Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer (14 page)

Another motive, supposedly hidden from his family but in reality quite obvious to all, was his desire to fly an Aardvark. Ever since the A-24 program had gone public, in general if not in detail, he’d known he was meant to be part of it.

Vincent had learned to fly from his grandfather, David Markis, starting on an old Cessna at the age of eight, and had never looked back. From then on it was what he lived and breathed, all he wanted to do: fly, fly, fly.

As the son of the most influential man on the planet, he had been afforded ample opportunity to do so. Fortunately, like his grandfather, he turned out to be a natural aviator. Between the two, getting an appointment to the Academy had been no problem, especially as the program had been expanded to more than ten times its former size, pumping out young officers at an amazing rate to fulfill the space program’s needs.

“Congratulations, son,” Daniel said as he and Vincent’s mother Elise fastened down the new insignia. A handshake for his father and a hug for his mother came next, then pictures as the crowd jostled around them, each new officer surrounded by family, friends and well-wishers.

“One more thing, sir,” Daniel said, startling his son with the honorific. The Chairman of the free Communities Council drew himself up to a rigid position of attention and snapped off a salute sharp enough to cut silk. “You outrank me now, Lieutenant. I mean, Leftenant,” he continued with a gleam in his eye. “I retired as a mere master sergeant, you know.”

Forcing himself not to laugh, Second Lieutenant Markis returned his father’s salute, then fished in his pocket for an antique silver dollar and handed it to the older man. Doing so carried on an American tradition possibly begun during the Colonial period, where the newly-minted officer gave such a coin to the first enlisted person to render that courtesy.

Daniel chuckled and spun the heavy orb into the air, catching it with an overhand grab. “This will go in a place of honor on my desk, son. Now let’s go get out of this sun and grab some lunch. Unfortunately I have to be back at the office by two for a teleconference.”

Vincent shrugged wryly, long used to the demands of politics on his father. “Good idea, Dad. Indian food?”

“I already made reservations,” his mother Elise replied. “Sorry your brother and sister couldn’t make it.”

“That’s all right. I know they’re busy,” he replied. His elder brother Ezekiel Markis, was studying to be a mechanical engineer at MIT. Just like Ezekiel Denham, he was named for their respective fathers’ mutual best friend Zeke Johnstone, who died just before Infection Day. Their younger sister Elizabeth was just up the road at the university in Cape Town but had final exams today.

“So, what’s the next step?” Elise asked as they climbed into the armored SUV mandated by Daniel’s political status. In front and behind, other vehicles, lights flashing, shooed cars out of the way with brief whoops of their sirens.

“Straight into jet trainers, then transition to F-35s.” The workhorse multirole fighter was old but still filled out many country’s inventories, especially for training. “After that, out to the Callisto base for Aardvarks.”

Vincent noticed his mother’s face faltered at the mention of the attack ships, and his father’s subtly hardened. He wondered whether the rumors were true – that each A-24 would carry an enormous fusion bomb for kamikaze use. It didn’t matter to him if it did; he didn’t expect to use it, but if he had to, he had to.

That Others May Live
, the motto of his father’s US Air Force Pararescue specialty, had seeped deep into his bones, as had his family’s record of heroism and military service. Markises had served with distinction from the American War for Independence onward – at Saratoga, Gettysburg, Iwo Jima, Hue, and Afghanistan to name just a few. With his elder brother taking after his mother, pursuing a career in the sciences, it fell to him to continue the tradition.

“Mom, Dad, don’t worry. We’ll beat this thing. With you guys on the job, and Admiral Absen running the show, we can’t lose.”

His mother and father exchanged glances again. Sure, they were worried. Parents always worried, it seemed, but everything worked out. Besides, if there really was an afterlife in heaven like Aunt Cassie insisted, what was to there fear about death?

This time would be a bit different. Less than a month ago the last of thousands of Pseudo-Von-Neumann factory complexes had taken up residence atop its soft-landed asteroid. Until then, each manufactory had been building nothing but more factories. One made two, two made four, and so on. Now there were over eight thousand, spaced regularly across the entire surface of the planetoid.

