Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer (4 page)

Reaching out his hand to touch her face, he said. “What, then? Can you tell me what tears at you?”
For your own soul’s sake.

Hand covered hand. “I would…but I cannot, my love.”
For my own soul’s sake.

Briskly then, removing his touch, he pushed away Alan the lover, became Skull and said, “Then forget about it, and let’s get to business. We’ll talk later.”

Thus was the spell broken, and time, for a span suspended, resumed.

Different, that’s what, but better. The best he’d ever had, even better than with Linde, because now he knew what love was.

Cliché, Skull,
Denham told himself,
but clichés are there for a reason – they are shorthand for essential truths, and really, it’s not as if I’m writing a term paper here and my prose will get graded.

The wonders of the universe opened to him, yet he was, as usual, drawn inward to his son Ezekiel. As his avatar was elsewhere, he manifested an internal eye and speaker, slowly so as not to startle the boy: a tyke of perhaps four in body and emotions, and much older in intellect, though born barely a year ago.

Zeke didn’t miss the surveillance. He spotted the staring orb right away and waved. “Hi, Daddy!”

“Hi, Zeke. What are you working on there?”

“Math’matics. Times tables.”

“What number are you up to?”

“Hunnerd an’ forty-four.”

“Twelve times twelve? I thought you did that long ago.”

“No, Daddy, hunnerd an’ forty-four times other numbers.”

“Ah. Good for you. Never know when you won’t have a computer around.”

“You can always do it for me, right?” Ezekiel held up the tablet with the teaching program. “Even if this breaks, your brain is bigger than all of us. Of ours, I mean.”

“I suppose it is.”

“Daddy, let’s play a wargame. I wanna play Stellar Conquest.”

“Sadly, son, I have something I have to do for your mother.”

“The private thing?” He cocked an eyebrow at the spy-eye. “But she left on the shuttle.”

“Not
with
your mother,
for
your mother. You just like to ask that question because you hate not knowing. When you’re older your mother and I will explain all that to you.”

“But I want to know
now
.”

Alan thought for a moment. “Here, I have something for you.” Concentrating, he extruded a barbell made of dense biomass, weighing perhaps forty kilos. “Pick that up.”

Ezekiel, always eager to please, stood up and grasped it with both of his chubby hands and lifted. He failed utterly. “Turn off the gravity.”

“That wouldn’t be fair, would it? You wouldn’t actually be lifting it on your own, that would be just a cheat.”

“But it’s too heavy for me.”

“Yes, and so is the knowledge you’re asking for. You have to grow some more.”

Ezekiel sat down and scrunched up his face with thought. “So giving it to me now is like turning off the gravity?”

Alan laughed, and the sound echoed throughout his inner body. “Such a smart kid you are. I love you Zeke, but I have to go now, and do work things. Just call me if you really need me.”

Leaving Zeke there, Alan moved his attention to the nursery, where four children lay in four miniature cocoons, biomachines that saw to all of their physical needs, and fed them selected memory molecules from time to time even as they whirled their tiny minds within virtual worlds. He checked the system status and made sure they were doing fine, and reminded himself to go in avatar form later to hold them, rock them, sing to them.

Afterward, he withdrew his attention to his cockpit.

That’s how he named the control room of the ship. It used to contain three Meme and all the biodevices they needed. The young vessel it directed had not grown intelligent enough to do more than follow orders or react to obvious stimuli. Now its mind was mostly subsumed in Alan’s and though he could run the whole thing without putting his consciousness
here
or
there
, he found it kept him more human to do so.

Settling his avatar into a man-shaped chair, he ran his fingers over the consoles, even though the controls were also part of him. If he’d had to explain it to someone, the best he could have done was to liken it to playing a musical instrument, wherein all the senses engaged and the machine and the man became one.

Or perhaps there was no point in trying to describe it at all.

Vacation’s over, Skull, with nothing really resolved…I’ll have to push more later
, he thought as he gently started the fusion engine in the rear of the ship.
At some point I may just have to tell her I know what she did to me and damn the consequences, but we’ve both been telling these lies to each other for so long that the truth is going to sting quite a lot
. He – and she too, he felt sure – kept putting off the inevitable emotional showdown.

Maybe if he put it off long enough, they’d never need it.

Artificial gravity built into his ship-body ensured the occupants felt hardly a pull, even at an easy thirty Gs acceleration.
Alan Denham
the ship surged forward, a spaceborne greyhound at an easy lope.

A few hours later he sidled up to the first asteroid on the list, a medium-sized hunk of mostly iron five hundred meters in diameter. Extruding a pre-grown fusion-engine pod, he slapped it on the spot closest to its center of mass and waited a few minutes for it to bind to the surface with biological nanofibers. Downloading instructions into its primitive brain, he moved off and triggered it.

At very low thrust, a highly efficient one hundredth of a G, it began to move along a path that would eventually insert it into Earth orbit, to join the other two dozen there. As it approached the planet, Orbital Control would take over and make any adjustments needed.

Only a year, and already humanity has leaped forward decades by using these Meme biotech fusion motors.
As if Greek galleys had been given outboards, the hybrid lift-ships were ugly but they functioned, shuttling people and materials from the surface to orbit and back again as easily as airliners flew from city to city.

Speaking of materials…the next rock is mine
. The
Alan Denham
approached the one he had picked out, a chunk rich with a nice balance of volatiles, water ice and minerals, about twenty meters long and ten wide. Lining up on one narrow end, he caused an intake, a mouth really, to open in the nose of himself, and began to swallow like a snake with a rabbit.

