Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer (29 page)

Fortunately he’d only experienced three subjective days. Between the chips in his head and the computers in his Aardvark, his sense of passing time had been slowed to the point where this confined space seemed merely irritating rather than unbearable.

Hitting the
Decant
control caused gravity to come on and the gel to begin draining away, leaving him nude and standing in a cramped shower-like stall. Once he pulled the connectors out of his cranial sockets and put their caps back in, he turned on a spray of gloriously hot water and washed himself thoroughly. It was likely the only such he was going to have unless he survived and returned from this mission.

Reluctantly he stepped out, driven by duty and also by the vaguely unsettled feeling of being unlinked. After a year with his brain connected to the machines, there was definitely something missing, as if background music were suddenly shut off, or a breeze died. He remembered the briefings about virtuality addiction and VR confusion, but those were supposed to only apply after long subjective times in the artificial universe. The whole point of slowing things down was to combat those effects.

Then again, no one had ever been stuck in a coffin for a year with a plug in his head, until now.

The shower chamber door folded into one wall to make a small room about two by two by one meter. Aardvarks did not have much spare space, though not because the fuselage wasn’t large enough. Rather, this was all the room engineers could find by rerouting and rearranging systems that had not originally been designed to accommodate it, not to mention adding more gravplates to make sure the somnolent occupant wasn’t turned into jelly under hard acceleration.

A standard attack ship had a cockpit barely big enough to squeeze into, which had been designed to keep the pilot alive for several days. Theoretically it could have been modified to perform the function of the coffin. In fact, debate had raged about the need to put in the sleep cabin, but in the end the psychologists had convinced the bean counters that the people would function better,
significantly
better, for not waking up and having to fight in the same place they had been breathing, being fed through tubes, urinating and defecating for a year.

Vango was very glad of it now.

He did some knee bends and stretched. While his muscles had been electrostimulated and his joints had been moved in the coffin, he still felt weak and stiff. The doctors had postulated unknown effects, and so they had been on the side of the head-shrinkers in supporting the extra space.

Once he had worked the kinks out, he turned on the cabin’s screen, which took up one entire wall. It came to life showing a mountain meadow scene, designed to communicate placid openness, with wildflowers waving in a gentle breeze. He left it on as he dressed, taking his time. Wherever they were, the ship systems would have woken him at least twenty-four hours before anticipated combat. Had there been some emergency or other timetable, the ship’s computer would already be hounding him about it.

A few minutes to get his head together wouldn’t hurt.

Skinsuit, G-suit, then exosuit, though if the ship was damaged badly enough that he needed the latter to resist hard vacuum, things would be very bad indeed. Still, he was happy for any edge he could get.

Boots came next, sealing themselves to the exosuit, but he didn’t put the helmet on just yet. Instead, he opened the door to the cockpit.

Movies usually showed such spaces as large, with room to move around. Virtual control obviated any need for that. In this case, Vango turned as he stepped through the door and backed up into his seat that appeared to be bolted to the wall. With no up or down except as dictated by gravplates and acceleration, this arrangement made the most sense.

Now he put on his helmet as he leaned against the vertical seat. Once he’d sealed it and attached his suit to its various feeds – air, water, cooling, sewage, and the all-important electronics – he closed the cockpit hatch and started on his checklist, running down all of
Lark
’s systems manually, according to the book. Some pilots took the shortcut and skipped this step, relying on the cybernetic systems to tell them if anything went wrong, but he doggedly stuck to the manual.

Soon he found something…odd. Two of his sixteen Pilum missiles had been launched during his long sleep, and he’d not been notified. It must have been a command override, some kind of change of plan.

Also, that niggling feeling was becoming a full-blown jones to link, confirming his suspicion; VR space was addictive, even when subjective time was slowed. Being connected for that long hadn’t done him any favors, and he wanted to find out just how bad it would get.

It got bad. He’d long since finished the checklists and so just sat there, alone in his suit in his tiny cockpit, another kind of coffin: one in which he might die. Waves of anxiety washed over him, and he doggedly ignored his medcomp when it suggested administering something to take the edge off.

Over a half hour went by on the clock before an incoming message pinged its alert. He took it on audio only.

The voice of Vango’s squadron leader, Richard “Dick” Hiser, spoke calmly. “Two Sierra Thirty-three, this is Two Sierra Thirty. What’s the trouble, Vango?”

Vango reached out to switch to a private channel. “I’m here, boss. Feeling some kind of psychological effects. Trying to see what the limits are before I plug in.”

“What kind of effects?”

“I think it’s some kind of VR addiction.”

“Yeah. Some others have reported it too. You just have to link up and it will go away.”

Vango licked his lips. “I don’t like adding to the problem before I even know what it is.”

Hiser’s voice took on an edge of irritation. “If this were training, I’d agree with you, but we’re twenty-two hours out and I need you in the link. You’re the last one in the whole damned armada, and you’re holding everyone up. Plug in now.”

“Yes, sir.” Vango couldn’t keep a certain sulkiness out of his voice, but the young pilot forced himself to be professional. Hiser was right anyway, Vango thought. The possibility of addiction or scrambling his brains was far smaller than the threat of being killed.

Or of failure. He plugged in.

Immediately all the negative emotions went away with his physical self. Instead, he now felt as if he occupied the body of a hundred meter long machine equipped with the best systems humanity could build. Cameras, radar and lidar were his new eyes, radios his ears.
Lark
’s hull was his skin, his legs his engine and thrusters, and his weapons, fists with which to smite his enemies.

Glorious
.

