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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 PVN1, 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 haven't 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.”
