Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) (11 page)

“We have to get word to Absen,” Ezekiel said.

“I hope he already knows. Our sister will brief him if she survived the assault on Jupiter.”

Leslie’s eyes skipped from face to face, finally resting on Rick Johnstone’s, perhaps the least suspicious. “Sometime in the near future, as soon as two months or as late as several years from now, the Meme believe this system will be attacked by a heretofore unknown race of aliens they call the Scourge. They make Meme seem pleasant by comparison, for they don’t merely conquer and enslave. They ruthlessly wipe out all higher life forms and fill every planet with their teeming billions. Swarms of their ships are reported to appear without warning near stars, and then attack outward.”

“What a load of bullshit,” Ford scoffed. “Appear how? They must have planted this story to throw us off. Buy time.”

“I have to wonder about that too,” said Fleede. “Could this be disinformation?”

“That’s unlikely,” Leslie said, “because we intercepted the report before the word of
Conquest
’s impending return or its upgraded technology reached the solar system. There’s no reason for the Meme to fabricate such a story if they still believed they were winning. No, this was a general biolaser beamcast from a Meme deep space communications relay, and is actually over a hundred years old. Unfortunately there is no video, just text.”

“But you said they just appear near stars,” Fleede pressed. “Does that mean they have a stardrive of some kind? To outside observers,
Conquest
seems to just appear when it drops pulse.”

“The report postulates they have a faster-than-light drive, or perhaps some kind of artificial wormhole gate. Something that allows them to show up without traversing intervening normal space.”

“Oh, this is really getting thick,” Ford said, throwing up his hands. “Nothing has ever actually been shown to move faster than light.”

“The math says it’s possible. A theoretical warp drive has been on the books since the twentieth century,” Quan Ekara said.

“Yes, but it takes the entire power output of a star to make it work!” Ford retorted. Quan and the others stared at Ford until his eyes widened. “Oh.”

Leslie lifted her head imperiously. “Yes,
oh
. It stands to reason that somehow they tap into a star’s power – fusion, gravity, even antimatter – to make their FTL drive work. And we have no information on how much faster than light it moves them – twice as fast? A thousand times? Instantaneously?”

“That really doesn’t matter in the short term, though,” Absen said. “This report, if true, changes everything.
Everything
,” he emphasized, rapping his knuckles on the table.

“Have the Meme ever beaten them?” Ford asked.

Leslie said, “Sometimes, it seems. When they have enough force waiting to hit them early, right when they appear. But when that happens, within a year or two another, much larger invasion force appears, and then another, until the defenders are overwhelmed.”

“Poetic justice for the bastards, I think,”’ Ford said. “The galactic food chain. They do it to us, and these Scourges do it to them.”

“But now the Scourges are gonna do it to us,” Bull ben Tauros said from across the table.

“Yeah, so what’s the plan, Skipper?” Ford asked, turning to Absen.

“That’s what I called you all here to talk about. We’ll get into specifics later, but I need to hear all your ideas about our overall course of action.”

“We gin up and fight!” Ford said. “Worst case, we can escape with the TacDrive, go get Desolator and his buddies, and then come back and kick their asses.”

“And leave Earth to its fate? There won’t be anything left to salvage,” Absen said, “and if they can tell where we went,
they might actually be able get to Gliese 370 ahead of us
. No, we have to try to beat them here and now. These Scourges will wipe out all life. This isn’t about winning a fight. It’s about preserving humanity. If they show up here, they’ll show up at Gliese 370 and maybe anywhere else.”

Commander Ekara cleared his throat. “We have to get ahold of the FTL technology. Assuming their fleet doesn’t totally outclass us, it’s their strategic mobility that spells our doom. If we can reverse engineer it, we can use it or defeat it. That has to be our number one goal.”

“No, our number one goal is to defeat their first beachhead and buy time,” insisted Ford. “If we can rebuild EarthFleet’s industrial capability, we can deploy enough weaponry to kill each successive wave. Soon, probably within seven to ten years, one of the
Desolator
ships will arrive and he can help us. With enough firepower, it won’t matter what appears. We’ll just keep slaughtering them until they give up.”