Around him he saw a handful of attack boats on optical, none closer than ten kilometers away. Tiny comm lasers painted these nearest kin, and Vango knew theirs painted him and their neighbors in turn, connecting all thirty-thousand-odd ships in a vast web. As none of the vessels pointed their beams forward, none would be detectable to the enemy they now presumably approached.

The planners had predicted that even such a large number of ships would be invisible in the vastness of space, given their small size, stealthy radar-detecting angles and absorptive coatings. As the armada got closer the probability of detection increased, of course, but they hoped to delay that moment as long as possible.

“Go ahead and initiate your briefing package,” Hiser said, and Vango told the computer to comply. Immediately space opened up like a high-res 3D video game. Inside virtual reality he could send his presence swooping to any point, view from any angle, as long as the information was there.

General Yeager’s recorded voice seemed to speak in his ear. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is One Alpha One. We are here.” A vast disc, over two thousand kilometers across, flashed blue in his view, representing all of the armada arrayed like an enormous pizza pan coasting silently through space, flat side to the enemy. Where they thought the enemy should be, that is.

“Here is the enemy location EarthFleet intel predicted. Like all intel tends to be, this is true, but still wrong. The stealth drones have spotted something
here
.” A point far off to the side flashed once, then turned a steady red. “In fact, two somethings. Two separate intermittent drive emanations, of low power but still easily detectable. Observation data records backtrack them to the predicted location’s vicinity, so we know the readings are associated with the Meme ships, but we don’t know why there are two. Worst case, there could be two Destroyers. Or it could be a couple of auxiliaries doing who knows what. Intel predicted they would graze out here, but they also said it would only take them a few weeks to refuel.”

On the recording Yeager took a deep, ragged breath, sounding tired. That didn’t make sense to Vango; the old man was a rejuv after all, and the Eden Plague should have restored his vitality just like it had his own grandfather David and his father Daniel. He wondered.

“In fact, this whole force is now headed for this position,” Yeager’s voice went on, and a cursor moved to indicate a point midway between the enemy’s original and current locations. “That was the best I could do on cold thrusters alone.”

Cold thrusters meant just liquefied gases, heated enough to use as reaction mass. The ability of these tiny weak jets was limited, but they had none of the energy signature of fusion motors or chemical rockets. In this case, Vango deduced the general had used them to alter the fleet’s course.

Quickly Vango had the computer run calculations extrapolating backward, using the strength of the cold thrusters and the distances involved. When he saw the numbers, he realized the fleet had begun to turn, very slowly, more than sixty days ago. That’s how early he must have altered course to achieve even that much.

He shuddered. General Yeager had been awake for nine weeks.

Now Vango examined the geometry and realized that they were nearing the point where they would have to light up their fusion engines if they intended to engage the enemy, or go flashing past. Once they went hot, they would be visible for all to see.

Now he knew why Yeager sounded so rough. He’d been living in a box the size of a closet, in and out of VR space, for two months. If he felt the way Vango had, he’d been fighting the effects of VR addiction outside the link, and then making it worse by giving in to the urge. At best he could slow his time sense now and then to make the hours pass faster, but unlike in the coffin, he had to get out of the suit and the cockpit from time to time.

There also wasn’t nine weeks of food and water there, not at normal activity levels. He must have either starved himself, or put himself back in the coffin one more time. There was only enough biogel for two uses – one out, one back. If he had done that, Yeager might have given up his only chance to get home.

Vango’s stomach roiled despite the VR overlay. The man was a legend, a bona-fide hero, from the Second World War on through the time of the space race and into this uncertain future. Rejuvenation had given him another shot at glory, but eventually everyone’s number came up.

Vango rewound the recording once he realized he had stopped listening, and picked up where the general’s voice had left off. “So here’s the plan. At IP Alpha, we begin a maximum burn to fall on the enemy like a blanket.” Lines and diagrams swept through the VR space, showing the proposed routes. The disc of the armada, or blanket in the general’s metaphor, flexed forward at the edges until it became concave, the Meme ship or ships at the center.

“Calculations show that if they react immediately and violently, they can skate out from under our blanket. As far as we know, even big Meme ships can accelerate faster than we can. But they can’t accelerate fast enough to avoid these, not as fast as they are already going. ”

A green ring appeared, off to the side and forward of the armada and centered on the enemy. It was larger than the edge of their circle of ships, and traveled only a bit faster. “I’m sure you all noticed that you lost two missiles each from your load. I launched them some time back, when I was revived. Using their chemical guidance thrusters only, I had them maneuvered into the position you see. I am hoping that if the enemy runs for the edge of the blanket, some of these missiles will catch them. We won’t be that far behind. If the warheads can slow the enemy down, perhaps we can finish them off.”

“That’s the worst case. The best case is that we catch them flatfooted. Maybe they decide to attack us or break straight through us, giving us an opportunity to damage or even destroy them. Whatever happens, though, remember that flexibility is the key to airpower. I can’t control thirty thousand ships, or even thirty wing commanders. Be aggressive and you can’t go wrong.”

“And trading us for them is a win for Earth. We all knew that when we started. Damaging them will mean they are less capable when they get to the solar system, or that they will have to go back to feeding and healing, delaying them significantly. That is also a win for Earth. Every day, week or month we buy means more ships and more weapons at home.”

The general’s voice strengthened once more. “I’ll leave you now to coordinate with your units. Remember your duty, remember your loved ones behind you. Remember Earth. Good luck, and good hunting.”

Emotions flooded into the silence the general had left behind. Fear, uncertainly, and hatred toward the enemy that threatened his home, but also determination and desire, the joy and eagerness to engage the hated Meme no matter what they looked like or what kind of ships they had. The simulations gave thirty thousand ships an outside chance of beating a Destroyer.

Vango resolved to do his part, or die trying.