R-05, R-15 and R-25 continued inward toward the K-type orange dwarf star. In the years since they were launched from Conquest, they had moved outward along curving paths, thence to approach Gliese 370 at slightly convergent angles. Though spread millions of kilometers apart, each had long ago carefully aimed itself at a point very near the star itself.
Unlike R-35, these three crossed the interstellar boundary without incident, undetected. Even at more than half of light speed their approach to the star itself took several hours. During this time, they greedily collected data, pinpointing Meme spacecraft, orbital structures and the many installations that sat on moons, asteroids and planets.
Gliese 370 itself, an orange dwarf star, had six bodies that one could call planets. Labeled A through F for convenience, only Afrana, the innermost and most Earthlike, had a name and a single large moon. It also held indigenous life – the thousand-kilo bipeds they called Hippos. A hot world, when the time came to colonize, humans would be able to live comfortably only close to the poles.
B and C were Mars-like and D was a cold dwarf, barely large enough to be termed a planet. E and F were analogous to Jupiter and Uranus, respectively. All but Afrana happened to be well away from the task force’s path of travel, so neither Meme nor Hippos could use the planets, or any installations they might contain, for defense or surprise.
Electromagnetic emanations from all forms of technology within the Meme complex were shockingly faint. EarthFleet intelligence believed that the Meme Empire deliberately hid its emissions to minimize the warning any target civilizations might receive. Had humans picked up signals from other worlds at the dawn of the radio age, history might have been far different. Once the Meme invasion spurred humanity into space, careful searches had found the faint traces.
As they neared the orange dwarf star, the robot probes collected petabytes of data, imaging and recording every anomaly, every planetary surface, every moon, and as many of the asteroids as they could see. One even flew within a light-second of HD85512b, the planet dubbed Afrana, sponging up intelligence.
Independent of each other, never coordinating in order to stymie detection, each sent a heavily encrypted comm-burst of coherent light toward Conquest just before the probes began massive decelerations, very near the system’s sun.
The robot drones each made one brutally quick and close partial orbit of the star, decelerating all the way, their blazing emissions lost in the glare of its corona. Once slowed, they egressed on paths that would drift them into position to collect information for as long as possible.
R-15 never emerged from the far side of the star, having encountered a fluke solar flare that burned it to a cinder. R-05 and R-25 noted the fact and continued their missions, floating at speeds unlikely to trip enemy detection grids, back toward Afrana’s orbit but well away from the planet itself.
No longer protected by enormous velocity, each of the two remaining probes might be able to transmit its collected data once only, at risk from Meme automated systems defenses. Had the robots been sentient, this might have disturbed them, but in human experience, true AI had always failed or gone mad, leaving tasks such as this to mere computers. Thus, the robots fulfilled their assignments with machine determination and awaited their masters’ arrival.
***
SystemLord released instructions throughout his Sentry network and ordered his enormous ship Monitor to its intermediate stage of wakefulness. Soon the great animal would grow hungry, so he nudged the half-asleep leviathan toward a cache of comets and asteroids that had long ago been positioned at a stable orbital point, as a supply depot.
One kilometer-wide ball made of water ice and useful elements vanished into the vast maw of the Meme-directed spheroid and began its digestion. Tough outer skin hundreds of meters thick rippled as the chunk was broken, filtered, and processed. Biological factories, living creatures in their own right, attacked the pieces as they passed through Monitor’s gut.
Then it ate another.
Replete with materials, SystemLord turned Monitor in toward the orange dwarf star. Its shape changed from a lumpy grey ball to that of a disc, spreading surface area perpendicular to the solar radiation, becoming a vast collector of energy to process the water it had consumed. H2 and O2 were split and stored separately: isotopes of hydrogen for fusion, and pure oxygen to sustain the living tissues.
On the way, Monitor gulped two smaller metallic asteroids, materials to be digested into ships and weapons with which to eradicate the Human disease that was certainly on its way. Within itself it began the gestation processes that would ultimately birth destruction for its enemies.
