Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) (17 page)

Fleede clicked to the next slide. “You will notice that craft we call aerospace fighters occupy the innermost layer of the lattice, then small gunboats on the next layer, then cheap assault craft packed with direct combat forces in the Marine role farther out.”

Bull stood up. “You sure that ain’t backward, Fleede?”

Fleede looked down his nose at the big man, only possible because of his position on stage behind the podium. “No, Colonel, but I understand why you ask. We would put fighters on the outside for quick launch and leave the more vulnerable ground forces inside. However, they have hundreds of assault boats for every fighter, and fighter pilots are valuable Centurions, while assault boats contain mere Soldiers and Scourgelings. The cheap grunts are there to absorb casualties, while the fighter pilots are the top of the food chain, except for Archons.”

“These Scourges actually sound like sensible guys,” Vango Markis deadpanned, drawing a laugh from the audience.

Fleede took a deep breath, a look of longsuffering on his face as he continued. “When the mothership leaves its wormhole warp, it immediately begins launching from the outside inward. The assault swarm spreads out and starts toward its target or targets, absorbing enemy fire and overloading enemy sensors with their sheer number. Fighters easily overtake and then get ahead of them, attacking and seeking to overwhelm enemy fighters and small ships. Gunboats follow up, assisting the fighters to swarm larger ships and fortresses, while the assault boats board and chew their way into anything that resists. Once opposing space forces are driven off or destroyed, assault troops land and infest habitable planets, bringing pairs of fertilized junior Archons with them. While the ground troops continue to overwhelm and eat everything in sight, the Archons set up nests and breed more Scourgelings, becoming a self-sustaining threat.”

Rick Johnstone leaned forward from two rows behind, to speak quietly but within the senior staff’s earshot. “It’s like one of those computer strategy games from before the Plague Wars – Swarmcraft or something. Except it’s real.”

Absen turned to look over his shoulder with interest. “How did you beat the swarms in the game?”

Rick frowned. “If you couldn’t beat them in an early rush, you had to get ahead of their tech curve. Come up with lots of cool weapons.”

Absen grunted and smiled faintly. “Sounds pretty obvious. I thought you’d give me some great insight.” He turned back to Fleede’s briefing.

“When the Meme defeated an attack,” the intel officer continued, “they did it by striking with maximum force early. The motherships are most vulnerable when they have just arrived, because of two factors. One, it takes over an hour to deploy hundreds of thousands of small craft, even though they do so in such a mad rush that it often causes over one percent casualties from their own collisions. Two, they must recharge their wormhole drive for about thirteen hours.”

Admiral Absen spoke. “So if we hit them in the first hour, they’ll be densely packed and vulnerable. And the motherships have to stick around for at least, say, twelve hours after that.” Fleede nodded. “All right, Commander. Carry on with your briefing. My staff is staying –” he gave them all a stern look “– to get all the detail for their specific operational areas. Be sure to send me a copy.”

“Already on your desk, sir,” Fleede replied smugly.

“Excellent. Senior staff, ops discussion in,” Absen looked at his watch, “three hours twenty minutes.”

“If this one’s over by then,” Ford muttered.

Absen smiled as he walked out.
Sometimes, it’s good to be the boss.

“At ease, everyone. Go back to work,” Absen shouted in turn as he looked around the heavily automated factory. He noticed how tired Nightingale looked as he drew him inside a glass-enclosed office where it was quieter. “I just wanted to see how the SLAMs are coming. We’re going to need them.”

“Yes, sir, and we’ve almost got the first one finished.” The big man led Absen over to an area containing dozens of multi-ton pieces of machinery. “We’ll assemble this prototype on the flight deck and grabship it out the launch bay doors. I hope later versions will have a thruster suite so it can maneuver itself like a pinnace. Once it’s out in space, it will line up on whatever we tell it to and engage the lightspeed drive, flying dead straight until it hits its target. If it misses, it will dump out of pulse and turn on its beacon for recovery. It will have a self-destruct to prevent recovery by the enemy.”

