Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer (37 page)

Two big rocks, or three, might kill the planet.

“Ready for liftoff,” his helmsman said from beneath his medusa, eyes closed as usual.

With one final look around, Huen replied, “Proceed.”

Unlike
Artemis
’ maiden voyage full of nuclear-bomb sound and fury, this takeoff felt smooth if not powerful. The ring of twelve human-built fusion engines bolted onto the back of her, plus the four at her waist on gimbals as steering thrusters, was enough to lift her tonnage from the low gravity of Callisto and move her sluggishly around the solar system.

Compared to true warships like the new cruisers she was a fat cow.

Even so, Huen felt pride in the ship and her crew. Disparagers called her the biggest flying bus ever built. Kinder commenters called her an old workhorse, a supertanker past her prime but still useful. In reality she had been a mother ship, carrying enormous amounts of cargo and great numbers of engineers and workers for the space program. Without her, Earth and the Fleet would be a year, perhaps two behind where they were now.

That was no small thing, Huen kept telling himself. Unfortunately, outward greatness and heroism came in no small measure from luck, from being the right person in the right place at the right time. He shrugged to himself. Not everyone got all they deserved, and if the Buddha, heaven and the gods wanted him rewarded, they would do so. He was content.

Mostly.

“Rounding Callisto now,” the helmsman said, and Huen looked up from his musings to see the path the ship was taking. Immediately after launch from Grissom Base, she had turned to sweep low over the horizon like an enormous powered zeppelin, gaining altitude only slowly as she ran for the only cover available – the moon itself.
Artemis
was big enough and slow enough that one of the guided rocks might decide to target her, and so she zoomed into a half orbit that would end when she had put the bulk of Callisto between her and the swarm, and the Destroyer.

“Launch the probes,” Huen ordered, and his sensors officer did that thing. Icons for four tiny stealth satellites joined the rest on the big display. These would provide eyes and ears to see and hear what occurred on the other side of the moon.

Now the display showed nineteen incoming rocks aimed at Grissom, just as
Artemis
rounded the edge of the moon, moving out of the line of fire. As fast as they came on, the rocks could not turn quickly enough to alter course and sweep behind the planet to get at the ship, even if they tried.
Artemis
was a mouse hiding behind a big tree from a herd of charging buffalo.

Huen breathed a sigh of relief.
Artemis
had a full array of bolted-on point-defense lasers as hyper defenses, but those had a range of only a thousand kilometers and not a lot of power, and all together probably could not destroy even one rock. That’s why she had had to pull up from the surface, after the civilians had gone to the shelters and the stalwart Marines had set up their defenses.

It still felt like running away. It just felt wrong.

“We are in place, sir,” the helmsman reported. Now the big, unarmored ship hung in space above the back side of the moon, with Jupiter over her shoulder, using engines to hover gently instead of orbiting. It seemed wasteful of fuel, but the tanks were full and
Artemis
could hold here for weeks if necessary, fighting against a mere three hundredths of a G.

Huen finally identified what had been bothering him when Steward Schaeffer entered the bridge from the back door, the one that led directly to officers’ country and his quarters. The man seemed surprised at something, and took a position at his admiral’s elbow.

“Senior Steward Shan is occupied?” Huen asked. He vaguely remembered his enormous shadow saying something about needing to take care of a duty before they took off. Shan’s absence, now that he noticed it, had been niggling at his mind, especially with no other steward to fill that place.

“I’m not sure, Admiral. I can’t raise him.” Schaeffer tapped his jaw as a shorthand for his short-range internal radio. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say he wasn’t on the ship.”

“CyberComm, put out a request for Senior Steward Shan to contact the bridge, please,” Huen ordered.

A moment later the assistant helmsman called from the auxiliary bridge, where an alternate crew of controllers stood ready to take over in case the main bridge became unable to function. “Sir, Senior Steward Shan left in a shuttle just before takeoff.”

Huen froze, controlling his breathing. “I did not authorize that,” he replied.

“Sorry, sir. No one prohibited the launch, and he did follow proper procedure, informing the bosun, who logged the departure.”

Huen realized this was true; there would have been no reason to inform him that a shuttle launched, assuming the occupant was otherwise authorized – and Shan had access codes to almost everything. Suspicion flared that after all these years together, all the trust that had been built up between them, the man-mountain had nevertheless for some reason turned coat.

But to whom? The leaders of the People’s Republic of China had kept their political behavior well within the bounds of good sense, stalwartly supporting the defense of Earth. What could they gain by activating Shan, if he was their agent? What could he possibly do that would benefit China without risking Earth’s very survival?

Then Huen stamped hard on that thought.
If that is true, then I am the biggest fool ever born to woman. Whatever Shan is doing, I refuse to believe it is a betrayal. Instead, it must be something he believes important enough to…to take extraordinary initiative.

“Please relay through the probes and try to raise Senior Steward Shan.”

After two minutes of trying, the CyberComm officer shook his head. “No luck, sir. I’ve tried the shuttle and his internal radio, as well as querying the Marines on Grissom. No one has seen him.”

Giving up his citizenship had not given up his heart for the land of his birth.

That is why you are here. You fight and die so they can grow the food and live.

Two enlisted men accompanied him. All three wore survival suits and sat in crash chairs in a small control room a thousand meters deep inside an asteroid fortress. Cables carried command and sensor data to and from antennas and weapons on the surface – two railguns and a beam array, and transceivers to control the six other, smaller automated guns planted on nearby rocks.

The seven floated far enough off Jupiter to be little affected by its gravity. Located directly between the enemy and Earth, they expected to draw first blood.

Probably the blood will be ours. I volunteered, and I have made peace with my maker. For the honor of the King and the life of my family, I stand here and I will not yield passage. Mother Mary and the saints preserve us all.