***
The all-hands assembly approached rapidly as the BioMed staff hustled to get everyone decanted and on their feet in time. Some of the last ones ended up listening to Admiral Absen’s address in the locker rooms, but most clustered around screens in their designated wardrooms and messes, sat in filled auditoriums, crowded into conference rooms or stood on the flight decks of assault carriers, staring at giant screens.
Cameras focused on the main auditorium podium so everyone throughout the ship would see and hear the admiral’s address. “Attention on deck!” Thirty thousand pairs of boots snapped together in unison across the ship as Absen entered its largest amphitheatre.
Front and center with the rest of the off-watch senior bridge crew, Master Helmsman Otis Okuda imagined he could feel the crash through Conquest’s deck plates. “Take your seats,” came next, and he was happy to sit. Okuda understood the need for artificial gravity to be set high, but disliked it nonetheless. His was the realm of trackless space, of piloting starships through the implanted cybernetics in his brain, not clomping around with his boots in the mud. Coal-black skin glistened with sweat at the unaccustomed effort.
“Good morning Conquest, and welcome to the year 2115,” Absen began, prompting a murmur of amusement from the audience. “A few of you have been out of stasis during the trip, but for the vast majority, you have been asleep since 2075, and as most of you already know, a powerful Meme fleet was due to hit Earth in 2110. Ladies and gentlemen, as I told those near me when I found out, there’s nothing we can do about it. Word of the outcome won’t even reach us here for thirty-one years.”
Absen cleared his throat. “If EarthFleet won, some of us might eventually return home, but even then it will be a different solar system. Those you know might be alive, but after a hundred years of separation, they won’t be the same people you knew.”
Sweeping the room with his pale sky-colored eyes, the cameras transmitted his craggy intensity throughout the ship. “And if we lost, then we might be the last true humans in existence. So just as I told you forty years ago when we started, I tell you again in all sincerity: Conquest is your world, and the people here are your family, your clan, your tribe, your nation. If we do not conquer here, there is no retreat, no surrender. If we do not conquer here, we cannot run. If we do not conquer here, humanity dies.”
Pausing to let that sink in, he turned to his senior officers sitting behind him. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Absen concluded, looking pointedly at his watch, “we are nine days out.”
***
Relieved that the All-Hands had been short, Master Helmsman Okuda settled comfortably into the sunken pit of the bridge’s helm station, surrounded by holodisplays. The 4D screens were nearly superfluous as long as his linked cybernetics functioned, but like the manual controls in a computer-directed airliner, they comforted him. Besides, regulations required them, and no one ever died from too many redundant systems.
He reached up to his medusa, slotting retractable plugs into the interface sockets in his skull. Soon he resembled the mechanism’s namesake, his ebony shaven pate a nest of snakelike wires.
Initiating the link opened his mind to a whole new universe. Godlike, he flew in the center of nothingness, perceiving the cosmos in all directions. He smelled the interstellar winds, tasted hydrogen atoms as the magnetic scoops swept them into fuel collectors, heard the radio sirens of pulsars and quasars and stars of every kind – Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
Magee’s High Flight stood enshrined in the heart of every helmsman, every pilot.
His sense of touch remained deliberately unaltered, essential for grounding a linked helmsman in the real world. Hands resting on the complex suite of manual controls, he brushed them lightly like a pianist, and though his nerves now transmitted impulses with the speed of fiber optics, nothing had ever really improved on the sensitivity of those ten digits.
Short of direct computer control, of course. Okuda had that option; he could turn any and all functions over to one of Conquest’s supercomputers, and he sometimes did, but ultimately, piloting had to come down to one helmsman.
Or woman. He thought of his wife Celia, Master Helmsman of the assault carrier Temasek, and the few days they would have together before Conquest initiated separation into its component ships. When it did, the massive mothership would spawn a fleet, and opportunities for visits would be rare. No doubt all those with lovers and spouses aboard – an unusually high percentage, since procreative ability was one criterion for the mission – were thinking the same thing: what will sex be like after forty years in stasis?
Thirty-seven minutes after his watch ended, Okuda found out it was still almost as good as piloting a starship.
