Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer (30 page)

Vango’s clock crossed T minus sixteen hours, coming up on
Lark
’s IP Alpha, the point in space where he would start his burn. All systems checked out fully green, especially the internal gravplates that would counterbalance the enormous G forces of the course change. He watched the numbers count down, and then turned over the initiation to his computer.

Lark
groaned as she took up the strain, gravplates overloaded to seven percent above rated maximum. At this level they could expect to lose roughly one in a thousand ships to some kind of failure. If they were lucky it would be something small and fixable. If not… thirty losses was an acceptable number, in the general’s estimation, Vango figured. He just hoped he would not be one of them.

Stress meters showed everything green, with a few systems in the yellow. He switched to backup on those he could and brought everything into the green again.
Lark
was a good, tight ship, and he knew her inside and out.

She’d hold together.

His tactical VR display filled in some holes, and some ships, even whole squadrons, seemed to teleport into new positions as the armada’s net came up to full power and activity. With no more need for stealth, each Aardvark could now use its comm suite.

Only a tenth of the ships went on active sensors, though, to hide their numbers. Return echoes and datalinks filled in the gaps for the others.

Tiny dots began to appear in front of the formation, shooting through it suddenly like dust motes. Occasionally one of the armada’s ships winked out. When Vango queried the computer, it told him what he saw were chunks of ice and rock, the leading edge of the section of the Hills Cloud they approached. Despite the enormous dispersion of ships and pieces, occasionally one would intersect the other, and at the speed they were traveling, any ship that struck something larger than a golf ball was likely dead.

For over five hours they blasted, engines straining to divert the armada’s headlong traveling rush toward the Meme’s old position into a tactical envelopment of the new. As they flew they waited the time it would take for the light of their burns to reach the enemy and then the evidence of his response to come back to the fleet. Vango thought how strange it was that at this distance, several light-hours, each side peered into the past, and would react with information that was, in tactical terms, ancient. He sincerely hoped the general was as good as his reputation, and got the jump on the Meme.

Vango watched as lights continued to wink out one by one. He could have queried why each did so, but he really did not want to know whether they died from stress failure or collision with space debris or some other reason. Some of the tiny dots stayed on but ceased to maneuver, continuing in straight lines along paths sending them out into space. He didn’t ask about those either; they must retain some function but their engines had failed, and no one could do anything for them without abandoning the fight. If the pilots were lucky they could put themselves back into their coffins, eventually to get chased down and picked up.

Sometime. If there was anyone left to do it.

Vango sharpened his attention coming up on the time where they should begin seeing the enemy’s reaction. Unsurprisingly, it was not as expected.
In other words, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

“What in the Name of the One Above All Ones is that?” Two asked, designating the thousands of point sources approaching their position.

“It appears the Humans have launched very large missiles at us,” One replied flatly. “They
must
be missiles to be so numerous, and are only now becoming visible. We would have seen real ships, and the evident drive and vector analysis correlates to craft the sizes of a Survey vessel.”

“Such as we used to occupy,” Three said wistfully. “I was happy then.”

“Please try to focus your attention on current reality,” One snapped.

“Is it possible they are not missiles, but small craft?” Two ventured.

“Unlikely. Possible,” One said grudgingly.

“Should we not report our speculation?”

“No,” One replied. “We are still in disfavor. Besides, if we think of it, others will as well. Better to ensure rear fusors are fully healed and fuelled.”

“Understood.” Two and Three busied themselves with bringing their weapons up to optimum efficiency.

“There are many thousands,” One mused, as was his occasional wont, expressing his thoughts. The other two had seen this propensity grown over the years, but it did not seem to impair One’s efficiency. “I wonder how powerful each one is.”

“Shall I calculate how powerful they would have to be to overwhelm us?” Three asked obsequiously.

“There is no point to that,” Two objected. “There are far too many factors to predict – maneuver, distance, velocity, warhead size, radiation yield.”

“Yes,” concurred One. “We must wait for more information.”

Three closed his pores and slumped back in his holding tank, thinking how his existence so often involved boredom. He dreamed of the day he could blend. Then, life would become truly wonderful, not only for its fleshly pleasures, but because no One would lord it over him anymore.

Because the fusion drives pointed directly at the center of the fleet, it was obvious they were running directly away from the blanket of ships and at an angle to the most direct route to the solar system.
We’ve already won a small victory
, Vango thought. No matter what, they had interrupted the two Destroyers, if that’s what they were, in their feeding, and had driven them farther outward from home.

As soon as the enemy drives lit, those of the fleet’s advanced missile ring did so as well. With the lightspeed delay in all directions, some of the weapons would take longer than others to see their enemy and react, or get orders, and the actions of some would take longer than others to be seen by the fleet. It was very hard to keep in his head, even with the VR aid.

While the concave blanket of pursuing Aardvarks had canted itself toward the enemy as they ran at an angle, the green circle’s edge marched implacably forward. Eventually all of the missiles marked in that ring began to converge toward the enemy. Yeager’s gambit had succeeded so far: at least some of the weapons would reach the Destroyers sometime in the next hour.

