Planetary Assault (Star Force Series) Page 10
“As you say, keeping an eye on things.” Spooky’s eyes roamed the room, searching, she knew, for anything out of place.
She watched him for a moment more, bemused. “Good to see you on the job. Look me up sometime soon. I see Bull waving at me.” Repeth stood up, bowed slightly to her old instructor, and walked over as her Bravo company commander left Colonel Stallers’ table to sit at a different one nearby.
“Good decade, Smaj,” Bull greeted her.
She accepted the familiar corruption of “Sergeant Major” with good graces, knowing such nicknames built trust and camaraderie. “Good freakin’ four decades, Bull, but it feels like I only slept for a week.” Repeth sat down across from him and reached over to tilt his cup toward her with one nailbitten finger. “Ugh. Can’t believe you’re still drinking that dreck. I should space it.”
Bull pulled the protein shake back protectively. “Don’t you dare. I used all my personal allowance on this stuff. Can’t stay big on Navy food.”
“Who cares if you stay big? Your wetware provides most of your actual strength. Besides, it gives you gas like a sick hound.”
“I like to be big. You think this huge noggin would look good on a skinny body like yours?” The Israeli major reached up to palm his scalp like a basketball.
Repeth held up her hands. “All right. So what’s the word?”
“Word is, All-Hands at 1500 hours. Word is, Earth got hit five years ago by sixty-four Destroyers. We don’t even know if anyone’s left.” Bull slurped more of his shake, pensive.
Repeth pursed her lips and put on a stoic front. “Can’t help that. We knew when we left it was long years of travelling at best, a one-way trip at worst.”
“We might be all that’s left of the human race.” He hid a fleeting expression of deep concern.
She leaned over to pound her index finger on the tabletop in front of the big young Marine officer. “Listen, sir, I know you’ve never seen the elephant, but you’re, what, twenty-eight not counting sleep time? I’ve spent longer than that in active combat. I’ve spoon-fed green eltees and I’ve made and I’ve broke company commanders like you. But I’ve seen you over the past few months – before the forty years – hell, you know what I mean – and I know you’ve got what it takes. So just do your job the best you know how and have faith in ol’ mother Reaper.” Unconsciously Repeth patted her left breast pocket where her ancient leather-bound small-print Bible rested.
Bull’s mouth quirked up in a smile at her gesture. He reached up to his neckline to reveal a heavy ferrocrystal Star of David medallion on a chain. “I got faith, Smaj. But Moshe Dayan said faith and bullets’ll get you farther than faith alone.”
Repeth laughed. “Amen to that, my bulky brother. Pass the Lord and praise the ammunition.” She clapped him on the shoulder, a sensation like slapping wood. “I see the Bravo platoon sergeants are up. Suggest you finish that glop and start doing some officer stuff. Find your lieutenants, tell them mommy and daddy will make everything all right.”
Bull rose with her, draining his no-drip plastic cup and folding it into a cargo pocket. “Yeah, lieutenants. Making simple shit hard since Christ was a corporal.”
Repeth tsk-stk’d good-naturedly at his irreverence.
Bull grinned. “You don’t like the way I talk, Smaj, that’s your cross to bear.”
“Why do I feel like you set me up for that line?” With a rueful snort she put the coffee mug in the rack and went to see to her awakening troops.
Chapter 2
R-05, R-15 and R-25 continued inward toward the K-type orange dwarf star. In the slightly less than forty years since they were launched from Conquest, they had moved outward along curving paths, to then approach Gliese 370 at slightly convergent angles. Though spread millions of kilometers apart, each had long ago carefully aimed itself at a point very near the star itself.
These three crossed the stellar wind bubble without incident, undetected. At more than .6C their transit through the star system required approximately ten hours. During this time they greedily collected data, pinpointing Meme spacecraft, orbital structures and ground installations.
