The flight deck fell silent as the AV team brought up the tactical overview on the main display and stabilized the many sub-screens surrounding it. The icons for the enemy’s cluster of powered asteroids crossed the orbit of Jupiter in a swarm, multiple attached fusion engines flaring like fireflies, maneuvering them in random directions, but always headed toward Earth.
The Jupiter system itself lay far from the enemy’s path, or one could say that the Meme had chosen an attack route well away from any obstacle. Instead of splitting their efforts, this time they bored straight in for the prize, apparently convinced they would smash through and win a frontal assault.
A line of EarthFleet asteroid rams and armed fortresses pointed directly toward the enemy group as if fired from Earth itself. Given the space between all the combatants, these formed a gauntlet of nearly seven hundred expendable giants. All personnel had been removed and computers controlled them now. The extra efficiency gained by putting crew on them was offset by their targets’ simplicity – just a bunch of big rocks.
Behind each grouping lay their respective combatant fleets.
The Destroyers had fallen back from the rocks about thirty light-seconds, two and a half minutes of travel at current speeds, like cavalry waiting to charge after the infantry engaged. Before them, between them and the asteroids, flew their swarm of stingships.
The Home Fleet, anchored by the seven teardrop dreadnoughts and twenty-two wedge-shaped battleships, hovered between Earth and the enemy, ready to finish off any rocks that made it through and, more importantly, to react to the Destroyer fleet’s movements.
Like football backs, they could shift in any direction to cut off the Meme drive toward the goal of Earth. They had the advantage of interior lines; every move they made could be shorter and quicker as the enemy tried to sweep down the sidelines. More like the soccer form of football than rugby or the American game, the goal was small, and in the center. If they swung wide, at some point the attackers had to angle inward toward the planet, or risk flying past and having to turn around.
Absen and the rest of the crew watched as the lead rocks engaged, some firing massive weapons or launching missiles, others merely smashing into each other. The Meme ram-bodies jinked and dodged, if those were words that could apply to such mountainous things, but at the speeds involved, a nudge of a hundred meters in any direction caused fast-flying projectiles, even energy beams, to slip by or strike only glancing blows.
A number on one of the smaller screens kept statistical track of the remaining total of enemy craft. Sixty-four large rocks had begun the engagement. Absen watched as that tally counted down into the fifties and then the forties as the lead asteroids were annihilated within seconds.
The Destroyers made a sudden and coordinated turn away from the stream of incoming EarthFleet fortresses, as many of the defenders’ rocks flashed by their targets. Once the asteroid fortresses had passed, the EarthFleet fortresses immediately focused their weapons on the enemy ships, which explained the Meme fleet’s maneuver. The massive living craft would simply avoid the lumbering human rocks, letting them drift helplessly into interplanetary space. By the time they reversed course, the battle would be over.
“Those two asteroids,” Absen leaned over Scoggins’ shoulder to tap the small screen at her console. “They didn’t seem to guide on the enemy rocks. They just zoomed through the formation and are now guiding on the Destroyers. And they have a lot of engine power, for rocks.”
“Yes, sir. You’re right.” Scoggins expanded the view of those two on a sub-screen, then let out a sound of exasperation. “No real data on those, sir. Just ID number and size, tonnage...almost nothing.”
“But the other fortresses and ram-bodies have more on them?”
“Yes, sir. Even the simple rammers have more stats listed.”
Absen punched Scoggins lightly on the shoulder, and then pointed at the screen. “I need all of the actual sensor data possible integrated into the synthesis, and focus the big screen on those two.”
“Sir?” Scoggins seemed surprised, but rushed to comply. Soon the main display showed the two rocks following the Destroyer fleet as it blasted sideways. The Meme seemed to be trying desperately to avoid those two lonely harmless asteroids.
The stingship swarm on the other hand kept itself in a loose disk, flattened like a shield between the Meme fleet and the pair. “Damn, they’re being cagey,” Absen said. “It was a good try, Huen, but I don’t think it will work this time.”
“What is it, sir?” Johnstone asked. “And do you mind being on speaker?”
“Go ahead, Rick,” the captain said. “I believe in just a few seconds you will see Huen’s first attempt at a surprise...there they go.”
Suddenly the icons for the two asteroids winked out, replaced by a blizzard of new ones that seemed to burst forth from the rocks. The fused realtime sensor feed, combining optical, radar, infrared and other data, showed pinpoints spreading out from the two flying objects, forming up into fleets of more than one hundred, and leaping toward the Destroyers.
“Thunderchiefs, ladies and gentlemen,” Absen narrated with grim acceptance. “Each armed, unless I miss my guess, with the heaviest missiles EarthFleet can fashion. They were able to get in close because the Meme did not consider those asteroids a threat at first, but they turned out to be one-time-use aerospace carriers.”
The missiles he predicted appeared a moment later, more than two thousand accelerating from the Thunderchiefs like cheetahs spotting antelope. Stingships leaped to intercept them.
One wave of fusion rockets led, another lagged. “At least two different types of missiles,” Absen said. “The first will run interference for the second, and the Thuds will follow them in. Damned brave people. This is another kamikaze run.”
The first wave of four hundred missiles met the cloud of four thousand stingships, and for a moment it seemed as if they would be wasted, picked off easily at a disadvantage of ten to one. But the lead warheads began winking out, replaced by enormous flares of energy that overloaded the sensors, forcing Scoggins’ AV team to pull the view back and engage virtual filters to try to make some sense of the engagement.
Seconds later, the first wave had done its work. Instead of easily picking off the missiles to protect the Destroyer fleet, the stingship screen had lost nine tenths of its number in the driving sleet of hard radiation and heat released by fusion warheads larger than Absen had ever seen. “Yield?” he asked.
“Raw energy in the hundred megaton range, as we predicted, but also, I picked up a lot of gamma. It looks like these were advanced bomb-pumped graser packages, very well aimed. At a guess, I’d say each had ten or twelve tubes, and most of them struck home.”
“That’s some fine shooting,” Absen replied. “Well planned, Huen. This may work out better than I thought.”
The second wave of about sixteen hundred missiles lost a hundred or so as it flashed through the remaining four hundred stingships, but at the speeds and accelerations involved, the enemy fighters seemed far less efficient than before. Absen thought probably many of them still suffered from the effect of the first wave, as if the living Meme ships were in shock.
