Epilogue

Spooky smoked like a chimney, staring out the flat glass porthole surrounded by brass and polished wood. The fumes of his cigar wafted into the air and vanished, disturbing his fellows not the least. Sighing, he tossed the half-finished stogie into the air, where it vanished. “There’s always something missing about smoking in VR,” he said with a touch of wistfulness.

“Maybe it’s the guilt,” Ezekiel said from his position standing before the bank of steampunk-inspired levers, knobs and gauges. “You were born in a time where smoking caused all sorts of nasty illnesses. It was a real vice back then, something for macho men. Now it’s just one more annoying habit.” Like Spooky, he wore a pea coat with brass buttons, trousers with stripes down the legs, and sported a round naval cap.

“VR used to be interesting, but I find it pales in comparison to reality.”

Bogrin, or the VR avatar of Bogrin anyway, snorted with amusement in a very manlike way. Spooky suspected the simulation interpreted the Hippo’s emotions and rendered them with a homo sapiens flair. “You humans constantly seem to be trying to escape from reality. If you can’t do that, you obsessively control it. Eventually you realize that all such control is an illusion, and the best one can hope for is to ride life’s waves.”

“Your English has improved quite a lot,” Ezekiel observed.

“That’s because I am speaking my own language, and your translator simulation renders it more accurately than I can in physical form.”

“Of course. I should have thought of that.”

Bogrin snorted again and manifested a cigar of his own, suited in size for his enormous grip. Once lit, he puffed on it contentedly. “I have not spent enough time in VR to get bored of it, however. The Meme did not allow Blends access to ships such as this one, or the organic technology to link into virtualities. I sometimes wonder if, had they done so, no revolt would have been possible. Most of the Blends would just have abandoned reality to spend all their time inside this kind of ‘second life.’”

“For a while,” Spooky countered. “As you pointed out, eventually you would have tired of it.”

“Yes.” Bogrin said no more, but simply smoked and looked out at the void rushing by.

On the other side of the room, Trissk paced back and forth like the upright lion he resembled. After ten years, he had grown into his prime, his mane full and his muscles rippling. Though not as bulky as a Sekoi, he flowed with contained menace and power. “I do not fully understand what we are doing here. Conquest fights on, and now we abandon her and our fellow warriors, for what?”

“You didn’t have to come along. As you Ryss have no Blends, some other could have represented your race,” Ezekiel said mildly.

“I was the logical choice. I have the most experience dealing with humans and Sekoi. I command our small contingent. I could not send another in my place, or I would have looked like a coward. However, I fear I may still look like a coward, as I will be elsewhere when the fight finally comes to tooth and claw.” He snarled and slashed a hanging curtain, which slowly raveled itself up afterward. “I also do not like this virtual reality. What satisfaction is there in attacking a simulation?”

“You can always go back to your body in the cocoon,” Ezekiel replied. “Though without the link, you won’t be comfortable. And you can’t get out and roam around. This ship doesn’t have the extensive gravplating of Conquest, so you need to be sealed up and cushioned in case of hard maneuvering.”

“I agree with the young Ryss, though,” Bogrin said around his stogie. “It is time to hear what this is all about.”

Ezekiel sat in a chair, placing his hands on the arms as if on a throne, and smiled. “We’re going to meet my family.”

The two aliens stared in puzzlement, and Spooky lifted an eyebrow in a very Vulcan manner. “I always thought Raphaela had her own base somewhere in the outer reaches of the solar system. I even had people searching for it in the decades before we departed, but I never found it.”

“Space is too vast even for your resources to find it,” Ezekiel said with satisfaction. “And we were very careful. If Earth ever fell, no one could know where it was, what it looked like or how to detect it. With the Meme sucking information out of everyone’s head, if anyone knew, they would too.”

“Absen could have found it,” Spooky groused, “but he didn’t want to put enough EarthFleet resources against it. But, I suppose that’s now proven fortunate.”

“Precisely.”

“Would you two cease sharing inside anecdotes and explain yourselves?” said Trissk, striding up to Spooky and looming over the small Vietnamese man.

Ezekiel waved diffidently and said, “Before he died, my father convinced my mother to set up a secret base, a young and healthy living machine little different from a ship. With that, her shuttle, and the resources of the Asteroid Belt and the cometary halo, she and my brothers and sisters had everything they needed to assist EarthFleet without ever getting co-opted by it.”

Spooky grunted, moving out from under Trissk’s shadow. “Brothers and sisters? I never knew. Were they part of the ‘black box’ team of scientists that cracked so many technical challenges?”

“Yes. They were quadruplets, and they were not only part of the team, they were the team. No other humans were ever brought out to the base, though Mother did recruit some smart normals to form a second cell on Mars.”

“As a blind. I see,” Spooky said.

“So that’s where we’re going? This secret base?” asked Trissk.