A swarm of new bogeys now appeared in his tactical VR, two distinct groups of about sixty each, accelerating at frightening velocity toward the fleet.
Hypers
, Vango thought. Destination lines appeared as his computer extrapolated the individual enemy missiles’ courses toward friendly ships. As his squadron was well off to what the common display called “right” of the center, none of them came near him.

He wondered why so few, for such large ships. Intel had theorized Destroyers could launch thousands of hypers at a time. On the other hand, the living weapons took time to be created within the ships, to gestate. Perhaps the enemy was, after all, caught flatfooted without weapons ready, and now ran away to buy time to make more.

Vango watched as the six score missiles accelerated toward the middle of the fleet. On the display they crawled, but considering the distance between the two sides, they must be moving at awesome speeds. Given time, Intel theorized Meme hypers could achieve half of lightspeed before they ran out of fuel, although to do so would mean any evasion by their target would cause them to miss.

That highlighted the eternal problem of missiles in space: fast was great against fixed, nonmaneuvering targets, but made terminal guidance against smaller ones – like the Aardvarks – almost impossible. On the other hand, slower meant less damage and more time to react, but more time for the hyper to guide. The armada was getting a firsthand lesson in their enemy’s actual tactics, for which it would certainly pay in blood.

Eventually the plots intersected. According to the numbers, the hypers had boosted to just under .1
c
and then coasted, maneuvering violently as they tried to strike their targets in their terminal phase. Of the one hundred twenty-eight missiles, only three had connected with Aardvarks. Each attack ship had been utterly vaporized, but Vango thought those casualties surprisingly light.

He could hear an odd sound through his comm net, eventually realizing it was cheers picked up by the voice-activated mikes of his squadron mates. Although he didn’t feel like celebrating at the deaths of three of his comrades, he understood their sentiment; the fleet had gotten off easy, and the enemy wasn’t ten feet tall anymore.

And EarthFleet had learned something. Already no doubt watching sensor drones were pumping data back toward the solar system, important intelligence about how the enemy employed their weapons.

Vango wondered what became of the hypers that missed, and queried the net. His display showed that, rather than trying to swing around and chase the Aardvarks, they were gradually turning on minimum thrust in the direction of the solar system.
Smart
, he thought.
Might as well send them cruising in to hit something of ours. Maybe they would double as some kind of sensor drones, too.

He uploaded that observation to the net as well. Every computer was supposed to store and distribute the pilots’ various ideas and lessons learned, and every minute or two one of the surviving ships would automatically burst-transmit them back to EarthFleet. With no big ships and no intelligence staff, this was the best they could do.

It had long ago occurred to Vango that one important reason they were out here was to provide live combat testing of the Aardvarks and their tactics. Even if they all died, the A-24s being built back home would be piloted by people with a better understanding of what they faced.

A few minutes later he began to sense increasing tension throughout the net. Given their shared VR space, echoes of the pilot’s feelings, subvocalized unconsciously or bleeding into the cybernetic systems, were always an issue. Damping software, like the squelch function on an old radio, kept it manageable, but the stronger the emotions, the harder it was to suppress without losing chunks of connectivity or dropping out entirely.

Vango figured the bleed-over was due to everyone watching the converging missile ring so intently. The Pilums overtook slowly, so slowly, as the enemy sought to stretch out the engagement from the rear, gaining themselves more time to pick them off.

Most of the missiles had locked on to the nearest, rearmost of the two ships. In the general’s place that’s how Vango would have programmed them: chase and kill only one target.
Half a loaf…

Clusters of green merged together, and Vango swooped his virtual viewpoint in closer and closer, until it seemed he rode along with the missiles. Even though intellectually he knew all of this data was half an hour old from the lightspeed delay and what he was seeing had already happened, he felt the rush of the kill, and found himself yelling and cheering the Pilums on.

Doing so also gave him his first good view of the Destroyers. He had no sense of scale, but the two ships looked like footballs, each with one enormous fusion motor at the back and hundreds of fusor ports, large and small, spread over their skins like puckers on ostrich hide.

The flare of the enemy drive swung back and forth, reaching hundreds of kilometers to incinerate several missiles at a time, but those numbers were mere pittances. Sixty thousand Pilums chased the ship, closing at tens of kilometers per second. Smart enough not to try to fly right up the Meme’s engine, the fusion-armed drones blasted on parallel courses, aiming at points ahead of their target.

As the lead missiles drew closer, heavy fusor blasts flared out, directed jets of plasma scores of kilometers long. While inherently inaccurate, they made up for it in destructive power and sheer size, incinerating hundreds of missiles at a time.

But many hundreds among sixty thousand still left a lot of missiles.

Closer and closer the cloud of fusion weapons bore in, still accelerating. Despite the drive and the fusors wiping out great swaths of missiles, it looked like at least half of them would get close enough to damage the enemy.

Given that the Destroyer was about two and a half kilometers across, there was a lot of enemy to damage.

Forcing the new and rather stupid Destroyer to function at maximum combat efficiency took pods-on control at all time for the Meme crew. It consumed many cycles for the training to take hold, even though it had the benefit of molecular memories from before its mitosis. There was a known, strange and mystical effect of consciousness that meant that only one of the two great ships truly carried forward its full experiences. The other, lesser being started sluggish, an animal that had to be goaded and taught.