The two hundred trailing Thunderchiefs easily finished off the stingships, firing their inline masers and defensive suites to cook the water-based Meme bioplasm of their enemies as they tried to chase down the missiles accelerating toward the Destroyers.
On the screen Absen could now see the combatants: sixty-four Destroyers blasting frantically to the side, trying to make an end run around the fifteen hundred missiles moving to intercept, with over two hundred Thuds driving frantically sideways to try to cut them off. Of course, all this happened while the Meme moved at two tenths of lightspeed in the general direction of Earth.
“Every bit we drive them off course buys EarthFleet time,” Absen said for the benefit of his crew. “The Meme are staying true to form. Even though they must know they need to crash through, their instinct is to minimize damage to their ships, holding the incoming missiles at range as long as possible to give them time to pick them off. That’s doubly true now that they have seen we armed those missiles with some really big warheads. No matter how heavily armored, a hundred megatons in a shaped charge will do significant damage.”
Absen did not even mention what else he suspected, preferring not to give his crew too much hope, only to have it dashed or not materialize as predicted.
Inevitably, the cloud of EarthFleet missiles would catch the Destroyers. As fast as the big ships could go, two things weighed against them.
First, human technology had evidently progressed to the point that the Meme could no longer simply run away; at least, not from missiles, which could withstand accelerations far higher than crewed ships.
Second, they were committed to attacking Earth, both doctrinally and physically. Even if they wanted to divert from their courses, they were already going so fast that they could not easily turn aside and then attack again. Like fighter planes at speed, they must continue forward, ever forward.
Third, Absen added in his own mind, they cared more about their own lives than humans did. As the blend Raphaela Denham had explained to him so long ago, Meme were egoists, unwilling to sacrifice self for the good of their fellows. That gave humans the edge, and it showed as the incredibly powerful fleet of sixty-four destroyers shied away from the relatively small force it faced.
On the other hand, Absen mused, if his suspicions were correct, they may have a very good reason to keep their distance.
“Captain, there’s something strange about these missiles,” Rick Johnstone said. “I’ve been running simulations and analyzing their communications and telemetry – just to keep myself busy, you understand.”
“Go on.”
“Well, sir, they aren’t acting exactly like any missiles I’ve ever seen. There are too many random variations and anomalies – in their flight paths, in their corrections, their formations, the distances from their fellows...”
Scoggins spoke up. “Could they have some kind of randomized heuristic pseudo-AI in them?”
“That’s what I thought at first, but there are also the comms...I can’t decrypt them, but the metadata I can see, the rise and fall of transmission strength and tone, seems less like machine code and more like, well...human speech.”
Absen’s mind raced. “Missiles with people in them?” he hazarded.
“No, sir. Not possible at the accelerations they have displayed, according to all we know about current technology.”
“AIs then. Experimental, perhaps.”
The sound of a throat clearing from the doorway to the control room caused the rest to look up from the screen. Ezekiel Denham and Spooky Nguyen stood there. “May we come in, Captain?” the Blend asked.
“Of course. Sit down.”
The two took free chairs and then Ezekiel made a throat-cutting motion to Scoggins, who turned off the feed to the flight deck. “Not AIs, I think, sir.”
Absen looked at the screens and then back at the tall but unassuming son of Skull Denham and Raphaela. “What, then?”
“Engrams.”
“What’s an engram?”
“A recording of a human mind, placed inside a Meme bio-receptacle, a blank cloned brain. Or perhaps a computer, though I don’t see that having any advantage.”
“So the missiles have copies of human minds as controllers, you think, instead of computers?”
“Augmenting and controlling the computers, more probably.”
“Something else you’ve kept from us all these years, then.” Absen’s face had turned dark. These Blends always have one more secret, one more agenda, he thought in irritation. Hard to trust them no matter how many times they seem to prove their intentions.
“It wasn’t anything that could have helped you, Captain. In fact, it would have been a distraction. As my mother once so rightly argued, introducing the technology to copy human minds into other creatures such as Meme ships or receptor modules, or even computers, would open a Pandora’s box the human race is simply not ready for.”
“Why tell us now, then?”
Ezekiel lifted a hand, palm up, toward the screen. “Because the box has been opened. There’s no point in keeping it a secret anymore. I just plead with you, Captain, that you do not rush to explore this possibility. It is far too laden with questions to which we have no easy answers.”
Absen sat back and crossed his arms in thought, looking from face to face. “I understand. Is such a mind a person? What if it doesn’t want to be loaded into a missile and fired at the enemy? Would that be murder?” He rubbed his face. “And I thought the AI question was knotty.”
“Precisely, Captain. You’re already thinking a lot about the AI on this ship, I bet. She represents a new frontier for humanity. Adding engram technology to the mix could be extremely disruptive.”
“All right,” Absen replied. “I’m classifying this Top Secret. No one outside this room talks about engrams yet, especially not to our scientists. People like that will feel compelled to investigate. No discussion, even in the cleared and secured spaces. We can’t afford to divert energy and resources to explore the idea. When the time comes, I’ll release the information. And Ezekiel, you and your boat represent the most advanced Memetech aboard. I want you and Spooky to take extra measures to secure it.”
“I’m the only one who Roger will recognize, sir.”
Absen pointed a finger at Ezekiel’s nose. “We have Sekoi Blends aboard, in case you haven’t forgotten. They may have their own agenda, and they may have abilities you don’t know about.” He turned to Nguyen. “Spooky, that’s your priority assignment starting now. Secure our Memetech. You’re in charge of this potential mess, since you two have brought it to me. I’ll draft you both into EarthFleet if I have to. Got it?”
Spooky nodded with a twitch of his lips. “Of course, Captain. Have no fear.”
“I’ll have no fear when you have no secrets, Nguyen.”
“Fair enough. May we stay?”
“Of course. Restart the battle.”
Scoggins had paused and buffered all of the feeds, effectively stopping the depiction of the situation during the discussion. The crew had taken the opportunity to run to the nearby heads and line up for drinks at the bar, but as soon as the screens came to life again they hurried back to their seats and places. “I’ll speed things up ten percent to run out the buffers and eventually catch up,” she said.
“You can put us back on the PA. Everyone, watch what you say with everyone listening.”
