, even though it was not EarthFleet custom. “Then if you will excuse me, I have duties to attend to.”

Chapter 21

Rear Admiral Huen bowed and shook hands with his staff as appropriate after the promotion ceremony. He hadn’t expected the orders to come so soon, or for Admiral Absen to stay for the two days it had taken to arrange, but it felt good to have his broad stripes affixed to his uniform by the commander of EarthFleet himself.

In the reception afterward he thought he might have caught a sparkle in Senior Steward Shan’s eyes. The man-mountain had loosened up enough for such small indications to leak through. In turn, Huen inclined his head slightly and mocked himself by ostentatiously brushing off imaginary lint from his shoulderboards.

Huen let his staff relax while quietly slipping out of the event, Shan following him back to his office. While overseeing the setup of Ceres, he still had a lot of planning to do for Grissom Aerospace Base on the moon of Jupiter, Callisto.

“What do you think, Shan,” Huen said, throwing a graphic up on his largest wall screen. “We’ll move Artemis and land her to provide a ready-made base, just like we did here. The engineers will lay down permanent structures as fast as they can. It will be much easier than here. Callisto’s surface has areas of silicates that make it a lot more stable than Ceres, so it won’t be as tricky to build there.”

Shan studied the graphic. Precisely because he was not part of the engineering team, Huen valued the man’s outsider’s eyes. The steward said, “Once the warships fly here to be based, they will need pilots and maintenance personnel, correct?”

“Yes, of course. The next phase will be to build those facilities.”

“I see,” Shan said. “And these are the ship pads. But how will they get to their ships?”

Huen stood up to stare at the wall screen alongside the big man. “I presume the engineers have thought of something.”

Shan bowed slightly, but Huen made a note to ask. Sometimes the planners and engineers, so focused on the mechanical details, missed things that seemed obvious to others who had a broader view. It further occurred to Huen that he needed some more people to provide such a viewpoint. Artemis’ crew contained some good officers and petty officers, but he also saw in this an opportunity to obtain some extra hands. With personnel always tight, these days, he always used any good reason to get a few extra, rather than just burden the existing ranks with more duties.

“Thank you, Shan. You have given me at least two good ideas with your observation.”

“I am always grateful to serve he who maintains the mandate of heaven.”

Huen smiled faintly. “You were beginning to wonder about that these past years,” he said.

“No. I only waited until the eyes of heaven turned once more toward you, and they have, Admiral.”

“Rear Admiral only, my friend. But it is good. I wish I could reward you similarly, but there is no higher rank in your specialty than Senior Steward.”

Shan nodded, but said nothing, only taking a deep breath. Huen knew by long association this meant the man wanted to say something more, but waited for an invitation. “Perhaps you have some favor in mind for me to grant?”

“I would never ask for such a thing,” Shan replied.

“You are not asking. I am offering, Senior Steward. You must only tell me the truth. What is it you wish?”

Shan bowed again. “I wish permission to marry.”

Huen lowered his eyes. Quite an unexpected request. Technically he does not need to ask me that, though culturally he would want my blessing. “Of course you may, with my best wishes. You do not need my permission, according to EarthFleet regulations. Who is the lucky…?” He stopped, not wishing to assume anything.

“A westerner, Admiral. She pilots one of our shuttles. Her family name is Lockerbie. She is…different from Chinese women.”

Huen smiled more broadly. “Shan, your penchant for understatement is matched only by the enormity of what you don’t know you are getting into. Let me be the first to congratulate you.” He reached out to seize and shake his bodyguard’s hand. “Felicitations.”

For once Shan’s equanimity seemed disturbed, but he managed a smile in return as he awkwardly returned the handshake. “Thank you, sir.”

“May you have many sons. Now, isn’t your shift ending soon? Send in your relief on the way out, and my aide and administrative assistant. Give your intended my best as well. We must have dinner together soon.”

Chapter 22

Absen waited outside the Combined Council of Earth with only a little trepidation. His conscience was as clear as any man’s could be: all his reports were honest, and he believed EarthFleet Investigative Service kept corruption and graft to a minimum. He knew of nothing that he might do better, though he thought some others could.

Almost two decades after the Eden Plague had reshaped humanity, society found itself less changed than most people had expected. Human nature had been adjusted, but not perfected. On the sliding scale of morality, the normal setting had tipped a bit toward the social good, but there were still as many definitions of that word as there were people.

Violent offenses had dropped by over ninety percent, but people still found reasons to hurt or even kill. Property crime and exploitation crime had dropped as well, but not quite as much. It was easier to rationalize the usual rackets like drugs, smuggling and prostitution than knocking someone on the head for their wallet.

This reduction in crime was all to the good, because Absen knew it still took every ounce of effort to vault Earth’s military technology far enough forward to take down this world-killer on its way. He felt rather like a Napoleonic admiral trying to develop a way for his sail-powered frigates and ships of the line to defeat a World War Two naval battleship.

When the Council’s attendant nodded to him and opened the door, he entered.

Smaller than most people expected, it held one representative from each nation seated in three concentric rings, stepped down like a half-circle theater or indoor arena. Aides and onlookers occupied the outermost banks of seats, but were barred from the “floor” during the actual session.

Absen took the podium in the center and, after introducing himself, launched into the main part of his report. “The Ceres project is proceeding apace with no major snags. Barring surprises, we will have reached maximum efficient production in about three years. This leaves two to three more years to produce warships.”

A discreet red light flashed in front of the man directly before Absen on the first row. He had the right to ignore questions until he was finished with his initial speech, but given who had pressed the button, he decided that would be unwise. “Yes, Chairman.”

Daniel Markis leaned forward to speak into his stalked microphone. “I’d like to hear more about these warships. It’s all been kept very hush-hush, even from me, but we’re in the fourth year of our nine-year effort and I’m sure Earth’s leaders would like to know a bit more. There have been some disturbing rumors.”

Absen was fairly certain Markis knew the answers to his question, so he must be asking for the benefit of the others. Well, it had to come out sometime, and he was prepared. “Yes, Mister Chairman. Naturally EarthFleet wanted to be certain of our courses of action before they became known, to keep those rumors to a minimum.”

“But you are ready to tell us something now? About these suicide ships?” Markis prodded.

“Yes, sir.” Absen cleared his throat. “First, let me say that the name is not strictly accurate. Suicide, kamikaze, is a tactic of last resort, but we want to be sure we cover all possible eventualities. Given the stakes, I felt this was only prudent.”

“Admiral, just spit it out in plain language. Your job is not at risk. Nobody is gunning for you. We just believe it’s time to tell the people of Earth what nine years of sacrifice and hard work are going to buy, and going to cost.”

Absen looked down at his notes, on old-fashioned paper because of the restrictions on devices in the Council Chamber. He shuffled them for a moment, then folded the sheets deliberately and slipped them into the breast pocket of his dress whites. Then he lifted his eyes to Markis, locking gazes with him. “Fine. I’ll give it to you all straight, without any political bullshit. Just remember, sir, you asked for it.”

Sipping from the water glass on the podium gave him a moment to shift rhetorical modes. He decided to just talk to them as if they were his staff and not his masters.

“There’s a principle in wargaming called the ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Fallacy,’ based on Lanchester’s Laws regarding conflict. In simple terms, it says that cheaper and more numerous is more likely to win against expensive and few – in the long run. There are lots of corollaries and caveats, but all of our modeling has upheld the theory.” Absen leaned forward on the podium.

“The Meme employ this principle by overwhelming their enemies with cheap hypervelocity missiles in huge numbers, backed up by very robust and extremely maneuverable naval units – their ships, such as this Destroyer. To defeat them, we must mitigate three advantages.” He raised a finger.

“First, the large number of missiles they will fire. Modeling and simulation has shown that if we build big ships, they will be easy to hit and will get pounded to dust. The scout ship we fought hit Orion with nine hypers and killed more than half the crew, damaging the ship proportionally. Conservatively we expect this Destroyer to be able to launch hundreds, or more probably thousands, of missiles per salvo. Nothing we can build can stand up to that directly. Anything we could fashion – fortified asteroids for example – that could take the pounding, may not maneuver well enough to engage.”

Absen held up a hand at the flood of red lights that came on. “Allow me to go on. So, we don’t try to stand up to them. We make maneuverable ships that won’t get hit as often. I liken it to the PT boats of World Wars One and Two, each of which carried torpedoes that could sink much larger ships, and relied on speed and small size to avoid getting killed.”

“But what about this kamikaze notion?” Markis insisted.

“These attack boats, for want of a better term, will be heavily armed and lightly armored. Their job will be to press home against the enemy at speed, launch our overwhelming number of weapons, and if necessary, ram the Destroyer and blow their fusion devices. If necessary.”

“Why not just use robot ships to do the same thing?”

“We considered that, sir. Two problems. One, we can’t program a computer smart enough to cover all eventualities, and two, the lightspeed delay makes remote control unworkable. We’ve run every simulation, ladies and gentlemen. There are strategies that are more efficient – that result in lower casualties – but none more effective. Without pilots willing to kamikaze, the best chance the wargames give us to win is thirty-one percent. Less than one in three.”

“And with the pilots?”

“More than fifty percent.”

Silence fell on the assembly for a moment, before murmuring started as representatives conversed with their neighbors. After a moment Markis, as usual the spokesman for the rest of the world, asked, “This was the best solution?”

Thank you, Absen thought, as he realized the Chairman was carefully leading the Council toward the only possible conclusion. “Yes, sir. The best we could find. Now realize,” he raised his voice, leaning into his microphone, “that this is just the fleet strategy, of the mobile forces that will close with and kill the Destroyer. My monthly reports detail the defensive strategies using orbital lasers, railguns, missiles and a whole bunch of other technologies to mitigate its attack on Earth and to reduce the Destroyer’s options. I’d be happy to take questions on these items, but it’s likely that Production Minister Ekara or my J4, General Travis Tyler, can answer those better than I can.”

Despite this attempt at deflection, Absen spent the next hour addressing as many questions as he could, as Markis got out of the way to allow many of Earth’s hundred-odd remaining nations to speak. The admiral knew enough of politics to realize this consensus-building process was important, and that the horses all pulled harder when the whip hand stayed light.

Chapter 23

“This turned out to be a really good idea, my love,” Rae said to Alan as she looked around the new base. Taking the better part of a year, what with all of the distractions and demands of raising the quads and fulfilling as many of Earth’s requests as possible, the part of her that had been Sofia Ilona felt as if it had taken forever.

The Raphael piece, with the memories of four thousand years, was amused.

“Glad it worked out,” he replied. “It gives us a redoubt of sorts, and more flexibility.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to just get rid of us?”

“Not at all…though it will allow me to do some running around that I couldn’t do before, while you all work at maximum efficiency here.”

Rae took the avatar in her arms. “How soon do you have to go?”

“In a day or three. Whenever. Besides some rearrangement of rocks, I want to concentrate on serious expansion of my combat capabilities, and I can’t do that with a bunch of kids running around inside me. I also thought I’d pick up Zeke and teach him some more about Memetech and…just have some father-son time, I guess.”

There. That will make her happy, and hopefully deflect her curiosity. She’s so smart in some ways, but isn’t really a good liar or detector of the same, while I…Skull…got quite good at it in my life.

“Excellent. The quads will benefit from some stability, and they can play with customizing the new base as well. By the way, have you thought about the secrecy issue?” she asked.

“As in, communications to and from this secret base? I configured our tame Sentry to act as a tightbeam relay. It’s happy and well adjusted now, and I upgraded its stealth capability so nobody should be able to track it or who it talks to without physically approaching it, and nothing of EarthTech can possibly catch it if it doesn’t want to be caught. Good enough?”

Rae nodded. “They can still figure out some things by transmission time lags.”

“Then don’t ever reply quickly. Make a policy of sending data packages, not messages, perhaps once per day. Think like Ilona this time. She was an intelligence officer.”

“Right.” Rae smiled like the sun coming out, and winked. “A day or three, huh?”

“Woman, have I ever told you you’re insatiable?”

“Almost every day. Is that bad?”

“No…” Alan thought for a moment. “I guess I just wonder how much is who, and from whom it’s coming.”

Rae’s face turned serious for a moment and she drew back to arms’ length. “You sure you want an answer?”

Alan’s avatar replied, “Rae…I’m less human than you are anymore. I don’t have much ick factor left in me. I recycle your wastes, I eat biomass and rocks and I produce the food you eat from my body. Hell, I eat it too, which is damned weird if you think about it. We have sex that isn’t really sex and we had kids after the first me’s body was dead. So yeah, I think I’m all right with you talking about things like that.”

Wryly, she shrugged and answered without reservation. “Okay. I’d say it’s twenty percent Ilona and eighty percent Raphael. To an inexperienced girl, it’s all a dream come true – I’m a physical goddess and I can have all the sex I want with complete control of my biology and reproductive system – no pain, no limits on what I can do, no matter how rough or weird. It gives new meaning to ‘consenting adults.’”

“That sounds like more than twenty percent.”

“That’s because you don’t understand the Meme physical drives. They are biological creatures, even more than humans. Theoretically, human minds depend on quantum brain states for some of what we call consciousness, free will, and the inability to make perfect copies. Trillions of neurons are packed into a few kilos of gray matter. Meme are more distributed, and at the molecular level, much more mechanical. They think more slowly, and their biology drives them more heavily.”

“So you’re saying the Meme sex drive is stronger than humans?”

“Reproductive drive, yes. Much stronger. Human psychology links conquest loosely with sex and dominance. With Meme, it’s inherent, hard wired. They are driven to spread their genes, both before and after blending, so that their bloodlines win out over others. With me, the drive is there; I just choose not to reproduce.”

“But you could?”

Rae cocked her head. “I still have some Skull sperm left. Or I could extract some of the children’s DNA and produce clones functionally identical to brothers and sisters of theirs. Or –”

Alan held up a hand. “Okay. My ick factor finally kicked in. I get it. You have enough self-control not to spawn offspring everywhere you go.” He thought for a moment. “Zeke has never met a girl. Other than his sisters. When he does…”

Rae laughed. “You’re only just realizing that. Maybe that could be one of the subjects of your man time. Now, if you’re done yakking…come satisfy some of my drives, you sexy beast.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Chapter 24

Year Five

Vincent Markis stood at attention in front of his father Daniel, his sky-blue uniform blazing as the southern sun beat down the assembled ranks of over a thousand brand-new greenies newly graduated from the Military Academy at Stellenbosch. Appointment orders had been read, technically turning the mass of cadets into officers, but each young man or woman now waited for others to remove their trainees’ shoulderboards and attach the epaulets of the first rank appropriate to their chosen services.

In Vincent’s case, those each showed the thin loop of a second sieutenant in the South African Air Force. He’d considered the Navy, but given his father’s service in the US Air Force, he thought it appropriate he stay blue. Soon he knew he’d trade in his national uniform for that of EarthFleet’s Aerospace branch.

Another motive, supposedly hidden from his family but in reality quite obvious to all, was his desire to fly an Aardvark. Ever since the A-24 program had gone public, in general if not in detail, he’d known he was meant to be part of it.

Vincent had learned to fly from his grandfather, David Markis, starting on an old Cessna at the age of eight, and had never looked back. From then on it was what he lived and breathed, all he wanted to do: fly, fly, fly.

As the son of the most influential man on the planet, he had been afforded ample opportunity to do so. Fortunately, like his grandfather, he turned out to be a natural aviator. Between the two, getting an appointment to the Academy had been no problem, especially as the program had been expanded to more than ten times its former size, pumping out young officers at an amazing rate to fulfill the space program’s needs.

“Congratulations, son,” Daniel said as he and Vincent’s mother Elise fastened down the new insignia. A handshake for his father and a hug for his mother came next, then pictures as the crowd jostled around them, each new officer surrounded by family, friends and well-wishers.

“One more thing, sir,” Daniel said, startling his son with the honorific. The Chairman of the free Communities Council drew himself up to a rigid position of attention and snapped off a salute sharp enough to cut silk. “You outrank me now, Lieutenant. I mean, Leftenant,” he continued with a gleam in his eye. “I retired as a mere master sergeant, you know.”

Forcing himself not to laugh, Second Lieutenant Markis returned his father’s salute, then fished in his pocket for an antique silver dollar and handed it to the older man. Doing so carried on an American tradition possibly begun during the Colonial period, where the newly-minted officer gave such a coin to the first enlisted person to render that courtesy.

Daniel chuckled and spun the heavy orb into the air, catching it with an overhand grab. “This will go in a place of honor on my desk, son. Now let’s go get out of this sun and grab some lunch. Unfortunately I have to be back at the office by two for a teleconference.”

Vincent shrugged wryly, long used to the demands of politics on his father. “Good idea, Dad. Indian food?”

“I already made reservations,” his mother Elise replied. “Sorry your brother and sister couldn’t make it.”

“That’s all right. I know they’re busy,” he replied. His elder brother Ezekiel Markis, was studying to be a mechanical engineer at MIT. Just like Ezekiel Denham, he was named for their respective fathers’ mutual best friend Zeke Johnstone, who died just before Infection Day. Their younger sister Elizabeth was just up the road at the university in Cape Town but had final exams today.

“So, what’s the next step?” Elise asked as they climbed into the armored SUV mandated by Daniel’s political status. In front and behind, other vehicles, lights flashing, shooed cars out of the way with brief whoops of their sirens.

“Straight into jet trainers, then transition to F-35s.” The workhorse multirole fighter was old but still filled out many country’s inventories, especially for training. “After that, out to the Callisto base for Aardvarks.”

Vincent noticed his mother’s face faltered at the mention of the attack ships, and his father’s subtly hardened. He wondered whether the rumors were true – that each A-24 would carry an enormous fusion bomb for kamikaze use. It didn’t matter to him if it did; he didn’t expect to use it, but if he had to, he had to.

That Others May Live, the motto of his father’s US Air Force Pararescue specialty, had seeped deep into his bones, as had his family’s record of heroism and military service. Markises had served with distinction from the American War for Independence onward – at Saratoga, Gettysburg, Iwo Jima, Hue, and Afghanistan to name just a few. With his elder brother taking after his mother, pursuing a career in the sciences, it fell to him to continue the tradition.

“Mom, Dad, don’t worry. We’ll beat this thing. With you guys on the job, and Admiral Absen running the show, we can’t lose.”

His mother and father exchanged glances again. Sure, they were worried. Parents always worried, it seemed, but everything worked out. Besides, if there really was an afterlife in heaven like Aunt Cassie insisted, what was to there fear about death?

Chapter 25

Year Six

One would think that during six years in space Absen would get out here to Ceres more, but truthfully, visits every three to six months were enough. It was General Tyler’s role as J4 Chief of Logistics to oversee the production efforts and pass him reports. As with most militaries between battles, a flag officer’s job was less about fighting and more about organizing, training and equipping.

This time would be a bit different. Less than a month ago the last of thousands of Pseudo-Von-Neumann factory complexes had taken up residence atop its soft-landed asteroid. Until then, each manufactory had been building nothing but more factories. One made two, two made four, and so on. Now there were over eight thousand, spaced regularly across the entire surface of the planetoid.

This was necessary mainly to control the heat each would generate. The carefully-selected metal-rich asteroids actually floated, in a sense, atop a sea of frozen ices – much of it water, but also methane and other volatiles. Raising the temperature even a few degrees, from the pressure of the weight of the rocks and also the leakage from the fusion power generators, presented all sorts of challenges. Bases would settle and shift; random pockets of oxygen found flammable gasses and burned or exploded; crevasses opened unexpectedly as the planetoid was mined for its materials.

People died, and often. Peacetime safety protocols had long since fallen by the wayside. Workers took risks and most of the time got away with them, driven by the oncoming desperation and the knowledge that anyone who survived could be restored.

Artemis provided a safe base atop the largest of the rock mountains, containing administration, hospital facilities, and every other metaphorical dog and cat that happened to need care and feeding. Thus it was here that the admiral landed and received his briefings, but that was not really his purpose. He was here for a more important, if symbolic reason.

He strapped himself into the cockpit of a shuttle, one of hundreds that workers used to service the factories. While largely automated, nothing humans had yet created was truly maintenance-free. Everything needed supervision, tending, and the repair that only a set of human hands could perform. That meant thousands of people, keeping the PVNs, as they were colloquially known, in running order.

Of course, by doing so, they ensured the PVNs would eventually produce hundreds of millions of man-hours worth of warships for the defense of Earth and its solar system.

Now the shuttle pilot flew her dozen passengers the short hop over to VN1, the very first factory to be emplaced. On the next rock mountain over, roughly ten kilometers away, they landed on the designated pad of the huge factory complex. Three hundred meters on a side and twenty high, the integrated building contained everything necessary to produce EarthFleet’s best hopes for victory.

A score of workers could be seen standing inside the PVN’s crew compartment at the thick molecular glass window, looking at the arriving shuttle. A couple of them waved. “Are we going inside?” Absen asked as the pilot made no move to unstrap.

“No, sir,” the woman said, “unless you insist. We can get just as good a view from right here, and save ourselves a lot of time and trouble.” She popped a lever on her seat and rotated it a quarter turn toward the center, the better to address her passengers. Her name tag read “Lockerbie” and she wore a warrant officer’s bar.

“So –” Absen began to ask, when she pointed out the front shuttle viewport. He turned to see enormous double doors, sized for a jumbo jet hangar, begin to open slowly, withdrawing into recesses.

General Tyler moved up to squat between the seats, and others in the shuttle shuffled forward to crane their heads for a piece of the view. “What we should be seeing is the very first Aardvark to be produced solely by a PVN. It and about a hundred others will be the operational prototypes for testing and evaluation. We started production on these three months earlier than the rest, to give us time to revise the runs based on the results.”

“Aardvark? I thought these were called A-24 Avenger IIs.”

Tyler shrugged. “Officially, sure, but A-10 Thunderbolt IIs were called Warthogs, and pilots called F-16 Fighting Falcons Vipers…some battles are just not worth fighting. Besides, you’ll see why it got its nickname in a minute.

The doors finally opened to reveal the front of the craft inside, a proboscis that started squat and thick but narrowed rapidly to a truncated point like the nose of its namesake. The thing was ugly, that much was clear. A blocky utilitarian craft with nothing of beauty about it, nevertheless Absen found himself wanting to love it, because it represented life and salvation for his planet.

The Aardvark rolled slowly out of the hangar, drawn by a robot tug cart toward its metal-surfaced launch pad. Almost a hundred meters long, thirty wide and twenty high, it looked more like a high-speed train engine than a spacecraft. Unlike that vehicle, it sprouted nodes and fittings all over its surface.

“Pretty big for one person,” Absen remarked. “Looks kind of like a squared-off submarine with no sail.”

“Remember their final option,” Tyler answered. “If they are going to suicide, why put more than one person in it?”

“Point. But can just one person really pilot that thing?”

“They’ll have fully functional cybernetics just like a helmsman,” Tyler said. “In fact, once the real op starts, they might never unplug. There is a sophisticated computer suite that can run the ship while the pilot sleeps or if he or she is incapacitated, but basically, everything is one integrated system.”

“Who’s in there now?” Absen asked.

“Old fighter pilot named Yeager. You might have heard of him.”

“What? You mean –”

“Yup. Courtesy of the Eden Plague, he’s young and fit again. Volunteered to lead the attack on the Destroyer. Couldn’t exactly say no to a legend, could we?”

“Holy crap. Well, who better? I guess I should be glad Bull Halsey isn’t still around or I’d be out of a job.” Absen watched as the A-24 came to life, its fusion engines glowing slightly as Yeager tested them at low power.

“He should do about ten minutes of preflight before taking her up,” Tyler remarked.

“Well, while we’re waiting, why don’t you brief us on her specs?” Absen asked this for the benefit of the others behind him, as he already knew the A-24 pretty thoroughly. On paper.

“All right, in brief. Two Rolls Royce F-1244 fusion engines generating a million kilos of thrust each. Between those and the new gravity compensating plates, it can accelerate at about thirty Gs while the pilot only feels five. As its main armament it carries a centerline microwave laser, or maser, up front in that funny-looking nose, optimized against Meme bioplasm. That’s a general-purpose weapon, to try to fend off any hypers coming its way, or deal with any small craft the Destroyer might launch. Kind of like the PT boats carrying a 40mm deck gun.”

“Okay. But how is it going to hurt a ship two or three thousand meters in diameter?”

“Nukes, obviously. Well, technically, hybrid thermonuclear fusion bombs. We don’t have anything bigger or nastier. These are analogous to the torpedoes the PT boats carried.”

“PT boats only had four to six torpedoes, though. How many do these carry?”

“Sixteen. Well…seventeen, technically.”

Absen got it immediately. “The last one being the final option bomb.”

“Yes. If the pilot arms it, the computer will continually compare the Aardvarks’ situation with a set of standard parameters and will detonate the bomb at the optimum moment.”

“Such as?”

Tyler cleared his throat. “Such as at the closest point of approach to a Meme craft of a certain size or larger. Just in case the COA where the enemy builds a fleet in the Oort Cloud comes to pass.”

“Why not at impact?” Absen asked.

“At the speeds they will probably be going, impact will be too late. If the computer tries to wait until the ship rams, it will be vaporized before the detonation sequence is finished.”

“Sure wish we could get those antimatter bottles working right,” Absen mumbled. “Best impact fuse around. Just keep matter and antimatter apart, and if anything breaks the containment…boom!”

“Notwithstanding the fact that less than a gram of antimatter has ever even been created by humans,” Tyler replied, “it will be twenty or thirty years at least before we harness that kind of technology. Even Raphaela’s mad scientists have not been able to crack that one.”

Absen nodded. “All right then, let’s stick to current realities. Tell me more about those missiles.”

“The other sixteen warheads are on Pilum guided missiles. We expect the Aardvark to launch a spread, then follow it in.”

“That’s assuming we can even catch the damn Destroyer.”

Tyler nodded. “Yes, I’ve seen the Red-Blue simulations. It’s going to be tricky just to bring it to battle.”

“What else does your baby carry?” Absen asked for the benefit of the briefing.

“Nothing offensive. We’re having to go for cheap and numerous, so there’s a limit to what we can load aboard. It has a suite of small lasers and some electronic shotguns as point-defense weapons, but those are more in hopes they will be useful against unknowns than out of any belief they can stop an enemy hyper at speed.”

Absen turned to the rest, production officials and staff officers lucky enough to come along on this trip. “Our projections say we will eventually be able to build about ninety thousand of these attack boats.” He paused to let that sink in. Some of them knew it already but others gasped. “We’re going to be like the Zulus attacking rifle-armed troopers at Isandlwana. A shitload will die, but those that get through will close and kill the enemy.”

“How many?” one civilian reporter asked. “How many will die?”

Absen pressed his lips together. “Between a quarter and ninety percent. Assuming we win. If we lose…all of them, and all of us.”

“Ninety thousand men…”

“And women. All of them volunteers, all of them psych-tested and willing to use the Final Option.”

“All of them heroes, you mean,” the reporter replied, tapping notes on his tablet.

“You’re damn right, and you can print that,” Absen growled.

The onlookers turned in silence to watch out the window as the prototype’s takeoff thrusters powered up a few more percent and vectored downward. It didn’t take much in three percent gravity to lift the jumbo-jet-sized craft off the deck and send it drifting upward, outward into interplanetary space.

Lockerbie said, “Strap in, people, and we’ll tag along.” The passengers hastened to do that and she lifted nonchalantly after the A-24, using easy blasts of her chemical thrusters. The shuttle was not a high-priority enough craft to rate one of the valuable fusion engines. Soon, though, as production ramped up, they would be common, and humanity could stop relying on the cloned Memetech motors.

“Can we keep up with it?” Absen asked the pilot.

“For as long as he is just testing maneuvering thrusters, sure. If he lights the main engines…not a chance.”

“Well, let’s just watch history from a safe distance, shall we?” General Tyler spoke from the rear.

Lockerbie shook her head in amusement. “Haven’t lost a flag officer yet, sir,” she declared with a chuckle. “Besides, I’m in line to get one of those babies, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Chapter 26

“Rae, we need to talk.”

“Isn’t that the woman’s line, Alan?”

“Skull.”

Rae stared at her husband’s avatar, perched there on the edge of their bed. “Okay…what’s that signify?”

Skull leaned forward, his eyes unwavering. “I have an idea for the Aardvark program.”

“But you want to run it by me before you talk to Absen? Okay.”

“No. It’s more than that. It involves you, and us to an extent.”

“Go on.”

Skull stood up and began to pace, his feet making faint sucking sounds as they pulled loose for just moments from their connection to the rest of him, the ship. “You know, I used to not give one shit about the flyboys. Well, the Marine aviators were all right, but the frickin’ zoomies…up there in the air dropping bombs while we lay in the mud getting shot up.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Rae stood up and made as if to embrace him but he pushed her gently away.

“Don’t distract me, please.”

“So what is it?” She sat back down, idly smoothing the blanket.

“I think we should tell them about engrams.”

Rae leaned back to stare. “You’re kidding. That’s a tremendously disruptive technology. Things are humming along smoothly, and you want to tell Earth’s population that we can copy minds and put them into Memetech containers?”

“So we wait until the last minute.”

“But why?”

“Because,” he rounded on her, looking for a moment like his old, anguished self, “they don’t have to die. The pilots. We could copy them and put Memetech control modules into the Aardvarks, and they would fight just as well.”

Rae’s brow furrowed in thought. “I’m not so sure. I guided you through a prolonged period of adjustment and…I…” She ground to a halt.

Skull knew why; she still could not bring herself to admit she had edited his engram. Perhaps now was the time to force the issue.

“You removed my suicidal impulses.”

Her hand flew involuntarily to her mouth before she forced it back down. “You knew?”

“I know myself. I remember how I used to feel, even if I don’t actually feel that way anymore. I’ve had six years to think about it. I figured it out.” He smiled. “I do have a lot of brainpower available.”

“I just didn’t want to fight with you, or lose you again.”

“I know. It’s all right. I forgave you long ago. But what about all the pilots?”

Rae waved her hands as if to fend off his argument. “As I was saying, it would take a lot of work by trained specialists to guide the minds through their transitions, otherwise a significant portion of them may go mad.”

Skull shrugged. “Then those that go mad we just snuff out and try again. Eventually we’ll have enough stable ones that will go fight and die for humanity.”

“That’s monstrous!”

“Why?” He looked genuinely puzzled.

“It would be creating and then destroying thousands of intelligent, sentient minds. It would be murder!”

“It’s war.” Skull raised his palms. “It’s no different from sending men into battle knowing some will die.”

“No. No, I won’t do it, but not just for that reason. Okay, I might agree with your argument to a point, but there are other considerations.”

“Such as?”

“Such as,” she stood up to pace along with him, “Earth’s politicians might think this was a solution, making these…slaves. And what happens to them afterward? Do we just have them fly ships forever?”

“Why not? The Meme would.”

“We’re not Meme! Humans don’t deliberately use people like that. Or they shouldn’t, not in cold blood.”

“We could give them a choice. Fight, fly, be turned off…if we chose the right people for engrams, they would almost all volunteer to fight. We can figure out what happens afterward.”

Rae shook her head slowly at first, then more vigorously. “No. I won’t do it. It’s too cold-blooded. Also…” She lifted her eyes to meet his. “Humanity needs heroes and martyrs. This would not be the same in the public mind.”

“Oh my God. Now who’s cold-blooded?” Skull faced her across the room.

“Dammit!” Rae raised an arm, her fingers pointed at the ceiling, one hand on her hip. “Let me tell you a story.”

To Skull this position seemed odd, until he remembered a hazy bit of history about Greek and Roman oratorical traditions. She’d assumed a position mimicking an ancient senator or teacher. “Go on,” he said.

“In the early days of Rome, every male citizen was required to serve in the legions, a tradition handed down from the Greeks. Once Rome conquered an empire, they were allowed exemptions, stand-ins, and payments to individuals to take the place of the soldier. Of course, only wealthy people could afford this, so gradually the vaunted cohorts turned from truly egalitarian institutions into something made up mostly of the lower classes. Those aristocrats with enough honor or ambition to serve used their influence to secure commissions as officers, sometimes buying them outright.”

“I’m not talking about anything like that,” Skull objected.

“Keep listening. Eventually all of the legions were made up of a majority of non-Romans. Whole units of auxiliaries from subject nations fought alongside them. The military forces always had their politics – not to mention the Roman Civil War – but now they were becoming unreliable. Do you know what the Empire began to do?”

“I’m sure you’ll tell me,” Skull replied with gentle amusement.

“They continued substituting gold for blood and steel. You might say individuals already hired mercenaries to serve in their places, but eventually the Empire began hiring whole mercenary units with uncertain loyalties.” Rae stopped there, breathing heavily, and let her hand fall, staring at it as if only now recognizing what she was doing.

“Nice speech. So you’re saying using engrams would be like hiring mercenaries? How is that different from launching missiles with computer brains?”

“Because missiles are extensions of their ships. They are not independent fighters. They are not substitutes for combatants. If we provide people with an option to stay at home and avoid risking themselves or their loved ones, they will take it. Oh,” she held up a hand again, “not the military people at first. They’ll protest and feel bad. But the decision makers, the civilians in charge, will take the easy option, and it will be wrong. If people give up the willingness to put their lives on the line and sacrifice for their homes, their families, their clans, their nations, and their planet, then they are already beaten. This is why the Greeks beat the Persians, why the Russians beat Napoleon, why the Vietnamese beat the Americans and why the Afghans beat the Russians.”

“Draft exemptions lost us the Nam?” Skull laughed with a bit of his old edge.

“Part and parcel of a loss of national will. Doing as you suggest will sap the will of humanity. It will cause enormous debates about what a human being is, what life and death is, what kind of rights such engrams have, and so on endlessly. It’s a recipe for disaster. It’s reason number one that no one but us knows you are alive.” Rae ended her vehement diatribe by shaking Skull’s avatar by his shoulders. “Besides, we don’t have the ability to make thousands of control pods to hold engrams.”

“All right,” he replied, taking her hands in his. “I’ll take your word for it. The Raphael part of you has a lot more experience with people and politics than I do. It seemed like a good idea.”

“Lots of good ideas have hidden downsides. Don’t stop thinking, Alan.”

Skull just shrugged.

Chapter 27

Destroyer 6223 was a relatively new creature, only hundreds of years old, and had participated in just three battles. Two of them had barely been worthy of that name, mere crushing of enemy colonies unable to offer more than token resistance before succumbing to hundreds of hypervelocity missiles.

Once disarmed, its plagues, warbots and Purelings – low-grade Meme mitoses blended with blank-minded cloned subject races – had stamped out each planet’s resistance and prepared the populace for its new role as part of the Meme Empire. Those of the race who wished to, had blended with their new subjects, taken their positions of power, and set out to organize their new slaves. With labor compelled from the lower races and the depth of technological knowhow resident in the new masters’ memory molecules, it would only be a few tens of cycles before these new worlds took their places alongside the thousands that made up the True Race’s holdings.

The third encounter had been a fight, though one that Destroyer 6223 had been destined to win. Around a Jovian gas giant a dozen shark-like ships had attacked and done some slight damage to its body using primitive physical means. Specifically, the things had bitten chunks out of its hide. The creatures had proved themselves surprisingly agile, dodging hypers time and again, ultimately succumbing only to close-range fusor blasts.

After that, they had been brought on board and put in bio-stasis chambers for future study. As Destroyer 6223 was not a scientific vessel the majority of examination would have to wait until it was able to drop off the samples on an appropriate Meme world. The ship itself, about as intelligent as an Earthly dolphin, only vaguely wondered where its enemies had come from, and why they were in space.

The crew of eighty-one Meme aboard knew, but did not care. The creatures had originated from the gas giant, obviously evolved in its atmosphere but having made the leap into space just like they believed planetary forms spread from sea to land.

One trium of Meme, an Investigator threesome combining the functions of scientists and intelligence analysts, postulated that the things had not evolved, but had been bred for war by sentients deeper beneath the masking layers of heavy gas. Their suggestion was diffidently noted and filed away as having no relevance. Meme could not live in such an environment unless they somehow blended with such creatures, and the environment was so inimical that they simply had little interest. What sensual pleasure could there be in floating within clouds of hot gas?

If and when such theoretical sentients presented a threat, they would be dealt with. Meme feared nothing living. Only the machine cultures, such as Species 447 with their enormously destructive Deathbringer-class ships, had ever truly challenged the Empire. That had made blending with the remnants of their race all the sweeter.

As with all living things, these experiences influenced the outlook of the warship and crew, therefore when the initial reports from the unnumbered scout ship in their next scheduled system reached them, their interest was minimal. In fact, the main reason they took time away from their endless mental games and expended effort at all was boredom. It had been years since the most recent battle and Destroyer 6223 Commander One found entertainment in directing and supervising, as did Two and Three, the others of the Command trium.

Below them, tria of various sorts such as Executives, Engineers, Biologists and Weaponers grudgingly examined the incomplete data that had been beamed from the Survey craft before it had lost contact. From its entry into the Humans’ system, to its examination of the old Watcher base, to its clumsy but valiant attempt to propel an asteroid to impact the resistant sentients’ world, they looked at the whole encounter.

Their examinations intensified when they found reports of the fission-fusion detonations around the asteroid and Survey craft, and the few images available of a mechanical warship much more massive than the Meme ship it had clearly destroyed. It seemed as if the trium of Pure Forms aboard had escaped immediately before its death.

From the limited evidence available they came to the only possible conclusion: this attacker was no match for Destroyer 6223.

First, the mechanical warship was less than one percent of the giant Meme ship’s size. Its acceleration was pitiful, as were the speed of its explosive missiles. Kinetic and coherent-light weapons seemed plentiful but could not possibly do enough damage to threaten Destroyer 6223. They had beaten the Survey craft only because of the gross mismatch of size.

Cautious by nature, the Investigators had provided scenarios assuming threats of eight, sixty-four, and 512 of such enemy ships at once. The last scenario presented a defeat possibility approaching fifty percent in a straight-up battle, but dropped to zero when maneuver was factored in. It would take another enemy order of magnitude to present a serious challenge to a Destroyer.

Given all available data, the likelihood of the Species 666 Humans possessing enough such large ships to be really dangerous hovered just above zero.

Therefore, when the escape probe containing the essences of the Survey craft’s trium was recovered, all eighty-one of the crew had already formed and solidified a conclusion that brooked no alteration: the target solar system would be a pushover, or at worst an interesting exercise to stave off ennui.

Chapter 28

“We must overcome this disgrace,” said Recycler One to Two and Three. Until their embarrassing failure they had been Commander, Executive and Biologist of the lost Survey craft. Now they had been demoted to the lowest rung of shipboard society, caring for the guts of the great living ship and even more bored out of their molecular minds than the assigned crew.

“Agreed,” replied Two, who had been Executive, and Three, who had been Biologist. Their designations had been withdrawn but not their skills, and hundreds of years of independent scouting had made this trium positively open-minded, even insubordinate, for Meme.

The rigid rules and definitions of the Empire’s society existed to keep their race’s natural egotism and will to power in check. Finding themselves all but outside that structure, it seemed quite easy to keep to themselves and cast about for some form of redemption.

“Perhaps we can supplant the new Zookeepers,” Three suggested, referring to the trium of former Recyclers now promoted to taking care of the various nonsentient biological forms retained aboard. These animals represented a combination of biological archives and spare parts, some in stasis, some bred and used in experiments, still others kept to provide food or entertainment for the crew.

“And how shall we do that?” Two asked with a nasty sneer. “There is no one lower than we, and the new Zookeepers have been aboard this ship for many cycles. They have associates and local knowledge. We have nothing.”

“We have feces,” One observed with irony, manipulating a bio-absorber to clean up a spill. “Go seal and repair that hernia,” he ordered. Two and Three hastened to the offending breach and began the disgusting task of using their own body’s biological processes to regenerate the tiny part of the Destroyer’s digestive system that had failed. If a Meme had tried to explain to a human by analogy, he would have said that this task was akin to licking an animal’s open wound, one very near to its elimination hole.

“What do you suggest?” Executive grumped. Fortunately its ability to converse was not limited by its work, except that it made the words malodorous.

“Perhaps we should perform this task so poorly we will be given a different set of duties,” said Three.

“Tempting,” replied One, “but I do not believe that is the path to redemption. I had in mind instead providing a more…complete report to our illustrious leadership.”

“But only a Level One report was requested,” whined Three.

One said, “Yes, and that gave the impression these Humans are insufficiently advanced in their machine technology to defeat this vessel. But by the time we arrive they will have almost nine of their years to prepare, and for a desperate species, that time might prove dangerous.”

“Do you actually think they can defeat this Destroyer?” Two asked with concern.

“No. It is not possible, but a few more years is not long to wait for the chance at rapid advancement.” One reversed the flow of its absorber and excreted the feces into a valve that would send the effluvium back into its proper channel.

“How do you know?” Two dared to raise a brief argument.

“There was an executive summary logged into the most recent shipwide report files. It seems comprehensive and persuasive, and I must agree with it. The Empire will conquer.”

“You actually read those things?” Three asked, incredulous.

“Yes, and that is why I am One and you are Three,” One snarled.

“But if the battle will be so easy, what chance do we have of moving up?” Three grumbled.

“I begin to understand the thrust of One’s communications,” Two interjected with growing interest. “I believe he means that, although the Humans cannot win, they might fight hard, even produce a certain number of casualties among the crew, if this vessel conducted itself in…slightly suboptimal ways.”

One favored Two with the equivalent of a smile. “You grasp my intent.”

“We would sabotage our own ship?” Three asked, aghast.

“Of course not,” One snapped. “Merely provide additional selected information that may lead the Command trium to make decisions that are less efficient than they might be. I estimate that a ten percent reduction in effectiveness will result in better than a fifty percent chance of loss of one or more tria, leaving the crew short of qualified personnel.”

“And when new mitoses are created, they will take the lowest positions, and we will move up! That is brilliant!” Three gushed.

“Stop floating so many excess communication molecules,” One ordered, spreading himself wide to seal the tube they occupied, sucking up the offending miasma. “Someone might overhear.”

“No one comes down here except us,” Two replied.

“That’s exactly why we speak of this nowhere else. Now have you finished with that hernia?”

“Yes, of course, One.”

“Then let us continue our duties, keep our pods clean, and give no hint of our plan, while I assemble a supplementary report.”

***

“What is this?” Destroyer 6223 Commander One asked the Internal Communicator Three wobbling nervously just inside his control chamber. The junior functionary held a data package gingerly in one pseudopod, as if the thing stank.

Which it did.

“A supplementary report from the former Survey craft trium, Commander.”

Commander One ruffled his surface, the Meme equivalent of guarded approval. At least this subordinate came straight to the point. “Put it down and go about your duties.” Once the other had gone, he put the blob of complex molecules into his reader and began displaying its index.

He could have absorbed it directly, but it was not unknown for a virus to “accidentally” be encoded into such a package, with highly variable results, from memory alterations to sickness and even death. Once he had run the data thoroughly through his examiner, then he would consider directly experiencing it.

In the meantime…the supplemental data proved interesting, but ultimately not critical. It confirmed the conclusions Commander One had already come to about the Humans, while providing some ideas for optimization strategies during the coming battle, dovetailing neatly with his beliefs. The former Survey trium was obviously pathetically eager to work itself into its new Commander’s good graces, and he had to admit, this was a fair start.

Therefore Commander One logged a minor commendation to his new Recycler trium, knowing full well it would be a long time, at least until after the conquest of the Human system, before it would matter. At that time various tria would be detached for off-ship duties – for example, another Watcher base – and some of his crew would undoubtedly decide to move on to the next stage of life by blending with the lower forms, beginning the endless cycle of incorporation into the Empire.

With the Meme equivalent of a shrug, Commander One redistributed the report to his senior staff, and then went back to his usual duties, effectively forgetting about the whole thing…or at least, the source of the ideas that fit so well with his own preconceptions. With years still to think about it, he slowly came to incorporate Recycler One’s flattering advice into his plans and eventually gave in to the temptation to absorb the data module directly, having determined there was no threat.

If there was such a thing as the Supreme God the Meme worshipped, It would have laughed at the irony of one of Its servants, composed of living transferrable memory molecules, believing that an idea, a meme such as their race was named for, could not itself be infectious.

As it was written in their sacred Book of the Meme: “In the beginning was the Information, and the Information was with the Supreme, and the Information was the Supreme. Without the Information was not anything made that was made.”

So when Commander One issued orders to increase speed in order to gain some time, he thought the intentions were entirely his own, rather than having been literally planted in his mind and willingly incorporated.

Chapter 29

Year Seven

Vincent Markis, now dubbed “Vango” by his jet fighter training class, sat still for a moment, just feeling Callisto’s roughly one-eighth gravity as it pulled steadily on him. It seemed somehow different from acceleration or spin gravity, even from that of the grav-plates he had experienced on the transport out from Earth.

It had taken him a while to figure “Vango” out, because no one would tell him. The derivation of pilots’ call signs, “names” or “handles,” was always supposed to stay secret for as long as possible, a game to those in the know. Many were obvious, such as those popularized in the movies: “Maverick” for the rebel, “Iceman” for the cool technician, “Goose” for the funny looking guy with the long neck.

But “Vango”…it had taken a serendipitous song on the radio, Don McLean’s “Vincent,” to make the connection in his mind: Van Gogh. Vango. The appellation was both a relief and a disappointment. He’d hoped it would have some deeper meaning than just a word play on his name…but then again, perhaps it was better not to, considering the artist’s tragic life.

Or maybe it meant they thought he was an artist with the airplane?

Okay, I’ll take it. Besides, showing any displeasure with the handle your comrades give you is a surefire way to make them think you can’t hack it.

At least he hadn’t been tagged with “Cupcake,” like one guy, or the young woman that got “Stringy.”

Vango unbuckled last, earning a couple of funny looks about his reticence from the other passengers as they filed out of the acceleration seating area. Maybe in the future entire ships would be gravplated and passengers could stay in their quarters or the rec areas even as they maneuvered, but for now they had to be collected in one area and restrained for extra safety. Human technology now cut everything close for efficiency’s sake. With the Destroyer only two years out, that meant very few luxuries.

About half of the human cargo on board were prospective Aardvark pilots, jet jockeys all and certain that they would tear through this course just as they had all their training before. Despite the nearly hundred thousand pilot roster to eventually fill, Earth was producing plenty of qualified candidates. Most Edens didn’t have the problems the old normals used to: weak eyes, badly tuned inner ears, heart problems, any number of niggling issues that used to disqualify ninety percent of the population before they even applied.

So Vango was the last off the ship as he shuffled down the ramp and through the mandatory ID checks. After that he looked around, having been told someone would be there to meet him.

Apparently that someone was one harried lieutenant and a sergeant driving the open electric tram that sat next to an exit from the hangar. The officer held up a sign with the letters AAT on them, for Advanced Attack Training, the official name for the qualification course. Twenty-odd men and women, all cast from the same basic clear-eyed clean-cut mold, gaggled toward the two and climbed onto the vehicle. It reminded Vango of those things at Disneyland that took people to and from the parking areas.

He found himself next to a pleasant-looking blonde woman holding a carry bag in her lap just as he was. “Hi,” he introduced himself, holding out his hand. “Vango.” This was one moment that he was glad to use just his handle; the Markis name had often made him a target, forcing him to play everything even more by the book than he was inclined.

“Pleasedtameetcha,” she replied, pumping his hand enthusiastically. “Stevie. Ain’t this a hoot? Can’t wait to climb into an Aardvark.” If he’d had to place her accent, he guessed it was from somewhere in the American South, sounding a bit like Aunt Cassie.

Already her eyes had slid past him and stared out into infinite space, and he guessed that she must love the freedom of flight just as much as he did. “What d’you fly?” he asked, the safest of aviator’s questions.

“Super Ospreys. US Navy. You?”

“F-35s. South African Air Force.”

“I guess we’re all EarthFleet now, huh?”

“I guess we are.” The supranational military service had standardized uniforms, but retained the Army, Navy, Aerospace and Marine force designators that overlapped with most of the source nations’ services. That meant Stevie wore whites while Vango sported sky blue, the uniforms’ only concessions to their original nationality a flag on the left shoulder of each. He’d heard Admiral Absen wanted to get rid of that too, but the Combined Council had overruled him.

Vango wondered how long after the Destroyer was dealt with until Earth’s fractious nations would go back to feuding, and unconsciously shook his head.

“What? You look like someone just ate y’all’s doughnut,” Stevie said.

“Y’all? I thought that word was plural in your dialect.”

“Mah dah-uh-lect? This ain’t a dah-uh-lect, Vee, it’s an ack-say-ent,” she said, pronouncing these words as if they had three syllables. “Now if I lapsed into Cajun, that would be a dah-uh-lect. And don’t start about me talkin’ funny, not with you sounding like some weird District Nine journalist from Seyth Effrica.”

“Sorry,” Vango replied, turning away from her vitriol.

“Oh, hey, ain’t nothin’ but a thang,” she replied, changing her speech yet again.

Vango kept his eyes straight ahead as they cruised down a wide two-lane tunnel, passing other electric vehicles on the way, and after a moment Stevie punched his shoulder.

“Come on, Van. I’m just jerkin’ your chain. It’s ’cause I like ya.”

He smiled uncomfortably and glanced her way, then faced front again, unnerved by her strange forward manner. The women he’d grown up with had been smart and kind, but never acted like this, except for a few of the girls in school, whom he’d avoided. One of the reasons he liked flying was its clarity and structure, its checklists, its right and wrong answers.

Girls like this didn’t fit.

“Oh, mah, it looks like I have a lot of work to do,” Stevie went on with a dramatic sigh.

“Yes, we all do,” Vango responded, deliberately acting as if he misunderstood. Maybe if he was lucky they would be nowhere near each other as they trained, at least until their schedules filled with work. After that, perhaps she wouldn’t have time to bother him.

Chapter 30

Master Sergeant Jill Repeth beamed over at her husband Lieutenant Commander Rick Johnstone as they left Orion on a ten-minute hop over to the interplanetary transport ship. While the shuttle had about twenty seats, the transport looked like it could comfortably carry ten times as many.

Both wore uniforms: hers the crimson and navy blue of the EarthFleet Marines, his the khakis of a working Fleet naval officer. Because of this they avoided holding hands or any other obvious public display. To complete the inadvertent illusion that they were not together, Jill carried most of their gear: four tightly-packed duffels, as if she were his enlisted aide. Rick toted only two carry bags.

What onlookers did not know was that, while Rick had a full suite of chips in his head for his CyberComm duties, Jill’s body brimmed with the latest cyborg upgrades, lacking only things that might show. Some Marines opted for ferrocrystal outer skin or obvious mods such as metal teeth and claws, but with her part-time duties as a covert operative, everything on the outside looked standard human.

Of course, with her enhanced musculature and bones the baggage seemed more awkward than heavy, even in the half gravity provided by the gravplates, but she was far more physically capable than he. Human culture still tended to ascribe overt strength to the male, though, and they drew a few odd looks.

“Couldn’t we just have checked all of those bags through to the new base?” Rick asked as they walked the short distance to their quarters, threading their way among other arriving personnel.

“Airlines ever lose your luggage?” she asked. “No one’s going to bring it over later in space, and there are no malls or mail-order companies out here. Trust a Marine. The best thing we can do is keep our gear close.”

“Right. Well, here’s our stateroom.” As a married couple they rated a tiny private space the size of a closet, with bunked beds taking up half of the space. Drawers below the bottom one and netting above the top provided some stowage, but they barely had room to turn around with both standing. “Looks like restrooms are communal,” Rick went on.

“Head, Rick. It’s called the head. Dress you up like a sailor but you’ll still be a civilian at heart.”

“Hey, I didn’t ask for this uniform,” he retorted. “I got drafted.”

“You got presidentially appointed is what you did, and then you joined EarthFleet.”

“Only because you did.” He sighed. “Out of the frying pan…”

“I thought we talked about this?” Jill said.

“We did. I’m just whining, in private, to you. Is that okay?”

“Of course,” she said, kissing him. “I’m sure things will be much better at Grissom Base. I hear they have plenty of living space.”

Rick nodded. “At least I hear the food is decent.”

“Welcome to forward garrison. Besides, you’ll be going back to Orion before the attack starts. For you, this is a working vacation. For me, it’s my job.” She leaped lightly to the top bunk. “I’m for some shuteye.”

“Okay. Sweet dreams. I’m going to look around the ship.”

“Have fun. One ship is pretty much like another.”

“After being stationed on Orion for the last four years, any change is a good change.”

“At least you got to come down to Earth once a quarter and see me.” Jill pumped her eyebrows comically up and down.

“And you got to come up several times. It’s your fault. I’ve gotten used to the military.”

“You’re just a techie at heart. You want to look at the gizmos.”

“Good thing you’ve got so much machinery inside you, huh?” Rick waved as he shut the cabin door.

Chapter 31

All right ladies and gentlemen, this is your first full virtual reality simulation of the A-24 Avenger II. The voice of the aerospace controller speaking inside his head was so smooth and real-sounding, it almost made Vango forget he was not actually hearing the man with his ears. Rather, the feed came directly into his auditory nerve via his implanted link chips.

Your first scenario is simple takeoff and landing practice, set here on Callisto. During this first day, your ship will be locked in beginner mode, and you won’t be able to get hurt. Later, you will be able to crash the simulated ship, which will cause you some mild pain feedback and also will be recorded for your debriefings. Good luck, and follow the tutorial.

This method of instruction was quite different from what he was used to, but all the students were fully trained jet pilots, and he’d heard they had been experimenting with a more organic, heuristic approach. Besides, they didn’t have enough qualified Aardvark fliers yet for the usual one-on-one methods.

A tutorial screen opened automatically, and he followed its prompts to start up the ship from power-down all the way to takeoff-ready status. LAUNCH. The word flashed gently in front of him.

Vango looked down at his virtual hands on the virtual controls and remembered what he’d been taught. You don’t actually need the physical illusion, but it helps a lot, the brain-teachers had said. Eventually you’ll find yourself losing track of your virtual avatar and just flying the ship as if it was your body.

Placing those hands deliberately on his virtual lap, he decided to use his newbie grace period to try doing without them. With his mind alone, he willed the craft to take off.

Nothing happened.

Vexed, he reviewed his checklist, and ran a snippet of the brain-teacher’s class on a virtual video screen projected before his mind’s eye. If you really want to fly the Avenger the right way – the instructors always called the A-24 by its official name, even though everyone else called them Aardvarks – you have to inhabit it. You have to imagine that its sensors are your eyes and ears, its weapons your arms, its thrusters your feet and your muscles.

Deliberately, Vango sank into the illusion, trying to feel those things the teacher had talked about. He replicated some of the exercises he’d performed back then, on simpler brain-training scenarios after he’d had the additional link chips implanted. In those, he’d inhabited the virtual bodies of animals, cars, airplanes, even heavy construction equipment, but those simulations had been simple, designed to help the new pilots take baby steps.

Now he was expected to really run and play.

His first success was his vision. Instead of the illusion of the inside of a cockpit, he followed the sensor feeds through the skin of the ship and suddenly looked out upon the 3D surroundings without being anchored in place. After that it was easier to hear the radio comms all around him, and feel the idling fusion engine, like a beating heart oddly connected to his feet.

Around and above him he watched dozens of ships flying in simple takeoff and landing patterns, presumably his compatriots who had seized the physical controls and launched. He had no doubt that if communication with them had been allowed, they would be razzing him for just sitting there on the virtual ramp, not moving.

That’s all right. I’ll show them, he thought. I always do things by the book, but the instructions did not say I had to follow the taxiway to the runway and go zooming down it, airplane style, the way everyone assumes. The simulation should replicate everything about Callisto, including its low gravity, so…

With a deep breath that he felt as a ramping up power, he imagined himself crouching in place, then gently rising up on his fingers and toes.

His Aardvark lifted off the ground, wobbling a bit but under positive control, and he continued to rise, until he imagined himself standing. This brought his ship to a vertical orientation, nose up and twin engines pointed at the ground, like an old-fashioned rocket.

Then he leaped.

Blasting upward, he shot through the middle of the formation of ships in their counterclockwise traffic pattern, higher and higher until the limits of the beginner’s VR space stopped him from climbing. Even so, he now hovered far above the rest. More and more, he felt as if he was flying his body rather than sitting in a cockpit.

ENTER PATTERN, CIRCLE AND LAND said the tutorial. The words had been pulsing there for some time, but he’d ignored them as he had climbed. Now, though, they constituted an order and his natural sense of responsibility kicked in. He was happy to push the boundaries of instruction, but wasn’t going to blow his chances by acting like some rebel on his first day.

Swooping down, he selected a gap and dropped into it from above, and then followed the left turns on the pattern legs named upwind, crosswind, downwind, base and final, regardless that there was no actual wind on this moon.

He hurried through the tutorial as fast as he could, earning several hours at the end to just play in the no-crash mode. Instead of hanging around the virtual spaceport, he flew out over the representation of the moon’s surface, racing above the plains and zooming through mountain passes, just…having fun.

