Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer (38 page)

“We must ensure every hit from the array. Our only chance of survival is to break it apart and for the debris to strike us like a handful of gravel rather than one huge rock. Do as I say.”

“
Si, Jefe
.” Mercadez turned reluctantly back to his board. “Ceasing fire. Twenty seconds. Ten.”

“Firing array,” the German said with as little inflection as ever. “Ninety-seven percent accuracy assessed. Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine.”

The massive five-second burst from the array’s railguns sent thirty-five thousand steel balls slamming into the rock at a combined speed of eighty-five thousand kilometers per second. In this case, heavier projectiles would have been more effective, as most of the force came from the speed of the asteroid, not the shot. Unfortunately, railguns took one standard size of ammunition.

The first five hundred or so roundshot impacted the rock, flashing into fusion and releasing enormous quantities of energy. As they did, a plasma-filled shockwave formed in front of the asteroid into which more railgun shot poured. Unfortunately that roiling hell devoured the projectiles, adding to its heat and energy but not striking the object body itself.

“Close crash chairs,” d’Lorenz ordered, and their seats reached up to enfold them, automatically filling the spaces with biogel even as mouthpieces for breathing and viewing goggles shoved roughly onto their faces.

Because everything flew through the vacuum of space together, even the expanding fireball, what struck Array Control Center 887 was more a plasma-blanketed glob of molten metallic lava than a hard rock, but at a quarter the speed of light, it did not matter. Nor did the crash couches or gravplates or other pitiful human countermeasures provide any safety.

One moment, three men lived and fought.

The next, they died as a ball of lava and their asteroid met in a collision that left pieces spinning through the void. Though their armored control chamber did not disintegrate, human bodies could not possibly survive the single hammer blow that transmitted thousands of gravities of acceleration to their flesh, exploding their bodies like blood-filled balloons and smearing them across the walls.

Callisto base, and then the rest of the network, heard one last transmission from Weapons Array 887 Control, recorded by Lieutenant Jacque d’Lorenz for posterity.

“
Vive le Roi. Vive la Belgique. Vive le monde
.”

Once the large doors had opened, he gingerly hovered the tiny spaceship into the spot between a hopper and a crawler and let it fall to the deck with a grinding clang, doing a bit of cosmetic damage to the deck and the ship but nothing important. Besides, it was unlikely he would need it again.

After telling the doors to close, he stood up and stripped off his outer clothing, revealing an outfit of the finest yellow silk.
It is fitting,
he thought,
that I fight and perhaps die properly attired. The time has finally come.
“Treason doth never prosper,” he quoted to himself aloud. “What’s the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

But how can I be loyal to something I left a thousand years ago, and help destroy my adopted people?

Quickly he donned his outsized vacuum suit, the only one aboard either base or ship that would fit him. While he did not strictly need the covering, it would extend his capabilities somewhat, and he could always discard it later. It would also keep the Marines scattered around the base from shooting him on sight, as a clearly human EarthFleet artifact. It would also provide him access to the comm net.

Once he’d sealed the suit, he used his HUD to establish a datalink with the base network, giving himself access to everything it knew – Marine deployments, heavy weapons status, external and internal sensors – while at the same time using his steward’s override codes to make himself appear as a maintenance supervisor to anyone else using the same system.

Fortunately for him, the Marines used their own encrypted net, and would likely just accept the evidence of their eyeballs that he was a human wearing a Fleet suit, and not bother him.

The last thing he did before putting the shuttle into standby mode was to open its large rear cargo door, feeling the air rush out of its interior as he did so. In the back bay he took hold of the two handles he’d spot-glued to the casing of the heavy device and carefully lifted it in the low gravity. Its weight was no problem, but its mass remained. Ripping the handles loose by mistake would cause delay.

Carrying the awkward two-meter-long cylinder, he walked down the ramp and out into the vehicle hangar, and headed for the doors to the interior of the base.

In reality he could just place the device here in the capacious hangar, or even leave it in the shuttle, but to do that would be to invite certain anomalous possibilities, not the least of which was the potential for the thing to be destroyed by some stray chunk of incoming rock. Alternately, Meme ground troops might indiscriminately destroy any piece of human technology they could not identify.

Shan wanted to make sure that any such attackers were welcomed in the best way he could.

Then there were the Marines to think about, spread out and dug in throughout the base, intending to make any attackers pay in blood. The timing of things would be fine indeed, what a speaker of English would call “tricky.” For his purposes, he needed a place unlikely to be destroyed by either incoming debris or by ravaging Meme ground troops, whatever their chosen form.

He considered broadcasting some kind of instructions or plea to the Marines to withdraw to the bunkers, but no matter what he said, he was sure they would confirm it with Huen himself, who knew nothing of his friend and bodyguard’s plan. Unless by chance the admiral would take a leap of faith, doing so would probably cause more harm than good.

Then there was always the chance that the EarthFleet ground forces would win the fight, would hold off the enemy and even destroy all the attackers, capturing valuable Meme technology in the process. He had to incorporate all possibilities into his plan, so he lugged the massive thing, looking like nothing so much as a vitamin capsule swollen to the size of a coffin, through the door and down a corridor.

Plotting his route carefully, he proceeded to the area everyone called the Quarter, cleverly built and painted to look like a New Orleans cityscape. Deserted now, he half expected papers to tumble like weeds down the street, but without atmosphere not even a rat disturbed the stillness. Perhaps after mankind had been in space long enough, some kind of pest larger than a microbe would adapt to vacuum and inhabit such abandoned places, but that time was not yet come.