On the main display they watched as the missile swarm spread out and set itself to charge into the Destroyer fleet, maximizing distance among themselves to avoid allowing one fusor blast to kill two or more of them.
A few seconds before they reached maximum effective warhead range, the Destroyers burst forth with thousands of small hypervelocity missiles. “What the hell?” Johnstone said involuntarily, and he closed his eyes, plunging into his link. Absen knew the CyberComm officer had simply reacted, instinctively trying to understand and then affect the battle as he had many others before, but this time, no influence was possible.
“They saw the power of the warheads and decided to use small hypers as a defense,” Absen replied. “Not very efficient, but in this case, a smart move. If they pick off even one in a hundred, it will be worth it, and any that miss will go after the Thuds, which are much larger than missiles.”
Absen was right. Fifteen hundred missiles became thirteen hundred as almost nineteen thousand small hypers stormed through the spread formation. The human weapons spun and swirled on their guidance jets, tiny jinks that at such extreme speeds caused the oncoming Meme guided weapons to miss most of them.
As the captain predicted, the ones that missed turned and headed directly for the Thunderchiefs, closing up into a tight mass to overwhelm their enemies a hundred to one. “They’re dead,” muttered one of the techs under her breath, drawing a sharp hiss from Scoggins.
“Have some faith,” Absen said in an iron voice. “The Thuds have pilots. They will use some kind of tactic...see, there.” With or without bodies, he thought, the human factor is vital.
At the last minute, the lead Thunderchiefs fired missiles, apparently kept in reserve against this eventuality. Closing at high combined speed and under acceleration, the enemy hypers had no time to dodge.
Hundred-megaton warheads bloomed in the void, swallowing thousands of Meme missiles packed into tight groups. Of those few that made it through, most were picked off by Thunderchief masers. Only a handful of the human attack ships died. The rest forged ahead for their rendezvous with death.
Now, the EarthFleet missile cloud reached the tightly packed Destroyers.
At first the enemy fleet stayed in formation, blasting thousands of fusor beams like gargantuan blowtorches in space, reaching out to wipe the incoming weapons, but as the missiles closed in the final seconds, the ships of the Meme fleet abruptly rotated on their centers of gravity, still firing, and accelerated in all directions, expanding in a sphere from a common center.
“They’re spreading out, each on his own.”
“Why would they do that?” Okuda said, his voice reflecting puzzlement.
“Because hundred-megaton warheads aren’t all they have to worry about. Somehow, they know, or guessed.”
“Know what, sir?” Johnstone asked.
“Exploders. Remember the hole in the data. Somehow the Meme knew that we might have antimatter weapons. At least, they are taking precautions. With all of them spreading out that way, an Exploder can only take out one of them at a time. Had they stayed clumped, we might have won the battle in one shining moment.”
“That would have been worth the sacrifice of so many in this gambit,” Spooky said clearly. Absen realized the man was reinforcing the narrative of the brave Thud pilots in the minds of the crew, even though the senior officers now suspected that only engrams occupied them.
“Yes, it would,” he replied. “We still may see some effect.”
The display confirmed his words. Dozens of fusion warheads blossomed near Destroyers. Some wasted themselves, while others gouged chunks from the armored ferrocrystal skins of their enemies, leaving glowing hotspots.
One unlucky Meme took three hits in a row, very well placed, and it shuddered and spun, apparently losing control as its fusors went dark. Like sharks, several more human weapons suddenly diverted from their nearer targets to go after the stunned Destroyer, aiming themselves precisely at the wound their fellows had made. Each explosion bored farther into the enemy ship, and after four more, the Destroyer cracked, spurted fire from all its weapons ports, and died.
All the crew on the flight deck leaped to their feet and cheered, throats straining with bloodthirsty joy as they saw one of their hated enemies go down in flames. In the control room, the officers smiled and exchanged glances, some slapping their consoles or clapping hands. “That’s just one,” Absen reminded them. The engrams made the difference, he thought to himself. They saw an opportunity and changed their targeting in a way mere computers could not have.
Eyes back on the screen, Absen waited for what he expected and hoped for. If no Exploders came, the gambit would still have been effective, taking out one Destroyer, wounding others and forcing the Meme to burn fuel, weapons and time. But...
“There it is!” the captain cried as the screen whited out. Scoggins backed the view off and cut in the filters again, showing a sun-like sphere fifty times larger than any fusion bomb. She ran the feed backward a few seconds, cleaned up the picture, and they were able to watch what had happened.
One missile, dodging madly as fusors picked off its fellows, had gotten close enough. At a distance of five kilometers from its targeted Destroyer, and directly in front of the enemy’s line of travel, outside of the effective range of any lesser warhead, it converted itself from a mere machine into a miniature star, briefly hotter than a thousand suns. The Meme flew into the fireball.
One moment it was a living world-wrecker, a moonlet of doom bent on genocide.
The next, nothing but plasma remained, particles stripped of all their bonds and so energetic that no element, no atomic association, was even possible. However, the momentum of the individual protons, neutrons, electrons and more exotic pieces of matter remained, so what exited the other side looked like a cone of roiling light, a brief living flamethrower that vanished in seconds, leaving a traveling, expanding miasma.
“Damn,” Absen breathed as the crew erupted yet again in cheers. “Keep the tape running forward,” he said.
“Haven’t used tape in decades, sir,” Scoggins said with a smile, and had her people resume the battle feed.
Seven more Destroyers met their deaths to antimatter weapons: two from the wave of missiles, three fired at the last moment from the Thunderchiefs, and two from the attack craft themselves as they chased Destroyers and detonated near enough to take the enemy with them.
At the end of the battle, all the Thuds were dead.
“Eight of sixty-four. Twelve and a half percent. That’s amazing. Very significant,” Absen breathed. “Ladies and gentlemen, we may have just witnessed the decisive engagement of the battle, but let’s not become too ecstatic. I suspect that Admiral Huen just employed at least half, perhaps all, of his antimatter stock. It’s what I would have done: try to use surprise to maximize the effect of new weapons and tactics.”
“Somehow I do hope that those just had engrams,” Scoggins cut the feed and said quietly. “Maybe with those, more real people wouldn’t have to die.”
Ezekiel Denham swallowed a choke, and the rest turned to him. “You have something to say?” Absen said.