This was necessary mainly to control the heat each would generate. The carefully-selected metal-rich asteroids actually floated, in a sense, atop a sea of frozen ices – much of it water, but also methane and other volatiles. Raising the temperature even a few degrees, from the pressure of the weight of the rocks and also the leakage from the fusion power generators, presented all sorts of challenges. Bases would settle and shift; random pockets of oxygen found flammable gasses and burned or exploded; crevasses opened unexpectedly as the planetoid was mined for its materials.

People died, and often. Peacetime safety protocols had long since fallen by the wayside. Workers took risks and most of the time got away with them, driven by the oncoming desperation and the knowledge that anyone who survived could be restored.

Artemis
provided a safe base atop the largest of the rock mountains, containing administration, hospital facilities, and every other metaphorical dog and cat that happened to need care and feeding. Thus it was here that the admiral landed and received his briefings, but that was not really his purpose. He was here for a more important, if symbolic reason.

He strapped himself into the cockpit of a shuttle, one of hundreds that workers used to service the factories. While largely automated, nothing humans had yet created was truly maintenance-free. Everything needed supervision, tending, and the repair that only a set of human hands could perform. That meant thousands of people, keeping the PVNs, as they were colloquially known, in running order.

Of course, by doing so, they ensured the PVNs would eventually produce hundreds of millions of man-hours worth of warships for the defense of Earth and its solar system.

Now the shuttle pilot flew her dozen passengers the short hop over to VN1, the very first factory to be emplaced. On the next rock mountain over, roughly ten kilometers away, they landed on the designated pad of the huge factory complex. Three hundred meters on a side and twenty high, the integrated building contained everything necessary to produce EarthFleet’s best hopes for victory.

A score of workers could be seen standing inside the PVN’s crew compartment at the thick molecular glass window, looking at the arriving shuttle. A couple of them waved. “Are we going inside?” Absen asked as the pilot made no move to unstrap.

“No, sir,” the woman said, “unless you insist. We can get just as good a view from right here, and save ourselves a lot of time and trouble.” She popped a lever on her seat and rotated it a quarter turn toward the center, the better to address her passengers. Her name tag read “Lockerbie” and she wore a warrant officer’s bar.

“So –” Absen began to ask, when she pointed out the front shuttle viewport. He turned to see enormous double doors, sized for a jumbo jet hangar, begin to open slowly, withdrawing into recesses.

General Tyler moved up to squat between the seats, and others in the shuttle shuffled forward to crane their heads for a piece of the view. “What we should be seeing is the very first Aardvark to be produced solely by a PVN. It and about a hundred others will be the operational prototypes for testing and evaluation. We started production on these three months earlier than the rest, to give us time to revise the runs based on the results.”

“Aardvark? I thought these were called A-24 Avenger IIs.”

Tyler shrugged. “Officially, sure, but A-10 Thunderbolt IIs were called Warthogs, and pilots called F-16 Fighting Falcons
Vipers
…some battles are just not worth fighting. Besides, you’ll see why it got its nickname in a minute.

The doors finally opened to reveal the front of the craft inside, a proboscis that started squat and thick but narrowed rapidly to a truncated point like the nose of its namesake. The thing was ugly, that much was clear. A blocky utilitarian craft with nothing of beauty about it, nevertheless Absen found himself wanting to love it, because it represented life and salvation for his planet.

The Aardvark rolled slowly out of the hangar, drawn by a robot tug cart toward its metal-surfaced launch pad. Almost a hundred meters long, thirty wide and twenty high, it looked more like a high-speed train engine than a spacecraft. Unlike that vehicle, it sprouted nodes and fittings all over its surface.

“Pretty big for one person,” Absen remarked. “Looks kind of like a squared-off submarine with no sail.”

“Remember their final option,” Tyler answered. “If they are going to suicide, why put more than one person in it?”

“Point. But can just one person really pilot that thing?”

