Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer (47 page)

Ezekiel hoped one day he could be a fighter jock, but for now, this was as close as he would come.

When the next transmission finally came, it seemed his father’s voice filled his head, reverberating through his consciousness. “When you’re done, son, go back to the base and see your mother and the quads. I love you, son, and I’m very proud of you, and of all of them. Make sure you tell them how much I loved them.”

“What?
Loved?
” Ezekiel answered as if there weren’t a minute’s lag or more. He hadn’t missed the past tense. “
What?”

He got no answer.

“What is it?” Rae had asked.

“Ezekiel’s taken
Roger
out after the rocks. He’ll probably kill a few of the packages and knock some off course.”

Rae had made a sound of frustration. “I told him to stay out of it!”

“You can’t expect a teenage boy with a hot ship to stay out of it, Rae. But I think he’ll be all right. Bumping off rocks isn’t like going up against a Destroyer.”

She had balled her fists in frustration. “You get out there and look out for him. Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

“What do you think I’m planning to do? Now kiss me and let me go back to the rest of me, unless you want a zombie meat puppet to keep you company.”

So she had kissed Skull and let him go back aboard the
Denham
.

Fully fueled and fat,
Denham
the ship had moved quickly off, and then blasted at maximum acceleration in a long arc, more or less in the direction of Earth and the Destroyer beyond.

Now he lined his body up on the Destroyer on a reciprocal course, the planet almost between them. Larger than an Aardvark, larger even than one of the new EarthFleet cruisers, Skull had been growing himself as much as he was able over the last ten years. Had he been free to do only that, he might have achieved perhaps a tenth the size of a Destroyer, but his biological capabilities had been fully tasked with making cloned engines and jump-starting the human space effort.

His current size would have to be enough.

Three hundred meters long and perhaps forty wide, like most of the human spaceships he resembled a sea creature, perhaps a dolphin or seal. A tapering cylinder was the most basic practical shape for a warship, and though the Destroyer was much more squat and blunt, even it conformed roughly to that mold.
Denham
’s “fins” were sensors and weapons and manipulators, and could be extended or retracted as needed.

Today, now, he had very few of those fins, or any other protuberances. As if to streamline himself, he had absorbed every extraneous item, everything that did not directly contribute to his mission.

Within himself he felt the central spine of ferrocrystal, a shaft that ran from nose almost to tail, so large that it had started to interfere with his drive and other life processes. He’d had a devil of a time keeping it hidden until he could offload his family onto the new base. Laced with carbon fibers and buckyballs at the nanomolecular level, that spine was the densest, strongest piece of material he had ever created.
So heavy, so heavy
…in human terms it felt as if he wore an awkward rucksack that was somehow inside him as well.

Now he soaked up all the encrypted Fleet comms, all the data streams that he had long ago learned to read in order to synthesize his own virtual picture of the battle. He knew as much or more than the pilots in the attack wings, or the cruisers, or even of Admiral Absen and the staff on
Orion
that was even now preparing themselves to do what really only he, Skull Denham, could accomplish. What thousands of Aardvark pilots had already done.

With his own sensors and all the borrowed data of EarthFleet he located Zeke, and called him. The conversation was short, too short, but in it he tried to convey what he needed to, without alarming the boy. Skull had left personal memory modules back on the base for each of his loved ones, but had ensured every trace of himself and his engram was scrubbed from any potential storage device. All of him that existed, all that there was of Skull or Alan or the
Denham
was here, in one body.

He examined himself once again as he continued to accelerate at more than three hundred gravities, not quite as fast as a hyper but at a far greater rate than any EarthFleet ship or even missile could. Every second, every minute his body accumulated more and more kinetic energy as his fusion drive blasted tightly nozzled plasma backward at half the speed of light.

Mass-energy,
he thought,
cannot be destroyed, but only converted from form to form.
In this case the fusion inside his incredibly efficient engine turned the purest deuterium-tritium fuel into heat and movement, reaction mass to push him forward faster and faster, like a hypervelocity missile himself.

Exactly
like a hypervelocity missile.

The largest one ever made, as far as he knew. A Meme hypervelocity missile with a penetrator almost three hundred meters long, weighing a million tons. A missile with a guidance package of not only human intelligence but all the cunning of a man who had spent his whole life fighting, his whole life killing at a distance, carefully planning, preparing, lining up each time for one and only one perfect shot.

Except for a brief period, another role, another life, where he became a father and a husband, for the last few years. Where he’d accepted someone else’s vision for him, to be something he wasn’t, which was a kind of sacrifice more difficult than this.

But that idyllic hell was now past.

Now he had restored himself, a killer again, as always, in defense of his home.

Skull had reviewed the current data, using the superb processing capacity of the former Meme Survey ship, a kind of living supercomputer. The EarthFleet effort had been amazing, and more effective than he had expected, but Skull had never been a man of hope. To his thinking, hope was no kind of plan. A sniper always prepared for the worst, and did what it took to get the job done.