“Real people? What else is a person but a mind?” he asked with tear-filled eyes. “Most of you have interacted with Michelle. Isn’t she a person?”
Scoggins replied, “Of course, but –”
Ezekiel glared hotly at Scoggins. “My father, Alan Denham, was an engram.” This declaration brought a hush to the room.
“I don’t understand,” the sensors officer said, and Absen seconded the notion, seeing the faces of the others.
“The man Skull Denham died in the first battle when he boarded the Meme scout ship. My mother Raphaela built a device into his suit to record his mental gestalt. She recovered it from where his body lay.”
“I remember when she did that, though I did not realize the significance,” Absen said. “I wondered about her request at the time, to leave the body where it was until she could see it. Later, when he broadcast that last message, I thought she had somehow revived him.” Or had fabricated the “Skull Speech” for the sake of humanity’s morale.
“Yes. She uploaded his mind into the bio-neurology of the captured scout ship, what the Meme called a Survey craft, and for the next ten years, Alan Denham inhabited the nervous system of the ship itself. He even replicated a man’s body as an avatar within it, so as a child I interacted with a real human, as far as I knew.”
“So,” Absen realized, “when the ship Alan Denham slammed like a bullet into the Destroyer...”
“He became the ultimate kamikaze. My father. Not just some cheap copy of him. Whether or not he was the same guy who provided half my genes, the man who raised me was as real as you or me. Flesh and blood and heart and soul. It didn’t – it doesn’t – matter what kind of body someone has. Human is human.” Ezekiel leaned forward, elbows on knees, and buried his head in his hands, trying and failing to hold back silent tears.
Melissa Scoggins walked over to Ezekiel to put a hand on the younger man’s head, and he leaned against her like a child with a mother while she stroked his hair. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
The tableau held for a moment longer, and then broke as Ezekiel let go and leaned back, wiping his face on his sleeve. Throats cleared and people turned back to their boards, leaving him to his remembered grief.
Absen caught Scoggins’ eye. “Let the display run, but pause it if anything particularly decisive starts to happen.” He got up to depart the room.
“The fleets should engage in around twenty minutes, maybe more,” she informed him, tapping at her controls.
“Thanks.” The captain walked out, and then hopped into an electric cart for the fastest transit possible. Tobias leaped aboard even as the thing began to move, flipping on the flashing red light and bee-boop siren sound, a signal to clear the passage, though few of the crew remained outside the flight deck.
Less than two minutes later the two men arrived at the cybernetics laboratory where Michelle lived. Her holographic avatar snapped to attention as he entered the room even as the lone civilian tech working there stood up in response to the nearby Marine guard’s roar of “CAPTAIN ON DECK!”
“At ease, everyone. Chief,” he turned to Michelle, “I’d like to apologize for leaving you out of what’s happening on the flight deck.”
“No problem, sir. I am watching all of the screens here, and making my own analyses.” Michelle seemed relaxed and confident, as usual.
“Even so, in not inviting you, I am playing into the fear of AIs that we all have. Instead, we need to start reducing that tension.” While Absen wasn’t completely confident in his own assessment, Ezekiel Denham’s words about his father had resonated. It was time to take a leap of faith: faith in another human being, even if she was one made of optical processors and quantum memory states.
“Would you please clarify, sir? What do you want me to do?”
Absen cleared his throat, looking over at the tech. “If I authorize you access to the necessary maintenance bots, how quickly could you set up holoprojectors, such as you have here, on the flight deck?”
The tech replied, “With Michelle’s full involvement, we could install a limited three-part system within nine minutes, sir, and transfer this avatar. In a few hours the entire area could be done.”
“That quick? All right, let’s do it. Then you can join the crew where they are.”
Michelle seemed to suppress a smile. “This will be interesting. I’ve never met anyone except the technical team, you and a few others who visited my quarters.”
“Quarters?”
“What I call my holographic room and workspace.”
Absen grunted, thoughtful.
The tech tapped at his board. “You’ll have to enter your authorization code, fingerprint and retinal scan here, sir,” he said. Absen quickly complied, accepting that he was now signing off on whatever the technician had set up. Even though he was captain of the boat, he had to trust everyone to do his job honestly and correctly, hundreds or thousands of times each day.
Trust. That’s what he had to do. Choose to trust this new human being that had been created, or copied, or programmed, and now lived inside the systems of his boat.
“Thank you, sir!” When Michelle’s enthusiastic salute dropped to her side, she disappeared, leaving the captain standing, bemused. The tech had plugged in his link and closed his eyes in the manner of modern CyberComm personnel. Absen glanced at Tobias, who merely turned back to the cart, this time slipping into the driver’s seat.
As they drove at speed through Conquest’s wide corridors, thankfully almost deserted because most of the crew were on the flight deck, Absen triggered his internal radio. Though something he seldom used, it seemed convenient now, and he passed on instructions to Bull ben Tauros to have Marines make sure the maintenance bots were given plenty of space to do their work.
“Let’s take a quick diversion. I haven’t seen my two favorite engineers lately.” Absen used the next several minutes to make quick appearances in Engineering and Weapons Control, greeting the skeleton crews there. He saw the battle displayed on their screens as well.
By the time he arrived back at the flight deck control room, a dozen spider bots zipped around at high speed in one corner, mounting holoprojectors and laying optical and electric cable. By the end of the predicted nine minutes, the avatar of Warrant Officer Michelle Conquest appeared. The machines continued to install projectors outward, expanding the network toward the area where most of the crew milled around or sat.
This caused a small stir among the milling crew on the flight deck. Cybernetics specialists familiar with Michelle clustered protectively around her hologram, as if to keep others away, but the AI simply walked through them and began introducing herself to as many curious ratings, noncoms and officers as possible.
Satisfied that his decision seemed to be working out, Absen turned back to the AV team and signaled he was ready.
“I’ve brought us back up to realtime, sir,” Scoggins said. “Or as real as it gets, by which I mean, we’re watching a synthesis that’s as up-to-date as I can make it with the actual light and sensor data as it comes in.”
“Got it, Commander. Let’s see.”
Absen saw the main picture show the sixty-four enemy ram-bodies broken up into a cloud of rocks ranging from sand through gravel up to pieces a few hundred meters wide, much of it still inbound toward the home planet. “Not much of that will hit Earth, I presume,” he said.