“Exactly. If we can find it, we can show Mother what we’ve done, and the allies we’ve made. She can give us a wealth of information about Earth. If there are any resistance movements, any soft underbelly to Meme rule, she will know about them. The trick, though, will be making contact.”

“Did you not arrange codes and signals, in case you returned?” Bogrin asked.

“Of course. The tricky part will be dodging or getting rid of all the Meme sentry drones lurking around the system, and making sure that when we transmit, nobody sees or follows us. If I was Mother, I would be extremely careful. On the other hand, she must already know that the Empire has been attacked here. The battles and the destruction of the two Guardians would have been visible throughout the system and beyond.”

“Then we had better get started killing drones, don’t you think?” Trissk snarled. “Show me how to use this ship’s weapons, and I will be your gunner. Let us begin the hunt.” He paced around the room as if looking for a fire control station.

“I have a better idea.” Ezekiel gestured toward the front screen, which appeared to be a window opening onto space itself. The view leaped forward until they stared at the shark-like shape of a Meme sentry. “Roger, think you can sneak up on that drone?”

“Of course, Zeke,” the voice of the ship came back.

To the two aliens, this was just another VR wonder. Spooky, though, nearly jumped out of his skin.

“I will keep that expression permanently in memory,” Ezekiel laughed. “In fact...” A moment later a holographic image of Spooky, with completely unrehearsed shock on his face, appeared on the wall. “Priceless.”

“Roger is sentient,” Spooky accused. “All these years we have been working together, you kept this from me.”

“Only so I could reveal it to you at the proper time. What, you think you’re the only one that gets to have secrets?”

A slow smile stole across Spooky’s face, then a belly laugh burst forth from his lips. He bent over, clutching his knees and letting out several gasps and whoops. Ezekiel had never seen the man so unabashedly amused. “Well played, sir. Well played.”

“If you can breathe now, take a look at the screen.”

The four gathered in the front of the sumptuous control deck to see the sentry looming closer and closer. It seemed to be unaware, almost somnolent. Suddenly it jerked and thrashed as two tentacles leaped forth from Steadfast Roger and speared into the tiny ship. A moment later it calmed, returning to its former stillness.

“Give Roger a few hours and he will break through its conditioning and steal all the current Meme communications codes and protocols. Then he’ll have that sentry doing our work as well. If all goes as planned, he will quietly call the drones in this area of space to him one by one and take them over. Pretty soon, we’ll have our own little fleet reporting only what we want back to the Meme, and also searching for the base signature that I supplied. It may take a few days or a few weeks, but eventually we’ll track Mother down.”

The four, each a warrior in his own way, stared at the screen and watched the future unfold.

THE END of Tactics of Conquest.

READ ON for an excerpt from Conquest of Earth, Stellar Conquest Book 4.

Excerpt from CONQUEST OF EARTH

Bull glanced over at his sergeant major, whose head lolled within her helmet as the assault sled screamed down through Io’s thin atmosphere. “Reaper. Reaper.”

“Yeah, boss. I hear ya,” Repeth replied, not opening her eyes. “Can’t a girl get any sleep around here? We still got four minutes to touchdown.”

“Four minutes...right.” Raising his stentorian voice, Bull punched up the company freq and said, “Listen up, you diggers. In four minutes we’re slamming in hot as hell. All you gotta do is follow your NCOs and kill anything that moves that ain’t wearing yellow. No matter what they look like, there are no human beings here, only Purelings and Blends. Pureling’s are soulless, fanatical clones, not people, and Blends or Meme are high-value prisoners. If you find a Blend or a Meme, do not let it escape. Make every effort to capture it, and burn it if you have to, you got me?”

“Aye aye, sir!” roared the line doggies, most of whom had exactly one real battle under their belts – the assault on the Weapon on Afrana’s moon ten subjective years ago. Bull hoped the extensive VR training would be enough, that and the improved Avenger battlesuits. He had so few Marines.

Bull still wished Captain Absen had brought a lot more troops, but these eight squads of six Marines each were all he had. They couldn’t even take more than a few of Conquest’s Recluse battle drones, one on each assault sled. Fortunately the pilots had proven quick studies, using their cyber-links to control the ground support machines.

Bull snorted. Aerospace. As usual, it would be Marine infantry that would do or die. Tip of the spear, end of the shaft, he thought.

Though he couldn’t forget the thirty Ryss he’d been forced to use. At least they had their own customized Avengers. Unwilling to link in to VR space, the aliens had trained for the assault in an enormous converted cargo bay. Even without cybernetics or nano-augmentation, they made fearsome warriors, if not as deadly as his own troops, pound for pound. They were just so very, very green.

Bull switched freqs. “Slash, you copy?”

“I hear, War Leader Bull.” Between the chip in Bull’s head and the translation software in his suit, the big Ryss officer he called Slash might as well have been speaking English.