“You know,” said Doctor Egolu, the lone civilian in attendance other than Leslie, “we seem to be ignoring the Meme problem. They still hold almost a billion humans hostage on Earth. But they also must fear these Scourges as much as we do. Is there any way to join forces with them, or at least get them to get out of our way while we defend ourselves? This would seem to be a rational compromise for them.”

“I can’t believe we’re talking about working with the Meme,” Ford protested. Scoggins and several others nodded in agreement. “They’ve been screwing with us for thousands of years, and oh yeah,
killed billions of people.
How can we let them off the hook?”

Absen fixed Ford with a gaze of steel. “There’s an apocryphal quote from Churchill that seems apt. ‘I’d make a deal with the devil himself if it would defeat Hitler.’ If you don’t like that one, how about, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’? Let me tell you something – all of you.” He stood up and looked from face to face. “I want the Meme to suffer for what they did to us, and I’m skeptical about this Scourge thing. But even if there are no Scourges, if we can scare the Meme into leaving, and by doing so save human lives, I’ll put aside my feelings. Killing a few Destroyers is meaningless. Desolator showed me a record of a battle against
thousands
of Destroyers. That’s the strength of the Empire, which we’ve never had to face. And if there’s something out there that can beat the Meme, it will beat us. Hang together or hang separately.”

“If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, why are we sure the Scourges aren’t the friends we need against the Meme?” Quan Ekara asked. “How do we know this information isn’t completely skewed and that the Scourges aren’t a race that the Meme attacked and pissed off long ago. Maybe now they’re just doing what we are – waging war against an evil empire?”

“We don’t know. But somehow, we have to find out.”

Leslie cleared her throat. “Sir, this just shows how badly we need evidence. That means talking to the Meme. Getting access to their records.”

“Records can be faked,” Ekara said with the wave of a hand.

“Not molecular memories. Not if I can see them for myself – or my brother Ezekiel can do it, if you don’t trust me.”

“Do you think the Meme would go for that?” Absen asked.

Leslie pursed her lips. “The Meme never talked to EarthFleet before. To them, we’re savages. Just getting them to respond, to open a dialogue now, would show they’re terrified, I would think. That in itself will prove something. We have to try.”

“Removing them from the equation would give us a fighting chance. Getting them to actually work with us against the threat would be ideal,” Absen said.

Leslie nodded. “I think it’s our best shot.”

“Then start figuring out how to do it…Ambassador.”

“No, sir. Not me. You don’t know me and don’t trust me fully, and I was born a Blend. There’s only one person you’ll trust, that really knows how to deal with the Meme, because she used to be one. Mother.”

“We haven’t been able to find her,” Scoggins said.

Leslie smiled. “Let me broadcast, and I’ll get her to show herself.”

Absen laughed at himself internally as he wiped his sweating hands on his uniform trousers. He could coolly fight a battle from his bridge like Fletcher at Midway, but meeting this woman he hadn’t seen in almost a century made him nervous.

Maybe death was easier to face than the promise of a life. Maybe dealing with equals wasn’t something he was used to anymore.

Or maybe he still had trouble forgiving her for what she’d done all those years ago.

The doors closed and soon the controller seated in a chair nearby signaled that atmosphere had been restored. Absen opened the pressure door, descended the metal ladder to the deck and walked alone across the wide expanse.

Not entirely alone, of course. Conquest herself would be watching with a thousand mechanical eyes, and Absen was sure he saw guns in the internal defense emplacements twitch. They wouldn’t be needed, he was certain, but the AI wasn’t so trusting, and that was fine. After this long, he might be wrong.

An opening irised in the living ship before him, and then she stepped through. Dressed simply in utilitarian trousers and tunic, to him she still embodied perfect beauty. His heart flipped within his chest. Not for the first time he wondered if she had that effect on everyone, or did she tailor it for him? He never could get a definitive answer from the others who met her.