“Correct, sir,” Scoggins said. “As the asteroids were broken, most of the material deflected enough to miss the planet. About forty of our orbital facilities remain, and some slower ships that weren’t worth sending with the fleet. They’ll clean up or break up the rest.”
“Look at that.” Absen walked over to tap an icon on the console screen. “Orion. After a century of use, sixty years after we left home, the old girl’s still there for the fight.”
“Amazing,” Johnstone said, and the others echoed the sentiment, especially those such as Okuda and Scoggins, who had fought aboard her.
Far beyond the inbound swarm of meteoroids Absen could see the outbound line of EarthFleet asteroid fortresses and ram-bodies, the ones that had missed. Slowly, they were decelerating to eventually return. Calculations next to their icons showed days or weeks.
“Those are out of the fight,” Absen murmured, and then spoke more loudly for the crew’s benefit. “Admiral Huen’s asteroid counterforce did its job, but in doing so, the enemy removed a lot of our close-in defenses from the fight, which was obviously what they had hoped. They traded a bunch of low-cost rocks to get a significant portion of our forces out of the way, but they paid for it when the Exploder kamikazes sneaked in close.”
He picked up a handheld cursor to point at items on the big screen as he lectured for the benefit of the crew. “Now the remaining fifty-six Destroyers have diverted slightly spinward and up, staying well away from the now-useless fortresses, and are curving back inward under easy thrust, conserving fuel. The Home Fleet is pacing them sideways and falling back slightly, making certain that the Meme can’t squeak around them. There’s no Mars, no other planet for a slingshot. Nothing but open space.”
Now everyone could see what Absen described as the time-to-intercept numbers on the screen dropped below five minutes. “Why is our fleet falling back? Won’t that slow the closing speed of missiles and railgun shots, making it easier for the Destroyers to pick them off?” Rick Johnstone asked.
“That works both ways, Commander. It also gives our ships more time to knock down hypers, which should be launching soon. They need at least a few minutes time to get up to effective speed.” As if in response to Absen’s words, a blizzard of pinpricks appeared next to the Meme fleet.
“How many?” he asked.
“Not sure, sir. Give it time...”
A minute went by. “About thirty-five million hypers. Monster size, over a thousand tons apiece, I would say. Bigger than we’ve ever seen.”
“Thirty – I’ve never seen so many. That’s...”
“Almost seven hundred thousand launches apiece.”
“That’s impossible.” Absen cut himself off before he said something even stupider. “No chance that’s a data error?”
“No, sir.” The team in the room exchanged bleak glances.
“That’s almost a billion tons of missiles per ship. They just fired five percent of their mass.”
“That’s what the numbers say, sir.”
“They must have been gestating hypers for months or years to save up that many.” Absen had never felt so helpless as at that moment, and so despairing. With absolutely nothing he could do to affect the battle, he called for a time out. That he could do. “Freeze the feeds.” Then he stared.
“What’s happening to their ships?”
Scoggins and her team rapidly punched keys, some diving into their links for VR overlays. “It looks like they are reconfiguring the Destroyers.” She zoomed in on one, frozen in time with the “pause” function. “Normally they have the shape of rugby or Aussie footballs, fat oblongs. They are thinning and elongating. This one now looks like a plump cigar, and I think...” she let the displays run forward, “...it’s stopped.”
“What do those look like to you?” Absen said, his voice ominous with suppressed horror.
Before one of his officers could, Ezekiel spoke. “It looks like my...like the Alan Denham, before he slammed into the first Destroyer.”
“I was afraid you’d say that. Ladies and gentlemen...” Absen’s voice fired as he took a breath, “they are turning themselves into massive hypers. They intend to ram their way through to Earth.”
“But sir...that goes completely against Meme doctrine,” Johnstone objected. “All the lectures from Captain Forman and from Raphaela Denham said they would not kamikaze.”
Suddenly, Spooky Nguyen, who had been lounging quietly in a corner chair, bounced to his feet and strode forward to stand beside Absen, staring out over the flight deck at the giant screen. “Commander, please give us a close-up on the last group of Destroyers, the rearmost bunch there. Those eight.” He plucked the cursor out of the captain’s hand and drew a circle around the ones he meant. Absen ignored the impertinence, stepping back, fascinated.
Scoggins did so, and Spooky pointed with his outstretched arm. “Those have not reshaped themselves. Did they launch hypers?”
The sensors officer ran the video back, then forward again, muttering. “No. They didn’t.”
“They’ve changed tactics on us, Captain,” Spooky said. “I’d lay a hefty wager that group of eight contains the only Meme crew in their fleet, probably consolidated from the rest. The other vessels have been made into fireships.”
“Into what?” Johnstone asked.
“Fireships,” Absen said, still staring across the flight deck. “Old wet navy tactic. Fill a ship with explosives and incendiaries, leave just a pilot aboard or control it remotely, and you can turn it into a suicide weapon. They’re using our own methods against us, Meme fashion.”
Johnstone said, “So they evacuated everyone to those eight ships, keeping them back as a command group or reserve. If they fail in this attack, those will go streaking through the solar system and run away. They will have lost a bunch of Destroyers but few if any actual Meme.”
“I believe so,” Spooky replied.
“Damn. Why can’t they be stupid and arrogant like aliens in all the movies?” Absen asked.
“They are arrogant, Captain,” Spooky replied. “You might be too if you ruled an empire stretching across thousands of worlds.”
“Point.” Absen stared at the frozen displays a moment more, noticing the restlessness of the crew. He stepped out from behind the clear crystal of the flight control room and onto the catwalk that ringed the great open space, holding up his arm for attention.
Once the crew quieted and turned to look up at him, he addressed them in his best parade-ground voice, without amplification. “Ladies and gentlemen, let me remind you that what we are about to see happened almost twenty-four years ago. No matter how horrifying, no matter how you feel about what you see, there is nothing we can do about it. The light and data transmissions we are using to observe this battle has been traveling that long, and it will take us a similar number of years of realtime to reach Earth. If we win, we can continue as before in the happy knowledge the efforts of EarthFleet have kept the home planet safe. If the battle is lost, it has been lost for decades, but we will still continue onward, to take the fight to the enemy.” He swallowed. “Good luck to us all.”
Instead of going back in the booth, Absen signaled through the glass at Scoggins with a spin-fingered motion, roll it. He wanted to see what the rest of the crew saw, feel what they felt, as much as possible, with nothing between himself and them.