“Three minutes. You good to go?”

“We yearn to spill blood and taste Pureling flesh, War Leader. Again, I request the honor of first assault.”

“No. You’ll damn well follow your mission orders or I’ll rip your fuzzy mane right off your neck, you got me?”

“I hear and obey, War Leader.”

Slash, like all the Ryss warriors, was young, a bare yearsmane. Scarcely adult, he had a good head and heart, but like most unblooded troops seemed terribly eager to die gloriously. More than once Bull had cuffed him hard enough to send the young warrior stumbling. Not a recommended method of discipline with human troops, Absen had been adamant that Bull use Ryss training methods on Ryss.

Once again, Bull wished Trissk hadn’t been sent off on some secret mission. The experienced Ryss warrior could have helped get the cat-boys ready, or better yet, led them.

Bull switched his HUD to the forward external view, looking at what the sled pilots saw. Before his eyes stretched Io’s hot yellow surface, colored with the massive amounts of sulfur dust thrown up by the moon’s many volcanoes. Unlike other moons, Io was a hot planetoid on the inside, with violent tidal forces pulling and twisting at its silicate crust and molten core, generating massive amounts of heat.

Despite this, its distance from the sun meant usually that seething heat remained trapped beneath the crust, except when it erupted as lava from a volcano. Most of its surface stayed cold, very cold, even if a few hundred meters down flowed rivers of magma.

The Empire’s command center over the horizon occupied a geologically calm area. Perhaps the aliens had stabilized it by draining the heat below and using that to energize the Weapon just beyond. That massive laser had the power to burn through the heaviest ship armor over ranges out to ten million kilometers, and thus controlled space all around Jupiter.

At least, it controlled the space within the laser’s ever-moving arc of fire. The Marines’ assault was coming in from below the horizon.

Bull looked up to see Reaper staring at him. “Awake now, are we?” he said.

She snorted. “Who can sleep through all your yakking with Slash?” As if in reply, the assault sled bucked again and picked up a harmonic as it skimmed lower, bleeding off speed in the moon’s chill atmosphere. “Besides, we’re about to get hit.”

“Crap.” Switching his HUD view to flight tactical, Bull watched as a swarm of Meme stingships fell toward them, trailing tongues of fusion fire. The enemy launched hypers, tiny ones that nevertheless could bring down something as small as the sleds they rode. “Where the hell’s our aero cover?”

***

Above and behind the assault sleds, Major Vango Markis lined his StormCrow Weaver up on the first Meme stingship even while slowing his time sense by a factor of ten. Doing so allowed for precise targeting, and a fraction of a second after he fired his inline maser the first shark-like living enemy died in a blast of microwaves calibrated for Meme ship physiology. Shifting to another bogey, he stroked the trigger and sent another stingship straight to boiling hell.

Around him Vango’s squadron did the same, and dozens of stingships fell to their beams. Unlike the Marines or the Ryss warriors, his pilots were thoroughgoing veterans, both of the battles to defend Earth so long ago, and of the fight to wrest the Gliese 370 system from the Meme. Cool professionals all, they lined up targets and one after another calmly knocked them down.

Even so, hundreds of the swift little enemy fighters remained. Roughly half turned away from the assault sleds to attack the StormCrows while the rest held their courses toward the assault force.

“Damn,” Vango said conversationally to his fighter jocks. “I was hoping they would all come after us. Alpha and Bravo Flights, with me. We punch through and hit the bogeys chasing the sleds. Charlie and Delta, keep them busy.” All of his Crows couldn’t dive to protect the sleds; if they did, the lagging half of the stingship group would roll in behind them and crawl up their asses.

“Roger, Alpha lead,” came the clipped acknowledgements from his three flight leaders, each with eight Crows.

Vango led Alpha with Bravo flight right behind as they rolled and stooped like falcons through the oncoming formation of stingships. Pushing his time sense up over one hundred to one, the universe slowed to a crawl and Vango let loose with the lasers and railguns in his wing pods. On automatic, the weapons pumped fire into the noses of the oncoming enemy fighters, nice low-deflection shots that could hardly miss, sending them tumbling as the weapons clawed their eyes out.

The Crows knocked out a score of stingships, but not without cost. “Just lost Red Dog,” Bravo’s leader Tex called, his accelerated VR voice sounding tinny through the link. Vango looked over his shoulder within VR space and pushed his time sense up to maximum, almost two hundred to one. Sending his viewpoint toward the expanding explosion where Red Dog’s Crow used to be, Vango could see nothing left but plasma and bits of wreckage in a spray, so he turned back to the slow-motion battle in front of him.