“All is well?” he asked in his accented English.

“
Si, jefe
,” PO2 Esteban Mercadez replied. “We approach the ten minute firing mark.”

“It is the enemy who approaches, not us,” rumbled PO3 Sven Waldner in his clipped Teutonic tones. “Or one could say, the ten minute mark approaches.”

Mercadez rolled his eyes at the German’s hairsplitting, and d’Lorenz shrugged and smiled. “No matter what the words,” he soothed, “the effect is the same. Prepare to fire on primary target.”

The common display screen filled the front of the room. Most of it showed a game-like graphic of icons representing inbound rocks. One in the center pulsed redder than the rest.

“Ten minutes,
signor
.”

D’Lorenz nodded. “Invite our friends to launch missiles.”

Ten million kilometers back from his small weapons array, the broad swath of Aardvarks in formation began firing missiles as they received his request. Each attack ship launched one of its sixteen weapons.

The control room’s screen filled briefly with the evidence of sixty thousand Pilums maneuvering before Waldner cleaned up the display, simplifying everything to a manageable level.

Behind them, the missiles found their targets and lined up, approximately six per rock. They formed themselves into trailing formations hundreds of kilometers apart, to explode in strings as the rocks passed through their zones, more like mines than missiles. Though launched first, they would engage after the direct fire weapons.

“Callisto base is firing.” Waldner pulled back the display to show plotted lines of railgun shot arcing out from the moon of Jupiter, intersecting enemy rocks about a minute before they were due to fly through the asteroid fortresses’ area. Other arrows reached out ahead and faster, enormous ground-mounted beam weapons of collimated coherent energy – lasers and masers and particle beams, streaking at the speed of light to begin their work of heating, warping and fragmenting the speeding chunks.

D’Lorenz looked over the broad display once more. “I find it interesting that so few rocks aim for Callisto. How many?”

“Nineteen,” Waldner replied.

“With their massive weapons, they will likely take no damage at all. This seems odd.”

Waldner only grunted, and Mercadez gave a very Spanish shrug.

D’Lorenz put curiosity aside and ordered, “Commence weapon array firing, primary target only.”

Up on the surface the beam array fired, a sustained ten-second burst that drained its capacitors. Simultaneously the energy guns on the other rocks threw their power along similar axes, all aiming for one rock.

Immediately afterward, all seven asteroids’ railguns vomited dense streams of ball bearings, accelerated to ten thousand kilometers per second by the megajoules of electricity in the systems’ capacitors. Stabilizers struggled to keep the lines aimed at the primary target, the one incoming rock aimed directly at the command center. Recoil from the guns affected their aim and even made the asteroids yaw fractions of degrees. Fusion thrusters fired, trying to compensate.

That tiny amount of movement was enough to cause the streams to miss at the distances involved, thus the extreme number and density of shots to compensate. Within a minute the railguns had exhausted their capacitors and shut down to recharge.

D’Lorenz watched as the power on his weapons slowly rebuilt. They would be ready just a minute before the rocks arrived, giving his array one more set of shots at close range.

“
Herr Leutnant
,” Waldner said, jarring d’Lorenz out of his thoughts. The petty officer gestured at the screen. “We see hits on the rocks. Callisto base’s beams are powerful.” He worked to sort out the thousands of targets, showing a small but increasing number broken up. That readout climbed to two digits and then, barely, to three as it totaled more than one hundred.

“Our railgun impacts are showing up now,” Mercadez said, zooming in on the primary target. Results of the other strikes were interesting, even important, but the rock coming their way represented a duel to the death.

D’Lorenz could have tried to maneuver his asteroids. Even small movements could have made the enemy rocks miss – if they did not each have a Meme guidance package that would compensate. Also, to attempt that would give up use of their weapons. The same engine that moved the asteroids provided firing power.

So, we stand and fight
, he told himself calmly.
Perhaps soon I will see Papa in God’s heaven, and will be able to face him with pride.

Suddenly his petty officers cheered as the primary target broke apart under the barrage of steel.

“Firing plan Bravo,” the Belgian said. “Separate target protocol.” Now that the first threat to the three men had been dealt with, they would seek to do as much damage to the swarm as possible, chipping away at the rocks so that defenders behind would have that much less to fight.

Watching the small number climb from one hundred to nearly one-fifty gratified him greatly. His little crew, combined with the Callisto base, had already eliminated more than one percent of the threat, and soon the total would grow to more than two percent.

Mercadez yipped, “
Jefe
! A rock is turning toward us!” On the display the predicted path of one of the undamaged chunks curved like a live thing and intersected Weapons Array 887 Control – their asteroid.

D’Lorenz gripped his chair reflexively. “Retarget all weapons. Continuous maximum fire.” He stared at the track and the icon as the time to impact counted down past forty seconds. “Give us an optical picture please, Sven.”

Waldner tapped a control and waited, with nothing else to do. The automated targeting systems locked onto the inbound rock already were doing their utmost, and no merely human intervention could improve that. The main screen changed from representative icons to a pure optical feed, a telescope focused on the nemesis bearing down on them.

Lumpy and irregular, the blackish chunk of rock sparkled and glittered under the impacts of coherent energy and railgun balls, but still on it came. “Big bastard,” Mercadez mumbled. “Almost one thousand meters across.”

This assessment chilled d’Lorenz. Even while their weapons blew off pieces of the flying mountain, its very size made destroying it unlikely. “Spare five seconds of railgun power for a burst at point-blank range, minimum distance,” he ordered.

“
Jawohl, Herr Leutnant
,” Waldner replied while Mercadez stared aghast.

“It will hit us!” the Spaniard protested. “Keep firing,
senor Teniente!
”