Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest) (18 page)

“Thank you, Mister Ford.” Absen sat down in his own chair, drumming his fingers on the console next to him. “What’s the yield on an Exploder?”

“Depends on how much antimatter we want to load into one. Normally, about forty thousand megatons. Forty gigatons.”

“Four hundred times as powerful. Enough to kill a Destroyer in one blow.”

“Actually, sir,” Ford smiled grimly, “it’s enough to flash-fuse and vaporize any conventional matter within ten kilometers. It would make one hell of a dent in even
Desolator
’s neutronium-collapsium composite. Or our own.”

“How long would it take EarthFleet to gather enough antimatter to make an Exploder? A bomb of the same power?”

Ford’s eyes crossed and he reached slowly toward the console, then realized it was made to control flight operations and, even worse, was jury-rigged for crew audiovisuals. “I need to get to the bridge,” he muttered.

“No need,” Rick Johnstone said as he pulled out his link and plugged in. “I can access everything from here.” A moment later he spoke. “Six months to two years, depending on how efficient their collectors are. They don’t have
Desolator
’s technology.”

“So depending on how soon they started, they could have anywhere from a handful to several dozen Exploders.” Absen turned back to Vango Markis. “Well done, Major. The attack ships are hiding somewhere, and I’d bet my last bottle of real Earth champagne that the fleet’s biggest bombs are with them. Exploders, might as well call them, and probably the largest fusion missiles they can build.”

“That’s a pretty big deductive leap, sir,” Ford said.

Absen nodded. “It is.” He turned in his chair to face the weapons officer. “How do you find something that isn’t there?”

“What?”

Patiently, the captain said, “How do you locate something you can’t see?”

“By its absence,” Scoggins said excitedly. “By the hole it leaves.”

“Exactly. Scoggins, Johnstone, search the data for anything included about antimatter – research, projects, weapons, testing, anything.”

Several tense moments later, Rick shook his head. “There’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. In fact, I found deleted file markers where some things logically should be, as if someone made a hasty final global purge of anything related.”

“That proves it,” Scoggins added. “Why delete something that isn’t important?”

“Exactly,” Absen replied. “No matter how unlikely it would be for the enemy to intercept and decrypt this data package, someone wasn’t taking any chances. Just in case, they hid the most important secrets of this battle. The Thuds, and the Exploders. Together…together they could turn the tide.”

“If they get in close enough. If they can strike home,” Ford said, voice gloomy.

“We’ll do it if anyone can,” Vango said coldly, staring at the weapons officer. “I was on the original Aardvark missions, my Final Option bomb armed. With tens of thousands of Aerospace pilots ready to make the ultimate sacrifice.”

“And yet you’re still here,” Ford sneered. “Did you chicken out?”

Johnstone and Scoggins both leaped to intervene as Vango took an angry step toward Ford, raising his fist.

“Belay that!” Absen roared, rising to his feet. “Ford, you’re done for today. Confine yourself to quarters for twenty-four hours. No visitors, no communications. Dismissed.”

“Aye, sir,” Ford replied, stalking out.

“And you,” he pointed at Vango. “Officers do not brawl on duty. I decided to keep Aerospace as an elite and separate service of EarthFleet because of the unique demands on individual pilots. That doesn’t mean you get to fan rivalries among your fellow officers, all of whom have gone above and beyond the call of duty time and again.”

Vango stiffened to attention. “I apologize, sir.”

“Not good enough. When Ford is ready to be released for duty, you will be the one to tell him in person, and you will hash it out with him in his quarters. You can talk through it, you can put on the gloves and have a slugging match, or you can both stay in there and rot until you resolve your differences.” Absen gave an exasperated sigh. “Dismissed.”

Once the two men had gone, the captain eyed the rest of his officers. Scoggins seemed embarrassed for her husband, while Fletcher appeared cool and observant, and Rick Johnstone had a disgusted look on his face. Okuda caught Absen’s eye and shrugged slightly. COB Timmons stage-coughed and handed his boss a cup of coffee.

