Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) (21 page)

“Firing run set. Pulse in three, two, one, mark.” Okuda’s call had hardly faded in their ears when he said, “Dropping pulse, mark.” Within the relativistic TacDrive field, distances seemed short.

The forward optical screens jumped and then stabilized, the holotank not far behind as it updated, both more smoothly in VR than they would have in realspace. On the displays, expanded for clarity and overlaid with targeting graphics, hung their first glimpse of a gigantic enemy vessel, at twenty kilometers across more of a ponderously mobile base than a ship. Scoggins heard several expressions of shock and surprise before the far more critical firing reports.

This one was waking up, that much was clear. Uncounted small craft, tiny at this distance and scale, spread from the thing’s surface like organized clouds of gnats. Notations appeared as the AI processed the inputs, labeling groups as assault boats. Fighters and gunboats would follow. A rough total of the numbers visible topped four hundred thousand individual craft, almost half. Fortunately they were streaming in the other direction.

“Exploder and decoy missiles away,” Conquest said. Reluctantly, Ford had relinquished deployment of the antimatter weapons to the AI. Precision was just too critical, and even with link and targeting computers, the weapons officer couldn’t be quite as accurate and certain.

“Pulse, mark,” Okuda said immediately, and reality shuddered once more. “Dropping, mark.”

“Waiting to load the next Exploder…” Ford said as soon as they debouched from the TacDrive field.

Scoggins fretted as the antimatter missile levitated up the thousand-meter track from
Conquest
’s central magazine to the launcher in her nose, but as delicate as the weapon’s magnetic bottles were, rushing the shot was not an option.
I should have prepped the Exploder before the pulse, not afterward
, she thought. She used the pause to slow her own time sense and examine the next mothership that lay off the port bow.

Okuda had been careful to arrive five thousand kilometers behind the enemy, away from Earth where its swarm was headed. Still, for the first time, academic knowledge began to turn visceral, and a knot of fear grew in her gut as she stared at the numbers on their way to the planet.
So many…and each assault boat with a thousand critters aboard, all wanting to eat us.

“SLAM hit. Another!” Fletcher at her old Sensors station suddenly crowed. “The SLAMs are working!” Light from the first two strikes must have just reached
Conquest
, and Scoggins fervently hoped the other six would connect as well.

Cheers of relief broke out on the bridge with the knowledge that the enemy force had just been reduced by one sixth, sparing the defenders while slaughtering over two billion of the bugs. Scoggins felt no remorse. As far as she could tell, these Scourges had no redeeming qualities whatsoever, making the Meme look positively benign by comparison.

“Mister Ford, where’s that Exploder?” Scoggins snapped.

Of the twelve motherships, eight of them had vanished. In their places he saw balls of expanding plasma and sprays of wreckage. “Emergency power; evasive maneuvers,” Yort blasted through every photo-emitter on his body, his words slurred with residual lethargy. “Begin immediate deployment.” Machines on the bridge echoed the order to his subjects.

“But Archon Third, we have no targets,” blinked one of his officers. “The lower orders will be confused and some will head for the star.”

“Then ensure they do not!” Yort ordered. “Send them outward while I determine what disaster has befallen our motherships.” Playing his digits over the controls himself, he ran the record back to the time of their appearance, and then quickly located the moment when the massive swarm-carriers exploded. First they existed, and then long moments later they exploded, so suddenly that only light-based weapon strikes seemed likely. The direction the wreckage sprayed provided him with a vector, and within seconds he plotted the position the unknown weapon must have fired from, a significant distance above one pole of the star.

Somehow, the infestation had expected them, had waited at a place that allowed them to see all possible exit points, and fire on them. But even light-based weapons took time to reach them, and so as long as his mothership continued to evade, he should be safe from the hideous death ray.

Unfortunately the blazing radiation of the star eliminated any hope of his sensors detecting the exact nature of the enemy. It must be a supermassive fortress to employ such a weapon, a veritable planetoid.

“There,” he said to his officers, indicating the place with a claw tip. “Send half my forces to the enemy firing location via a spherical route. Spread the other half out and away from the star. Where…” He quickly examined the first planet in the system, a small barren world, then the second, shrouded in hot clouds, neither of which showed signs of abundant life. But the third teemed with it.

It also swarmed with infestations of war machines.

Of interest, the eight annihilated motherships were all closest to the third planet’s current orbital position.

“Sir, I have detected another biomass cluster, here, near us. Eight large nests.”

Yort examined his primary display. Life readings beckoned opposite the infested planet, but closest to his own mothership, a stroke of luck. If he moved quickly, he could seize and eat this prize himself, then move on to join in the main assault as other swarms took the brunt of the casualties.

“Vaporized them, hon,” Commander Ford said with a wolfish smile.

She let him get away with the familiarity this time. He was her husband, after all. Right now the elation of the plan’s success had her in its grip, and she forced herself to concentrate. “Where’s that second Exploder?” she growled.

“Coming up now.”

Scoggins cheated with her time sense, tweaking it so the seconds passed quickly, though that caused the swarms of enemy looming in front of
Conquest
to deploy even faster on the screen. Suddenly, witch-lights flared among the enemy, ripples of color and brightness in complex waves and densities.

“What the hell is that?” Scoggins asked.

Lieutenant Fletcher replied, “Some of it’s laser fire. No threat at all at this range. A little is some kind of plasma discharges aimed at us, but we’re too far away. The majority seems to be communication lights among themselves. Millions of them.”

“James –” Scoggins said to Ford in a tone of warning.

“Firing now,” he replied hastily. “Exploder and missiles away.”