Electromagnetic emanations from all forms of technology within the Meme complex were shockingly faint. EarthFleet intelligence believed that the Meme Empire deliberately hid its emissions to minimize the warning any target civilizations might receive. Had humans picked up signals from other worlds from the dawn of the radio age, history might have been far different. Once the Meme invasion spurred humanity into space, careful searches found the faint traces.
Much closer now, the robot probes collected petabytes of data, inspecting every anomaly, every planetary surface, every moon, and as many of the asteroids as possible. One flew within a light-second of HD85512b, the planet dubbed Afrana, greedily sponging up intelligence.
Independent of each other, never coordinating to stymie detection, each then sent a heavily- encrypted comm-burst of coherent light toward Conquest just before the probes decelerated on approach to the system’s sun.
Meme scientific installations detected the fusion drive flares but, as predicted, dismissed them as coronal anomalies, well within the random variation limits of the star itself. The probes each made one brutally quick and close partial orbit of the star, decelerating all the way, intending to emerge on paths that would drift them into position to continue intelligence collection as long as possible.
R-15 never emerged from the far side of the star, having encountered a fluke solar flare that burned it to a cinder. R-05 and R-25 noted the fact and continued their missions, floating at speed unlikely to trip enemy detection grids.
No longer protected by enormous velocity, each probe might be able to transmit its collected data once only, thereafter at risk from Meme automated systems defenses. Had the robots been sentient this might have disturbed them, but true AI had always failed or gone mad, leaving tasks such as this to mere computers. The alternative, downloading human engrams into silicon CPUs, would have been murderously cruel.
Even so, that thing had been considered, then rejected as unnecessary. Thus the robots fulfilled their assignments with machine determination, and awaited their masters’ arrival.
***
SystemLord released his instructions throughout his Sentry network and ordered his enormous ship Monitor to its intermediate stage of wakefulness. Soon the great animal would grow hungry, so it nudged the half-asleep leviathan toward the comet-line that girded the star system like a one-row orchard of ripe fruit trees.
One kilometer-wide ball made of water ice and useful elements vanished into the vast maw of the Meme-directed spheroid, then SystemLord turned Monitor in toward the orange dwarf star. Its shape changed from a lumpy ball to that of a disc, spreading surface area perpendicular to the solar radiation, becoming a vast collector of energy to process the water it had consumed. H2 and O2 were split, processed and stored separately: isotopes of hydrogen for fusion, and pure oxygen to sustain the living tissues.
On the way Monitor gulped two smaller asteroids, materials to be processed into ships and weapons with which to eradicate the Human disease that was certainly on its way. Within itself it began the gestation processes that would ultimately birth destruction for its enemies.
***
The 1500-hours All-Hands approached rapidly as the BioMed staff hustled to get everyone decanted and on their feet in time. As the active complement of task force Conquest numbered over fifty thousand, some of the last ones ended up listening to Admiral Absen’s address in the locker rooms, but most clustered around screens in their designated wardrooms and messes, sat in filled auditoriums, crowded into conference rooms or stood on the flight decks of assault carriers.
“Attention on deck!” Fifty thousand pair of boots snapped together in unison as Absen entered the main amphitheatre, and Master Helmsman Otis Okuda imagined he could feel them all through Conquest’s deckplates.
“Take your seats,” came next and he was happy to sit. Okuda unde
rstood the need for artificial gravity to be set high but disliked it nonetheless. His was the realm of trackless space, of piloting starships through the implanted wetware in his brain, not clomping around with his boots in the mud. Coal-black skin glistened with sweat at the unaccustomed effort.
“Good morning Conquest, and welcome to the year 2115,” Absen began, prompting a murmur of amusement from the audience. “A few of you have been out of stasis during the trip, but for the vast majority, you have been asleep since 2075. And as most of you already know, a powerful Meme fleet was due to hit Earth in 2110. But ladies and gentlemen, as I told those near me when I found out, there’s nothing we can do about it. Word of the outcome won’t reach us here for thirty-one years.”
