Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer (12 page)

“Thanks, Mom,” he said with put-on brightness designed to appease parents. Being polite deterred getting a lecture, which he supposed was the point, a kind of social symbiosis. “Where is everyone?”

“Exploiting that Sentry,” she said as she plated some hash and then dumped the rest of it into four bowls. “Once you’re done you can take these to your brothers and sisters.”

“Yeah, okay.” He shook drops of spicy sauce onto the plate and then shoveled seasoned hash into his mouth.

Mom sat down across from him, looking at him the way mothers do. Or at least, the way mothers on TV seemed to, which was the same as his own mother. He’d never met anyone else’s mother for real. He focused on eating, hoping she wouldn’t start some kind of “conversation.”

Fortunately she seemed content to just stare at him with that funny smile she had. As soon as he could, he finished, dumping his plate and spoon into the sink and grabbing the bowls, balancing them on his hands and arms like a diner waitress. “See you!”

“Bye,” Mom replied.

In the cargo bay he expected to see a scene of science, with inexplicable tubes and biomachines and his siblings in miniature lab coats or something. Instead they all just stood next to the quiescent dolphin-like Sentry with their palms resting on it and their eyes closed.

Dad’s avatar hung out to the side and turned his head when Ezekiel came in. “They’re exploiting it.” His mouth turned up in a smile.

“Cool. What are they gonna do with it?”

“We’ll see.”

“Dad…I want to keep it. It could do all sorts of stuff. I could train it to push more asteroids around and stuff.”

“You know, son, I could make you a Sentry any time, that knows you from birth. This one is special, though, because it has some fragmentary memories it inherited from the three Meme that got away, as well as all their standard military programming. It’s too useful to just make into a pet for you. I’m sorry.”

“Aww…”

The avatar smiled. “Don’t go saying I never let you have any fun. When I was a kid I could only dream of having my own spaceship and flying around the solar system.”

“When you were a kid they didn’t even have computers!” Ezekiel retorted.

Dad just shook his head in amusement. “Besides, we might have a use for this little guy when the Destroyer shows up. I’d hate you to get too attached to him.”

“He might get killed!”

“Exactly the reason I don’t want you to become fast friends.”

Ezekiel looked around at the scene, realizing he wasn’t going to win this argument. “Okay. Well…I’m going to get back to work, then.”

“All right.” Dad lifted a hand in farewell. “Well done with this thing, son. It might make a real difference.”

“Thanks, Dad,” he said, reddening at the praise. As smart as they were, such special recognition for him alone had come more rarely lately. It felt good to have done something they didn’t and couldn’t.

Still…his potential pet just got snatched away from him, turned into his siblings’ lab experiment.
Boo
.

He called
Roger
back to dock, and boarded. Maybe if he found another Sentry out there he could keep that one.

Captain Huen sat comfortably in the Chair. “That’s really not seeing it, sir,” he said in his smoothest of British accents maintained by the upper crust of Hong Kong society, legacy of ninety-nine years under foreign rule. “But we can go to the docking port and take a real look.”

“I’d like that,” Absen responded.

“Ms. Rikard, you have the conn.” Huen stood up to turn over his position to a tall thin woman with Commander’s stripes. “Follow me.”

The ship’s captain, the admiral, and four stewards – Tobias, Shan, Schaeffer and Clayton – walked along
Artemis’
central corridors, so like
Orion
’s own.
As sister ships that is to be expected,
Absen mused,
but already they have diverged due to the damage and renovation of the station, and the use to which this ship has been put.

Crew and passengers crowded through the corridors, but moved for the command party. Shan made sure of it by going before and calling out, “Make way!” in a carrying voice. Civilians, some of them not fully understanding, were pulled aside by EarthFleet ratings if they did not get out of the way of their gods-on-deck fast enough. Navy tradition wasn’t the only driver of this behavior: no one took security lightly, or wanted to be the target of a steward’s ire.

The walk from the bridge, buried deep in the middle of the cylindrical ship, to the docking port in the nose, took less than two minutes, as it was only around two hundred meters distance along a straight corridor. Once they arrived, they were able to look out upon their objective from a range of a mere thousand kilometers. It appeared as a dim grey sphere that filled a large part of their direct view.

Ceres. The planetoid, largest object in the Asteroid Belt, bulked over nine hundred kilometers in diameter, a quarter that of Earth’s moon, but far less massive. Its gravity pulled at only about three percent of Earth’s, so
Artemis’
current orbit was very slow, a controlled drift.

Composed mostly of ices and clays, nevertheless the planetoid was slated to become the arsenal of EarthFleet. The new mechanical fusion reactors, now being produced by the thousands on orbital factories, could process its materials and it could power machines, and metallic asteroids had already been soft-landed on its surface to provide the necessary construction substances.

“You can’t really see much detail from this viewport,” Huen said, “but it does provide perspective. We are in a slowly descending spiral. Our engines can give us almost a half G, plenty of power to maintain orbit or get away if we need to. In about four days we will land the ship atop one of the many large iron asteroids that have been set down in a massive field near its north pole. Special landing struts will keep us far enough away from the surface that waste heat will not cause us problems.”

“I hear all the structures will be fitted out with pylons like that,” Absen said.

“You are correct, sir. With gravity so low, one can almost imagine that, instead of being on the surface of a planet, the facilities are actually sitting next to a massive asteroid that happens to have a tiny attraction. It’s all a matter of perspective.”

“Yes, I see,” and Absen did. After this long in space, he had gotten the hang of not thinking only in terms of up or down. “And how long until the first ship is built?”

“Projections say three years.”

“Leaving at most three years of production, which yields…”

“About ninety thousand kamikazes. You know the rest of the order of battle.”