Displays came to life again, pictures moving slowly at first, and then faster. Knowing he would be analyzing the records for weeks to come as they traveled, the captain resigned himself to just experiencing the next few minutes, without interruption.
Rip the bandage off, quickly, painfully.
The Meme fleet now flared with fusion drives at maximum, turning and burning in an arc that would line them up on Earth within moments. The group of eight hung back, and drifted spinward, in order to flash past rather than impact the planet like their fellows, close enough to fight but far enough off the line of advance to run.
In response, the Home Fleet interposed itself between the forty-eight fireships and Earth, as Absen knew they must. Now he wished Huen had saved more asteroid fortresses, but could not fault the man for what he had done. At the time, the Meme ram-bodies had seemed the greater threat.
One minute remained, and now the millions of hypers entered the engagement envelopes of the human ships. The EarthFleet vessels used Meme tactics against the aliens, turning their fusion drives toward the enemy and blasting at full speed. The massive plasma flares became weapons, burning tens of thousands of closely packed missiles at a time, while holding open the range as long as possible.
Seconds later, hundreds of thousands of Home Fleet antimissiles, StormRaven fighters, railguns and beam weapons saturated the void with energies. The crew on the flight deck gasped in unison as the dense cloud of hypers met a veritable wall of defensive fire. Multimegaton fusion warheads tore great gaping holes in the ranks of Meme projectiles even as lasers plucked thousands out of space in microsecond bursts.
“We’re winning!” someone said from below him, and Absen shook his head slightly to himself, eyes still fixed on the screen.
No, we’re not, he thought. Oh, the Home Fleet will fend off those hypers, sure enough...but what will they have left to take on forty-eight Destroyer-sized projectiles, each six thousand meters long, a thousand across, and made mostly of ferrocrystal composite rather than mere asteroidal rock? If only Huen had more antimatter weapons, or had saved what he had until now. He might have taken out two or three at a time, now that they are just driving straight for Earth.
Absen realized the Destroyer-bullets’ narrowed cross-sections made them much harder to hit or damage. At speed, they could withstand impact after impact, explosion after explosion from anything less than an antimatter bomb, and still keep their drives and animal brains intact. There was simply no way to target the stern of anything moving that fast. The best EarthFleet could do was to keep hammering on their bows, hoping to damage or deflect each one enough to miss the planet. In short, they would have to chew their way through every ship to kill it. None of them had any weak spots.
The defensive action gave one last flare of fireworks before it died down to a few remaining sparkles. Several hundred thousand hypers, the ones that had both missed Fleet ships and avoided being destroyed, accelerated onward toward Earth, targeting orbital facilities. In moments they had scoured the twoscore remaining fortresses and artificial satellites.
Absen watched, tremendously saddened, as the Orion station died. He grasped the railing in front of him with hands like claws, and told himself that in the grand scheme, one old rustbucket didn’t matter.
Now the Home Fleet reversed itself, continuing their withdrawal Earthward with momentum but pointing armored prows toward the enemy again, all except the carriers. Those continued to drift backward, still providing aerospace control to their fighter wings, while their gigantic sister ships – dreadnoughts, battleships and cruisers – formed up into a wall of battle.
The largest fleet engagement I have ever witnessed, Absen mused, and at these speeds, it will be decided in moments. Like wet navy fleets before, much of strategy and tactics was maneuver, trying to put the enemy in the worst position possible, and retaining the best for oneself. In this case, the Meme plan was sound, akin to what he had himself used against them in the Gliese 370 system: force them to defend what they valued, limit their options, drive them into certain specific actions, and pound them to a pulp.
Being on the other side of that equation, he realized, brought with it a sickening sensation.
Too fast for human eyes to follow, Conquest’s sister dreadnoughts led the way forward, this time with no million colonists in their bellies to force their captains to sacrifice others. They held the center of a bullseye, a flattened cone like a coolie hat with its point toward the enemy, and sent forth all the death and destruction they could muster.
Home Fleet direct fire weapons blazed, and Destroyer after Destroyer bubbled, burned and crumbled, then exploded as residual fuel ignited in the uncontrolled fusion of their fracturing drives. As the enemy flared with fusors, the Home Fleet picked off Meme like a gunfighter knocking down targets.
Absen discerned their tactic, one he had hoped Huen would employ: sections of the fleet coordinated their weapons fire on one ship at a time, being forced to smash each utterly before turning their combined energies on the next. Configured as projectiles, the Destroyers were not able to strike back with their usual thousands of hypers. Those had all been expended.
Forty-eight Meme became thirty-five, then thirty, twenty-five, twenty and then fourteen before the two fleets interpenetrated.
For a fraction of a second all Absen could see was a mass of ships, like two blasts of birdshot fired directly at each other, slamming together in a cataclysm, and then it was over.
Seven distinct fireballs, massive beyond belief, showed where the seven Conquest-class dreadnoughts had thrown themselves deliberately into the paths of the enemy.
Two more Destroyers spun, broken, where dozens of lesser ships had rammed them.
Five blazed onward, now less than one minute from Earth.
“Dear God,” Absen gasped, whether a prayer or a curse, he did not know. Even though he knew all this had already happened, he could not help but settle the question with his next words. “Dear God, save them...”
But it seemed nothing could stop those five deadly projectiles.
Now past interfering with the five, the remainder of the Home Fleet turned to attack the lagging Meme reserve group of eight, which now skirted the edge of the battle area and employed their own weapons conventionally. Thousands of hypers leaped from those Destroyers, fencing and then knife-fighting with the disorganized remainder of humanity’s naval ships.
Even without the dreadnoughts, to Absen the two groups’ strength looked about equal, and so he dismissed that battle from his mind for now, to turn his attention back to the five. Plenty of time to study it all later. Along with the rest of the crew, now all on their feet below and staring, he gazed raptly at, he was nauseatingly certain, the imminent ravaging of his homeworld.
The view pulled back to encompass the ever-shrinking distance between the speeding death ships and Earth. Nothing near the home planet remained after the hypers, except...one anomalous icon, representing a squadron of fifty Thunderchiefs, appeared suddenly as if by magic. Perhaps they had hidden, powered down and EMCON.