As he was working his way back, he was startled to see a ship pop up from a canyon behind him and paint him with a targeting laser. “Bam! First kill for me, flyboy,” he heard a female voice say.

“Can’t kill me today, Stevie,” Vango replied. “We’re in beginner mode.”

“Sounds like quibbling,” she replied as she pulled up alongside.

“How’d you find me?” he asked, curious.

“From above. Got tired of flying around in circles when I saw you shoot off thisaway. Figured if we was gonna get put on report, we might as well do it together.”

“We’re not going to get put on report,” he replied. “They are watching us. They want to see who is going to think outside the box.”

“Well nobody ever accused me of doin’ too much thinkin’,” she said.

“That’s a crock and you know it, Stevie. You’re as smart as anyone. Why do you try to cover it up with that hick act?”

Her accent became an aristocratic drawl. “Wah Vango…a gentleman never asks such a question of a lady. Pahaps ah just want to be appreciated for mah body and not the brilliant mind you boys can’t keep your frontal lobes off of.”

Vango couldn’t help but laugh. “Anyone ever tell you you’ve got a funny way of looking at the world?”

She didn’t answer for a moment, and then she said in a pensive tone, “Not often enough, Vee. Not often enough.”

Outside the simulator pod Vango jumped, startled by a slap on his butt as he stood adjusting to reality. He turned to find Stevie there, with that turned-up nose and short blonde bob that barely came up to his chin. “Hey,” he said.

“Come on, flyboy. Let’s go get some chow. I’m starving.”

“Sure,” he replied, and let her lead the way toward the busy dining facility – or so he thought. At some point he realized she was taking him off the expected track, down unfamiliar corridors of the vast training base. “Where are we going?”

“Getting dinner. Real food.”

“What?” He had no idea what she was talking about. “Where else but the chow hall or the Officers’ Club is there?”

Stevie tsk-tsked. “You gotta live a little, Vee. Get out more. You been here for two weeks and I bet you never been anywhere but your cabin, the gym, the chow hall and class.”

“I went to the O Club last Friday,” he said defensively. “Had a beer and everything.”

“Ooh, a beer. Wild man.”

They rounded a corner to enter a sudden whirlwind of humanity, and not a bunch of uniforms, either. People of all shapes, sizes and colors of dress and outfitting mixed on what Vango first thought was a city street full of shops. After a moment, he realized that the high ceiling had been decorated with stars and a moon, augmented by some kind of fiber optic lighting to resemble a night sky, at least at first glance.

The buildings that lined the street were facades in a New Orleans style and neon signs flashed in windows, advertising food, drink, tattoos and other…services. LIQUOR IN THE FRONT, POKER IN THE REAR proclaimed one garish marquee, and other similar ones competed.

Vango lifted a hand to wave at a couple of classmates as they walked by. EarthFleet personnel were in some evidence, along with many civilians. Some of those also seemed to be patrons, but most looked like they were working here.

“My god,” he breathed. “Where did this come from?”

“Oh, come on. Every base has some kind of sleazy district to soak up the excess cash,” Stevie replied. “They call this the Earth Quarter, or just the Quarter.”

“Like the French Quarter in New Orleans. How did you find it?” he asked.

Stevie just laughed and clutched his arm. “Come on. Let’s get some real food.” She pulled him toward a restaurant at the main intersection corner and with a twenty-FleetCred bill soon secured them a table on the balcony. This allowed them an excellent view of the milling humanity enjoying the ambience.

“I had no idea anything like this was here. Isn’t this a military base?” Vango asked.

“Not this part. This is owned by General Services. You know, multinational contractors that build, maintain, provide services...”

“But…where do all these people come from?”

Stevie stared at him as if he had three heads. “What, your mama never told you how babies are made?” Then she relented. “Some are official, some are family of the civilians, some are people whose contracts ended but they decided to stay on. Some declared allegiance to EarthFleet and now don’t have countries to go back to. A few probably came out here specifically for this kind of…opportunity. Earth is a bit over-regulated nowadays for some folks’ tastes, what with the command economy and all. Did you know a lot of places back home now prohibit any businesses that don’t contribute to the war effort?”

Vango stared at her. “Really? Like what?” I guess I’ve been in the military pipeline too long.

Steve shrugged. “Tattoo parlors…casinos…bordellos…smoke shops…strip clubs…even bars and some kinds of restaurants, some places. Depends on what country you’re talking about, but in the ones without much history of personal liberties, most of this kind of fun has been driven underground.”

“Some would call it vice,” Vango opined.

“Do you want other people to make those decisions for you?” she retorted.

“I want to beat the Meme.” He waved at the scene over the railing. “I don’t see how this helps.”

Stevie threw her fork down disgustedly, splashing sauce on the white tablecloth. “People aren’t machines. They need to blow off steam. Trying to regulate victimless crimes is a pointless exercise.”

Vango cocked his head at her. “Two things I just realized.” He held up a finger. “One, you seem to lose most of your accent when you get mad about something. Two,” he held up another, “you’re really cute when you’re mad.”

Thunder rolled into Stevie’s eyes, and she stood up. “You know, I came here to have a good time, not to be psychoanalyzed.” Picking up the remains of her bowl of gumbo, she upended it over his head. “See you later, flyboy.”

Vango sat there for a moment with sauce dribbling down his face as he watched her go. Picking up a napkin, he wiped as much off of himself as he could, then realized he’d been left with the bill. What have I gotten myself into? he thought at her retreating back. He shook his head. What a girl. For a short time he thought she might be someone to get to know better, but…

As he threw some FleetCreds down on the table, he watched her exit the restaurant beneath the balcony and cross the street, still clearly in a huff. Only, she didn’t head to the corridor that led back to the base area. Instead, she entered an unfamiliar tunnel.

A combination of curiosity and concern caused him to hurry down the stairs, out the door and after her. Fortunately the corridor she had entered was wide and tall, another “street” in this miniature sin city, and he was able to catch a glimpse of her as she turned into a doorway with a relatively discreet, low-key sign above it that said Lotus
Flower Shop.

What the hell? He found a position across the street, in the doorway of what appeared to be a closed tool vendor, and waited until she came out again, in about five minutes. She held a small bouquet in her hand of what looked like real, if undersized, flowers.

Flowers on Callisto, Vango thought. Talk about your useless businesses. Must be hydroponics, or someone is poaching food space. He followed Stevie.

This time she made a beeline for the base area and the pilots’ village, and went straight into her own quarters. Feeling foolish, and wanting to set things right – at least, less wrong – between them, Vango waited a few minutes, fidgeting, then knocked on her door.

He had to knock three times before the handle jiggled and the door opened a crack, Stevie’s angry eyes peering out. “What do you want?” she hissed.

“I wanted to thank you for showing me the Earth Quarter, and to say I’m sorry.”

Her face softened, and she nodded. “Sure, Vee. Now scram.” She shut the door and he could hear it lock.

Normally he would have left it at that. He’d never pushed a girl on anything – well, except his sister, who was fair game – but something about this situation seemed out of whack. The way Stevie had stormed off…and why run straight to a flower shop? It didn’t make sense. So he knocked again.

This time she flung the door wide and glared at him. Her flight suit was zipped down to her waist, showing off a regulation t-shirt beneath, and, he had to admit, a pretty nice chest. “I said scram!”

“What’s that,” he asked as his eyes were drawn to her upper left arm. Something was tied around it there, tightly circling her bicep.

Her reaction surprised him. She tried to slam the door, but he instinctively put out his booted foot and blocked it, and then pushed his way inside, shutting it behind him. Once it became clear he wasn’t going to be kept out, she bolted for the bathroom.

He caught up with her before she could get that door closed. “Get the hell out of here, you creep!” Stevie screamed, punching at the arms holding the bathroom door open.

“Stop it, Stevie, please,” he pleaded. He caught first one of her fists, then the other, in strong hands. His father had insisted he take a full program of martial arts when growing up, and immobilizing one female half his size wasn’t too difficult.

Finally, she went limp, slumping. He set her gently on the closed toilet seat and stood in the doorway. Slowly she reached up and slipped the rubber hose free of where it constricted her arm.

Vango’s eyes roved the tiny bathroom, taking in the flowers set in a plastic cup, the tiny packet of white powder on the tray, the spoon, the needle. Finally he looked at her as she hung her head. Not knowing what to say, he just asked, “Stevie, what the hell?”

“Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it,” she quoted, raising her chin with a strained smile. “Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God, and tasted the eternal joys of heaven, am not tormented with ten thousand hells, in being deprived of everlasting bliss?”

“I don’t understand,” he replied.

“It’s Marlowe. Doctor Faustus.” Stevie sighed. “You’re the dumbest smart guy I know, Vincent Markis. You grew up in a protected little enclave in South Africa where nothing bad ever happened, and you think that pathetic little red light district is a big deal. Other people didn’t have it so easy. Other people have problems.”

“Stevie…” Vango dropped to his knees to take her hands awkwardly in his. He didn’t know quite how to relate to her – as a sister, a comrade, a woman? “Look, I can’t know what you’re going through, but I do know you don’t need this stuff.”

Stevie looked like she would explode again, but controlled herself. “I need something, Vee. I’m not like you, all self-contained and perfect. I got a big hole in me that needs filling, and I was hoping you might do some of that.” She grinned slyly, as if realizing exactly how much of a double-entendre her statement contained.

“I, uh…” While not exactly a virgin, a willful woman like Stevie was far outside of his experience.

Abruptly she leaned forward and kissed him tenderly, then more insistently. Her tongue probed into his mouth, and he found himself responding without thought, putting his arms around her waist. “You’re right,” she breathed hot in his ear. “I don’t need that shit, as long as I have something better.”

Somehow they made it to her bed and, laughing, wiggled off their flight suits. With the whole weird situation, and…she had turned down her fix for him. That was flattering. He decided to just try to forget about the stuff in the bathroom for now, be happy with his good luck, and enjoy the ride.

Chapter 32

Disembarking on Callisto was tremendous relief for Rick and Jill. The twenty-day trip out had strained even their excellent relationship, with little space to breathe but the cabin, a crowded gym and the common room. As deadheading EarthFleet personnel they had a few more options than the ordinary passengers, such as visiting the cramped bridge or the small wardroom, but only a couple of times during the trip were they invited.

“They weren’t kidding,” Jill exclaimed as they debouched from the docking tunnel into a well-lit, high-ceilinged room. Plants, mostly tough fast-growing varieties like ivy and wisteria, twisted around the inside of the gymnasium-sized dome’s central park, and the air smelled like the outdoors – at least, to their ship-stunned senses. “This is great!” She bounced up on the balls of her feet, leaving the ground for a moment in the low gravity.

“Compared to three weeks on that ship, it sure is,” Rick replied. “They have plenty of power, water and soil here for fresh food. Lots of construction materials right from the planet means big quarters. I hear they have one-G gravplated football fields and everything.”

“Come on, let’s go. I can’t wait to look around.”

After the usual inprocessing rigmarole, they found their quarters, a nice apartment with a balcony on the third level overlooking another, smaller park, that looked like it had been placed there just for the residences. “I’m amazed they would put so much effort into amenities,” Rick remarked.

“The headshrinkers said people would go crazy if they didn’t have some sense of normalcy. People can’t deploy for years without going nuts. They have to feel like they have a life outside of work, and somewhere without four close walls,” Jill responded.

“Even Marines?”

“Even Marines. Speaking of that…I’m going to go report in to my commander.”

“Today?” Rick’s voice held surprise. “I thought you had your initial interview scheduled for tomorrow. I don’t even have to report until next Monday.”

“Tomorrow’s appointment is with the battalion commander. I want to report in to the battalion sergeant major. Marines always exceed the standard, Rick. You know that.” She stripped off her utilities and began to put on her dress uniform. “If I didn’t, the smaj would wonder why. Then as soon as he found out I arrived with my officer husband and took my sweet time, he’d think I was a slacker. I’d have two strikes against me before I started.”

Standing in front of the mirror, she buttoned her high collar to the top, brushed off her sleeves, and then placed her wheel cap on her head once before removing it and tucking it under her arm. “I won’t be long.” She kissed Rick as she went out the door.

After a few wrong turns, she found the Marine headquarters, and stepped up to the counter at the S1 Personnel section, nodding at the staff sergeant behind a desk, the senior of four enlisted people busily working at computers.

Odd that they’re all in dress uniform, she thought. Maybe it’s a special day. She checked her watch for the date, and racked her brains but came up with nothing significant to any military organization she’d ever been in.

The NCO, whose nametag read Duyers, popped to his feet with a professional smile. “Good morning, Master Sergeant Repeth. Can I help you?”

Jill handed him a disk. “Reporting. My orders and records. Is my boss in?”

“Umm…” The NCO looked over his shoulder at a closed doorway with a brass plate reading LtCol Donald A. Simms, EFM. “You’re not scheduled until tomorrow.”

“No, not the commander.” Jill pointed at the door across the open floor of desks. This one had a simple plastic name holder with Sergeant Major Ernesto Tano on it, along with his symbol of rank. “The smaj.”

“Oh. Of course. But don’t let the colonel hear you call him that. He’s a stickler for propriety.”

“Very well,” She kept her expression pleasant as Duyers accessed a computer in front of him.

“It appears the sergeant major is currently inspecting the deployable dining facility,” he told her. “It’s in J-3-1. Out the door, to the left, follow the corridor to J section.”

“I’ll find it,” Repeth said and left as quickly as she could. No Marine liked paperwork, and something about that personnel NCO bothered her. Perhaps the smaj could shed some light.

Once she found J section Repeth wandered around a bit until she spotted a couple of enlisted Marines, also in dress uniform, with sidearms. In fact, she hadn’t seen any in utilities or even PT gear, which she thought odd. She approached the two privates.

“Good morning, Master Sergeant,” both murmured quietly.

“Is the sergeant major in the AO?” she asked.

“Sergeant Major Tano is inspecting the deployable field kitchen module, Master Sergeant,” one replied, nodding toward a door.

“He’s not to be disturbed until he comes out on his own, Master Sergeant,” offered the other.

Repeth looked at them as her lips turned down. “Why is that?”

The two clammed up and their faces froze. “Those were his orders, Master Sergeant,” one finally replied.

“Well, gentlemen, you’re going to have to give me a better reason than that,” she said with false pleasantness and an undertone of steel.

“Umm…Master Sergeant,” the other finally volunteered, sweat standing out on his brow, “he’s…in a conference.”

“Yes, a private conference.”

Repeth looked from one to the other as they displayed blank faces more eloquent than any expressions. “All right, for now. Next question. Why is everyone in dress uniform?”

Their faces relaxed slightly. “This is UOD, Master Sergeant.”

“Dress is uniform of the day? What is today?” she asked.

“Tuesday, Master Sergeant.”

“I mean,” her voice hardening, “why are you wearing full dress uniform on an ordinary workday? Is it some EarthFleet military observance of which I am unaware?”

“No, Master Sergeant. The battalion commander has set a policy of maximum professionalism, so we wear our dress uniform all the time.” This time a slight edge of exasperation leaked through his demeanor.

“Understood.” That was a lie; she didn’t understand at all, but she accepted that the information was accurate. A billion kilometers from Earth, providing security for the most distant base in the solar system, and no one in utilities, no one in combat armor that she could see. No weapons larger than pistols.

In her experience parade-ground perfect troops were usually deficient in more vital areas.

“Where is the armor and weapons?” she asked.

“In the armory, Master Sergeant,” one replied.

“All of it?” Her voice revealed deep surprise.

“Yes, all of it except sidearms. For accountability purposes.”

“And if we have a sudden Meme attack, or some kind of sabotage or riot?” She knew the base held thousands of personnel, with more arriving all the time as they prepared for the arrival of the A-24s and pilots.

“We hold frequent drills to practice retrieving our combat equipment, Master Sergeant.”

Repeth grunted. She was starting to get a picture of this battalion, and it concerned her. “Next question. Why are there two of you escorting the sergeant major?”

“Colonel Simms has directed that key personnel on duty be accompanied by escort at all times.” The private said this with a straight face.

“All times?”

“All times when on duty outside of Battalion spaces,” he amended.

Repeth was really starting to get tired of asking, but she did anyway. “Why?”

“Personal security, Master Sergeant.”

She raised her chin and looked askance at the man. “You’re effing kidding me. Is the sergeant major augmented? Full Marine cyberware?”

“Of course, Master Sergeant.”

“Then what in the hell could threaten an armed Marine who could blow through a roomful of normals without breaking stride? Has there been some sort of sabotage? Is there an insurgency or terrorist movement of which I am unaware? Have the Meme landed?”

The private squirmed. “No, Master Sergeant. That’s just the policy.”

“That’s just the policy.” What the hell kind of lunatic is the battalion commander, anyway?

Suddenly the door the two had been guarding flew open and a short man with the look of a South Sea Islander stepped out. As expected on any sergeant major, his uniform was impeccable, but there was something slightly off about his gait as he took four steps out the door toward the group of three. Before the portal shut behind him she caught a glimpse of another man, a pudgy man in what looked like white food service garb.

“Good morning, Master Sergeant. I don’t recognize you.” The man’s eyes seemed hazy and dull, his demeanor defeated, odd for a Marine.

“I just arrived today, Sergeant Major. I’ve dropped off my paperwork at Personnel and I have my commander’s interview tomorrow, but I thought I’d look you up today.”

“Good, good.” He held out his hand. “Good to have you aboard. I can use you…” he muttered as his face grew thoughtful. “Repeth. Where have I heard that name?”

“My father was a retired Sergeant Major, but he died in the LA bomb.”

“No, that’s not it.”

She didn’t really want to talk about saving the President or any of her other exploits that might have gotten her name known. Having a hero’s reputation could easily backfire, and wasn’t something to be bandied about on her first day. “I was on Orion during the battle.”

Tano nodded. “Maybe that’s it.” He turned to walk down the corridor away from the battalion HQ. Because the base was laid out in an enormous wheel pattern, this curving walkway would presumably circle the entire structure. “I have a mind to make you Bravo Company’s first sergeant.” Once he started moving, his steps seemed to firm up and take on a grim determination. The two privates followed at a discreet distance.

“I’d be honored. Are you short of senior NCOs?”

“Short of good ones,” Tano muttered.

This shocked Repeth. In her experience, EarthFleet Marines were normally hand-selected at every stage, though admittedly she had been earthbound for several years and had mainly professional journals, media and hearsay to guide her. She’d only joined EarthFleet proper a few months ago, when she’d found out that they were sending Rick out here to Callisto as a CyberComm officer.

“Why short of good ones?” she asked.

“Let’s have some coffee,” Tano said instead of answering her question. Turning a corner, he led them to a kiosk tucked into a widening in the corridor, one of several selling fast food. He bought four cups, handing two to the attendant Marines but sending them to sit by themselves several tables away.

Once they settled at a spot against the wall where they were unlikely to be overheard, Tano answered, leaning in close, and Repeth smelled the sharp tang of alcohol on his breath. Now she understood the “private conference” with the cook. Probably unauthorized hooch, but that was a longstanding tradition of every navy she ever knew. That actually relieved her mind. Knocking back a few cheap drinks on the job seemed less repugnant than some kind of lover’s tryst. Especially as the two privates undoubtedly knew all about it.

Clearly Tano noticed her noticing, and raised his eyebrows. “You’d drink too if you had to put up with what I do.” He gulped his coffee as she sipped hers. “Can I be honest with you?”

“Sergeant Major, you were a US Marine before EarthFleet, right?”

“Twenty-seven years, Master Sergeant Repeth.” Bitter pride came through in that simple statement.

“I did almost twenty myself before I transferred. Can’t two old leathernecks be honest with each other?”

“All right.” Tano took a sip of coffee and made a face. “This commander is a problem. He’s not a real Marine.”

“Said ‘EFM’ on his door…”

“He’s a recent transfer. For some god-awful reason the subcommittee on the Combined Council that oversees EarthFleet Marines decided to let nationals come in from other services when they joined up. Simms was a US Army major and going nowhere. He’d been involuntarily transferred to the reserves, so he joined EarthFleet and somehow kept his rank.” Tano grimaced. “Then he got promoted, and took over here. I had him checked out, after I realized what kind of man he was.”

“And that is?”

“Selfish. Political. He has a lot of connections. Obviously he pulled strings, or swapped favors. As a boss…well, you see the uniform we’re in. Appearances are everything to him. He’s ambitious, and his primary goal is taking no risks, keeping his record blemish-free.”

Repeth bared her teeth. “Maybe we can get him promoted to somewhere he can’t do any harm. A staff position?”

Tano’s bleary eyes hardened. “I’m not going to fob my problem off on someone else, Master Sergeant. Nor am I going to request a transfer out, like some have.”

So that’s where some of his best people went – looking for a better command climate, or incoming replacements finding out they were coming here and wiggling out of the assignment. “Very well,” she said. “What’s your strategy?”

“Strategy?” He laughed without humor. “Dig in and hold until relieved.”

Repeth thought about saying more, like that doesn’t sound much different from what Simms is doing. As she’d just met the man, she decided to make her own assessment and see how bad it really was before sticking her oar in too far. “Just let me know what I can do, Sergeant Major,” she said.

“You can get Delta Company in shape. Bad officers seem to collect mediocre ones, and while Captain Rapplean isn’t the worst, he’s a long way from the best. You’ll see.”

“I guess I will. Any direction on how I should handle him?”

Tano’s expression turned as sour as his breath. “You’re a big girl. You figure it out.”

“Semper fi and oo-rah, Sergeant Major.” It was the only thing Repeth could think of to say. Got my work cut out for me, she thought as she stared at the man in front of her. Are you as mediocre as you say the officers are?

Chapter 33

Repeth’s first encounter with Marine Captain Rapplean seemed a positive surprise, after Tano’s warning. The man’s uniform was proper but not overly so, and when he invited her into his tiny office in the corner of the company barracks he unbuttoned his collar and waved her to a seat, casually returning her reporting salute.

“Take a load off, Master Sergeant,” he said. “I hear through the grapevine you’re going to be my new spear.” That terminology for “First Sergeant” was common in Europe and harkened back to the Roman legions, where “First Spear” was the senior enlisted man in a century of one hundred. The man’s smooth good looks, blonde hair and slight accent combined with his word use and name placed him as Scandinavian.

“That’s what I hear from the sergeant major, though I haven’t received any official word, sir.”

“We’ll operate as if it will happen. The colonel leaves all enlisted assignments to the sergeant major.”

“Very good, sir,” Repeth agreed, and Rapplean grunted. She raised an eyebrow in question.

“The colonel feels it’s beneath him to get into NCO business.”

An odd viewpoint, but one she could live with. Then she realized what her company commander had just done. Within five minutes of meeting a senior NCO who might or might not be working for him, he’d denigrated his commanding officer to her. Rapplean could have phrased that explanation in any number of less damning ways, but he’d immediately revealed his lack of respect for Simms. So had the staff sergeant at the desk, come to think of it, and so had the privates escorting Tano. So had the smaj, but honesty among senior NCOs in private was expected and customary.

Serious cracks always start small.

“How is the company, sir?”

Rapplean shrugged. “Fair. Staff Sergeant Botkina has been acting spear, so you’ll have to get with her. She can probably tell you more.” He reached into a drawer to draw out a clear, unmarked plastic bottle. “Drink?”

Repeth hesitated just a moment before agreeing. No need to antagonize the man now. “Skoal,” she essayed as she raised the plastic cup he’d poured.

Rapplean blinked, then smiled. “Skoal.” He downed his dram and poured another while she sipped hers. Rough on her throat, it reminded her of the homemade white lightning she had first tasted so long ago on the McConleys’ farm.

“So…” he continued, “once you get settled in, perhaps I can tour you around the base a bit? Show you where the fun’s at?”

Alarm bells began to ring in her head as she processed what he just offered. Officers, especially commanders, did not give personal walk-arounds to enlisted people they supervised. Another NCO could do that. If the boss had intended to make a quick introduction to the company spaces, he’d have simply said “come with me” and given her the nickel tour. She kept her expression bland as she replied, “Perhaps you can show my husband and me the base some off-duty day. Once we’ve settled in.”

Rapplean’s face blanked, then brightened false. “Of course. We’ll have to get together some time. Well, let’s go find Botkina, shall we?” He slammed the rest of his drink and put away the bottle, then led her out of his office and carefully closed and locked his door.

Another anomaly. Lock a desk, sure, or his quarters, but his office? What happens if his first sergeant needs to get in there for paperwork? Where is the trust in this unit?

The nickel tour materialized after all, brief and desultory – barracks, common room, dayroom. Apparently Rapplean had lost interest. She was starting to see what made him mediocre. If she was correct about her feeling, the man’s priorities ran more toward alleviating his natural boredom than attending to his command.

Their last stop was the company orderly room, military terminology for the administrative offices. Suddenly something that had been unconsciously bothering her made itself known. Usually – okay, always – a company commander’s office was at or very near the orderly room. A unit with a paper strength of two hundred or less did not need much administrative support, especially with battalion headquarters nearby, so the standard configuration had the CO, first sergeant, and a couple of admin troops in a cluster.

This orderly room had two small offices and a space in front with four facing desks for those who didn’t rate. Two female Marines and a female sailor sat there, chatting, and glanced at her as she came in. One office had Staff Sergeant Botkina’s name and rank, and the other had a corporal’s rank alongside the name “Swieu.”

Corporal? What the hell was a corporal doing with an office?

“Morning, ladies,” Rapplean singsonged at the three, and they put on artificial smiles to answer, “Good morning, sir.” The captain breezed past them, leading Repeth toward Botkina’s office.

Inside, a large woman with a broad peasant face and hard eyes stared at the two newcomers from a seated position, then stood up, as if doing so was an afterthought.

If I didn’t know better, she stood because I am here, not because her commander walked in.

“Staff Sergeant Botkina, this is Master Sergeant Repeth. She’ll be taking over as Spear. I’ll leave her with you.” With that, the CO bolted, as if he couldn’t wait to get away. “Bye, ladies,” Repeth heard from outside.

The two women eyed each other across the room office. Repeth thought of asking about Rapplean, to establish some camaraderie, but realized immediately that to do so would risk exactly what had put her off in the first place – criticizing the leadership right off the bat.

Instead, she set her wheel cap on a chair and stepped forward with her hand out. “Good to meet you, Staff Sergeant. Sorry this is so abrupt.”

“No problem.” The other woman’s thick Slavic accent seemed to cover a certain unhappiness as she clasped palms with Repeth.

At least there was no excessive hand-crushing, despite her size. Repeth prepared herself to like Botkina if she could. Certainly no one else she’d met here had been likable, either professionally or personally.

“I see you’ve met our CO,” Botkina said, and then stopped.

Repeth just waited for her to go on, but she did not. “Yes,” she replied, but still the other did not continue. Finally she prompted, “What’s he like?”

Botkina flicked her eyes at the door, and Repeth immediately reached behind herself to close it tight. The staff sergeant then waved her to a seat. “Master Sergeant, may I be frank?”

“Of course. We’re the most senior NCOs in this company, I assume. I don’t gossip.” This last was not only a promise but an implied warning to stick to business.

“You see the orderly room is all female,” Botkina stated.

“I wondered about that.” Repeth now inferred that Corporal Swieu was also a woman. “Are female Marines sidelined in this company?” Marines continued the tradition of everyone at the line level being a combat troop. Any pure admin or support types would be collected at the battalion level or higher, and would not be fully cyber-augmented.

“No. Not the way you mean, I think. They are protected.”

Understanding dawned. “From the CO. He’s a womanizer?”

“That is correct. Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

Botkina looked uncomfortable. “Corporal Swieu does not need protection. Rather, I am keeping an eye on her.”

“An eye. Because…”

“Now we are drifting into gossip,” the other woman said.

“If it affects the combat readiness of this unit, I need to know. Just the basics.”

Botkina pressed her lips together, then nodded once, sharply. “It is common knowledge anyway. The corporal is a whore.” A challenging stare dared her to object to her choice of words.

Repeth leaned back in her chair to give herself a moment to think. “You’re not just expressing disdain. You mean that she is actually prostituting herself?”

“Exactly, though the currency is gifts, privileges, favors – an undeserved office, the ability to avoid work without consequence, wearing unauthorized fingernail polish and earrings in uniform – all those little deviations that add up to a Marine gone bad.”

“And you can’t rein her in because the CO protects her?”

Botkina nodded again. “The CO…and others.”

“Dear God. What kind of rotten barrel have I fallen into? No, please, Staff Sergeant. I see you are not part of the problem.” I hope. Repeth leaned forward. “Will you be part of the solution?”

Slowly, a grim smile stole across Botkina’s face. “It would be pleasure, Master Sergeant.” Apparently a surge of emotion caused her to drop her articles in the Slavic manner.

“Call me Jill if you like.” A bit of bait. Now let’s see if this rot has infected her as well.

“Perhaps in club, but not on duty. Not even behind closed doors.”

Repeth noticed the other woman did not volunteer her own first name, though undoubtedly she could find it out just by reading one of the awards on the wall, if necessary. “Very well. Oh, and why do we have a sailor assigned to us?”

Botkina blinked at the change of subject. “Like the others. Protection. She was in battalion S-1 before. Pretty, young, vulnerable to rank and power.”

Repeth let some of her growing anger leak through. “What the hell is going on around here, Staff Sergeant? I have never encountered a unit so rife with unprofessional behavior, and if this is what I see within hours of arrival, I can only think it’s actually worse. If you want me to help, you’ll have to tell me everything. That’s the only way I can try to figure out how to square this shit away. Are we clear?”

Botkina took a deep breath, then nodded once again. “Clear, First Sergeant.” The honorific was premature, but indicative of her assent. “I explain.”

Chapter 34

Rick’s look was quizzical as a very wearing Jill came in the door of their quarters. He’d spent the day doing some of the paperwork of any military transfer, trying to get as much out of the way as possible. His assignment was temporary, just a year to help out the newish base with his CyberComm skills.

The private reports he would make to headquarters would also give the rear echelons, billions of miles away, an outsider’s view of the situation. Red Team could get by without him for a while, at least in the flesh.

“You look stunned,” he said as she threw herself into a chair. Like most of the inhabited areas of the base, their quarters were gravplated. Human bodies stayed healthier with something near normal gravity.

“I am stunned, and angry. This battalion is in bad shape.”

“Bad troops?” he asked.

Jill stared at him in disbelief as she loosened her collar and began unbuttoning her thick fitted dress jacket. “Tell me something, oh husband of mine who holds field grade rank but only because of his technical expertise,” and she took a breath. “What’s the most important factor in any organization?”

“Umm…is this a trick question?”

“Nope. Just answer.”

“Okay…morale?”

“Morale is a symptom and an indicator, not a cause.”

“Oh, like…the answer is always ‘Jesus’?”

Jill burst out laughing at the old joke they’d discovered they both knew: in church, the answer is always ‘Jesus.’

“You’re not so far off. In a military unit, the answer is always ‘leadership,’ even if it seems like something else. And leadership starts with the commanding officer. When there is a problem, start looking in concentric circles starting from the commander’s desk.”

“Bad officer then?”

“Yes, but I don’t know how bad. It’s only been twelve hours but I already see conflicting agendas and even the good people look bad to me. Sometimes if the boss just takes his hand off the tiller, the unit can go bad because, say, the executive officer is the problem. Or the CO might be negligent, or clueless, or actively corrupt, or perhaps he’s being blackmailed, or, or, or.”

“I see.” Rick stood up to open the small fridge and take out a precious bottle. “Orange juice?”

“The real thing?” Her face lit up.

“Yes. They have extensive hydroponics here. I did a little shopping. Fresh vegetables and fruits, herbs, and even some fresh chicken, though that’s hellaciously expensive. But what else do we have to do with our salaries, and hey…”

“We might not live to enjoy it? Please, pour me a glass. I’ve already had my alcohol for the day, trying to get people to open up.” Jill took the plastic cup and sipped. “Wow. That’s good.”

“Yes. So…what can I do to help?”

“I’m not sure yet.” Her eyes turned pensive. “I need a few days to observe, just keep my eyes and ears open. Later, I may ask you to find some things out for me.” She suddenly looked up at the ceiling, waving a pointing finger around questioningly.

“I swept the room. No bugs. I plugged into the base net too. It’s pathetically open, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff I already found out. Illegal casinos and cathouses, unregulated alcohol and drugs, smuggling…this place is a regular Barbary Coast, minus the slavers. ‘A wretched hive of scum and villainy.’ I even found what I believe are back doors into the military nets, though I’d rather approach them from the other side in case of ICE.”

Jill blinked. “Okay. Sounds like you have your work cut out for you as well. I wonder if the Fleet bureaucracy here is as bad as Battalion?”

“It’s run by Aerospace, more or less, though overall command of trans-Jovian space is held by a navy rear admiral by the name of Huen.” Rick waited for Jill to recognize the name, and when she did not, he went on. “Huen was Absen’s executive officer on Orion. Rank of Commander back then. Chinese, though from Hong Kong, so not a PRC insider, and by all accounts a fine, by-the-book officer, if a bit hands-off. He stays aboard Artemis and out of the base, mostly, I hear.”

Jill sighed. “So…a leadership void at the top, or perhaps just below, perhaps the Aerospace base commander. And with the Marines. Did you know that the Marines are completely handcuffed from performing security duties except in very specific instances – such as their own barracks? They aren’t even assigned to police Fleet facilities, though they have plenty of them as ‘guards.’ The problem is, they can’t do anything unless someone threatens Fleet facilities or property.”

“Nothing?”

“Illegal activities go on right in front of them and they have no right to detain or arrest unless it affects Fleet, so they get used to not caring, and that’s only one step from participating. They are supposed to report anything to the base Security Police, of which there are exactly twenty-six personnel to deal with more than twenty thousand pilots and trainees and the staff. They then pass reports on to the civilian corporate security liaison officer, who is supposed to then pass it on to the correct corporation, who then might direct their security forces to do something about it. Maybe.” Jill finished her juice, then slammed the cup down on the table, causing a few droplets to splash.

“Holy mother of pearl. So what you’re saying is, no one is watching the henhouse. Enormous amounts of materiel and goods coming through here, fifty thousand plus people, billions of dollars, and no law enforcement or policing to speak of. It’s the Wild West.”

“Reckon so, pardner,” Jill replied.

Rick smiled. “So, Sheriff, what are you gonna do about it?”

Jill’s mouth turned up at the corners but no one would have called it a smile. “I prefer ‘Marshal,’ thank you. I’m a cop at heart, Rick. What do you think I’m gonna do?”

“Clean up this here town, I reckon.”

“Ayup.” Jill took off her jacket and went into the bedroom to hang it in the small closet. “Just give me some time to gather intel and figure out a plan.”

Chapter 35

The next morning Master Sergeant Repeth entered battalion headquarters in perfect dress uniform, wheel cap held precisely flat and horizontal in her left hand, her fingers curled upward to grip its brim. Every hair was in place, every medal and accoutrement measured thrice and aligned, the U.S. Navy Cross at her throat.

Fifteen seconds before 0900, Staff Sergeant Duyers nodded to her and then preceded her to Lieutenant Colonel Simms’ closed office door and knocked. At an indistinct command from inside he opened the door and said, “Master Sergeant Repeth for your oh-nine-hundred, sir.”

“Send her in.”

When Repeth entered, she saw Simms sitting at his desk with his palms flat on it, as if to hold it in place, and staring – not merely looking, staring, perhaps glaring – straight at her.

Oh my.

She marched to a position in front of his desk and snapped to rigid attention. “Master Sergeant Repeth reports as ordered, sir.” Her hand came up in a salute sharp enough to cut paper, and she waited, staring at the wall over his head. Of course, with her cybernetic eye she could actually see everything out to the limits of its periphery…and it was recording everything, along with the audio from her ear implant.

Just in case.

Simms lifted his right hand and returned the salute, then put it back down again flat on the desk. Its surface was free of papers, except for one folder squared in front of him, and every other item on it seemed to be set precisely in place.

Repeth dropped her salute and waited.

“What is that abomination around your neck?” Simms asked the question in a mild voice, as if inquiring about the weather.

Repeth’s mind whirred for a moment, reorienting into this unexpected track. “The United States Navy Cross, sir. EarthFleet uniform regulations allow the wear of certain national awards in full dress uniform.”

“Did I ask you why you were wearing it, Master Sergeant?”

“No, sir.” Now I see how this will be. Like a recruit in front of a drill instructor, nothing I do or say will be right. Okay, I can handle this kind of game.

“Staff Sergeant Duyers!” Simms raised his voice to carry to the outer office. “Please bring me a copy of EarthFleet uniform regulations open to the section for wear of medals on service dress.”

Duyers came in almost immediately with a three-ring binder and set it open in front of the CO, between his flattened hands, and then left. “Shut the door, Staff Sergeant.” Simms leaned over without moving those hands and looked down his nose at the paper for more than a minute.

He has hardcopy files printed out, in this age of digital. Well, I suppose that’s reasonable, if he uses them a lot and likes them. With cheap fusion energy it’s not prohibitively expensive to ship paper here. Lots of people still prefer physical books…though I am starting to think it’s more about having his people bustle about like lackeys than efficiency. I’d hate to be in Duyers’ place.

Simms head came back up and he stared at Repeth. “I really detest a barracks lawyer, Master Sergeant. Though you may be correct in technicality, displaying such awards shows me you are trying to make yourself look better than others. Do you think you are better than others, Master Sergeant?”

Better than some, and worse than others, of course, she wanted to reply, but reason had already fled this conversation, replaced by classic Lords-of-Discipline-style traps. There was, by long tradition, no way to win an exchange like this, except to maintain her military bearing, give him nothing to really gig her, and endure the attempt to beat her down.

“No, sir,” she replied.

“But you wore that decoration,” he pressed.

Repeth saw a small opening, but then realized he was trying to sucker her into explaining further, which would only provide him with more ammunition. Therefore, she simply responded, “Yes, sir.”

Simms stared at her, evidently nonplussed that he had not gotten what he wanted. He tried a different tack. “How do you intend to rectify this error?”

“I will wear only the medals and accoutrements mandated by EarthFleet regulations, or those which the chain of command instructs me to wear.” There, try to find a flaw with that.

Simms seemed to chew on that for a moment, and then suddenly stood up, thrusting his head directly into her line of sight. He closed the binder with an audible snap and called for Duyers to recover it. Once that was done he said, “Master Sergeant, I expect you to be a model Marine, an example to the enlisted in Bravo Company.”

This coming from a man who apparently has only been a Marine of any sort for a year or two…

“Those enlisted people are a collection of goats, wayward sheep and lambs,” he continued as his voice dropped in volume but grew angry and intense. “Not a one of them has proper direction it seems: not from their company commander, whose leadership is questionable even when he is not pursuing improper relationships with his subordinates; not from the battalion sergeant major, who is a drunk and a deviant; and not from the other NCOs in the company, who have apparently abandoned their roles as the backbone of their unit. In short, Master Sergeant, I expect you to fail just like the rest, and nothing I have seen today from you has dissuaded me from this expectation.”

Repeth remained rigidly braced, shocked but not really surprised at this diatribe, this spewing of inappropriate and undeserved bile upon her. But I’ve had worse. Just not lately; not since early training, and never in EarthFleet.

Simms’ voice dropped even more, to a faint whisper as he thrust his chin forward almost to her face. “Now get out of my office, you ugly, arrogant and incompetent piece of shit, before I have you broken in the ranks.” He stayed in that pose for a long moment, then drew back to stand straight before her.

Mind stunned and blank despite believing herself prepared, Repeth responded properly. “Aye aye, sir. Will that be all, sir?”

“Get out.”

She lifted her hand in salute and held it.

“Just get out.”

Repeth held the position a moment longer, just in case he was trying to trap her again. When he opened his mouth once more, she dropped the salute and about-faced, marched to the door and opened it. At any moment she expected to be called back for some petty infraction, but only silence followed her as she exited.

Duyers threw her a look of sympathy as he turned toward his boss’ office, and then she passed out of the battalion HQ spaces, her mind in turmoil. Her thoughts spun and twisted, trying to rationalize this kind of treatment by an officer with such a bizarre attitude toward command.

Encountering petty tyranny bordering on madness would not have surprised her in a training unit, which often bred or attracted strange unhealthy little minds. Or perhaps at some isolated posting, without oversight from higher up.

But perhaps this base, this command may fit that definition. It is certainly remote, and Simms is the most senior Marine, answerable only to Admiral Huen aboard Artemis, who himself has fifty thousand or more people to supervise. But still…it’s too extreme. It really does seem to be a kind of madness, a psychological pathology, brought on by…what?

As she walked around the battalion area, just strolling and moving to help her think, one phrase kept coming back to mind. Broken in the ranks? Where had she heard that saying? Some old movie, or perhaps a book?

In her youth she’d read sea stories, of Hornblower and Ramage and Jack Aubrey, and watched Sharpe’s Rifles, the entire series of movies. They had inspired her with tales of bravery and discipline, and especially of those wearing the red coats of Brittania’s Marines and soldiers. It sounded like a saying common in that time, roared by some aristocratic tyrant ship captain, or an army officer who had bought his commission instead of earning it.

The man is simply bughouse mad. He’s living out some historical fantasy. That’s the only explanation. He’s gone ’round the bend, as the Commonwealthers would say. So what the hell can I do about it?

She spent a day or two just thinking without confiding in Rick, preferring to mull it over without input and observe, though eventually she did.

***

Master Sergeant Repeth did a double take as she passed the young lieutenant in the corridor. If he hadn’t looked so melancholy she might have missed him entirely, but she’d seen that expression before, she was sure…on someone else’s face.

Actually, she was happy to have a distraction.

“Pardon me, Lieutenant,” she began, and when the man turned, she used her cybernetic eye to zoom in on his name tag. FLT Markis? That’s why he looks familiar. “Vincent Markis? Sir?”

“Yes, uh, Sergeant…Aunt Jill!” Suddenly his face lit up and he reached out to hug her, changing his motion into a grab for her hand with both of his, as they were in uniform. Of course she was no blood relation, but she’d been “Aunt Jill” ever since she married “Uncle Rick” Johnstone, who was twelve years older than Vincent. The Johnstones and Markises had lived across the street from each other in Carletonville, South Africa.

Repeth squeezed his hand in return with no more than ordinary pressure. “I see wings. You’re an Aardvark pilot?”

“Yup. And you’re assigned here?”

“Yes. Rick and I just got here a few days ago.”

Vincent’s smile widened even more. “That’s fantastic. With the…I mean, it’s all training, and these guys are buddies, but…”

Jill nodded. “It’s not the same as having real friends and family nearby, especially a billion kilometers from anywhere.”

“No, it’s not.” The lieutenant’s face fell slowly back into the miserable expression it had started with. “Not at all.”

“Having a tough time?”

Vincent looked around at the people coming and going, passing them as they stood talking at the side of the corridor, and Jill could see pain in his eyes. “Yeah, kinda. Maybe we could go somewhere?”

“I’m off duty in about an hour. Why don’t you come by our quarters after the duty day? It’s over in the married officers’ block.” She told him the address. “Twenty hundred hours?”

“Sounds great, really. Great.” To her, he resembled a starving dog that just had a bowl of food set in front of him but couldn’t quite believe it.

“See you then.” Jill nodded, as this accessway was a no-salute zone. With twenty-some thousand lieutenants and warrant officer pilots around, there were actually only a few places designated for standard customs and courtesies. As far as she was concerned, this was part and parcel of the whole rotten base.

Lose customs and courtesies and respect for each other isn’t far behind. Familiarity breeds contempt.

She spent the last hour inspecting the barracks, having instituted random checks of the lower enlisted personnel, something well within her scope of duties, no matter what the officers thought. In fact, Rapplean and the smaj both approved, the captain because he wanted his company to look good as long as someone else did the hard work, and the sergeant major because…well, all sergeants major loved to see a perfect display of kit in the barracks.

More than halfway through the line of bunks and lockers, she came to her Private Pyle, a kid named Wingen. In her experience, every unit of platoon size or larger had one, a screw-up that just didn’t get it. Five years ago EarthFleet Marines had been elite, the best of the best, but like any bureaucracy, the selection process had let more and more marginal people slip through with the pressure to recruit. All it took was a personnel NCO with a soft heart for a kid who “needed” a second chance, or a training company commander who didn’t want his attrition rate to drop below a certain number, and some goober would get passed to a line unit in hopes that the chain of command there could hammer him or her into a decent troop.

Sometimes it worked. Some youngsters just needed some extra time. Some became mascots, serving unusual functions or finding their niches. But a Pyle was always a Pyle.

This time his kit looked pretty good, almost good enough. Given that Repeth had held more than a dozen personal inspections in the last week, it had better be. Something odd about it this time, though. She slid a drawer all the way out and flipped it upside down, as she’d felt something catch and crackle on it. Taped to the bottom was a packet of clear flat buttons. Some kind of pills.

“That ain’t mine, Top,” Wingen babbled.

“You’re supposed to be at attention, Private,” Repeth barked. “How can you possibly see what just happened if your eyes are caged and locked front?”

“No excuse, First Sergeant!” The kid quivered like a half-trained dog told to sit and stay.

Repeth slipped the packet into her pocket. Not about to jump to conclusions. It could be anything. It could be his, but I doubt it. It could be a setup, or just a place to stash something where Wingen takes the fall. It could be some kind of test for me.

She’d begun leaving her cybernetic eye on permanent record, downloading the video every evening so that Rick could take a look, incidentally covering her ass against any sort of accusations. As her husband was not finding his duties here too strenuous, he was spending a lot of time cataloging people and suspicious actions. Maybe a look at this sequence would reveal someone reacting when she found the stuff.

“All right. This barracks is finally looking shipshape. I might start believing I had Marines in this company instead of a bunch of Ground Forces wannabees. You’re gonna get a chance to prove it to me, because we’re going for a little run.” Repeth held up a “brick,” a walkie-sized box that held the command override codes for her people’s cyberware. “Muscles only.”

Last week she would have heard muttering. This time, the disciplined silence cheered her up. “You got two minutes to get in PT gear and fall out in company formation, starting now. Move!”

The barracks erupted into the controlled chaos of troops stripping out of their utilities and donning regulation physical training gear. She walked into the female head and quickly changed into her own, and then followed the rush of bodies as they flowed out the doors and onto the quad that gave them a place to assemble.

Once they’d all fallen in, she punched in a number sequence on the brick, and watched for the sway as implanted cybernetics went inert. With the push of a button they’d gone from supermen to ordinary, if fit, Marines carrying an extra twenty kilos of laminated bones and servos.

“Company! Right…’ace! For’ard…’arch!” Her commands came out more like the barks of seals than words. “Doub’ time…’arch!”

Twenty kilometers later she found out what she needed to know. Half of the company enlisted was seriously out of shape and had fallen out, which was absolutely pathetic. Parts of the run hadn’t even been in full gravity. She kept everyone standing at attention in formation as the stragglers came in one by one.

Over an hour later, the tram that Staff Sergeant Botkina had driven behind rolled up with those who couldn’t even make it under their own power.

“Get off that tram, you pukes!” Repeth turned to the rest standing in formation. “At ease! I want you to look at these dirty stinking scumbags who can’t even walk twenty klicks.” Her voice dripped sarcasm. “They had to ride the tram. They made you stand here in formation for over an hour. They are now on my shit list. Staff Sergeant Botkina will write down the names on my shit list, and those on that list will remain on restriction and will pull extra duty until this happy horseshit ends. Do I make myself clear?”

“YES, FIRST SERGEANT!”

“You are also going to leave your cyberware off until you earn the privilege of using it again. Some of you have made it a crutch. You never know when it might fail, and it behooves every Marine to be in the best shape he or she can be, regardless of augmentation. So you will start hitting the gym, you will start running, and if that cuts into your drinking and whoring and gambling time, tough titties. Am I clear?”

“YES, FIRST SERGEANT!”

“One more thing. If you override and turn on your cyberware yourself, you had better have a damn good reason, because if you do not, that will constitute failure to follow a direct order. For any barracks lawyers among you,” she tapped her temple, “everything is being recorded, and the system backs everything up. So ladies, I suggest you all get some sleep tonight, because now that we have your barracks and your gear in shape, I will be making it my personal mission in life to kick your asses until your bodies are too.”

Repeth’s face now lit up in a nasty smile. “Oh, and one more thing. Staff Sergeant Botkina will begin calling names. When she calls yours, you will fall out and go through the door behind me, where some medical technicians will be taking blood and hair samples. If I get any reports of illegal substance use, you will also be on my shit list, but! One time and one time only, I am going to forgive you, and not recommend disciplinary action. The second time…” She reached up and made a cutting motion across her throat.

Staff Sergeant Botkina began to call names.

During the drug testing, Repeth and her four platoon sergeants, whom she had already made sure were clear of such addictions, went through the barracks as thoroughly as they knew how to do, upending drawers and wall lockers, flipping bunks, unrolling clothing, unscrewing vent covers, looking for any sort of contraband.

The dice and gambling chips and porn she didn’t even bother to confiscate, just scattered everything and ground it underfoot, but she and the others half filled a duffel bag with illicit booze and drugs. They took careful notes of where they found each item.

They also went through the junior NCOs rooms, almost fifty squad and team leaders, as well as the orderly room staff. Repeth was disappointed to find serious infractions in almost half of them.

At least I don’t have to worry about nanocrack…I hope. What with their official nanites set to kill off any such invaders and their cyberware detecting and reporting, that shouldn’t be possible. Too bad all that doesn’t make them immune to ordinary illegal drugs.

***

Over the next few days First Sergeant Repeth personally interviewed everyone caught with contraband, or showing positive on a drug test, with Botkina in the background as a witness. What none of them knew was that Rick had tweaked her visual and auditory pickups, optimizing them for physiological changes, and everything fed back to recorders in their quarters.

In simple terms, he had turned her into one big bug.

In the evenings they went over the recordings of the interviews and divided the offenders into two categories: those that could be salvaged, and those that had to go. The former she whipped into shape in her own way. The latter began to receive unexpected transfers to certain remote stations, mostly back on Earth, where they were unlikely to do much damage, with minor disciplinary offenses appended to their records that would hopefully tip off the receiving commanders that they were trouble.

Unlike Sergeant Major Tano, Repeth had no problem transferring her problems to someone else if she knew her chain of command would not back her up. Had they been willing, she would have had them brought up on charges, but in the current environment, that was too much of a crap shoot. Doing so might have gotten her sent away, leaving the place in a worse mess.

No, it’s a dirty way to do business, but not half so dirty as covert ops, and in this case, the end has to justify the means. Especially when the end is survival of this base.

Chapter 36

The third time Vango found Stevie passed out before a scheduled exercise, half-filled needle stuck in her arm, he thought maybe he couldn’t keep his mouth shut anymore.

Sure, the fact that she hadn’t shoved the whole load into her veins meant she had some kind of self-control, or at least some smarts within her stupid, like a diabetic who only eats half the cake instead of all of it. He was also starting to get the idea that great sex and a great relationship weren’t exactly the same things.

But who could he talk to? If he reported her, she would never fly again, and he didn’t want that. Was it because he selfishly wanted to keep getting laid? He also wondered how she was beating the random drug testing.

Wrestling with it affected his performance for the next week. He kept trying to talk to her, but every time he did she just dragged him into bed and told him how much she needed him, and that she’d lay off the stuff, that this time had been the last.

He pleaded every day for her to go to the doctors or the chaplain and self-report. Doing so would avoid disciplinary action, though who knew whether she would keep her wings. Maybe they would put her in a treatment program and give her another chance.

Every day she refused.

Five weeks into the training, they were ready to move on from simulators. Facing climbing into an actual ship and flying for real, no free respawns after crashing, was what pushed him into action.

One email sent from an anonymous rented terminal in the Quarter was enough to prompt a half-assed raid on the flower shop, enough to show compliance with some kind of rules, but he heard later they had found only some traces of the drugs. The proprietors had cleared out hours before.

They must have been tipped off.

Vango was starting to get an idea of how pervasive the problem was.

The next time he tried to go to eat at a restaurant in the Quarter, a couple of the security guards there told him he wasn’t welcome there anymore. After getting the same treatment from the next three places, he realized that he’d been blackballed from sin city.

Somehow, someone had found out it was him from the “anonymous” e-mail, and that was that. They wouldn’t do anything serious to him; after all, the last thing whoever ran the place wanted was for the EarthFleet pilot son of Chairman Daniel Markis to come to some harm that could be traced to them. The hell that would rain down on the Quarter would be Biblical in proportion.

Losing the privilege to eat and drink well didn’t bother him much, but it didn’t take long for Stevie to find another source from somewhere, and he realized that trying to cut off her supply was no answer. She was sick, and she needed help. If that cost him getting laid, or even her friendship…Vango decided he had to do it.

“Come on, Stevie,” he begged her as they lay sweating in her bed after another athletic bout. “You gotta talk to someone before they catch you.” Right after she was done seemed to be the moment she was most amenable to hearing things she didn’t want to, but instead of responding she just snuggled, turning her face into his chest and away from his eyes.

A few more attempts at conversation earned him an annoyed look as she slid out of his embrace and showered. “I’m gonna go to the casino. Wanna come?” she asked.

“No. It’s almost midnight. I gotta get some sleep. Early go tomorrow,” he replied as he watched her dress in her civvies. He’d learned that what she was really asking was for him to be her chaperone and keep her out of serious trouble, while she pushed against his boundaries, acting wild and blaming him for anything that didn’t work out.

Once she left, instead of sleeping he lay staring at the ceiling for over an hour. Eventually he made a choice he should have long ago, because if he let her, she was going to drag him down with her.

Slowly he scoured her quarters for everything of his – underwear, toothbrush, a hardcopy letter from his mother – that had gotten left there over the past weeks. Throwing it all in his gym bag, after one final look around, he shut her door for good. Although he didn’t want to report her, the decision to break up with her turned out to be easier than expected.

She came after him the next day, though she had the courtesy to wait until after training had ended. The beer she poured over his head and the attempt to slap him made her meaning plain. That look of angry betrayal on her face as she stormed out of the O club seared itself into his mind. He told himself she would get over it, and that he had to do it.

When she didn’t show the next day he figured she was sulking, drunk or high and sleeping it off.

He almost called it right. Stevie never woke up from her last and final high. He found out when he went by and a couple of cleaners were prepping the room for another occupant. Staggering away, he wandered the corridors with no idea of where he was going, until he found himself sitting on a bench in the central park.

It seemed like serendipity, if not outright divine intervention, that Jill and Rick had shown up, and he was going to see them tonight. He never felt so in need of friendly faces as he did now. The only person that even came close was the chaplain, Captain Forman, but she was back on Orion. Besides, when he’d expressed interest in her, she’d made it clear she was way out of his league, or something like that.

Everything confused him right now, when he just wanted to fly and fight the aliens.

Women.

That brought his mind back to Stevie, and his heart broke again. It was all he could do to force himself off of his bunk, dress in civvies, and go find his friends’ quarters.

Three beers later he found himself sobbing on their couch, with Jill holding him like his mom used to, Rick with a hand on his shoulder. “I should have done something more,” he said as he set the empty on the coffee table. “I could have saved her.”

“I doubt it,” Rick replied. “She was going to wreck herself eventually.”

No one spoke for a moment, until Vincent pushed himself away with mild embarrassment. “Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” replied Rick. “Did she have family?”

“All dead in the nukes. She spent a year living like an animal on the edge of the DC dead zone before the government came back and rescued her. She had nobody. At the end, she didn’t even have me. I failed her.”

“Look,” Jill said in that matter-of-fact tone that seemed to promise everything would be all right. “This is a tragedy and it hurts, I know, but peacetime rules don’t apply. In a better, saner world, she would have gotten help. Maybe you should have reported her, but you made the call and now you have to live with it.”

“Wow, you’re some comfort,” Vango retorted.

“When I raised my right hand and took the oath of enlistment,” she said, “I really didn’t understand what that would mean. Now, almost three decades later, I’ve seen a lot of good people die. You wanted a warrior’s life. You have to take the bad with the good. If you think you made a mistake, then learn from it and do better next time.”

“Maybe coming over here wasn’t such a good idea.” He made as if to stand up.

“Your choice, Vincent Markis,” Jill said flatly. “I never treated you with kid gloves before. Why should I start now? You had a good cry, and you’ll have a few more bouts of grief, over drinks or locked in your room, but eventually you’ll get over it. Now if you want to keep drinking, we’ll be happy to get smashed with you and tell you it’s gonna be all right – because it will, after a while. I’m just not telling you it ain’t gonna hurt in the meantime.”

“Things like this aren’t supposed to happen,” he protested. “Dad and Mom said the Eden Plague would fix humanity, but that was bullshit.”

“Your parents aren’t infallible, you know,” Rick said gently. “And it did fix me. When your father released it, I had been in a wheelchair from the time the muscular dystrophy took hold. I would have lived ten, fifteen years more, tops, getting worse and worse. And it did get rid of a lot of problems – but not all of them. People still have free will.”

Jill said, “Some people can get offered heaven but they refuse and make their own hell. You can’t be responsible for their choices.”

Vincent shrugged, suddenly exhausted. “I think I’m gonna hit the sack now.”

