Captain Absen had to force himself to concentrate on Lieutenant Commander Fleede’s intelligence briefing. Besides his own brain’s well-honed reflex to avoid the avalanche of detail, he’d much rather think about the last three days and nights he’d spent with Rae. But every time he did that, worry threatened to intrude. He knew only she could really treat with the Meme, but always there was the nagging fear that her mission would end in disaster. He’d asked her if there was some other way to communicate, but she’d insisted that the Meme would only make a deal by in-person contact and that she had a better chance than any other Blend.
He knew she was almost to the rendezvous in interplanetary space just outside Mars’ orbit. Half the sensors on Conquest were focused on her ship, the other half on the approaching Meme shuttle. At least they had responded to Rae’s offer to meet. That was one thing EarthFleet had never achieved. That actually strengthened the case against her, for of course a Meme agent would get a meeting. Absen figured the Empire would be desperate to acquire the TacDrive technology, and they were devious.
Absen pushed it out of his mind once more. An encrypted broadcast for Ezekiel and his contact crew to return had gone unheeded, and until a Blend he trusted implicitly was available – and the Sekoi did not count – he couldn’t do anything about Rae. Hopefully by the time she came back Ezekiel would have returned.
But hope was not a plan.
For now, he had military matters to attend. He picked up Fleede’s monologue in mid-sentence, focusing on the artist’s rendering on the main screen. “– believe each Scourge mothership to hold between one hundred and two hundred million assault troops, along with at least one million assault shuttles and one hundred thousand aerospace fighters.”
“I’m sorry, could you say that again?” Absen said, his attention finally fully engaged. “Two hundred million troops per mothership – and how many motherships do they usually use in an invasion?”
“We only have the one Meme summary, which was of an incursion that was defeated. In that one, twelve motherships appeared and were destroyed by a fleet of two Monitors and sixty-four Destroyers, as well as the native defensive emplacements, which were considerable.”
“Sixty-four destroyers and a heavily fortified system. And how well did they do?”
Fleede swallowed. “The Meme suffered approximately fifty percent casualties.”
“And there’s no follow-up report from that system?”
“No, sir. We presume the next attack must have overwhelmed them.”
“Do we know when and where this attack took place?”
“Yes, sir. At a star system about one hundred thirty light-years away, approximately that long ago, as the beamcast only recently reached the Meme here in normal space.”
“Does that help us locate the Scourges’ area of operations?”
“Not really, sir. We need more access to Meme data – any data, in fact.”
“All right, no matter,” Absen said with a sigh. “Back to the fight in front of us. Do we have any idea how many will be coming here?”
“No, sir. If you’ll allow me to continue, though, my team has made some confident estimates of their methods and tactics.”
Absen sat forward. “Now you’re speaking my language.”
Fleede smiled. “Thank you, sir.” He gestured. “On the screen you see a mothership shaped like a saucer, about twenty kilometers in diameter and five deep. The troops and, presumably, their commanders, ride the mothership during its FTL transit, but our estimates give them a maximum of one week of food, water and air, so they must not live aboard for long. As soon as they appear, they immediately launch their assault shuttles and attack, covered by their aerospace fighters and small gunships. There seems to be no method of easy recovery once launched. Reassembling the force would basically involve rebuilding the whole outer shell.”
“So the mothership is more of a barge, not a true assault carrier. They aren’t using a navy at all – their ships are one-use amphibious tubs.”
“On the outside, quite true, sir. However, there is a valuable, reusable core to the mothership. The cores don’t even mount capital-class weapons, only a few defensive systems apparently designed to allow them time to escape with their FTL drive. By this we deduce their commanders value themselves, but their armies are, in essence, suicide troops.”
“Do these suicide troops have capital weapons? Nukes, for example?”
“A few, sir, but not in large numbers. We believe they don’t like destroying things they want to eat.”
Absen stood up and took the podium, waving Fleede aside as his eyes swept across his staff. “Then we have essentially three problems to solve, people. One, the obvious, is how to keep this horde from winning in its first massive rush. Two, how to stop their motherships from escaping to tell of their defeat and bring more Scourges. Three, and most importantly, how to seize a mothership so we can capture and exploit its FTL technology. I’m pretty confident we’re well on the way to solving number two, and if we don’t achieve number one, the rest will hardly matter. So listen to Fleede here and digest all his detail. Study these Scourges like you studied the Meme. Figure out how to beat them and avoid dying in the process. And find me answers to those three questions. Scoggins, you take the Red Team. Ford, you’re Blue. Ms. Conquest, you’re the impartial referee and simulations goddess. Oh, and figure how we’re going to get some warning before these things show up. Go on, get to work.”
“But sir,” Fleede protested as the conference room dissolved into a buzz of conversation, “I have a lot more slides...I know, package them up and shoot them to your desk, right?”
“Yes, Commander. Your reporting is very thorough, and I prefer to study it alone with the concentration it deserves.”
“Thank you...Commander, you said?”
“Absolutely. You’ve earned it.” Soon, Absen knew, promotions wouldn’t be hard to come by. Not if this was going to get as bloody as it looked.