The icon’s ID icon read UNKNOWN, though they were obviously EarthFleet vessels. Absen slipped back into the control room and asked Scoggins, “What do you have on those?” as he highlighted the marker with his cursor.
“We have no data. We’re just watching what the sensors have soaked up, and we’re lucky to get that. They’re actually stealthed pretty well, but once I figured out they were there, I adjusted my systems enough to see more clearly.”
“Good job.” As he watched, the squadron came to life and launched a spread of five hundred missiles.
“That’s odd,” Absen mustered. “The weapons aren’t guiding.” Now he wished he had brought Ford back in time for the battle, and then reminded himself of the way they watched. “Freeze it.”
Once Scoggins did, to an audible groan from the crew outside, he continued, “Someone get Ford back up here, pronto.”
A long two minutes later, the chastened weapons officer hurried in, still buttoning his tunic. “Sir?”
“Have you been watching?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why aren’t those missiles guiding?”
Ford stepped over to the plate crystal window and stared at the massed displays, and then down at the control boards. “At a guess, sir, they are aimed for a spot in space where the antimatter warheads will do the most damage. The enemy will fly into them, they’re going so fast.”
“Of course,” Absen breathed. “Sit down, Ford. You’re not out of the doghouse yet.”
The man quickly took a seat and kept his mouth shut, watching expectantly.
“Roll it forward now, half speed.”
Scoggins signaled her team, and all watched as the cloud of missiles closed on the five enemy ships. Those had arranged themselves in a ring about a thousand kilometers across. “There’s no way any one antimatter warhead can take out more than a single ship,” Absen said.
“True, sir. It looks to me like the flight of missiles is staying together to try to mask which are the heavy ones.”
“How many Exploders do you think there are?”
“No idea, sir. No way to tell.”
“If I am right, and Huen reserved half his warheads, there may be as many as seven,” Absen said.
Ford shrugged, still staring at the screens. Absen let it pass.
“There!” the weapons officer said, standing and stabbing a hand at the display. On the screen, the flight of five hundred missiles divided itself up into groups of one hundred and altered course to directly intercept the modified Destroyers, burning their drives furiously. As they closed, fusors came to life and plasma fire blossomed, trying to pluck the human weapons from space, but seemed desultorily aimed, confirming the suspicion that the vessels had no Meme guiding the defenses.
As with each engagement before, this ended in less than one second as surviving missiles detonated nearby or slammed into the enemy.
Three titanic blasts wiped an equal number of Meme ships from space.
Two flew onward, now less than thirty seconds from Earth.
“What happened?” Absen asked, turning to Ford, but he already knew, and answered his own question, overriding his subordinate. “There must have been one or two antimatter bombs per Destroyer, and against these two, our luck ran out. They must have been picked off by fusors.” He cleared his throat, realizing Scoggins had slowed the view to a crawl at one-tenth speed. “Is there any chance now?”
Ford shook his head in misery, his voice a whisper. “No, sir.”
“Then roll it, Scoggins,” Absen husked, his throat a desert. “Just roll it.”
Turning slowly back to her board, the commander ran her finger up the slider that controlled the speed of display advance, until it reached one to one.
“Five...four...three...” Absen murmured.
“Two...one,” the rest joined him.
Widely separated, the two fireships crashed into Earth, exploding to sunlike brightness as they struck atmosphere. Compressed solid as steel, nitrogen and oxygen fused into the higher elements of the speeding vessels. Pinpoint light swelled and shock propagated through the filmy air of the planet. The crew of Conquest watched as, at fifteen thousand miles an hour, incomprehensible energies scoured humanity’s homeworld in two expanding rings, like annihilating ripples in a pond.
Except this pond held the thin sheath of life covering the verdant planet – air, water, topsoil, crust.
People.
Absen could hear screams, cries and weeping through the door to the flight deck, echoed from within the control room. He walked out onto the catwalk and shed tears for his race, watching them drop ten meters to the textured deck below. Then he sank to his knees, overwhelmed, still clutching the rail, until he had collapsed onto the metal mesh of the walking surface.
Vision graying, great gasping breaths, almost sobs, tore from his chest as he contemplated the death of billions. Worse, he knew that EarthFleet had just lost its battle. Humanity’s best efforts had not been enough.
After long moments Absen felt a hand on his shoulder, and he turned to see COB Timmons, his oldest friend, sink down to sit next to him on the catwalk. “Shit,” the chief said without heat. “That’s one hell of a setback.”
This simple steadiness, this prosaic practicality common to chiefs everywhere, brought him back, and he realized he could not afford to mourn right now. Leadership is about rising above disasters, he told himself.
“Yeah,” he said. “One hell of a setback. But you know what? It’s not over yet.”
“It’s not me you need to tell, Skipper.” Timmons pointed out over the flight deck, where his people staggered or lay on the deck, or sat in chairs, holding each other in grief. On one side two women scratched at each other in rage until a Marine broke it up. Another couple looked like they were about to have sex in a corner behind one of the parked weapons lifts.
Insanity and breakdown lurks. They can’t lose hope.
“Right. Thanks.” Absen pulled himself to his feet, took three deep breaths, and then began speaking loudly.
“Men and women of Conquest! Human, Ryss and Sekoi! Listen to me!”
In ragged clumps, the human officers and ratings turned to look, joined by the Ryss and the Sekoi clustered in their own groups, keeping well away from the apes. “This is a tragedy, a horror none of us truly ever expected to face. I feel as you do. In fact,” he choked back a brittle laugh, “I’m only standing because I have my hands clamped to this railing. But remember – this all happened more than twenty years ago. What’s past is past. We have to pick ourselves up and face the future, no matter how much we don’t want to believe it.”
Several more breaths fortified him as he spoke. “Now as much as I want to charge straight in and rip the guts out of the enemy with our new weapons, we still have over twenty-three light-years of realtime distance to go. By the time we get to the solar system, the enemy will have had at least forty-six years to enslave and rule the remnants of the human race. Rushing there unprepared to save a few days or weeks will not serve anyone.”
Absen ran his fingers through his thin blonde hair, and then waved his hand out over the crowd as if in benediction. “So now, as strange as it may seem, we’re going to just sit here in deep space for a few days, on minimum watch rotation. We’re going to mourn, and grieve, and get drunk and talk and comfort each other. Then we’re going to rest, and evaluate, and study our enemy. Eventually, when we get over the shock, we’re going to sort ourselves out, get back into fighting shape, and as soon as we can, we’re going to stick it to the Meme.” He paused, throat working, and then finished, “We’re going to kill every last of them.”
