Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest) (19 page)

Third, Absen added in his own mind, they cared more about their own lives than humans did. As the blend Raphaela Denham had explained to him so long ago, Meme were egoists, unwilling to sacrifice self for the good of their fellows. That gave humans the edge, and it showed as the incredibly powerful fleet of sixty-four destroyers shied away from the relatively small force it faced.

On the other hand, Absen mused, if his suspicions were correct, they may have a very good reason to keep their distance.

“Captain, there’s something strange about these missiles,” Rick Johnstone said. “I’ve been running simulations and analyzing their communications and telemetry – just to keep myself busy, you understand.”

“Go on.”

“Well, sir, they aren’t acting exactly like any missiles I’ve ever seen. There are too many random variations and anomalies – in their flight paths, in their corrections, their formations, the distances from their fellows…”

Scoggins spoke up. “Could they have some kind of randomized heuristic pseudo-AI in them?”

“That’s what I thought at first, but there are also the comms…I can’t decrypt them, but the metadata I can see, the rise and fall of transmission strength and tone, seems less like machine code and more like, well…human speech.”

Absen’s mind raced. “Missiles with people in them?” he hazarded.

“No, sir. Not possible at the accelerations they have displayed, according to all we know about current technology.”

“AIs then. Experimental, perhaps.”

The sound of a throat clearing from the doorway to the control room caused the rest to look up from the screen. Ezekiel Denham and Spooky Nguyen stood there. “May we come in, Captain?” the Blend asked.

“Of course. Sit down.”

The two took free chairs and then Ezekiel made a throat-cutting motion to Scoggins, who turned off the feed to the flight deck. “Not AIs, I think, sir.”

Absen looked at the screens and then back at the tall but unassuming son of Skull Denham and Raphaela. “What, then?”

“Engrams.”

“What’s an engram?”

“A recording of a human mind, placed inside a Meme bio-receptacle, a blank cloned brain. Or perhaps a computer, though I don’t see that having any advantage.”

“So the missiles have copies of human minds as controllers, you think, instead of computers?”

“Augmenting and controlling the computers, more probably.”

“Something else you’ve kept from us all these years, then.” Absen’s face had turned dark.
These Blends always have one more secret, one more agenda,
he thought in irritation.
Hard to trust them no matter how many times they seem to prove their intentions.

“It wasn’t anything that could have helped you, Captain. In fact, it would have been a distraction. As my mother once so rightly argued, introducing the technology to copy human minds into other creatures such as Meme ships or receptor modules, or even computers, would open a Pandora’s box the human race is simply not ready for.”

“Why tell us now, then?”

Ezekiel lifted a hand, palm up, toward the screen. “Because the box has been opened. There’s no point in keeping it a secret anymore. I just plead with you, Captain, that you do not rush to explore this possibility. It is far too laden with questions to which we have no easy answers.”

Absen sat back and crossed his arms in thought, looking from face to face. “I understand. Is such a mind a person? What if it doesn’t want to be loaded into a missile and fired at the enemy? Would that be murder?” He rubbed his face. “And I thought the AI question was knotty.”

“Precisely, Captain. You’re already thinking a lot about the AI on this ship, I bet. She represents a new frontier for humanity. Adding engram technology to the mix could be extremely disruptive.”

“All right,” Absen replied. “I’m classifying this Top Secret. No one outside this room talks about engrams yet, especially not to our scientists. People like that will feel compelled to investigate. No discussion, even in the cleared and secured spaces. We can’t afford to divert energy and resources to explore the idea. When the time comes, I’ll release the information. And Ezekiel, you and your boat represent the most advanced Memetech aboard. I want you and Spooky to take extra measures to secure it.”

“I’m the only one who Roger will recognize, sir.”

Absen pointed a finger at Ezekiel’s nose. “We have Sekoi Blends aboard, in case you haven’t forgotten. They may have their own agenda, and they may have abilities you don’t know about.” He turned to Nguyen. “Spooky, that’s your priority assignment starting now. Secure our Memetech. You’re in charge of this potential mess, since you two have brought it to me. I’ll draft you both into EarthFleet if I have to. Got it?”

Spooky nodded with a twitch of his lips. “Of course, Captain. Have no fear.”