When he took a sip, Absen’s nostrils flared and he glanced at his old friend. The COB’s mouth twitched in a slight smile. “A little added punch. Since we can’t do anything but watch anyway.”

“This tastes like my best brandy. Tobias?”

The Steward’s ebony expression did not change as his head swiveled to reply. “It seemed appropriate to open your liquor cabinet for the occasion, sir.”

“Oh, I agree. Pass the bottle around.”

As they did, one of the audiovisual techs signaled Scoggins, who turned to the rest. “Looks like the battle is about to begin.”

The Jupiter system itself lay far from the enemy’s path, or one could say that the Meme had chosen an attack route well away from any obstacle. Instead of splitting their efforts, this time they bored straight in for the prize, apparently convinced they would smash through and win a frontal assault.

A line of EarthFleet asteroid rams and armed fortresses pointed directly toward the enemy group as if fired from Earth itself. Given the space between all the combatants, these formed a gauntlet of nearly seven hundred expendable giants. All personnel had been removed and computers controlled them now. The extra efficiency gained by putting crew on them was offset by their targets’ simplicity – just a bunch of big rocks.

Behind each grouping lay their respective combatant fleets.

The Destroyers had fallen back from the rocks about thirty light-seconds, two and a half minutes of travel at current speeds, like cavalry waiting to charge after the infantry engaged. Before them, between them and the asteroids, flew their swarm of stingships.

The Home Fleet, anchored by the seven teardrop dreadnoughts and twenty-two wedge-shaped battleships, hovered between Earth and the enemy, ready to finish off any rocks that made it through and, more importantly, to react to the Destroyer fleet’s movements.

Like football backs, they could shift in any direction to cut off the Meme drive toward the goal of Earth. They had the advantage of interior lines; every move they made could be shorter and quicker as the enemy tried to sweep down the sidelines. More like the soccer form of football than rugby or the American game, the goal was small, and in the center. If they swung wide, at some point the attackers had to angle inward toward the planet, or risk flying past and having to turn around.

Absen and the rest of the crew watched as the lead rocks engaged, some firing massive weapons or launching missiles, others merely smashing into each other. The Meme ram-bodies jinked and dodged, if those were words that could apply to such mountainous things, but at the speeds involved, a nudge of a hundred meters in any direction caused fast-flying projectiles, even energy beams, to slip by or strike only glancing blows.

A number on one of the smaller screens kept statistical track of the remaining total of enemy craft. Sixty-four large rocks had begun the engagement. Absen watched as that tally counted down into the fifties and then the forties as the lead asteroids were annihilated within seconds.

The Destroyers made a sudden and coordinated turn away from the stream of incoming EarthFleet fortresses, as many of the defenders’ rocks flashed by their targets. Once the asteroid fortresses had passed, the EarthFleet fortresses immediately focused their weapons on the enemy ships, which explained the Meme fleet’s maneuver. The massive living craft would simply avoid the lumbering human rocks, letting them drift helplessly into interplanetary space. By the time they reversed course, the battle would be over.

“Those two asteroids,” Absen leaned over Scoggins’ shoulder to tap the small screen at her console. “They didn’t seem to guide on the enemy rocks. They just zoomed through the formation and are now guiding on the Destroyers. And they have a lot of engine power, for rocks.”

“Yes, sir. You’re right.” Scoggins expanded the view of those two on a sub-screen, then let out a sound of exasperation. “No real data on those, sir. Just ID number and size, tonnage…almost nothing.”

“But the other fortresses and ram-bodies have more on them?”

“Yes, sir. Even the simple rammers have more stats listed.”

Absen punched Scoggins lightly on the shoulder, and then pointed at the screen. “I need all of the actual sensor data possible integrated into the synthesis, and focus the big screen on those two.”

“Sir?” Scoggins seemed surprised, but rushed to comply. Soon the main display showed the two rocks following the Destroyer fleet as it blasted sideways. The Meme seemed desperately to be trying to avoid those two lonely harmless asteroids.

The stingship swarm on the other hand kept itself in a loose disk, flattened like a shield between the Meme fleet and the pair. “Damn, they’re being cagey,” Absen said. “It was a good try, Huen, but I don’t think it will work this time.”