“Pulse, mark,” Okuda said immediately, and the displays blanked as
Conquest
bolted. “Dropping, mark.” Scoggins mentally counted this pulse as the ship’s third capital action of the five their capacitors allowed them, a convenient shorthand.

Another mothership, looking much like the first, appeared in front of them, only this one was surrounded by its enormous, already expanding swarm. The enemy now resembled the biggest hornet’s nest Scoggins had ever seen.

“Alpha strike. Target the mothership.”
Fourth action, and an Exploder would get intercepted by that mess.

“Aye aye, Skipper,” Ford said with relish. This time he got to fire with his own hands, or at least it would feel that way in VR.

The swarm was already turning and firing thousands of weapons toward
Conquest
when her primary weapons array speared death into the mothership core.

First, the three gargantuan
Desolator
-built particle beams bored a hole through the intervening thousands of boats to touch the mothership. Attenuated by the interfering escorts, the energy blew through the organic resin of the latticework and barely singed the armor of the enemy core, but it cleared three cylinders of space.

Space for a million ferrocrystal spheres to pass and strike the target at 0.3
c.

The streams of railgun shot slammed into the mothership’s hull and each immediately fused, every one releasing power equivalent to a tiny nuclear blast. The inexorable tide of sun-like heat quickly ate its way through the core’s heavy armor in three separate places. Once the lines of shot chewed through, the resulting plasma, stripped ions and superheated gas propagated throughout the interior of the flattened sphere very much like the sledgehammer had done to the Io base, but more so. Ironically, the mothership’s heavy armor became a liability, holding the expanding hell within the vessel it was supposed to protect.

Inside, everything ignited as lines of blasts marched through its structure in a ruler-straight line. Even substances not normally flammable – foodstuffs, metals, even ceramics – burst into flame and consumed themselves in a firestorm that snuffed out every living thing within.

Gutted, the core spewed a blazing jet of gases from its entry wounds and spun broken through the void like a firework pinwheel.

“Yes! Yes!” Ford slapped his console with fierce joy, echoed by others on the bridge.

“Well done,” Scoggins said with a pleased shudder. It was one thing to launch SLAMs or deploy Exploders and run, not seeing the results, but quite another to witness the kill with a warrior’s dark satisfaction. “Mister Okuda, take us out of here.”

“Pulse, mark. Dropping, mark.”

Fifth action.

“Capacitors at two percent,” the Engineering station reported. “Full charge in sixty-three minutes.”

Now the holotank and flatscreen displays – really just images in her head, Scoggins reminded herself – showed
Conquest
hanging in space twenty million kilometers out from Sol’s
south
pole, exactly opposite from where they had launched the SLAMs and well away from any action. This position allowed her, and the admiral, full visibility of the theatre of battle.

Drained of stored power,
Conquest
waited. Had they not been in VR space, Scoggins would have ordered everyone to take a break. Instead, she toyed with the idea of using the AI’s control of VR time to skip forward but decided against it.

Beside her, Admiral Absen paced about the bridge, looking at the holotank from all angles and issuing terse orders to his forces strewn around the solar system. “Captain, take a look at this mothership,” he said after he was done. He pointed to one Scourge carrier separated from its fellows, on the opposite side of the sun from Earth.

Scoggins nodded. “That’s the one we left alone, heading for the Meme Destroyers.”

“Just what we need,” Absen replied. “He’s out of position. Probably figures he’ll be last to the buffet, so he might as well try to grab a snack while his buddies are distracted.”

“You have a sick sense of humor, sir.”

“It’s been said.” The admiral pointed. “Hmm. What’s this swarm cluster? The one that’s heading to the solar north? We can barely see it.”

Scoggins stared, leaning over the railing and putting her nose into the holotank. “Michelle, magnify that, will you?”

The fuzzy icon expanded rapidly until it resolved itself into a swarm of Scourge ships. “What the hell are they doing out there?” Absen asked. “Replay the record and tell me where they came from.” The display reversed time, showing clearly the enemy group had been launched from the lone mothership.

“They’re heading for where we fired the SLAMs from,” Scoggins realized aloud. “Probably thinks we have something permanent there, like a fortress.”

“Clever bug,” Absen said, “but not clever enough. Half his swarm is going for the Meme, where I hope they’ll be savaged badly. The other half is on a wild goose chase…”

“And the mothership’s all alone, heading away from the sun,” Scoggins finished. “Bughouse.”

“Yes.” Absen made one more circuit of the holotank, looking at the display from all angles. “Put me through to Vango and Bull.”

Yort briefly considered angling his forces and mothership up and over the plane of the ecliptic, but that would use valuable time and fuel already being prodigiously expended by the mothership’s evasive maneuvers. What had he to fear from a few defenses? Even with half his forces on their way to the still-unseen superfortress above the star’s pole, he had over fifty thousand Claws, an equal number of Lances, and a half-million Mandibles filled with a billion larva and adolescents. His only challenge would be chasing down the fat nests, consuming them, and returning to the infested world soon enough to claim his share.

Abruptly, several of his Claws vanished in first one fusion explosion, then another. Within seconds, blasts flared along the line of his advancing craft, annihilating them in small groups. “The pestilence has deployed orbital mines. Why did the Claws not see them?”

“I do not know,” said his underling officer. “The surveillance technicians are searching for an answer.”

“Spread our forces out to ensure no more than one is killed at a time,” Yort ordered. “The damage is bothersome, but negligible.” Soon, the frequency of explosions waned, still striking here and there, but killing barely one in a thousand of his Claws, Lances and Mandibles.

“The Claws approach the asteroids,” Yort’s underling reported. “They exhibit minimal signs of infestation.”

“Tell the Claws to begin firing plasma torpedoes at extreme range to provoke a response.”