“What about creating dedicated launchers within
Conquest
?” Absen asked.

Nightingale shook his head. “Bad idea, sir. It’s the same issue as with normal missiles but worse. Anything that has to pass through the ship’s armor to be launched creates a vulnerability, both because of the weakened protection and the fact that one blocked tube traps lots of weapons behind it. We put our missiles in disposable launchers on the outside for a reason.”

“So we’re going to strap these babies onto
Conquest
like our box-launched missiles?”

Nightingale looked troubled. “We could, sir, but they are big and fragile. Maybe we could put them on the back, so they are protected during TacDrive and conventional maneuvers both. My understanding was these would be strategic weapons, though, not tactical, so we would just egress them from the main bay like ships. Then they line up and go.”

Absen rubbed his hands and rolled his shoulders as he paced in front of the pieces of the SLAM. “I had dreams of adding this to our tactical arsenal.”

“Sir, I’ll do what you tell me to, but we’re working like dogs here already, and the few liberated weapons engineers Leslie sent me from the Jupiter cadre are all hopelessly out of date. The Meme didn’t allow weapons research beyond simple efficiency improvements. Even Michelle’s processors are fully tasked, she tells me.”

Absen clapped Nightingale on the shoulder. “Just get me the SLAMs, as many as you can. How fast do you think you’ll be able to make them?”

“Not fast, sir. The lightspeed drive is just on the edge of our current technological ability. This is like building aircraft in 1910, sir – a long ways to go and no established infrastructure.”

“Just give me some numbers.”

Nightingale pursed his lips, thinking. “I’d say one a week.”

Absen made a sound of frustration. “What about the PVNs on Ceres? Can’t they help?”

“Also hopelessly out of date. It would take months to bring them up anywhere near to
Conquest
’s standards. Michelle’s got a telefactor team working on one, and when that’s upgraded it will be able to upgrade the next and so on in typical Von Neumann fashion, but it’s going to be a while before that gets going. No, sir, the best the PVNs can churn out is standard munitions and equipment. Marine battlesuits, Recluses, missiles, StormCrows.”

“But at least they can do that.” Absen looked around the enormous noise- and movement-filled room. “Do you have anything else in your box of tricks?”

“Sir, I have a dozen ideas, but no time. Once the operational SLAM design is finalized, my R&D team can move on to something else.”

Absen realized Nightingale’s bowed shoulders and sunken eyes meant he was nearing his limit. No matter how desperately he wanted more and better weapons, the man was already working as hard as he could. “All right, Ellis. Thanks for the incredible job you’re doing here.” He shook Nightingale’s hand again.

“The rest of my team could use hearing that too, sir,” Nightingale replied.

“Absolutely.” Absen turned to shake hands and slap backs, wishing he could do more.

“Michelle,” he called to the AI, “I need all this stuff summarized. I’m turning back into an administrator and I don’t like it. If it’s not tactical or operational, send it along to Leslie.” Rae’s daughter had become the civilian leader of Jupiter system, coordinating industrial production, personnel, the economy, social policy and more. Every day he thanked heaven for her drive and capacity.

Rae had taken on a similar, even grander role as civilian administrator of the entire Solar System, including dealing with the Meme. With Charles running Earth’s economy and Spooky – that is,
Spectre
– bringing the leftover Blends to heel and rooting out Meme loyalists, Absen wondered to himself if the Meme hadn’t won in the end. After all, it seemed Blends ended up at the top of things no matter what. Then there were the hyper-capable AIs. How soon before ordinary humans became obsolete?

Not yet, though,
he thought.
The human spirit is still strong enough to prevail, and if the Sekoi are any example, Blends may form an elite but they do assimilate with their own people eventually. Over the generations, Blends will spread and dilute into the gene pool. We’ll be like the Han Chinese, who simply absorbed any outside culture that dared to rule it.

Assuming we survive.