Absen nodded. “I’m still very uncomfortable with this tactic, but there are plenty of volunteers, and maybe none of them will have to use their final option.”

Huen shrugged. “Many nations in times past have employed suicide warriors when their backs were to the wall. Some used condemned criminals and promised them pardons if they survived. Some were religious zealots driven by visions of Paradise. Some, like those that provided this eponymous Japanese name ‘kami-kaze’ – Divine Wind – died for the nation, or a warrior’s code. Ours will be just one chapter in a long history of honorable sacrifice.”

“I know.” Absen stared at the dim ball, so cold but so vital to Earth’s defense. “It still seems odd that, with all the tremendous industry on Earth, we come all the way out here to make the shipyards.”

“The orbital factories are scheduled to capacity already. While Earth’s resources are close to them, extra materials in the form of asteroids have to be brought from beyond the orbit of Mars. Here, the asteroids are all around us. Once the Pseudo-Von Neumann factories we carry are running, they will build more modular factories in logarithmic progression. By that time they will spread out over the surface of Ceres. Then, about three years from now, they will stop making more factories and will start making weapons and ships.”

“I wanted them to do it on the Moon,” Absen remarked.

“I hear they are putting some factories there, but the gravity well still impedes efficiency. Robots facilities are very good at working fast in very low gravity. All people have to do is monitor them and adjust their programming. I suggested they put the factories on Callisto, where we will soon build the operational Aerospace Force Base, but I was overruled as well.”

Absen turned to Huen in surprise. “I never heard about that suggestion.”

“Ask General Tyler, or his staff. Why should they listen to one lone captain?”

“Because you’re in charge of one of the most vital pieces of our war effort there is, and you’re the man on the ground. If you can call this ground…”

“Admiral…” Huen seemed reticent, but continued. “I did not mean to cause problems at your level. I was not complaining. I have come to believe that General Tyler made the right decision. Ceres has a better mix of materials, and is surrounded by millions of tons more within easy distance. It will not be an immediate and obvious target, while the operational base will be. Our eggs should not be all in one basket.”

Absen pursed his lips in thought, turning away to pace for a moment while Huen stood in uncomfortable silence. “Captain Huen…I see I have been remiss. I knew you were a competent and capable officer, and I was happy to take advantage of your obvious managerial and leadership skills, but at my level it’s easy to get lost in the forest and forget the trees. And, I know you’re chafing at being a glorified factory manager these last three years, and would like something more operational.” He took his tablet out of a pocket and made a note. “I won’t forget again.”

“Thank you, sir,” Huen responded, trying not to show his sudden happiness.

“Well,” Absen smiled at the captain, not so constrained by culture or position, “thank you for the eyes-on view. Now I’d like to just tour your operation here, if you don’t mind. I’ll stay for a couple of days, and then go back on my command courier. My report will reassure the Combined Council, and I’ll be out of your hair.”

Huen couldn’t stop himself from bowing gratefully, even though it was not EarthFleet custom. “Then if you will excuse me, I have duties to attend to.”

In the reception afterward he thought he might have caught a sparkle in Senior Steward Shan’s eyes. The man-mountain had loosened up enough for such small indications to leak through. In turn, Huen inclined his head slightly and mocked himself by ostentatiously brushing off imaginary lint from his shoulderboards.

Huen let his staff relax while quietly slipping out of the event, Shan following him back to his office. While overseeing the setup of Ceres, he still had a lot of planning to do for Grissom Aerospace Base on the moon of Jupiter, Callisto.

“What do you think, Shan,” Huen said, throwing a graphic up on his largest wall screen. “We’ll move
Artemis
and land her to provide a ready-made base, just like we did here. The engineers will lay down permanent structures as fast as they can. It will be much easier than here. Callisto’s surface has areas of silicates that make it a lot more stable than Ceres, so it won’t be as tricky to build there.”

Shan studied the graphic. Precisely because he was not part of the engineering team, Huen valued the man’s outsider’s eyes. The steward said, “Once the warships fly here to be based, they will need pilots and maintenance personnel, correct?”

“Yes, of course. The next phase will be to build those facilities.”

“I see,” Shan said. “And these are the ship pads. But how will they get to their ships?”

Huen stood up to stare at the wall screen alongside the big man. “I presume the engineers have thought of something.”

Shan bowed slightly, but Huen made a note to ask. Sometimes the planners and engineers, so focused on the mechanical details, missed things that seemed obvious to others who had a broader view. It further occurred to Huen that he needed some more people to provide such a viewpoint.
Artemis’
crew contained some good officers and petty officers, but he also saw in this an opportunity to obtain some extra hands. With personnel always tight, these days, he always used any good reason to get a few extra, rather than just burden the existing ranks with more duties.

“Thank you, Shan. You have given me at least two good ideas with your observation.”

“I am always grateful to serve he who maintains the mandate of heaven.”

Huen smiled faintly. “You were beginning to wonder about that these past years,” he said.

“No. I only waited until the eyes of heaven turned once more toward you, and they have, Admiral.”

“Rear Admiral only, my friend. But it is good. I wish I could reward you similarly, but there is no higher rank in your specialty than Senior Steward.”

Shan nodded, but said nothing, only taking a deep breath. Huen knew by long association this meant the man wanted to say something more, but waited for an invitation. “Perhaps you have some favor in mind for me to grant?”

“I would never ask for such a thing,” Shan replied.

“You are not asking. I am offering, Senior Steward. You must only tell me the truth. What is it you wish?”

Shan bowed again. “I wish permission to marry.”

Huen lowered his eyes.
Quite an unexpected request. Technically he does not need to ask me that, though culturally he would want my blessing
. “Of course you may, with my best wishes. You do not need my permission, according to EarthFleet regulations. Who is the lucky…?” He stopped, not wishing to assume anything.