“You want the couch?”

He shook his head. “No, that’s okay. I’ll be better back in my own bunk.”

Rick stood up with him, throwing a brotherly arm across his shoulder. “I’ll walk back with you.”

Chapter 37

For three weeks First Sergeant Repeth drilled her company, always staying strictly within the letter of her authority to do so, always keeping a copy of the regulations handy on a pocket tablet. By and large Captain Rapplean stayed out of her way, as she thought he might; his MO seemed to be to avoid hard work and hard choices except when some superior officer was around, at which time he temporarily became a model officer.

In that time she felt cautiously confident that she had cleaned out the worst rot from Bravo Company, and that she could rely on them.

At least, the enlisted. Captain Rapplean and the company’s lieutenants were still suspect, but with decent NCOs in place, that could be handled.

As she came back from Monday morning PT, Sergeant Major Tano intercepted her and pulled her aside in a far corner of the company formation pad, his two escorts thankfully elsewhere inside Battalion spaces.

“You’re getting Bravo Company noticed,” Tano said.

“Just trying to whip them into shape, Smaj,” she replied.

“Not saying it’s a bad thing, but bad things are coming. Simms is going to do a surprise inspection tomorrow, at first formation after breakfast.”

“No problem,” Repeth said easily. “We’ll be ready. Hell, we’re ready right now, except for a few little things.”

Tano shook his head and scowled darkly. “No, you don’t understand. You’re ready for Simms to inspect the company, but afterward he likes to hold a kumbayah session with the lower enlisted.”

“What? What does that mean?”

“He’ll get the lower enlisted into the auditorium, kick out the NCOs and officers, post guards and then talk to them by himself.”

Repeth looked away for a moment, staring at nothing. “That’s…weird.”

“It’s worse than that. He tries to get them talking, tries to convince them he’s their best friend and pal, and they should open up to him about any perceived problems in the company. If that doesn’t work, he’ll get them talking about how far they are from home, how they miss their sweethearts, how scared they all are of the aliens…anything to get them emotional and blabbering.”

Repeth turned to Tano in shock. “Oh. My. God.”

“Yeah, in spades.”

“A bunch of privates are too stupid to keep their mouths shut. They’ll start saying any damn thing that comes into their heads to try to please the big boss.”

Tano smiled with absolutely no humor involved. “That’s only the start. Not only does he try to get them to talk bad about the chain of command, he records everything himself. And he forbids them to do the same. Sweeps the room for bugs, makes sure the troops’ cyberware is all shut down.”

“Because an unedited rendering would show just how insane the whole thing was.”

“To a real Marine, yeah. Or even a decent Ground Forces or Navy officer. But to a hometown politician that’s never worked with troops, or someone’s daddy or mommy… I can tell you he doesn’t like hard chargers like you. He wants a frickin’ college campus here for some reason, with everyone kissing his ass. I think he already knows the entire chain of command doesn’t trust him, so he tries to get troops on his side.”

Repeth’s jaw had sunk lower and lower, and now she closed it with an audible snap. “I knew he was bad but… We have a lunatic for a commander, trying to undermine his own chain of command and convincing the troops to spill their guts to him, only to use their babbling against them. But why?”

Tano shook his head, in uncertainty not negation. “Maybe he’s reporting to an officer or politician with an agenda of some sort. Maybe someone wants the Marines’ reputation damaged. We’ve always been the fleet’s guarantee against mutiny or, on the flip side, individual Navy officers getting big heads when they have an independent command. Maybe the Ground Forces feel like they have no status anymore, hanging around Earth and manning a few asteroid fortresses, and they want to undermine us.”

Repeth chewed her lower lip. “Or maybe some politician is trying to save money by reducing the expenditures on Marines, or…I just don’t know.”

Tano said, “We can speculate all day. I just wanted to give you a heads up.”

“What do you want me to do?” Repeth immediately realized that was the wrong tack. “Never mind…I’ll figure out a mitigation plan.”

“You’d better, Top. If this keeps up, something bad is going to happen, no matter how hard you train your people. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down; you know that. You haven’t rocked the boat too hard yet, but Simms may be gathering evidence in case you do.”

Slowly a genuine smile spread across Repeth’s face, quickly suppressed. “Sergeant Major, I believe I can handle this situation. Thank you for tipping me off.”

Tano cocked his head critically. “Be careful, Top. You’re a good NCO. I’d hate to lose you.”

“And if I’m not careful? If I go out on a limb?”

“I’ll back you up, under two conditions. One,” he held up a thumb, “I’m not gonna get court martialed, and two,” he added his index finger, “you and your fancy husband bring this son of a bitch down once and for all.”

Repeth’s eyebrows went up in surprise.

“Oh yeah,” Tano said, “I looked into Lieutenant Commander Johnstone’s background. Don’t worry, I’m on your side. It just seems to me that someone with his skills ought to be able to, well, help out.”

“Sergeant Major, I have no idea what you are talking about, and if anyone asks, that’s my answer.” She showed her teeth once more, then nodded as she turned to go. “Good day to you, Smaj.”

Quickly she gathered her platoon sergeants together, four NCOs she trusted, and put out the word to tell the troops that no one was to volunteer anything if the colonel asked any open-ended questions. “Tell them that anyone who runs his mouth, anyone who does anything more than answer a direct question will be in for a hell that they’ll never forget.”

She hoped that would mitigate the problem, and would lay the groundwork for the next part of the plan she’d thought of. Next, she went and looked up Sergeant Dasko.

Dasko was the best of her NCOs, a squad leader. As soon as he had enough seniority she’d try to make sure he got a platoon. Most importantly, she was sure he was both completely reliable, and also flexible-minded enough to do what she asked.

“Sure, Top, whatever you want,” the surprisingly youthful-looking man said once she’d outlined the situation. He appeared barely twenty though he was at least thirty, which was another reason for choosing him.

“You think you’ll have any trouble?” she asked.

“No, Top. My guys are all solid. They’ll keep their mouths shut.”

Repeth reminded herself that good leaders seemed to always have good squads. It was some kind of symbiotic feedback loop, where the good troops reflected their good bosses, and good bosses attracted or found or developed good Marines.

The opposite also tended to be true, which was one reason the battalion was all screwed up.

That evening, after making sure Rick had swept their quarters once more for surveillance, she finally asked him to do what he had been waiting for: to put his skills to use.

Chapter 38

The next morning, after the PT period posted on the training schedule, Lieutenant Colonel Simms showed up exactly as Tano had predicted, with a squad of Alpha Company troops in full combat armor, holding battle weapons rather than just sidearms. Additionally, Repeth noticed a team of what must be counterintelligence techs with mysterious electronic equipment that they set up and employed in arcane ways.

Captain Rapplean, caught out despite Repeth’s warning to him first thing this morning, hustled up to Simms and saluted breathlessly. A moment later, she watched as they turned toward her as she stood at ease, waiting for the inevitable.

“First Sergeant, prepare the company for inspection.”

Repeth saluted Simms as the senior, then replied to Rapplean, “In ranks or barracks?”

Rapplean turned to Simms, whose face turned sour. Simms spoke to her, bypassing his subordinate officer. “A barracks inspection, First Sergeant, with full displayed kit.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Repeth replied, saluting and performing a crisp about-face, then double-timed into the barracks. “Barracks inspection, five minutes, people! Hop, pop and move, triple time!” She shouted it with a smile, as she looked up and down the perfect rows of Marines standing at the feet of their bunks with their kits displayed. Of course, she’d cancelled PT and had the troops preparing from reveille onward. Simms had hoped to give her just a few minutes to get ready.

Repeth walked up and down, yelling a few more choice epithets just for effect, as Sergeant Dasko peeked out the window, making sure Simms and Rapplean did not surprise them. “They’re heading this way,” he finally said, after almost ten minutes.

“Generous,” she murmured to Dasko. “Now disappear.” Dasko quickly scurried out the back door.

She opened the door in time to call the barracks to attention. “Officer on deck!” Repeth roared in her best leather-lunged DI imitation, and then fell in behind the two commanders as they walked up and down the rows. It appeared Simms’ frustration increased as he proceeded, asking arcane questions on Marine Corps lore, obviously looked up in some obscure history. Some her troops answered correctly, some they didn’t, but that was expected. The colonel then took out a white glove and ran it over as many cracks as he could find, turning up a bit of dust here and there.

Repeth didn’t mind. A few demerits or perhaps some extra duty or training would be the worst he could legally inflict, and she suspected that if he found nothing to ding her for, he would have been very unhappy indeed. She didn’t want to throw him off his game.

Once Simms inspected the barracks and common areas, he turned to Repeth, again ignoring his own company commander. This time Rapplean seemed to notice, his expression darkening as the colonel spoke. “First Sergeant, assemble all of your lower enlisted in the company auditorium in five minutes. You and the senior enlisted are released to your other duties.”

“Aye aye, sir,” she replied.

“Captain, that applies to you and the company officers as well. That will be all. Dismissed.”

Rapplean gobbled slightly, then clenched his jaw. “Aye aye, sir.” It was the only possible response. He turned as if in a daze and walked toward his office as Simms headed toward the counterintel team.

“All right, people! You heard the colonel. You have four minutes to be sitting at attention in your seats by platoons and squads in the auditorium. You think you can do that without your NCOs holding your hands?”

“YES, FIRST SERGEANT!” came the thundering reply.

“Fall out!” she barked, and the barracks dissolved into controlled chaos, each Marine quickly reloading all of his or her gear back into wall lockers, footlockers and drawers. In the midst of the activity she saw Dasko slip back in, his name tag not his own and lacking rank insignia. He’d even swapped his ribbons for a much more modest couple of awards appropriate to his apparent status. He gave her a nod and a wink, which she studiously ignored.

Within two minutes the repacking was all done, and within three, the bays were clear and everything was shipshape. Repeth smoothed out a pillow and double-checked the area, and then went to the window, using a finger to bend a blind enough to look out. She saw Simms disappear into the auditorium across the parade deck and the doors shut behind him, two Alpha Company Marines taking up positions in their impressive armor, weapons at port arms.

As if any real Marine would be a threat to their own commander, no matter how much of a lunatic, she thought. It’s insulting. Then again, there is such a thing as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and not all threats are physical ones.

Activating her backup internal comm circuit – a remnant of her covert ops days and decidedly not Marine standard – she subvocalized, “How are we doing?”

“Reading five by five,” Rick replied. “The counterintel guys are lazy. If they really wanted to seal that room they’d have to put scramblers into the electrical circuits. As it is I am piggybacking Dasko’s signal through the power network and then grabbing it up outside.”

“You’re sure they won’t pick up the transmission?”

“Not one hundred percent, but almost. I’ve forgotten more about CyberComm security than most of them ever knew. Trust me.”

Repeth’s smile crept into her voice. “I do, oh king of the silicon chips. Just make sure you erase Dasko’s self-override in the log.”

“Already done, oh queen of Marines.”

The sealed kumbayah lasted until lunch time, among the longest four hours of Repeth’s professional life. What the hell could they be talking about in there? She really hoped the audiovisuals were good enough to explain this mystery, this complete anomaly of the battalion commander having a private group hug with the troops.

When the doors opened and Simms came out, he looked pleased, and took the Alpha Marines with him along as he strode away. The technicians packed up their gear as quickly as possible. Had Repeth not had confidence in her husband she might have tried to pump them for some kind of information, but then again, counterintel didn’t let much slip. Ever. Their whole job was to be paranoid.

The rest of the day was difficult as well, pushing her Marines through the scheduled training. The company enlisted seemed listless and out of sorts, distracted. This only increased her curiosity about what had happened inside the auditorium.

That evening she’d barely entered their apartment when she asked, “Have you got it?”

“Of course. Been working on it all day,” Rick said from his computer. He’d hardwired it into the television screen on the wall, and then plugged himself into the computer via his wrist link. “It opens up with the usual hi-how-are-ya crap, how taking care of his people is his top priority –”

“ – which is bullshit,” Jill interrupted. “Any Marine knows completing the mission is the top priority. Taking care of your people is important, but the mission always comes first.”

“Just let me set this up, all right?”

“Sorry.”

“Okay. Then he starts asking them questions – where are they from, how do they feel about being here, what they think about fighting the Meme, stuff like that. Your people give short, professional answers for a while, but then…” Rick started the video.

On the screen, Lieutenant Colonel Simms spoke to a male Marine standing at attention in front of his seat. “So, Private Wazinski, you are from Chicago?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But Chicago was bombed in the nuclear strikes.”

“I was visiting relatives. Just lucky, sir. I was ten.”

Simms reached out to put a fatherly hand on the Marine’s shoulder. “How do you feel about that, son?”

“Feel?” The man’s expression held for a moment, and then seemed to crumble. “It was horrible.” With eerie swiftness, tears started to roll down his face. “My dad and mom, my sisters, all wiped out.”

“And did you think that was fair?”

“What do you mean, sir?” The Marine was nearly blubbering now, with Simms’ hand still in place as if in comfort.

“Do you think the government did all it could to prevent such an inhuman tragedy?”

“I…I…”

“Isn’t it amazing how horrible people can be to each other?”

“Y-yes, I…”

“It’s all right, son, it’s all right. Let it out.” Simms drew the private to him in an embrace and patted him on the back, and Wazinski suddenly clutched the colonel with both hands like a child and buried his head in the man’s chest.

Rick froze the video. “It goes on like this. For an hour.”

Jill sat there stunned. “What the…who does…” She just could not figure out what to say for a long minute.

Rick selected a different time marker and brought it up. “Here’s a sample of his next theme.”

Now Simms spoke to a different Marine, a young female named Burns. Jill remembered her as very businesslike and professional, and hoped to get her promoted to Corporal soon.

“Are you happy with the leadership here? Do they take care of you?” Again, Simms put a gentle hand on a shoulder.

“Yes sir. They’re very good.”

“Are you sure? Nothing at all out of regulations? Not the slightest deviation?”

Burns’ eyes seemed to glaze over, and then she said, slightly petulant, “Well, we did have a piss test shortly after the new First Sergeant took over.”

“And?”

“And…I know for a fact that somebody must have tested positive. I mean, I have seen people going in to some of the drug dens in the Quarter, and I’ve seen people popping pills, but no one got busted! All that happened is a few of the worst ones got transferred out. They should have been given disciplinary action!” Like Wazinski before, tears welled up in her eyes.

“That little shit!” Jill muttered.

“I’m not so sure it’s her fault, Jill,” Rick replied.

“What?”

“There are a lot more examples. In total over thirty separate Marines lost their military bearing in some way. Those were a couple of the worst.”

“It makes the company look completely dysfunctional, and it’s not like that at all! I was getting them squared away.” Jill stood up and slammed her hand against a wall, making sure her servos were disabled. “How the hell did he get them to react that way? It just doesn’t make sense!”

“I’m not sure. The quality of the video and audio is not that good, and the only angle is from Dasko’s eyes and ears. In fact, you’re very lucky none of his squad identified him as a plant, but that was probably because it didn’t occur to Simms to ask. But I believe you have to start thinking like a covert operative again.”

Jill glanced sharply at Rick. “Okay. Could it be some kind of drug? A gas, or an injector ring he’s wearing? Some kind of…sonics maybe? Or tampering with their cybernetic systems? Did you check that?”

“I checked their cyberware. Nothing I could find. But the one thing I did notice was that in every one of his conversations, he found a way to touch the Marine who lost it. Not directly skin to skin necessarily; sometimes it was only through the sleeve or jacket, but in each case the contact was solid.”

“What does that mean?”

Rick shrugged. “You’re the former spy girl. You tell me.”

Jill paced, rolling her shoulders and slapping her palms together in frustration. “I don’t know. I need someone to see this and figure it out, but I’m not sure who I can trust. Just the fact that this video exists proves I spied on my own commander. In the wrong person’s hands…I’m in big trouble.”

Rick nodded. “Not like the old days when you had that presidential ticket in your pocket. But you still know a few people. You bodyguarded Absen, right?”

“Yes I did, but that’s…remember, I helped launch the missiles that incinerated his family. Appealing to him could go either way.”

“Who else, then? Spooky? Or former President McKenna?”

Jill thought for a moment with a hand raised. “You know…even if you can get a transmission out of here without it being blocked or noticed, we can’t be sure the other end is secure. What if this is more than one complete nut case? What if there’s a conspiracy?”

Rick sat back in his chair, being careful not to pop the link cable out of the computer. “What about releasing it anonymously? Send it to enough people and someone will have to take action.”

Jill took a deep breath. “That’s a last resort. If you can set that up just in case…but no, that’s the nuclear option. It will get messy. I’d really rather try to do this surgically. I’m convinced that if we can somehow get rid of Simms and get a decent commander, the rest of this battalion’s problems will become manageable.”

“How, then?”

“I have an idea. If it works, it will go a long way toward solving our problem. If not, it will tell us that the corruption goes higher.”

Chapter 39

Rear Admiral Huen called Shan into his quarters and waved him over to look at the surface of his desk, which had a full-screen video file open. “I found this anonymous message and file attachment at the top of my inbox when I logged in this morning,” he told the steward. “It’s titled, ‘Lieutenant Colonel Simms, commander, Callisto Base Marine Battalion in closed session with lower enlisted Marines.’ I find it very interesting, but I wanted you to take an independent look.”

“If you will permit me, Admiral?” Shan reached over, and with a few taps on the touchscreen put the picture up on the large wall display.

“I’ve only seen about a half hour of it, fast-forwarding through it to certain marked places. I’ve got a staff meeting in twenty minutes, but I can get one of the other stewards to escort me. I’d like you to stay here and view the entire thing. We’ll talk later.” Huen stood up. “And Shan…don’t share this with anyone yet.”

“Yes, Admiral.” Shan turned to watch the video.

When Huen returned two hours later, Shan sat at the admiral’s desk. He made as if to get up but Huen waved him back and took a seat on a padded chair. “Use the controls there and show me what you have.”

Shan nodded. “I have marked several significant exchanges, wherein the colonel appears to solicit troops under his command to make statements contrary to good order and discipline.” He played several of those for Huen, who felt more and more amazed at each conversation.

“That’s sufficient. The man is…disturbed,” Huen finally said when he had seen enough. “I have never even heard of an officer acting in this way, much less in wartime.”

Shan said, “I agree. While I am no psychologist, this almost seems like some sort of pathological aberration. There is one more, separate clip that’s interesting.”

He brought up and played a few minutes of video showing what appeared to be a reporting interview with Simms, shot from a Marine’s cybernetic eye. Each time one of the two participants said something that might identify the Marine, the audio was bleeped and the video fuzzed, apparently to prevent lip-reading. Even without those details, Simms’ behavior shocked Huen.

Huen crossed his arms and rubbed his face with one hand in thought, and then once again noticed how comfortable he’d gotten with Shan over these last several years. He’s my closest friend and confidant, Huen thought, and I am fortunate to have him. Perhaps someday I will also find a wife, and our children will play together.

“Clearly I have to relieve him, but…”

“But it will have to be done delicately. There’s the political and public relations fallout, but more importantly, he is in charge of the one military force on this base sufficient to cripple it.”

“You mean, if he mutinies? Do we know what the Marines are like? Will they follow him if he refuses to obey orders?”

Shan lifted his huge hands, palms up, in a gesture of uncertainty. “I am not familiar with the temper of the battalion. They never caused any trouble before, aside from a few brawls.”

Huen sighed. “What resources do we have to deal with them?”

“Deal with them?” Shan raised his eyebrows.

“If it comes to a fight.”

Shan shook his massive head, slowly, ponderously. “There is no one on this base that could do so, in a conventional sense. With a very careful plan, they might be taken by surprise. There are command overrides to shut down their cyberware, but that still leaves heavy weapons and combat armor. The armory would have to be secured by some trustworthy force.”

“Difficult and risky.”

Shan nodded again. “But Admiral…perhaps we should try to figure out whether the Marines will follow this man before we – what is the opposite of counting chickens before hatching, in English?”

“Borrowing trouble?”

“Yes. Let us not borrow trouble. Will you give me a day to make some discreet inquiries?”

“Of course, Senior Steward,” Huen replied, standing up, prompting Shan to do the same. “You have my full confidence and authority in this matter. In fact, as busy as I am, I would appreciate it if you could investigate and bring me some way to defuse this situation while maintaining the greatest possible harmony.”

“Yes, sir.” Shan hesitated. “I have one other request.”

“Name it.”

“I would like a signed undated nonprejudicial hardcopy order to detain Simms. If the opportunity presents itself, I would like to be able to take him in for questioning, and only you as the senior commander can sign such an order.”

Huen thought for a moment. He trusted Shan with his life, but sometimes it felt as if his career and the potential shame to his family of a scandal were more important than mere living or dying. This would give his bodyguard a great deal of rope. Hopefully he would not hang himself, and Huen with him.

“All right. Type it up and print it yourself, and I will sign it. I don’t want anyone else seeing it.”

Shan bowed deeply. “I will not fail you, sir.” He reached over to withdraw a flash drive from the data port on the desk. “I have taken the liberty of making my own copy of the video.”

“As you wish.”

Chapter 40

As soon as he had the order to detain folded securely into his uniform pocket, Shan went to Artemis’ computer center and requisitioned an audiovisual booth, normally used to produce high-quality presentations for briefing or training. In this case, he made sure the system was disconnected from the ship’s intranet and then used it to carefully examine the audio and video record.

Several hours later, he had come to a tentative conclusion, though its proof was yet to come. It appeared his foresight in obtaining the detention order had been prescient.

Now for confirmation.

Taking the flash drive and wiping any residuals from the AV booth, his next stop was to speak with his fellow stewards and pass on certain instructions, and then to call in Lieutenant Harvey, the officer in charge of the ship’s Marine detachment – completely separate from the Callisto battalion – and make arrangements with her as well.

Then he went to the bridge.

Although Artemis was grounded on Callisto, it maintained watches and in all ways functioned as a working ship, except that its crew had access to the Grissom base facilities. Shan remembered that one of the officers had a spouse in the Marine battalion.

“Lieutenant Commander Johnstone?” Shan asked, knowing full well he had found the right man.

“Yes, Senior Steward?” Johnstone did not bother getting up or unlinking. Yet.

“May I see you in private for a few minutes, please, sir?”

Johnstone blinked in surprise, undoubtedly because Shan had seldom spoken to him except briefly, in an official capacity. “Of course. Meet me in the wardroom in ten minutes, please? I have to call for relief.”

Shan nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Ten minutes later Shan looked at Johnstone across a wardroom table in the corner, away from the few officers stopping in for an off-hours meal or drink. “Sir, the admiral has asked me to make certain confidential inquiries.”

“Sure. What about?”

“I cannot divulge the nature of the inquiries, sir. I am merely informing you that what I am about to ask is official and confidential, and cannot be discussed with anyone. Not even your spouse.”

“My wife?” Johnstone’s face turned concerned. “All right. I know the rules.”

“It’s very important that you do, because I am going to ask you about things you might have learned from her.”

Johnstone’s face froze. “I’m not sure I can answer your questions.”

Shan took one massive hand from where it had been folded on the table in front of him and reached across to lay it on the wrist of the smaller man. “I really need you to do so, sir. Admiral Huen needs you to do so.”

Johnstone opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it, his eyes unfocused. “Sure. No problem. As long as it’s official.”

“Very official, sir.” Shan withdrew his hand. “Now please tell me all you know about the temper, morale and esprit de corps of the Callisto Marine battalion, including any discipline problems they might be having.”

Johnstone spoke for almost an hour. At the end of it, Shan sent him back to the bridge to finish his watch. He’d found out all he needed to know.

***

Shan watched as Lieutenant Colonel Simms left his office for his quarters, accompanied by two escorts with sidearms. The bodyguards did not concern him particularly, but as his enormous body made genuine spying impossible, any approach to the battalion commander would have to be made somewhere away from the Marine compound. The nondescript maintenance coveralls he had put on turned away casual glances.

As he followed well back, Shan realized that until now he had never actually interacted with Simms. On the few occasions that the admiral had met him, Shan had happened to be off duty, with another steward pulling security for Huen.

Or perhaps this was not happenstance at all…

Thinking about that, suspecting what he now suspected, Shan found an explanation for that circumstance blossoming in his mind. So instead of lingering in Marine spaces, he clapped several tiny spy-eyes in places where they would not be noticed, their placement disguised by casual touches on walls and corners and conduits. All together, they covered the front and back entrances and corridors surrounding Simms’ suite.

Then he waited in a small cantina just outside the compound, patronized by a mix of civilians and military, mostly those finishing up a hard workday and grabbing a cheap bite. Shan sat in a corner with his collar loosened, staring at a computer tablet, a half-finished beer in front of him. That was about as inconspicuous as he could make himself short of also changing his body.

The tablet showed nothing but routine work; his view of the spy-eyes was fed to his optic nerve via his cyberware. It took almost an hour before he saw anything significant.

From Simms’ back door a man emerged in a nondescript civilian suit, of indeterminate racial type, not white, not black, not of obviously Asian or Negroid features…if he had to guess, Shan would have posited a South Asian or Semitic ethnicity.

Quickly leaving the bar as if in response to a sudden call, Shan moved to intercept the man before he lost track of him, by waiting at the nearest main intersection he would pass.

Catching sight of his quarry, Shan shuffled along in the man’s wake as he crossed the plant-filled central park, with its crystal dome that right now showed the rings and edge of the planet Jupiter as well as the stars beyond. People thronged the open space, the largest public recreation area on the base, relaxing in the evening. Its lights had already dimmed somewhat, simulating twilight, and lovers strolled hand in hand while manufactured breezes blew and piped-in music played faintly.

That breeze and the myriad scents precluded Shan from obtaining what he really wanted, so he contented himself with trailing along, making sure he was not seen. Once the man hurried across the park, he entered one of the main access spokes and continued walking along the sidewalk next to the tramway.

Shan pressed forward, sensing that this was the perfect chance, as his quarry was confined and was now downwind of the man. As he came up behind to within two meters, the big man expelled all the breath from his lungs and drew in a slow but enormous inhalation, and then fell back, holding the air within himself and switching on his internal emergency oxygen to sustain his function.

That gave him ten minutes or so during which he had no need to breathe. After distancing himself from the man but still following – he might provide Shan with some information by where he went – Shan set to analyzing the molecules within the air sample: dust, droplets, sweat, skin cells and dandruff, expelled lung vapor, every effluvium that inevitably proceeded from a human body as it lived its life.

Ten minutes was not necessary. Shan found what he was looking for right away, and began to breathe naturally again. He kept the smile off his face that threatened to break out, the one that would have told the world how immensely satisfied he was at this moment.

His exercise in surveillance ended after they entered the Quarter, as Shan thought it might. He took note of where the man went, into one of the larger clubs reputedly run by the Tongs, offering gray market services such as booze and strippers and low-stakes poker up front, and more esoteric and illegal diversions in the back. There was no possibility of Shan following him in there; no doubt his face was well known to any criminal organizations here, especially the Asian ones.

Therefore, he withdrew from the Quarter to plan his next move.

***

The signed order resting in his uniform pocket might still be useful, Shan thought, but right now it had come down to the application of force. His confidence was high that he, with Schaeffer and Clayton backing him up, could handle any one man, no matter how extraordinary.

All wore their steward garb, not because it would impress their quarry, but it might save trouble with any Marines or others who happened to stumble into the situation. Shan and the other two lurked in side corridors to the tunnel that the man he had followed must take if he was to return to Simms’ back door. If by some chance the fellow decided to enter through the front door, Shan would have to wait for another chance, but he thought that possibility remote.

The spy-eye he had placed at the main crossroads nearby finally showed the nondescript individual approaching, his gait precise and steady, unintoxicated and apparently not even tired despite the hour being after midnight. All the better, Shan thought. There was no telling exactly how the knockout drugs he had loaded into his air-powered trank pistol would have interacted with any of the illegal substances available in the Quarter.

“He comes,” Shan subvocalized over his internal comm, and the other two men made ready. They carried EMP cannon normally used to knock down cyborgs or vehicles. Their taser-like blasts were also effective to incapacitate ordinary human targets. All in all, they made excellent tools for safely capturing someone who might be in the mood to resist.

Shan stepped out in front of the man from the niche where he had been standing, and the other two stewards drifted out of the side corridors behind the target. Rather than make some kind of demand to submit, Shan fired the trank dart directly at the man’s throat.

Shan had prepared himself for the drug to be less than effective, but he was still surprised at how quickly his target moved – almost fast enough to dodge. However, no matter what kind of person he faced, surprise was on Shan’s side.

When the suited man tried to put on a burst of speed and race around him, Shan fired the rest of the six darts in the gun and then reached out to grapple with him. Surprise worked both ways: Shan found himself holding ragged bunches of suit, and the stumbling figure managed to slip by him, nearly naked. Somehow he had shed his clothing, or the cloth had been made in break-away fashion, and apparently the drugs hadn’t knocked him down.

Fortunately his fellows were alert and had charged forward as soon as the man had made his move. Shan stepped out of the way as blue lightnings blazed in the corridor, accompanied by loud cracklings and the explosions of light fixtures. The near-naked figure fell to the floor, stunned by thousands of volts of electricity.

“Bind him, quickly, in every way you can think of. I have reason to believe he can alter his body shape, or at the very least he can get out of restraints like Houdini,” Shan ordered.

As Schaeffer and Clayton used up two dozen code-locked zip cuffs binding wrist, ankles, elbows and knees, Shan pulled a roll of duct tape out of his pocket and began to wrap the man up like a mummy. He had no idea how long the EMP blast would keep him unconscious.

Next, he pulled out a regulation body bag and said, “Slide him into this.” Once wrapped in plastic, Shan sealed that up with tape as well.

“Won’t he suffocate?” Schaeffer asked.

“I have reason to believe he will not, but if he does, I take full responsibility.”

Schaeffer shrugged and watched as Shan hefted the body easily onto one massive shoulder, and then at a signal, led the way toward Artemis. In the early hours of the morning there were only a few people out, and those that did see the three stewards did not question them.

The officer on watch at Artemis’ main hatchway passed them through without comment, having been told beforehand to expect the three and possibly a fourth. While Shan knew that the scuttlebutt of how they had carried a body aboard would quickly spread, that was actually better in his estimation than a story about arresting a protesting Lieutenant Colonel Simms.

“Straight to BioMed,” Shan ordered unnecessarily. He’d already told them that would be their first stop. If he happened to be completely wrong about Simms, they could always move him to the brig.

“Wake up,” Shan snapped at the ship’s doctor and the corpsman dozing in the BioMed lab in full biohazard suits. They were there at his request, made in Huen’s name, but had been waiting for some hours. The body bag Shan dropped onto the operating table inside the biological containment unit brought them around quite effectively.

“Seal your biosuits and get ready to deal with an alien life form,” Shan snapped.

“A what?” the corpsman said.

The doctor didn’t bother asking questions, but sealed his suit, and then made to close the examination room. Shan stayed inside, without a suit, but ordered the other two to go outside and watch through the large window, cutting off Schaeffer’s protest after borrowing his EMP cannon.

Then the doctor finished sealing the room. “Is it dangerous?” he asked.

“Possibly.” Shan hefted the electric weapon. “If it gets out of control, step back. This was effective before. If necessary, we will dissect a corpse.”

“What is it?” the doctor said.

“Either it’s human and I will be very, very embarrassed, or it’s a Blend, an enemy agent.”

The doctor gasped with what Shan thought might be delight. “If it is…I’ll be the first to dig into one…” He quickly used a scalpel to slice the duct tape on the bag over where the body’s mouth should be. A few more cuts and he had exposed the man’s face, his eyes and ears taped shut but his mouth and nose unimpeded.

“Take tissue samples and use these protocols to test for biological anomalies,” Shan said, handing the doctor a flash drive.

“Where did you – never mind,” he interrupted himself as he took the drive and put it in a decontamination drawer. “Do you think there is any danger of infection?” He began to swab the man’s mouth and nose, and then used a biopsy needle to take a couple of plugs of flesh. The patient remained unresponsive, but Shan could tell he still breathed.

“Probably not, but I want to make sure. Your first priority is to determine for certain if this man is human or not.”

Shan and the corpsman remained with the immobilized subject while the doctor hustled out of the containment facility through the decontamination room.

The corpsman looked at Shan as if realizing for the first time that the steward had no protection. “What if he is infectious? You are already exposed.”

“Have no fear for me,” Shan replied, and the corpsman shrugged.

Long minutes went by, with the two inside and the two outside watching the man, and the doctor hurriedly running tests with his automated analyzers according to Shan’s protocols. Eventually the physician returned, his faceplate open to show a stunned expression. “It’s not human. The cells…they’re amazing. It’s a Blend?”

“I believe so, doctor. Is there any sign of disease or infectiousness?”

“No, none.”

“Keep it in isolation, then. I will leave a steward here at all times, as well as two Marines sealed in full combat armor, until the admiral decides what to do with it. And say nothing to anyone. This is top secret.” Rumors would get out, but Shan was less concerned with stopping them than merely slowing them down enough for him to set certain other plans in motion.

He strode quickly to rouse Admiral Huen in his quarters.

Chapter 41

“Shan, you are to be commended in the highest regard,” Huen said as he brewed a pot of tea to help him wake up. “A superb piece of work, especially as you turned out to be correct. Amazing. An enemy Blend in the BioMed lab. The first one ever captured.”

“Yes, sir. The first we know of, though of course, the covert services on Earth might have some we do not.” He cleared his throat. “Now I need immediate authority to search Simms’ quarters. I believe the creature we have in custody is Simms himself, but there is also a chance that the real colonel is some kind of puppet that the Blend controlled biochemically, just as it incited those Marines to sedition with its touch.”

“Of course. Have the paperwork drawn up immediately, and you have my full authority to commandeer whomever you need. Aerospace Police or ship’s Marines, perhaps?”

“Yes, Admiral. I must get moving on this.”

“Agreed. Dismissed. I will be on the bridge if you need anything further. Pass the word to get the prime watch up there, too.”

“Yes, sir.” Shan departed, moving as fast as Huen had ever seen.

On the bridge Huen was gratified to see Lieutenant Commander Johnstone at CyberComm. The man was an absolute wizard at his station, if a bit casual for his tastes. This time he looked clean cut and more properly uniformed than usual. Huen recalled that the man’s wife, a Marine, cohabited with him on the base. He supposed she was having a positive effect on his appearance. That triggered another concern.

“Johnstone, have you been briefed on the situation?”

“Umm, not really, sir. I was told we are on condition yellow and the prime watch was to report to duty.”

“Very well.” Huen sat down in the Chair. “The situation involves potential internal threats to this ship and this command. It may involve the base Marines. I understand your spouse is among them?”

“Yes sir.” Suddenly, Johnstone became very still.

“Have you noticed any unusual behavior since you two arrived here…six weeks ago?” Huen peered down at the display on the arm of the Chair, reading details about Johnstone from his personnel file.

Johnstone gave a significant look around, as if asking about the others listening.

Huen replied to his unspoken question. “Forgive me, Lieutenant Commander, if this is an awkward request, but I trust everyone here, and this is of vital importance. If you know something, please tell me.”

Johnstone swallowed, then spoke. “My wife, First Sergeant Jill Repeth, has been informally investigating some serious issues she discovered within the base Marines. These might involve the battalion commander, or even others of higher status here on Callisto. Or off.”

“What kind of issues?” Huen kept his voice deceptively mild, while flogging himself mentally. Obviously his hands-off approach, trusting the base’s Marines to police themselves, had failed. Then he realized that if, as Shan asserted, they had an actual agent of the Meme Empire in custody, they could hardly be faulted.

“Drugs, for one, sir. Disciplinary problems – gambling, smuggling, failure to train properly. And less definable things as well. She said there was a…cultural problem. Because of the battalion commander.”

“The commander?”

“Yes, sir.” Johnstone glanced around the bridge again at the rest of the prime watch, who were now staring at him, fascinated. Years of routine duty on a pseudo-warship sitting at a training base apparently made this quite an interesting turn of events for them. “Because the battalion commander only joined EarthFleet Marines recently, she felt he had a culturally incorrect approach to handling combat troops.”

Huen folded his hands in front of him, his elbows resting on the arms of the Chair, and leaned forward to stare at his CyberComm officer. “In other words, he’s a bad commander that exacerbated problems in the unit instead of dealing with them.”

“As you say, sir.”

“I’ve recently become aware of some of these issues myself,” Huen went on. “I have directed my stewards and the ship’s Marines to take certain steps to investigate this matter quite thoroughly. Every member of this crew is to give every assistance to them, is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” all of the watchstanders replied in near-unison.

“There is also a possibility of something worse than a commander gone bad. It is conceivable that political forces, criminal elements, or even Meme agents present a threat to this ship and this base. The ship is the first priority, and after that, we will coordinate a full internal security review for the base. And that,” Huen said with a calculated wave of his hand, “is why we are all up in the middle of the night, the tertiary watch is on the auxiliary bridge, and all entry points are guarded.”

***

By 0600 the prime watch had relaxed somewhat, as nothing seemed to be happening other than routing a few requests through the bridge. Admiral Huen had authorized the base analytical lab staff to be rousted out of bed at Shan’s request, and were even now testing all of the blood samples they had on file against his anti-Blend protocols. It now seemed particularly fortunate that First Sergeant Repeth had instituted frequent drug testing, so at least one Marine unit could be cleared.

“Bravo Company is clean,” Shan reported to Admiral Huen. “I have ordered the company commander in your name to muster in full combat gear in case other personnel must be suppressed. Also, there is no sign of Simms. I believe the creature we have in BioMed is he. Or it.”

“Very well. Continue.” Huen smiled inside at that term. Suppressed. There was nothing suppressive about recoilless machineguns and fragmentation grenades. While nonlethal weapons were common on Earth, Fleet Marines had to be ready to kill aliens, not “suppress” other humans. They did have a supply of Needleshock ammo, but he suspected anyone on the receiving end of the vetted Marines’ weapons would deserve what they got.

“The next order of business is to obtain and process updated blood samples from the rest of the Marines. Once we are certain we can rely on them, I respectfully suggest we go to Condition Zebra and begin to do the same for all base personnel.”

“All base personnel?” Huen made a mental calculation, starting with the count of fifty thousand people on Callisto. “That will take weeks.”

“Yes, sir, but it must be done.”

“Agreed. BioMed,” Huen turned to the appropriate watchstander, “pass to the senior physician that I want her to work up a plan to test this entire base for Blends. Also have her assign someone to liaise with ship’s Marines to make the brig secure for holding Blends.” And if that is not possible, he thought, I am not averse to killing them rather than risking their escape, especially if, as Shan suspects, they can change their appearance.

Next, Huen dictated a brief report to be sent at flash priority to Admiral Absen on Orion, assuring him that he believed everything was under control. Then he notified the Aerospace Training Wing commander of the situation, ordering him to suspend all other operations and to put a squadron of his instructor pilots on alert with armed Aardvarks, after they had been blood-tested.

The rest of the day turned into a grinding administrative nightmare that tested Huen’s peacetime leadership skills to the utmost. It wasn’t long before the rest of the base got wind of the rumors and he had to lock everything down with emergency drills and curfews. The corporations protested, but as he’d learned over the last years, threats to their funding got quicker compliance than any other kind. With the carrot of increased compensation for overtime, they even agreed to use their corporate security to help keep order until the crisis eased.

Eventually Huen turned the bridge over to Captain Rikard, his executive officer, and rotated the watch. Then he used the opportunity to go down and take a look at what they had caught.

When he walked into the small but well equipped BioMed lab, he found the staff there looking morose and tired. One corpsman tried to call the area to attention but Huen waved him down and approached his senior physician, Commander Guptra. “What have we got, Doctor?”

“I’m afraid the patient is dead, through no fault of our own,” she said distractedly. “I believe he killed himself in some biological fashion. We have tested for contamination but there appears to be none.”

“Perhaps the creature had insufficient warning to prepare any such thing,” Huen remarked.

“Or was simply unable. It’s not magic, Admiral. I would suspect that if it intended to release some kind of plague in the base, it would have done so.”

“Unless it was saving that for when the Destroyer showed up. Now we are testing everyone and we will continue a program to do so, until…”

The doctor smiled tiredly. “Until we win or die. I understand. Admiral, I’d like to stand some of my staff down for rest. We’re really not equipped for this kind of round-the-clock operation.”

“Use your best judgment, Doctor. Just make sure that thing is no threat to anyone. I don’t want to find some kind of xenomorphic monster rampaging around the ship like a science fiction movie.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll make sure we have armed Marines here at all times.”

Huen left Doctor Guptra to do her job, then headed for his own quarters, utterly exhausted. It was either that, or stims, and he felt that at this moment his subordinates had the crisis well in hand.

Chapter 42

First Sergeant Repeth had a spring in her step that had nothing to do with her cyberware or the low gravity of the base. Bravo Company stood in polished ranks in dress uniform – this time only because their new battalion commander would inspect them.

Ever since Simms had been…what would she call it? Arrested? Captured? Identified? She settled on “removed.” Ever since Simms’ removal, she’d witnessed a dramatic improvement of the entire battalion, and Bravo Company in particular. Not perfection, but moving in the right direction. All was well with her world. The bizarre and surreal situation she had stepped into upon arrival had turned out to have a direct cause, and that cause had now been eliminated. Her faith in EarthFleet and the Marines had been restored.

“Company…tench-hut!” she barked in that peculiar throaty seal-like yelp affected for Marine drill and ceremonies. NCOs and officers from other nations had different ways of doing things, but she’d brought as much USMC with her as she could.

She turned the formation over to Captain Miller, the new Bravo Company CO. While no one on base, least of all Captain Rapplean, had yet turned out to be a hidden Blend, her candid secret report to Senior Steward Shan, and thereby Admiral Huen, had prompted a purge of those personnel deemed too tainted to rehabilitate. Perhaps they would be put to use somewhere else, or maybe their cyberware would be deactivated, even surgically removed, but that wasn’t her problem anymore.

The front lines were no place for the unreliable.

The short, chunky blonde captain received and returned Repeth’s salute with a precise flip and then about-faced to wait for the new commander, a man named Ruchek. He came highly rated, and it couldn’t hurt that the battalion would get a full colonel to take charge of it. Repeth had heard he was a no-nonsense, by-the-book officer of Hungarian extraction, minor nobility if one could believe the reports.

No problem. That kind of officer I can deal with. For a while I thought the world had gone mad, with a commander holding love-ins with line Marines. It’s actually a relief to know he was an enemy Blend, subverting for a nefarious purpose. Otherwise I would have to believe my troops were disloyal, and I could never stand that. As she watched the new colonel inspect Repeth’s company – all right, Captain Miller’s company – she couldn’t keep a satisfied smile off her face.

***

Repeth stood up with the rest of the people in the battalion conference room when Colonel Ruchek entered the room, still wondering why she was there, and why everyone was back in dress uniform. It reminded her unpleasantly of the ridiculous procedures of the former commander.

Captain Miller and the other company commanders and first sergeants were in attendance, as well as Sergeant Major Tano. The new battalion XO, a rat-faced woman named Hennessy who despite the Eden Plague managed to support a visible crop of acne pimples on her face, rounded out the group of key Marine personnel on the base.

Behind the principals at the table sat more than a dozen lieutenants, all of the platoon leaders that had not been summarily busted in the purge and the staff officers, and another dozen-plus platoon sergeants, and Staff Sergeant Botkina, the personnel NCO. In short, anyone who was anyone in the battalion was here.

“Take your seats,” Ruchek said, then sat down, folding his lanky frame into the chair at the head of the table. His words susurrated with a middle-Asian accent, and his features reflected his Turkic and Kazakh bloodlines, mixed no doubt with the remnants of the Mongol peoples that had roamed the area almost a thousand years ago.

“I have just come from Admiral Huen’s office aboard Artemis. I must tell you that he is extremely concerned right now about the state of this base. Fortunately he is less concerned about the state of this battalion, now that the possibility of enemy influence has been removed, as well as certain personnel who took advantage of past laxity.”

Ruchek stood up again, as if his body contained too much energy to hold him in place, and he began to pace around the room. “The admiral asked me what role I saw this battalion playing in restoring and ensuring Grissom Base runs properly, and of course, I told him we would do whatever was asked of us. Marines get the job done, no matter what.”

Soft grunts of agreement and oo-rahs echoed around the room.

“Then he told me he wanted us to bolster an increased police presence here. Aerospace Security Police are already being transferred in, which is good, because they never held up their end before. Now they will have at least enough specialists to keep track of their own pilots and support personnel, which as you know comprise forty percent of the people here.”

Reaching up, Ruchek idly ran a finger along the top of the EarthFleet heraldic shield mounted on the back wall, flicked off the accumulated dust with a curled lip, and then continued to slowly pace the room. “The admiral has also put the corporate security forces that are supposed to deal with the civilian contractors on notice that they had better tighten up their areas. So I asked him what he envisioned our role to be, and you know what he told me?” He had come to a stop directly behind Repeth, so she had to turn her chair and crane her neck to keep him in view.

“Admiral Huen gave me two names. One was that of his Senior Steward, Shan. Big bastard, and not someone I’d want to tangle with from anywhere closer than a thousand meters.” This drew a bit of laughter.

“The other name was that of our own First Sergeant Repeth.”

Repeth’s eyes widened and her lips pressed shut, wondering just what this could mean. Was the admiral angry with her and Rick for slipping the video that exposed Simms anonymously into his system instead of going through normal channels? She’d heard Huen was a by-the-book type.

“Please, First Sergeant, join me up front.” Colonel Ruchek marched over to stand next to the EarthFleet flag on its pole in the corner.

Repeth quickly stood, wondering why it sometimes seemed easier to face an enemy with a gun than to be stared at by a room full of peers and superiors. She stood where he indicated, next to him, and came to attention.

Am I going to be publicly humiliated? Is this the way Ruchek is going to shape battalion up? With a whip in an iron fist? Will I lose my rank or position?

“Admiral Huen,” Ruchek went on, “identified First Sergeant Repeth as a highly competent EarthFleet Marine. What’s more, he pointed out that as a member of the United States Marine Corps, she was a highly decorated military police specialist, and served for a time as one of Admiral Absen’s stewards. All of this experience undoubtedly served her well in the recent difficulties. I suspect that is why Admiral Huen instructed me to appoint her to head up a special law enforcement task force that will coordinate among the various entities on Callisto, and will report directly to Senior Steward Shan, who of course reports to the admiral.”

Ruchek paused and initiated a polite round of applause as Repeth reddened with pleasure. Not a censure after all, but an appointment. Then she realized that she could not possibly perform her First Sergeant duties at the same time, and her heart fell.

“This will be a temporary appointment, the admiral told me, for no more than one year, and then she would come back to us. I in turn told him that it was not appropriate for a noncommissioned officer to hold such a position. So…”

Ruchek’s hand came out of his uniform pocket, holding a set of shoulderboards with senior warrant officer’s insignia on them. “I was told you had turned down a commission and several warrants, but this time, you don’t get to turn this down. This base needs you. Admiral Huen needs you. I need you, and you have to have the rank to go along with it.”

Signaling to Captain Miller to assist, Ruchek slipped the rank insignia onto Repeth’s shoulders, and then brought his fists firmly down on them as if to seat them in place. “Congratulations, Chief Warrant Officer Repeth. I’ve looked over your record. If you do a good job, as I am sure you will, you can keep them, with the retroactive pay grade of W-4.”

“Thank you, sir,” Chief Repeth said, saluting her commander to the unprompted applause of the room. “But I’d rather lead troops, if you’ll have me back.”

“Spoken like a true Marine. I have no doubt I will.”

Ruchek joined in the applause, and for a moment, Jill Repeth basked in her colleagues’ appreciation, knowing full well that she would earn every bit of it over the next year.

Like Rick said…there’s a new sheriff in town.

Chapter 43

Year Eight

Admiral Absen was sleeping as soundly as he ever did when his door intercom beeped at 0417. “Yes?” he called into the air, reaching up to turn on the reading lamp over the head of his bunk.

“Flash traffic for you, sir.”

“From who?” he asked as he pulled on his trousers.

“Header says EarthGov Intel, passed through Fleet. The rest is Eyes Only.”

“Right.” He opened his door, taking the tablet from the steward on the other side and closing it again. Setting the thing down on his smart desk linked it and brought up a prompt to sample DNA, scan retina and input codes. They’d never yet caught a Blend trying to break in to a secure system; there was no guarantee those theoretical leftover entities even knew what they were, much less worked for the Meme Empire, but counterintelligence organizations were paid to be paranoid.

Whether those measures would be effective was another story.

The message unlocked and presented itself. Ten minutes later, Absen put out the word to wake up and gather his senior staff in his command conference room, along with Red Team, at 0700, and he went back to bed. Flash traffic it may be, but its subject would not manifest for at least six months, perhaps a year. He could afford to give his people their sleep.

He, on the other hand, lay awake the rest of the early morning thinking, and then took a good hot shower and ate a leisurely breakfast, telling his stewards to make sure they brought in enough strong coffee for everyone in the meeting.

“Received this flash message last night,” he said loud enough to carry to the fifty or so people packed inside. “Several large Earthside radio telescopes just picked up fusion emanations along the same track the scout ship’s escape pod took. They retasked orbital and deep-space opticals to take a look and have confirmed the presence of a Meme ship half a light year out, in the Hills Cloud, the closer and denser piece of the Oort Cloud. Johnstone?”

Rick Johnstone had held up a hand and now said, “Sir, that must mean they decelerated, or we probably wouldn’t be seeing them. They must be intending to make use of the bodies there.”

“I concur, but we’ll just have to keep watching to see whether they are merely refueling, or are going to send something our way.” Absen paused. “Any word from the stealth probes?”

Colonel Myrna Zolen, his chief of intelligence, cleared her throat and lifted a tablet of her own. “We’re processing some reports now, but remember, the light from the enemy itself is getting here soonest. I’ve got a bit more info since the first ExecSum, sir. The emanations are interesting in that they varied a lot, as if the source was spinning, and they seem far too weak to represent a Destroyer-sized spacecraft. Doppler shift shows it decelerating at usual Meme noncombat rates. Collating all data, TECHINT says whatever it is masses no more than a tenth of what we expected.”

“Good news, then,” Absen responded in surprise. “Are they sure?”

“Confidence is medium to high, sir. There is a minority report that points out they could somehow be deliberately masking their emanations.”

“I’m not going to endorse anything that minimizes the danger,” Absen said firmly. “We proceed as before, in overkill mode, got it?” He looked around to receive assent from all of his staff. “Stallers? You got something?”

The EarthFleet Marine liaison officer, or LNO, looked even more sour and hatchet-faced than usual, as if he’d forgotten the tequila and gone straight to bitter lemons. “Just thinking about politics, sir. Anything that gives the whiners ammo…”

He meant the scattered opposition movements on Earth, which constantly questioned the austerity and massive defense expenditures that years of wartime economy had imposed on the populace. Some were crazies, disbelievers and conspiracy nuts. Some just thought the threat must be overstated, not believing the aliens to be as dangerous as claimed. Some thought the whole thing to be a lie, calling for Raphaela to be detained and interrogated until she “finally told the truth.”

“It will come out soon enough, but that’s not our problem. That does remind me: set up a videoconference with the Combined Council at their earliest convenience, would you, Tobias?” Make the politicians handle the politics, he thought.

His chief steward nodded and made a note.

“I want more steal probes out there,” Absen commented, inviting any disagreement to surface. “Send out four more, looping out then in to cross the enemy’s predicted position. This is the first we’ve really seen of them and we need all the intel we can get. Zolen, I want all your assets on this thing ASAP. You have carte blanche to retask the deep space sensors according to your best collection plan. We need to know what it is and what it’s doing, top priority.” He knew he was stating the obvious, but he was also communicating his explicit intent and ensuring unity of effort.

It was amazing how many military SNAFUs arose just from well-intentioned misunderstandings.

Ford from the Red Team raised his hand. “What if this is a deception ploy? Have some small decoy ship decel while the big one cruises straight on or even accelerates, hitting us early and unexpectedly?”

“Yes, good point,” Absen agreed. “That means Red Team goes into overdrive. It’s not theoretical anymore. Start adjusting your COAs and coming up with new ones based on the fresh information as it comes. Zolen, make sure Red Team has everything they want; no green door crap, period dot end of story, got it?” He pointed a finger at her to emphasize his order.

“Aye aye, sir,” she replied. Though she was Aerospace, she’d learned the important traditional Navy difference between yes, meaning “acknowledged,” and aye aye, which meant “I understand and will comply.”

“Great job, everyone. Keep up the good work.” Motivational duty done, Absen left them to their tasks and headed for the communications center, his stewards shadowing him as always.

For most things he did not mind working from his desk; he had ninety-nine percent confidence that his missives remained secure between there and the computers that processed and triple-encrypted all of his orders to EarthFleet. However, to be even more certain he preferred to go to the heart of Orion’s network and pull strings from there.

Absen handed Tobias his tablet, the signal to log his boss in with the comms officer on watch, while the admiral entered a small shielded room with nothing but a terminal atop a table, and a chair. No media port existed here; nothing but the Mark One Eyeball could receive, and the human fingers send, information. The room’s doorway scanned anyone entering for electronics of any kind.

Seating himself, he logged in and composed a message to Major General Yeager, Commander, First Aerospace Fleet. Its text field contained only these words: Initiate Attack Plan Bravo. Good luck and good hunting.
–Absen.

Chapter 44

The recall code caught Vango at a fortuitous time, already returning to base in his Aardvark Lark after a very routine training run, blasting pebbles. Jupiter’s rings shone faint and unimpressive compared to Saturn’s but they still contained millions of individual pieces to shoot with his inline maser.

Following the IFR glide path in, Lark’s automatic system guided him to a landing among the thousands of craft lined up in neat rows on Callisto’s surface. Actually, the Aardvarks rested on individual platforms, slightly concave and set on insulated pylons a meter above the ground. The moon’s surface was so permeated with ice that any significant amount of heat would cause melting of the mud and potential surface collapse.

By the time he had finished his post-flight checks and shutdown, the hopper had landed atop his bird. A tiny vehicle compared to the jumbo-jet-sized A-24, it flew on cold compressed gas, jumping from platform to platform as it picked up and dropped off pilots.

Vango climbed into the belly hatch and strapped in to one of the three of eight seats open. Once it was full, it would hop back to Grissom Base, drop everyone off, pick up another group, and off it would fly, over and over. Clicking shut the last buckle was the signal to the pilot to continue.

“What’s the scoop? Anyone?” he asked the other pilots there. Everyone shook their heads. “Hey, hopper jock,” Vango called to the front, “you know anything?”

“Nope,” the pilot called as she lifted the dual sticks and hopped the vehicle toward the next pickup. “And if I did, I couldn’t tell you. But I do know one thing.” She paused, apparently for dramatic effect.

“What!” Vango and the others cried at the same time.

The pilot of pilots turned her head to grin back at her passengers. “It ain’t no drill.”

Despite more pleading, the hopper jock kept her mouth shut the whole way back, and the eight passengers hurried out the hatch and beat feet toward the officers’ mess, the most likely source of good scuttlebutt. Once they got there, a bored-looking chief master sergeant holding an official tablet buttonholed them as a group. “Ladies and gents,” he drawled, looking at the screen, “orders from Fleet. You got nineteen minutes to be in your seats in the briefing room for your WARNORD. That is all.” Ignoring their questions, he turned away and headed toward another bunch of pilots that had just arrived.

“I’m getting some chow,” Vango said to the only pilot in his group he knew well, Josiah “Token” Gaffney.

“Good idea. Might be a long briefing.” They ate as fast as they could and made the briefing with minutes to spare, taking their seats among the almost five thousand Aardvark drivers assembled in the auditorium.

“General on deck!” The call showed a Navy officer had been designated to warn everyone when Yeager showed up. Had the sailor been an Aerospace Force pilot, he would have just said “Tench-hut!” Service-specific rivalries and differences seemed to magnify the more some tried to stamp them out, becoming ways to needle each other.

The slim, intense two-star took the podium and tapped the mike to make sure it was on. “Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen. This a warning order. Approximately sixteen days from now, all of us that are ready will sortie to attack the enemy.”

A rumble of murmuring swept the room and the general held up his hand for silence. “During that time our ships will be modified, which is the reason for the delay. A bio-stasis pod will be installed in each Aardvark. Everyone will be sleeping for about eleven months outbound to the engagement. Pipe down, people!” Yeager barked at the upswell of disbelief, slamming his hand on the podium. This brought a stunned silence. “Just shut the hell up and listen. You can get used to the idea later.” He took a deep breath.

“We hope the engagement will take place in the Hills Cloud, the closest extra-system concentration of cometary debris, because that’s where intel has just located the enemy.”

Conversation swelled again with this announcement and the eagerness of thousands of pilots to know something of what they faced, but not nearly as much as before. Yeager thumped the mike to get their attention. “Here’s the very tentative outline of the plan. I’m only bothering to tell you to limit the rumor mill a bit, and don’t anyone take it as gospel. So here’s the overview.”