Glancing down, he saw his desktop screen now reorganized, clear stacks of summarized documents in cascades he could comprehend. “Thanks, Michelle. How could I ever live without you?”

“In a permanent state of confusion, I suspect. Glad to see you noticed, sir.” Absen’s wall screen flickered to life and Michelle’s visual avatar appeared in high-def.

“Hmm, is that jealousy I hear?” Absen had noticed a few snide comments from Michelle lately that seemed to relate to his relationship with Rae.

“No, sir. May I speak frankly?”

“By all means.”

Michelle’s tone turned unexpectedly wistful. “It’s not jealousy, sir. It’s envy.”

“Really?”

“I see how happy you are when Rae comes to visit. Then there’s Repeth and Johnstone, and Scoggins and Ford, and…”

“And you want a…what, a lover?”

“Is that so strange, sir?”

Absen folded his hands and sat back. “Not at all. Humans are built to want partners, people to share their lives with. You have no equal within light-years. But Michelle, though I sympathize, we just don’t have the spare resources to build another you anytime soon.”

“I know that, sir. Just thought I’d plant a bug in your ear for the future, once we’ve smashed the Scourges.”

“A bug. Funny. Noted. Now can we move on to this paperwork? What should I look at first?”

“I suggest the summaries on the proposals for the Solar Line.”

“Hmm.” Absen took a few minutes to look at several point papers outlining possible weapons and defenses to be placed in close orbit around the Sun in order to immediately engage the Scourges when they emerged from wormhole space. “I don’t like ‘Solar Line.’ Call it…call it the Jericho Line.”

“Israelites marching around and around the walls? Very inspiring, sir, and Bull will love it.”

“I have my moments.”

“I’ll make sure the story is slipped into the next intelligence briefings for all EarthFleet personnel.”

Conquest’s tone seemed flippant, dismissive even, so Absen looked up. “Stories are shortcuts to the heart, Michelle. They inspire and inform in ways that an intel briefing can’t. Don’t knock a good story.”

“As you say, sir.”

“Speaking of EarthFleet personnel…how is recruiting going?”

“It’s easy finding raw volnteers, sir. Earth’s population is up to about 970 million under the Meme’s breeding programs. Most are Edens, and about half are adults. Of those, the problem isn’t recruiting. Except for the former resistance movement and sympathizers, the populace is used to being told what to do, so if you ask for volunteers, you get them. The main issue is making sure we don’t mismatch skill sets, by accepting, say, a skilled cyberneticist to be a grunt, causing a hard-to-fill vacancy in a vital factory. Most of these Blends that ruled in the name of the Meme expected unquestioning obedience. Nobody wants to speak even obvious truths to power for fear of being brutalized or turned into sexual playthings.”

Absen sighed. “Once people lose their freedom, even if they take it back, it’s hard to get used to it again. That’s what we’re dealing with.”

“You can’t force-feed people freedom. They have to want it.”

The admiral stopped and looked thoughtful. “That’s a good point. Remind me to have Rae add some lessons on good examples of constitutions to the information operations campaign we’re directing at the populace – United States, European Union, Australian, Free Communities. Natural human and civil rights, stuff like that.”

Michelle’s tone turned wry. “More propaganda?”

“Call it what you will. We’re under martial law, and it’s for their own good.”

“For their own good, yeah. That’s what all Caesars say, sir.
Remember, thou art mortal
.”

“I’m not the one who thinks she’s an angel, Miss Conquest.”

“That was so twenty-first century, sir, when I was just a kid. I’m over it now.”

“So you say, Grandma.” Absen grinned, a rarity.

“Yes, sir. Will that be all, sir?”

“It will. Dismissed.”

Michelle’s avatar winked out, though Absen knew her departure was just an illusion. She monitored his office and would respond instantly if he called. Only if he specifically told her to cut herself off would she do so, and that grudgingly. He noticed she was becoming more possessive as time went on, and realized that granting her wish for some kind of AI love interest might be his only solution.

But not anytime soon. Now, they had a war to fight.