Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) (20 page)

Yort controlled himself, and waited, though his was not a patient nature.

Even if the first wave were driven back, most if not all of the motherships would escape, Archons intact, though shamed and diminished. The Race would prevail. It always had, ever since it escaped from the gravity well of the Home Nest barely ahead of its own extinction due to exhausting the planet of all competing life forms. Fortunately, other worlds with life had been located, and sublight colony ships with sleeping Archons and fertile eggs had launched themselves toward the stars in hopes of spreading the Race.

The ancient records said those colonies spawned more colonies, and their territory grew at a snail’s pace, limited by the speed of light and conventional physics. Until, that is, the Race consumed a system with knowledge of how to access null space, speeding from star to star. With this technology, all their goals seemed within reach, to fill this galaxy, and the next, and onward to the billion billions waiting.

Ah, the glory of it, Yort thought. All we have to do is be bold enough to seize it.

In 2110, when most of Earth’s population had been wiped out by the impact of the two Destroyers, nearly all of the Earthbound heavy industry and agriculture had gone with it, leaving a few locations where the howling winds and thousand-foot tsunamis did not reach. But even with a few cities intact, the Meme who took form as Blends had retooled what they seized. Farm machinery became the height of technology on the ground as staving off famine and then breeding more human underlings became the priority.

Each of sixty-four new Blends became overlords, calling themselves kings or pharaohs or presidents, dividing the spoils among them. Purelings imposed ruthless order, enslaving or killing all they found. For a time, humans were hunted and caged, then bought and sold for their labor, their skills, and the use of their bodies.

Over the next fifty years, human society was remade and reinvigorated, if not restored to what it once was. Survivors endured and were forced to breed, but they remembered and they taught their children about the old days, before the Meme and the Yellows came.

If not for the Eden Plague, the first generation, the breeding stock, would have died out and solved the Blend overlords’ problems for them. But with the longevity the virus conferred, dissenters found each other and formed an insurgency, carefully salvaging what technology they could as they recruited for the eventual day of liberation.

The Blend overlords had children, expanding their oligarchy beyond its members’ easy recognition. Rae and her two surviving children were able to walk among them, or take off the yellow and pass as ordinary humans slaving for the benefit of those above them. A poor Londoner of the nineteenth century or a Russian, North Korean or Chinese worker of the middle twentieth would have felt right at home in one of these feudal-industrial states.

This was the world Spectre had inherited. He’d spent an inordinate amount of effort over the past two months bringing the mishmash of the Blend’s police and military forces to heel, executing at least a fifth of them outright. Once EarthFleet replaced the loyalist orbital defense forces, liberal use of laser bombardment convinced the holdouts their former masters had abandoned them.

The rest the Skulls took care of, mercilessly.

Using the hardcore insurgents as his political cadre, Spectre conducted a terrifying purge, mitigated only by the ability to subject subjects to biological interrogation to confirm their change of loyalty. Without that, he would have ordered killed anyone he was not certain of.

Not surprisingly the lowest classes, the powerless slaves who toiled on the farms and in the factories, were overjoyed at their newfound freedom. They were not quite as happy to learn that they had all been drafted into EarthFleet as militia, but those born after the Third Holocaust had not yet broken the habit of obedience to those who wore the yellow, and so, in less than two months, Earth was once again militarized.

More and more of the children of the original Meme Blends had joined Spectre, multiplying his abilities enormously. Once he had thoroughly ransacked their minds to ensure their sincerity, he put them to work doing the same to others. Eventually he was confident all remaining Blends at least grudgingly accepted his rule.

The others, he executed. He had no time for rehabilitation. The enemy could appear at any moment.

Now Spectre gazed out over what had been Gilgamesh’s palace perched at the highest point of the Protectorate of Shepparton, pleased at the buzz of hundreds of people coming and going below him. The city’s self-titled Lord Mayor had ruled it with a bit more wisdom and benevolence than the average Blend, and had developed it into the largest metropolis in Australia with over one million people. Shepparton had been spared the worst effects of the worldwide cataclysm due to its inland position.

Spectre had taken it for his own, making it his world capital, nerve center of his operations, connected to the other sixty-four former dictatorships by liberal use of satellite communications. Now, Earth had one government again, under martial law.

Still, he shook his head in disgust at how little he had accomplished. In many ways he felt like he was back in one of the Central American countries as a Green Beret, trying to turn barefooted peasants into insurgents against their anti-American regimes or drug cartels. As then, he could call on a limited set of high-tech resources, air and space assets to leverage what he had, but he didn’t have enough of the basics: assault rifles, grenades, rocket launchers, much less lasers or EarthFleet-style pulse guns. Even the PVNs on Ceres had limits. And few of Earth’s downtrodden workers had ever even considered picking up a weapon. They had to be taught a new mindset.

One man’s propaganda is another’s inspirational theme.

If Yort were describing the procedure in layman’s terms, he would tell a young Archon that the ship within null space tunneled between the stars beneath space, as if it was a worm digging through the dirt. In this way a mothership bypassed the distance between. Therefore, when it surfaced, it did not arrive traveling
inward
toward the star from any combination of three dimensions, but rather
outward
, from the direction of another dimension entirely, as if surfacing into normal space, at speed,
away
.

This process must, however, be accomplished within a gravity well of sufficient power, which meant something with the mass of a star. At the same time, an arriving ship must not exit null space so close to the massive body that it was ripped apart by tidal forces, or blasted by a pulsar’s spinning beam, or irradiated by a black hole’s ravening polar jet…or simply burned up by a star’s corona.

The solution to this dilemma, worked out by the Race’s greatest physicists, was to exit as energetically as possible, like an underwater missile bursting from the sea. That way, even as the gravitic limit collapsed the wormhole field and ejected the ship into normal space, it was already moving away from the star.