***
Admiral Absen’s address still echoed across the crowded flight deck as she announced, “I am Sergeant Major Repeth.” Her amplified voice reached the whole formation as she stood in front of Second Marine Battalion, over one thousand enlisted troops. They were arrayed on the largest available open space of the assault carrier Temasek, which still clung like a remora to Conquest. Major ben Tauros and the other officers would arrive soon, she knew.
“Those of you who have served with me know I like to be called by my first name. Swede,” she asked, turning to her rawboned Alpha Company First Sergeant, “tell these diggers what my first name is.”
“Last time I heard,” First Sergeant Gunderson drawled, “it was SERGEANT MAJOR.” This elicited a few muffled chuckles from the newest Marines and groans from the oldest.
“How right you are.” She walked down the line, glorying in the precise ranks of well trained troops. “Now some of you may have heard of some stunts I pulled in my younger days. I’m an old and crotchety woman now,” she said, drawing some laughter, as the Eden Plague kept everyone fit and youthful in body, “and I have no interest in showing you how tough I am. Back in the day, a woman had to prove herself to a bunch of stupid macho boys. Any more, I just let my record speak for itself. I’ve killed more squids and blobbos than you greenies got boogers in your noses, and I still ain’t got my fill.”
“Besides,” she smiled nastily, “I know the lot of you young studs and studettes have the latest upgrades, just like me. You have laminated bones, cybernetic nerves and muscles, nanite speed and strength and the Eden Plague to heal you up after you break yourselves. This task force was given the best of Earth’s limited resources, so I’m not going to let you waste it on stupid schoolyard games. I will say this once and once only.” She swept the ranks with machine-gun eyes. “Do not test me. I would rather cull this herd of troublemakers now than let one stinking shitbird among you besmirch Second Battalion’s good name.” She scanned up and down the ranks, searching for any smirks, any hint of attitude or challenge, determined to make her example right away, as she always did.
A man stepped out of the ranks and swaggered up to her. He was big, and young, a corporal with a permanent anger on his face. A mutter went through the ranks.
There’s always one, Reaper thought with resignation. She wondered how the man had made it past the psych evals that were supposed to detect problem personalities. Best to get it over with quick.
“Finner,” she read off his name tag. “You sure you want to do this, Corporal? Even if you win, you lose.”
“I watched recordings of your little demonstrations,” the man responded with a sneer. “It took you whole minutes to barely beat better Marines than you, only because you had fancier cyberware. Now we all have the same, and I say your reputation is bullshit.”
The whole assembly watched and waited in silence for her response.
Reaper’s answering smile did not reach her eyes. Prominent eyeteeth enhanced her wolfish expression. “Take your best shot then, Private.”
His shot was a good one. Had she not been ready, it might have connected. A low, vicious kick at her knee, at least it showed the kid had some combat skills and street savvy.
It didn’t matter.
Reaper kept her claws in. To use them would be to prove her challenger right, since those were a modification available only to covert operatives and Stewards. Instead, she simply demonstrated a lifetime of personal combat experience and training.
She slid her leg back just enough to avoid the strike, then snapped it forward to plant her heel in the patella of his weight-bearing leg. It bowed unnaturally backward at the knee with a sickening crunch. Before he could fall, she stepped forward to seize the other leg, still in the air. Her elbow came down on that knee to destroy it as well.
Finner’s cybernetics had already shut down the pain, fooling his body into thinking it still had a chance, so even as he collapsed, his fists were striking out with surprising power.
Reaper turned her thigh into the blows, accepting a few bruises before driving the knife-edge of her foot through his guard and into his jaw, knocking him down, half-conscious. She then stamped both of his elbows to ruin.
It was over in three seconds. Finner lay broken on the deck, with knees and elbows smashed and inoperable. Absent those joints, all the implants and augmentation in the world couldn’t get him on his feet again.
Reaper hadn’t cracked a sweat. Her voice rang out. “This man’s squad leader, front and center.”
A stocky female sergeant double-timed forward to report, looking justifiably concerned. “Sorry, Sergeant M-“
“Shut it,” Reaper cut her off. She reached down to strip the fallen man’s rank tabs from his uniform, placing them in the other woman’s hand. Then she ripped the squad leader’s sergeant’s tabs off and put them in her own pocket.
