Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) (12 page)

“This brings me to the subject at hand: the Meme. Some apologists would say they are a force of nature, a predator species that can no more control its own imperatives than sharks can resist the scent of blood. Others, with whom I would agree, refuse to give them that excuse. The Meme are guilty of horrific crimes, unleashing plagues to wipe out the intelligence of planetary natives, stealing, using and even cloning their bodies for no better reason than to indulge themselves, enslaving whole societies just for their own pleasure.

“But one thing the Meme never did even in their most depraved moments was commit deliberate, premeditated genocide. Does that make them good? No. But it makes them less evil than something new: something Captain Absen has asked me here to talk about.

“It’s called the Scourge by the Meme. Alternately, the concept could be translated as a
swarm
, or a
pestilence
, but the central meaning is clear: this menace, new to us, has been chewing its way through the Meme Empire like locusts. If humanity had faced the Scourge rather than the Meme Empire, we would all be dead, along with every higher life form in the solar system. The Scourge doesn’t want to conquer us. It doesn’t want to enslave us. It wants to eat us, to consume us, to process us, excrete us and then to move on and do it to someone else. To the Sekoi, or the Ryss, and to every other noble species out there.” Rae gestured toward the small groups of aliens, and then upward is if to the stars. “Like it or not we must talk to the Meme. As much as we hate them and everything they have done, we have to put that behind us.”

Bull ben Tauros stood up then in the front row, and said, “That sounds like a load of crap to me. The Meme killed billions. Everyone here has lost…well, we don’t even know who we’ve lost, most of us, but odds are they’re all gone fifty years ago. We watched those bastards slam two ships into Earth trying to wipe us out. How the hell are we supposed to forget that? Just give them big hugs and call them our buddies? Well, we Marines have a saying: ‘buddy’s only half a word.’ So how do we keep the Meme from screwing us again?”

Rae lifted her eyebrows and looked over at Absen. “I’m sure we’ll be able to hold them to any deals. Your skipper here doesn’t seem the trusting type, so I think I’ll just place my faith in him, and in the people like you he’s got to help him. If we can work out some kind of arrangement, we’ll make sure we keep the whip hand.”

She’s good
, Absen mused as he stood. “That’s all for now. Intel will be debriefing Ms. Denham and distributing regular summaries of everything we find out. For now, go back to your duties and stick to the rebuilding plan. No matter what happens, turning Jupiter system into a manufacturing powerhouse is our top priority right now. With or without the Meme, we’ll liberate Earth, and we’ll defend what’s ours.”

***

Absen hadn’t said anything to Rae when she followed him to his office, neither forbidding nor encouraging her. Part of him wanted things to stay the way they always had between them – professional, edged with wariness. She’d led him on in their early days together, flirting with him when he was vulnerable and she was still married to Skull Denham, though Absen had thought the man was dead. His deduction that doing so was intended to forward Rae’s political agenda just made it worse. If it had been simple attraction, he might have forgiven her more easily.

He really didn’t like being
used
.

But that was long, long ago, and his anger had been blunted by time and intervening tragedy. So many dead, so much chaos…and just when he thought he was winning, this new menace threatened. It was enough to make a careful man crazy, and Absen had always been a planner, deliberate, calm and exacting in his operations.

Not one to go flinging himself into anything.

So when he closed the door on Steward Tobias’ faint smirk and found Rae in his arms again, he pushed her gently away with the discipline of a lifetime’s service to a higher calling. “Not yet. We need to get some things straight.”

Hurt crossed Rae’s face, and she stepped back. “I’m sorry. Too fast?”

“We haven’t seen each other in ages, and we never did more than flirt, which by the way…never mind. Yes, too fast,” Absen said.

“Henrich, can I be forthright with you?”

“I’d rather you were, though I know it doesn’t come naturally,” he said with an edge of bitterness.

Her head jerked as if stung, and she turned her face away. “I deserved that, I know. I was wrong to lie to you back then, and I apologize. After all this time, can you forgive me?”