“Hello, Admiral.”

Absen cleared his throat. “Just Captain today, though as soon as we’ve built a fleet I’ll have to promote myself again.”

“I’m glad to see your skill at comedy is as weak as ever.”

Staring, eyes level with hers –
I forgot how tall she was
– he found himself unable to move, unable to speak. It reminded him of when he’d first seen Kathleen across the floor of a Naval Academy dance. Funny, it was hard to remember his dead wife’s face anymore.

His lungs locked up and his throat closed. Swallowing convulsively, he finally croaked, “Hello, Rae.”

“Took your time, didn’t you?” Raphaela’s smile grew slowly, and he found himself echoing it helplessly.

“I’m sorry,” he found himself saying, though he knew he’d done nothing wrong. Something about this woman…

And then she stepped forward into his arms, a moment he’d envisioned, contemplated, but never experienced. “Welcome home, Henrich. I missed you.” Rae’s cheek touched his and he realized she might be manipulating him with her biochemistry, but if so, he didn’t care. He’d yearned for her a very, very long time.

As they embraced, all the anger he had felt melted away. “Me too,” Absen husked, forcing himself to step back from paradise. “We can catch up later. For now, my crew needs to see you. They don’t trust Leslie…if that’s who she is.”

“How do you know I’m who I say I am? Only another Blend could tell for sure.”

“We’re working on that, actually.” Absen led Rae over to an electric cart and hopped on.

“There’s no biochemical test. Given enough time, Blends can replicate everything but memories.”

Absen just smiled, and then said, “Auditorium.”

“Where’s my daughter?” Rae asked as she rode. “I haven’t seen her in several years.”

“I’ve made her the Jupiter system’s administrator. She’s down on the Io base, overseeing repairs and reconstruction of our industry.”

“A suspicious woman would wonder if you didn’t want me to see her yet.”

“A suspicious man would be right to feel that way. Until we establish your
bona fides
for sure, I’m not letting you anywhere near another Blend.”

Rae lapsed into silence at this declaration, and Absen contented himself with riding along, waiting on the word from the AI that the woman next to him was likely who she claimed to be. He knew Conquest was running Rae’s speech and biometric patterns against every record in the database, for the AI believed Rae was incorrect: memories weren’t the only thing impossible to fake. The habits of a lifetime, displayed and compared thoroughly enough, should provide an answer.

Soon Absen ushered Rae up to the podium, with most of the off-duty crew seated. “What do you want me to say to them?” she asked in a low voice.

“Whatever you think you should, but keep it short and sweet. We took a lot of casualties in the assault. For God’s sake, don’t tell them it was for nothing.” What she did say might be instructive, Absen thought. He’d have to chance it.

Turning on the microphone, he said, “Listen up, people. Some of you remember Raphaela, and some of you have only seen records, but you all know who she is and what she’s done for humanity. I wanted her to give you a quick overview of what the senior staff and I recently learned, and you’ve undoubtedly been hearing rumors about.” With that, he stepped aside.

Rae took the microphone and smiled, a dazzling thing that seemed to blast the audience with charisma and presence. “Thank you, Captain Absen, and thank you all for arriving to initiate the liberation of Earth. Freedom fighters here have been working tirelessly for more than a century, preparing humanity for a time when a military force like
Conquest
would arrive to give us top cover.

“Even now our insurgents, often called ‘Skulls’ after the hero Skull Denham, are stepping up their efforts to regain control of our own destiny. Yes, I say ‘our own,’ because despite what some have always said, I am just as human as anyone here…and more so than some.” She nodded to the contingent of Sekoi and the handful of Ryss who stood off to one side, by their own choice.

“The Eden Plague changed humanity, and so did the nanotechnology many of you have running through your veins. Then came cybernetic implants, and now I hear tell of genuine, viable artificial intelligence. The Meme who added itself to me was just one more augmentation.