Up on the enormous main display screen a graphic of the solar system appeared, a standard simplification with the eight major planets in rings around the sun, as if seen from above. A blue icon surrounded Callisto. “Obviously, we’re here.”

The view pulled back, zooming out until the entire solar system had shrunk to a tiny circle in one corner, the blue spot covering a big piece of it. “The enemy is here, decelerating into the Hills Cloud, which is around a quarter of a light year out.” A thin line arrowed from the solar system out to a cloud of tiny white dots, which must be far out of scale.

“Of course, this intel only shows what they were doing three months ago. I will adjust the op order as new information becomes available. In accordance with established aerospace doctrine, we will remain flexible. Now…” Yeager touched a control and a dotted line appeared. “This is our track. Automated systems will try to adjust our course with the cold jets to avoid our fusion engines being spotted. Our goal will be to put as many Aardvarks into the area as possible and try to catch the enemy napping, striking and destroying him with overwhelming firepower.”

A woman stood up in the front row, with a star on each shoulder, one of the wing commanders. “Sir,” she said, “how many ships?” Then she sat down.

“As many as we can modify and launch. Roughly thirty thousand, if the engineers can install that many sleep chambers. The PVNs on Ceres have already shifted to building the modules, eight thousand at a time. They will be sent over on fast transports and dropped into the birds, connected to your cockpits. When we go, you will get in, go to sleep already linked, and you will wake up just before the engagement.”

More muttering covered Vango turning to Token. “That’s really everyone. All the Aardvarks and all the pilots available. What happens if the Meme aren’t there when we show up?”

Token turned his dark face and eyes to Vango’s. “Then life sucks, for us and the people here. I’m sure Yeager and Absen have thought about that. Now shut up and listen.”

Yeager went on. “We will launch and burn fuel to gain as much velocity as we can, then will be refueled by our KCS-20s, who will be launching tomorrow to get ahead of us. We will match velocities, gas up, and burn a little more to attain cruising speed, leaving about ninety percent available for the fight, and to get home.”

The screen graphic changed to a list of support ships. “Besides the thirty or so tankers listed, Fleet will be building three motherships that will follow behind at a safe distance. They will have grabships and repair docks, and will be able to refuel and rearm us.”

“Any of us that survive,” Vango muttered darkly.

Token looked over and rolled his eyes.

Chapter 45

Commander One dismissed concerns about the flare of the Destroyer’s great fusion engines decelerating his craft from its increased speed. First, space was vast, and it was unlikely the Humans would even notice. He had given orders to point the drive off center and slowly rotate around the axis of travel, deflecting the direct particulate emissions well away from the enemy star system.

Second, even if they did detect the drive, they would probably mistake it for a much smaller ship. How could they possibly know what they faced? Of course, they had overcome a mere Survey craft, and might assume they would be the target of a force of one, perhaps two orders of magnitude greater.

However, the Destroyer’s capabilities reached up to two orders of magnitude beyond that – five to ten thousand times as effective as the scout ship they had defeated with such difficulty. There seemed little to worry about.

Precisely because there was so little to worry about, Commander One, with the concurrence of his trium, had decided to employ a novel strategy. Doing so would give the crew something to do, decreasing boredom, and might contribute to his standing among other Destroyer Commanders, perhaps earning him an early promotion to Fleet Commander or even SystemLord.

“We have come to relative rest near the largest concentration of ingestible material that is close to the target system, but still outside it,” External Communicator One said from his tank. This provided a feeding ground of cometary bodies in complete safety. The electromagnetic emanations of the fusion drive would delay any response, and it seemed inconceivable that the Humans could send a force sufficient to threaten them out this far.

No, the fight, when it came, would undoubtedly take place around the Human home world. Lower species always fought hard for the planets of their origins. That was why they were called “lower orders.” Meme had no need of such sentimentality.

Every station in the control room was full now. Commander One wanted no one to claim later that they were not involved in the unusual strategy. His senior staff had their opportunities to raise objections, but except for a few carefully-worded questions, they had not.

Commander One had a good, compliant crew. He was proud of himself, and them. In a race where rebellion always simmered beneath the surface, this was an accomplishment.

“Begin maximum ingestion processes preparatory to Destroyer mitosis,” he intoned. This statement was analogous to a human captain giving the order to send away half his crew aboard an empty vessel. More precisely, it instructed them to begin the arduous and difficult process of dividing the Destroyer into two, like an amoeba.

Within half a cycle, more or less, Destroyer Commander One would effectively become Fleet Commander One. He even thought about repeating the process, gorging the resulting duo of ships and splitting once more, but decided against it. Dividing once smacked of hubris; dividing twice would invite even more scrutiny, and if the tiniest thing went wrong, if casualties were higher than average, he might be pilloried and excoriated rather than commended. It would also leave them with three quarters of each crew brand new clones, inviting further inefficiencies.

Two Destroyers will be enough, he thought, and if by some insane chance the Humans killed one, he would make sure it was not the one he commanded.

***

Recycler One spoke to his trium in the privacy of the great ship’s digestive tract. “My plan has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. The Commanders have let it be known that this Destroyer shall divide, becoming two.”

“Our plan,” Two corrected.

“Yes, we helped,” Three chimed in.

“Of course,” said One indulgently.

“But that was not the plan,” Three went on in his usual whining grumbling taste.

“The plan was subtle, with many permutations!” One insisted. “The goal was to create a disruption that would provide opportunity, and that has occurred.”

Two soothed, “Yes, One, what Three means is he is very happy with the intersection of positive chance and the strategy you convinced us to employ. Right, Three?”

“Right,” Three agreed, suddenly remembering that his fortunes rested with his fellows, and if he failed in some way, they might discard him from the trium.

“Realize, comrades, that with two Destroyers, we will automatically be promoted to the middle of the hierarchy, probably in the new ship. Fresh cloned mitoses will fill the places beneath us, so instead of eighty-second of eighty-two, we can expect to land in the forties, or even thirties!”

“And,” interjected Two, “probably under a brand-new Commander who may bear us less animosity.”

Three could not help himself. “If there is hard fighting to be done, the new Destroyer will take the lead and the most casualties.”

“All the more reason to rejoice,” One enthused. “If we survive, we will be promoted into the casualties’ places and also gain a greater share of the glory and positive performance reports, so let us cease to babble about the consequences and concentrate on the planning and execution. We must be ready with plans and contingencies to forward our advancement.”

“Since when did you become so ambitious?” Three asked curiously.

“Since I had to share a tiny escape probe with you two,” One retorted. “I find I am eager to gain the perquisites of adequate pod-room, more control of my destiny, and when we inevitably conquer…”

“You wish to blend with a Human.”

One communicated the equivalent of an evil grin. “Perhaps I will. If I do, I will enslave them, lord it over them, and punish them for the trouble they caused us. Or, if denied, I will bide my time and rise in the hierarchy of this new Destroyer.”

“And we are with you, One,” Two said, flicking a warning molecule at Three. Grandiose dreams, Two thought, but he is a beast that might be ridden until it must be abandoned.

***

Rear Fusor One, formerly Survey Commander One and then Recycler One, examined his trium’s new control room with satisfaction. “It is as I said. We have risen to forty-first of eighty-one, and have an important function to perform.”

“Front Fusors would have been better,” Three grumbled. “We won’t get much action.”

“Nor much risk, because statistically the front of the ship sustains four fifths of the potential damage in any battle,” Two reminded.

“Oh. That’s true.” Three brightened a bit.

“More importantly, we now have fresh new subordinates and full access to all sensor feeds.” From his comfortable new container tank One extended a large eyeball to take a position inside a hemispherical screen, and shoved a pseudopod into a communicator port. “This will provide us with maximum information and maximum opportunity.”

“Opportunity?” Two asked.

“One never knows what might come up in the heat of battle,” One opined.

As the new Destroyer grew from its weak half-state, the trium trained with its rearward-facing fusors according to schedule, and more; One insisted on maximum effort, as weapons control was not something with which they possessed the greatest experience. He was determined that they perform with maximum effectiveness, mainly to ensure the potential to become casualties remained as low as possible.

Despite Three’s complaint, this position suited One quite well. Their control chamber was well inside the Destroyer’s skin, at approximately the midpoint of its back hemisphere, so they were unlikely to become casualties. Their duties were mostly defensive and reactive, unless the unlikely event of close-in battle using the short-range fusors occurred.

One judged the situation nearly ideal.

Chapter 46

Daily intelligence briefings on the enemy’s activities had become painfully routine. The analysts tried to wring new data out of the continuous long-range observations, and occasionally they had something to report, but most of the time it was all as bland as unsalted oatmeal, Absen thought.

This time he expected something different; Intel had received the first significant data dump from one of the four stealth probes launched six months ago. The tiny robot ships had been passively gathering information the whole time as they approached the enemy, and from now on would send periodic update packages in tightbeam burst transmissions.

Colonel Zolen had set it up this way so that if any of the scouts were detected, that only one of them would probably be found at a time. Coming in widely separated as they were, she hoped at least one would slip in close before being killed. If they got really lucky, it might even survive to watch from a reasonable distance.

“Good morning Admiral and staff,” she opened, nodding at her boss and the room full of officers. She went on, clicking to her first slide on the big display. “Our preliminary analysis of the first probe data package confirms the suspicions of the minority report; the Destroyer masked its fusion drive signature. It appears to have begun at a size approximately as Raphaela Denham has described: two and a half kilometers in diameter, massing perhaps eighteen billion tons. It has come to rest within a cluster of cometary objects approximately half a light-year from our sun, the closest such grouping in the Hills Cloud subset of the Oort Cloud. In other words, it’s the closest gas station before the Kuiper Belt between Neptune and Pluto.”

“And that would be far too close to us,” Absen observed. “If they waited to stop there, we’d already be attacking them, and no one wants to refuel under fire.”

“Correct, sir. Our probes are approximately here,” she caused four icons to flash on the display, “about three quarters of the way to the enemy’s position, but because of the delay this first report comes from here, only about half way. From now on we should receive information every few days at semi-random times, increasing in frequency as they approach their targets.”

“You said it began at a size we expected?” Scoggins asked from her seat down the table.

“Yes, based on the output of its drive and its observed deceleration speed.” Zolen consulted a tablet. “Realizing the observation distance is still a quarter light year, it appears that the Destroyer was, as of that time, mostly feeding. It has ingested large quantities of materials and now masses over twenty-four billion tons, with a corresponding expansion in diameter and volume.”

“Any idea what it’s going to do with all that mass?” Absen asked.

“We’re still analyzing, sir, but the highest probability is that it is generating an excess of hypervelocity missiles and other war materiel, and is storing processed fuel for its fusion engines. In short, we believe it is gorging itself before battle.”

Absen noted that Zolen had not mentioned the thirty thousand Aardvarks he had sent out to attack. Their mission was a semi-open secret, known but not confirmed to all the senior staff. Their departure on “deep space exercises” had been impossible to conceal, even with ironclad OPSEC procedures, if for no other reason that the Earth-based civilian-controlled radio telescopes observed their departure.

“Are there any other possibilities? Red Team?” Absen looked over at Scoggins, who shifted uncomfortably.

“Sir, we’re only seeing this data now. We can have something for you in a day or two.”

Absen waved a hand in the air. “Indulge me, Commander. Speculate.”

Scoggins cleared her throat and straightened, calling something up on her tablet. “We have a list of possibilities rank-ordered by likelihood. Colonel Zolen briefed the top one. Number two in our estimation is that it will spawn auxiliary ships such as frigates and cruisers to increase its tactical flexibility. This is what we would do in their place, though Mrs. Denham disagrees with the rest of us. She says we are thinking too much like humans, and alien minds are, well…alien.”

“All right. Go on.”

“Possibility three is that it is going to create a lot of cloned engine pods just like we have been using and slap them on comets or asteroids, either out there or in farther at the Kuyper Belt. Most of what’s out there with them is cometary ices, which would make using them as bombardment weapons quite tricky. They wouldn’t be able to take much acceleration without breaking apart. Coming in closer to get asteroids makes a lot more sense, except they have to know we’ll attack them if they do. There are a number of permutations of this scenario.”

“Okay, I get it,” Absen encouraged. “Next?”

“The last possibility with an assessed likelihood more than one percent is that the Destroyer is dividing itself.”

“Dividing itself?”

“Yes, sir. Like an amoeba, splitting in two. Mrs. Denham actually ranks this higher than the other two, based on her understanding of Meme psychology, though most of the rest of us do not. She says that they favor fewer, larger ships, a strategy which maximizes their ability to survive. She says they place more value on their own lives than we do. They don’t like to sacrifice themselves, even if it wins the battle.”

“Dividing or spawning extra ships also avoids an all-or-nothing strategy. If you have just one big ship and you lose it, you lose the battle and maybe the war,” Absen observed.

Captain Forman, Red Team’s psychologist, spoke up. “Admiral, while I am skeptical, I have to advocate for Rae Denham’s position in this case. We think in terms of losses of discrete ships, of damage repairs, and of winning the battle. The Meme think in terms of healing and running, of living to fight another day, because that’s what their ships are – alive or dead. From all we understand, they are what we would call cowardly, but it is a viewpoint tailored to the kind of ships they have. They also take the long view – if they do not win today, they will survive, heal, regroup, and come back with more ships. Tactically, they will expend all their long-range missiles, employ all of their low-risk strategies such as chucking asteroids at us, and then if things are going badly, they will run.”

“Them running is a marginal victory for us,” Absen said.

Ford snorted.

“You have something to say?”

The weapons officer cleared his throat and said, “I just think it’s ironic that if this turns into some kind of stalemate, both sides might think they won.”

“But we would be right,” Scoggins replied, “because for us, survival is winning. Buying time is winning. The more time we have, the more we grow and produce.”

“I agree,” Absen settled that discussion before it turned into its usual Ford-Scoggins scrap. “But back to this two-ship split. Red Team, get with Blue Team and make sure you have COA decision trees for all the possibilities, including that one. I also want to hear a potential COA rank order not by probability but by risk to us. In other words, tell me what enemy COA presents the biggest danger, and tell Blue Team to get working on contingency plans for each.” He turned to Colonel Zolen. “How soon will we know what they are doing?”

“No way to be sure, sir,” she replied, “but every report will tell us more.”

“I hate space. It’s too damn big,” Absen muttered.

***

“It’s confirmed,” Colonel Zolen told Admiral Absen privately four weeks later. “The enemy has split into two. But we are now too far for any message we send to the attack fleet to reach them before the engagement.”

“But the stealth probes have been beaming intel to Yeager, right?”

“The aerospace fleet is networked with point laser comms. If they picked up the probes’ beamcasts – which they should – it will bounce from ship to ship to his on-board computer. It may decide to wake him up early. At least it will be waiting for him first thing, so he can decide what to do.”

“Makes me wish we could have put people on the stealth probes, so they could prioritize the information with a human mind. Computers can’t be relied upon to understand things like that.”

Zolen nodded. “Maybe the AI program will improve things.”

“Not on my watch,” Absen replied. “There’s no way I am going to trust an artificial intelligence with any important task until they have proven themselves, and that won’t happen before the fight.”

“Roger that,” she replied.

“Is there anything we can do to help them now?” Absen asked, then realized he was inquiring of the wrong person. Intel people did not make decisions or policy, and thinking they had all the answers just because information on the enemy was their specialty had led many a commander astray.

Zolen cleared her throat and appeared to choose her words carefully. “I can brief the Red and Blue Teams on all this, and I’m sure they will have some COA adjustments as soon as you want them.”

Absen smiled and nodded. “Good answer, Colonel.” He held up a hand as she bristled a bit. “No, I don’t mean that sarcastically. I have a couple of hundred experts to answer questions like that, and I mean to use them. Just make sure you give them everything you know. OPSEC doesn’t mean a thing if we compartmentalize it all to the point that we can’t use information we know.”

“But sir, what about the enemy agents? Like Simms?”

Absen stared at the woman for a moment. “Even if there are any we haven’t found, they are limited by the speed of light as we are. Counterintelligence and the security people are working overtime on that problem. Leave it to them. For now, I’m more worried about some key fact sitting in some obscure secret file because it’s been overclassified. You’re my J2. Loosen up.”

Zolen pressed her lips together and nodded, clearly withholding something.

“Spit it out, Colonel,” Absen snapped. He wondered to himself if it was a sign of age or stress that he seemed to bark more lately.

Some repressed anger seemed to allow her to overcome her reticence. “That’s it, though, sir. I’m a colonel.”

“So? You bucking for a promotion?”

“Frankly, sir, yes!”

That stopped him, as his question had not really been serious. Like any bureaucracy, the EarthFleet promotion system ground its gears in a very measured way, and except for signing endorsements or making decisions on recommendations his staff came up with, he had little to do with it. He was far too busy with operational details.

“Go on,” Absen said. “Really. I want to hear your concerns.”

“Your J4 Logistics is a former four-star that accepted demotion to two so he could do a job he was eminently suited for. You are your own J3 Ops, but even then you have a one-star deputy to do the day-to-day. J5 Plans is a one-star as well. Somehow, us J2 Intelligence types – and J6 CyberComm for that matter – only rate oh-sixes.” She meant the rank immediately beneath the lowest general officer. “I need a similar rank and status as my counterparts, not for myself, but just to get the job done. And I’ve been doing this job for almost four years. Have I pissed you off somehow? Sir?”

Absen forced himself to look at Zolen, really look at her, and realized that she was right. He’d been taking her for granted, at the very least. Perhaps his operational disdain for the intel weenies had blinded him to the inequities in the system, and he had been letting parts of EarthFleet run itself. He remembered reading about organizational behavior and bureaucracies – back when he had time to read for professional pleasure – and knew that he had neglected certain things too long.

“Colonel, you have done an exemplary job. I promise you I will look into the situation and you will hear something within a week.” Absen gave her a reassuring smile. “Expect good news. If there’s nothing else, send in my aide as you go, will you?”

“Yes sir. Thank you, sir.” Her step seemed light as she left his office.

“Commander,” he said as his aide stepped to the door, “tell the J1 I want to see him at 0800 tomorrow. Tell him to bring EarthFleet org charts down to the O-6 level, as well as have handy the records of every colonel equivalent. Download everything to my desk.”

Chapter 47

Year Nine

Vango Markis opened his eyes to the inside of Lark’s coffin. Despite the biogel lining that eliminated all hot spots and kept bedsores from forming under acceleration, he felt like hell. The thing stank, too; he’d been told to expect that. He’d have thought he’d gotten used to it after almost a year in space, even if he had been asleep most of the time.

Fortunately he’d only experienced three subjective days. Between the chips in his head and the computers in his Aardvark, his sense of passing time had been slowed to the point where this confined space seemed merely irritating rather than unbearable.

Hitting the Decant control caused gravity to come on and the gel to begin draining away, leaving him nude and standing in a cramped shower-like stall. Once he pulled the connectors out of his cranial sockets and put their caps back in, he turned on a spray of gloriously hot water and washed himself thoroughly. It was likely the only such he was going to have unless he survived and returned from this mission.

Reluctantly he stepped out, driven by duty and also by the vaguely unsettled feeling of being unlinked. After a year with his brain connected to the machines, there was definitely something missing, as if background music were suddenly shut off, or a breeze died. He remembered the briefings about virtuality addiction and VR confusion, but those were supposed to only apply after long subjective times in the artificial universe. The whole point of slowing things down was to combat those effects.

Then again, no one had ever been stuck in a coffin for a year with a plug in his head, until now.

The shower chamber door folded into one wall to make a small room about two by two by one meter. Aardvarks did not have much spare space, though not because the fuselage wasn’t large enough. Rather, this was all the room engineers could find by rerouting and rearranging systems that had not originally been designed to accommodate it, not to mention adding more gravplates to make sure the somnolent occupant wasn’t turned into jelly under hard acceleration.

A standard attack ship had a cockpit barely big enough to squeeze into, which had been designed to keep the pilot alive for several days. Theoretically it could have been modified to perform the function of the coffin. In fact, debate had raged about the need to put in the sleep cabin, but in the end the psychologists had convinced the bean counters that the people would function better, significantly better, for not waking up and having to fight in the same place they had been breathing, being fed through tubes, urinating and defecating for a year.

Vango was very glad of it now.

He did some knee bends and stretched. While his muscles had been electrostimulated and his joints had been moved in the coffin, he still felt weak and stiff. The doctors had postulated unknown effects, and so they had been on the side of the head-shrinkers in supporting the extra space.

Once he had worked the kinks out, he turned on the cabin’s screen, which took up one entire wall. It came to life showing a mountain meadow scene, designed to communicate placid openness, with wildflowers waving in a gentle breeze. He left it on as he dressed, taking his time. Wherever they were, the ship systems would have woken him at least twenty-four hours before anticipated combat. Had there been some emergency or other timetable, the ship’s computer would already be hounding him about it.

A few minutes to get his head together wouldn’t hurt.

Skinsuit, G-suit, then exosuit, though if the ship was damaged badly enough that he needed the latter to resist hard vacuum, things would be very bad indeed. Still, he was happy for any edge he could get.

Boots came next, sealing themselves to the exosuit, but he didn’t put the helmet on just yet. Instead, he opened the door to the cockpit.

Movies usually showed such spaces as large, with room to move around. Virtual control obviated any need for that. In this case, Vango turned as he stepped through the door and backed up into his seat that appeared to be bolted to the wall. With no up or down except as dictated by gravplates and acceleration, this arrangement made the most sense.

Now he put on his helmet as he leaned against the vertical seat. Once he’d sealed it and attached his suit to its various feeds – air, water, cooling, sewage, and the all-important electronics – he closed the cockpit hatch and started on his checklist, running down all of Lark’s systems manually, according to the book. Some pilots took the shortcut and skipped this step, relying on the cybernetic systems to tell them if anything went wrong, but he doggedly stuck to the manual.

Soon he found something…odd. Two of his sixteen Pilum missiles had been launched during his long sleep, and he’d not been notified. It must have been a command override, some kind of change of plan.

Also, that niggling feeling was becoming a full-blown jones to link, confirming his suspicion; VR space was addictive, even when subjective time was slowed. Being connected for that long hadn’t done him any favors, and he wanted to find out just how bad it would get.

It got bad. He’d long since finished the checklists and so just sat there, alone in his suit in his tiny cockpit, another kind of coffin: one in which he might die. Waves of anxiety washed over him, and he doggedly ignored his medcomp when it suggested administering something to take the edge off.

Over a half hour went by on the clock before an incoming message pinged its alert. He took it on audio only.

The voice of Vango’s squadron leader, Richard “Dick” Hiser, spoke calmly. “Two Sierra Thirty-three, this is Two Sierra Thirty. What’s the trouble, Vango?”

Vango reached out to switch to a private channel. “I’m here, boss. Feeling some kind of psychological effects. Trying to see what the limits are before I plug in.”

“What kind of effects?”

“I think it’s some kind of VR addiction.”

“Yeah. Some others have reported it too. You just have to link up and it will go away.”

Vango licked his lips. “I don’t like adding to the problem before I even know what it is.”

Hiser’s voice took on an edge of irritation. “If this were training, I’d agree with you, but we’re twenty-two hours out and I need you in the link. You’re the last one in the whole damned armada, and you’re holding everyone up. Plug in now.”

“Yes, sir.” Vango couldn’t keep a certain sulkiness out of his voice, but the young pilot forced himself to be professional. Hiser was right anyway, Vango thought. The possibility of addiction or scrambling his brains was far smaller than the threat of being killed.

Or of failure. He plugged in.

Immediately all the negative emotions went away with his physical self. Instead, he now felt as if he occupied the body of a hundred meter long machine equipped with the best systems humanity could build. Cameras, radar and lidar were his new eyes, radios his ears. Lark’s hull was his skin, his legs his engine and thrusters, and his weapons, fists with which to smite his enemies.

Glorious.

Around him he saw a handful of attack boats on optical, none closer than ten kilometers away. Tiny comm lasers painted these nearest kin, and Vango knew theirs painted him and their neighbors in turn, connecting all thirty-thousand-odd ships in a vast web. As none of the vessels pointed their beams forward, none would be detectable to the enemy they now presumably approached.

The planners had predicted that even such a large number of ships would be invisible in the vastness of space, given their small size, stealthy radar-detecting angles and absorptive coatings. As the armada got closer the probability of detection increased, of course, but they hoped to delay that moment as long as possible.

“Go ahead and initiate your briefing package,” Hiser said, and Vango told the computer to comply. Immediately space opened up like a high-res 3D video game. Inside virtual reality he could send his presence swooping to any point, view from any angle, as long as the information was there.

General Yeager’s recorded voice seemed to speak in his ear. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is One Alpha One. We are here.” A vast disc, over two thousand kilometers across, flashed blue in his view, representing all of the armada arrayed like an enormous pizza pan coasting silently through space, flat side to the enemy. Where they thought the enemy should be, that is.

“Here is the enemy location EarthFleet intel predicted. Like all intel tends to be, this is true, but still wrong. The stealth drones have spotted something here.” A point far off to the side flashed once, then turned a steady red. “In fact, two somethings. Two separate intermittent drive emanations, of low power but still easily detectable. Observation data records backtrack them to the predicted location’s vicinity, so we know the readings are associated with the Meme ships, but we don’t know why there are two. Worst case, there could be two Destroyers. Or it could be a couple of auxiliaries doing who knows what. Intel predicted they would graze out here, but they also said it would only take them a few weeks to refuel.”

On the recording Yeager took a deep, ragged breath, sounding tired. That didn’t make sense to Vango; the old man was a rejuv after all, and the Eden Plague should have restored his vitality just like it had his own grandfather David and his father Daniel. He wondered.

“In fact, this whole force is now headed for this position,” Yeager’s voice went on, and a cursor moved to indicate a point midway between the enemy’s original and current locations. “That was the best I could do on cold thrusters alone.”

Cold thrusters meant just liquefied gases, heated enough to use as reaction mass. The ability of these tiny weak jets was limited, but they had none of the energy signature of fusion motors or chemical rockets. In this case, Vango deduced the general had used them to alter the fleet’s course.

Quickly Vango had the computer run calculations extrapolating backward, using the strength of the cold thrusters and the distances involved. When he saw the numbers, he realized the fleet had begun to turn, very slowly, more than sixty days ago. That’s how early he must have altered course to achieve even that much.

He shuddered. General Yeager had been awake for nine weeks.

Now Vango examined the geometry and realized that they were nearing the point where they would have to light up their fusion engines if they intended to engage the enemy, or go flashing past. Once they went hot, they would be visible for all to see.

Now he knew why Yeager sounded so rough. He’d been living in a box the size of a closet, in and out of VR space, for two months. If he felt the way Vango had, he’d been fighting the effects of VR addiction outside the link, and then making it worse by giving in to the urge. At best he could slow his time sense now and then to make the hours pass faster, but unlike in the coffin, he had to get out of the suit and the cockpit from time to time.

There also wasn’t nine weeks of food and water there, not at normal activity levels. He must have either starved himself, or put himself back in the coffin one more time. There was only enough biogel for two uses – one out, one back. If he had done that, Yeager might have given up his only chance to get home.

Vango’s stomach roiled despite the VR overlay. The man was a legend, a bona-fide hero, from the Second World War on through the time of the space race and into this uncertain future. Rejuvenation had given him another shot at glory, but eventually everyone’s number came up.

Vango rewound the recording once he realized he had stopped listening, and picked up where the general’s voice had left off. “So here’s the plan. At IP Alpha, we begin a maximum burn to fall on the enemy like a blanket.” Lines and diagrams swept through the VR space, showing the proposed routes. The disc of the armada, or blanket in the general’s metaphor, flexed forward at the edges until it became concave, the Meme ship or ships at the center.

“Calculations show that if they react immediately and violently, they can skate out from under our blanket. As far as we know, even big Meme ships can accelerate faster than we can. But they can’t accelerate fast enough to avoid these, not as fast as they are already going. ”

A green ring appeared, off to the side and forward of the armada and centered on the enemy. It was larger than the edge of their circle of ships, and traveled only a bit faster. “I’m sure you all noticed that you lost two missiles each from your load. I launched them some time back, when I was revived. Using their chemical guidance thrusters only, I had them maneuvered into the position you see. I am hoping that if the enemy runs for the edge of the blanket, some of these missiles will catch them. We won’t be that far behind. If the warheads can slow the enemy down, perhaps we can finish them off.”

“That’s the worst case. The best case is that we catch them flatfooted. Maybe they decide to attack us or break straight through us, giving us an opportunity to damage or even destroy them. Whatever happens, though, remember that flexibility is the key to airpower. I can’t control thirty thousand ships, or even thirty wing commanders. Be aggressive and you can’t go wrong.”

“And trading us for them is a win for Earth. We all knew that when we started. Damaging them will mean they are less capable when they get to the solar system, or that they will have to go back to feeding and healing, delaying them significantly. That is also a win for Earth. Every day, week or month we buy means more ships and more weapons at home.”

The general’s voice strengthened once more. “I’ll leave you now to coordinate with your units. Remember your duty, remember your loved ones behind you. Remember Earth. Good luck, and good hunting.”

Emotions flooded into the silence the general had left behind. Fear, uncertainly, and hatred toward the enemy that threatened his home, but also determination and desire, the joy and eagerness to engage the hated Meme no matter what they looked like or what kind of ships they had. The simulations gave thirty thousand ships an outside chance of beating a Destroyer.

Vango resolved to do his part, or die trying.

***

Vango’s clock crossed T minus sixteen hours, coming up on Lark’s IP Alpha, the point in space where he would start his burn. All systems checked out fully green, especially the internal gravplates that would counterbalance the enormous G forces of the course change. He watched the numbers count down, and then turned over the initiation to his computer.

Lark groaned as she took up the strain, gravplates overloaded to seven percent above rated maximum. At this level they could expect to lose roughly one in a thousand ships to some kind of failure. If they were lucky it would be something small and fixable. If not… thirty losses was an acceptable number, in the general’s estimation, Vango figured. He just hoped he would not be one of them.

Stress meters showed everything green, with a few systems in the yellow. He switched to backup on those he could and brought everything into the green again. Lark was a good, tight ship, and he knew her inside and out.

She’d hold together.

His tactical VR display filled in some holes, and some ships, even whole squadrons, seemed to teleport into new positions as the armada’s net came up to full power and activity. With no more need for stealth, each Aardvark could now use its comm suite.

Only a tenth of the ships went on active sensors, though, to hide their numbers. Return echoes and datalinks filled in the gaps for the others.

Tiny dots began to appear in front of the formation, shooting through it suddenly like dust motes. Occasionally one of the armada’s ships winked out. When Vango queried the computer, it told him what he saw were chunks of ice and rock, the leading edge of the section of the Hills Cloud they approached. Despite the enormous dispersion of ships and pieces, occasionally one would intersect the other, and at the speed they were traveling, any ship that struck something larger than a golf ball was likely dead.

For over five hours they blasted, engines straining to divert the armada’s headlong traveling rush toward the Meme’s old position into a tactical envelopment of the new. As they flew they waited the time it would take for the light of their burns to reach the enemy and then the evidence of his response to come back to the fleet. Vango thought how strange it was that at this distance, several light-hours, each side peered into the past, and would react with information that was, in tactical terms, ancient. He sincerely hoped the general was as good as his reputation, and got the jump on the Meme.

Vango watched as lights continued to wink out one by one. He could have queried why each did so, but he really did not want to know whether they died from stress failure or collision with space debris or some other reason. Some of the tiny dots stayed on but ceased to maneuver, continuing in straight lines along paths sending them out into space. He didn’t ask about those either; they must retain some function but their engines had failed, and no one could do anything for them without abandoning the fight. If the pilots were lucky they could put themselves back into their coffins, eventually to get chased down and picked up.

Sometime. If there was anyone left to do it.

Vango sharpened his attention coming up on the time where they should begin seeing the enemy’s reaction. Unsurprisingly, it was not as expected. In other words, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Chapter 48

Alarm molecules washed through the new young Destroyer, jolting Trium Forty-One, Rear Fusors, from somnolence into full alertness. In their control chamber the three Meme extended eyeballs and jammed pods into communication ports, absorbing information at prodigious rates.

“What in the Name of the One Above All Ones is that?” Two asked, designating the thousands of point sources approaching their position.

“It appears the Humans have launched very large missiles at us,” One replied flatly. “They must be missiles to be so numerous, and are only now becoming visible. We would have seen real ships, and the evident drive and vector analysis correlates to craft the sizes of a Survey vessel.”

“Such as we used to occupy,” Three said wistfully. “I was happy then.”

“Please try to focus your attention on current reality,” One snapped.

“Is it possible they are not missiles, but small craft?” Two ventured.

“Unlikely. Possible,” One said grudgingly.

“Should we not report our speculation?”

“No,” One replied. “We are still in disfavor. Besides, if we think of it, others will as well. Better to ensure rear fusors are fully healed and fuelled.”

“Understood.” Two and Three busied themselves with bringing their weapons up to optimum efficiency.

“There are many thousands,” One mused, as was his occasional wont, expressing his thoughts. The other two had seen this propensity grown over the years, but it did not seem to impair One’s efficiency. “I wonder how powerful each one is.”

“Shall I calculate how powerful they would have to be to overwhelm us?” Three asked obsequiously.

“There is no point to that,” Two objected. “There are far too many factors to predict – maneuver, distance, velocity, warhead size, radiation yield.”

“Yes,” concurred One. “We must wait for more information.”

Three closed his pores and slumped back in his holding tank, thinking how his existence so often involved boredom. He dreamed of the day he could blend. Then, life would become truly wonderful, not only for its fleshly pleasures, but because no One would lord it over him anymore.

Chapter 49

Two large fusion burns announced the presence of EarthFleet’s target ships, shining beacons of energy that grew and grew, pointed at the center of the Aardvark armada. With practiced calculations and special senses, using the power of the flares and their sources’ observed acceleration, Vango determined that they faced two ships of roughly fifteen billion tons each, a significant deviation from the expected twenty billion ton single ship. He uploaded his estimation to the net, knowing it would be passed and synchronized with others that did the same.

Because the fusion drives pointed directly at the center of the fleet, it was obvious they were running directly away from the blanket of ships and at an angle to the most direct route to the solar system. We’ve already won a small victory, Vango thought. No matter what, they had interrupted the two Destroyers, if that’s what they were, in their feeding, and had driven them farther outward from home.

As soon as the enemy drives lit, those of the fleet’s advanced missile ring did so as well. With the lightspeed delay in all directions, some of the weapons would take longer than others to see their enemy and react, or get orders, and the actions of some would take longer than others to be seen by the fleet. It was very hard to keep in his head, even with the VR aid.

While the concave blanket of pursuing Aardvarks had canted itself toward the enemy as they ran at an angle, the green circle’s edge marched implacably forward. Eventually all of the missiles marked in that ring began to converge toward the enemy. Yeager’s gambit had succeeded so far: at least some of the weapons would reach the Destroyers sometime in the next hour.

A swarm of new bogeys now appeared in his tactical VR, two distinct groups of about sixty each, accelerating at frightening velocity toward the fleet. Hypers, Vango thought. Destination lines appeared as his computer extrapolated the individual enemy missiles’ courses toward friendly ships. As his squadron was well off to what the common display called “right” of the center, none of them came near him.

He wondered why so few, for such large ships. Intel had theorized Destroyers could launch thousands of hypers at a time. On the other hand, the living weapons took time to be created within the ships, to gestate. Perhaps the enemy was, after all, caught flatfooted without weapons ready, and now ran away to buy time to make more.

Vango watched as the six score missiles accelerated toward the middle of the fleet. On the display they crawled, but considering the distance between the two sides, they must be moving at awesome speeds. Given time, Intel theorized Meme hypers could achieve half of lightspeed before they ran out of fuel, although to do so would mean any evasion by their target would cause them to miss.

That highlighted the eternal problem of missiles in space: fast was great against fixed, nonmaneuvering targets, but made terminal guidance against smaller ones – like the Aardvarks – almost impossible. On the other hand, slower meant less damage and more time to react, but more time for the hyper to guide. The armada was getting a firsthand lesson in their enemy’s actual tactics, for which it would certainly pay in blood.

Eventually the plots intersected. According to the numbers, the hypers had boosted to just under .1 c and then coasted, maneuvering violently as they tried to strike their targets in their terminal phase. Of the one hundred twenty-eight missiles, only three had connected with Aardvarks. Each attack ship had been utterly vaporized, but Vango thought those casualties surprisingly light.

He could hear an odd sound through his comm net, eventually realizing it was cheers picked up by the voice-activated mikes of his squadron mates. Although he didn’t feel like celebrating at the deaths of three of his comrades, he understood their sentiment; the fleet had gotten off easy, and the enemy wasn’t ten feet tall anymore.

And EarthFleet had learned something. Already no doubt watching sensor drones were pumping data back toward the solar system, important intelligence about how the enemy employed their weapons.

Vango wondered what became of the hypers that missed, and queried the net. His display showed that, rather than trying to swing around and chase the Aardvarks, they were gradually turning on minimum thrust in the direction of the solar system. Smart, he thought. Might as well send them cruising in to hit something of ours. Maybe they would double as some kind of sensor drones, too.

He uploaded that observation to the net as well. Every computer was supposed to store and distribute the pilots’ various ideas and lessons learned, and every minute or two one of the surviving ships would automatically burst-transmit them back to EarthFleet. With no big ships and no intelligence staff, this was the best they could do.

It had long ago occurred to Vango that one important reason they were out here was to provide live combat testing of the Aardvarks and their tactics. Even if they all died, the A-24s being built back home would be piloted by people with a better understanding of what they faced.

A few minutes later he began to sense increasing tension throughout the net. Given their shared VR space, echoes of the pilot’s feelings, subvocalized unconsciously or bleeding into the cybernetic systems, were always an issue. Damping software, like the squelch function on an old radio, kept it manageable, but the stronger the emotions, the harder it was to suppress without losing chunks of connectivity or dropping out entirely.

Vango figured the bleed-over was due to everyone watching the converging missile ring so intently. The Pilums overtook slowly, so slowly, as the enemy sought to stretch out the engagement from the rear, gaining themselves more time to pick them off.

Most of the missiles had locked on to the nearest, rearmost of the two ships. In the general’s place that’s how Vango would have programmed them: chase and kill only one target. Half a loaf…

Clusters of green merged together, and Vango swooped his virtual viewpoint in closer and closer, until it seemed he rode along with the missiles. Even though intellectually he knew all of this data was half an hour old from the lightspeed delay and what he was seeing had already happened, he felt the rush of the kill, and found himself yelling and cheering the Pilums on.

Doing so also gave him his first good view of the Destroyers. He had no sense of scale, but the two ships looked like footballs, each with one enormous fusion motor at the back and hundreds of fusor ports, large and small, spread over their skins like puckers on ostrich hide.

The flare of the enemy drive swung back and forth, reaching hundreds of kilometers to incinerate several missiles at a time, but those numbers were mere pittances. Sixty thousand Pilums chased the ship, closing at tens of kilometers per second. Smart enough not to try to fly right up the Meme’s engine, the fusion-armed drones blasted on parallel courses, aiming at points ahead of their target.

As the lead missiles drew closer, heavy fusor blasts flared out, directed jets of plasma scores of kilometers long. While inherently inaccurate, they made up for it in destructive power and sheer size, incinerating hundreds of missiles at a time.

But many hundreds among sixty thousand still left a lot of missiles.

Closer and closer the cloud of fusion weapons bore in, still accelerating. Despite the drive and the fusors wiping out great swaths of missiles, it looked like at least half of them would get close enough to damage the enemy.

Given that the Destroyer was about two and a half kilometers across, there was a lot of enemy to damage.

Chapter 50

Rear Fusor One had his pods full, even with the stern fusors in semi-autonomous mode. He controlled half of the available weapons, with Two controlling a third and the less dependable Three with one sixth. Frantically he coordinated the flow of fuel to the fusion plenums, ensuring the gouts of hydrogen were pushed peristaltically through the supply arteries.

Forcing the new and rather stupid Destroyer to function at maximum combat efficiency took pods-on control at all time for the Meme crew. It consumed many cycles for the training to take hold, even though it had the benefit of molecular memories from before its mitosis. There was a known, strange and mystical effect of consciousness that meant that only one of the two great ships truly carried forward its full experiences. The other, lesser being started sluggish, an animal that had to be goaded and taught.

No matter, thought One. We have enough crew to closely manage its functions.

He had less confidence in the overall combat situation. No one would ever call One a coward, but the tens of thousands of missiles bearing down on the two young Destroyers did not bode well. They would cause a number of casualties, and he began to regret that he had influenced Commander One to divide the original, stronger ship.

More and more Human missiles died, but still more came on. There was simply no way his rear weapons would be able to intercept them all, even with the drive at full power with its aperture widened, like a giant fusor itself.

Then, on the ship-wide network he tasted, “Prepare to spin the ship. All rear fusors to continuous fixed fire.”

For a moment One did not comprehend the order, though his well-trained pods input the molecular control sequences automatically. Spin the ship? Fixed fire? The only reason to spin the ship that he knew was to reverse and unblock certain flows within the body of the great beast, and fusors could hardly be expected to destroy missiles without aiming.

He followed orders, though; as clever as he thought himself to be, he knew that both the Command and the Tactical tria had far more experience, and he wasn’t about to make a fool of himself by asking why.

A moment later he praised the wisdom of his leaders as Destroyer 6223-2 began to rotate around its long axis and his fusors turned from intermittent blasting to continuous hoses of flame sweeping the surrounds with hot plasma. Combined with opening the main drive’s nozzle wide and inducing a certain deliberate wobble, they achieved near continuous coverage of the stern hemisphere, slaughtering the enemy missiles by the thousands, the tens of thousands.

One exulted in his natural Meme superiority, until he noticed the rate of his fuel expenditure. Gluttons at the best of times, now the weapons gulped fuel like ravenous slave-beasts.

Chapter 51

Vango saw the Meme reveal another tactic, a reason that they had run away, gaining them more time to engage. The rear Destroyer began to spin, slightly off center, like a wobbly football pass. At the same time its stern fusors went to continuous fire, blowtorches of pinwheel fireworks swirling through the space behind the ship like a skirt of flame. Added to the cone of the drive as it blasted, whirling, the whole back half of the enemy ship emanated a killing zone for hundreds of kilometers, a hemisphere of destruction.

A groan surged through the net, and Vango was not certain whether he joined them or just heard them. He wondered how long the Destroyer could keep up that prodigious use of fuel; it must be burning millions of tons per second. How much tritium and deuterium must it expend before it was forced to use simple hydrogen, reducing its efficiency further?

Each Pilum datalinked with its neighbors, avoiding collisions and fratricidal explosions, spreading themselves out until the last moment of attack. Some of the missiles had swung wide enough to avoid the blasting wreath of fusion plasma. Even as thousands of missiles dove into the hot sea to die, others arced in before the Destroyer and turned to attack from the front.

Vango had been watching the target Meme so closely that he missed the other one dropping back to help its fellow. As the ten thousand or so surviving Pilums closed in on one, the other ceased its acceleration and rolled to point its own nose to the back. As the rearmost Destroyer still accelerated, this had the effect of allowing it, and the fleet missiles, to catch up.

At extreme range the inverted Destroyer fired all of its forward fusors and kept firing as the distance closed. Had the living ship done so even ten or twenty seconds earlier, it might have succeeded in wiping out all of the Pilums. For whatever reason – Meme are not infallible, Vango reminded himself – it had delayed just long enough.

Out of more than sixty thousand missiles, a few hundred got through to within effective blast radius. Sophisticated algorithms in the missiles’ computers selected their detonation times, and they began exploding just before the fusors touched them. The enormous warheads, yielding ten megatons each, also powered bomb-pumped graser clusters that fired deadly beams of gamma rays in tight spreads toward the target.

Because the fight took place at long distance and the nose of the hindmost Destroyer faced away from the fleet, the VR display could not show Vango or anyone else much of the direct effect of the Pilums. Also, with the tremendous energies pouring from the defending ships and the exploding missiles, the whole area of the display turned milky white and showed only ghostly outlines of what the computers guessed was happening.

Representative flashes sparked in VR space, completely understating the ravening energies of the missiles’ fusion warheads. Had one of them been detonated on Earth it would have devastated everything for a hundred kilometers around. In space, though, the zone of effect did not reach so far, lacking any medium to transmit the shock and blast.

Vango hoped the graser beams would be reaching deep into the Destroyers with penetrating fingers, gamma rays slaughtering untold trillions of living cells, and perhaps actual Meme or whatever else crewed the mobile moonlets. At the same time the plasma from the naked blasts would be burning the ships’ armored skin, bubbling and crisping it like bacon in a pan. Unless the armor was too thick. No one knew for sure how strong it was.

Intel had estimated that skin to be at least five hundred meters deep, and made of a chitin-like substance infused with biologically generated ferrocrystal harder than any steel. Only a warhead detonated on its very surface would likely crack it, and that kind of timing was very, very difficult. Vango had to hope that repeated damage, the attrition of multiple blows, would weaken and slow the monster enough to catch up and finish it off.

Slowly the display cleared with the dispersing of titanic energies. Swooping in, probably as many of the fleet’s pilots were doing, Vango could see the less-damaged Destroyer maneuver to fall back behind its companion. That one showed definite deterioration around its waist, which was all the armada’s sensors could actually see. Moving his point of view around to the front of the enemy only yielded a bland, computer-generated simulation of an undamaged surface.

One effect he could see was that the injured ship had reduced thrust drastically. In fact – Vango checked the numbers – the fleet was now slowly overtaking the two. Many hours would pass before they were in direct fire range, but missiles…

Just as this thought entered Vango’s mind, the squadron commander came onto the net with instructions. “This is Two Sierra One. All right people, the general says we’re to fire one more missile each. I’m uploading instructions to coordinate them. We continue to chase in this big fleet blanket formation. Everyone maintain station on me, and wait for my mark.”

Vango acknowledged digitally rather than verbally, else the thirty-some pilots would step all over each other on the net. Datalinks were more efficient for most things, though he was happy to hear the voice chatter now and again. It made him feel less alone.

A telltale flashed, informing him the automated systems were feeding his body, pumping food down a tube in his throat and metering liquid into his veins. He could have chosen to withdraw part or all of his consciousness from the virtuality, but he decided against it. The suite of machinery dedicated to keep him alive showed all in the green. He felt no need to go back to being a little man in a big machine, when he could remain a flying bird of space.

If he lived, he might have to face a hell of VR withdrawal, but for now, he soared among the stars.

“All Two Sierra,” Dick’s voice recited once more. “Launch one missile at target two on my mark. Ready. Mark.”

Vango executed this command with the practiced ease of thousands of launches in the simulators and a few live dummy missiles. Only after he had kicked his loose did he actually think about doing it.

Around him he saw thirty-one other missiles from his squadron launch and speed away toward one of the enemy ships, and then thousands more from the other Aardvarks. Calculations read that they would catch up in about two hours assuming their targets did not go back to full burn, or six hours if they did. While Meme could outrun ships of EarthFleet, they couldn’t outrun their missiles.

However, these overtaking Pilums would be lucky to get close enough for their fusion warheads to do damage. The two Destroyers continued to stretch out the engagement time to allow them to pick off the incoming missiles. Vango knew Yeager was fighting a chess match with a limited number of pieces – ammo and ships – and playing for the end game.

He checked his own tanks of tritium-deuterium. Except for antimatter, a highly experimental technology at best, this was the most potent fuel known to man. It fused within the ferrocrystal plenum of the best engines humanity could produce, and then flung out the back through a nozzle that accelerated the resulting hot plasma to an appreciable fraction of lightspeed.

About a fifth had been used so far. The Aardvarks had arrived filled by enormous tankers before exiting the solar system. Vango knew consideration had been given to sending more tankers along, but that idea had been rejected. The relatively tiny and stealthy attack ships might be missed in the deep of space, but a bloated refueler couldn’t be cloaked. Instead, three motherships with repair and refuel capability followed more slowly, a month back. Those might be able to save pilots and ships that otherwise wouldn’t make it.

Vango ran through a quick systems check, then took a look at the Destroyers again. They appeared to be cruising under minimal acceleration, perhaps conserving fuel. By the numbers, they should not have seen the next wave of missiles launched at them, and once they did, it would take almost an hour for the fleet to see their reaction.

The two Meme seemed oddly close to each other. Vango zoomed his view in and found the enemy actually touching side to side, like two slightly deflated footballs. He keyed his mike and called his flight lead.

“Token, this is Vango. Take a close look at the Destroyers. What do you see?”

“Umm…sec…huh. Looks like two whales having relations.”

Vango laughed. Token was the son of a Baptist preacher and never let a vulgar word pass his lips. A moment later he stopped laughing. “I think you figured it out. They must be mated or docked. Why, do you think?”

“One helping the other make repairs? Refueling? Or some unknowable reason of their own.”

“Yeah.” Vango wished he could feel his body enough to chew on the inside of his cheek. “I’m uploading it with a priority tag.”

“You don’t think someone else has already noticed?”

“Somebody has to be the first. Maybe it’ll be me.”

“Bucking for promotion?”

Vango let loose a virtual sigh. “I suspect everyone who makes it out of here will get promoted.”

“Heck of a way to get a bump.”

“Hey, that was almost a curse word!”

It was Token’s turn to laugh. “The heck it was.”

Vango fell silent as he kept straining his senses, trying to figure out what the two were doing, but nothing changed so he checked on the inbound missiles. Still an hour and a half away.

Chapter 52

“Fusor fuel reserves are depleted to unacceptable levels,” Two remarked.

“Understood. I have reported the situation,” One responded.

“What will we do? We can’t fight without fuel. We should never have divided Destroyer 6223,” whined Three.

“If not, we would still be repairing hernias and tasting excrement,” snapped One. “We still have enough to fight, and the Command tria know the situation as well as we do.” He held up a pod in a gesture of ingesting communication. “I have just received word our supplies will be replenished.”

“How –”

“From 6223,” Two snarled at the hapless Three. “That’s the only possibility. Am I correct?”

“You are,” One replied. “Three, cease your vocalizations and attend to your duties. Prepare to receive and rebalance the fuel supplies.”

“Yes, One,” Three said, trying to just concentrate on his job.

For a long, nerve-wracking time they received the precious gas, but One noticed it was all lowest-grade hydrogen. He turned a secondary eyeball in Two’s direction, then extended a pod to the other Meme’s tank to poke him.

“What?”

“They are giving us only hydrogen.”

Two got it right away. “Command trium 6223 is reserving the best fuel for themselves.”

“Perhaps they are just being prudent.”

“Perhaps they are preparing to sacrifice us,” Two said with as few transfer molecules as possible, aimed directly at One’s receptors.

“No...” One replied similarly after a moment’s pause. “Certainly 6223-2 will be made to take the brunt of the attack, but the experienced crew aboard this ship is too valuable to just throw it away. We will be taken off before we are lost.” He tried to put conviction into his words.

“Let us hope you are right.”

“What are you two conversing about?” Three interjected, snaking a pod across the floor to the place where One and Two almost touched.

“Nothing!” they replied in unison, and withdrew to their tanks, leaving Three feeling very worried indeed.

“Get back to your duties,” One added more gently. “We will survive and advance. Five of the True Race above us have been killed. Eventually tria will be consolidated and we will move up.” Now was not the time to cut away the weak link in their trium. One never knew if another might be worse. At least he knew how to browbeat Three into compliance.

Chapter 53

Suddenly the Meme’s behavior changed, the two Destroyers drawing away from each other. Vango couldn’t tell for sure but he had a gut feeling they were somehow weakened. Or maybe he imagined it. It also looked like the lead ship was a bit bigger than the trailing one. He wondered what that could mean even as he uploaded that observation.

One of them, the original leader he thought, drew slightly ahead and to the side, taking up a guard position better suited to intercept missiles than the last time. Once it had done so, both great ships brought their engines up to what looked like full cruise, and the closure rate dropped slightly. However, the delay had allowed the fleet’s missiles to gain velocity impossible to overcome.

Now came a general order to the Aardvarks to shut down their acceleration, only using enough thrust to keep station and adjust their ragged blanket formation into something more resembling a concave disc again, centered on the enemy. With slightly over a quarter of his fuel depleted, Vango knew that bingo was not far away. Because the fleet had been running generally away from the solar system the whole time, they needed about three fifths of their tanks to make it home within the ability of the coffins to keep them alive.

It was time to coast.

Now Vango really wished for those refuelers, but put it out of his mind. No point in wanting the impossible. Instead he slowed his time sense once again so the virtuality sped up around him, knowing the computer would return him from fast-forward mode if anything came up.

The chasing missiles seemed to leap forward impossibly fast, and what felt like a minute later they closed on the waiting Destroyers. Speeding himself up again brought Vango back to realtime, and he watched avidly as close to thirty thousand missiles converged on the enemy.

This time the weapons had plenty of time and information to set up perfectly. The enemy had not maneuvered. Doing so would have used extra fuel for both prey and predators, and would have complicated the Destroyers’ brute-force response to the attack. In their place Vango would have burned hard sideways at the last minute to complicate the Pilums’ targeting and skew their formation, but then, he wasn’t Meme. Perhaps they had something up their sleeves.

If they had sleeves.

Again the cloud of missiles enveloped the enemy like a concave hemisphere, a cup trying to scoop the Destroyers up from behind. This brought the maximum number from as many directions as possible, from the entire back half of their firing arcs.

As fusors reached out to touch them, the missiles detonated themselves. Their computers had been programmed by the best minds of the Blue Team, who had determined that a missile detonated was much better than a missile burned to a crisp. Even at extreme range the bomb-pumped graser cluster could do damage, and the blast itself served to disperse the hot plasma, gouging a hole in space that allowed any following missiles to get that much closer. Electromagnetic pulse and thermal overload might also interfere with the Destroyers’ targeting systems.

So each shell of missiles, from the inside out, sacrificed itself to gain a little bit of distance for its fellows following. Explosions marched on the display closer and closer to the enormous enemy ships.

The rearmost one suddenly spun madly as before, spraying plasma in all directions, though…Vango ran a comparison with the earlier scenario, and determined that its energy output was down by over fifteen percent, and the missiles were exploding closer in.

The forward Destroyer did not turn its nose backward this time, but rather engaged in a modified version of its fellow’s defensive gyrations, swinging its drive flame back and forth in a plane that provided defensive coverage of one side of the sternward ship. This allowed it to more or less keep station very close to the other, as little as ten kilometers away. Given the size of the two ships, this constituted only four or five of their own diameters.

The lead ship also fired its fusors profligately, taking down dozens of missiles per shot. Vango wondered about hypers, and then realized that such weapons were useless to engage missiles coming in so fast. Trying to strike one with another at these speeds was like trying to shoot bullets with bullets.

At least we’re keeping them burning resources, and they’re not shooting at us, he thought. They’re not so tough after all. Then, belatedly, a sailor’s superstition about assuming victory overcame him. What the hell am I doing tempting fate? I shouldn’t even be thinking such a thing.

That concern became a punch in the gut as the situation he watched suddenly changed again.

Just as before, the enemy’s torch-like defensive sweeps had cleared nearly all of the missiles from the bottom of the cup formation, leaving a thick ring sweeping up the sides and curling inward to attempt a maneuver similar to last time, trying to hit them from the front where their drives could not be used as shields. Or, Vango thought, if they are, they will be decelerating back toward us, giving up their advantage.

Putting the lie to his prediction, both Destroyers abruptly flipped end over end, their main drives flaring even brighter. Either they were now at overload levels, or their thrust capability was even greater than predicted.

This maneuver seemed to catch the missiles flatfooted. Of course this was an illusion; machines could not be surprised, but they could and did take precious time to run the new situation through their processors and select from a list of alternatives, then distribute all those updates through their network.

In that brief moment the Destroyers seemed to dive back down the inside of that ring, putting the circling missiles behind them as they flew past. Now they were able to use their drives again on the majority of the Pilums, at the cost of allowing the pursuing Aardvarks to gain a lot of ground in their coasting chase.

“Let’s go, boys,” Dick’s voice came over the squadron net just a moment after the datalinked command told them to go to full burn again. The fleet’s commanders had seen immediately that they might have an opportunity to catch up, despite the lightspeed delay. The closer they got to their enemies, the more accurate their information became…and the nearer everyone got to their final options.

Inside the VR world Vango imagined he could feel the G forces as Lark leaped toward the enemy, using the chance to get as close as possible. “Everyone launch two more Pilums, nearest target protocol,” the squadron leader continued. “Fleet will push updates.”

Vango wondered how the general was holding up. The man must be running on the ragged edge of stims and adrenaline, and though his ship Glennis II had extra command and control capability, it was still an Aardvark, still just a tiny tube in space like the rest of them had, compared to the monsters they chased and stung.

Dumping the mass of two more weapons allowed the fleet to accelerate even more quickly, and now he felt like they had a chance to catch up. The distance and time to intercept fell faster and faster, though not as fast as he would like. Pilums away, he looked back at the fight situation, and gave a groan that probably could be heard on the net.

The two Destroyers had dove through the center of the ring of missiles and left behind those they had not destroyed. Switching positions now, the smaller, more damaged one led while the larger ship, in better shape but heavier, fell slightly behind. It took only a few moments for it to clear all of the Pilums that had tried to reverse course with them.