A cheer began from somewhere, the Marines he thought taking it up first, and soon five hundred throats roared and yelled themselves raw as words coalesced into a chant.
“DEATH TO THE MEME!”
“DEATH TO THE MEME!”
“DEATH TO THE MEME!”
***
That night, Jill and Rick made love with a passion they had forgotten, knowing full well the urge was just a biological response to witnessing the death and destruction of so many, but far beyond caring. The brain, the nervous system, couldn’t count, but it knew when its genes were threatened, and drove them together like fiery metal bars hammered on an anvil, sparks flying in all directions.
Afterward, as they lay covered in sweat in the ventilation’s breeze, Rick wondered again whether he had made the right decision. Maybe if he’d dug his heels in and insisted, he could have kept Jill at home with him and the children. His mind knew that was fantasy, but his heart ached for the lost years of children they would never see.
In another compartment, Trissk and Klis lounged together on their sleeping platform. Trissk bit Klis playfully on the back of her neck, his teeth gnawing but not breaking the skin, the Ryss equivalent of a nibble on the ear.
“Frisky tonight, are you?” Klis purred.
“You are still the most beautiful female in the universe.”
“If only I was in season, you would be doing and not talking.”
Trissk snorted. “Sometimes I envy the apes, mating whenever the urge takes them.”
“They only have one or two in a litter. If we mated all the time, we’d overrun every planet we settled on.”
“We could alter our biology.”
Klis drew back to look at her mate. “The thought does not disgust you?”
He reached with his paw, hooking his claws into the ruff around her neck, like a man might lightly seize a woman’s hair, and drew her muzzle to his. They rubbed faces, marking each other with their scent glands. “No. Our race almost died because of its taboos and inflexible traditions. We already have accepted contraceptive implants. Using drugs or medical techniques to further control our reproduction is not life code tinkering – but what if it were? The Humans do it with caution, and the Sekoi embrace it with abandon.”
Klis laughed. “You just want to mate more often, without dealing with a litter afterward.”
“So your yowls as we mated were not of pleasure? I suppose I must have been mistaken. Forgive me.”
Her raspy tongue began to groom Trissk’s face, a most intimate gesture of assent. Once Klis had finished, she said, “I relished every minute of it. My body remembers it. I want to do it again.”
Trissk sighed. “It is madness to conceive a litter here, on a warship.”
“I know. What if there were a way?””
“A way to what?”
“A way to have me, to take me in season, and yet have no fear of kits?”
Trissk rolled up on an elbow and held her at arm’s length. “That is impossible. The implants stop the season and fertility both.”
“Idiot male. What have we just been talking about?” Klis reached into a drawer beneath the sleeping platform and drew out two spray tubes, one black, one white.
“That is forbidden!” Trissk gasped.
Klis yawned. “Taking one mate for life was forbidden just a few short years ago. And who is there to forbid anything here? The apes don’t care about our reproductive taboos. All they care about is whether we perform our duties. You are in charge of the Ryss here. We are many light-years from any of our people. When we next see them, who knows how their customs will be changed?” She stroked his flank. “You were wise to only allow mated pairs to join us. Will you now forbid us glorification if it is within our grasp?”
Slowly Trissk reached out to pick up the black spray, but Klis stopped him, substituting the white. “That’s yours. White for a warrior’s honor. Black for the hearts of females.”
“You made that up.”
“Of course. The Sekoi biochemist that brews it said that each race sees color differently, so this was simple and foolproof. I didn’t ask her the rationale.”
“So what do we do?”
Klis did not answer, but merely sprayed a tiny burst into each nostril, set the vial aside, and then closed her eyes.
Trissk did the same, and within moments, lust for his mate grew within him, starting in his belly and moving outward along his limbs. Strangely, his loins responded last, but when the urge came, it rolled him under like the wave of a sea.
***
Bogrin pushed a knight forward to take a position covering one of his center pawns.
“Surprise, surprise,” Ezekiel Denham said as he moved a pawn of his own, uncovering a line from his bishop to attack the knight. “You still play a conventional game.”
“I prefer to think of it as conservative, and deep. And I do win more often than you.”
“But when you lose, it’s spectacular. You fall apart like a building of mortarless bricks.”
“Games like these reveal our minds,” Bogrin replied. “The Meme I was and the Sekoi Blend I am both do not like uncertainties. That’s why I like Human chess. No dice, no cards, no random elements.”
“I thought your Meme ancestor blended with a mindless drone.”
“He did, but the stolid Sekoi propensities remained. And yet...I ended up a radical, and a rebel.” He studied the board.
“The admiral believes strategy and tactics will beat the Empire.”
“The captain,” Bogrin emphasized the word, “is a clever man but limited in vision. Technology has fallen into his lap to allow him his revenge upon the Empire, but all such advantages are limited. Assuming the Meme have not been overrun by some other unknown race, they are undoubtedly working on a stardrive. Once they have that, their own TacDrive will not be far behind.”
“Politics,” Ezekiel replied, “always trumps strategy, as strategy overrides tactics.”
Bogrin grunted, and finally moved a pawn to block Ezekiel’s bishop’s attack. “Any Meme knows that by his first century. You humans, and the Ryss, are far too young yet to play the deep game.”
“Thanks for teaching me. And yet...I’ve seen you angry.”
Bogrin smiled a mouthful of peg teeth, instantly resembling the hippopotamus of his human nickname. “Who is to say even anger cannot be a strategy?” Then his expression reverted to its usual serenity. “Why are you so calm after seeing your homeworld trampled underfoot?”
Ezekiel sat back and crossed his arms, staring at the board but not really seeing it. “I slaked my physical responses already. There’s this Marine...well, let’s just say she’s finds me exotic, and she’s persistent. Hard to say no when the woman could break me in half...and even with her cyberware shut down, she wears me out. I guess I’m calm now because I’m tired, and I know in my heart it all happened decades ago. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Until we arrive.”
“Yes.” The human made a quick move, advancing another pawn in a sacrifice.
“Once we do...”
“I won’t forget, my friend. You’ll be a part of it.”