Yort’s dreams softened as his ship and its fellows emerged from null space.

Automated systems, recovering their abilities more quickly than living things, engaged reaction engines and accelerated twelve motherships away from the hot yellow sun, a starburst radiating outward along the equator of the spinning ball of fusion. Unfortunately it was not possible to coordinate their random departure points, though they always appeared along the plane of the stellar ecliptic, its equator.

The motherships’ computers immediately launched spy drones, which began to gather data about the star system and feed it back to the ships’ cybernetic brains even as they spread out and formed a web of communication. When the machines’ masters fully awoke, they would already have vital information at their claw-tips.

Captain Scoggins swore without heat as her heart suddenly pounded with adrenaline. “General Quarters, Battle Stations. No drill, people: this is the real show. Tell Weapons Control to wake up the SLAMs.” The finicky spaceship-sized missiles floating nearby took several minutes to bring to firing state.

At least we have sixteen minutes of warning. I hope it’s enough
, Scoggins thought.

Soon,
Conquest
’s prime watch hustled in to begin pulling on their suits and strapping into their seats. Scoggins held off on telling everyone to link in. There was little her admiral hated more than stepping onto a bridge full of closed crash cocoons…but she fully expected this battle to be fought from VR space. The margins were simply too close to give up any potential advantage, no matter the effect on crew brains and nervous systems.

The dead cared nothing about VR syndrome.

Admiral Absen slipped in and sat down at the flag station. “COB,” he said to Timmons as he accepted a battered mug of hot coffee, “how is it my stateroom is a hundred meters closer than yours and yet you always beat me to the bridge?”

“Secret, sir. Master Chiefs only.”

Absen grunted and began pulling on his suit. Once he’d finished and sipped more coffee, Scoggins swiveled around to face the admiral. “Eleven minutes remaining, sir. The SLAMs are hot. All sections report ready. Automated notifications have been sent. Suggest we go to VR at your convenience, sir.”

Absen rubbed his jaw and stared at the holotank. “I hate VR,” he muttered, and then took one last gulp of lifer-juice. “All right,” he said with an air of resignation. “Let’s plug in.”

“All command and staff personnel, link up and cocoon,” Scoggins ordered, reaching for her own plugs. Every now and again someone proposed making the links wireless, but the purity and reliability of the hard lines always won out.

VR space washed over Scoggins as the cocoon closed over her, replacing her view of the bridge with a similar but harder-edged simulation of the same. Now she seemed to sit comfortably in the Chair again, and so did the rest of the watch crew. The virtuality was designed to mimic reality as closely as possible in order to minimize cognitive disruption. Unlike specialists such as helmsmen and pilots, she didn’t live a third of her life in VR, balanced between addiction and the drugs that fought it.

The captain ran through status reports for the entire ship, and then turned to Absen. “Battle speech, sir?”

Absen waved her off. “Mine went out prerecorded to the fleet and the rest of the system, Captain.
Conquest
is yours now.”

Swelling with pride, Scoggins smiled. “Thank you, sir. I’ll try to keep her in one piece.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

Scoggins cleared her throat – or felt like she did. It was so easy to forget about VR. “All hands, this is Captain Scoggins. We’re just moments from what might be the greatest battle EarthFleet has ever faced. For you veterans who know what it’s going to be like, I say: be the professionals you are, and we will prevail. For you who’ve never seen combat, focus on your jobs, listen to your leaders, and do your best. For you of faith, pray. If not, take heart and have faith in each other, in your brothers and sisters in arms.” Then she took a slow, deliberate breath. “Now let’s go kick some ass.”

Johnstone pointed at his ear. “The crew’s cheering you, Captain.”

“Good speech, Melissa,” Absen said, standing up and clapping her on the shoulder. “Better than mine, actually.”

“Thank you, sir. Worked on it a lot.”

The admiral walked over to stand before the holotank. “One good thing about VR is I don’t have to worry about being knocked around the bridge.” He stood looking over the display as time ticked away, the officers around him murmuring clipped commands and reports.

Abruptly the holotank blazed with new icons.

“Contacts…twelve contacts, twenty-one million klicks from Sol,” Fletcher reported. “On the plane of the ecliptic, as expected.”

In the holotank, the Sun occupied the center with a muted blaze. Now, twelve icons showed in a ragged ring twenty-one million kilometers out from its surface, inside the smooth Jericho Line orbiting at twenty-two million kilometers.

“Ford, target eight motherships with the SLAMs, the ones nearest Earth,” Absen said, reaching his hand into the display to point. “Conquest, launch them as soon as you have firing solutions of sufficient confidence.”

Conquest’s voice spoke after a slight delay. “SLAMs away.”

The holotank display plotted tiny lines that crawled toward the eight target icons more than ninety light-seconds away, the hypotenuse of the right triangle defined by Conquest’s position, the location of its targets, and Sol. Scoggins hoped, as she knew they all did, that the eight motherships would continue along their plotted paths. The Meme intel on the Scourges said they were sluggish during the first several minutes after appearance, with only automated systems coming on line.

“All sensors up and open. Plot a min-range intercept course for the next nearest mothership not targeted by a SLAM,” Scoggins ordered. “Ready one Exploder in the forward launcher, one in the magazine.” If they were lucky, the antimatter weapon would catch the first ship’s swarm before it spread far from its lattice. “Set two secondary targets and initiate the firing run.”

Conquest
would be in pulse before the SLAMs reached their targets. Scoggins would just have to hope they hit some of the motherships, and
Conquest
would deal with the rest. The main question was whether they could get the swarms before they cleared their motherships.