Sixty thousand more missiles converged on the enemy, this time adopting a swept-back conical formation, point toward the Destroyers. This position provided the optimum parameters for a nose-on engagement, where density of weapons swelled in importance, and their dispersion diminished. With so much less time available as the two forces closed, detonations would be timed in milliseconds, perhaps nanoseconds. Often the weapons would be exploded by their computers almost as if they were mines set in the way of the Destroyers, but even machine speed would be hard pressed to hit targets at combined velocities approaching relativistic territory.

The best they could do was form a kind of explosive gauntlet, filling the two ships’ intended paths with graser beams, plasma shockwaves and debris.

The entire fleet of twenty-some-thousand ships, minus the many that were out of action due to failure or collision with Hills Cloud objects, tightened up, mimicking the cone of missiles, getting in the way of the enemy. It appeared to be an ideal situation for the Aardvarks, a nose-on fleet confrontation that would cost thousands of ships but would also allow them to bring most of their firepower directly on the Destroyers. Vango knew the general had no choice but to take the chance offered. Losing half, three quarters, even all of the fleet to destroy these two would be a tremendous victory, buying years of life for Earth and the solar system.

Chapter 54

“Maintain continuous fire, all rear fusors,” One said again, showing his nervousness. With one eye on the fuel gauge and one on the status boards, he felt fear rising in him. Hydrogen supplies drained away like protoplasm through an escape drain, and a quarter of the fusors themselves had been damaged or destroyed.

Destroyer 6223-2 was healing the weapons as fast as it could, One knew; obviously the stern fusors were of the highest priority after the drive itself. Because of that, he knew that the armor over his own precious self had thinned and cracked in many places, and the Humans’ damnable radiation weapons continued to kill both experienced and newly-cloned Meme.

He sucked in extra data from the ship-wide nerve network and his mood worsened. Digestion, Gestation, Vascular Circulation, all showed severe damage.

In fact, the only system not under severe stress was Close Combat. The insectoid Purelings stood impassively with their weapons, useless.

That gave One an idea. He put a call through to the Close Combat trium. “Close Combat One, this is Rear Fusor One. Can you taste me?”

“Communications are functional, Rear Fusor One. What do you want?”

“I have an idea. These tiny Human missile-launching craft cannot possibly contain troops, and even if they did, at current speeds the possibility of boarding is vanishingly small.”

“Ah, you bring me such good news. Now my function, merely marginal before, has been declared completely useless.” Close Combat One’s sarcasm came through unmistakably.

“Thus my idea,” Rear Fusor One replied, keeping his response even and reasonable. “We could use some assistance to keep our weapons functioning. Could you and your Purelings help clear dead tissue?”

Close Combat tria were selected for their decisiveness, so that One’s response came back swiftly. “Of course. An excellent suggestion. We will share the credit for increased efficiency.”

“Naturally. If we live. Communication remains open.”

Rear Fusor One monitored the progress of dead tissue removal long enough to confirm its acceleration, and congratulated himself for his cleverness. The insect-like Pureling troops were sturdy and powerful, though a bit clumsy.

If everything worked out, he had also made an ally above him who might be able to assist him upward. Would it be better to remain One of this trium, or be Three in a higher-ranked one?

That discussion had occupied idle Meme through the ages.

“We have destroyed all but a few targets,” the molecular voice of Two broke into One’s thoughts.

“Cease continuous fire and change to targeted shots.”

“Agreed.” Two and Three adjusted the necessary controls.

“You are overriding orders,” Three observed even as he complied.

“I am conserving precious fuel,” One replied, knowing Three was just trying to provide himself an excuse if their superiors inquired. One ordered me to do it he would undoubted say in that weak-moleculed way he had. Two shot him a look, and blinked his eyeball.

“Accelerating repairs,” Two announced. “The Purelings’ assistance is helpful, and the process is exceptionally efficient.”

“Of course.” One basked for a moment in the pride of his success.

“We are maneuvering,” Three called, for once providing useful information rather than mere complaints. “Reversing orientation.”

“Prepare for firing again. Close Combat One, please concentrate your efforts on those fusors with minimal blockages, in order of priority.”

“Yes, yes, I am doing so,” the higher ranking Meme replied condescendingly.

Rear Fusor One was about to mention the maneuver, but decided that nonessential communication with his counterpart just gave the other Meme more opportunities to act superior, and kept his molecules to himself.

“Continuous fire again.” Two passed the order. “We are decelerating and reversing toward the enemy ships.” A pause. “Continuous fire is effective.” The control room shook from a particularly near explosion, and a bubbling stripe appeared on one wall.

Three squealed at the near miss from the enemy radiation beam. “Cease that noise, Three,” Two said before One could. “We still live.”

“Return to targeted fire,” One ordered, seeing that only a few hundred scattered enemy missiles remained. More might get through with continuous fire stopped, but fuel supplies were now below twenty percent. He sent a request for more to be released from the central reserve, and saw his available hydrogen grow by only a few thousand tons.

“Our next engagement will exhaust the fusor tanks,” Two observed. “Main sensors show another double wave, and the Human ships behind. We cannot beat them head on.”

“I know,” One replied. “See if the recycling system can be squeezed for any more fuel, and pray to the One of Ones that Command thinks of something.”

“Maneuvering,” Two observed. “We are…rotating perpendicular and engaging full propulsion thrust.”

“There goes our fuel resupply,” Three mumbled. “They’ll probably take some back.”

“If they do, there’s a good reason,” One replied.

“New orders,” Two announced. “Return all but five percent of fusor fuel to the central reserve.”

“I knew it,” Three said.

“Also, essential fire only.”

“Knew that was coming,” said Three.

One held onto his control with every molecule of his being and replied, “That’s good news, not bad, Three. If we do not need to fire, we are not being attacked.”

“Oh. That’s true.” Mollified for now, Three shut his pores.

This proved little consolation as the hammer blows of exploding Human missiles shook their compartment again. One ignored Three’s accusatory stare.

Chapter 55

Just when Vango thought the Meme had put their heads well and truly in the noose, the game changed again, and he had to remind himself that these creatures had conquered thousands of star systems, and were at least as smart as humans, if in a very different way.

He watched as the two footballs rolled once more, this time angling sideways, their drives still on full. Immediately the computer updated their projected courses, and if he had been able to see and feel the cockpit he would have likely pounded something in frustration, for now the future path line curved away from the missile cone. It would skim the edge. The Pilums adjusted their courses to intercept.

Vango watched as updates flickered through the system with the differing time-late information. Lark’s computer was only as good as its input, and every time something changed tens of light-minutes away, it had to recalculate vectors and situations, making really accurate predictions almost impossible.

However, the fleet was inevitably getting closer. Now it swept in from an increasing angle, following the enemy’s turn. They had begun nose on and now were almost at right angles. The Aardvarks and the missile cloud in front of them aimed not directly at the enemy but at a point in front of him, a place predicted by extrapolating from the Destroyers’ current course, speed and thrust vector.

Unfortunately, now it appeared that if the enemy were willing to burn at maximum, as long as their fuel held out they could dodge around the fleet and get away.

It might be a race to see who would run dry first.

Vango reflexively checked his own tanks, and his heart slammed into his throat, a fear-phantom he could feel even linked. Lark was already coming up on bingo – the point of no return. In about three minutes he would no longer have enough gas to make it home alive.

That time revised itself constantly, and actually began creeping upward. This confused him for a moment until he realized it was due to the fact that the fleet was bending its course around, no longer accelerating away from the solar system but rather coming to a heading that was roughly tangent to the orbits of the debris cloud. In layman’s terms, they were going sideways, and so the computer did not have to allow for double the fuel to bring the ships back.

Now Vango watched as the Destroyers passed through the edge of the missile cone. Apparently they were not able to avoid it entirely, and the projection for the fleet showed that they would get at least one good shot at the enemy as well.

The Aardvarks’ armor could stand up to fusors better than missiles, but they would still die like flies in a flamethrower. Long before, they would have expended their Pilums.

All that assumed they actually would be able to engage the enemy.

Vango felt like a wolf in a giant pack, chasing two fleet-footed gazelles, except the canines had been unable to encircle the prey and now had to run them to ground from the side and then rear. Closer and closer, he could almost feel his feet blurring and his jaws closing. It took an effort of will to snap himself back from near-daydreaming, to concentrate on the actual situation.

Is this what VR confusion does? If I’m already having problems, what must the general be feeling? He just couldn’t imagine.

Sparkles flashed along the perimeter of the Pilum formation, following the Destroyers’ path as they skimmed the edge of the cone. Zooming his view in, Vango could see plasma clouds blossoming in front like old-fashioned flak bursts in a World War Two air combat movie. This time, though, the “bombers” flew directly through the shockwaves, with no chance to dodge or fusor them. The Meme did not even try.

Instead, Vango noticed, the smaller, more beat-up Destroyer shielded the larger. The one in better shape had snuggled up to the other, angled precisely so that the blasts they flew through struck the more-hurt ship and not it.

Clever, he thought. I bet when they mated up, they took most of the crew and supplies aboard the less damaged Destroyer, and planned this all along. If they can’t get both away, then one ship will act as an enormous blocker for the other, virtually tripling its armor on that side. Vango uploaded that observation.

It took mere seconds for the enemy to sweep through the danger zone and out the other side, the remaining missiles turning to curve into the enemy’s wake, but with so much velocity to overcome, the computer predicted the Pilums would run out of fuel before they caught up. A moment later Vango saw their thrust reduced to minimum. The general, or whoever was controlling them – one of the wing commanders that was in better shape perhaps – had obviously decided not to waste them. Perhaps in the swirl of battle they could be brought back to do some good.

The fate of a few thousand missiles fled from Vango’s mind as the Aardvarks drew closer. When they crossed the intercept minus fifteen minute mark, he couldn’t help himself. For the first time since childhood, he prayed a prayer. For victory first, and for survival. His agnostic mother Elise might have laughed at him for doing so. No, he reconsidered. She might not agree, but she would understand. His father Daniel would probably shrug, or nod in guarded approval. “Can’t hurt, and it might help,” he’d probably have said. Something about Pascal’s Wager.

Dad was a practical kind of guy.

As the nearest part of the fleet crossed intercept minus ten minutes – Lark’s readout read eleven minutes five seconds – orders came over the net to launch all remaining missiles. As close as they were, the computer predicted that more than one hundred thousand Pilums should get near enough to have some effect.

If that didn’t do it, whatever portion of twenty-eight thousand Aardvarks remained would have to finish the job.

As the swarm of missiles hurled themselves toward a point in space in front of the still-potent Destroyers, the ships of the fleet leaped forward, now shed of the big weapons’ mass. Even so, the Pilums easily outdistanced the Aardvarks, rushing to cut the enemy off as they skated sideward as hard as they could, trying to curve away and turn the engagement into a stern chase again.

However, now the timelines were too short. Too many Aardvarks with too many missiles spread over too much distance provided enough coverage across the Destroyers’ path that they would not escape unscathed.

Like defensive backs in a football game, the missiles and attack ships shifted with the enemy, who had so much forward momentum that they could not turn sharply enough to get past. Once the enormous swarm had planted itself squarely in the two big ships’ way, all Vango and the rest could do was cross their fingers and hope the Pilums’ programming was up to the complex task of timing their detonations to kill the Destroyers without taking their fellows out in the explosions, a problem known as nuclear fratricide.

Chapter 56

“New orders…” Two’s communication trailed off in a way odd for his normally reliable and precise manner. “Emergency recombination.”

“What?” One trusted Two, but he had to taste this missive for himself.

What he said was correct. Emergency recombination was ordered, in the middle of a battle. It was insane. It was unprecedented.

It was brilliant.

If it could be done. “Initiate fragmentation protocol,” One snapped. “Full emergency mode. Prepare transfer tubes and sphincters.” He watched the automatic process for a moment, seeing the living modules of the complex fusor system unhook from each other and extend their mobility cilia. Tubes formed leading to the largest fusor nozzles, which would soften and become connection ports to the other ship.

One spared one eye to look at the ship-wide information feed, and saw that the two Destroyers flew, for a brief period, through empty space. Human missiles trailed behind them with no chance to catch up, while many more bored in from a forward angle in an attempt to cut them off.

Command had taken the respite to press the two ships together again, but instead of merely transferring fuel, this time 6223-2 split open along one lengthwise seam like a sliced fruit, widening until it partly enveloped the larger, healthier original Destroyer 6223. Then it split again like a four-armed starfish and began transferring all of its guts to its fellow.

Through ports all over the skin of the ship, and sometimes directly between their raw unshielded interiors, subsystems of the enormous living ships crawled, propelling themselves on millions of cilia, tentacles and legs. Ranks of sub-creatures looking something like millipedes, beetles, anemones or octopi poured along tunnels and tubes, racing to the other ship.

Among them came dozens of surviving Meme. Confusion reigned for a short time, but here the superiority of their biochemical communication system showed. Like swarming ants, the connected hive of creatures seemed disorganized but quickly sorted itself out.

Rear Fusor One lost track of the big picture as 6223-2’s ship-wide net dissolved, but he could imagine what was happening. The living skin of the cannibalized ship would spread to cover as much of its fellow as possible before cementing itself into place, while the extra internal systems would augment and replace damaged parts of the remaining Destroyer.

In essence, they would be roughly back to where they were before One’s subtle manipulations had convinced Command to divide into two ships.

One could think of worse situations to be in.

Chapter 57

As the icon representing the enemy intersected the lead missiles, Vango saw the area turn milky again, a translucent representation of the VR processors’ inability to fully detect what was going on. That bubble of pale white marched forward as sparks brightened around it and then extinguished, and still it came on, even accelerated.

Vango checked the numbers and marveled as the Destroyers crept up toward .1 c, an amazing value for a tactical engagement. No doubt that velocity contributed to their survival; the missiles now had to calculate precise and accurate trigger time in finer and finer slices, as the closing speed with the missiles on opposite tracks approached .2 c.

And still the enemy flew.

More than halfway through the missile swarm and the Destroyers continued to accelerate. Over two thirds of the missiles had not even detonated, cruising on past, never getting within their blast radii. Programming reversed their vectors and reduced their accelerations to save fuel, and they began the long process of slowing down to relative rest, to be issued new instructions later or even recovered.

Now the lead ships’ time to intercept crossed five minutes, six minutes five seconds for Vango. All they had left were their centerline masers.

And their suicide bombs, of fifty megatons each. Just one of them, if it could be triggered close enough, should crack a Destroyer. Getting close enough would be the trick.

His whole life, in every tough situation, Vango had always tried to do what he thought his various elders would have done, and in this moment he realized he had only done half. With that prayer launched heavenward, he’d done what his father might have done – certainly what Aunt Cassandra would have. She had an unshakable faith in God’s plans, though she sure seemed to be willing to give Him all the help she could.

Now he thought he ought to do what Grandpa David would do in his place, who’d flown in Vietnam and had taught him, in his opinion, the best piece of poetry ever written: High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Vango opened up his squadron channel and slowly, reverently recited the first line:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

He felt the surprise through the link, emotional phantoms that the technicians insisted were illusions, as his fellow pilots heard the words and responded –

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

A few echoes seemed to come back to him over the verbal comm as he continued.

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence.

By this time he could feel others join in: a few, then a dozen, and then many more as he realized Dick had opened the squadron net to the entire wing. Almost a thousand attack ships now heard the words, and as many as knew them, all of the Aerospace Forces personnel for sure, and a goodly portion of the Navy as well, recited with him, their voices swelling:

Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air....

The entire array of Aardvarks, awkwardly named and ugly, transformed in Vango’s vision into a sparkling of stardust, pinpricks of light converging on their hated nemeses, the things that wanted to kill their planet, their nations, their hometowns and their families.

The fleet’s nearest edge crossed the one minute mark.

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.

Where never lark, or even eagle flew —

Open channels carried tens of thousands of voices across space, raised in the unison that only those who put their frail bodies between death and their loved ones can truly achieve: a oneness of fighting spirit that could not be matched or even understood by any hated alien.

And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Vango lost himself in the glory of it, surrendered himself to onrushing death even as his senses heightened further.

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

A pause came then, a moment of silence, then a swell of cheering. It lasted for as long as throats could hold it, then the comm nets broke back apart as the commanders rescinded their overrides, taking back tactical control just in time.

At thirty seconds out the lead elements began firing, their puny microwave lasers reaching en masse across the distance, hoping to do damage. Vango, with almost two minutes until his turn came, had the luxury to take a close look at the enemy ships, to try to find out how they had survived the fleet’s missile storm.

What he saw caused him to grudgingly admire the Meme commander, whoever he or it was. Where before the two ships had been rubbing shoulders, now they had done something else entirely, something only two ships that were alive possibly could have.

The football of the damaged enemy had been split at the back and down four symmetrical seams, opening up like a flower from the tail. Wedges of armored skin five hundred meters thick now wrapped over the nose of the healthier ship, extending down to past its midpoint, as if the rearmost Destroyer had been shoved inside the other. In effect, it had just cannibalized its fellow and doubled the armor over its own front half.

A thousand meters of layered bio-ferrocrystal chitin, Vango thought with a shudder. And with these living ships…could one absorb the other? Could they graft together like trees, in time becoming one even bigger, more dangerous ship? Had there originally been one, and it had split into two, explaining the discrepancy in the intelligence reports? So alien…

He tried to recall the briefings he had on the enemy armor’s resistance to heat, blast and radiation and came to a stark conclusion: to have any chance of seriously damaging the enemy, one of the fusion bombs would have to detonate at impact, or so close to the skin as did not matter. In open space, all explosive effects beyond the fireball dropped off by a factor of one over the cube of the distance, which was very steeply indeed.

Looking closer, the VR was now able to show a high-resolution near-real-time image of the combined Destroyer. Great portions of it had blackened, and pits, bubbles and rents hundreds of meters wide and deep showed on the second skin. If that damage had been done to the healthy one itself, it might not have survived, but like a gunman shielding himself with a dead body, the Meme had made the corpse of one ship work for them.

And then there was no more time to think. With his virtual hands and feet on the controls, he lined up his attack vector to intersect the enemy ship’s future position. By itself the computer would get him close, but in simulations and exercises the value of the human-in-the-loop system had proven itself. Properly trained, a pilot who knew how to use his systems always made better, more intuitive decisions than a computer alone.

The single combined Destroyer bore forward, continuing to accelerate at what must be its maximum, though now less with all that extra mass on it. Instead of turning to use its drive to clear a path and thereby cause itself to slow, it was just bulling its way through.

One unexpected benefit to the fleet of the enemy’s corpse-draped nose was its inability to use its bow fusors. Here and there one reached out from between the flaps of skin around the waist, angled forward as much as possible, but this had very little effect. At the current speeds, all of the incoming Aardvark maser fire struck the Destroyer’s front. Unfortunately that armored area, being dead already, could hardly die again, though it glowed a dull red in places with the heating effects of the microwaves.

Finally the first Aardvark met the enemy.

If it wasn’t General Yeager, then the next one or the next was, as the leading center of the mass EarthFleet formation naturally struck first. Suicide bombs, set to automatically detonate at the closest distance calculable, blossomed like fireworks in the path of the enemy.

Then one did not detonate, apparently striking the Destroyer itself, and a strange thing happened; the enemy seemed to stagger slightly, and chunks of the dead-skin armor peeled away after the impact fireball dissipated.

The enormous suicide device of the Aardvark that actually struck the enemy ship had not gone off. The shock of impact at those speeds had vaporized the ship, pilot and bomb in one titanic blast of heat, but slamming two objects into each other at such speeds created its own fusion blast, much smaller but much more concentrated at the point of intersection, tearing hundreds of meters into the enemy armor. The materials of human and Meme crushed themselves together so powerfully that not merely hydrogen, but all sorts of elements up the periodic table fused and release their energy.

As the seconds ticked down Vango abruptly realized what must be done, if it was not already too late. He opened a channel to his wing commander, the highest he could reach, to request a flash priority broadcast to the fleet.

Two Alpha One must have been on the ball because he immediately granted Vango’s request.

Without time to prepare, he just said what came into his head. “All ships listen. We need to turn off our suicide bombs and just aim for the enemy. No fratricide, and at these speeds we’re doing more damage by impact.” And he almost went on, and if we miss we survive to try again, but he stopped himself, worried that saying so might seem cowardly or self-serving.

But he really did believe this was the best tactic. Now he realized why the Meme didn’t bother to put warheads on most of their hypervelocity missiles: they were cheap, and nearly as damaging at speeds this high.

“This is Wing Commander Reardon, acting fleet commander,” Vango heard over the voice net. “Do what that man said. He’s right. The bombs aren’t working.”

His communication came too late for over a hundred pilots, who detonated themselves in the path of the enemy, to minor effect. When the explosions ceased, Vango saw the cloud of Aardvarks tighten up into a stream, a line that threw itself into the enemy’s path.

Only a small percentage of the attack ships were actually able to maneuver into the path of the Destroyer. Most flashed past at enormous velocity. In the vacuum of space, a miss by a meter was the same as a kilometer, unless the hapless ship happened to get caught in the enemy’s fusion wake. Vango sincerely hoped no one disregarded orders and detonated his or her warhead, as the river of thousands of Aardvarks now packed themselves so tightly that doing so would take several friendlies along.

But discipline held, and no matter how the Destroyer twisted and turned, trying to use its fusors, eventually the dead armor was stripped away by repeated impacts, like shotgun blasts tearing through zombie flesh. Soon the dying heroes tore great gouges out of the enemy ship itself.

Whether out of desperation or cunning, the Meme changed tactics again. Turning once more sideways, it rolled and spun, drive still blasting. This provided at least two benefits to the enemy that Vango could see.

First, it threw off the aim of the entire fleet, as the Destroyer’s thrust vector was now perpendicular to its path of flight. He was not sure that would matter much, as the cloud of Aardvarks now impacted the enemy more by luck than any particular skill.

Second, it allowed the use of a lot of the thing’s fusors even as it spun to present different parts of its armor to each successive impact. The blasts of plasma flame reached out ten kilometers to destroy some of the tiny ships before they could strike, and limited the possibility of repeated collisions tearing their way through a single place.

Even as he analyzed the battle, Vango’s hyperaware mind and psychomotor skills guided him in to his own rendezvous with death. Suddenly he had to reflexively reduce the zoom on his VR display as his real position overtook his apparent viewpoint. Now, at thousands of kilometers per second, he became just another part of the suicide stream, a fire hose blast of individual ships hoping to do their duties by dying well.

Five. He held the caret showing the intersection point steady on the enemy’s path, and set his maser to continuous fire. One advantage of such a weapon was that it had little effect on friendlies, its wavelength optimized for Meme flesh.

Four. He edged the caret over to the side a bit, Kentucky windage based on his instinct about the effects of the impacts of the ships in front of him.

Three. The Destroyer, the caret, and the target projection drew together, jittering around like beetles shaken in the bottom of a jar, but inevitably getting closer.

Two. The ability of his computer system to help him failed. He couldn’t bring the three icons closer together with any consistency. The best he could do was hold them as near to each other as possible.

One. He aimed Lark at the middle of the variables, and waited. In truth, he was not sure what he hoped: to die, or to live.

Zero.

Minus One. No impact. Lark missed, and Vincent Markis failed to die.

He felt his vision blur and he took a great shuddering breath as his body’s physical reaction bled over into the VR. Not dead…I failed. Shutting down the virtuality for a moment, Vango found himself back in his suit, snot streaming from his nose and his heart triphammering in his ears. He reached up to try to wipe his face but his visor prevented it, so he opened up and tried to use his gloved hand. Eventually he gave up and shit it again.

Laboriously employing the manual controls, he turned around and brought his engine down to minimum burn, aiming back along his path. Checking his fuel, he realized he had only seven percent remaining.

There was no way to reengage. If the Destroyer made it through the gauntlet, none of the fleet had the means to do anything about it. Ergo, his job was done. He could relax.

But he wasn’t going to make it home, either. Not unless the refuelers found him, so he set out to make that as likely as possible.

One more time into the VR, he thought. One more time, then I unplug and go to sleep. Then he remembered that he would have to stay linked in or he would just wake up in a few days. It was the virtuality system that controlled his consciousness, made the time go by faster, and reduced his need for food and oxygen to a minimum. Without it, he wouldn’t make it more than a few weeks.

Like the general. That feat still amazed him. If there really was an afterlife, he hoped to shake the man’s hand there.

Anxiety crept up on him again, hints of paranoia to be stuck here inside this little tube instead of part of Lark in open space, flying free.

Hell. I guess it’s better than dying, and maybe with the information sent back they’ll be able to treat VR addiction somehow.

So Vango gave up, linked in, and became well again.

Examining the situation, he found the Destroyer beyond the reach of the fleet and still accelerating, though with less fury. Zooming in, he could see a great deal of damage done to the giant ship, but he knew that such was only temporary.

Living ships healed.

Fleet Aardvark count stood just above sixteen thousand, out of more than thirty thousand at start. Some wings, especially First Wing that had detonated most of its suicide bombs, had been hit hard. Others had lost only a few. Vango wondered what the point was now, to have built all these little ships with each pilot in his or her isolated world. No chance of sitting down in a mess or wardroom, no drinks with friends, no gyms or bunks or lovers’ trysts.

Then he remembered that larger ships would have been spotted, would have been targeted by the enemy’s hypers, and wouldn’t have been able to keep up. Relatively overpowered for their size, only something like the Aardvarks had a chance to engage.

And they’d gotten one of the bastards. Whether there had been two originally or the original had divided, hoping to double their power before taking on Earth, didn’t really matter; either way, they had done their job. At a cost of some fifteen thousand heroes, they had taken down a Destroyer.

“All right ladies and gents,” Dick came over the comm, “form up in standard squadron flight ranks, according to the plan I just uploaded. Our squadron lost five, and they’ll be missed, but we got one of the bastards and that’s something. Now we’re going home.”

“How?” came the question from one of the attack ship drivers, quicker than the others who echoed her. “We’re all way over bingo fuel. By my calculations we’ll make it back to Saturn’s orbit in about thirty years.”

“At least our families will have something to bury,” commented some wag.

“Hold up, hold up,” Dick overrode them. “There are three refuelers on the way, with grabships, spares and processing plants to turn some of these iceballs into hydrogen. They’ll be here in a month or two. All we have to do is sit tight, link in, and go to sleep.”

Vango asked, “Are the refuelers’ positions uploaded?” He’d tried to call up the info but had been unable.

“No,” Dick replied. “We don’t even have their plots, in case the Destroyer could somehow hack our systems or capture and interrogate a pilot. All I know is, they are over a month behind us, cruising in silent mode.”

“So no chance of that son of a bitch seeing and killing them on the way in?” Vango made the icon of the receding enemy pulse and highlighted the curving track of its predicted course, which looped back toward Earth.

“I can’t know for sure, but it only makes sense they should be somewhere around here.” Dick drew a circle around an area of space between them and the edge of the solar system. The Destroyer’s track came nowhere near. “So we’ve already done our bit. Nothing to do but wait. All of the intel is being pumped back home, and will get there at lightspeed long before the enemy. They’ll adjust strategy and tactics accordingly. If all of us out here beat one and drove the other one off, then I have every confidence the entire strength of EarthFleet can kill the other.”

Positive murmurs and chatter filled the squadron net, but Vango wasn’t listening anymore. Never the type to take things at face value, he began working on a report, including some very pointed questions, such as: Are we sure there were only two?

And then, overwhelmed, he adjusted his time sense to forty to one, giving him one or at most two subjective days to live through, and went to sleep.

Chapter 58

Destroyer 6223’s freshly assigned Second Forward Fusor One looked around his control room with satisfaction. Despite the frustration of Commander trium’s plans – really One’s plans – the Fusor trium had been transferred from control of the dead second ship’s rear fusors to control of half of those of the new, larger Destroyer’s forward weapons.

“This is more satisfactory,” One said. “Our molecules are rising.”

“The two-ship concept failed,” said Three.

“It is you who fail to understand,” One replied. “This has worked out well both for us and for the Empire. We have advanced our trium, and the True Race had an additional Destroyer to sacrifice when the unexpected Human attack came. Now we have destroyed or avoided their pathetically slow forces and have absorbed most of the substance of 6223-2. Our ship is larger now than when we traveled between stars.”

“But not as large as it could have been,” Two interjected. “Still, all in all, our lot has improved.”

“Thank you for that resounding endorsement,” One said.

“I only wish to maintain accuracy in our assessments.”

“Yes, accuracy is important,” Three chimed in.

One’s gelatinous body shook with irritation. “You could be promoted three ranks tomorrow and still find bad news.”

“I am concerned,” Two said. “You and Command both claimed these Humans would be pushovers. Yet they mounted a significant attack a great distance from their home system. Their forces are slow, but numerous, and if their fusion missiles were more accurate they could easily have killed us. Perhaps we should seek reinforcements.”

“Now you aspire to Command? Perhaps you should forward advice upward on how to proceed. I am sure Commander One would be happy to taste your words. Many things could kill us. Running into a comet could kill us. Larger forces of the Empire are undoubtedly on the way. We cannot hasten that day. We can only try to eliminate Species 666 while we can, or do as much damage as possible. We live for the Empire.”

“We live for the Empire,” the two others repeated, and both subsided in their holding tanks, effectively ending the conversation.

One wondered whether he had been too harsh, but decided not. Three was skilled enough but always worried, but he was surprised at Two’s doubts. The road to advancement was never simple or easy for one of the Pure Race.

Some time later, after much of the routine of their first day on the job had been dispensed with, One called another conference, after ensuring the enemy remained far behind.

“I wanted to pass on what I have found out regarding our future,” he began. Two put on an appearance of guarded interest, while Three seemed worried, as usual.

“Please go on, One. Your observations are always insightful,” Two said.

“Agreed. I have been reviewing the routine reports from all sections, available on the intraship informational web, and I have deduced that we are circling around to enter the enemy solar system from a significantly differing direction.”

“What good will that do?” Three asked. “Our drive cannot be concealed.”

“Perhaps. But before we enter their system, we will be conducting certain operations among these comets around us. I have not been able to determine their exact nature, but we are already slowing our headlong flight in order to match velocities with some of the free-floaters.”

“What about the enemy!”

“Calm yourself,” Two said sternly. “They no longer pursue us, but have turned back for their system. However, they will not get home in time to affect our plans. They are low on fuel and expendable munitions. Machine technology cannot easily resupply, but we are undoubtedly pausing for Destroyer 6223 to consume material.”

“Well said, Two,” One replied. “However, there is something unusual about our projected course. One short stop should be sufficient to resupply ourselves. One long stop would allow us to continue to grow the ship and keep our consumables topped off. Instead, it appears we plan to stop in no fewer than sixteen different places.”

“What could be Commander’s purpose?”

“What indeed?” One said. “What do you think?” He enjoyed the power that greater knowledge and a greater intellect gave him to lord it over his subordinates.

“In Commander’s place, I might employ stellar bombardment tactics,” Two mused. “The recent engagement showed that we are closer in force parity than first thought. Perhaps he seeks to complicate their defense plans.”

“Excellent, Two. That is precisely what I came up with already. Aside from consuming as much as possible, growing and laying in stocks of weapons and auxiliaries, I suspect he will place bombardment modules on all available free-floaters.”

Two rippled his integument, the equivalent of a human clearing his throat. “We should prepare for this eventuality using your deductions. This will allow us to be more efficient than others when the time comes. We might even file a suggestive report to increase others’ effectiveness – but not enough to outdo us.”

“An excellent idea. I see you are finally absorbing my mental processes,” One replied. “If we can figure out how, perhaps I – I mean we – can submit another report that will impress Command in some way. Once we conquer this species, the higher our status, the greater our options. Perhaps we can gain command of a ship again, something larger than a Survey craft.”

Two sloshed in agreement, while Three turned his main eyeball away, as if unsure. One resolved to keep a secondary eye on that one, in case his nerve broke. He seemed to be growing less dependable, though he had performed adequately during the battle.

Some Meme rise to stressful occasions, One thought, and some Meme seem to have only so much fortitude before they crumble.
Three seems one of the latter.

It remained to be seen about Two.

Chapter 59

This is your virtual briefing.

The text window popped up as Vango Markis stared out like a god over the solar system. With nothing else to do as he cruised back home, he had been running tactical plots of where he thought the Destroyer went and what he could do about it if he was in command.

A stylized clock counted down with a time-sped blur, presumably to allow him to mentally prepare himself, then the universe went away, leaving him staring at a screen. Obviously whoever had intruded on his waking dream was making sure he paid attention. Then words appeared.

Your A-24 Avenger II is now being automatically processed by the EarthFleet Auxiliary Ship Gladstone. When completed, your A-24 Avenger II will be fully fueled and armed, and all battle damage repaired. If any issues occur, you will be informed.

“Huh,” he said to himself, and then the slide changed.

Your A-24 Avenger II service has been completed. All systems read nominal. Good luck, Flight Lieutenant Vincent Jonah Markis, and good hunting.

The screen of words disappeared. Hastily Vango dialed down his time sense back to realtime as he realized that the servicing had actually taken hours if not days, though it flew by in seconds for him. Back in his virtuality, he moved his viewpoint outside his ship to see the Gladstone and two other auxiliaries frantically servicing Aardvarks.

Grabships, with their two huge padded waldoes extending from the nose like mechanical arms and hands, seized the little warships one by one and maneuvered them into enclosed docking bays like big missile tubes. As soon as one had been placed inside, the door shut and presumably the atmosphere was restored to allow the maintainers to work in relative comfort.

He tried to move his viewpoint inside the Gladstone but encountered a null zone of no data, so instead he waited until one of the docking bays opened its doors. The Aardvark he viewed flew gently backward and out, pushed by a low-speed ram, and a grabship, well, grabbed it as soon as it was clear, hauling it off to set it in position several kilometers away. Attack ship drives were too hot to use near the motherships.

Other Aardvarks cruised, lined up in precise rows pointing toward the distant solar system. Occasionally an attitude jet flared, keeping a ship on station. Vango’s display told him they were about three months from the solar system at their current slow speed, but he had to believe that once everyone was topped off they would accelerate to shave off time.

Another query showed the projected path of the enemy, hundreds of billions of kilometers off to the side. Confirmed sightings dropped off near another cluster of comets and asteroids whose distance was better stated as more than a light-week away. That data was over a month old. He wondered if his ship had been updated by the Gladstone or was he still running on just the A-24 network.

Next he looked at the orders queue, hoping their reduced force, now given their stings back, would turn to intercept, but it was not to be. Instead, they would proceed by wings and squadrons toward Grissom Base on Callisto, taking advantage of their interior lines, falling back on their defenses, regrouping for the defense.

Of course, orders could always be changed. Otherwise, why bother to rearm the Aardvarks? Though General Yeager was gone, Vango was sure the Fleet’s leaders were keeping their options open.

Besides…he pulled back and oriented himself above the plane of the solar ecliptic, and manually projected a course for the Destroyer. If it kept curving inward toward the sun and Earth, the fleet’s course still generally aimed for an interception. Vango superimposed a scale on his view in astronomical units, a compromise between light-hours and kilometers. Earth was one AU out, by definition. Callisto orbited Jupiter at about ten AU from the sun. Pluto’s orbit varied, but could generally be called fifty AU out.

Vango and the fleet were only one hundred AU out, much closer than they had been for the fight. Expending all fuel, they might be able to get home in a week. Without accelerating, three months. He figured reality would fall somewhere in the middle, so that they could arrive with enough gas to fight, sometime before the enemy got there.

Now he ran the numbers. It appeared just under fifteen thousand ships remained combat capable. The rest had either been lost, or were too badly damaged to put back in service. Presumably their pilots were being decanted and faced a long trip home, even longer if the auxiliaries intended to go out to the battlefield to search for survivors.

Perhaps the drifting men and women would just be written off as too expensive to recover. He forced his mind away from contemplating that, and said a prayer for them.

Speeding up his time sense once more, his apparent velocity leaped forward as the edge of the solar system rushed toward him. It only seemed like hours before he reached Pluto’s orbit and had to slow down to begin to read and absorb the long queue of intelligence updates that awaited him. When he got tired of catching up, he slowed himself further to normal and slept.

In this manner he and the rest of the fleet returned to Callisto base.

While he expected a homecoming, he was not prepared for the sustained appreciation of everyone there and, at a distance, that of the people of Earth. We’re heroes, he thought. The half of us that survived. I guess it’s always that way. Grandpa and Dad always told me that heroism is just about doing your job the best you can, and living through it. I guess they were right.

Never having to buy a drink was nice, but not being left alone got old, so after a while he settled down to a life of hard training, visiting Aunt Jill – too bad Uncle Rick was gone back to Orion – and hanging out with Token. A few of the female pilots made passes at him, but after Stevie, he just wasn’t interested in risking his heart again, or even being distracted from the mission.

Nothing mattered but that damned Destroyer, waiting off the rim of the solar system like a lion in the darkness. In his mind, in his dreams, it roared and lusted for his blood.

Chapter 60

Year Ten

The giant operations center aboard the Orion station swarmed with personnel. Expanded several times, now it more resembled a modified indoor stadium than anything, with several rings of workstations rising from the center floor and a multitude of screens. Low spin and liberal use of gravplates for specific effects allowed for some oddities, such as whole sections tilted forty-five degrees inward for easier viewing. Inhabitants of these platforms got used to the feeling that the rest of the room hung over their heads as if to fall on them at any moment.

Today even more people packed in for the special meeting to come, both of the two shifts doubling the usual numbers, plus a slew of other personnel that did not work there. In a room that normally held five hundred, at least two thousand milled.

Because he happened to be on shift and sat in his usual seat, Lieutenant Commander Rick Johnstone didn’t have to stand, or sit on a desk like many. In fact, he cheated a bit and linked directly into one of the teleconference cameras so the system fed his optic nerves with direct views, a good thing because of the crowding.

Johnstone already knew much of what would be briefed, but this was the first time it had been laid out in front of the entire EarthFleet command and staff. At least forty flag officers circulated, their presence a natural result of the growth of EarthFleet and its bureaucracy. Still relatively lean for a military service, many senior personnel commanded elsewhere around the solar system.

Conversation died and everyone came to their feet as Admiral Absen entered and took the podium at one end, his aides and stewards taking places behind him. As usual, he wore his working khakis. Johnstone thought he had seldom met such an unpretentious flag officer.

“Take your seats, such as they are, ladies and gentlemen,” Absen began. “Everyone can read a report, but in less than two days EarthFleet will engage the enemy again, and I wanted to give you all as clear an overview as possible of the big picture. Slide please.”

Behind him the giant screen and all of the supplemental displays scattered around showed a top view picture of the main solar system out to Neptune filling the left half. A red icon and a trailing arrow from the right depicted what could only be the Destroyer, almost to Neptune’s orbit line, though the planet itself was nowhere near.

“As you can see, here is the enemy ship’s position, about forty hours out from Earth, inbound at roughly point three lightspeed. We’ll return to that later. Next.” The unseen audiovisual controller clicked to the next slide.

An enormous number of red pinpoints sprang up in a concave arc between the solar system and the Destroyer, a crescent whose inner curve aimed at the inner planets and the sun. “These represent approximately nine thousand three hundred objects incoming at about one quarter lightspeed, also about forty hours out, give or take. Our stealth drones tell us that the enemy gestated Meme fusion engine packages much like we used to accelerate our space program nine years ago, slapped them onto chunks of rock, and sent them at us in a relatively coordinated manner.”

Johnstone quickly queried for a 4D future look simulation of the inbounds and brought it up on his own desk screen. This mirrored Absen’s next slide.

“As you can see by these plots, some of these things are aimed at nonmaneuverable targets – Ceres, moons where we have bases such as Callisto and Luna, or Mars. The majority are aimed at Earth. A few would impact some of the larger asteroids, but we are already moving those enough to make them miss, and will keep doing so in case they are able to perform terminal guidance.”

Now a swath of blue icons appeared, filling the solar system, and the view swelled to put the orbit of Jupiter near the edge, allowing for more detail. “Here are our fixed defense installations, on repositioned asteroids and moons, mostly. These mount a variety of directed energy weapons as well as railguns and missile launchers. Consider these the pillboxes of our defenses, with similar strengths and weaknesses. They are nearly immobile, at least in tactical terms, but they are fortified and have heavy weapons that should be particularly useful against the rocks.”

Absen’s face turned grim. “They are also targets. Many are automated, but some are not, and one of their jobs is to soak up the enemy’s firepower. I salute in advance all of those brave men and women who will undoubtedly die out there, doing their duties. For those of you on such installations viewing this remotely, I pledge that your families will be taken care of and your sacrifices will not be in vain.” He paused for a moment of silence. “Next slide please.”

Yellow icons appeared showing the major bases on Ceres, Callisto, and Hiera. Ceres’ current location showed one quarter orbit clockwise from the direction of attack, while Callisto and Jupiter resided only slightly out of line. Hiera, of course, orbited Earth. Absen continued, “Ceres is being temporarily evacuated and its Pseudo-Von-Neumanns shut down, the workers to remain aboard a passenger ship hiding behind it. We hope its distance will mean the rocks we see aimed at it constitute the entire threat. Because PVNs are distributed across its entire surface, many will survive and will then rebuild more PVNs. My main concern is the personnel, and as long as they face only rocks, they should survive by moving behind its mass.”

Now Callisto flashed once as the Admiral pointed. “Grissom Base is nearly in the way, and is an obvious target. It is also the most difficult for us to defend. Until General Yeager’s fleet bought us an additional year, the plan was to evacuate and abandon the facility. However, the extra time has allowed us to dig in. Once they’d finished building the surface facilities, all that engineering and construction equipment and personnel was turned to digging in. High-energy, high-risk construction techniques, such as fusion borers and bombs, have allowed us to do two things. Slide.”

The display abruptly changed to show the layout of Grissom Base. Beginning as a top view, it rotated in three dimensions to show a subsurface diagram like an ant farm. “First, we now have slanting tunnels to these eight shelters and command centers more than two kilometers down and a similar distance off to the sides. Second, we were able to install an array of heavy weapons in a ring around it. We hope they will attack the base, because they will want to take out those weapons.”

Absen held up his hand to still the conversation that began. “Again, it was the extra year that allowed us to fortify the base, but the purpose of the weapons is not so much to defend as to damage the enemy when he attacks. Every effort on his part, every resource he expends to assault EarthFleet facilities in space, is a resource he does not have to hit Earth itself. Next.”

The screen changed again, back to the solar system view. “And of course, Hiera is at Earth, and its base will control the weapons placed on over two hundred captured asteroids in orbit there. Next slide.”

Now the display showed ten green icons in a short line between the Mars and Earth orbits, as if to block the inbound rocks and enemy ship.

Right now the home planet occupied a position about one eighth of a revolution counterclockwise from a line drawn between the Destroyer and the sun, and Mars was another one eighth along. Unless the Destroyer maneuvered widely, the red planet would play no part in the action, and Johnstone knew the facilities there were limited.

“These are our linebackers, the new Calgary-class light cruisers.” Johnstone had heard that these were a surprise development, an adjustment to strategy after information from the first engagement had been digested.

Absen went on, “As the Yeager action taught us, our swarm-of-Aardvarks technique has some weaknesses. They dodge hypers easily but die quickly to fusors.”

The view zoomed in on the line of ten. Of course, what looked like a line was actually more like a disc in space, or a shield. “We needed a mobile defensive force to play back, to catch rocks the other defenses miss, to pick off hypers fired at Earth or its facilities, and to charge in for the kill if an opportunity presents itself, and frankly, to force the enemy to expend hypers, and thus materials and energy. These ships were built with that in mind. They are fast and they have heavier weaponry but very light armor. To make up for that, we’ve clad them in asteroids.”

Now the display zoomed in to show one long cylindrical ship and an asteroid next to it. “We’ve cored out some rocks so that a ship can be inserted in the end, like a pen into a potato.”

Chuckles broke out around the room as the screen showed a corresponding image. The ship’s back end still protruded about half way. “Our engineers drilled ports for the main weapon, which consists of a high-capacity railgun along its central axis. All secondary weapons are mounted on its back part, along with maneuvering thrusters. I know it’s ugly, but simulations show it will work. The asteroid portion can take a pounding, and as soon as it is ablated or broken away, the underlying cruiser itself can still fight normally, with an enormous increase in speed. If necessary, the rock can be blown off with breakaway charges from inside.”

When Absen waved, the view reverted to the line across. “A squadron of forty Aardvarks will accompany each cruiser. This way, the two ship types will cover each others’ weaknesses.”

“We hope!” came an unknown voice from somewhere, loud enough to be heard.

“That’s right,” Absen responded with a grim smile. “This plan gives me great hope, and confidence that EarthFleet will do what it has to.” He lifted his hand from the podium to rub the back of his neck, an unconscious indication of how tired he was. “And finally, the front line. The hounds, if you will.”

A crescent of yellow dots, almost a mirror of the inbound enemy rocks, lit up across the Destroyer’s path, its concave side pointed at the enemy. “This represents about sixty thousand Aardvarks, including what came back from the Yeager fleet. We could have built more, but instead we diverted production output to build the cruisers and fortify all the rocks. Now, instead of only one strategy – the mass of small ships – we have a defense in depth that is more likely to succeed.”

“What about Orion and Artemis?” another voice called.

Absen’s expression did not change, but he swiveled his head to scan the crowd as if gauging his people’s temper and holding his own. “Everyone knows we had to make a decision between upgrading two big old ships, or making more modern ones. Artemis does not even have the decade-old weapons and armor Orion does, and so she has already lifted from Callisto and will remain out of sight behind the moon. When the battle is over, she will be ready to provide immediate assistance.”

Gripping the podium tighter the admiral continued, “Similarly, Orion’s combat capabilities are outdated, but she is filled with command and control systems and personnel duplicated nowhere else. We have retrofitted engines to allow her to stand off as far as necessary, well inside Earth’s solar orbit, to coordinate the defense. Ladies and gentlemen, it galls me to lead from the rear, but I’m not a sub captain anymore, and most of you are not ship commanders either. We all have jobs to do in this wartime headquarters. Let’s do them the best we can.”

With one more look around, Absen signaled Major General Zolen to come up on stage. “Now, the J2 will give you a more detailed intelligence update, and after that the J3 will brief ops. After that we’ll hear from the rest of the J-staff in turn. At the end of this briefing, we go on surge watches.” He nodded to his intelligence chief, then sat down in a chair at the edge of the stage to listen to the latest.

Chapter 61

“Finally we turn toward victory!” Second Forward Fusor One crowed to his comrades. “Only two more planetary cycles and we shall see the Humans broken.”

“We have been fortunate, and your leadership has been excellent,” Two said with no trace of obsequiousness.

“Yes, One. Your plans have been instrumental in our rise.” Three’s words, on the other hand, dripped sycophancy.

One knew that Three’s mood could change easily, but he appreciated Two’s steadiness under pressure. I could have a worse trium.

“We have an abundance of fuel,” Three crowed, stating the obvious.

The fact that One was about to say the same thing annoyed him. “We are well aware of our fuel state, Three. Keep your eye on your systems. We must maintain them at full readiness. The Humans are clever. It would be irony indeed to destroy their ability to resist, but for us to die in the doing, don’t you think?”

“Of course, One. I hear and obey.”

Two flung a few molecules at One that carried a combination of exasperation and condescension for Three’s flightiness. One slowly blinked his eyeball in acknowledgement.

“Because we have so little to do, we will follow the Close Combat trium readying their Pureling troops,” One said. Such magnanimity should pay off later, especially if Three whined about any hardship.

On their screens, Second Forward Fusor trium watched as Close Combat mustered rank upon rank of insect-like Purelings, fearsome monsters carrying simple energy weapons and cutting hand tools little different from those used to harvest plants on a planet. This combination had served them for millennia, and as unimaginative and specialized as Purelings were, simple weapons were always better.

Beside the groups of soldier bugs squatted the landing craft, hybrid Purelings with mechanical turrets grafted onto them. These would carry the close combat troops to their destinations, and support them with their heavier weapons.

“What about aerospace escort?” Three asked.

Two accessed another feed. “One grouping of stingships will accompany the assault.”

“Only one grouping?”

“Our resources are not infinite,” Two replied with more patience than One would have displayed. “It appears all of the enemy small craft have departed the moon’s base and wait for us up ahead.”

“They would have been wiser to use some to defend their valuable facilities,” Three opined.

“I believe you are correct,” One interjected. “Under my leadership, you seem to finally begin to grasp the basics of military operations. I commend you.” One Above All, could it be true? Could Three finally be gestating a mature mind beneath his stupid integument?

“We will crush them utterly,” Three continued. “They cannot win.”

“Of course not,” One replied, exchanging glances with Two again.

Chapter 62

Time is always the problem, time and speed, Lieutenant Commander Rick Johnstone thought from his CyberComm station in Orion’s ops center. At one quarter lightspeed, the enemy’s powered rocks an hour out from Jupiter would take about six hours to reach Earth.

Everything came down to this next six hours.

Time and speed.

One quarter light did not sound like so much, unless he put it in standard terminology: seventy-five thousand kilometers per second. Fast enough to go from the Earth to the moon and back in eleven seconds.

Apollo 11 had taken almost a day each way.

Trying to intercept something going that fast presented an enormous technical challenge. Directed energy weapons were the most reliable as they aimed quickly and struck at the speed of light, but packed the least punch. Get enough of them on target and a rock or iceball might fall apart, but it might take minutes or hours to destroy just one, and they had to expect the Meme guidance packages would try to keep them on course, so a simple early deflection would not work.

Missiles had to maneuver directly in front of the objects and hope they did not miss, the equivalent of steering a biplane to crash into a jet fighter as it approached at full Mach. Then there was the detonation timing issue, where a nanosecond’s deviation caused orders of magnitude variations in how the fusion blast and the rock intersected.

This left Admiral Absen’s Fuzzy Wuzzy principle – overwhelming numbers, in this case of railgun shot. The enormous Dahlgren Behemoth linear accelerator cannon deployed on every possible platform, every mobile asteroid and orbital facility, on every moon that might interdict the enemy, bulged fat with trillions of one-kilo steel spheres the size of racquetballs. The energy released by even one impact on a rock at one quarter lightspeed approached the lower end of prompt atomic yield, the equivalent of hundreds of tons of TNT.

Time and speed. The problem was, if only one large asteroid got through unscathed and struck the Earth, it would cause a cataclysm to make nuclear war look tame. Humanity might not die, but the devastation could set it back decades.

Two big rocks, or three, might kill the planet.

Chapter 63

Rear Admiral Huen sat in the Chair on Artemis’ bridge, feeling vaguely uneasy and not sure why. He looked around, seeing his usual prime crew and watchstanders. Nothing seemed out of place.

“Ready for liftoff,” his helmsman said from beneath his medusa, eyes closed as usual.

With one final look around, Huen replied, “Proceed.”

Unlike Artemis’ maiden voyage full of nuclear-bomb sound and fury, this takeoff felt smooth if not powerful. The ring of twelve human-built fusion engines bolted onto the back of her, plus the four at her waist on gimbals as steering thrusters, was enough to lift her tonnage from the low gravity of Callisto and move her sluggishly around the solar system.

Compared to true warships like the new cruisers she was a fat cow.

Even so, Huen felt pride in the ship and her crew. Disparagers called her the biggest flying bus ever built. Kinder commenters called her an old workhorse, a supertanker past her prime but still useful. In reality she had been a mother ship, carrying enormous amounts of cargo and great numbers of engineers and workers for the space program. Without her, Earth and the Fleet would be a year, perhaps two behind where they were now.

That was no small thing, Huen kept telling himself. Unfortunately, outward greatness and heroism came in no small measure from luck, from being the right person in the right place at the right time. He shrugged to himself. Not everyone got all they deserved, and if the Buddha, heaven and the gods wanted him rewarded, they would do so. He was content.

Mostly.

“Rounding Callisto now,” the helmsman said, and Huen looked up from his musings to see the path the ship was taking. Immediately after launch from Grissom Base, she had turned to sweep low over the horizon like an enormous powered zeppelin, gaining altitude only slowly as she ran for the only cover available – the moon itself. Artemis was big enough and slow enough that one of the guided rocks might decide to target her, and so she zoomed into a half orbit that would end when she had put the bulk of Callisto between her and the swarm, and the Destroyer.

“Launch the probes,” Huen ordered, and his sensors officer did that thing. Icons for four tiny stealth satellites joined the rest on the big display. These would provide eyes and ears to see and hear what occurred on the other side of the moon.

Now the display showed nineteen incoming rocks aimed at Grissom, just as Artemis rounded the edge of the moon, moving out of the line of fire. As fast as they came on, the rocks could not turn quickly enough to alter course and sweep behind the planet to get at the ship, even if they tried. Artemis was a mouse hiding behind a big tree from a herd of charging buffalo.

Huen breathed a sigh of relief. Artemis had a full array of bolted-on point-defense lasers as hyper defenses, but those had a range of only a thousand kilometers and not a lot of power, and all together probably could not destroy even one rock. That’s why she had had to pull up from the surface, after the civilians had gone to the shelters and the stalwart Marines had set up their defenses.

It still felt like running away. It just felt wrong.

“We are in place, sir,” the helmsman reported. Now the big, unarmored ship hung in space above the back side of the moon, with Jupiter over her shoulder, using engines to hover gently instead of orbiting. It seemed wasteful of fuel, but the tanks were full and Artemis could hold here for weeks if necessary, fighting against a mere three hundredths of a G.

Huen finally identified what had been bothering him when Steward Schaeffer entered the bridge from the back door, the one that led directly to officers’ country and his quarters. The man seemed surprised at something, and took a position at his admiral’s elbow.

“Senior Steward Shan is occupied?” Huen asked. He vaguely remembered his enormous shadow saying something about needing to take care of a duty before they took off. Shan’s absence, now that he noticed it, had been niggling at his mind, especially with no other steward to fill that place.

“I’m not sure, Admiral. I can’t raise him.” Schaeffer tapped his jaw as a shorthand for his short-range internal radio. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say he wasn’t on the ship.”

“CyberComm, put out a request for Senior Steward Shan to contact the bridge, please,” Huen ordered.

A moment later the assistant helmsman called from the auxiliary bridge, where an alternate crew of controllers stood ready to take over in case the main bridge became unable to function. “Sir, Senior Steward Shan left in a shuttle just before takeoff.”

Huen froze, controlling his breathing. “I did not authorize that,” he replied.

“Sorry, sir. No one prohibited the launch, and he did follow proper procedure, informing the bosun, who logged the departure.”

Huen realized this was true; there would have been no reason to inform him that a shuttle launched, assuming the occupant was otherwise authorized – and Shan had access codes to almost everything. Suspicion flared that after all these years together, all the trust that had been built up between them, the man-mountain had nevertheless for some reason turned coat.

But to whom? The leaders of the People’s Republic of China had kept their political behavior well within the bounds of good sense, stalwartly supporting the defense of Earth. What could they gain by activating Shan, if he was their agent? What could he possibly do that would benefit China without risking Earth’s very survival?

Then Huen stamped hard on that thought. If that is true, then I am the biggest fool ever born to woman. Whatever Shan is doing, I refuse to believe it is a betrayal. Instead, it must be something he believes important enough to…to take extraordinary initiative.

“Please relay through the probes and try to raise Senior Steward Shan.”

After two minutes of trying, the CyberComm officer shook his head. “No luck, sir. I’ve tried the shuttle and his internal radio, as well as querying the Marines on Grissom. No one has seen him.”

Chapter 64

Someone must be farthest forward, Lieutenant Jacques d’Lorenz thought as he watched the march of thousands of rocks closing on Weapons Array 887. No, be honest, Jacques, only one or two actually aim at you. The rest seek to crash themselves into God’s good Earth, into Europe and most particularly into Belgium, where mother and Claude and Henri work our farm just outside of Jurbise.

Giving up his citizenship had not given up his heart for the land of his birth.

That is why you are here. You fight and die so they can grow the food and live.

Two enlisted men accompanied him. All three wore survival suits and sat in crash chairs in a small control room a thousand meters deep inside an asteroid fortress. Cables carried command and sensor data to and from antennas and weapons on the surface – two railguns and a beam array, and transceivers to control the six other, smaller automated guns planted on nearby rocks.

The seven floated far enough off Jupiter to be little affected by its gravity. Located directly between the enemy and Earth, they expected to draw first blood.

Probably the blood will be ours. I volunteered, and I have made peace with my maker. For the honor of the King and the life of my family, I stand here and I will not yield passage. Mother Mary and the saints preserve us all.

“All is well?” he asked in his accented English.

“Si, jefe,” PO2 Esteban Mercadez replied. “We approach the ten minute firing mark.”

“It is the enemy who approaches, not us,” rumbled PO3 Sven Waldner in his clipped Teutonic tones. “Or one could say, the ten minute mark approaches.”

Mercadez rolled his eyes at the German’s hairsplitting, and d’Lorenz shrugged and smiled. “No matter what the words,” he soothed, “the effect is the same. Prepare to fire on primary target.”