“If EarthFleet won, some of us might eventually return to Earth, but even then it will be a different solar system. Those you know might be alive, but after a hundred years of separation, they won’t be the same people you knew.”
Absen swept the room with his pale sky-colored eyes, and cameras transmitted his craggy intensity throughout the ship. “And if we lost, then we might be the last true humans in existence. So just as I told you forty years ago when we started, I tell you again in all sincerity: Conquest is your world, and the people here are your family, your clan, your tribe, and your nation. If we do not conquer here, there is no retreat, no surrender. If we do not conquer here, we do not have the means to run. If we do not conquer here, humanity dies.”
Pausing to let that sink in, he turned to his officers. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Absen concluded, looking pointedly at his watch, “we are two weeks out.”
***
Master Helmsman Okuda settled comfortably into the sunken pit of the helm station, surrounded by holodisplays. The 4D screens were nearly superfluous as long as his linked wetware functioned, but like the manual controls in a computer-directed airliner they comforted him. Besides, regulations required them, and no one ever died from too many redundant systems. He reached up to his medusa, slotting retractable plugs into the interface sockets in his skull. Soon he resembled the mechanism’s namesake, his shaven pate a nest of snakelike wires.
Initiating the link opened his mind to a whole new universe. Godlike, he flew in the center of nothingness, perceiving the universe in all directions overlaid on his cockpit. He smelled the interstellar winds, tasted hydrogen atoms as the magnetic scoops swept them into fuel collectors, heard the radio sirens of pulsars and quasars and stars of every kind – Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
Magee’s High Flight stood enshrined in the heart of every Helmsman.
Actually, his sense of touch stayed deliberately unaltered, essential for grounding a linked Helmsman in the real world. Hands resting on the complex suite of manual controls, he touched them lightly like a pianist. Though his nerves now transmitted impulses with the speed of fiber optics, nothing had ever really improved on the sensitivity of those ten digits short of direct computer control. Okuda had that option; he could turn any and all functions over to one of Conquest’s supercomputers, and he often did. But ultimately, piloting had to come down to one Helmsman.
Or woman. He thought of his wife Celia deLille, Master Helmsman of the assault carrier Temasek, and the few days they would have together before Conquest initiated separation into its component ships. When it did, the massive mothership would spawn a fleet, and opportunities for visits would be rare. No doubt all those with lovers and spouses aboard – an unusually high percentage, since procreative ability was one criteria for the mission – were thinking the same thing: what will sex be like after forty years in stasis?
After his watch ended, Okuda found out it was still almost as good as piloting a starship.
***
“I am Sergeant Major Repeth,” she said in an amplified voice as she stood in front of Bravo Company, a reinforced unit of more than three hundred enlisted Marines. They stood on the flight deck of the assault carrier Temasek, which was still attached like a remora to Conquest. Troops lined up in eight platoons of about forty each. Bull ben Tauros and the other officers were deliberately absent.
“Those of you who have served with me know I like to be called by my first name. Swede,” she asked, turning to her rawboned First Platoon Sergeant, “tell these diggers what my first name is.”
“Last time I heard, forty years ago,” Master Sergeant Gunderson drawled, “it was SERGEANT MAJOR.” This elicited a few muffled chuckles from the newest Marines.
“How right you are.” She walked down the line in front of the platoons, glorying in the precise ranks of relaxed, well-trained troops. “Now some of you may have heard of some stunts I pulled in my younger days. I’m an old and crotchety woman now,” she said, drawing some laughter, as the Eden Plague kept everyone fit and youthful in body, “and I have no interest in showing you how tough I am. Back in the day, a woman had to prove herself to a bunch of stupid macho kids. Any more, I just let my record speak for itself. I’ve killed more squids and blobs than you greenies got boogers in your noses, and I still ain’t got my fill.”