Several hours later the materials were broken up and distributed in cavities, to begin their processing as food. Gestating a fusion engine was a slow and complex thing even for such a wondrous organic machine as he, but every motor represented another ship that could fly, and Earth desperately needed vehicles to do the endless tasks of its nascent space fleet.

Denham could make almost anything inside his body, given enough time for his nanobiologicals to build it molecule by molecule – but at the moment high-efficiency motors were the most vital. That would change, eventually, as Earth science and manufacturing ginned up to produce mechanical copies, but for that, it needed orbital factories – platforms and materials – and that’s what the asteroids were for. Soon there would be hundreds of them parked around Earth and the Moon, and after that…well, there was no reason to keep everything right there. Venus and Mars and free-floating asteroid bases could be developed, and then the moons of Jupiter and Saturn might be colonized.

If humanity survived.

With fusion ships Ceres the dwarf planet, or super-asteroid if one preferred, would become the arsenal of Earth. At least, that was the plan he had heard about, listening in to Earth’s radio traffic. Almost a thousand kilometers in diameter, it contained all the raw materials needed to build whatever Earth’s technology could design…whatever they could make in time.

Aye, there’s the rub,
he thought.
Time. Eight years or less until the Destroyer gets here, but we have to be ready earlier, because we have to presume they will find out we kicked their asses before that. Maybe they will speed up, or maybe they will slow down and wait for reinforcements, but in any case we’re under the gun here.

Even as he digested his food he sent himself toward the next target, timing his arrival by the readiness of the new engine he would birth.

Admiral Absen had invited her to the meeting on psychologically neutral ground: the
Orion
space station. A fitting location, it hung permanently between the heavens and Earth, bustling with activity as it rotated slowly on its long axis to produce pseudo-gravity.

Repaired and refurbished, the hulk of the battleship made an excellent base for administration and research. Heavy industry grew elsewhere, on the hundreds of relocated asteroids and comets that now crowded the Earth-Moon system.

She arrived in her old shuttle, since rejuvenated, and guided it in for docking at what was once the nose of
Orion
. Now the prow constituted merely one of two ends, each of which provided low-G access to the interior.

She’d left
Alan Denham
far out in space, continuing his mission of adjusting the locations and orbital paths of the solar system’s asteroids, but did not want to leave her newborns long. Logically she knew they would be fine; her presence there kept them no safer or healthier in the short term, but motherly instincts would not be denied.

She still felt better about leaving them out there, rather than, for example, bringing them with her on the shuttle. Even the thought of bringing them in this close to Earth frightened her in a way nothing else had. If normal humans met her progeny before they were physically adult, looking like kids and talking like mad scientists, they might react as humans always had with something that threatened them: with fear. Edens or not, she wasn’t willing to take that risk. Later, when they looked grown up and were ready to pass as much older, they could be carefully introduced to society.

Similarly, if people ever discovered Skull and his current state of being…well, since Meme were firmly in the bug-eyed-monster camp as far as the popular mind was concerned, she had little doubt that a fully intelligent Memetech ship would engender even more fear too, along with envy, jealousy and lust for power.

Best that they were all kept well away.

Rae put these thoughts out of her mind as she donned a skinsuit and a custom-grown outfit resembling business clothing. Dressing for the event was one way of minimizing the differences between herself and the average human; it put people at ease to see the half-alien goddess look like them. She also put her hair up and, with practiced biochemical techniques, subtly adjusted her other attributes to be less overtly attractive. This reduced her from stunning to merely pretty.

At the airlock she greeted two functionaries sent to meet her, a man and a woman, with a polite smile, and shut the living iris behind her. She had instructed her ship to stand off from the station, ensuring no one tampered with it and incidentally freeing the port for others. Then Rae activated the low-power encrypted bioradio within her body, keeping communication open just in case.

Motherhood had bred a certain distrust.

Perhaps the stakes just seemed higher now.

“Ms. Denham, the admiral sends his apologies. He was delayed. Come this way, please.” The woman speaking seemed officious, and slightly nervous.

Rae nodded. “Lead on.”

Used to her own organic vessels,
Orion
smelled to her like metal and volatiles, like a city. It made her want to seal her nostrils shut, but instead she merely reduced her olfactory sensitivity as she followed her escorts’ directions down a short corridor. Drawing to a halt before an open door, the man gestured her inside. Rae hesitated: the small room was brightly lit and seemed to have no function, with only one other portal directly across from the first.

In response to her upraised eyebrow, the female escort said reassuringly, “It’s just a body scan.”

“Ah.” Rae turned about to begin retracing her steps toward the docking port.

“Wait, uh, ma’am?” The two hurried after, but her long strides made them run to keep up. Exclamations and entreaties to stop followed her until she entered the antechamber to the personnel airlock.

Come get me,
Rae sent to her shuttle, which acknowledged her instruction. Walking across the floor, she ignored the man and woman trailing to stand before a large crystal viewport, where she could observe the ships come and go in the dock. She watched as outside her shuttle nosed forward, waiting patiently for the facility’s current occupant, a light cargo transport, to finish unloading and clear.

The two with her eventually despaired of obtaining a response from the icy goddess she now embodied. It took little acting ability to project her offendedness. Having saved all of humanity at least twice over, it seemed an unbearable affront to be subjected to such treatment.

Shortly she heard the sounds of booted feet, and a voice she could respond to without loss of face. “Admiral,” she said as she turned, forcing warmth into her greeting.

“Ms. Denham,” Rear Admiral Absen responded. He held out his hand to clasp hers, seeming to ignore her imperious demeanor. She thought he looked tired, his grey hawk eyes sunken a bit.