“What is it, sir?” Johnstone asked. “And do you mind being on speaker?”

“Go ahead, Rick,” the captain said. “I believe in just a few seconds you will see Huen’s first attempt at a surprise…there they go.”

Suddenly the icons for the two asteroids winked out, replaced by a blizzard of new ones that seemed to burst forth from the rocks. The fused realtime sensor feed, combining optical, radar, infrared and other data, showed pinpoints spreading out from the two flying objects, forming up into fleets of more than one hundred, and leaping toward the Destroyers.

“Thunderchiefs, ladies and gentlemen,” Absen narrated with grim acceptance. “Each armed, unless I miss my guess, with the heaviest missiles EarthFleet can fashion. They were able to get in close because the Meme did not consider those asteroids a threat at first, but they turned out to be one-time-use aerospace carriers.”

The missiles he predicted appeared a moment later, more than two thousand accelerating from the Thunderchiefs like cheetahs spotting antelope. Stingships leaped to intercept them.

One wave of fusion rockets led, another lagged. “At least two different types of missiles,” Absen said. “The first will run interference for the second, and the Thuds will follow them in. Damned brave people. This is another kamikaze run.”

The first wave of four hundred missiles met the cloud of four thousand stingships, and for a moment it seemed as if they would be wasted, picked off easily at a disadvantage of ten to one. But the lead warheads began winking out, replaced by enormous flares of energy that overloaded the sensors, forcing Scoggins’ AV team to pull the view back and engage virtual filters to try to make some sense of the engagement.

Seconds later, the first wave had done its work. Instead of easily picking off the missiles to protect the Destroyer fleet, the stingship screen had lost nine tenths of its number in the driving sleet of hard radiation and heat released by fusion warheads larger than Absen had ever seen. “Yield?” he asked.

“Raw energy in the hundred megaton range, as we predicted, but also, I picked up a lot of gamma. It looks like these were advanced bomb-pumped graser packages, very well aimed. At a guess, I’d say each had ten or twelve tubes, and most of them struck home.”

“That’s some fine shooting,” Absen replied. “Well planned, Huen. This may work out better than I thought.”

The second wave of about sixteen hundred missiles lost a hundred or so as it flashed through the remaining four hundred stingships, but at the speeds and accelerations involved, the enemy fighters seemed far less efficient than before. Absen thought probably many of them still suffered from the effect of the first wave, as if the living Meme ships were in shock.

The two hundred trailing Thunderchiefs easily finished off the stingships, firing their inline masers and defensive suites to cook the water-based Meme bioplasm of their enemies as they tried to chase down the missiles accelerating toward the Destroyers.

On the screen Absen could now see the combatants: sixty-four Destroyers blasting frantically to the side, trying to make an end run around the fifteen hundred missiles moving to intercept, with over two hundred Thuds driving frantically sideways to try to cut them off. Of course, all this happened while the Meme moved at two tenths of lightspeed in the general direction of Earth.

“Every bit we drive them off course buys EarthFleet time,” Absen said for the benefit of his crew. “The Meme are staying true to form. Even though they must know they need to crash through, their instinct is to minimize damage to their ships, holding the incoming missiles at range as long as possible to give them time to pick them off. That’s doubly true now that they have seen we armed those missiles with some really big warheads. No matter how heavily armored, a hundred megatons in a shaped charge will do significant damage.”

Absen did not even mention what else he suspected, preferring not to give his crew too much hope, only to have it dashed or not materialize as predicted.

Inevitably, the cloud of EarthFleet missiles would catch the Destroyers. As fast as the big ships could go, two things weighed against them.

First, human technology had evidently progressed to the point that the Meme could no longer simply run away; at least, not from missiles, which could withstand accelerations far higher than crewed ships.

Second, they were committed to attacking Earth, both doctrinally and physically. Even if they wanted to divert from their courses, they were already going so fast that they could not easily turn aside and then attack again. Like fighter planes at speed, they must continue forward, ever forward.