“I’ll have no fear when you have no secrets, Nguyen.”

“Fair enough. May we stay?”

“Of course. Restart the battle.”

Scoggins had paused and buffered all of the feeds, effectively stopping the depiction of the situation during the discussion. The crew had taken the opportunity to run to the nearby heads and line up for drinks at the bar, but as soon as the screens came to life again they hurried back to their seats and places. “I’ll speed things up ten percent to run out the buffers and eventually catch up,” she said.

“You can put us back on the PA. Everyone, watch what you say with everyone listening.”

On the main display they watched as the missile swarm spread out and set itself to charge into the Destroyer fleet, maximizing distance among themselves to avoid allowing one fusor blast to kill two or more of them.

A few seconds before they reached maximum effective warhead range, the Destroyers burst forth with thousands of small hypervelocity missiles. “What the hell?” Johnstone said involuntarily, and he closed his eyes, plunging into his link. Absen knew the CyberComm officer had simply reacted, instinctively trying to understand and then affect the battle as he had many others before, but this time, no influence was possible.

“They saw the power of the warheads and decided to use small hypers as a defense,” Absen replied. “Not very efficient, but in this case, a smart move. If they pick off even one in a hundred, it will be worth it, and any that miss will go after the Thuds, which are much larger than missiles.”

Absen was right. Fifteen hundred missiles became thirteen hundred as almost nineteen thousand small hypers stormed through the spread formation. The human weapons spun and swirled on their guidance jets, tiny jinks that at such extreme speeds caused the oncoming Meme guided weapons to miss most of them.

As the captain predicted, the ones that missed turned and headed directly for the Thunderchiefs, closing up into a tight mass to overwhelm their enemies a hundred to one. “They’re dead,” muttered one of the techs under her breath, drawing a sharp hiss from Scoggins.

“Have some faith,” Absen said in an iron voice. “The Thuds have pilots. They will use some kind of tactic…see, there.”
With or without bodies
, he thought,
the human factor is vital.

At the last minute, the lead Thunderchiefs fired missiles, apparently kept in reserve against this eventuality. Closing at high combined speed and under acceleration, the enemy hypers had no time to dodge.

Hundred-megaton warheads bloomed in the void, swallowing thousands of Meme missiles packed into tight groups. Of those few that made it through, most were picked off by Thunderchief masers. Only a handful of the human attack ships died. The rest forged ahead for their rendezvous with death.

Now, the EarthFleet missile cloud reached the tightly packed Destroyers.

At first the enemy fleet stayed in formation, blasting thousands of fusor beams like gargantuan blowtorches in space, reaching out to wipe the incoming weapons, but as the missiles closed in the final seconds, the ships of the Meme fleet abruptly rotated on their centers of gravity, still firing, and accelerated in all directions, expanding in a sphere from a common center.

“They’re spreading out, each on his own.”

“Why would they do that?” Okuda said, his voice reflecting puzzlement.

“Because hundred-megaton warheads aren’t all they have to worry about. Somehow, they know, or guessed.”

“Know what, sir?” Johnstone asked.

“Exploders. Remember the hole in the data. Somehow the Meme knew that we might have antimatter weapons. At least, they are taking precautions. With all of them spreading out that way, an Exploder can only take out one of them at a time. Had they stayed clumped, we might have won the battle in one shining moment.”

“That would have been worth the sacrifice of so many in this gambit,” Spooky said clearly. Absen realized the man was reinforcing the narrative of the brave Thud pilots in the minds of the crew, even though the senior officers now suspected that only engrams occupied them.

“Yes, it would,” he replied. “We still may see some effect.”

The display confirmed his words. Dozens of fusion warheads blossomed near Destroyers. Some wasted themselves, while others gouged chunks from the armored ferrocrystal skins of their enemies, leaving glowing hotspots.

One unlucky Meme took three hits in a row, very well placed, and it shuddered and spun, apparently losing control as its fusors went dark. Like sharks, several more human weapons suddenly diverted from their nearer targets to go after the stunned Destroyer, aiming themselves precisely at the wound their fellows had made. Each explosion bored farther into the enemy ship, and after four more, the Destroyer cracked, spurted fire from all its weapons ports, and died.