“You should have handled his attitude yourself before this, Corporal. Take him directly to the brig. Tell them to disable his cybernetics before they treat him. Get moving.” She deliberately turned her back on the newly demoted noncom, waiting until she and her squad had carried the miscreant off.
Raising her voice to address the battalion again, she said, “I hope this lesson is not lost on everyone here. Not the lesson that I can take any one of you, because military discipline is not based on who’s the best brawler. The lesson I hope you learn is that this never should have happened. That shithead should have been dealt with long ago by his squad leader and his platoon sergeant and his first sergeant – who will all report to me after this formation concludes. We’re gonna be in a fight to the death in just a few days. There’s no room in this battalion for weak links like that.”
She looked around, searching for further problems, or challengers. This time she found nothing. This time, she thought, they know it’s as real as it gets. Fear of death doth wonderfully concentrate the mind.
Reaper’s smile became genuine, almost warm, lighting up her bony triathlete’s face. “But for those of you who give me one hundred percent, I will back you to the hilt, and so will your NCOs. If you have a problem, you bring it to them and they will bring it to me. You do not bring your problems to officers, unless you mistakenly think the problem is me, which is proof positive you are hallucinating, at which time you will be sent to BioMed for psych-eval. Am I clear?”
A thousand throats roared as one. “Clear, Sergeant Major!”
“We have nine days to get ready before we climb into the sleds. The training schedule is posted and I expect nothing less than your best. The only easy day was yesterday.” She saw Gunderson motion with his eyes off to her right and she turned to see Bull, his company commanders and a gaggle of lieutenants watching the drama from a discreet distance.
“Battalion: tench-hut!” She marched precisely to the center front of the formation and turned it over to Major ben Tauros with a perfect salute that nevertheless managed to convey that certain worldly confidence common to all senior noncommissioned officers. The fact that her commander overtopped her by a full head and eighty kilos somehow did nothing to diminish her presence as she marched to her position to listen to Bull’s first pep talk.
Yeah, it’s good to be a Marine.
***
Flight Leftenant Vincent “Vango” Markis flipped the switch that powered up the training simulator. With his “wizzo” – Weapons Systems Officer – Helen already linked in, initiating the simulation flooded their minds with shared sensation. The universe expanded and crowded into his brain all at once before his implanted cyberware sorted it out.
Opening his eyes changed nothing, as his optic nerves now shared their pathways with feeds from the virtual world. He could see the cockpit and the controls, which functioned just like in a real StormCrow fighter, as well as the complex overlay of the consoles only visible in his mind.
“Link is up and one hundred percent,” Vango said, and Helen echoed his words in ritual confirmation. “I’ll set us up for Level One.”
“Let’s just go right to Level Three, huh? The early ones are too easy,” Helen replied.
“No, we run the checklist. Jumping to Level Three denies the simulator data on our performance that the wing needs for its analysis and optimization. Besides, you haven’t used that link in forty years. You want to overload it now?”
“Better now than in combat. I ran the standard diagnostics; it’s fine.”
Vango’s voice hardened. “We do it by the book.”
Helen didn’t answer. He figured she heard he had fired wizzos before when they didn’t measure up. She was good and she knew it, so she got impatient.
“Look, Helen, it’s one thing to take a shortcut now and again in combat, if you think it’s worth the risk. If you do it routinely here in the simulator, you get used to it and you end up forgetting things.”
“Yes, boss.” Her voice sounded sulky.
Why do they send the problem hotshots to me? I think I know – because I’m the best there is. I hammer them into shape or I get rid of them.
“Okay, Level One.”
A simple row of Meme ships appeared at long range and launched a light spread of rather anemic hypervelocity missiles. As they approached, Vango lined up his sights and pressed the firing stud. Capacitors dumped simulated megajoules of electricity into the microwave laser, the maser, which ran through the spine of his fifty-meter-long StormCrow fighter.