“I’d forgive you in an instant if I was certain you weren’t playing more games with me.”

Rae put her face in her hands. “You know, I was a hundred years younger then. How long are you going to hold a grudge?”

“Not trusting someone isn’t the same as holding a grudge. Trust is like a piece of fine china. Once it shatters, it’s never quite the same, no matter how much glue you slather on.”

“Maybe instead of dragging up what I
did
do, you should think about what I
didn’t
do. I always treated you with respect, Henrich. I never undermined you, I never tried to influence your mind directly – biochemically, that is, which is something you know Blends can do – and I never worked against humanity. And here’s something else you seem to have forgotten.” Rae took a deep breath, turning back to him. “Skull Denham kidnapped me at gunpoint just a short time after I had blended with Raphael. Some crazy things, things I’ll never explain, happened in the following months when we were crammed together in a tiny little spaceship. I had his child. That was Ezekiel. I ended up loving Skull, but I can’t say I ever fell in love with him. Then he got killed, and I resurrected him, and then I had four more children by him, but he wasn’t the man I loved anymore, and that was my own fault, because I…well, let’s just say I did some things I shouldn’t have, out of sheer arrogance and bad judgment. I was young, I was stupid, and I’m sorry. I’ll never do anything like that again.”

“Yes, Ezekiel told me about engrams.” After Rae’s face registered surprise, he continued, “Nice speech.” He moved to sit down on one end of his office sofa, waving her to the other. “I would have thought someone with such an intimate knowledge of biochemistry wouldn’t put much stock in the notion of love.”

“Just because something is biochemical doesn’t mean it’s not real. Love, hatred, anger, addiction, mercy…it’s all rooted in neurology and biology…but I’ve come to believe there’s something more than just chemistry and physics at play. Something…ineffable.”

Absen snorted. “What, did you get religion?”

“I didn’t – and by the way, contempt doesn’t become you, Henrich. No, just that I feel like there’s something more than what we usually see. It might be another layer of reality, or it might be a higher order of perception of how everything fits together – or, hell, it might be a manifestation of a greater intelligence. It’s been postulated that the billions of galaxies, each with their billions of suns, are just cells in one vast mind that was birthed at the Big Bang, and we’re running around inside its body.”

Lifting his hands in surrender, Absen said, “That’s a fascinating topic for a comfortable retirement, but right now, we have wars to fight. Back to what’s at hand: how can I be sure? How can I trust you?”

Rae held her hands out to him in supplication, gasping his arm. Pleading like Absen had never heard her before, she replied, “You
can’t
be sure. Not with any human being. That’s why they call it
trust
, not certainty. You have to take a leap of faith.”

Absen realized how eerily this echoed his misgivings about Michelle Conquest, giving the AI full power over military operations. On some level, these two were similar – women of extraordinary talents, in some ways so much more capable than he would ever be that he wondered what they saw in him.

With Michelle, he’d had to decide to give her incrementally increasing autonomy and responsibility, knowing there was no going back. Perhaps with Rae, he should do the same. In romance novels a moment always came where the protagonists threw themselves into each other’s hearts with abandon, but he knew the real world seldom worked that way – and especially not with him. He couldn’t transform himself from a tightly controlled warship commander into an openhearted lover with the flip of a switch, even if he was sure…and his primary mission always had to be
command
.

“All right, Rae,” he finally said, sliding toward her until their knees touched. He allowed his resolve to soften, just a little. The best he could do was put words to his intentions, even if he discarded them immediately. “I’ll take a few hops, if not the full leap. And…” he reached up to place a fingertip under her chin, “I’ve waited long enough.”

“Me too,” she sighed as her lips reached for his. Soon, he forgot everything.

Later, as Rae slept, Absen put on workout clothes and slipped out of his quarters, but he didn’t go to the gym. Instead, he entered the empty conference room, trailed by Steward Tobias. His head seemed clear, if he could be his own judge.

A moment later, Michelle appeared in her android guise, also in athletic dress.

“So,” Absen asked without preamble, “did I just sleep with an imposter?”