Shan stumped up to the entrance to the grandest casino and, after entering, kicked open the door to its equally grand bordello and extralegal drug parlor. While the crackdown that First Sergeant Repeth had masterminded had cleaned up a lot of corruption, nothing had shut down the Quarter; there were just too many people that wanted, perhaps needed, some place like it.

Still it seemed appropriate that he bring his cleansing machine here to the center of sleaze. If he did not have to use it, perhaps he would nevertheless break it open and scatter its contents around, discomfiting the denizens of the night for a time. At least it would make a statement of sorts. And if he did have to, it would begin its sterilization here, symbolically satisfying at least.

“No, sir, I don’t.” Turning to the CyberComm officer, Schaeffer asked, “Do we have any video of Shan or the shuttle? Anything that might shed light on this?”

“Give me a few minutes, sir, while I run through it.”

The bridge crew watched the big picture display for several minutes, the Destroyer arcing around toward Earth and the incoming rock cloud heading directly for the home planet, incidentally passing near Jupiter and Callisto.

Finally the CyberComm watchstander spoke. “Here’s the best I could find, sir. It looks as if he took some pains to override or avoid the internal cameras, but this is from a cleaning bot with its own independent vid, downloaded when it secured itself for launch.” The front view was replaced by a low-res shot of a corridor deck and a pair of legs. While the scale was hard to tell it did seem as if those could be Shan’s.

“What’s that blob?” Huen asked. The object in question was obvious, if difficult to identify: the lower half of a grayish cylinder hovering next to Shan’s feet, as if being carried.

“Not sure, sir.”

“Clean that up and send it out to all stations. See if anyone can identify it.”

A short time later a call came through to the bridge. “Chief Prochaska here, sir,” the voice on the other end identified itself. “That thing you want to know about? It looks like a drive bomb, sir. And we’ve got one missing.”

Huen sat back, stunned. “A drive bomb? A nuclear weapon? How could he have gotten away with that?”

“I have no idea, sir,” the chief replied, sounding anguished. “I take full responsibility. All I can think of is he used a command override code, because no alarms went off.”

Schaeffer chimed in, “With all the cyberware in his body and as long as he’s been on this ship he could have easily obtained override codes. Hell, sir, he might have just overheard or seen someone punching them into a keypad and recorded them with his cyber-eyes or ears. He must have been planning something like this for some time. But I just can’t believe…”

“You and me both, Shades,” Huen replied. “Even getting married…I wonder if his wife is in on it.”

“In on what, sir?” Schaeffer asked with a certain subdued hostility. “Whatever he’s doing, he must believe it’s necessary and right.”

“Yes, I want to believe that too, but I must be realistic. It hardly matters, though. What can we do?”

Schaeffer licked his lips, and then spoke as if the words were being dragged from his lips. “We could radio the Marines to arrest him and stop him.”

Huen shook his head in negation. “If he really does have a drive bomb, doing so might cause him to trigger it. He might blow up a whole battalion of Marines and the base with it. And, what if what he’s doing turns out to be necessary? I vetoed the idea of setting a fusion bomb on the base. What if he disagreed with me, and is willing to die for that belief? What if he’s right?”

Schaeffer nodded slowly. “He’s given you an option you weren’t willing to take yourself, knowing full well what might happen. Gotta respect that.”

“Yes. We must.” Huen turned to the CyberComm station. “Record and relay this through the spy drones to the whole base in the clear, please.” He switched to Han Chinese. “Shan: now we will see if you retain the mandate of heaven. Good luck, my friend.”

“Yeah,” the senior watchstander, the one with a warrant officer’s insignia, agreed. “They couldn’t have survived that impact. Array 887’s on automatic fire now. Damn, lost another one,” he went on as six remaining icons became five. “Brave buggers.” He sketched a salute toward the ceiling.

“Yeah,” echoed the other, a female sergeant. “Wouldn’t want to be out there floating all alone in the middle of nothing.” The control chamber, buried twenty meters below the railgun itself, thrummed with the vibration of intermittent launches.

“We got our own problems,” said the first. “Nineteen inbounds.”

“We can handle them,” the sergeant replied confidently.

“Yes we can,” the warrant mused. “Wonder why so few. This base has the biggest concentration of weapons in the area. You’d think they would have sent a few hundred to pound us to dust.”

The sergeant glanced over her shoulder at Repeth, standing in the doorway to the control room, as if she thought the Marine would have an answer.

Behind Repeth, a squad of Marines lined the access hallway. All of them were clad in full space armor and carried an array of personal weapons, from caseless-recoilless machineguns to grenade launchers and electromagnetic cannon. She set her helmet camera to pass her audiovisuals back so that everyone could see what was going on. Nothing was more boring than waiting in place for something to happen.

“Maybe they’ll just bypass Callisto,” Repeth volunteered. “Once they pass out of your arc of fire, the ground-based weaponry is pretty much moot.”

“But they’re going to leave us operational. We’ll be able to recover, refuel and rearm Aardvarks once the threat has passed. You’d think they would at least flatten the base to deny it to us for a while.”

Repeth shook her head. “Once the Destroyer passes us, any birds that land here will never catch up to the fight, unless it slows way down. Right now it looks like it’s charging straight in behind its barrage of rocks.”

“Yeah, but –” the sergeant argued, then turned to her board. “Central just released us to local. Ready to engage those inbounds.”

“Roger. Target designated. Fifty-seven seconds to full recharge. Seventy seconds to optimum range. Locked. Set for intermittent burst mode.” The warrant’s hand hovered above the fire button.

“Aye aye, sir,” replied the sergeant as she complied.