“They’ll have fully functional cybernetics just like a helmsman,” Tyler said. “In fact, once the real op starts, they might never unplug. There is a sophisticated computer suite that can run the ship while the pilot sleeps or if he or she is incapacitated, but basically, everything is one integrated system.”

“Who’s in there now?” Absen asked.

“Old fighter pilot named Yeager. You might have heard of him.”

“What? You mean –”

“Yup. Courtesy of the Eden Plague, he’s young and fit again. Volunteered to lead the attack on the Destroyer. Couldn’t exactly say no to a legend, could we?”

“Holy crap. Well, who better? I guess I should be glad Bull Halsey isn’t still around or I’d be out of a job.” Absen watched as the A-24 came to life, its fusion engines glowing slightly as Yeager tested them at low power.

“He should do about ten minutes of preflight before taking her up,” Tyler remarked.

“Well, while we’re waiting, why don’t you brief us on her specs?” Absen asked this for the benefit of the others behind him, as he already knew the A-24 pretty thoroughly. On paper.

“All right, in brief. Two Rolls Royce F-1244 fusion engines generating a million kilos of thrust each. Between those and the new gravity compensating plates, it can accelerate at about thirty Gs while the pilot only feels five. As its main armament it carries a centerline microwave laser, or maser, up front in that funny-looking nose, optimized against Meme bioplasm. That’s a general-purpose weapon, to try to fend off any hypers coming its way, or deal with any small craft the Destroyer might launch. Kind of like the PT boats carrying a 40mm deck gun.”

“Okay. But how is it going to hurt a ship two or three thousand meters in diameter?”

“Nukes, obviously. Well, technically, hybrid thermonuclear fusion bombs. We don’t have anything bigger or nastier. These are analogous to the torpedoes the PT boats carried.”

“PT boats only had four to six torpedoes, though. How many do these carry?”

“Sixteen. Well…seventeen, technically.”

Absen got it immediately. “The last one being the final option bomb.”

“Yes. If the pilot arms it, the computer will continually compare the Aardvarks’ situation with a set of standard parameters and will detonate the bomb at the optimum moment.”

“Such as?”

Tyler cleared his throat. “Such as at the closest point of approach to a Meme craft of a certain size or larger. Just in case the COA where the enemy builds a fleet in the Oort Cloud comes to pass.”

“Why not at impact?” Absen asked.

“At the speeds they will probably be going, impact will be too late. If the computer tries to wait until the ship rams, it will be vaporized before the detonation sequence is finished.”

“Sure wish we could get those antimatter bottles working right,” Absen mumbled. “Best impact fuse around. Just keep matter and antimatter apart, and if anything breaks the containment…boom!”

“Notwithstanding the fact that less than a gram of antimatter has ever even been created by humans,” Tyler replied, “it will be twenty or thirty years at least before we harness that kind of technology. Even Raphaela’s mad scientists have not been able to crack that one.”

Absen nodded. “All right then, let’s stick to current realities. Tell me more about those missiles.”

“The other sixteen warheads are on Pilum guided missiles. We expect the Aardvark to launch a spread, then follow it in.”

“That’s assuming we can even catch the damn Destroyer.”

Tyler nodded. “Yes, I’ve seen the Red-Blue simulations. It’s going to be tricky just to bring it to battle.”

“What else does your baby carry?” Absen asked for the benefit of the briefing.

“Nothing offensive. We’re having to go for cheap and numerous, so there’s a limit to what we can load aboard. It has a suite of small lasers and some electronic shotguns as point-defense weapons, but those are more in hopes they will be useful against unknowns than out of any belief they can stop an enemy hyper at speed.”

Absen turned to the rest, production officials and staff officers lucky enough to come along on this trip. “Our projections say we will eventually be able to build about ninety thousand of these attack boats.” He paused to let that sink in. Some of them knew it already but others gasped. “We’re going to be like the Zulus attacking rifle-armed troopers at Isandlwana. A shitload will die, but those that get through will close and kill the enemy.”

“How many?” one civilian reporter asked. “How many will die?”