The common display screen filled the front of the room. Most of it showed a game-like graphic of icons representing inbound rocks. One in the center pulsed redder than the rest.

“Ten minutes, signor.”

D’Lorenz nodded. “Invite our friends to launch missiles.”

Ten million kilometers back from his small weapons array, the broad swath of Aardvarks in formation began firing missiles as they received his request. Each attack ship launched one of its sixteen weapons.

The control room’s screen filled briefly with the evidence of sixty thousand Pilums maneuvering before Waldner cleaned up the display, simplifying everything to a manageable level.

Behind them, the missiles found their targets and lined up, approximately six per rock. They formed themselves into trailing formations hundreds of kilometers apart, to explode in strings as the rocks passed through their zones, more like mines than missiles. Though launched first, they would engage after the direct fire weapons.

“Callisto base is firing.” Waldner pulled back the display to show plotted lines of railgun shot arcing out from the moon of Jupiter, intersecting enemy rocks about a minute before they were due to fly through the asteroid fortresses’ area. Other arrows reached out ahead and faster, enormous ground-mounted beam weapons of collimated coherent energy – lasers and masers and particle beams, streaking at the speed of light to begin their work of heating, warping and fragmenting the speeding chunks.

D’Lorenz looked over the broad display once more. “I find it interesting that so few rocks aim for Callisto. How many?”

“Nineteen,” Waldner replied.

“With their massive weapons, they will likely take no damage at all. This seems odd.”

Waldner only grunted, and Mercadez gave a very Spanish shrug.

D’Lorenz put curiosity aside and ordered, “Commence weapon array firing, primary target only.”

Up on the surface the beam array fired, a sustained ten-second burst that drained its capacitors. Simultaneously the energy guns on the other rocks threw their power along similar axes, all aiming for one rock.

Immediately afterward, all seven asteroids’ railguns vomited dense streams of ball bearings, accelerated to ten thousand kilometers per second by the megajoules of electricity in the systems’ capacitors. Stabilizers struggled to keep the lines aimed at the primary target, the one incoming rock aimed directly at the command center. Recoil from the guns affected their aim and even made the asteroids yaw fractions of degrees. Fusion thrusters fired, trying to compensate.

That tiny amount of movement was enough to cause the streams to miss at the distances involved, thus the extreme number and density of shots to compensate. Within a minute the railguns had exhausted their capacitors and shut down to recharge.

D’Lorenz watched as the power on his weapons slowly rebuilt. They would be ready just a minute before the rocks arrived, giving his array one more set of shots at close range.

“Herr Leutnant,” Waldner said, jarring d’Lorenz out of his thoughts. The petty officer gestured at the screen. “We see hits on the rocks. Callisto base’s beams are powerful.” He worked to sort out the thousands of targets, showing a small but increasing number broken up. That readout climbed to two digits and then, barely, to three as it totaled more than one hundred.

“Our railgun impacts are showing up now,” Mercadez said, zooming in on the primary target. Results of the other strikes were interesting, even important, but the rock coming their way represented a duel to the death.

D’Lorenz could have tried to maneuver his asteroids. Even small movements could have made the enemy rocks miss – if they did not each have a Meme guidance package that would compensate. Also, to attempt that would give up use of their weapons. The same engine that moved the asteroids provided firing power.

So, we stand and fight, he told himself calmly. Perhaps soon I will see Papa in God’s heaven, and will be able to face him with pride.

Suddenly his petty officers cheered as the primary target broke apart under the barrage of steel.

“Firing plan Bravo,” the Belgian said. “Separate target protocol.” Now that the first threat to the three men had been dealt with, they would seek to do as much damage to the swarm as possible, chipping away at the rocks so that defenders behind would have that much less to fight.

Watching the small number climb from one hundred to nearly one-fifty gratified him greatly. His little crew, combined with the Callisto base, had already eliminated more than one percent of the threat, and soon the total would grow to more than two percent.

Mercadez yipped, “Jefe! A rock is turning toward us!” On the display the predicted path of one of the undamaged chunks curved like a live thing and intersected Weapons Array 887 Control – their asteroid.

D’Lorenz gripped his chair reflexively. “Retarget all weapons. Continuous maximum fire.” He stared at the track and the icon as the time to impact counted down past forty seconds. “Give us an optical picture please, Sven.”

Waldner tapped a control and waited, with nothing else to do. The automated targeting systems locked onto the inbound rock already were doing their utmost, and no merely human intervention could improve that. The main screen changed from representative icons to a pure optical feed, a telescope focused on the nemesis bearing down on them.

Lumpy and irregular, the blackish chunk of rock sparkled and glittered under the impacts of coherent energy and railgun balls, but still on it came. “Big bastard,” Mercadez mumbled. “Almost one thousand meters across.”

This assessment chilled d’Lorenz. Even while their weapons blew off pieces of the flying mountain, its very size made destroying it unlikely. “Spare five seconds of railgun power for a burst at point-blank range, minimum distance,” he ordered.

“Jawohl, Herr Leutnant,” Waldner replied while Mercadez stared aghast.

“It will hit us!” the Spaniard protested. “Keep firing, senor Teniente!”

“We must ensure every hit from the array. Our only chance of survival is to break it apart and for the debris to strike us like a handful of gravel rather than one huge rock. Do as I say.”

“Si, Jefe.” Mercadez turned reluctantly back to his board. “Ceasing fire. Twenty seconds. Ten.”

“Firing array,” the German said with as little inflection as ever. “Ninety-seven percent accuracy assessed. Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine.”

The massive five-second burst from the array’s railguns sent thirty-five thousand steel balls slamming into the rock at a combined speed of eighty-five thousand kilometers per second. In this case, heavier projectiles would have been more effective, as most of the force came from the speed of the asteroid, not the shot. Unfortunately, railguns took one standard size of ammunition.

The first five hundred or so roundshot impacted the rock, flashing into fusion and releasing enormous quantities of energy. As they did, a plasma-filled shockwave formed in front of the asteroid into which more railgun shot poured. Unfortunately that roiling hell devoured the projectiles, adding to its heat and energy but not striking the object body itself.

“Close crash chairs,” d’Lorenz ordered, and their seats reached up to enfold them, automatically filling the spaces with biogel even as mouthpieces for breathing and viewing goggles shoved roughly onto their faces.

Because everything flew through the vacuum of space together, even the expanding fireball, what struck Array Control Center 887 was more a plasma-blanketed glob of molten metallic lava than a hard rock, but at a quarter the speed of light, it did not matter. Nor did the crash couches or gravplates or other pitiful human countermeasures provide any safety.

One moment, three men lived and fought.

The next, they died as a ball of lava and their asteroid met in a collision that left pieces spinning through the void. Though their armored control chamber did not disintegrate, human bodies could not possibly survive the single hammer blow that transmitted thousands of gravities of acceleration to their flesh, exploding their bodies like blood-filled balloons and smearing them across the walls.

Callisto base, and then the rest of the network, heard one last transmission from Weapons Array 887 Control, recorded by Lieutenant Jacque d’Lorenz for posterity.

“Vive le Roi. Vive la Belgique. Vive le monde.”

Chapter 65

Senior Steward Shan watched from his impromptu landing site atop one of the Aardvark pads as Artemis sped toward the horizon to hide behind Callisto. Once she had dropped out of sight, he carefully lifted the shuttle he had borrowed using only thrusters and hopped it the short distance to the base’s ground vehicle hangar, and then keyed in the external opening code.

Once the large doors had opened, he gingerly hovered the tiny spaceship into the spot between a hopper and a crawler and let it fall to the deck with a grinding clang, doing a bit of cosmetic damage to the deck and the ship but nothing important. Besides, it was unlikely he would need it again.

After telling the doors to close, he stood up and stripped off his outer clothing, revealing an outfit of the finest yellow silk. It is fitting, he thought, that I fight and perhaps die properly attired. The time has finally come. “Treason doth never prosper,” he quoted to himself aloud. “What’s the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

But how can I be loyal to something I left a thousand years ago, and help destroy my adopted people?

Quickly he donned his outsized vacuum suit, the only one aboard either base or ship that would fit him. While he did not strictly need the covering, it would extend his capabilities somewhat, and he could always discard it later. It would also keep the Marines scattered around the base from shooting him on sight, as a clearly human EarthFleet artifact. It would also provide him access to the comm net.

Once he’d sealed the suit, he used his HUD to establish a datalink with the base network, giving himself access to everything it knew – Marine deployments, heavy weapons status, external and internal sensors – while at the same time using his steward’s override codes to make himself appear as a maintenance supervisor to anyone else using the same system.

Fortunately for him, the Marines used their own encrypted net, and would likely just accept the evidence of their eyeballs that he was a human wearing a Fleet suit, and not bother him.

The last thing he did before putting the shuttle into standby mode was to open its large rear cargo door, feeling the air rush out of its interior as he did so. In the back bay he took hold of the two handles he’d spot-glued to the casing of the heavy device and carefully lifted it in the low gravity. Its weight was no problem, but its mass remained. Ripping the handles loose by mistake would cause delay.

Carrying the awkward two-meter-long cylinder, he walked down the ramp and out into the vehicle hangar, and headed for the doors to the interior of the base.

In reality he could just place the device here in the capacious hangar, or even leave it in the shuttle, but to do that would be to invite certain anomalous possibilities, not the least of which was the potential for the thing to be destroyed by some stray chunk of incoming rock. Alternately, Meme ground troops might indiscriminately destroy any piece of human technology they could not identify.

Shan wanted to make sure that any such attackers were welcomed in the best way he could.

Then there were the Marines to think about, spread out and dug in throughout the base, intending to make any attackers pay in blood. The timing of things would be fine indeed, what a speaker of English would call “tricky.” For his purposes, he needed a place unlikely to be destroyed by either incoming debris or by ravaging Meme ground troops, whatever their chosen form.

He considered broadcasting some kind of instructions or plea to the Marines to withdraw to the bunkers, but no matter what he said, he was sure they would confirm it with Huen himself, who knew nothing of his friend and bodyguard’s plan. Unless by chance the admiral would take a leap of faith, doing so would probably cause more harm than good.

Then there was always the chance that the EarthFleet ground forces would win the fight, would hold off the enemy and even destroy all the attackers, capturing valuable Meme technology in the process. He had to incorporate all possibilities into his plan, so he lugged the massive thing, looking like nothing so much as a vitamin capsule swollen to the size of a coffin, through the door and down a corridor.

Plotting his route carefully, he proceeded to the area everyone called the Quarter, cleverly built and painted to look like a New Orleans cityscape. Deserted now, he half expected papers to tumble like weeds down the street, but without atmosphere not even a rat disturbed the stillness. Perhaps after mankind had been in space long enough, some kind of pest larger than a microbe would adapt to vacuum and inhabit such abandoned places, but that time was not yet come.

Shan stumped up to the entrance to the grandest casino and, after entering, kicked open the door to its equally grand bordello and extralegal drug parlor. While the crackdown that First Sergeant Repeth had masterminded had cleaned up a lot of corruption, nothing had shut down the Quarter; there were just too many people that wanted, perhaps needed, some place like it.

Still it seemed appropriate that he bring his cleansing machine here to the center of sleaze. If he did not have to use it, perhaps he would nevertheless break it open and scatter its contents around, discomfiting the denizens of the night for a time. At least it would make a statement of sorts. And if he did have to, it would begin its sterilization here, symbolically satisfying at least.

Chapter 66

Rear Admiral Huen drummed his fingers on the arm of the Chair in irritation. “Steward Schaeffer, I do not mean to imply you are in any way complicit, but you did know Shan well. Can you think of any reason he might have taken a shuttle and deliberately not told you or me?”

“No, sir, I don’t.” Turning to the CyberComm officer, Schaeffer asked, “Do we have any video of Shan or the shuttle? Anything that might shed light on this?”

“Give me a few minutes, sir, while I run through it.”

The bridge crew watched the big picture display for several minutes, the Destroyer arcing around toward Earth and the incoming rock cloud heading directly for the home planet, incidentally passing near Jupiter and Callisto.

Finally the CyberComm watchstander spoke. “Here’s the best I could find, sir. It looks as if he took some pains to override or avoid the internal cameras, but this is from a cleaning bot with its own independent vid, downloaded when it secured itself for launch.” The front view was replaced by a low-res shot of a corridor deck and a pair of legs. While the scale was hard to tell it did seem as if those could be Shan’s.

“What’s that blob?” Huen asked. The object in question was obvious, if difficult to identify: the lower half of a grayish cylinder hovering next to Shan’s feet, as if being carried.

“Not sure, sir.”

“Clean that up and send it out to all stations. See if anyone can identify it.”

A short time later a call came through to the bridge. “Chief Prochaska here, sir,” the voice on the other end identified itself. “That thing you want to know about? It looks like a drive bomb, sir. And we’ve got one missing.”

Huen sat back, stunned. “A drive bomb? A nuclear weapon? How could he have gotten away with that?”

“I have no idea, sir,” the chief replied, sounding anguished. “I take full responsibility. All I can think of is he used a command override code, because no alarms went off.”

Schaeffer chimed in, “With all the cyberware in his body and as long as he’s been on this ship he could have easily obtained override codes. Hell, sir, he might have just overheard or seen someone punching them into a keypad and recorded them with his cyber-eyes or ears. He must have been planning something like this for some time. But I just can’t believe…”

“You and me both, Shades,” Huen replied. “Even getting married…I wonder if his wife is in on it.”

“In on what, sir?” Schaeffer asked with a certain subdued hostility. “Whatever he’s doing, he must believe it’s necessary and right.”

“Yes, I want to believe that too, but I must be realistic. It hardly matters, though. What can we do?”

Schaeffer licked his lips, and then spoke as if the words were being dragged from his lips. “We could radio the Marines to arrest him and stop him.”

Huen shook his head in negation. “If he really does have a drive bomb, doing so might cause him to trigger it. He might blow up a whole battalion of Marines and the base with it. And, what if what he’s doing turns out to be necessary? I vetoed the idea of setting a fusion bomb on the base. What if he disagreed with me, and is willing to die for that belief? What if he’s right?”

Schaeffer nodded slowly. “He’s given you an option you weren’t willing to take yourself, knowing full well what might happen. Gotta respect that.”

“Yes. We must.” Huen turned to the CyberComm station. “Record and relay this through the spy drones to the whole base in the clear, please.” He switched to Han Chinese. “Shan: now we will see if you retain the mandate of heaven. Good luck, my friend.”

Chapter 67

“Damn,” First Sergeant Repeth said to no one in particular as she watched the displays over the shoulders of Grissom Base’s Behemoth Number Four control crew. Each weapon, ten times as massive as the ones out on the mobile asteroid array, had two humans looking after it, even though many of the targeting commands were automated.

“Yeah,” the senior watchstander, the one with a warrant officer’s insignia, agreed. “They couldn’t have survived that impact. Array 887’s on automatic fire now. Damn, lost another one,” he went on as six remaining icons became five. “Brave buggers.” He sketched a salute toward the ceiling.

“Yeah,” echoed the other, a female sergeant. “Wouldn’t want to be out there floating all alone in the middle of nothing.” The control chamber, buried twenty meters below the railgun itself, thrummed with the vibration of intermittent launches.

“We got our own problems,” said the first. “Nineteen inbounds.”

“We can handle them,” the sergeant replied confidently.

“Yes we can,” the warrant mused. “Wonder why so few. This base has the biggest concentration of weapons in the area. You’d think they would have sent a few hundred to pound us to dust.”

The sergeant glanced over her shoulder at Repeth, standing in the doorway to the control room, as if she thought the Marine would have an answer.

Behind Repeth, a squad of Marines lined the access hallway. All of them were clad in full space armor and carried an array of personal weapons, from caseless-recoilless machineguns to grenade launchers and electromagnetic cannon. She set her helmet camera to pass her audiovisuals back so that everyone could see what was going on. Nothing was more boring than waiting in place for something to happen.

“Maybe they’ll just bypass Callisto,” Repeth volunteered. “Once they pass out of your arc of fire, the ground-based weaponry is pretty much moot.”

“But they’re going to leave us operational. We’ll be able to recover, refuel and rearm Aardvarks once the threat has passed. You’d think they would at least flatten the base to deny it to us for a while.”

Repeth shook her head. “Once the Destroyer passes us, any birds that land here will never catch up to the fight, unless it slows way down. Right now it looks like it’s charging straight in behind its barrage of rocks.”

“Yeah, but –” the sergeant argued, then turned to her board. “Central just released us to local. Ready to engage those inbounds.”

“Roger. Target designated. Fifty-seven seconds to full recharge. Seventy seconds to optimum range. Locked. Set for intermittent burst mode.” The warrant’s hand hovered above the fire button.

“Aye aye, sir,” replied the sergeant as she complied.

With that much time, Repeth felt safe to ask, “We have twelve railguns and nineteen targets?”

“Seventeen now,” the sergeant replied as the warrant officer ignored them, his eyes on the countdown. “The beam array is picking off one rock at a time. They’ll take out their targets and then spread out to help us with ours.”

“Is there any chance we’ll miss?”

The sergeant shook her head. “Not unless something freakish happens, knock on plastic.” She rapped her knuckles on her console. “These babies are rock-steady and extremely accurate.”

“Shut yer gobs,” the warrant snarled, still watching as the numbers fell.

Repeth patted the sergeant on the shoulder with her armored hand, then stepped back to let the crew concentrate.

At time zero the man’s thumb mashed down on the button and control room vibrated with a bass sound as of a dozen train locomotives running over a track joint.

Above their heads, the Behemoth flung thousands of steel balls upward in controlled bursts. As they impacted the incoming asteroid, pieces peeled off in waves. Short pauses between groupings allowed the plasma to disperse and the shot to reach the solid rock, slamming repeatedly into its surface.

Twenty-five seconds to impact, the young sergeant gave a small cheer, pointing at one of her screens. “It’s breaking apart!” she whooped.

“Spread the pattern. Requesting laser targeting,” the warrant said tersely.

The sergeant did as ordered, widening the gun’s narrow focus, turning her weapon from a rifle into a shotgun in hopes of further breaking the large chunks. “Optical,” she said, pointing at a screen.

“We got some light,” the warrant said, and on the visual screen some of the flying gravel flared redly as one of the central array’s massive lasers reached out to turn it into hot vapor. “Getting a few hits from the pattern.”

“Not enough,” the sergeant mumbled, worried.

“Continuous autofire,” the warrant snapped. “Seal up.” He sat back into his crash chair and it folded over him. The sergeant’s did the same just a moment later.

Repeth immediately passed a similar order. “Seal suits. Everyone back up into the tunnel.” The squad performed an about-face and trotted down the access corridor and deeper into the living rock of Callisto, huddling close, the best defense for armored troops against cave-ins and earthquakes.

Just as she stepped in and crowded up against her troops, a ground shock knocked her off her feet. Fortunately there seemed only one, and then the vibration settled.

Jumbled among armored bodies, Repeth gently pushed upward in the low gravity and triggered a maneuvering jet to shove herself feet-first out of the tunnel and into the corridor. Her troops sorted themselves out and got back on their feet. A moment later she looked into the control room.

As she did, the clamshell crash chairs opened up, revealing the two uninjured crew, who immediately lunged for their boards. “We’re down,” the sergeant said. “Hard impact on number four strut.”

“Requesting emergency repair. Putting our power onto the grid. We won’t need it for a while.” The warrant slapped his console with disgust, sitting back.

“How are the rest of the guns?” Repeth asked.

“We’re the only one that took a significant hit. Shit,”’ the sergeant groused. “We did everything right. Just bad luck.” She turned to Repeth. “Think you’ll see any action?”

“You’d better hope we don’t,” Repeth replied. “If any kind of ground troops land here, you guys just seal up tight, dog the hatch and hope to hell our weapons are effective against whatever they throw at us.”

“You don’t know what they’ll be?” the sergeant asked with surprise. “Didn’t the alien tell us?”

“She gave some guesses, I hear, but remember her information is four thousand years old. And she’s not an alien. Not more than half, anyway,” Repeth replied. “Mostly she just seemed like an impressive lady everyone in sight would like to get to know better.” She waggled her eyebrows within her helmet. Waiting for something to happen always brought out her amateur comedian.

“You’ve met her?” the warrant asked with an edge of disbelief.

“A few times, when I was on Admiral Absen’s security detachment. Seemed pretty human to me.” Normally she didn’t drop names but in this case, she might as well provide some entertainment while they waited for the repair crew to come up from the deep bunkers and take a look.

“I hear there are more Blends among us, trying to take over and let the Meme in, like that colonel,” the sergeant said. “Traitors.”

Repeth shrugged her armored shoulders. “You know, people say a lot of things. When the Eden Plague was first released, people said everyone who got it would turn into some kind of peacenik zombie pod people. They interned us in camps.”

“Aw, that couldn’t happen today,” the sergeant scoffed. “Society has progressed.”

“So you wouldn’t lock up all the Blends you found? No matter what their loyalties? Just in case?”

The sergeant fell silent while the warrant shook his head, at what Repeth was not sure.

“I guess that answers why she and her son don’t come down to Earth much,” Repeth said.

“Repair crew’s up on the surface.” The sergeant seemed glad to change the subject, pointing to a screen that showed a utility vehicle disgorging several suited figures next to the structure of the railgun tower. That looked like the articulated skeleton of a skyscraper, ferrocrystal and steel framing that held the four magnetic rails in place.

Those rails had to be aligned precisely with one another so the hundreds of ball bearings per second would accelerate properly, shooting upward with the enormous surges of electromagnetic energy. Panning the camera, the sergeant pointed. “See. Strut four.”

It appeared a chunk of rock had struck the ferrocrystal support a glancing blow, bending it sharply as it expended its final energy. The resulting plasma burst had melted the ordinary steel surrounding it. “They’ll have to replace that, and then test it,” the warrant said. “Gonna be more than an hour.”

“You can’t fire with only three supports?” Repeth asked.

“Sure we can. Once, for about a millisecond,” the man replied in disbelief. “Then the whole thing will come apart and the entire external structure will need replacing. Might get five, maybe six rounds through before it fails.”

“Like firing a rifle with a bent barrel,” she replied.

“A big rifle, yes,” the man said drily.

“What’s that?” Repeth pointed at the large display that showed the synthesized battle overview. “Those two groups of icons.”

“Looks like they’re down under nine thousand rocks,” the warrant replied, tapping the cloud of enemy objects screen with a finger to illustrate. “Now it gets interesting. This here’s the Pilum missiles lining up on the rocks, there. Got about thirty seconds before they detonate.”

“Detonate?” Repeth asked. “Why don’t they just go for impact?”

The warrant shrugged. “A fusion fireball five hundred meters wide is more likely to do damage than one kinetic missile, they say. Also hope the heat will kill the Meme guidance package, or at least hurt it enough to keep it from adjusting course. All we need is a little uncorrected nudge and a rock will miss its target.”

“Right,” Repeth said. She wondered if the man knew what he was talking about, or he was just running his mouth. Each seemed equally possible.

The three watched the screen as the cloud of rocks overran the lines of Pilums. One moment they approached the missiles, and the next, the enemy objects had swept through them. On the screen the entire swath of human warheads disappeared, along with some of the incoming kinetic asteroids.

“Got almost one thousand of them. Not bad.” The warrant tapped the screen where the estimated count read 7800. “One more pass.”

“What pass?” Repeth asked. Keep the man talking, keep my troops listening. Nothing better to do right now.

“The Aardvarks.” The warrant tapped the concave crescent that represented the attack ships. They stood across the plotted path of the rock cluster. “They may take out a few, but not many.”

“Why?”

“According to the plan, they won’t use up any more missiles. They’re saving those for the Destroyer. But they’ll take shots with their masers.”

Repeth nodded, watching as the icons overlapped momentarily, and then the rock cloud flew on, seemingly unaffected. She looked at the estimated object count, and it did not change.

The warrant shrugged. “So few the system can’t sort it out. Oh, well. That’s not what they are for anyway.”

“What’s next?”

“Against the rocks?” The warrant manipulated his controls and recentered the display on an area farther along the objects’ path. “There’s a group of seventy asteroidal weapons arrays right here. They should take out a few hundred, maybe another thousand.”

“Why was there one array forward, and sixty-nine back a bit?”

The warrant’s face turned bleak. “What are sentries and pickets for? To force the enemy to engage and reveal his plans. To force him to commit, and to get some intel on his tactics, and see how effective our own fire is. I’d have thought a Marine would get that.”

“Thanks for explaining it.” Repeth refused to be drawn into a clash with someone senior to her. Times like these she wished she had hung onto Chief Warrant rank. He’s just frustrated that his gun is down, she told herself, and then chuckled at how that sounded in her own head.

“Something funny?” he snapped.

“No, sir,” Repeth replied, blanking her face. “Just a random thought.”

“Marines aren’t paid to think,” the man replied with a sneer. “Leave that to us.”

Asshole. This is one of these times I wish I had kept that warrant’s rank.
But then I wouldn’t be a company first sergeant. At best I’d be honchoing a section of heavy weapons. “Yes sir. Will that be all, sir?”

“Right. Shove off. You’re distracting us.”

Repeth fell back into the corridor to confer with Sergeant Dasko, the squad leader, switching to Marine channels so the crew could not hear. “I’m off to check on the rest of the company. Don’t engage the gun chief there; he’s a bit testy.”

The squad laughed as Sergeant Dasko replied, “We’ll keep away from the squiddies, Top.”

“Just keep your ears open in case you’re needed. Stay on max alert. We should hear something within the next hour about what the Destroyer is doing. If we’re lucky, he’ll send something to kill us.”

“Lucky?” Dasko seemed disbelieving.

“Yes, Sergeant, lucky. I don’t want him to just fly past. I want him to expend resources against us. After ten years of waiting, I want to close with the bastards and kill some of them. Don’t you?”

“Oo-rah, First Sergeant. Thanks for explaining it to us dumbshit Marines that ain’t paid to think.” That brought more laughter from the squad, easing the tension of waiting.

“Oo-rah. On the HUD and on the bounce.” Repeth flipped down her faceplate but did not seal her armor, preserving its internal air supply, and then pushed past the troops in the corridor, who spread out along the wall. Her HUD stuttered and fuzzed, until after a short distance she reached an intersection with the large circular accessway that ran in a huge ring under the base. There it cleared up.

“Dasko,” she called over her suitcomm, “fall back to this main intersection and hold in place. The datalink is wonky in the access tunnel anyway, and you’ll be in a better position to react.”

“Aye aye, Top,” came Dasko’s voice.

Not waiting any longer, Repeth took off with gliding low-gravity bounds, her suit jets stabilizing her now and again. After years on Callisto, she didn’t need much help.

She could see Bravo Company spread out on her HUD, eight squads and the crew-served weapons section covering half of the ring. Charlie Company held the other half, and Alpha was positioned in the center of the spoked wheel of tunnels, beneath the beam array.

Delta Company had the shitty end of the stick, occupying heavily fortified positions in the base complex above. They would be first to engage, if there was some kind of landing. They were also the most exposed if a heavier bombardment came.

Dasko’s Fourth Squad, Second Platoon had one end of the company’s arc, so Repeth made her way up the main tunnel. Every hundred meters or so she found a squad, right where her HUD said they should be, and in the middle, between the first and second platoons she found the CO and reported in to her on a private channel. “Ma’am, Second Platoon is good to go. Making rounds on First now.”

“Very well, Top,” Captain Miller replied, her steady black eyes roving over her HUD. “Carry on.”

Good officer, Repeth thought, which right now means one who is not dicking around with the plan at the last minute. The company was deployed to guard the perimeter, contain any breach and still be able to rapidly redeploy along the underground corridors, reinforcing any point in three dimensions.

As she glided unhurriedly along toward First Platoon’s closest position, her HUD lit up with the command net icon. “This is Ruchek,” the harsh voice of the battalion commander came. “Base tracking confirms second set of estimated four hundred objects inbound this base. Destroyer released these objects and they are maneuvering at high G, generally decelerating toward us. Unknown at this time whether they are ships, missiles, or something else entirely. Weapons array is engaging, but effectiveness assessment indicates more than ninety percent will get through. Will pass more information as it becomes available.” The battalion CO’s voice cut off, leaving Repeth back on the Bravo company net.

“Anything we can do?” Repeth asked.

Miller shook her head. “Just wait. The boss will make the call to pull out Delta and evac us to the bunkers if it looks too hot.”

“Right. I’m off again.” Off she went.

Chapter 68

“They launch,” Three said unnecessarily. All of the trium could see the Close Combat force departing the sphincters created to external access, streaming out of the holes like the insects they resembled departing a hive.

This similarity was not lost on them, but was so routine as to be completely unremarkable, even for Meme bored with their own duties. Of course everything they dealt with resembled living forms. Mostly, they were living forms.

Pride swelled in One at the impressive display of force. Avarice, or perhaps lust, filled him as well, thinking about the Humans just waiting helplessly to be captured there. Of course, they would have some of their own close combat troops, such as overwhelmed their old Survey craft so recently, but in fairness, such ships had very little defensive capability. This time would be different.

One wished for a moment that he could accompany the Close Combat force, or that he had been placed in charge of that section. Perhaps in the future, his trium would rise so high. He would have to content himself with watching from a distance. At least they had access to hundreds of individual bioradio feeds. He could not issue commands, but he and the others could listen and watch.

It made for a pleasant diversion.

A certain amount of trepidation entered his mind when the admittedly potent ground weapons ringing the moon’s base fired thousands of kinetic projectiles at the Close Combat force, as well as targeting them with directed energy weapons, but as the grouping of ships aimed at a point tangent to the moon rather than directly at it, and they retained the tremendous speed of the Destroyer itself, only a few craft were lost. The Human fire control systems remained inferior to those of the Empire. Their only advantage was that of numbers.

Even so, One felt relief when the Close Combat force dropped below the moon’s horizon, out of line of sight of the enemy magnetic launchers and energy projectors. Slingshotting around the planetoid and approaching from the other side would allow them time to decelerate, and also reduce any more potential losses.

Close Combat trium is clever, and competent, One said grudgingly to himself. If we are fortunate, they will achieve their objectives, then become casualties in the main battle for the Human planet. Fortunately they are less well protected than we, of necessity located nearer the surface, with their Pureling forces.

One could always hope.

Chapter 69

“Ruchek here,” came the CO’s voice on the battalion net. “I have good news and bad news. The good news is the objects are not going to impact us directly. The bad news is, inbounds have inserted into Callisto orbit and dropped below the horizon, and so cannot be engaged with the weapons arrays. Three hundred eighty-one separate craft survived.”

Repeth could hear a tinge of disgust at the Fleet gunners’ performance, though she knew it was not likely their fault. Trying to hit small maneuvering targets at high deflection angles was very difficult, like trying to shoot far-off flying birds with rifles.

On her HUD the CO threw up a crude diagram of Callisto, with Grissom Base marked. A line appeared, streaking from the Destroyer to the edge of the moon, and then curving close around it to approach the base from the other side.

“Weapons arrays cannot depress enough to engage targets coming in NOE, and I believe the only reason these craft are using a decelerating orbit is to land and occupy this base, otherwise they would just use their kinetic energy to smash the surface installations. ETA is seventeen minutes until they are visible on the horizon. Expect ground assault shortly after.”

Repeth could hear the Colonel take a deep breath in his helmet that echoed through the net. “Base Command tells me the ground crews are working to get three broken Aardvarks launched in an effort to hit the enemy during their landing.”

I’m sure the pilots would rather die in their birds than in the ground fighting, Repeth thought. Time to fulfill the Ultimate Liability Clause on the life insurance.

The CO went on, “But don’t pin your hopes on the zoomies or the squids saving your sorry arses, Marines. We’re going to do that ourselves. I want the heavy weapons section from each company up to the first level and emplaced to target the enemy as he comes over the horizon. Whatever the hell they are, they’ll be most vulnerable as they slow down to land. Delta One, mark us four good firing positions. Everyone seal up and go on internal oxygen in four minutes. I’m going to have the surface complex pressure lowered to almost nothing.”

She wondered again if this would be the time she’d be carried home in a box. In a way, that would be a relief. So many missions, so much death. At least Rick is back on Orion, where he can do the most good.

“All right, people,” she heard Captain Miller come on, “you heard the man. Everyone seal up and go on internal. Toroda, Kostas, give me another systems check, top to bottom. Chief Massimo,” she addressed the master gunnery warrant in charge of the crew-served weapons, “get your section up top and emplaced. Take direction from Delta, but don’t throw those weapons away. Withdraw to the tunnels if you must. Make them dig us out.”

“Roger,” Repeth heard the chief’s acknowledgement. For a moment it made her think of Roger Muzik, dead these nine years. He should be with us, kicking ass.

She glided up to Captain Miller, a short fireplug of a woman, and tapped her on the shoulder to let her know she was there. They watched as Massimo and his people loaded up their ground-pounders’ holy trinity of heavy railgun, heavy laser and missile launcher, each with a crew of three. All carried extra ammo and powerpacks on their backracks, but in the low gravity they probably could have held much more.

“You want to send some grunts up to cover them?” Repeth asked. “I don’t trust those Delta goobers to keep the enemy off them, and they may need help when it comes time to pull back.”

Miller turned to look at her, faceplate to faceplate. “You mean someone cool enough to pull them out if they need reminding?” Massimo was known as something of a hothead, not inclined to listen to orders.

“And with enough clout. That means one of the eltees, or you or me. He won’t listen to anyone else.”

“Right.” Miller thought for a moment. “You go, Top. I have to grok the big picture and I’d rather the eltees stayed with their platoons. Take Dasko and his squad. I know you guys get along. We’ll adjust. I’ll tell Kostas.”

“Aye aye, ma’am.” Repeth pulled up Dasko direct and told him to meet her in the central park above. A few bounds took her up one of the cargo ramps and to the surface base, though it looked similar to the tunnels below, except for the fact that instead of twenty meters of rock overhead there was just a few centimeters of structure and a meter of Callisto’s dirt.

Her HUD located the squad leader and she glided over to him and his ten Marines. “Follow me,” she said and led the way across the central space to the east side of the base, where the enemy would approach. Massimo’s icon moved ahead of her, and settled to a stop just a moment before she reached the heavy weapons section.

Those ten Marines busied themselves with their heavy laser, cutting the external wall. Repeth kept Dasko’s squad back as she watched them open three holes, the residual pressure of the atmosphere shoving the external dust and dirt outward, making nice firing ports. She had to hand it to him, the chief knew what he was doing.

Once they had their firing ports cut, she ordered Dasko to get his people in to clear out everything in the room they were in – some kind of low-priority storage, emergency rations and water, it looked like. The line Marines soon had the spaces cleared for action, with nothing to ignite or turn into flying debris if they got hit.

“Need to get someone out there to emplace sensors,” Massimo said, looking around. Clearly the holes were too small to fit a Marine through, and he didn’t want to widen them. Then he spotted Repeth. “Hello, Top. What are you doing here?”

“The boss wanted us to cover your sorry butts,” she replied cheerfully.

“Well all right, then. Let’s get you some firing ports.” The chief told the laser gunner to punch some more holes in the wall.

“Dasko,” Repeth said, “get everyone on the heavy weapons channel and then send two people with a modicum of brains out the nearest airlock to set up the chief’s sensors.”

“Right.” Dasko sent off two Marines and soon they had exited the base and come around to the firing ports. They began to emplace sensors as the gunners handed them through the firing ports, trailing armored cables.

“Get them as widely spaced as possible,” Massimo roared, as if yelling in a suitcomm helped. “We don’t want one hit to take them all out! Then get back inside.”

“One hit from what?” Dasko muttered.

“From whatever comes. They aren’t super-beings,” Repeth replied for all to hear. “They follow the same laws of physics that we do. We can kill their troops with our weapons. You’ve all seen the video.” She meant the sequences of the less advanced Space Marines of ten years ago assaulting the Meme scout ship, fighting the weird critters inside.

Chapter 70

Rear Admiral Huen leaned forward and gripped the arms of the Chair. “They’re going to swing around Callisto. If they came straight in, they’d have taken a lot of casualties from the heavy weapons emplacements. Instead, they’re zooming past and going to drop into a surface-skimming orbit and decelerate to hit the base from the other horizon.”

Sensors updated the main display to show the path of the incoming force, arriving tangent to the moon and a thousand kilometers away from the base, then curling behind Callisto in an enormous three-quarter circle, ending just short of Grissom. “Do you think they know we’re here?” he asked.

“No way to say,” Sensors replied, along with murmured negations from the other watchstanders. “They could tweak their courses and rise to hit us or stay low and avoid us.”

Huen stroked his chin in thought. “What if we force their hand? What if we drop down and deliberately place ourselves in the enemy’s path?”

Weapons replied, “Depends on the capabilities of the enemy craft, sir, and we simply don’t know what they can do. If their weapons are short-range and powerful, they could rip us up. If they are long-range, it doesn’t really matter, except we’ll make ourselves easier to hit and harder to ignore. Either way, sir, all we really have are a bunch of point defense lasers.”

“And drive bombs,” Schaeffer said.

Everyone on the bridge turned to look at him in surprise. “That’s true,” Huen said. “A valuable insight.”

Schaeffer shrugged. “I only thought of it because we were talking about Shan.”

“I can drop a bomb, or a series of them, with time delays, like falling mines, to try to catch them as they go under us,” the helmsman said.

“Do so, please,” Huen ordered. “Make sure we stand off far enough not to be damaged. And Weapons, make free with anything at your disposal, but remember they might come after us, so save sufficient power in case they do.” His officers acknowledged his instructions, and they watched as the group of four hundred or so blips descended toward the edge of the moon.

When they reached the point of tangency, in reality just a few kilometers above Callisto’s surface, Huen could see the enemy craft flaring with fusion engines on full power as they forced themselves into brutally decelerating low orbits. “I don’t think they even see us, or perhaps they do not care,” he mused.

“Repositioning to come above them,” the helmsman reported. “Setting up the bomb drop. Weapons, will you give me control?”

“You have control,” the weapons watchstander said after a grudging moment. Huen knew that the helmsman, with his multiplicity of cranial chips and his acute three-dimensional senses, was the best person to try to bomb the enemy as he raced past below.

The moment came, and the helmsman said, “Mark.” Six flashing dots fell away from the ship on the display, the view rotating to allow them to follow the weapons’ progress toward the surface.

“Damn. They’ve seen them.”

On the screen, Huen could see the enemy spread out, flowing around the falling bombs like a river of ants around a rock. Suddenly the icons flared and klaxons sounded on the bridge. “Proximity warning,” Sensors said.

“Got a few of them,” the helmsman reported. “We have inbounds.”

While most of the remaining enemy craft continued on their paths, a dozen or so altered course, zooming upward and heading straight toward Artemis. “What are those?” Huen asked.

“Looks like some kind of fighters, pointy-nosed hot ships,” the helmsman said before Sensors could. “The ones ignoring us look like turtles or something.”

“Guns, you are weapons free,” Huen reminded him, and the fire control watchstander nodded, pressing keys. Beside him, his assistant stood ready on her board.

“Firing,” he said tersely, and the two played their boards like concert pianists. Most of the lasers would be on automatic, but they could be guided by human hands and intuition in certain ways should the weapons officers so desire. “Got one! Got two…three…six…seven. They turned away. Driven off, out of range.”

“Good work, gunners. Those are seven that won’t hit the base.” Not enough, but something.

“If only we had some heavy lasers,” the weapons officer grumbled, then looked at Huen sheepishly.

Huen nodded in understanding. “Unfortunately Fleet cannot give every ship everything it wants, and we were not expected to engage in combat. Helm, follow the enemy around the moon. How long until we are above the base?”

“About fifty-five minutes,” the helmsman answered.

“Admiral,” Schaeffer said quietly, bending down to speak in Huen’s ear, “if Shan detonates that drive bomb…”

“Good point. Helm, make sure we stay above and out of damage range of a theoretical detonation of a drive bomb on the surface of the base.”

The helmsman looked over his shoulder at Huen and blinked once, then nodded.

Chapter 71

“Ruchek here,” the battalion commander broke in on Repeth’s channel – probably on all channels. “The enemy is three minutes out. Artemis says they took out a few on the way by, and are coming in higher than expected, but faster. Expect combat decel at the last minute, with their fusion drives providing cover. Disable your thermal targeting until they are all down. A missile entering a plasma envelope will just get fried. Use electromagnetic or polarized optics to avoid the drives and engage the vehicles themselves. Good luck, and good hunting.”

“You heard the man,” Captain Miller came on to the Bravo Company net. “If you can see it, shoot it. If you are getting overrun or get low on supplies, withdraw to the tunnels in accordance with the oplan. Watch your HUDs, listen to your leaders, and kick some ass. Semper Fidelis.”

One of the Aussies broke in. “By land, by sea, by space.”

“Who Dares, Wins,” came another voice, a Brit for sure.

“For those about to die, we salute you,” quoted Warrant Officer Massimo.

Well, what do you expect from a Roman. Repeth spoke on the company channel, “This is your first sergeant. Pipe down, ladies. Here’s a better one. ‘We are surrounded. That simplifies the problem.’ Now shut up and look to your guns.”

“One minute,” Massimo said on the heavy weapons section channel.

Dasko and his squad stood leaning against the wall, their weapons in the loopholes pointed toward the horizon. Despite her desire to join them, she was the company first sergeant, and couldn’t afford to get bogged down in shooting. Yet. Although when they took their first casualty, she would step up.

Instead she pulled her HUD view back and rotated it to high overhead. Twenty kilometers to the west she could see three green icons hovering just above the surface: the Aardvarks. Twenty klicks sounded like a long way, until she remembered that they sported masers and targeting systems made to reach out to a thousand. Maybe they would do some good after all.

Suddenly red blips blossomed as the base sensors picked up the enemy. “Incoming,” she said. “Fire free.”

“Light them up!” Massimo cried, and his heavy trinity began to spit death. A whoosh of vapor briefly filled the long room they were in as the cold launch charge of the Hades anti-armor guided missile spurted, shoving the projectile out the firing port. A moment later its rocket engine ignited as it accelerated toward a target.

Beside it the railgun they had bolted to the floor rocked with each burst of magnetic discharge as it accelerated groups of ball bearings toward the enemy at ten thousand meters per second, while the heavy laser, with no recoil, flashed brightly as its coherent light vaporized dust motes and visible gases.

Repeth watched her HUD for a moment more as the Aardvarks maneuvered, spreading out and jinking low near the surface of Callisto, firing their centerline masers. While small for space combatants, the beam strength far exceeded the Marines’ ground weapons, though not nearly approaching that of the now-useless fixed weapons arrays. Note to self for the after action report, she thought. Make sure the big guns can depress to the horizon. And, do not assume the enemy is stupid.

The HUD common operating picture was not so detailed that she could tell the specific effects of the Aardvarks’ shots, but as she looked at the wave of hundreds of craft come over the horizon she saw several dozen wink out. Switching to an optical view from a remote camera, she observed plumes of dust and debris as some of the enemy augered in. Others wounded tumbled above the base, the low gravity insufficient to bring them down for kilometers.

Because she had no control of the camera feed, she could not focus well on one of the enemy craft to examine it, but in the flashes and glimpses she thought they looked like bugs, beetles perhaps, curved on top and flat on the bottom, with struts or legs all around. She wasn’t sure at this point whether they were organic or mechanical.

That question was answered when they began to land. Now and then one would crumple and die from some invisible source, presumably the Aardvark masers. Those were earning their keep, and Repeth wished now the base had kept a squadron back for close-in defense.

Another lesson learned, if we live through this.

Then that equation changed as five shark-like vehicles with stubby wings roared over the base at high speed and low altitude. As she watched, they launched tiny missiles that accelerated at incredible velocity, and a moment later the Aardvark icons winked out.

Damn.

Now her view blurred and filled with explosions, subliming ice vapor and dust. Her HUD view showed about three hundred remaining beetles, and she brought her attention back to her surroundings. No casualties yet, though rock dust blew through the firing ports and the structure shook, showing some kind of fire incoming.

“Adjust laser for organics,” Massimo yelled, and the heavy beamer’s color reddened almost to invisibility. “Those beetles are alive, and they’re deploying something.”

Repeth belatedly switched her view to the section sensors they had emplaced. Now the flying beetles that had descended in a swarm turned into gigantic monsters, as if she herself had been shrunk to tininess, bringing a visceral terror that she had to force down. Unlike a natural insect, these had turrets that fired green plasma like focused flamethrowers.

A Marine anti-armor missile roared off the launcher and immediately slammed into a nearby beetle, blowing a hole in its head-shaped front portion. It halted, its joints locking and swaying in an apparently automatic response to damage. The turret on top swung in their direction.

“Cover!” Dasko barked, and the line Marines dropped immediately to their knees, heads below the loopholes. The heavy weapons crews, with their gun shields filling their holes, didn’t bother, but kept firing.

Green plasma washed into their embrasures, filling the room with heat and igniting the ceiling panels, the light fixtures and, briefly, even the paint on the concrete walls before flaring out from lack of oxygen.

Another good reason to fight in vacuum.

“Son of a bitch!” Massimo spat. “Pull that laser back. Get a new barrel on it.” Repeth saw the emitter had warped from the heat, rendering it useless. “Target that turret!”

The heavy railgun, its snub nose made of tougher stuff, shifted fire and slammed a stream of steel into the plasma gun atop the beetle, shredding it and leaving it slewed sideways, smoking and popping.

“Back on the line,” Dasko said before Repeth had to, getting his people into their loopholes again. “They are deploying ground troops.”

“What the hell are those?” one of the Marines said as she let loose with her recoilless machinegun. Railguns had been miniaturized to the level of the crew-served heavy, but most line Marines still carried weapons descended from the assault rifles of terrestrial forces, firing caseless ammo.

Dropping from the bottom of the beetles from holes in their bellies, Repeth could see some kind of…creatures. Three meters tall, they moved ponderously, their skins or exoskeletons armored with plates that looked more organic than mechanical. Insectoid centaurs of a sort, with four legs on an abdomen below, an upright thorax with two arms, and a head with wide-set, glittering eyes, rather like mantises.

They also seemed to have no problem with vacuum, and each carried a firearm in its left hand, which discharged short-range energy pulses, perhaps particle beams. Each also had a meter-long metal blade in its right.

Swords?

“They are going to close,” Repeth called on the local channel and then switched to the company net. “Captain Miller, the enemy appears to be large insectoids armed with short-range energy weapons and blades. This makes me suspect they are willing to close and use their superior size and strength in hand to hand combat. The only sense that makes is if they are trying hard to take this base intact, and minimize damage.”

“Understood, Top. Will pass to Battalion. Break.” Miller’s voice dropped off.

Just then a blue crackling explosion blasted one of Dasko’s line Marines backward from his loophole. A moment later an insectoid leg reached through the hole and ripped at its edge, widening it like a miniature backhoe.

Repeth stepped up with her machinegun and fired one-handed into the hole, and the limb jerked back. Then she reached to her grenade dispenser and popped one into her hand, rolling it out the opening. “Use grenades if they get too close,” she barked, turning to check on the fallen Marine.

The man was unconscious but alive, his armor showing a rebooting sequence. “Those energy blasts will take down your armor and cyberware, people, so duck! I need live Marines, not dead heroes!” She manhandled him over to the door and tossed him into the corridor in hopes he would recover to fight, then turned back to the firing line.

Two more Marines were down, one still moving and one as immobile as the first. “Defensive grenades, people,” Repeth repeated, dropping her gun to its sling and pulling four grenades off the fallen man’s backrack. Activating them as she moved, she rolled them out the three empty firing ports and then past Dasko’s shoulder. “Sergeant, get your squad using their grenades. Pull them off the wounded. There are too many of these things out there to just stand and deliver.”

Dasko turned from his loophole just in time to dodge the brunt of a blue bolt, but it caught his arm and he stumbled back to the wall. A moment later Repeth had her hands full as one of those swords came probing through the opening.

Her steward-level cybernetics exceeded even the standard Marine package, otherwise she would not have been able to execute the technique that occurred to her as she grabbed the “wrist” of the giant limb in a bear hug. At the same time she lifted her right leg to brace against the loophole’s inner edge, her left on the floor, and torqued her body backward, levering the chitinous limb sideways in a direction it was clearly not designed to go.

Roaring with effort, Repeth forced the thing’s exoskeleton to flex like a lobster shell, and then it cracked. She felt rather than heard its squeal of pain as it let go of its sword and tried to withdraw. Finally it slipped out of her grasp. She had to fight the instinct to deploy her claws to tear into it, but unless she wanted to expose her naked hands to vacuum, that was a bad idea.

Instead she picked up the sword. With two hands, she had plenty of strength to use it, a bit awkwardly perhaps. Who would have thought a frickin’ sword would be useful in high-tech combat? But in this case…

The next limb to come through became the test – a leg with a shovel foot that sought to widen the hole. Repeth chopped at it, missing the first time and almost vibrating the awkward sword out of her hands. The second time her strike bit deeply, and her third chopped it off entirely.

The next few minutes turned into a haze of chopping, blue blasts, staccato orders and automatic weapons fire. Somewhere along the line the laser, with its more delicate mechanism, had been punched back through its larger firing hole and now a blizzard of incoming fire spewed through that opening. Half of the Marines were down.

“Fall back!” Repeth ordered, overriding everyone on the local net. “Fall back now, everyone. You too, chief. They’re getting in!” She wasn’t overstating the case, as one of the buggers forced its full upper body through the hole, sword swinging and energy cannon blasting.

Dasko came up next to her, emptying his machinegun into the creature, driving it back. “You too, Top! Get back, I’ll handle this.”

He was right, so Repeth bounded over, dropping the sword to grab Chief Massimo by the back-rack. “Come on, Chief. Fall back. Captain’s orders! We can’t lose your guns.”

The warrant officer snarled but echoed, “Weapons section, withdraw now. Leave the laser.” That mechanism lay broken on the floor, so the rest of the Marines unbolted the railgun and the missile launcher and withdrew, carrying their casualties as well.

Repeth was unable to tell who was dead, wounded, or just a victim of electronic overload, so she grabbed one of the fallen in each hand and dragged them easily out the door as other mantises began to force their way in. “Don’t leave anyone behind.”

Checking her time and oxygen levels, she was startled to see that they had only been fighting for sixteen minutes. It had seemed an eternity. “Leapfrog to the next redoubt,” Repeth ordered, dropping an icon onto a secondary position the HUD showed was unoccupied.

As the ragtag group hustled down the access corridor away from the edge of the base, a railgun burst slammed into the wall in front of her, causing her to drop to the ground. “Hold fire, hold fire,” she called after switching to Delta’s freq. “Use your goddamned HUDs, you morons, you’re shooting at friendlies!”

“Sorry, First Sergeant,” came a shaky voice, and she grabbed her two casualties again and bounded forward again, pitching their armored bodies over the barricade she’d come upon.

“Make a hole, damn you. We have wounded and heavy weapons,” she snarled at the corporal and his fireteam manning the position. “We’ll set up at the next designated position. You hold as long as you can, then fall back on us. We won’t shoot at you.”

“Got it, First Sergeant. No excuse, First Sergeant.”

Repeth waved the rest through the opening in the barricade, with Massimo leading and Dasko on rear guard. She was tempted to put the railgun down here to stiffen Delta’s line Marines, but the position was already too crowded.

“Listen, Corp,” she said, grabbing the man by the shoulder. “They’re big bugs, and we killed a bunch of them. They die just fine. You’re in an excellent defensive position. Roll some grenades down there, set on command detonation, and be ready to throw some more. These things are tough, but they’re clumsy. Just keep pouring disciplined fire into them, and when they get too close, throw some more grenades and haul ass for our position. They have electromagnetic weapons that screw up the armor and cybernetics, so make sure you recover anyone that isn’t obviously dead. Got it?”

“Got it, First Sergeant,” the man replied in a much steadier voice.

“Here…” She stepped back to her two fallen, one of which was finally stirring, and emptied their backracks of grenades, coming up with seven. “These are coded two-four-two-Bravo. Punch it in.” While the corporal set his HUD for the command detonation function, Repeth pitched the spheres down the corridor toward the direction the enemy would come, where they scattered randomly. “Blow them when they get close.” She clapped him on his shoulder. “Good luck.”

While her warrior heart wanted to stay with them, that wasn’t her job, and they weren’t even in her company. The best thing she could do was get her wounded back, and set up the next redoubt so the Delta corporal and his Marines could fall back when they needed to, so she turned and grabbed her people. The one who seemed to be coming around she ended up ordering to just hold still; it was actually easier in the low gravity to carry them like baggage than try to help the man move under his own power.

Coming in sight of her troops’ position at a major intersection, she saw they had sorted themselves out and pushed a couple of utility trams into place as barriers, catecorner across. This gave them some cover and allowed everyone to fire in the two directions the enemy was likely to come, but also meant that they might get hit from both directions. It all depended on how organized the enemy was. Were these bugs just a bunch of killer drones, or did they have some kind of radio command and control system? She’d seen no technology on them other than the blaster and swords, but she knew the Meme used bio-radios, so that proved nothing.

Pointing toward the narrower of the two corridors, she told the task force, “The Delta troops will be falling back from there. Make sure you ID your targets and do not fire on friendlies. Watch your sectors and your HUDs. Someone take a look at these two.”

Checking the rear of the position, she identified the larger of the corridors as their route toward the down-ramp to the lower level. A barricade icon occupied the spot, so she pushed her comms through to its occupants, part of Charlie company. “Redoubt C-5, this is First Sergeant Repeth, Bravo Company. Stay alert to friendlies falling back into your lane. We have engaged the enemy and they are assaulting in battalion strength, but we have inflicted heavy casualties.”

“Roger,” came the laconic reply of the Charlie squad leader occupying the position. “We’ll try to shoot bugs only.”

Taking a deep breath, Repeth switched among HUD views, first checking the battalion-level synthesis. The originally circular base perimeter now looked like a giant letter D, with the enemy pushing in from the east. Hot spots showed combat at other locations, including one point deep behind the Marine lines. She zoomed into that area, and watched as an Alpha Company reaction force in platoon strength moved toward the incursion. It looked like the bugs had broken in from above and were trying to establish a beachhead, but the Old Man had it under control.

She glanced up at the overhead, wondering if they had to worry about other attacks from above, and she noticed several holes showing starfield behind them. Crap. If one of those bugs finds that hole and starts firing down on us, we’re going to be in a world of hurt. In fact, the thin layer of ceiling and dirt between them and the outside now looked like a distinct liability.

“Chief Massimo,” she said, “you see the overhead? Those holes? I’m concerned we could get flanked in three dimensions.”

“Damn, Top. You’re right.” The man stared at the offending opening. “Wish we had some claymores.”

“Engineers put all we had up on the surface already, on proximity. Probably why we haven’t had any more overhead assaults than we have. Any other ideas?”

“Command detonated grenades will clear the opening one time, if the enemy doesn’t realize what they are.”

Repeth nodded. “I think I can worm through there. If I can, I’ll plant some under the dirt. Do you have a remote sensor left?”

“Sorry, Top. We lost them all back there.”

“Anyone got a spy-eye? No? Crap.” Repeth waved at the Marines. “Collect me up a couple of dozen grenades off the casualties – anyone that can’t use them. Load them in my backrack. Dump the rations if you have to.” Once she had her utility compartments loaded with grenades, she carefully gauged the opening above and jumped, catching its edge with her hands and pulling herself slowly up through the hole.

Performing a careful three-sixty, she could see dozens of big beetles stalking the landscape, tearing all the surface facilities to shreds with their limbs or blasting them with their green-plasma guns. Many more, hundreds perhaps, stood frozen or had fallen broken onto the surface. It looked like at least half of the enemy personnel carriers were knocked out, but that still left at least a hundred. Above, several of those flying shark craft cruised with seeming impunity.

Yeah, some dedicated fighter craft would have been really useful, as well as some camouflaged anti-air missiles, she thought. But no one really expected this kind of serious ground assault. I mean, what the hell do they intend to gain out of it?

Repeth racked her brains, but couldn’t think of anything that justified the effort of trying to capture, rather than just hammer down, Grissom base. What could they want? Intelligence, maybe?

She could see several groups of insects digging at the soil in groups, clearly trying to break in from above, but none of them were too near her. A short distance away, one bug seemed to explode into pieces as a proximity mine went off.

Easing out low, she popped her backrack compartments, disgorged two dozen grenades onto the ground next to her and began to shove them under the dusty soil. Several of them she tossed ten to twenty meters away from herself, trying to spread the kill zone out while still staying next to her gopher hole and watching in all directions.

One of the bugs spotted her and raised its blaster in her direction, so she dove through the opening, grabbing the edge on the way and reversing as soon as the blue electrical discharge cleared. Her HUD fuzzed for a moment but recovered. Better shielding on the armor’s electronics, she added to her mental list of lessons to report.

Raising her helmet just enough to see several bugs hurrying her way, she dropped gently to the floor below. As soon as she saw movement against the starfield, she triggered half the grenades. Maybe some of the other half would survive the blast and remain for a second round.