“Shit. He’s gone. Keep your heads in the game, people,” Vango replied in a frozen voice. What he really wanted to do was curse the dead man and everyone else for carelessness. Or maybe the stingship had just gotten lucky. The enemy fighters were fast but predictable, not too bright, and they didn’t have the many advantages of EarthFleet’s tech.

On the other hand, they were dirt-cheap, so that a hundred-to-one loss ratio was still an ugly proposition for Conquest’s aerospace squadron.

None of Vango’s pilots used their inline masers, saving full charges for later targets. Instead, they flashed through the enemy formation to swing onto the tails of the other group of stingships, the ones trying to line up on the assault sleds skimming over the surface far below. “Watch the red zone as you come out of your runs, people,” Vango called, referring to the slice of space high enough for the Weapon to have line of sight on them. One sweeping wide-area beam from the gargantuan laser waiting beyond the horizon would burn anything it touched. Titanic enough to gouge chunks out of Conquest’s glacis, the StormCrows would die like insects in a bug zapper if its sun-hot touch ever reached them.

The fifteen remaining Crows took shots at the stingships even as the enemy began to fire at the assault sleds in front of them. Tiny hypers leaped toward the Marine craft, and Vango passed the information via link to the blinding lasers mounted on the rears of the landers. Flashes sparkled in the void as beams crisscrossed intervening space. While the defensive lasers of the sleds sought to dazzle the sensors of the incoming hypers, stingship biolaser shots targeted the assault craft themselves.

Fortunately these new sleds had been fitted with extra armor for this single high-risk landing, and while Vango could see hits, none of the Marine sleds did more than wobble on damaged thrusters. Unfortunately, the stingships were just stupid enough to follow their suicide orders, and they were considerably faster than the sleds, which already decelerated for their landings.

“Dammit,” Vango muttered as he burned enemy after enemy. He hadn’t expected quite so many stingships.

“Sledgehammer in ten seconds actual,” Vango heard Commander Rick Johnstone’s VR voice in his comm.

“Sledgehammer in ten seconds actual,” Vango echoed to his flight leaders. “Check your lines and make sure you’re well out of the firing path.” He kept knocking down stingships as fast as his weapons would recharge, locked in accelerated time sense, determined not to waste any fraction of a second.

One stingship, pulling ahead of the others, dove for the rearmost assault sled, and Vango desperately concentrated all his fire on it, but his maser was out of juice for the next few seconds, and his wing weapons didn’t have the range or punch.

Just then, the ten seconds on his display ran out, and the dirty amber surface of Io erupted in a line of fire. The finger of one primary particle beam fired from Conquest ripped a hundred-kilometer-long trench pointing arrow-straight at the side wall of the Meme command center buried deep underground. Incidentally, the burst of superheated dust and burning sulfur thrown up engulfed sleds and pursuers alike.

The sleds were built to take it, but the lightweight stingships must have felt like they had entered a fusion-powered sandstorm. Even if they were not flash-cooked, they certainly lost sight of their quarries, and dozens slammed into the ground or the sides of the newly dug trench.

Right behind Conquest’s particle beam came a precisely calibrated burst of hundreds of ferrocrystal balls, accelerated by a Dahlgren Behemoth Fifty railgun to over 0.3c, fast enough to cause mutual contact fusion in whatever they hit. Each impact would create a brief, tiny thermonuclear explosion.

Down the dust-filled trench below the sleds these glowing projectiles flew to slam against the buried armor of the enemy command center. If the intel section’s educated guesses were right, that hellish impact would bore a hole into the Meme complex, providing both a breach and a disruption for the Marines and Ryss warriors to exploit. The resulting superheated plasma should expand through the constricted volume and ignite everything inside the confined space, turning anything and anyone not armored or sealed behind blast doors into crispy critters.

Vango watched the assault sleds, specially reinforced for this mission, descend to enter the trench. Invisible to the naked eye beneath the billowing dust and dissipating plasma, they would follow the channel to its end using radar, there to do what Marines do.

Fight, kill, and die.

“Gotcha,” Vango exulted as the pursuing stingships pulled up, shying away from the obscured trench. Barely of animal intelligence, the little fighters hadn’t the wit to figure out what to do when their targets vanished in the hot haze. Instead, they climbed out of the cloud and turned nose-on to the two flights of Crows and stood on their fusion engines, clawing to reverse course.

“Follow me,” Vango ordered as he rolled Weaver left, parallel to Io’s bilious surface, in order to stay under the minimum engagement altitude of the Weapon lurking just over the horizon. Tagging one more stingship with his wing weapons, he skimmed low over mountains and ridges, keeping his speed high while describing a wide curve that would take them back the way they had come.

Charlie and Delta still whirled in their own furball far behind, Crows against stingships. Once Vango set course to rejoin the fight, he said, “Finish them off and then punch it, boys and girls. Execute the bugout plan for refuel and rearming.”

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The End of Conquest of Earth excerpt.

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