| |
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 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.