“My answer would be more accurate if you hadn’t ordered the visual feed turned off,” Michelle said with a hint of reproach.

“You think I’m going to let you watch as we make love?”

“Seems a small price to pay for security.”

“That’s what the NSA said when I was growing up in the twentieth century.”

“With all due respect, sir, how am I supposed to do my job when you handcuff me this way?”

“That also sounds eerily familiar. Just tell me what you’ve found.”

Absen noticed Michelle emulated irritation quite well. Could she be jealous? He’d have to keep an eye on her. Crushes on superior officers were far from unknown, and then there was the X factor of her AI mind. Now wasn’t the time to call her out on it, though.

As if sucking on lemons, Michelle said, “My analysis indicates a greater than ninety-eight percent chance that she is really Raphaela. But that does mean its almost one in fifty that she’s
not
.”

“That variation could easily be explained by the passage of time. People change. In fact, I’m surprised the difference isn’t larger.”

“You seem to
want
to believe her.”

“Oh, I do, I do. That’s why you’re playing devil’s advocate. But for now, we go ahead and act as if she’s for real.”

“You may be letting your personal feelings interfere with your judgment, sir.”

“Yes, I may be. Are you?”

Michelle didn’t answer, just saluted and stalked off.

He knew she was almost to the rendezvous in interplanetary space just outside Mars’ orbit. Half the sensors on
Conquest
were focused on her ship, the other half on the approaching Meme shuttle. At least they had responded to Rae’s offer to meet. That was one thing EarthFleet had never achieved. That actually strengthened the case against her, for of course a Meme agent would get a meeting. Absen figured the Empire would be desperate to acquire the TacDrive technology, and they were devious.

Absen pushed it out of his mind once more. An encrypted broadcast for Ezekiel and his contact crew to return had gone unheeded, and until a Blend he trusted implicitly was available – and the Sekoi did not count – he couldn’t do anything about Rae. Hopefully by the time she came back Ezekiel would have returned.

But hope was not a plan.

For now, he had military matters to attend. He picked up Fleede’s monologue in mid-sentence, focusing on the artist’s rendering on the main screen. “– believe each Scourge mothership to hold between one hundred and two hundred million assault troops, along with at least one million assault shuttles and one hundred thousand aerospace fighters.”

“I’m sorry, could you say that again?” Absen said, his attention finally fully engaged. “Two hundred million troops per mothership – and how many motherships do they usually use in an invasion?”

“We only have the one Meme summary, which was of an incursion that was defeated. In that one, twelve motherships appeared, and were destroyed by a fleet of two Monitors and sixty-four Destroyers, as well as the native defensive emplacements, which were considerable.”

“Sixty-four destroyers and a heavily fortified system. And how well did they do?”

Fleede swallowed. “The Meme suffered approximately fifty percent casualties.”

“And there’s no follow-up report from that system?”

“No, sir. We presume the next attack must have overwhelmed them.”

“Do we know when and where this attack took place?”

“Yes, sir. At a star system about one hundred thirty light-years away, approximately that long ago, as the beamcast only recently reached the Meme here in normal space.”

“Does that help us locate the Scourges’ area of operations?”

“Not really, sir. We need more access to Meme data – any data, in fact.”

“All right, no matter,” Absen said with a sigh. “Back to the fight in front of us. Do we have any idea how many will be coming
here
?”

“No, sir. If you’ll allow me to continue, though, my team has made some confident estimates of their methods and tactics.”

Absen sat forward. “Now you’re speaking my language.”

Fleede smiled. “Thank you, sir.” He gestured. “On the screen you see a mothership shaped like a saucer, about twenty kilometers in diameter and five deep. The troops and, presumably, their commanders, ride the mothership during its FTL transit, but our estimates give them a maximum of one week of food, water and air, so they must not live aboard for long. As soon as they appear, they immediately launch their assault shuttles and attack, covered by their aerospace fighters and small gunships. There seems to be no method of easy recovery once launched. Reassembling the force would basically involve rebuilding the whole outer shell.”