The Crow had other weapons, but the maser was the biggest and hit the hardest. As it fired at full power, Vango saw his energy cells empty, and then start refilling as his fusion engine diverted some of its capacity to the closed-system generator. The invisible beam reached out toward the still slow-moving wave of enemy hypervelocity missiles, spearing one, cooking its living cells and causing it to veer and tumble. In the vastness of space and without guidance, that weapon was out.
Quickly he lined up another, letting it get closer and firing at half-charge, causing enough damage to kill that one too. He knew they’d speed up pretty soon and get harder to hit.
“Good shots,” Helen said from the back seat in a studiously bored voice; then again, she always seemed bored unless she was working her short-range systems, and the StormCrow squadron around them had killed all the inbound hypers of this wave at long to medium range.
Focusing ahead, Vango saw the far-off enemy ships launch another group, this time with greater velocity and more evasive maneuvers. A little more difficult, but he still lined up and killed his missile, then let his maser recharge. He nailed another, but some looked likely to make it past the fighter screen before he’d have power again.
“Helen, you are weapons free,” Vango said, rotating the Crow to give her a better solution on a cluster of three hypers flying past.
“Finally,” she groused, and the small secondary lasers and mini-railguns on the X of the StormCrow’s four equally spaced wings spat their deadly beams and balls. Though not packing the punch of the big maser, the converging high-cyclic-rate rays and shots battered a passing living missile with enough hits to cause it to sputter, deflate and fold up dead.
“Nice,” Vango praised. Helen was a cherry; she’d never flown a combat mission before Gliese 370. For her, this was all one big video game. She had never seen what a hyper could do if it really got going.
With their fantastic acceleration, Meme hypers got more and more dangerous at longer ranges. Sometimes they achieved a fair bit of light speed before impact, enough energy to tear apart anything smaller than a heavy cruiser. StormCrow fighters represented just one element of EarthFleet’s multilayered defense systems.
“Next wave coming up.” With capacitors full, he decided to split his shots at half power, since it looked like that was enough to take down a hyper after all. His shot at the first missile missed, but his second attempt nailed it, and he was glad he'd modified his technique.
Helen was already engaging at extreme secondary range, along with the dozens of Crows around them. They filled the space in front of them with coherent light and bullet-sized railgun rounds. Following one past in her crosshairs, Helen got another kill, and cheered herself. “Yes!”
Vango spun the fighter around to fire a parting half-power shot at the bright fusion flare of a hyper that had gotten past. The microwaves it projected, concentrated by the enemy missile drive’s plenum nozzle, overloaded the amazingly tough living material’s ability to control the reaction, for they destabilized the hyper’s engine and it blew.
“Getting tougher,” Helen said, concentration in her voice. “Who’s ahead on kills right now?”
Accessing his datalink, Vango replied, “We’re neck and neck with Ironman and Spin from the Giessen.”
“Good. Let’s beat those uppity bastards.”
“I think you ought to focus on saving the ships behind us from damage,” Vango said seriously.
“Same thing, isn’t it? Jeez, you’re such a damn straight arrow. It’s just a simulation!”
Growling deep in his throat, Vango touched the manual abort and the virtual universe evaporated around them. Fuming in the simulator cockpit for a moment, he finally barked, “Get out.”
“What?”
“Get out of my bird, Helen.”
“You bastard. You’d throw me out now? I’m the best wizzo in the squadron!”
Vango jerked his link out and stood up in the simulator, stepping up on his seat and turning around to look into her realistic cockpit. “Your stats may be the best, but that’s not all it takes. If you keep thinking of this as a simulation, you’re going to lose track of reality and get us killed. On every mission, simulated or actual, always treat everything as real. With our high-end virtual overlays, there’s no way to tell. The only way to operate is at your best, and if you’re not one hundred percent, you can go fly with someone else. Got it?”
Helen stared at Vango, her too-perfect face defiant. Finally she dropped her eyes. “I got it, boss,” she replied, and he glared at her for a moment more before dropping back into his own cockpit.
“You’d better,” he growled. “I’m about this close to flagging your flight status.” Plugging his link back in, he said flatly, “I’m setting the attackers to Level Three. Get ready.”
The hypers came at them again.