All the crew on the flight deck leaped to their feet and cheered, throats straining with bloodthirsty joy as they saw one of their hated enemies go down in flames. In the control room, the officers smiled and exchanged glances, some slapping their consoles or clapping hands. “That’s just one,” Absen reminded them.
The engrams made the difference
, he thought to himself.
They saw an opportunity and changed their targeting in a way mere computers could not have.

Eyes back on the screen, Absen waited for what he expected and hoped for. If no Exploders came, the gambit would still have been effective, taking out one Destroyer, wounding others and forcing the Meme to burn fuel, weapons and time. But…

“There it is!” the captain cried as the screen whited out. Scoggins backed the view off and cut in the filters again, showing a sun-like sphere fifty times larger than any fusion bomb. She ran the feed backward a few seconds, cleaned up the picture, and they were able to watch what had happened.

One missile, dodging madly as fusors picked off its fellows, had gotten close enough. At a distance of five kilometers from its targeted Destroyer, and directly in front of the enemy’s line of travel, outside of the effective range of any lesser warhead, it converted itself from a mere machine into a miniature star, briefly hotter than a thousand suns. The Meme flew into the fireball.

One moment it was a living world-wrecker, a moonlet of doom bent on genocide.

The next, nothing but plasma remained, particles stripped of all their bonds and so energetic that no element, no atomic association, was even possible. However, the momentum of the individual protons, neutrons, electrons and more exotic pieces of matter remained, so what exited the other side looked like a cone of roiling light, a brief living flamethrower that vanished in seconds, leaving a traveling, expanding miasma.

“Damn,” Absen breathed as the crew erupted yet again in cheers. “Keep the tape running forward,” he said.

“Haven’t used tape in decades, sir,” Scoggins said with a smile, and had her people resume the battle feed.

Seven more Destroyers met their deaths to antimatter weapons: two from the wave of missiles, three fired at the last moment from the Thunderchiefs, and two from the attack craft themselves as they chased Destroyers and detonated near enough to take the enemy with them.

At the end of the battle, all the Thuds were dead.

“Eight of sixty-four. Twelve and a half percent. That’s amazing. Very significant,” Absen breathed. “Ladies and gentlemen, we may have just witnessed the decisive engagement of the battle, but let’s not become too ecstatic. I suspect that Admiral Huen just employed at least half, perhaps all, of his antimatter stock. It’s what I would have done: try to use surprise to maximize the effect of new weapons and tactics.”

“Somehow I do hope that those just had engrams,” Scoggins cut the feed and said quietly. “Maybe with those, more real people wouldn’t have to die.”

Ezekiel Denham swallowed a choke, and the rest turned to him. “You have something to say?” Absen said.

“Real people? What else is a person but a mind?” he asked with tear-filled eyes. “Most of you have interacted with Michelle. Isn’t she a person?”

Scoggins replied, “Of course, but –”

Ezekiel glared hotly at Scoggins. “My father, Alan Denham, was an engram.” This declaration brought a hush to the room.

“I don’t understand,” the sensors officer said, and Absen seconded the notion, seeing the faces of the others.

“The man Skull Denham died in the first battle when he boarded the Meme scout ship. My mother Raphaela built a device into his suit to record his mental gestalt. She recovered it from where his body lay.”

“I remember when she did that, though I did not realize the significance,” Absen said. “I wondered about her request at the time, to leave the body where it was until she could see it. Later, when he broadcast that last message, I thought she had somehow revived him.”
Or had fabricated the “Skull Speech” for the sake of humanity’s morale.

“Yes. She uploaded his mind into the bio-neurology of the captured scout ship, what the Meme called a Survey craft, and for the next ten years, Alan Denham inhabited the nervous system of the ship itself. He even replicated a man’s body as an avatar within it, so as a child I interacted with a real human, as far as I knew.”

“So,” Absen realized, “when the ship
Alan Denham
slammed like a bullet into the Destroyer…”

“He became the ultimate kamikaze. My father. Not just some cheap copy of him. Whether or not he was the same guy who provided half my genes, the man who raised me was as real as you or me. Flesh and blood and heart and soul. It didn’t – it doesn’t – matter what kind of body someone has. Human is human.” Ezekiel leaned forward, elbows on knees, and buried his head in his hands, trying and failing to hold back silent tears.