Dust and debris fell slowly as she shot up to look out the gopher hole again. A quick survey showed all of the nearby bugs dismembered, but several more heading her way. Dropping down again, she turned to Massimo and Dasko. “More are coming, and they’re gonna get through. If not this time, than the next. We have to either lay heavy fire on that hole, or move.”

“Trying to hold them off when they have the high ground is a losing proposition,” Chief Massimo said.

Just then Repeth saw more movement so she triggered the second set of bombs. A much smaller blast blurred the hole with dust, and a blown-off bug leg fell through. “No more grenades,” she said.

“Heating up anyway,” the chief said, pointing down the corridor.

Four Marines carried another, led by the Delta corporal, hustling toward them while waving their weapons backwards and firing at nothing from time to time. “We got a bunch with the grenades,” the man said as he came up, “but there were too many.”

At that moment an avalanche of bugs rounded the far corner, and Massimo’s railgun opened up. The stream of steel ball bearings hosed into the mass, blowing the critters apart. A missile from the launcher followed, turning the mob into what looked like a tub of blue-gray crab pieces at a buffet.

“Corporal, cover that hole,” Repeth said, pointing upward. “Take positions in an inward-facing ring, and shoot at any movement.”

The Delta fireteam did, just in time, blasting at the edges as bugs showed themselves then hastily pulled back.

“Chief, we gotta go,” Repeth said.

“Wait, Top. We can take down a bunch more,” Massimo replied.

“Chief, this position is untenable. All the bugs have to do is roll some kind of grenades down on us and we’re dead. Chief.” She grabbed him and shook him. Technically he outranked her, but he was a gunnery specialist while she was the senior enlisted Marine in the company, which gave her a lot of pull.

Fortunately, pull carried the day. “All right, heavy section: let’s go. Fall back.” Massimo and the others grabbed their weapons and manhandled them toward the ramp.

“Dasko –” Repeth began, then saw something fall through the hole, a big egg-shaped package that looked for all the world like, well, an egg. “GRENADE!” she yelled, diving for cover.

One of the Delta fireteam’s Marines, luckier or a better shot than average, put a crackling electromagnetic burst directly into the egg and it spun off to bump against a wall, then roll down the corridor toward the withdrawing weapons Marines. One of those reacted immediately, grabbing the football-sized thing and launching it a hundred meters down the corridor in a damn fine throw, where it came to rest on the ground.

Nothing happened.

Maybe the EMP knocked it out. “Go go go!” Repeth yelled as Marines opened fire around her, aiming at the hole above. “Withdraw, withdraw!” She leaped to her feet and grabbed one, then another, shoving them toward the heavies. “Withdraw and cover the rear.”

Another egg dropped through the hole as the last of Dasko’s troops backed up firing. This one fell to the floor and detonated immediately in a burst of goo. The corridor filled with vile-looking smoky fumes, and the tail-end Marine’s entire front armor began to melt.

“Shit!” she heard the woman say as she dropped her weapon and began to claw herself, as if to wipe the stuff off. Then she began to scream and thrash.

Repeth keyed her HUD to shut the Marine down, sending a command override to the woman’s cybernetics. This immediately rendered her unconscious and put her into hibernation, a last-ditch response to extreme injury. Then Repeth grabbed her by the neck handle and hauled her backward with one hand, firing her machinegun with the other.

“I need some cover,” Repeth said as she retreated, and a moment later two more Marines joined her as rearguard, blasting away with their weapons as more and more bugs dropped down the hole. Those ignored the gunk on the floor and walls, seemingly unaffected.

Just in time, Repeth felt the floor tip under her and realized she had reached the top of the ramp. As she and the other two backed down it, they passed Massimo with his missile launcher.

Once they were clear, he slapped the gunner on the shoulder, who fired on that command. The missile leaped off the rails and shot down the corridor to explode against one of the utility vehicles they had been using as cover.

Immediately an unusually large explosion vaporized the group of bugs there. “Good shot,” Massimo said. Repeth realized he must have targeted the vehicle’s fuel cell, enhancing the blast.

Dust falling from overhead alerted her to the danger. “Massimo, get back! They’re coming in from the top again!”

The chief and his missile gunners grabbed the launcher and ran down the ramp just as another egg fell. The edge of the goo splashed their lower legs as they ran, and their armor immediately began to smoke.

Repeth pitched the unconscious casualty she carried over the barrier at the bottom of the ramp, the one occupied by Charlie company Marines, and turned to help those three. She could see the stuff eating holes in their leg armor, right in front of her eyes. “It’s acid! Strip it off!” she yelled, grabbing the missile launcher to allow the three to deal with their problem. Once she had handed the weapon off to those behind the barrier, she helped them pop off the leg plates and boots.

Horrible wounds awaited her gaze beneath the hard ferrocrystal-reinforced plastic armor. She could see the stuff keep eating into their bodies, and wondered when it would stop. They weren’t reacting to the pain; they all must have been aware enough to shut down all feeling in their legs. Well trained, they waited without panicking while their fellows figured out how to help them.

“You Marines, two each, grab these three,” Repeth ordered. “Set them down behind the barrier. The enemy is right behind us, and they’re using acid bombs that look like footballs. Shoot them with EMP cannon if you can. It might stop them from detonating.” She hopped over the barrier, following the six with the wounded Massimo and his two gunners.

“Fire extinguishers. Get all you can.” She pointed down the corridor, where she could see at least two on the walls. “Bring them here. And go get that alien sword.” One had fallen skittering down the ramp to land by the barrier.

As soon as they handed her one of the cylinders of compressed CO2, she blasted Massimo’s lower legs. In a moment she had frozen them up to the knee, about the extent of the corrosion, and the stuff stopped advancing. “Massimo, hibernate yourself now. I’ll wake you up if we need you.”

The chief looked at her through his faceplate and grimaced, then nodded. A moment later consciousness faded from his eyes.

“Both of you too,” she told the others. As soon as they were out, she froze their legs as well, using a second and then a third extinguisher to make sure the job was done well. Can’t let that stuff get into their bloodstream or we’ll lose them, she told herself.

Then she lopped their legs off with the alien sword.

She heard someone retching in her comm, but legs could be regrown by the Eden Plague. Whole Marines, especially brave and skilled heavy gunners, couldn’t. Coming up on the Bravo company push, she called, “Repeth here. I am at redoubt Charlie Five with the weapons section. We have taken heavy casualties. Request bearers and relief.”

“Roger, Top,” came Captain Miller’s calm voice. “How’s Massimo?”

“Lost his legs, but he should live, if any of us do,” she replied. “But he’s down.”

“Understood,” she said. A moment later the CO herself led a fireteam up and they began grabbing downed Marines.

“Getting thin, ma’am?” Repeth asked.

“You asked for the reserve. We’re it,” she responded with a smile in her voice. “We’re giving them hell, but we’re slowly getting our asses kicked,” she went on. “Tell your people to continue their delaying action, assist Charlie here, but don’t wait too long. We’ve lost the surface. Delta has taken seventy percent casualties and is combat ineffective. The Old Man and Alpha Company are keeping the penetrations contained, but Bravo and Charlie are both down about twenty percent and rising fast.”

Repeth nodded. “We’ll do our best.”

“As soon as you frog back from this position, head for shaft number one, get in and seal up tight. We’re going to execute the collapse protocols.” Then Miller was gone.

“All right, ladies, you heard the boss,” Repeth said to her little command grouped behind the Charlie firing line. “Gunners, get that railgun and the missile launcher set up to fire over their heads up that ramp. Dasko, you and yours have to cover us. We will be withdrawing down that corridor to the deep shaft. Captain Miller will be waiting there.”

As the heavy gunners emplaced their weapons, the Charlie squad opened up as targets appeared at the top of the ramp. Several footballs rolled wobbling down, and Repeth joined the others in shifting to blast them to bits with aimed fire from multiple weapons. This caused the acid inside to leak, but without the explosive spreader charge, all it did was smoke and fizzle in place.

“Good thing they don’t have acid hoses,” Dasko said.

“Bite your tongue, Sergeant,” Repeth said. “Damn, I’m getting low on ammo. Air, too.” Her O2 gauge read thirty-five minutes. They’d been fighting for just over an hour. The suits were supposed to be good for at least two, but exertion had cut that. Afterward they had ten minutes of oxygen in their internal cybernetics, stretchable to a lot longer if they went into hibernation.

“Why don’t we just pull back now, if we’re going to lose the base?” Dasko asked.

“When did you start thinking, you dumb grunt?” Repeth replied with cheerful sarcasm. “We hold because we are ordered to hold. Maybe we’re buying time to get more wounded out, or the squids that are in their weapons control rooms. I don’t know.”

“But –”

“Dasko, dammit, just shut up and soldier.” To a Marine, that was an effective insult. The man shut up.

Another cluster of acid footballs rolled down the ramp, this time followed by a rush of bugs. “Get the eggs,” Repeth ordered her remaining line Marines. The heavy gunners ripped into the insectoids with railgun rounds and a missile.

One egg made it through, to splatter the barrier and parts of the Charlie squad with goo. Several fell back writhing while others held the line. “Dasko, fill in,” Repeth ordered, and the sergeant and his remaining five Marines surged up to the barrier.

Blue bolts crashed into the barricade and two more Marines went down, and a bug reached far enough to smash his sword through the helmet of another, before suddenly the attack ran out of steam.

As the last enemy died twitching on the floor, Repeth began slapping Marines on their helmets rather than trying to sort out Charlie and Bravo comm channels. “Fall back,” she broadcast on maximum external speaker, hoping the tiny bit of atmosphere left would carry the sound. Her own Marines heard her just fine on the company channel, and quickly pulled up the heavy weapons to fall back again.

The Charlie Marines who were left saw what was happening and apparently decided they had better follow suit, so they grabbed their wounded and beat feet as Repeth’s people did the same.

As they passed Dasko’s original position, a head popped out of the weapons emplacement access corridor. Repeth almost shot it in reflex before she stopped herself. As the rest bounded past, she saw the ground force warrant and sergeant had left their railgun control center in their flimsy emergency suits. Without any idea of what comm channel they were on, she just blasted them with her external speaker and waved. “Follow us to the shaft!”

They did, but she had to grab them and propel them along, as their suits did not have stabilization jets and they didn’t have the enormous strength and speed of the Marines’ cybernetic augmentation. Repeth almost dropped the bug sword she still held, but at the last moment she tucked it under an arm and held onto it. It had proven useful so far, and at least would make a nice war trophy.

The tunnel shook and parts of the ceiling broke loose as they ran under it. “What the hell?” she mumbled.

“Looks like the bugs are getting impatient,” Miller’s voice came over her comm. “Before we lost all of them the sensors showed they brought in some kind of digging apparatus.”

“Seems a weird way to do business,” Repeth said as she finally reached the entrance to the deep shaft. “I’d have thought they would have brought in the digger first and made some holes, then rushed us through all the breaches. Instead, with clear numerical superiority, they charged us like…”

“Like bugs. Don’t try to figure it out. Just be happy. Alien minds are alien.”

“I’m not happy, ma’am,” she replied as she shoved the two grounders through the massive hatch and watched them descend the sloping tunnel. At that moment it appeared as if Miller and she were the only two remaining outside. “We lost a lot of good people. Sergeant Dasko asked me, ‘for what’? And I really didn’t have an answer to give him.”

In response, Miller pushed a display to her HUD. “For this, First Sergeant.”

Jerky video from a helmet-cam showed the inside of an Aardvark maintenance hangar, a long Pilum missile resting on a loader. One suited figure had the warhead hatch open while the owner of the camera assisted. No audio came through.

“Two of the ordnance techs are trying to rig a fusion warhead to detonate,” Miller explained. “We’ve been trying to buy them time.”

“Holy shit. But why didn’t anyone have this set up already?”

“I guess no one thought it was a good idea to have live fusion warheads inside the base, what with the problems we had with the criminal element.”

“Yeah, I know something about that. So where did they get that one?”

“These guys hopped it back from one of the ordnance loading stations into the maintenance hangar.”

Repeth’s eyes narrowed. “How are they going to get to a bunker?”

“They might not.”

“Shit.”

“Agreed.”

“Do we have any idea why the Meme are trying to take the base instead of just smashing it? I mean, the whole attack will be over within, what, a day maybe?”

Miller nodded. “Colonel Ruchek thinks they are so confident they are trying to preserve assets, but I have another theory.”

“I’m all ears.”

“What if they wipe out all human life on Earth? What’s left?”

Repeth’s blood ran cold. “Just what’s on bases here and there…like, thirty thousand civilians here in the bunkers.”

“And the Meme want slaves, and bodies to take. It’s what they live for.”

“Oh, crap. You see this?” Repeth’s video feed from the one bomb tech, looking over the other one’s suited shoulder, showed monsters charging up behind. Like an old horror movie, she wanted to scream at the victim, but exactly the same way, there was nothing she could do. Alien swords swung and cut one tech down, then the camera jerked and rolled over to show a piece of the floor and scurrying legs.

“Any chance they set the bomb?”

Repeth shook her head. “I don’t think so. They were concentrating on it to the end.”

“Shit. It was a good try.” Miller saluted in the general direction of the fallen techs. “I’m making sure that video gets retransmitted and saved. They deserve medals.”

“And more.” Repeth turned to Miller. “After you, ma’am.”

“Right.” Captain Miller strode through the opened tunnel door, watching as Repeth slammed it shut and then spun the dogging wheel.

Once the meter-thick door was tight, they bounded as fast as they could down the wide ramp, heading deep into the moon’s crust. When they reached the first dogleg, Miller yelled into the open channel, “Initiate collapse protocol!”

Behind her, charges in the ceiling exploded one by one in a carefully-timed sequence to collapse the entrance shaft. The two Marines sped up, using their stabilization jets in zero-gravity mode to fly faster and faster down the tunnel as the blasts came closer and closer. Repeth told herself they should have no problems, as the explosives only reached to the dogleg. In fact, the whole point of the sharp corner was to limit any overspill from rockfall.

Her surprise was therefore all the greater when she felt the enormous shock. The last thing she remembered was the tunnel writhing like a snake, and the loudest gong she had ever heard bloodied her eardrums and blinded her eyeballs before she blacked out.

Chapter 72

Shan appreciated his friend Huen’s message, but decided to reply would merely add to the admiral’s pain. Better his last missive serve as goodbye than perpetuate some kind of agonizing exchange.

What shall be, shall be.

So Shan put Artemis deliberately out of his mind and sat watching on his HUD as the enemy landed on the base and fought their way in. Species 331, he thought to himself. Vicious, able to operate in vacuum, willing to sacrifice themselves for any objectives…the perfect Pureling. Perhaps I should have provided anonymous tips about what the Marines would be facing, but the risk of discovery far outweighed any potential benefit. Physics is physics, and weapons are weapons.

Then he considered attempting to interfere, to assist the defense. Certainly I could kill many of them. With the number of landing craft, at least four thousand Purelings against at most two thousand Marines. I might be able to destroy several hundred. Would that be enough to tip the scale? But if I do that, I cannot manually detonate this device, and I cannot risk setting a timer on it. What if I were killed and yet we won – and then the bomb went off? Irony indeed.

So instead, Shan waited in the cold vacuum, with just the low lights of the bordello to keep him company. He looked idly around the room, his eyes resting on a magnificent grand piano. Regretfully, he considered, then discarded the notion of playing it for a time. He did enjoy music. He had for his entire life, ever since he had landed on the blue planet and blended with a Chinese farmer. Unfortunately, with no atmosphere, the best he could do would be to sense the vibrations through his fingers.

Then again…what else is there to do?
Perhaps I should clench a conductive rod in my teeth and press it against the piano’s soundboard, as the deaf Ludwig Van Beethoven did.

Shan stripped off his suit, hardening and sealing his skin and eyes as he did so, until the lack of air did not bother him. He shut the doors of this room and with delight found that he could seal them against air loss, apparently a safety feature that the owners had built into it.

Soon, he had allowed the air from his suit’s reservoir to fill the chamber, creating a thin but usable atmosphere. Sitting down at the piano, he first ran his hands over the yellow silk he wore, taking pleasure once again in the material’s marvelous texture.

I have loved many women, and a handful of men, he thought to himself, sampling all the pleasures of the flesh. I have eaten the finest foods, tasted the finest wine, and listened to the finest music. Then, at the last, I experienced the greatest pleasure of all: friendship, and comradeship, loyalty and betrayal. The joy of killing, and of refraining. The honor and privilege of passing on my genes to my wife, who will bear my child, if she survives.

I am ready.

Slowly he caressed the keyboard, and then, though saddened that the thin air did not do justice to the sound, began to work his way through Beethoven’s Ninth, without a doubt one of the greatest pieces of human music ever created. The notes swelled as he lost himself in their embrace.

When he finished the movement, he slipped his helmet on and checked the HUD. No live Marines remained above ground, according to either network. The last two had entered the bunker tunnel less than a minute ago, and according to the data recording, the final two civilians had died in the attack ship maintenance hangar just moments before that.

It is time.

Without further contemplation, knowing delay would help not at all, he folded his hands in his lap and sent the command, and Grissom Base dissolved into fire.

Chapter 73

Second Forward Fusor trium, all three Meme, jerked in shock as their feeds went violently dead. Electromagnetic feedback whipped through the network, as well as emotional resonance from so many of the crew watching the battle on the base.

A moment later, Observation trium provided an alternative view, from the closest Sentry drone to the enemy moon. A dirty fission-fusion explosion, primitive but powerful, had scoured the base from its surface, leaving a deep crater. A storm of interacting gases, heat and ice roiled the area before slowly dissipating, leaving nothing of use.

“What happened?” Three asked.

“I suspect they self-destructed,” Two answered.

“Obviously,” chimed in One. “Close Combat should have anticipated such a tactic,” he said with righteous indignation.

“You didn’t,” Three replied, and then suddenly withdrew his eyeball below the rim of his tank.

One controlled his response with difficulty. “I did, actually, but I did not wish to embarrass Close Combat trium by pointing it out.”

Three, whatever he thought about this explanation, apparently decided not to argue, and only slowly extended his optical stalk again, inserting it into his screen socket and avoiding eye contact with his superior.

“It is unimportant in any case,” Two said. “We lost some Purelings, and they have lost a valuable base, which cannot now be used against us. Once we have conquered this system, we can examine it at our leisure.”

“And,” One interjected, “there are plenty of Humans to serve us as Underlings on their home planet. Billions, if the reports are correct. At least a few million will survive our attack.”

Three made a gesture of acknowledgement. “Perhaps…perhaps Close Combat will be censured, even demoted for their lapse.”

“That would be agreeable,” Two said.

“Most agreeable,” said One. “My plans continue to improve our opportunities.”

Two rolled his eyeball in Three’s direction, thinking One would not notice. One noticed, but chose not to say anything.

He would remember that slight, however, as he ascended.

Chapter 74

Admiral Huen jerked involuntarily as the processor shut down the optics focused on Grissom Base – or what used to be the base. Bridge control boards flickered and some of the crew cursed, tapping at their consoles.

“I thought I said to make sure we were out of range of EMP,” Huen said mildly. He was not the type to raise his voice, which made his admonition all the more embarrassing.

“Sorry, sir,” the helmsman replied. “The explosion was much stronger than predicted for those weapons. Our hardening should have been enough.”

“Maybe the enemy forces contained something that created the spike,” mused the weapons officer. “Extra fissionables, or deuterium-tritium fuel.”

“Or even antimatter,” Sensors chimed in.

“In any case, in the future I expect more care,” Huen said. “Are we functional?”

“Yes, sir. Backups are effective.”

“Bring us in slowly over the…crater.”

Hovering ten kilometers up in the slight gravity, the large but fragile ship floated into position only a short distance off to one side of the hole in the ground that had replaced the center of the base. Some outlying buildings, and a lot of the Aardvark pads, had survived, but everything that had made Grissom base itself was gone. The central park, the Quarter, the Marine and Aerospace barracks, the family housing units and recreation spaces: annihilated. The heavy weapons emplacements in a ring around the base were twisted and melted, though their control centers beneath might have survived.

“Find a place to set us down, helm. Make sure it’s firm. That heat and shock might have destabilized the ground.”

“Aye aye, sir. I’ll be ready to lift us if we settle too much.”

“Perhaps the Aardvark pads would make for a firmer landing…at your discretion.” Huen knew he was micromanaging, but his confidence in his helmsman had been rattled, and he found it difficult not to.

“Aye aye, sir.”

Almost half an hour of careful hunting went by before they settled slowly onto Callisto near the most intact piece of the base. Guns had enjoyed a small workout as scattered enemies popped out from behind cover or dug themselves out of holes and fired at Artemis. While her lasers were small for a warship, they still outranged and overpowered the hand weapons or even the beetle turrets of the handful of survivors, and so quickly fried every one of them.

“Stay vigilant, Guns. We can’t be sure there aren’t more of them.” Huen sat back in the Chair and thought. “Get our Marines out there for a recon in force. I want every one of those things dead. And get me the XO.”

“Auxiliary control here,” the executive officer answered over the comm a moment later.

“Ms. Rikard, stand down auxcon and get a team together to plan and execute actions to restore as much function to whatever’s left of this base you can, and start figuring out how we’ll safely open up those bunkers. Artemis will have to do some heavy lifting again, and they’ll be depending on us.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Now Sensors,” Huen went on, “see what you can get us off the EarthFleet net and check the battle status. And Schaeffer, now that we’re down, go to my quarters and brew the bridge some tea and some coffee. I suspect we are in for a long day.”

Schaeffer pressed his lips together. “What about Shan, sir?”

Huen held his steward’s eyes for a moment. “We will mourn our dead later. For now, do your duty.”

Chapter 75

Vango lined his maser up on an oncoming rock, visible only in the VR world he inhabited, and fired again. The energy seemed to have no effect, even though he had tuned it to heat silicates. Even thousands of shots from the Aardvarks had only knocked a few of them out. The masers were just not big enough for this kind of work.

If we could turn and chase them, we could maybe kill off the guidance packages, he thought, but the ops planners had vetoed that idea. As fast as the rocks were going it would be very difficult to catch them even with missiles, and if they did, all those Aardvarks would be out of the fight with the Destroyer.

No, his fight was with the big ship. The fortresses, cruisers and their escorts would have to fend off the rocks.

Lark occupied a position to the upper left, as one looked at the force of attack ships from above. In three dimensions, they actually formed an enormous thickened lozenge, constantly adjusting to keep itself between the Destroyer and the Earth.

The Meme ship had stayed behind its rocks for the first hour or so, then had changed course and blasted to its right, Vango’s left, and “upward” in the plane of the solar system, using the third dimension to separate itself from the mass of asteroids it had launched. He wondered if that was part of its plan all along. Did it send the rocks as a distraction, a second attack, or had the enemy commander simply changed its mind after seeing EarthFleet’s deployment?

He projected the Destroyer’s track and known acceleration parameters, and determined that it could not dodge completely around the cloud of attack ships. However, it could cut through them where only a small fraction could engage, like a footballer racing down the edge of the field to avoid most of the defenders.

General Hyser, the A-24 fleet commander, apparently could see this as well as Vango, for the lozenge of ships constantly adjusted to try to keep within their engagement envelopes. That’s why this formation, unlike last time, had some depth.

Also, the Pilum IIs they carried were smarter, with software that made better decisions. Sometimes the missiles would explode, and sometimes they would just slam into the enemy, with calculations based on the intelligence gathered from the first fight. And, although the kamikaze bombs were still aboard, their use had been tightened and limited to only the best, most damaging parameters.

Or the pilot’s decision.

“What do you think, Token?” he asked his wingman. “Looks like we’re near the front this time.”

“Looks like,” came Token’s even voice. “Why, you scared?”

“Hell, no,” Vango replied, but deep inside he wasn’t so sure. The first battle had been the culmination of training, like a fireman finally getting to go into a burning building for the first time. In a way, it was now harder, a kind of stress fatigue, as he knew what to expect, and remembered how many friends and comrades had died that day.

And what about Stevie?
Is she better off now, or should I have never said or done anything? He forced those thoughts away. Keep your focus, Vango.

“It’s turning,” Token noted, and Vango turned his attention back to the big picture.

“Turning outward…” He ran the projections. “It’s gaining on us.”

Orders soon came to turn inward, using their interior lines to cut across the chord of the enemy’s turn, staying always between the Destroyer and Earth.

An hour later they continued in this position, except… “We’re heading for Mars,” Token pointed out.

“Why?” Vango asked. “There’s nothing there. Just a few defense installations. We’re way off the direct path, a long ways from the incoming rocks. What’s it doing?”

“Beats me. I’m just a fighter pilot,” his wingman replied.

Vango racked his brains, looking at the plots, the cloud of Aardvarks falling slowly back and sideways, preventing the Destroyer from getting around them. “If we keep doing this, eventually we’ll be pressed back into Earth’s defensive zone. Maybe it’s trying to make its move at the same time as the rocks hit, slashing through us while the planetary defenses have their hands full.”

“Or maybe it’s heading here.” Token threw up a very speculative track that showed the Destroyer passing behind Mars and swinging around toward the Orion station parked ten million klicks behind Earth. “All Orion has is point defenses – pretty good ones, I hear, and new armor bolted on, but nothing to beat a Destroyer with. Losing Absen and all the HQ staff would seriously cripple our war effort.”

“In the long term, maybe, but for today, for now…everyone knows their jobs. No, that doesn’t make sense. But…” Vango looked at Token’s plot. Something about it…he froze it in place for a moment. “Let me know if anything happens, all right? I’m going to do some 4D predictive modeling.”

“All right. If you feel a mallet upside your noggin, it’s me telling you to pull your head out of your assets.” Token’s lame double-entendres had become more frequent lately.

In his VR simulation, Vango ran several possibilities forward and backward in time, varying the Destroyer’s path. Sure, others on Orion or one of the cruisers or even other Aardvark pilots were doing the same thing for sure, but some of those were almost a light-hour away, and might not even have seen the enemy’s change in course yet.

Mars. Something about Mars was bothering him. As Token had asked, why would the enemy be heading toward Mars, with all of space around. Its facilities were bare bones, because it was off the direct path to Earth. Except now it was on that path, because the enemy had turned to go behind it.

Behind it. Could it make a sudden course change behind the planet? But in terms of the speeds involved, it would flash past Mars in mere seconds, not enough time to pull any surprises.

Sure, dragging the Aardvarks so far off the direct path had made them burn fuel, and they’d lost a few dozen birds to unplotted asteroid strikes and mechanical failures, but not enough to be tactically significant. Tankers shadowed the attack fleet, well back, and grabships and repair craft traveled alone and unafraid in the areas of low danger, searching for surviving pilots and repairable A-24s. No, all that wasn’t significant enough.

What was the enemy’s game?

Course change. Course change, planet. Planet, course change.

Course. Of course. Change course.

Vango modified the VR sim, running his theory several times in different ways. All of them worked out. “I got it!” he cried.

“What?”

Vango frantically packaged his data up with text notes, fearful it would not be soon enough. The attack fleet was spread out over more than a light-minute, and then there was the system’s time to process, and the human time to react. Once he fired it off at flash priority, he explained to Token. “Open up that package and follow along. Look at the Destroyer’s path.”

In the shared VR sim, the enemy’s projected track dove toward Mars, skimming its outer side, away from the Aardvarks, just above its thin atmosphere. At the same time the virtual Destroyer rotated to point its drive almost directly toward the planet, forcing itself in the tightest partial orbit it could without striking Mars air and burning up.

Pulling the view back out, Vango showed Token how the Destroyer’s future path had changed. “This maneuver gets it a completely free course change, along with an unexpected burst of speed. A slingshot maneuver, like a footballer briefly grabbing another player as he goes by. It will give him enough velocity to get past us.”

“How long do we have to change course?”

Vango shook his head, unseen. “We can’t. I mean, it’s already too late.”

“Can we fire missiles?”

“Let me see.” Vango quickly had the VR launch missiles and aim for a point to meet the Destroyer on its new, faster track. “Yes we can, but it will be a high-deflection shot for some, and a stern chance for others.”

“How many missiles will engage it?”

“Umm….about seven thousand.”

“Dammit, Vango,” Token said, shocking his wingman with even this mild profanity, “we fired over a hundred thousand missiles at the first two smaller Destroyers and we barely got one of them. How can seven thousand take down this monster?”

“They are Pilum IIs. They should be a lot more effective. And there’s the cruisers, and their escorts. And the planetary defenses.” Even to his own virtual ears Vango’s words sounded hollow.

Vango felt Lark shift under him as a command override turned the entire fleet. He watched the orders propagate at the speed of light, the simulation doing its best to reflect reality, as the mass of attack craft turned and blasted at emergency maximum acceleration in an attempt to intercept.

At the same time, all but two of his missiles launched themselves. Apparently Hyser had wasted no time in getting the Pilums on their way. Once they had launched, Lark’s missiles came back under his control, more or less. The network constantly assisted him, creating a kind of man-machine feedback loop that, once he was used to it, allowed him to fly them as effectively as possible.

Token said, “Maybe the ones that do intercept will slow the bastard down, or knock him off track. Force him away again.”

“Maybe,” Vango said doubtfully, “but it looks like we’re going to miss the fight by about twenty minutes.”

Chapter 76

Over the next hour and a half Vango watched as the Destroyer did exactly what he expected – swung past Mars, turning a corner and accelerating, cutting back in an arc toward Earth, a predicted path that ended at the planet on nearly a right angle to the line of its attacking rocks, and within minutes of impact.

“Bastard is clever, very clever,” Vango muttered in frustration.

“Bastard,” echoed Token. Now that they were edging toward failure and the potential destruction of humans on the planet, it looked like he was learning to swear.

“The cruisers and Aardvark escorts are moving to intercept. Their missiles will reach just after ours do. Maybe that will do the trick.”

“Bastard,” Token said again. “Dammit!”

Vango remembered that Token had a wife and baby daughter back on Earth, and understood what was going on in his wingman’s head. It must all be getting too real. For his part, all he had to lose were his parents and friends and brother and sister…which once he thought about it seemed just as ugly.

Compartmentalize, Vincent, he told himself. Just like Aunt Jill always said. Wall it off until the combat is done.

With hours more to go still, thoughts of Aunt Jill made him bring up the VR feed of Grissom Base on Callisto, and he got another shock. It was gone. Nothing but a smoking hole five hundred meters deep remained, and he had to zoom out quite a bit before any of the outlying surface platforms could be seen.

Some kind of big explosion or impact. I guess the Meme got them after all, despite the big weapons. Hope to hell everyone got underground into the bunkers. Suddenly he felt sick at the possibility Jill might be dead, and grief on Uncle Rick’s behalf intruded.

Compartmentalize, dammit.

Vango racked his brain for Token’s real name. “Get a grip, Josiah,” he said, actually talking to himself as much as his wingman. “We have to keep fighting, and we have to keep hoping. We beat them once and we can beat them again.”

“Right. Yeah, right. Yeah. Dammit. Dammit.”

It didn’t sound like Token was getting a grip, so Vango kept talking to him, distracting him, for long minutes as they flew onward through the void. Eventually his comrade seemed to calm down to something like his old ice-water self.

“Missiles are entering the merge,” Vango said as the first Pilums reached the Destroyer. In reality they had already done so, the updates finally propagating at lightspeed to their birds, but to them it all seemed realtime. “Detonations.”

Vango watched in the shared link as the edge of the missile cloud touched the Destroyer. Zooming in, he saw the fusors eat missile after missile, or forced them to detonate outside of effective radius. Armor on the great ship blackened and sloughed off as thin waves of hot plasma washed over it, but nothing got close enough to do it the catastrophic damage he hoped for.

Blisters and hot spots showed as well, where some of the bomb-pumped graser clusters had fired their gamma rays deep into the enemy, causing unknown damage, but still the enemy sailed serenely on, its fusors creating a wall of flame that ate everything fired at it.

Now the Destroyer outdistanced the tens of thousands of Pilums remaining, which turned to chase in hopes of catching up by some lucky turn of events. However, because of its great speed, the huge ship could not avoid the much smaller but still potent cloud of missiles launched from the cruiser escorts in front of it.

“Those should have more effect, because they’re coming in head on,” Vango observed. “If he’s smart, he’ll flip over and…yep.” He watched as the Destroyer swapped end for end and used its drive to augment its fusors, creating an advancing plasma cloud that reached out and burned dozens, then hundreds of missiles at a time. Soon the display whited out with plasma and EMP.

“But that’s going to slow him down some,” Token said, and it was true. Using the drive as a forward weapon allowed more of the original flight of missiles to catch up, though slowly. Because they overtook the Destroyer so sluggishly, its fusors easily picked them all out of space. “At least we’re making him burn fuel to power his weapons. Those fusors are horrendous but very inefficient. Maybe he’ll run out of juice…”

“Maybe. Look, something’s happening.” Vango zoomed the VR back in. He couldn’t get much accurate data off any part of the Destroyer, but something unusual was taking place along its leading edge.

“Railgun hits! Those are railgun impacts,” Token crowed, and Vango saw it was true. Dark spots accompanied by bursts of heat appeared all over the enemy’s skin where the metal balls must be slamming into its armor, blackening small pieces that individually were insignificant, but by the hundreds and thousands should cause a great deal of damage.

In response, the Destroyer suddenly vomited forth several hundred hypervelocity missiles, which accelerated at the incredible speed that gave them their name. These spread out into ten groups, aimed at the cruisers.

“Oh, crap. That doesn’t look good.”

“Those cruisers got a lot of rock on their nose. I hear that it was the first fight, where the Destroyer crapped itself in its dead buddy, that gave the engineers the idea of cladding them in asteroid,” Token said.

“Tactic and countertactic,” Vango mused.

“It’s slowing some more. And…it’s aiming at one of the cruisers.”

What Token said was true; the predicted path now intersected the cruiser EFS Innsbruck. The cruiser squadron commander must have seen it too, for Innsbruck fell back a bit as its fellows closed up to screen it in response.

But the Destroyer wasn’t a rock with a semi-intelligent guidance package; it was a fully crewed alien dreadnought almost three thousand meters in diameter, bristling with weapons. Its predicted path flexed in the VR sim and then intersected a different ship.

The cruiser squadron shifted again and again, dancing as the two forces slowly closed on each other – slowly only in terms of the vast distances of space. In reality they all moved at thousands of kilometers per second, though they would take an hour to finally close. When they did, Vango knew from his calculations, they would flash by each other in milliseconds.

Long before that, though, the hypers would do their work. Under hundreds of gravities acceleration, the Meme missiles had leaped ahead, lining up on their ten unmissable targets. Ironically, the unencumbered slender cruisers would have been able to dodge a lot of them, but the selected strategy had been to use the enormous, relatively free bulk of the asteroids as makeshift armor.

More threats, intended to absorb Meme power.

More men and women to give their lives in trade to weaken the enemy.

“Why is it slowing down?” Vango asked. “I would think it would just zoom past and keep heading for Earth. The slower it goes, the easier a target it becomes, and now it’s going to get to Earth well after the rocks do. Don’t they want to coordinate their assault?”

“They can always speed up again.”

“But that burns fuel.”

“Who knows? Look…it’s not slowing anymore. It’s letting the missiles catch up, and it can probably target the ones in front better at slower speed. Maybe it wants to get rid of the threat of the Pilums behind before it goes in for the final battle. Maybe it’s using its drive to shield itself against the railgun bullets.”

“Maybe. Look, more missiles.” A small flight of four hundred appeared, and then the icons of the four hundred Aardvarks accelerated to follow them, head on to the enemy.

“They’re going for suicide runs,” Vango said with a lump in his throat. “We know people in Fifth Wing. Billy-boy. Slammer. Dex.”

“I know. I know.” They watched as the two forces drew inexorably together. “At least the Meme can’t dodge them. They’re too close and going too fast. And hypers won’t take many out. It’ll have to be fusors against Aardvarks, and the new armor should buy them a little extra time to get close.”

“Extra time to get close and die, you mean.”

“Yeah.”

“Hypers merging on the cruisers.” The ten flights of Meme missiles suddenly spread out, like exploding fireworks, before converging again on their chosen targets, having ignored the Aardvarks. Vango had seen this effect shown in intelligence briefings as the hypers performed terminal guidance maneuvers to attack from all sides, like swarming piranha.

Vango zoomed in on the Innsbruck, still the rearmost ship, to watch the impacts. At the speed they were going, the hypers became blurs, the VR sim merely providing educated guesses until they struck.

“Look, they’re lighting their drive!” Innsbruck put on a burst of speed, full engine power. “It made a few miss!”

Dozens of hypers slammed into the asteroid cladding, one after another, separating themselves enough to avoid fratricide. At the speeds they were going, the impacts caused immediate low-grade nuclear fusion, converting a significant portion of both missile and material into hot plasma, which could destroy following missiles. But the hypers were clever, in their bio-programmed way, and those that struck, struck in a pattern that maximized their chances of damage.

Fortunately for the cruiser, it also spread the damage out, rather than drilling through any one portion. Chunks of rock broke away or were blasted aside by the white-hot plasma bursts, digging craters a hundred meters deep, but after it was over, Innsbruck had survived the storm.

Vango and Token cheered. “Looks like that rock armor was a good idea after all.”

“Not much of it left, though,” Token said. “A few more good hits deep in those craters will probably get through. Oh, look. They’re turning away from the Destroyer and cutting back toward the rocks.” It was true; the cruisers, like the linebackers they emulated, were shifting their defense sideways toward the incoming asteroids.

“Absen’s calling plays like a coach, trying to get the most out of his players. Trying to tire out the Destroyer,” Vango ventured. “You know, this is frustrating, us just watching. We’re chasing this bastard, but by the numbers, we’ll never catch him.”

“What if we do?” Token asked with a bleak tone in his voice. “We’ll be like the dog that caught the semi truck. Then what?”

“A dog with a fusion bomb. That’s our job.”

“We got one more missile each, though. I’d rather ram it right into the bastard than blow myself up, but at least I know I’ll be in heaven.”

Vango replied, “Yeah. You got that going for you.”

“It’s not too late for you,” Token said.

“We been over this ground before, man. I know you’re a pastor’s kid and all, but that’s just not me. Like my old man said, if God wants to save me, he’ll do it. If not, that’s okay too. I did my best.”

“Okay. I kinda hope you’re right about that.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

“I do believe we’ll be judged for what we do here in this life.”

Vango replied, “I can live with that. And maybe our final act will wipe away anything we’re not proud of.” He thought of Stevie then, and how he let her down. “I sure hope so.”

“Fifth Wing is closing. Looks like final missile shots.” Another flight of Pilums appeared and led the four hundred Aardvarks in. It seemed insane to Vango that he was watching four hundred men and women deliberately throwing their bodies into the path of the enemy. He felt as if a cold hand squeezed his chest. Yet he knew that there were probably four hundred crew on each cruiser too, no more or less human than the pilots. Each ship, each squadron represented one more chance for humanity to live.

One more roll of the dice.

Vango had seen the Destroyer survive so many waves of missiles that the detonations and deaths of several hundred Aardvark pilots merely left him numb, as a little more hope died. “The guys that missed are lucky,” he said, highlighting thirty or forty ships that had failed to either impact or meet the more restrictive detonation parameters.

Suddenly one of the survivors blossomed into fusion fire, then winked out. “What the hell?” Token said.

“I guess he couldn’t live with himself,” Vango replied. “All psyched up to die and then he didn’t.”

“Or maybe it was just a malfunction.”

“Either way, dead is dead.”

“Did they do much damage?”

“Some.” Vango zoomed in on the Destroyer. Its blackened skin seemed shrunken and there were gouges and craters. “Can’t get a decent measurement on it from this distance but it looks like we’re wearing it down.”

“What if it runs away again?”

“Then we’ve bought another year to build and get stronger.”

“Or a year for it to send another hundred thousand rocks at us. Another year to do this all over again. I’m not sure I can take that. I just want this to be finished.”

“You know, Token, you’re starting to sound like you’re giving up. Are you gonna be disappointed not to die and go to heaven? Or are you gonna man up and stay with us and fight?”

Token didn’t reply. They lapsed into silence for a dozen minutes more as they watched the battle unfolding. Finally, he asked, “How’s it going with the rocks?”

Vango pulled his VR view way back and then zoomed in on the cloud of enemy asteroids approaching Earth. “Down to about three thousand, but they’re not killing them fast enough. Pulling the cruisers off rock duty hurt. At least they will be back in time to pick a bunch more off. Those big railguns are designed to break them up.”

“And then what?”

“What do you mean?” Vango asked.

“After the cruisers do their job on the rocks, what about the Destroyer? There’s nothing left in the way except the planetary defenses.”

“The asteroid fortresses and the cruisers will combine on the Destroyer, along with the last few squadrons of Aardvarks. And the laser batteries on the moon. It has to be enough.”

“What if it’s not?”

Vango thought about that for a minute. “I dunno. Keep fighting, keep trying…or maybe we become Meme slaves.”

“I’d rather die.”

“You might get your wish.”

Chapter 77

“Command trium impresses me,” Two said. “The slingshot maneuver around the red planet exhibited a high degree of competence.”

“One doesn’t get to be a Destroyer commander without high competence,” One replied.

“We didn’t have much to do. Just destroying a few hundred missiles. Nothing compared to the fight in the outer ring,” Three said nonchalantly.

Two and One turned their eyeballs to stare at Three. After a moment, he cringed a bit and ceased communication.

“I for one am happy to have easy duties and certainty of outcomes,” Two said.

One bobbed his eye stalk, happy that Two had put Three in his place. Every time I think Three has grown a genuine mental molecule, he convinces me otherwise. Perhaps his life code is defective.

“If you are so eager for difficulty,” One said sarcastically, “be of good cheer! We are approaching a force of enemy cruisers and supporting small craft. Perhaps they will do us enough damage to satisfy your stupid desire for a fair fight. After all, the ethos of the Empire will certainly reward us for giving the poor little enemy a reasonable chance to kill us.”

“All right, all right! I withdraw my observation. I was just passing the time with conversation.”

“Oh, now you are bored,” One pressed Three. In truth, so was One, which was why he entertained himself by browbeating his subordinate. “How sorry I am for you. Perhaps you should go in person and check the fuel conduits for leaks.”

“That will not be necessary,” Three replied hastily, now thoroughly chastised. “I apologize. Please forget I ever said anything.”

“Perhaps I will. If you earn such consideration.” One felt better after again emphasizing his dominance. “Now see to your controls. We approach the enemy.”

Chapter 78

Captain Vernon “Deke” Deaker sat in the Chair on the bridge of the cruiser EFS Innsbruck, staring at the shaved head of Master Helmsman Jennifer Macduff. He’d never seen her with hair; she wasn’t vain enough to wear a wig off duty. Besides, the little cruiser didn’t have enough space for a lot of personal gear. He supposed she’d used her allotment for other things. He’d never seen her with makeup on either.

No matter; he still thought she was attractive. Maybe it was her confidence, the direct way she looked in his eyes when she spoke. He knew he wasn’t a handsome man by most standards, with a narrow face from his Norwegian side and an overbite bequeathed to him by his Somali ancestors, but he could dream.

Funny how his mind went to the possibilities of the future during these minutes, these tens of minutes in the middle of even the most intense space battle where nothing could be done. Speeds so great and distances so huge made interactions quick and preparations slow. They said that in the presence of death, the body and brain brought sex to the fore in one last attempt to pass on the genes.

He resolved that, if he survived, he was just going to ask her out. Once she wasn’t under his command, anyway. The worst she could say was no.

“Entering extreme range for rock engagement,” Lieutenant Chuks on Sensors said.

“What’s our ammo state?” Deke asked.

“Forty-one percent, Skipper,” Chief Warrant Tsing on Weapons replied.

“Wait, then,” Deke decided out loud. “Misses don’t do anyone any good.” He knew the big Behemoth railgun that ran the spine of the ship could burn up ammo pretty fast, and they’d need it when the time came.

Numbers on the clock crawled, until finally Chuks spoke. “We’re getting close enough to guarantee hits.”

“What does the commodore say?” The cruiser squadron commander, Captain Blackhorse, was given that title by courtesy.

“Last orders were to engage at our own discretion. Calgary has started intermittent fire.”

“I guess that’s the signal, then,” Deke said. “Guns, start firing small bursts at best targets. Minimize the frat.” He stared up at the big front display, at the Destroyer to the side of them, still boring in toward Earth. “Helm, plot me a squadron track, optimum burns, to engage the rocks, and then to swing back toward the Destroyer in time to hit it with whatever we have left.”

“With or without the cladding?” Macduff asked.

“Give me both plots. Also…run a max burn intersection plot.”

“Intersection?” She turned her smoky green eyes back to him and his breath shortened. “You mean ramming?” The rest of the bridge crew turned to look at their captain.

“If we have to. Just in case. If the Aardvark pilots can do it…how can we refuse?”

Tsing nodded first, gravely, and then the rest.

“Has to be without the cladding, then,” Macduff said briskly, as if discussing bad weather instead of their imminent deaths. “Unless we can get a perfect nose-on aspect, we can’t maneuver well enough with a million tons of rock attached to us.”

“Whatever it takes, Jennifer.” Realizing he just used her first name for perhaps the first time ever, he turned his eyes to the display to conceal his lapse.

“Aye aye, Skipper,” she said in a firm voice, turning to look forward again.

So what if they noticed. Deke found that impending death reduced the small stuff to complete insignificance.

“Taking position,” Macduff said after a few minutes. The cruisers had reached a point in front of the rocks again. Each lateral swing of the squadron had brought them closer to Earth, blasting back and forth on shorter and shorter arcs, the major advantage to their present position.

“Optimum fire patterns, Guns. What does the computer say?”

“Projections show less than a thousand rocks will reach the planetary defense zone, Skipper.”

“And will the fortresses take out the rest?”

Tsing turned from his board to answer. “More than ninety-nine percent, but statistical variance at that point makes it impossible to say. We might get them all, or as many as ten might get through to strike.”

“And then there’s the Destroyer. All right, people, do your best. Get as many as you can. Stay sharp, and if anyone gets any bright ideas, let me know, no matter how crazy.”

Innsbruck shuddered now, the vibrations of bursts of hundreds of railgun bullets at a time flung forward along the two-hundred-meter-long accelerator, leaving at over a hundred kilometers per second. Still a crawl at interplanetary speeds, but because each rock was coming straight on at seventy-five thousand klicks a second, the combined impact would be enormous, like a bird strike on a jet fighter.

“Chuks, what happens if a rock hits us?” Deke asked conversationally.

“Um…let me run the numbers.” A moment later the lieutenant answered, “Anything over about a ton will probably crack the cladding and do us some damage.”

“So letting a rock ram us is not a very effective tactic,” he mused.

“Not in the grand scheme of things, Skipper,” Chuks replied.

“Then let’s not do that. If we’re going to kill ourselves, we’ll take some Meme with us.” Deke sighed and reached into a pocket for a ration pack, activating the heater and then sipping the hot thick soup-like stuff through the attached straw.

“Here they come,” Chuks said after a few more minutes. Deke looked up at the big screen to see the wave of enemy rocks approaching the squadron. “Cladding is taking some hits from gravel.”

Of course, the millions of bits and pieces of the asteroids that had already been hit kept going toward Earth just as fast as ever, and now that cloud of debris had reached them. “No significant effect.” The screen fuzzed and whited, and then shifted slightly. “Except for losing some sensors,” Chuks corrected himself. “Activating reserves.”

On the surface, Deke knew that armored clamshells were opening up and tiny robots were emplacing cameras, lidars and phased-array radar emitters and receivers to replace those that had been vaporized by the speeding pieces. Without good sensors, of course, the Behemoth was useless.

“Final fires, point-blank.”

“Dodging.” The bridge seemed to tilt as Macduff threw the ship sideways to avoid a medium-sized rock that had altered course toward them. “Good thing they can’t turn much at their speed,” she said.

“Just keep us alive, Helm,” Deke said. “We have a Destroyer to meet.”

On the screen the cloud of rocks, much reduced, flew serenely onward. “Less than an hour to impact on Earth.”

“Skipper, a message from Commodore Blackhorse,” the CyberComm watchstander said.

“Throw it up for everyone to see,” Deke replied. Once Blackhorse’s chiseled face appeared on the big display, Deke said, “Commodore. What can Innsbruck do for you?”

Blackhorse did not respond, even though the squadron was close enough for comms to be effectively realtime. Instead, his eyes flicked to his right for a moment, then he took a deep breath and spoke.

“First Cruiser Squadron, this is Blackhorse. Our job shooting rocks is done. Others will have to finish them off. Our Aardvark escorts have given their last full measure. Admiral Absen has ordered all surviving EarthFleet ships with any offensive capability to head toward the enemy and do whatever they can. We were going to do that anyway, but I just wanted to let you know that we aren’t alone. No matter what happens, whether we live or not, we’ll do it together, in the company of brave warriors. I can think of no better way to die.” He raised a hand, palm out, in a kind of blessing, or salute. “Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.” Then his image winked out.

Deke cleared his throat. “I second the commodore. It’s a good day to die, but the day’s not over yet.”

“Squadron nav data coming through…programming,” Macduff said. Deke could feel the ship moving under him, heavy acceleration mitigated by the gravplates on the gimbaled bridge. “Here’s the tracks.”

On the display, Deke could see ten cruiser plots following the rocks toward Earth, but off to the side, intersecting the Destroyer’s path just as it got close to the planet. “Will we make it?”

“Yes, Skipper. When the Destroyer slowed down, the system calculated that in. We won’t be late to the party.”

“Even if he accelerates?”

Macduff’s eyes blanked for a moment as she accessed her VR world, and then replied, “If he goes balls-out right now, he could beat us, but…I doubt he has the fuel. He’s got to be getting low after all the fusor use, the things that hit Callisto, the hypers, and the hard maneuvering.”

“Unless he intends to ram Earth itself. What would that do?”

Macduff replied, “The same as an asteroid. But the Red Team reports all say Meme are not suicidal like that. They don’t sacrifice themselves for their race or empire. They always run away to try again later.”

Deke looked over at the intel watchstander, who nodded her agreement with the helm’s assessment.

“But he could speed up and fly by, and we’d never catch him?”

“Possible.”

Deke nodded. “So we just don’t know. How about us? What if we go to emergency acceleration? Keep just enough fuel not to fly off into space forever?”

Macduff answered, “Skipper, it would make a hell of a lot more sense to blow the cladding. Then we can accelerate and have plenty of fuel. It’s all this rock that’s slowing us down, making it a race.”

“Right.” Deke stroked his chin in a moment of thought, then said, “Tell the rest of the squadron we’re blowing the cladding and will fight without it. Give them a concise summary of our reasons, and transmit it…ten seconds before we do it.”

Macduff grinned. “Just enough time to claim prior notification, but not enough to countermand?”

Deke just smiled and lifted his chin at the CyberComm officer. “Set it up.”

“Aye, sir. Ready.”

“Ready to blow the cladding.”

“Give me the PA, please.” Deke cleared his throat to address the crew. “Captain Deaker here. Great job, everyone, but now it’s time to hurry back to Earth for the final fight. We’re going to blow the cladding to do that. Damage control parties stand ready. Blowing in one minute.” Sixty seconds later he turned to the CyberComm station. “Transmit.” Then to the helm. “Initiate.”

The ship shuddered as chemical explosives shattered the rock at preselected points. “Spinning the ship.” Macduff hit the thrusters, beginning a rotation that would throw the broken rock off into space. “I got one piece stuck amidships,” she said.

“I think I can get a point defense laser on it,” Tsing called. A moment later he said, “It’s cutting. Give it a minute or two and most of it will be gone.”

“Can’t you handle a few cling-ons?” Deke asked with one eyebrow raised. The bridge crew groaned, but with the weight of the moment they welcomed a little bad humor.

“No problem, Keptin!” Macduff replied with a wink and a cheesy Russian accent, and the tension lightened. “Heading for our rendezvous with destiny.” The display showed their plot now intersecting the Destroyer well short of Earth, in about forty minutes.

Something caught Deke’s eye on the big screen. “What’s that thing?” He used his arm control to highlight a rogue track coming in at the enemy rocks from the side, well away from the Destroyer and everything else. It seemed to be accelerating at extreme rates that nothing of Earthtech could match. “Another Meme?”

“Let’s hope not,” Chuks replied. “I got no IFF, though. Maybe it’s a missile?”

“Can we get optical?”

“I can try, but this far out…and we’re still getting some gravel impacts. Hard to keep steady.”

“What’s it doing?” Deke asked to no one in particular. “Looks like it’s joining the rocks…look at that thing go.”

“It’s matched velocities, Skipper,” Chuks reported. “It’s coming up behind one of them.” He manipulated the big display to zoom in and watch as the much smaller unidentified craft slipped in behind one of the largest rocks. “It’s closing in pretty tight.”

Closer and closer the blurry ship crept up on the rock from the back. “It’s firing…a fusor! It must be a Meme ship. Holy crap, it just flamed the guidance package. Now it’s nosing up and pushing on the side…”

Deke realized what he was seeing. “That must be the alien Blend woman – one of her ships. It’s the only thing fast enough to sneak up on those rocks like that and kill their engines. Now, with just a little push, it will miss Earth.” He stroked his chin. “How many do you think she can get?”

“Forty or fifty more, I’d guess,” Macduff said. “Better than nothing, but there are still thousands.”

“It looks like she’s going after the biggest ones, anyway.” The bridge crew watched as the little Meme ship flitted from rock to rock at amazing speeds, blasting the guidance packages and nudging rocks off course. “I take back anything bad I ever said about her.”

Chapter 79

Ezekiel Denham whooped and hollered within his VR world as he and Steadfast Roger burned another cloned engine to a crisp, then dove in like a dolphin ramming a whale to give the next rock a steady five-second shove. With tens of millions of kilometers still to go, that tiny push was sufficient to divert the rock enough to miss Earth.

“Good job, Zeke,” he heard his father’s voice over his bio-radio. “Keep doing that as long as you can, but remember to get out of the way before the asteroid fortresses start firing. You don’t want to take a stray railgun round at those speeds.”

“Got it. Where are you, Dad?” Ezekiel asked.

Minutes passed before the answer came, during which time he knocked a few more rocks off course. “A long way away. You’re probably getting a lot of comm lag. Your mother and the quads are safe on the base, but I’ve got a few things to do to help out the defense.”

“Like what?” he asked, curiosity piqued.

The answer came a few seconds quicker this time, indicating Dad was getting closer, and pretty fast.

“Just like you, son, I’ve got a ship – I am a ship – and I can’t just sit idle while others fight.”

“I get it, Dad. Like when you were a Marine before.”

Of course, Ezekiel was also traveling at a quarter the speed of light in the direction of Earth, so between the two of them they must be closing fast. He wished he could take the time out to fish through all the memory data in Roger, but trying to find out where Dad and the Denham was without any clues would be far too distracting. He put that idea aside for the moment and concentrated on his game of whack-a-rock.

The fusor he’d had Roger create had been his first, but the Meme molecular memory programming made it easy. The only thing that was hard was how fast he was burning through fuel. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t have enough gas to stick around much longer before bingo. That was what the fighter jocks called “just enough fuel to get home.”

Ezekiel hoped one day he could be a fighter jock, but for now, this was as close as he would come.

When the next transmission finally came, it seemed his father’s voice filled his head, reverberating through his consciousness. “When you’re done, son, go back to the base and see your mother and the quads. I love you, son, and I’m very proud of you, and of all of them. Make sure you tell them how much I loved them.”

“What? Loved?” Ezekiel answered as if there weren’t a minute’s lag or more. He hadn’t missed the past tense. “What?”

He got no answer.

Chapter 80

Two hundred million klicks and several hours ago, back at the Denham family’s secret base deep in the Kuyper Belt, Skull the avatar had hugged each of his children in turn, and then his wife, lingering for a moment.

“What is it?” Rae had asked.

“Ezekiel’s taken Roger out after the rocks. He’ll probably kill a few of the packages and knock some off course.”

Rae had made a sound of frustration. “I told him to stay out of it!”

“You can’t expect a teenage boy with a hot ship to stay out of it, Rae. But I think he’ll be all right. Bumping off rocks isn’t like going up against a Destroyer.”

She had balled her fists in frustration. “You get out there and look out for him. Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

“What do you think I’m planning to do? Now kiss me and let me go back to the rest of me, unless you want a zombie meat puppet to keep you company.”

So she had kissed Skull and let him go back aboard the Denham.

Fully fueled and fat, Denham the ship had moved quickly off, and then blasted at maximum acceleration in a long arc, more or less in the direction of Earth and the Destroyer beyond.

Now he lined his body up on the Destroyer on a reciprocal course, the planet almost between them. Larger than an Aardvark, larger even than one of the new EarthFleet cruisers, Skull had been growing himself as much as he was able over the last ten years. Had he been free to do only that, he might have achieved perhaps a tenth the size of a Destroyer, but his biological capabilities had been fully tasked with making cloned engines and jump-starting the human space effort.

His current size would have to be enough.