“Besides,” she smiled nastily, “I know the lot of you young studs and studettes have the latest upgrades. You have laminated bones, cynbernetic nerves and muscles, nanite speed and strength and the Eden Plague to heal you up after you break yourselves. This task force was given the best of Earth’s limited resources. So I’m not going to let you waste it on dominance games. I will say this once and once only.” She swept the ranks with machine-gun eyes. “Do not test me. I would rather cull this herd of troublemakers now than let one stinking shitbird among you besmirch Bravo Company’s good name.” She scanned up and down the ranks, searching for any smirks, any hint of attitude or challenge, determined to make her example right away, as she always did.
This time she found nothing. This time, she thought, they know it’s as real as it gets. Fear of death doth wonderfully concentrate the mind.
Repeth’s smile became genuine, almost warm, lighting up her thin bony triathlete’s face. “But for those of you who give me one hundred percent, I will back you to the hilt, and so will your NCOs. If you have a problem, you bring it to your them and they will bring it to me. You do not bring your problems to officers, unless you mistakenly think the problem is me, which is proof positive you are hallucinating, at which time you will be sent to BioMed for psych-eval. Am I clear?”
Three hundred throats roared as one. “Clear, Sergeant Major!”
“Now I have spoken with your platoon sergeants and they will speak with your squad leaders and they in turn will speak with you. With this double-sized company there will be no jumping chain of command for any issue short of life or death. We have about nine days to get ready before we climb into the couches. The training schedule is posted, and I expect nothing less than your best. The only easy day was yesterday.” She saw Gunderson motion with his eyes off to her right and she turned to see Bull and his gaggle of lieutenant Platoon Leaders.
“Company: Tench-hut!” She marched precisely to the center front of the formation and turned it over to Major ben Tauros with a perfect salute that nevertheless managed to convey both eagerness and that certain worldly confidence common to all senior noncommissioned officers. The fact that her commander overtopped her by a full head and eight kilos somehow did nothing to diminish her presence as she marched to her position to listen to Bull’s first pep talk.
Yeah, it’s good to be back in charge of warriors.
Chapter 3
Five days out, Absen thought as Breakup time approached. Five days to live or die. His youthful appearance, product of the Eden Plague, belied his old soul. He had aged a hundred years when Kathleen and his children died in nuclear fire, and no amount of bodily rejuvenation could really make him young. He’d put the thought of another relationship on hold for the years he fought humanity’s war, and now he found himself again wondering if that had been a mistake.
Plenty of time if we win here. It will take decades for the Meme to react, to shi
ft forces to try to retake Gliese 370, and in that time we’ll be making babies. That prospect was so much easier with orders to back it up – when he had a reason, an objective: another generation of humans to replace losses and to carry on the fight, to go with the ready-made factories that would build more factories that would build ships and weapons to defend the new civilization.
Thence to conquer.
If we win. That’s on my shoulders.
“One minute until first stage separation,” Master Helmsman Okuda intoned quietly. He skimmed his screens, turning left and right to take in all of them, seeing nothing of concern except a few yellow lights in the later sequences.
“Initiate on the T-zero mark, Chief. Don’t wait for my word.” Absen had long since passed a need for the melodrama of giving history-making orders.
“Three, two, one, mark,” the computer’s voice said. Throughout Conquest the same voice spoke, synchronizing thought and action.
Those deep inside the great sphere continued about their business, secure in the knowledge that their parts would begin hours from now. Those on Conquest’s skin hovered hands over control boards and monitored automated sequences over their links, preparing for the moment when the ship became a fleet.
Each of thirty-seven war vessels fit into a vast puzzle-box five kilometers across: assault carriers, missile frigates and beam cruisers, and the massive railgun-equipped battleships. These latter were the first to detach, four enormous wedge-shaped ships layered thick with armor, heavy with billions of steel balls to be flung at the enemy by magnetic accelerators – railguns – the size of skyscrapers.
These drifted forward, maintaining their precombat role as Conquest’s defense against objects that might be in their path. All maneuvers now were performed with exaggerated slowness and care, until the huge ships gained enough separation.