Three hundred meters long and perhaps forty wide, like most of the human spaceships he resembled a sea creature, perhaps a dolphin or seal. A tapering cylinder was the most basic practical shape for a warship, and though the Destroyer was much more squat and blunt, even it conformed roughly to that mold. Denham’s “fins” were sensors and weapons and manipulators, and could be extended or retracted as needed.

Today, now, he had very few of those fins, or any other protuberances. As if to streamline himself, he had absorbed every extraneous item, everything that did not directly contribute to his mission.

Within himself he felt the central spine of ferrocrystal, a shaft that ran from nose almost to tail, so large that it had started to interfere with his drive and other life processes. He’d had a devil of a time keeping it hidden until he could offload his family onto the new base. Laced with carbon fibers and buckyballs at the nanomolecular level, that spine was the densest, strongest piece of material he had ever created. So heavy, so heavy…in human terms it felt as if he wore an awkward rucksack that was somehow inside him as well.

Now he soaked up all the encrypted Fleet comms, all the data streams that he had long ago learned to read in order to synthesize his own virtual picture of the battle. He knew as much or more than the pilots in the attack wings, or the cruisers, or even of Admiral Absen and the staff on Orion that was even now preparing themselves to do what really only he, Skull Denham, could accomplish. What thousands of Aardvark pilots had already done.

With his own sensors and all the borrowed data of EarthFleet he located Zeke, and called him. The conversation was short, too short, but in it he tried to convey what he needed to, without alarming the boy. Skull had left personal memory modules back on the base for each of his loved ones, but had ensured every trace of himself and his engram was scrubbed from any potential storage device. All of him that existed, all that there was of Skull or Alan or the Denham was here, in one body.

He examined himself once again as he continued to accelerate at more than three hundred gravities, not quite as fast as a hyper but at a far greater rate than any EarthFleet ship or even missile could. Every second, every minute his body accumulated more and more kinetic energy as his fusion drive blasted tightly nozzled plasma backward at half the speed of light.

Mass-energy, he thought, cannot be destroyed, but only converted from form to form. In this case the fusion inside his incredibly efficient engine turned the purest deuterium-tritium fuel into heat and movement, reaction mass to push him forward faster and faster, like a hypervelocity missile himself.

Exactly like a hypervelocity missile.

The largest one ever made, as far as he knew. A Meme hypervelocity missile with a penetrator almost three hundred meters long, weighing a million tons. A missile with a guidance package of not only human intelligence but all the cunning of a man who had spent his whole life fighting, his whole life killing at a distance, carefully planning, preparing, lining up each time for one and only one perfect shot.

Except for a brief period, another role, another life, where he became a father and a husband, for the last few years. Where he’d accepted someone else’s vision for him, to be something he wasn’t, which was a kind of sacrifice more difficult than this.

But that idyllic hell was now past.

Now he had restored himself, a killer again, as always, in defense of his home.

Skull had reviewed the current data, using the superb processing capacity of the former Meme Survey ship, a kind of living supercomputer. The EarthFleet effort had been amazing, and more effective than he had expected, but Skull had never been a man of hope. To his thinking, hope was no kind of plan. A sniper always prepared for the worst, and did what it took to get the job done.

But the EarthFleet effort was failing. He knew it, and Absen knew it. Skull had seen Orion, with minimal weapons, full of critical staff, hide well back from Earth for a time, ensuring it wouldn’t be targeted by some stray hyper or guided rock, but the Meme had ignored it. Without significant weapons, with just enough maneuvering capability to limp from here to there, it was obviously irrelevant. Rae had told him the Destroyer’s commander was unlikely to think of a fragile tin can full of command and control capacity as a threat.

More likely they would think of it as a prize full of potential slaves.

Now he saw Absen’s headquarters, pitiful engines flaring to maximum, heading toward Earth again. There was only one reason Skull could think of for them to do that, and it wasn’t to merely take a ringside seat for Armageddon. It would be a stupid, very human gesture, but Orion would be lucky if she could absorb the impact of one or two rocks, and doing so would certainly kill everyone on board.

Maybe Absen planned to put everyone in the lifeboats. In fact, Skull thought that was likely. They could easily make it to the Moon facilities, and from there, if Earth died, perhaps rebuild again.

Skull knew that was hopeless, though Absen and his people would hope anyway. With the entire industrial capacity of Earth wiped out, there was no way to recover sufficiently to build the defenses that would be needed against the next wave of Meme. Rae had told him, had told Absen as well, that after one Destroyer would come several, then dozens, then hundreds, at intervals of eight to sixteen years, if the Meme Empire still functioned the way it used to.

So it all hinged on today. With a living, breathing planet full of humanity, the exponential growth necessary to live could continue. Knock that train off its tracks, and the human race was doomed to fall under the sway of intelligent amoebas that only cared about using human bodies as slaves and carriers for Meme minds.

Sometimes Absen’s Fuzzy Wuzzy strategy worked. Sometimes great numbers overwhelmed the highly advanced, as when a swarm of killer bees brought down an animal or human, or an army of ants ate a creature thousands of times as large as any one.

Other times, the single enemy was so advanced, so far above the teeming masses, that only a silver bullet would do.

In the Sixties and Seventies, the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance plane had flown high above all enemies, so far ahead of its time that nothing, not the thousands of missiles launched at it or any gun or any other aircraft could catch it. No Fuzzy Wuzzy strategy would ever succeed.

But with one modern laser or railgun or guided missile and it could have been easily taken down.

One silver bullet.

That’s me, Skull thought. One match-grade, hand-selected, perfectly machined projectile. I am the bullet, and I am the gun.

He’d long ago made his peace with his decision. In fact, Rae had made it for on that day when she had argued against using engrams to guide human attack ships. Her words had engraved themselves on his perfect memory: “Humanity needs martyrs and heroes.”

Skull was not sure about a martyr, but ever since that day when he’d watched Linde fade from life, all he’d ever wanted to do was kill, and die a hero.

If he died a martyr, so much the better.

And if he failed, he’d never know it, for sweet oblivion awaited.

Chapter 81

Captain Deaker bounced his hand on the arm of the Chair, staring at the big screen in front of him. Almost there. Looks like space war is no different from any other kind: hours of boredom broken by seconds of stark screaming terror.

Though he had to admit, space war was generally pretty clean. At these speeds and with these weapons, most combatants were either alive or dead.

Except the Destroyer. It was big enough to have taken a pounding but still function at most of its capacity.

He’d like to see what Innsbruck could do about that.

“Coming into range, Skipper,” Tsing said. “Twenty percent hit probability.”

“How long until it reaches Earth?”

“Nineteen minutes,” Macduff replied.

“How long until hit probability reaches fifty percent?” Deke asked.

“About six minutes, Skipper.”

“We’ll wait until then. Helm, make sure you keep adjusting for an intersection course. If all else fails…”

“Understood.” Her bald head bobbed in agreement.

The next six minutes took hours to go by, Deke was certain. Finally the hit probability number clicked above fifty. “Fire at your discretion, Guns,” he said.

“Firing aye,” Tsing replied. “Intermittent pattern with maximum spread.”

Deke stroked his chin. “What if we narrow the pattern?”

Tsing turned to look at his captain, his eyes widened as if to say, you know what if. But he spoke anyway. “It means an all or nothing shot for each burst. The group will either all strike, or all miss.”

“That’s what I want. Love taps won’t work on this thing. We have to gamble that we can get in a few hammer blows rather than just a bunch of little dings.”

Tsing turned back to his board, carefully entering the commands. “Aye aye, Skipper. Adjusting fire.”

The number up on the screen revised itself down to a single digit: seven. Seven percent chance of any one burst striking, but when it does, I hope it will hurt, dig through some armor, maybe drill into some vitals. “When will we see hits?”

“We’re already seeing hits from the orbital fortresses’ long shots, but I think…I think I can tell when one of our big bursts impacts, as no one else is likely to be doing the same.”

That prompted a thought from Deke. “Maybe they should. Pass what we are doing to the rest of the squadron and to Blackhorse. It might be something the rest want to do.”

“They might countermand,” Macduff said.

“They can court-martial me, I guess,” Deke said, resting on his elbows and folding his hands. “I believe it’s the right thing to do.”

Tsing exchanged glances with Chuks, who nodded solemnly. Deke caught the interplay, and hoped, believed, that it meant his crew was behind him in this. Of course, if they rammed the bastard, someone would be court-martialing a corpse. No, not a corpse. Just a bunch of floating plasma, and a memory.

The number clicked up to eight, and then nine, as they closed the range. “Ammo?”

“Twenty percent, sir. I’m rationing it so that we will run out just before we cross paths. We won’t have another chance, at the rate we’re closing.” Tsing reached out to adjust something on his board.

“Five minutes remaining,” Macduff called. “Here’s the countdown.” She made another number flash, then moved it to rest near the hit percentage and ammo readouts.

A very competent woman, Deke thought. Yes, I’ll definitely have to sound her out. A man could do a lot worse. Then he laughed inside at himself. Not exactly the most romantic endorsement, Deke. “You seem competent, Jennifer. Would you like to have dinner?” You’ve been out of the game too long, Deke, since Lana died. That memory was enough to chill his fantasies and bring him back to the present.

The number crossed four minutes and the hit probability clicked up to twelve, then thirteen. “I can see our bursts striking now, sir, I think. Either that or the other ships have taken to firing similar patterns. I think it’s having some effect.”

Chuks put a shaky optical up on the screen, unsteady despite the best computer stabilization could offer as the Behemoth railgun’s intermittent firing vibrated the whole ship. Without the cladding to absorb the recoil, Innsbruck shuddered and slewed as Macduff fought to keep her aligned with their target. The picture showed flaring bursts of plasma as groups of a hundred metal balls hammered into the Destroyer, tearing new craters each time.

But it was so damned big. Two and a half thousand meters across or more, a mile and a half using the old measurements, a flying mountain wrapped in armor a thousand times as strong as any steel. Each shotgun blast of fusion chewed a hole ten or twenty meters deep and wide, and there had been thousands of impacts over the last thirty hours, but simple math showed that fifty to a hundred of those would have to dig their way through in the same spot to reach into the soft core of the ship where the Meme crew must be.

Some places seemed thinner, where hundred-meter-deep craters showed the effect of fusion blasts or the heavy impact of much larger projectiles – Pilum missiles or Aardvarks perhaps. “Is there any way we can aim for those deeper craters?”

“Not yet, sir. In the last few seconds we might be able to get that kind of accuracy, but right now four out of five of our shots are not even hitting.”

Deke saw that Tsing was right. The hit probability number had climbed to twenty percent even while their ammo was down to ten. “Two minutes,” he said. “Give me the PA.”

Once he’d been patched through to the crew, Deke said, “Now hear this. Captain Deaker speaking. All hands abandon ship. I say again, all hands abandon ship using your assigned lifeboats. There is a strong possibility of a collision or catastrophic damage to this ship within the next two minutes. This is not a drill. This is a lawful order. All hands abandon ship.”

Deaker looked around at his bridge crew. “I won’t order you, but any of you want to go, please go with my blessing.”

Chuks, Tsing and Macduff stayed where they were, as he had expected. After wavering for a moment, several of the junior watchstanders unplugged tentatively.

“Go on, ladies and gentlemen. We’ll pick you up if we survive, and nothing will be said. We only need a few people to do what we must. No point in everyone dying.”

They left, and Deke was glad of it. “Helm, kick any occupied lifeboats free just before we impact. Your discretion. Make sure they get clear.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“One minute.” The hit probability climbed to twenty-five, then thirty, while the ammo dropped to five percent. “Well done, Guns. Give them the last full measure.”

“Damn straight, Skipper.”

Thirty seconds passed, and then Deke felt the shudder as the lifeboats were launched, ready or not. Now anyone aboard was committed. “Thank you all for staying,” he said, and he found he’d never meant anything more in his life. “I can’t think of better company to die in.”

The three murmured acknowledgement, but kept their minds on their duties, especially Macduff, who had closed her eyes to better see her virtual world, flying the ship with all the finesse she could summon.

“Final fire,” Tsing said as the countdown passed fifteen seconds. He mashed his finger down on the button and held it there for five seconds, ten.

Deke felt the ship shudder and slew with the tremendous force of the railgun throwing tons of mass forward, and heard Macduff curse. A line of fusion fire blossomed wiggling across the looming optical image of the Destroyer, constantly adjusted by the stabilization systems. The last five seconds the enemy became clearer and clearer, each detail sharpening with the declining distance until Deke was sure he could have picked out the features of a man standing on its surface.

Then the numbers crossed zero.

“Dammit, Tsing!” Macduff turned with tears of anger in her eyes. “You made me miss!”

“What did I do?” he asked.

“That huge last railgun blast shifted us off course. We passed right over the bastard.”

“I guess we did,” Deke broke in on the impending argument, and took a deep breath. “So we’re still here. We did all we could. Get the lifeboats back in.” He gripped his chair arms to still the adrenaline reaction, feeling somehow disappointed that he was still alive.

Fortunately the lifeboats would not be far away, having been carried along by the same momentum they had when launched.

“We lost one,” Macduff announced. “It’s gone. Must have slammed into the Destroyer. Twelve dead.”

“Oh my God.” Deke rubbed his face. “I didn’t expect that.”

“It’s war, Skipper,” she replied. “Shit happens. Not your fault. You made the best call you could. Fate swapped them for us.”

Deke did not reply, wondering if she was really so cold or if it was all an act. I’m going to have some sleepless nights, I think, once I learn who was on that lifeboat. Would it be too selfish to hope I didn’t know them well?

He’d also have to write the letters. A lot of officers would be writing a lot of letters in the coming days, he thought, assuming there were people to write home to. “What about the rest of the squadron?”

Chuks adjusted the display back to the grand tactical scale that showed the area around Earth. Eight other cruisers accompanied Innsbruck in loose formation as they headed at high speed roughly in the direction of Mars. “Where’s…where’s Calgary?”

“Gone, sir. Either they lost their transponder, or…”

“Or they did what we tried to do. See if we can get some good delayed video of the Destroyer from off the net.” Deke drummed his fingers in impatience. A moment later a shaky image appeared, showing an enormous impact on the Destroyer. The picture clicked forward in ultra-slow motion like a slideshow, showing an expansion of the bright burst, then it cleared.

Right in the nose of the enemy was a new crater fully five hundred meters deep, a grand divot that appeared like a huge circular mouth. “Wow…that took a pretty good chunk out of it. Blackhorse…”

“A cruiser-sized chunk. Nothing left of them, sir. No way, no how.” Chuks shook his head to emphasize the point.

“Can we get back?” Deke asked, knowing the answer already. “Can we hit them again?”

“No, sir. The squadron is swinging around but it will take hours to reverse course, even if we use Mars to slingshot like they did. By that time the Destroyer will have made its run at Earth.”

“Do it anyway. You never know.” Deke slumped down in his chair. “All right. Fine work, everyone. If anyone needs relief, call your counterparts. Someone yell if you need me. I might nod off.” He closed his eyes and put his head back, suddenly so tired he could hardly hold it up.

Once the captain had drifted into a light sleep, Macduff turned around to look at him with her own eyes, instead of through the bridge cameras she usually used. She stared at him for some time, thinking about the future.

Chapter 82

Second Fusor trium lost any sense of boredom as the Human cruiser group lunged their direction, accompanied by a spattering of missiles, suicidal small craft, and millions of kinetic projectiles. The enemy magnetic mass drivers worked overtime, peppering Destroyer 6223 with shot that ground away at their armor like sand in a sonic storm.

“Increase our fire frequency,” One snapped. “Anticipate!” He demonstrated by deftly picking a burst of metal projectiles out of space by firing a fusor burst into its path. “The kinetic spheres cannot dodge, so simply throw plasma into their way. When they strike it they will fuse themselves, and strike us as hard gas.”

Two and Three held their communications, too busy to reply, and they had tasted these imprecations many times already. Still, One’s berating tone actually seemed to soothe and steady them, as it was familiar. For some time they simply fired and fired again, destroying some bursts, letting others pass, missing others.

“Their attacks are insufficient,” Three declared confidently.

Two replied, “Their ships approach. The small craft have rammed us on more than one occasion. Do you think the cruisers will as well?”

“Absurd.” One thought about this a moment longer, and then realized that no matter how absurd such a thing seemed to him, reporting its possibility could only make him seem wise…if he structured his missive correctly.

“However, no matter how absurd, I shall suggest the possibility be taken into account.”

“I am always happy to contribute to your reports,” Two said.

“Of course, I will credit your contribution,” One replied.

“I had no doubt,” Two said in a doubting tone indeed.

Once he had sent off the communication package to shoot through the speedy nerve pathways of the Destroyer, One asked casually, “Do you really think they will try to ram us? There must be dozens, if not hundreds of Humans aboard each ship.”

“Thousands of them killed themselves individually in the small craft,” Two offered.

“I suppose they did. Then we must prepare for this possibility.”

Three turned his eyeball toward One. “Prepare how?”

“Watch your sector,” One snapped. After Three put his eye back on his screen, One replied, “I have some ideas, but I thought to give you two the chance to come up with effective solutions as well. Just as an exercise.” In reality, One had absolutely no idea what fusors could do against ramming ships approaching at the enormous velocities involved.

Silence filled the control compartment for some time, until Two finally said, “I have absolutely no idea.”

Three bobbed his eyeball in place as well. “Nor I.”

One vibrated with feigned exasperation. “When the time comes, perhaps I will reveal my brilliance. For now, just perform your duties.”

“The time is soon,” Two said. “They are getting very close.”

One, for once, had nothing to say before the Human ships flashed past. The control room shuddered and shook with a tremendous shock, and all of their screens and sensor feeds went dead.

“One of them rammed us after all, full on,” Two said. “It would have been more efficient had you explained your insights before the impact.”

“I…I am not certain they would have helped. After all, I can’t think of everything. But no matter. Return to your duties. We live, and Destroyer 6223 lives.” One accessed the damage control reports on the network as soon as they became available. “You see? The impact was severe, but the doubled nose armor of the skin of our old 6223-2 provided us enough protection, and the gravitic dampeners did not fail. The Empire reigns supreme.”

“The Empire reigns supreme,” the other two echoed.

“Have confidence, faithful comrades. It will all be over soon.”

***

“What is this anomaly?” One asked. “Another ship of the Empire?” He highlighted the distant sensory tag as it approached on an almost-converging course with Destroyer 6223.

“So it appears,” Two said, refining the image. “It looks to be a Survey craft much like the one that the Humans drove us from.”

“Perhaps it is the same one?” Three spoke up.

“Do not be absurd,” said One. “Even if they captured and exploited some of the technologies aboard, our faithful ship would not have been controllable by mere Humans. Without those of the Pure Race, or at a minimum a Blend to guide it, it would have gone rogue. They would have had to kill it. They simply do not have the knowledge to fly Meme craft.”

“Undoubtedly you are correct,” Two said. “This one is larger. Though it is using our old encryption codes…which are still valid.”

“Still valid?” One radiated astonishment.

“Yes. You will remember that, because we left Sentry craft hidden within the Human solar system, the codes remained valid for their use. We have received important intelligence from them.”

“Ah. Of course. I was wise to do so.”

“Yes, but…” Three stopped nervously as the others looked his direction, then went on. “Why would this ship use our old codes?”

“And why is it continuing to accelerate toward us?” Two echoed.

“Is it fleeing the Human forces?”

Two checked his console. “Not apparently. Nothing they have can catch it. Should we raise our concerns with Command?”

One made a gesture of negation. “No. They must be aware of it.”

Chapter 83

Skull saw the Destroyer had almost reached Earth. It had destroyed everything EarthFleet had sent against it, and though the incoming rocks had all been broken, diverted or destroyed, as he had feared there was nothing left. Earth lay bare like a captured wench.

They’d almost done it.

The Meme ship retained its velocity, but looked like a deflated football, an old pigskin that had been relegated to a chew toy for a particularly large and vicious junkyard dog. But Skull knew it had a lot of capability left, enough to devastate the planet just with a few large hypers. Hell, they didn’t even need the whole missiles. At the speed the Destroyer was going, it could just toss a few penetrators toward Earth and they would strike like Thor’s hammers, like the biggest nuclear weapon or volcanic eruption ever, at a fifth the speed of light.

Unlike the broken chunks of asteroids that would hit Earth’s atmosphere and create a dazzling light show but little else, ferrocrystal penetrators would not entirely burn up before reaching the ground. Skull estimated that a hundred-ton rod would only be half consumed by the impact fusion before it struck bedrock, and it would release enough energy to wipe out a country the size of the United States outright, in one horrible blast.

The rest of the world would just die more slowly as the air filled with dust and ash, blocking the sunlight for decades, the nuclear winter of doomsday scenarios.

That was if only one struck.

Skull believed Rae; she had told him that the Destroyer would not crash itself against the planet. Meme were too narcissistic to be self-sacrificing, especially as this was not by any stretch of the imagination a matter of their Empire’s survival. To them, humanity was just a particularly stubborn infestation of a desirable piece of territory.

But if all it would take was a few accurately-aimed ferrocrystal columns, dumb missiles dropped as the battered Destroyer swept by, Skull had to stop it. And even if by some chance the Meme couldn’t or didn’t use that tactic, he had long since resolved to wipe this thing from space, if it was the last thing he ever did.

Long ago, Skull had read Moby Dick. Now he saw the massive ship before him as the White Whale, and himself as Captain Ahab preparing to “shoot his heart as if from a cannon.” Melville’s imagery had been metaphorical, but Skull’s actions would make this literal.

He aimed himself slightly to one side of the enemy and waited for what must come. His fusion drives burned as hot as he could run them, though that lit him up like a beacon in the night of space. The Destroyer could not possibly miss seeing him already coming on so fast and accelerating furiously.

Now came the critical question.

He hoped he had the correct answer.

It pinged against his nose, his hull, a bioradio inquiry from the Destroyer, coded on current Meme bands and using unbreakable encryption. Simply put: who are you?

They could undoubtedly see that the Denham was a Meme Survey craft, a friendly ship, but acting oddly. Standard protocol would be to query the equivalent of an IFF, an Identify-Friend-or-Foe transponder. Without the correct encryption and codes, the Destroyer would know something was wrong, and might even fire on Skull before he got close enough. He could not afford to run head-on into a flight of hypers right now, not at this velocity.

Skull waited as long as he thought he could. Every second’s delay allowed him to close with his hated enemy, but eventually he had to transmit the response, red-shifted in spectrum as far as he could bend it so that at this excessive closing velocity it would be understandable.

So off it went, encrypted with keys and coded with numbers so obligingly provided by the tame Sentry that Zeke had captured. His son had thought he had brought home a puppy, but perhaps he had obtained the key to Earth’s salvation.

I am so proud of him.

For a moment, just a brief second, his resolve faltered as he thought of his firstborn and how he would never see him again, but Skull could find no other way. No other way to be certain, that was.

I’m still a sniper. One shot, one kill.

One agonizing minute later the answer came, bathing him in relief: Accepted. Undoubtedly some kind of orders, some instructions for the Meme “ally” would be forthcoming, but if Skull had his way, they would arrive far too late.

Closer now, closer, just a minute more, half a light minute’s distance, ten million miles and counting down fast. Skull could see with perfect clarity as every remaining weapon on every EarthFleet orbital fortress fired at the Destroyer, throwing shot, missiles and beams into the ship’s path.

Had the Meme ship come head on, this barrage might have achieved its end, might have finally destroyed EarthFleet’s nemesis.

Unfortunately, the great vessel had aimed itself at least a hundred thousand kilometers to one side of the planet, and so most of that barrage – nearly all of it – would miss. It was simply not within the capabilities of human technology to hit something so far away, going so fast, at such an angle of deflection, as if a mass of ancient archers had tried to bring down a jet plane flying across their field of fire.

Far behind it Skull could see the mass of Aardvarks vainly trying to catch up, even firing their masers from impossible distances. The surviving cruisers added their fire as well, but the Destroyer was going faster than their railgun bullets, and there weren’t enough lasers to kill it.

Skull flew past Earth and slowed his own time sense by a factor of a hundred. Even in ultra-slow motion, he flashed by the tiny blue marble so fast it seemed just a streak. He took one last look at the planet of his birth before focusing on the task before him.

At the last moment possible he turned from the path that would shoot past the Destroyer and set himself one that would intersect it. Even this slight alteration necessitated a full burn of his main engines, his whole body rotating briefly sideways.

Now the few seconds remaining stretched out to minutes in his sped-up mind, allowing him to examine the situation carefully, like a sniper watching his target. Right now his projected path led straight through the center of the Destroyer, but he began to refine his point of aim, looking for the right spot. Though all his calculations said it would not matter where he struck, he wanted no chance, no possibility that somehow the Meme ship would survive the bullet that was Skull Denham.

He picked out a spot on its nose, a deep crater where some lucky missile or brave kamikaze had gouged out a chunk of armor in an instant of sun-like heat.

That would be his bull’s-eye.

That would be his homecoming.

That would be his sweet oblivion.

In the last instants the crew of the Destroyer must have finally recognized the danger, despite his friendly codes, for Skull saw the ship’s fusors, which doubled as attitude jets, suddenly explode into life, attempting to twist the ship out of the way even as they blasted directly at him. A slight twitch of his own thrusters ensured that no such maneuver could possibly succeed, and the kiss of Meme plasma flame could not stop him.

Within his cockpit, Skull downloaded his engram, his mind, into his avatar one final time. He ripped his feet lose from the floor to sever himself from the Denham, suddenly reducing his perceptions and his world to only that body. In this last moment he wanted to be a mere man.

Where another might have roared or yelled or screamed, he just let out his breath to stillness, like the sniper he was, and then he smiled.

Finally, he saw only through the eyes of a man.

Finally, he felt fully human once more.

Finally he, the bullet, went home.

Chapter 84

Admiral Absen stared at the main screen while the rest of the crew of the operations center went mad with joy and relief. The expanding inferno of plasma and debris caused his Sensors officer to pull the view back, then pull back again, the scale of the devastation enormous even at this distance.

“It’s gone,” he said wonderingly into the confused hubbub of the operations center.

It was all Absen could do to remain in his chair, and for the first time since he had sat in his stateroom aboard the Tucson staring into the muzzle of a loaded .45, he felt absolutely spent, crushed, wrung out. A small child could have knocked him over with a stuffed toy. Trying to lift one hand seemed an impossible task.

Is this what victory feels like?

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won, Wellington had said. Absen had never understood what that meant until now, as he stared upward at the screen at the spreading cloud and few remaining pieces of the Destroyer tumbling in toward the sun. They wouldn’t fall into the star, not at their current speed, but no one would be catching them either.

“What in hell was that thing?” Absen managed to ask, dragging himself forward in his chair to rest his hands on the console in front of him. His vision seemed tunneled, and his breathing came at great effort. Raising his voice, he rasped, “What in the Sam Hill just happened?”

As usual Lieutenant Commander Johnstone answered first, one jump ahead of anyone else. “The video shows some kind of enormous missile striking the Destroyer at almost half the speed of light. I can’t even get a good image capture – it’s just a streak that I have to process to infer its characteristics. Whatever it was, sir, it was big enough to kill it in one blow. At least, after it had been battered so badly.”

“It wasn’t ours.” Absen almost made it a question, because he was almost certain of the answer.

“Not that I know of, sir.” Johnstone looked around as if to solicit input from others. No one said anything. Then he held up a hand to his ear, an unconscious gesture having nothing actually to do with the chips in his head. “I have an anomalous transmission.”

How Johnstone could pick out one “anomalous transmission” from the thousands that must be streaking around the solar system, Absen had no idea, but the man had a positively spooky talent for his CyberComm duties, so the Admiral nodded encouragement.

“The net picked it up just before the thing hit the Destroyer. A voice transmission in the clear.” Johnstone played it.

This message is for all the people of Earth, Warrant Officer Alan C. Denham, USMC speaking. I didn’t die in the battle ten years ago, but I bet I have now. I piloted the captured Meme ship that must have just slammed into the Destroyer. I hope it’s dead, or if it’s not, I hope you can now finish it off. I wish all of humanity well, and reserve my hatred for our real enemies. I ask that you do the same, and remember that it’s not biology that decides if we are human. It’s the choices we make.

“Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.” Zeke Johnstone used to quote that at me, and then, when the chips were down, he put his money where his mouth was, dying to protect his family. If I can do the same, I think I’ll finally be happy. Maybe in a minute or two I’ll be seeing him on the other side, if there is such a thing.

This is Skull, captain of the Alan Denham, signing off.

Absen licked dry lips. “Replay that on all channels. Everyone should know.” Under his breath he said, “Because we need heroes like that.”

***

Rick Johnstone finished his shift mechanically, his brain well trained by the chips in his head. They did all the work while his mind took a dazed vacation. He passed messages and patched parties through his board like an old-fashioned telephone operator. With the damage to many bases and the Van Allen belts of Earth filled with ionizing radiation, comms had gone to hell in the proverbial handbasket.

Moving Orion toward a lunar orbit helped, and once more the old warship-turned-station proved its worth as the nerve center of EarthFleet. Rick was thankful for the busyness, for it kept him from thinking of Grissom Base on Callisto, and the bomb that had wiped out the surface facilities and the invading force with it. With still no idea who had done that, and no word from those in the bunkers, all he could do was work and wait.

Wait to see if Jill still lived.

With the Destroyer gone, the guidance packages on the rocks seemed to lose their ability to adjust. Once Rick thought about that, it made sense. The barely intelligent engines could not easily see around their own asteroids, could not look to the front to figure out what to do. Fully fifty percent soon developed projected tracks that would miss the planet. Those could be ignored.

The rest, the remaining forces took care of and, though they were ready to do it, the captain and crew of Orion did not have to throw themselves in front of a flying mountain after all. Rick felt very glad of that, and also glad to finally end his shift as his relief showed.

Clumping along in his vacuum suit toward his quarters he had to dodge the revelry that spilled into all the main corridors. Stateroom doors stood open and everyone seemed to have a drink in his or her hand. Fumes from dope or hash drifted through the ventilation system, and no one seemed to care, least of all him. Music…

Let them party, he thought. They earned it. All I want to do is get this damned suit off, shower and sleep, and maybe when I wake up, there will be a message from Jill. At least for us there’s a chance. For others, their hopes have already been dashed.

He pushed through knots of people, hands slapping him on the back in greeting. A bleary blonde tried to lay a kiss on him but he pushed her gently away with a smile. From one darkened cabin he heard the unmistakable sounds of coupling, and he reached over to shut the door.

It’s like those films of VE day or something, with people dancing in the streets and kissing strangers. They think it’s all over, and for now, it is, but I’m married to a Marine and, no matter what my inclinations, I’m a Navy man.

For us…will it ever be over?

Epilogue

Rae Denham approached her meeting with Admiral Absen aboard Orion with a certain trepidation. Amid the celebration of the last week, his communications with her had taken on a decidedly chilly tone. She suspected she knew why, and wished she could avoid confirming her suspicions.

Somewhere, deep down inside the half-alien goddess she’d become lurked a scared young lieutenant, still impressed by a formidable senior officer. Sometimes she wondered if someone older wouldn’t have been a better choice for blending.

Buck up, Rae. You’re not Sylvia Ilona anymore. You’re the same person that told the Pharaohs how to build the pyramids, and you’re the same person that ended up, maybe more by luck than anything, saving Skull so he could in turn save Earth.

That made her feel a little better. Not much, but a little.

When Steward Tobias ushered her into Absen’s spartan quarters, he stood up from behind his desk but did not extend his hand, and waved her to a seat well out of arm’s reach. Then he sat down, and so did she.

“I see from our relative positions that this visit is not to be cordial,” she said as her butt hit the cushion.

“That’s because it’s personal, not professional,” he replied with a sour expression. “Professionally I am jumping for joy that your husband sacrificed himself and your ship to save all of humanity. How else could I react? As far as I am concerned, he deserves every posthumous decoration, every possible paean of praise that humanity can bestow. But you…” Absen pointed an accusing finger.

“What did I do that was so terrible?” she asked, knowing full well the answer but not willing to concede without a fight. “I told you we all have our secrets.”

“Secrets I can accept.” Absen stood and turned to pace, but did not leave the area behind his large desk, keeping it as a barrier between them. “You led me on. You flirted with me. That was…slimy.”

“Slimy?”

“I couldn’t think of a better word.”

“I’m sorry, Henrich –”

“Don’t you dare call me that!”

“All right, Admiral. I apologize. I’m not perfect. I wanted to maintain a good working relationship with you, so I tried to thread the needle. Obviously I missed. Oh, well.” Rae threw up her hands and then stood up. “If that’s all you wanted, I’ll be going now.”

“Probably for the best.” Now Absen came out from behind the desk, but only to open the door for her. “Goodbye, Colonel Denham.” His words came out flat and final.

“Goodbye to you, Admiral Absen. Thank you for your efforts against the Meme.”

“Likewise.”

The thunk of the shutting door had a ring of finality.

Only after boarding her shuttle and separating from Orion could she think calmly, as she stared out into speckled space. She put this fresh wound aside, overshadowed as it was by the enormity of her husband’s loss. The loss of their children’s father, too. Damn you, Skull, to leave them alone. Couldn’t you have found another way?

The stars upon the black glared at her unwavering, and did not answer.

At least I have them. Like any warrior’s wife, standing at graveside saluting a flag, I have to look my children in the face and explain why he did it, and why we should all go on. I have to explain why he sacrificed himself and why we should sacrifice ourselves for a human race that barely acknowledges our membership in it. How without our help and technology, of Meme heritage and of mad scientist children, they would all be enslaved.

It seems the more the gods do for them, the more people grow to hate and fear them.

Her mouth turned up in a reluctant smile. Perhaps that’s a good reason not to play god.

***

Admiral Absen lowered himself slowly into his chair, feeling very old. The rejuvenated body of his did not fool him one bit. Decades of stress and war had aged him inside, where it counted. The one bright spot in his life lately had been this mad dream of his, that the most desirable woman in the solar system might be interested in him, and he’d just thrown all that away.

His wounds, the ones he thought had healed, had opened up again. Kathleen had been his first love, childhood sweethearts ending up in a fairy-tale marriage, with three wonderful children. When nuclear hell had stolen them, he thought perhaps he could recover, eventually, especially when that little seed of feeling inside himself had been briefly watered by Raphaela’s attentions.

He was wrong. Her flirtation had turned out to be a cruel, adulterous and dishonorable joke from a woman who knew full well she was still married.

Raphaela had used him. She’d incorrectly thought, he felt certain, that he needed some kind of managing, massaging, some kind of handling, to make sure he did his job.

What an insult. Perhaps a Blend really was a completely different entity, a deviant species, not human at all. Certainly the one that Huen had captured had been a traitor, an agent. While he didn’t think Raphaela was one, he now knew that she was as conniving as any Machiavelli, Richelieu or Borgia.

He took a deep breath, and prepared himself for a long hard career leading EarthFleet, defending humanity against the Meme…and keeping a close eye on her.

***

“Welcome back, First Sergeant Repeth,” the fuzzy figure said in a voice sounding like it echoed down a tin tube. “You’ll be all right eventually, but for now, we’ve shut down your cybernetics for your own safety and ours.”

A face pushed close to hers, resolving itself into a mask and medical eye protection. Why they bothered anymore with Eden Plague and nano to cure everything she didn’t know. Rules were rules, she imagined.

“Just relax. Actually, you won’t be able to help it,” the doctor said cheerfully, “as we’re pumping you full of happy juice.”

Time seemed to drift for a while, with hours passing in a fog before clarifying again. Eventually she could see another figure sitting by the hospital bed, but her vision was still too fuzzy to see the face. “Who?” she rasped.

Sergeant Dasko leaned forward. “Just me, Top. How you doin’?”

“I’ll live. I guess we will too, huh?”

“For now. We’re all just sealed in down here, and the civil defense chief doesn’t want to make any moves until we have to. Until we’re sure they’re gone.”

“How long?” she croaked.

“Two days, about.”

“Miller?”

“She’s like you. Next room over. You guys really cut it close, you know that?”

“Cut what close? The bugs got the techs. Killed them. We saw it on video.”

Dasko shrugged. “They must have set the fusion bomb timer after all. Lucky you guys hustled, Top. Would have been tragically ironic if you’d have died in the blast, just sitting there jawing.”

“Ten-dollar words, there, Sergeant. Guess you’re not a dumb grunt after all.” Repeth reached for Dasko’s hand. “Thanks, Jorgen. For everything. You and your people did a hell of a job.”

Dasko gripped hers. “Yeah. I guess we found out why we were buying time. Never thought I’d say it about a couple of zoomie bomb techs, but…damn.”

Repeth leaned her head back, thinking on the military people she’d known over her lifetime. “It’s not the color of your uniform that makes you a hero, Dasko. It’s what’s in here.” She slapped her free palm against her heart. “Ow.”

Dasko cough-laughed once, sadly. “Yeah. I know that.”

“So…two days. Earth might be a smoking hole. Our families might be all dead.”

“Pretty sure not.”

“Why not?” Repeth asked.

“Engineers are boring through the rock, making a shaft well away from the base. They ran an ultra-long-wave antenna up and say they have picked up some comms. Nothing definitive, but…”

“That’s good news.” Assuming it’s not just from whatever’s left after Earth was scoured clean of life.

“Sure is.” Dasko squeezed her hand once more, then let go. “I’m going to check on Captain Miller.”

“Can you send in a doctor?” Repeth asked as he stood.

“Sure.”

A moment later one of the medical staff came in. “Yes?”

“Hi, Doc. Any chance Captain Miller and I can share a room?”

The woman smiled and nodded. “I think that can be arranged.”

“And bring me a tablet please. I’d like to compose a letter to my husband.”

***

Vincent Markis stepped off the executive jet at the Carletonville airfield to see a group of at least a hundred people, complete with banners, waiting for him at the bottom of the steps. He was glad he’d had the downtime on the long trip from Australia, where the shuttle full of returning Aardvark pilots had landed, to rest and prepare for this moment. He was also glad, though feeling a bit guilty, that the Chairman’s – his father’s – official airplane had been there to carry him home.

Still, it had been four years since he left home. Add the detox to rebalance the brain chemistry of all of the VR-addicted pilots… The special treatment, not to mention the full lieutenant’s bars on his shoulders, he had to admit he had earned.

Elise, his mother, had taken pride of place, tears of joy streaming down her face as she hugged him as if she would never let go. Then his father Daniel, his brother Zeke and his sister Elizabeth and Uncle Larry and Aunt Shawna and soon he lost track as many of the people he had grown up with right here on the South African research base mobbed him.

The last to do so made an impression, a body firm and curvy in all the right places with a sweet flowery aroma that made him remember he’d been celibate ever since Stevie died. “Dannie?”

The young woman squeezed him one more time before stepping back, still holding onto his hands. “All grown up,” she said, twisting left and then right as if showing off the spring outfit she wore.

“You sure are. You’re…”

“Twenty. I graduate next year. Biogenetics.” Her smile cracked the ice in his heart and his good day suddenly got even better.

“Come on, kids, you can catch up at the barbecue.” Daniel Markis’ boyish smile belied the command beneath his words as he waved the throng toward the gaggle of vans, SUVs and an official bus. “Today,” he said, raising his voice, “my son has returned, and I’m ordering him to have fun – and all the rest of you miscreants too. So…let’s have a party!”

-

The End of Comes The Destroyer.

If you enjoyed this book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon or any other book site.

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For more adventure in the Plague Wars universe, read on for an excerpt from First Conquest, Stellar Conquest Book 1, contained within the anthology Planetary Assault.

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Sergeant Major Jill Repeth, EarthFleet Marine Corps, gasped as the slimy tracheal tube withdrew and she began to breathe on her own again. Lifting her hands to rub her face, she carefully opened her eyes for the first time in what must be nearly forty years. Lighting glowed dim and no klaxons wailed, no strobes flashed, so she figured Conquest to be on schedule, nearing her destination.

Repeth felt the living coffin, another product of adapted enemy biotech, loosen on her lower body, and she winced when the catheter probes withdrew. Naked, she was birthed anew. She welcomed the sound and fury to come; after nearly sixty years of Marine service – plus the forty in stasis – she still looked forward eagerly to righteous battle. Neither guilt nor moral ambiguity troubled her thoughts of killing aliens hell-bent on genocide.

Sixty years. She’d never expected to serve for that long, but the Eden Plague virus conferred immortality and rapid healing, so such spans were now commonplace. She could have easily been an officer by now, but she’d always hated the idea of separation from the rank and file. Offered her choice of warrant or commission many times, she had always refused, preferring to stay where she was most comfortable – top enlisted Marine in a front-line combat unit.

Looking around, she marveled at the rows upon rows of the biotech cocoons that had kept everyone alive, healthy but in stasis for the last four decades. Lines of them extended in a vast adult nursery, incubators of military personnel. She could see at least a thousand of the things from where she stood, in various stages of processing, BioMed personnel bustling among them, and she knew there were many thousands more spread throughout Conquest and the ships attached to her.

Stumbling for the female showers in the deliberately heavy gravity that matched the target planet the astronomers had named Afrana – she was grateful for the protocol that decanted key leaders in order of rank. Brigadier Stallers and the rest of the Marine brigade’s officers should have been awakened ahead of her.

Under hot water she soaped and sluiced, scrubbing remnants of bio-gel out of her ears, and then gingerly tested her cybernetics. As far as she could tell, her laminated bones and polymer-enhanced musculature had come through without degrading.

Holding up her hands, she extended her claws in sequence to their full two centimeters, starting with the thumbs. The pain of the ferrocrystal knives slicing through her skin from beneath was familiar, comforting.

Like the anachronistic bayonet, she seldom used the cutting blades in combat, but they’d come in handy for covert missions, back before Earth had been unified.

Thoughts of Earth threw her mind back to her last view of that fragile blue marble hanging in space, and all the hopes and dreams of its inhabitants. Leaving behind everyone there was hard, and once again she crammed down the gentler part of her humanity, coating her soul in armor not so different from what she wore in combat. Only one man was allowed past that façade: her husband, Commander Rick Johnstone.

Having him along kept her human, but the time for softness was past. Conquest and the ships attached to her had one simple mission: kill any Meme craft in the Gliese 370 system, destroy all resistance from the aliens nicknamed “Hippos” on the planet Afrana, and then colonize.

She thought then about the briefings on the Hippos, what little they knew. So called because they were huge and gray and thick, they were reported to have technology similar to Earth’s, or possibly better.

It’s gonna be a hard fight.

Repeth touched her palm to the locker she had closed forty years ago and it hissed open, revealing her carefully-packed kit. Looking in the mirror set inside, she saw a severe, strong-jawed face, intense brown eyes, and skin tinged with the blood of at least one Hispanic ancestor.

A warrior’s face.

Once dressed in crisp utilities she felt like a Marine again. With her starched eight-point cap settled carefully on her head – an affectation from her wet-navy days – she went in search of coffee, information and her commander, in that order, probably all in the consolidated wardroom, where officers and senior NCOs ate.

Drawing a steaming cup of “lifer-juice,” the muddy coffee dispensed by the industrial-sized brewer, she nodded at Brigadier Stallers sitting with his battalion commanders. One of those was her own, infantry Major Joseph “Bull” ben Tauros, originally of the Israeli Defense Forces before volunteering for EarthFleet Marines. A hulking brute of a man, he was the only one that seemed completely normal without hair; the cue ball was his usual look.

Bull caught her eye and lifted his cup. She raised hers back in greeting, but doubted his held coffee. He stood up, nodding to the brigadier, then waved Repeth over to a table nearby, growling at a lone Navy ensign. The young man hastily grabbed his powdered eggs and found another place to be.

“Good decade, Smaj,” Bull greeted her as they sat down.

She accepted the familiar corruption of “Sergeant Major” with good graces, knowing such nicknames built trust and camaraderie. “Good freakin’ four decades, Bull,” she replied, “but it feels like I only slept for a week.” Repeth sat down across from him and reached over to tilt his cup toward her with one short-nailed finger. “Ugh. Can’t believe you’re still drinking that dreck. I should space it.”

Bull pulled the protein shake back protectively. “Don’t you dare. I used all my personal allowance on this stuff. Can’t stay big on Navy food.”

“Who cares if you stay big? Your cybernetics provide most of your actual strength. Besides, it gives you gas like a sick hound.”

“I like to be big. You think this huge noggin would look good on a skinny body like yours?” He reached up to run a hand over his basketball-sized cranium.

Repeth held up her hands in surrender. “All right. So what’s the word?”

“Word is, All-Hands assembly at 1500 hours. Word is, Earth got hit five years ago by sixty-four Destroyers. We don’t even know if anyone’s left.” Bull slurped more of his shake, pensive.

Repeth pursed her lips and put on a stoic front. “Can’t help that. We knew when we left it was long years of travelling at best, a one-way trip at worst.”

“We might be all that’s left of the human race.” Bull hid a fleeting expression of deep concern.

She leaned over to pound her index finger on the tabletop in front of the big young Marine officer. “Listen, sir, I’ve been in active combat longer than you’ve been alive. I’ve spoon-fed green lieutenants and I’ve made and I’ve broke battalion commanders like you. But I’ve seen you over the past few months – before the forty years – hell, you know what I mean – and I know you’ve got what it takes. So just do your job the best you know how and have faith in ol’ mother Repeth.” Unconsciously she patted her left breast pocket where her father’s ancient leather-bound small-print Bible rested.

Bull’s mouth quirked up in a smile at her gesture. He reached up to his neckline to reveal a heavy ferrocrystal Star of David medallion on a chain. “I got faith, Smaj. But Moshe Dayan said faith and bullets’ll get you farther than faith alone.”

Repeth laughed. “Amen to that, my bulky brother. No atheists in armor, eh? Pass the Lord and praise the ammunition.” She clapped him on the shoulder, a sensation like slapping wood. “I see the NCOs are up. Suggest you finish that glop and start doing some officer stuff. Find your drip-nose lieutenants, tell them mommy and daddy will make everything all right.”

Bull rose with her, draining his plastic cup and folding it into a cargo pocket. “Yeah, lieutenants. Making simple shit hard since Christ was a corporal.”

Repeth tsk-stk’d good-naturedly at his irreverence.

The Jewish major grinned. “You don’t like the way I talk, Smaj, that’s your cross to bear.”

“Why do I feel like you set every Gentile you know up for that line?” With a rueful snort she took her leave and refilled the coffee mug, intending to see to her awakening troops. It was NCO business to get them ready so officers didn’t have to.

Crossing the floor, Repeth spotted Tran Pham “Spooky” Nguyen sitting alone in a corner. Usually the slim Vietnamese highlander was easy to overlook, except that today she saw he wore the blinding white high-collared uniform of the Naval Stewards, EarthFleet’s specialized protective police service. She’d given up surprise at Spooky’s changes of uniform; he’d long since passed into legend within the clandestine services of Earth.

He’d gotten the nickname long ago, before the aliens salted Earth with the Demon Plagues, with which the Meme had tried to reduce humanity to mindless animals. Later enhancements – combat nanites in the blood, cybernetic implants like Repeth’s, and his dedication to the martial arts – had only enhanced his legend.

I’m one of the handful of people aboard that knows he’s a covert operative – spy, assassin, intimidator. Should have figured he’d show up; he’s always where the action is.

“G’day, Spooky. Nice look.” She sat down, knocked her coffee cup against his tea mug. “You playing bodyguard this trip?”

“Thank you, Jill. Of course, a Steward’s role extends beyond personal protection of the senior staff.” His accent was precise, perfect upper-class English, an affectation adopted so long ago that it was unshakeable. “Are you still playing at being Australian?”

She noticed he didn’t exactly answer her question, a common occurrence with Spooky. Jill chuckled. “Lots of Aussies in the Marines, so I pick up the dialect, that’s all. But are you doing anything, uh, specific, or just keeping an eye on things?” And I refuse to ask why you even came on this mission, she thought. You’ve always done exactly as you pleased and somehow you get away with it.

“As you say, keeping an eye on things.” Spooky’s gaze roamed the room, searching, she knew, for anything out of place.

Repeth wondered whether he was hunting traitors and spies again…ugly work, work she never wanted to have to do again. Guarded, she watched him for a moment more. “Good to see you on the job, but I have things to do. Look me up sometime.”

“Oh, you can be sure of that.” His look was unfathomable.

She ignored the comment and stood up, bowed formally to him as if they were back at the dojo, then put away her mug and went looking for her troops.

-

End of First Conquest preview. Read on for a preview of Stellar Conquest Book 2, Desolator

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Bull began barking orders through his suitcomm, consolidating his men and weapons, converging them midway between where he estimated the AI vault to be and its nearest reactor, even as he led his heavy weapons section there at a shuffling trot. Down metalsnake corridors, steely gray with age and use, Marines tramped on converging courses.

He watched as Corporal Bannon cleared corners, releasing tiny gnat drones from a slot on his back-rack. Special suits and training made Recon Marines the best at what they did, and he wondered what possessed him to have tried walking point himself. Probably stupid enthusiasm after nothing but training for the last three years, he thought. Well those autoguns almost got me, and the aliens’ maser weapons gave me some nasty burns. Maybe Jehovah is trying to tell me to quit sticking my dick out quite so far.

Splitting his attention between the here and now and the virtual HUD overlay, he watched carefully as his section approached the rear of the two score Marines of First Platoon, Alpha Company. “Captain Bryson,” he called to the company commander on the top channel, “keep a good three-sixty lookout, three dimensions. The enemy’s resistance has been scattered, but the Ryss aliens say the Desolator AI is crazy. We don’t know what it will do.”

Bull switched his net one level down, in order to include the understrength battalion’s senior NCOs. “Coming up behind, Swede,” he called, watching as Bannon sent a drone around another corner. “You should see my point man’s gnat momentarily.”

“Got it, sir,” Master Sergeant Lars “Swede” Gunderson replied. “Come on in. First Platoon will keep you snug and safe as a baby in his mother’s arms.”

“Bad metaphor, Swede, since all the mothers are back on Afrana, but I appreciate the sentiment.” Bull waved his men forward rather than switch channels again, though the gunner in charge of the semi-portable should have heard the exchange anyway.

A moment later they jogged by First Platoon’s outer troops and into the large intersection that was their meeting place.

From the portside corridor, another Recon Marine showed himself, and then led others forward. Third platoon, Bull saw on his HUD. Fourth was off to the starboard side and Heavy Weapon Section Two moved up behind them. He now had most of Alpha Company here, minus only Second Platoon spread out guarding the sleds, almost half his command.

Sergeant Major Charlie McCoy waved a greeting as he joined Bull from Fourth.

“General channel, all hands. First, Alpha Company,” he said. “Objective One is this fusion reactor,” throwing it up on their HUDs. “It’s forward of us and on the port side. My intent is to move forward cautiously and in force to Objective One and use the semis to disable it. My goal is to deny power to the enemy. The enemy is an AI the aliens call Desolator, and the machines it controls. All of those are fair game.”

“The aliens are big catlike people,” he went on, “and they don’t have sealed armor the way we do, but their weapons are high-tech and effective. Do not engage them unless you absolutely must. They are supposed to be passing the word over their comms to avoid engaging us too, but you never know.”

“All right, Third Platoon you are on the port side flank up these parallel corridors, with your limit the usable edge of the ship. Fourth here to starboard, with your limit the central corridor. First platoon, right up the middle toward the reactor, with semis One and Two in trail. Third and Fourth, detail one squad each to cover my ass, and remember everyone, they could come from the levels above or below. Any questions?”

None came, so Bull ordered, “Alpha, move out. Break break, Bravo Company this is Objective Two here,” HUD-marking a fusion reactor on the starboard side of the ship. “Captain Curtin, take that objective with all deliberate speed, keeping the rules of engagement in mind. The aliens are our allies, but new and twitchy ones from what I have seen. When you disable that generator, move on to the next one forward. Ben Tauros out.”

Curtin was a good man; Bull knew he’d get the job done.

Walking forward, he kept watching the HUD for any sign of resistance, but it didn’t come right away. Instead a sudden heavy feeling staggered him, and he saw the section carrying the semi-portable suddenly and clumsily set it down. “Gravity is increasing,” an unknown voice reported, then the whole company was shoved to the deck as the Gs went up to at least five. Bull crawled forward, his implanted cybernetics powering his limbs, but the sixty kilos of armor, suit and weapons that normally seemed so light now weighed at least three hundred.

“Alpha Company, is anyone experiencing less than five Gs?” The pull was not dangerous in itself, but they had lost all mobility and some of their combat capability too.

“I am, sir, about two,” Corporal Bannon called. The other two platoon Recon Marines on point reported the same.

“Gravplates take a lot of power, people, and that’s one thing this ship is short of – that’s why it pirated our fuel and why it’s only now putting these reactors on line. It’s also why we need to take them down. I’m guessing it has sensors and is gravving as many of us as it can, but it can’t do all of us, so everyone start crawling outward from the center of the company. See if you can find zones of less gravity, but be careful about standing up.”

Acknowledgements filled the suitcomm and Bull saw the company slowly spreading out. He noticed Bannon and a few other Recons moving fast enough to be on their feet, then the icons suddenly reversed course and blinked with the shorthand for enemy contact.

“Bannon here; war drones coming.” A shaky video feed from a gnat flashed briefly on the company’s HUDs, showing a jumble of nightmare machinery with far too many arms and legs for comfort before whiting out. “They got the gnat, though it took a few shots. First it tried some kind of EM weapon, maybe a maser, then it fired that blue plasma discharge.”

“The aliens had masers too. I think both sides are armed with weapons optimized against Meme,” Bull quickly called over the general net. “If they hit you they will cause burns. Seal up all faceplates and go to instruments only, or you may lose your eyes. Use the new anti-armor rockets and Hippo plasma rifles, and fall back toward the semis if that doesn’t stop them. Fire from doorways and crawl back into rooms if you have to. You know the drill.” He hoped they did: they may have trained too much against anti-Meme scenarios. He’d have to correct that later.

Bull watched the icons representing the enemy advance up the three corridors against Alpha Company, wondering if the AI would really be this unsubtle. Perhaps it was used to fighting nonsentient Meme boarders who used no technique, just brute force and numbers.

“Set up ambushes at the intersections, then fall back, delaying tactics,” he ordered. “Recon elements, get me some more video, I want to see what we’re up against.”

Bursts of static came though his suitcomm, quickly suppressed by the software. Microwaves were, after all, a kind of EM radio wave, and apparently were causing interference with the Marines’ ultra-wideband system.

Seems all right so far, Bull thought. We can handle five Gs if we have to, from on the deck, but retreating will be a hell of a thing. “Sections, get those semis set up to cover these corridors.” The teams grunted and dragged the heavy machines inch by inch into positions where they could fire down two of the most likely avenues, and the operators crawled up wearily to sit in the gunners seats.

Looks like maybe we waited too long to attack these reactors. Now we’re stuck like bugs in glue. We can fight, but we can’t move. We might all die in place here. Have to change the game. Already he heard terse orders and cursing as his lead elements ambushed the advancing war drones.

Dialing up the senior Flight Warrant on the assault sled channel, Bull said, “Sled command, this is Bull. Butler, we’re pinned down by heavy gravplates and being attacked. Is there any way you can take the sleds outside the hull and come back in through a damaged area, give us some fire support?” The idea was crazy, but then again, so were flyboys.

“Negative, sir…there’s no outside to go to. I can’t even describe what I’m seeing, but we are not traveling normally through space. Everything to the front and rear just turned black. There’s a white-and-rainbow vertical band precisely perpendicular to our axis of travel, and the radiation meters in the outermost sleds has gone off the charts. We had to move them inward to get behind more shielding. Whatever is out there…we can’t survive in it.”

Bull swallowed a few choice epithets. “All right, can you fly the sleds through the main corridors? It looks like most of them run five meters square.”

“Five by five? We’ll barely scrape through. Do a lot of damage to the sleds and corridors both, and everything will get torn up by fusion drive and thrusters. Sleds might not be flyable after all that.” Flight Warrant Butler sounded very doubtful.

“I don’t care. We’ve already lost enough men that we can spare some sleds, and we can always pack more in them, and we need fire support, now.” Watching the icons, he saw a dozen of his men already showed as dead, and two dozen more wounded as enemy warbots drove his Marines back toward his laser cannon.

Bull went on, “Get volunteers and send one sled up these four corridors on this center level. Look at your HUD feed, the whole situation is there. Use the breaching weapons to blast your way through along our flanks, engage any war drones you see, and if you can, put a couple of missiles into the Objective One reactor. That may get rid of the heavy gravity, and then you can come around behind the enemy and take them in the rear.”

“If I wanted to do that I’d have joined the Navy instead of Aerospace,” Butler quipped. “Aye aye, sir; we’ll get the job done.”

-

End of Desolator preview.

The Plague Wars Series

The Eden Plague

Reaper's Run

The Demon Plagues

The Reaper Plague

The Orion Plague

Cyborg Strike

Comes the Destroyer

Stellar Conquest Series

Planetary Assault - contains First Conquest: Stellar Conquest

Desolator

Tactics of Conquest

For more from David VanDyke visit www.davidvandykeauthor.com,
or find his works on your favorite online book vendor

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

By David VanDyke

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Epilogue