But the EarthFleet effort was failing. He knew it, and Absen knew it. Skull had seen
Orion
, with minimal weapons, full of critical staff, hide well back from Earth for a time, ensuring it wouldn’t be targeted by some stray hyper or guided rock, but the Meme had ignored it. Without significant weapons, with just enough maneuvering capability to limp from here to there, it was obviously irrelevant. Rae had told him the Destroyer’s commander was unlikely to think of a fragile tin can full of command and control capacity as a threat.

More likely they would think of it as a prize full of potential slaves.

Now he saw Absen’s headquarters, pitiful engines flaring to maximum, heading toward Earth again. There was only one reason Skull could think of for them to do that, and it wasn’t to merely take a ringside seat for Armageddon. It would be a stupid, very human gesture, but
Orion
would be lucky if she could absorb the impact of one or two rocks, and doing so would certainly kill everyone on board.

Maybe Absen planned to put everyone in the lifeboats. In fact, Skull thought that was likely. They could easily make it to the Moon facilities, and from there, if Earth died, perhaps rebuild again.

Skull knew that was hopeless, though Absen and his people would hope anyway. With the entire industrial capacity of Earth wiped out, there was no way to recover sufficiently to build the defenses that would be needed against the next wave of Meme. Rae had told him, had told Absen as well, that after one Destroyer would come several, then dozens, then hundreds, at intervals of eight to sixteen years, if the Meme Empire still functioned the way it used to.

So it all hinged on today. With a living, breathing planet full of humanity, the exponential growth necessary to live could continue. Knock that train off its tracks, and the human race was doomed to fall under the sway of intelligent amoebas that only cared about using human bodies as slaves and carriers for Meme minds.

Sometimes Absen’s Fuzzy Wuzzy strategy worked. Sometimes great numbers overwhelmed the highly advanced, as when a swarm of killer bees brought down an animal or human, or an army of ants ate a creature thousands of times as large as any one.

Other times, the single enemy was so advanced, so far above the teeming masses, that only a silver bullet would do.

In the Sixties and Seventies, the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance plane had flown high above all enemies, so far ahead of its time that nothing, not the thousands of missiles launched at it or any gun or any other aircraft could catch it. No Fuzzy Wuzzy strategy would ever succeed.

But with one modern laser or railgun or guided missile and it could have been easily taken down.

One silver bullet.

That’s me
, Skull thought.
One match-grade, hand-selected, perfectly machined projectile. I am the bullet, and I am the gun.

He’d long ago made his peace with his decision. In fact, Rae had made it for on that day when she had argued against using engrams to guide human attack ships. Her words had engraved themselves on his perfect memory: “Humanity needs martyrs and heroes.”

Skull was not sure about a martyr, but ever since that day when he’d watched Linde fade from life, all he’d ever wanted to do was kill, and die a hero.

If he died a martyr, so much the better.

And if he failed, he’d never know it, for sweet oblivion awaited.

Though he had to admit, space war was generally pretty clean. At these speeds and with these weapons, most combatants were either alive or dead.

Except the Destroyer. It was big enough to have taken a pounding but still function at most of its capacity.

He’d like to see what
Innsbruck
could do about that.

“Coming into range, Skipper,” Tsing said. “Twenty percent hit probability.”

“How long until it reaches Earth?”

“Nineteen minutes,” Macduff replied.

“How long until hit probability reaches fifty percent?” Deke asked.

“About six minutes, Skipper.”

“We’ll wait until then. Helm, make sure you keep adjusting for an intersection course. If all else fails…”

“Understood.” Her bald head bobbed in agreement.

The next six minutes took hours to go by, Deke was certain. Finally the hit probability number clicked above fifty. “Fire at your discretion, Guns,” he said.

“Firing aye,” Tsing replied. “Intermittent pattern with maximum spread.”

Deke stroked his chin. “What if we narrow the pattern?”

Tsing turned to look at his captain, his eyes widened as if to say,
you know what if
. But he spoke anyway. “It means an all or nothing shot for each burst. The group will either all strike, or all miss.”

“That’s what I want. Love taps won’t work on this thing. We have to gamble that we can get in a few hammer blows rather than just a bunch of little dings.”

Tsing turned back to his board, carefully entering the commands. “Aye aye, Skipper. Adjusting fire.”

The number up on the screen revised itself down to a single digit: seven
. Seven percent chance of any one burst striking, but when it does, I hope it will hurt, dig through some armor, maybe drill into some vitals.
“When will we see hits?”

“We’re already seeing hits from the orbital fortresses’ long shots, but I think…I think I can tell when one of our big bursts impacts, as no one else is likely to be doing the same.”

That prompted a thought from Deke. “Maybe they should. Pass what we are doing to the rest of the squadron and to Blackhorse. It might be something the rest want to do.”

“They might countermand,” Macduff said.

“They can court-martial me, I guess,” Deke said, resting on his elbows and folding his hands. “I believe it’s the right thing to do.”

Tsing exchanged glances with Chuks, who nodded solemnly. Deke caught the interplay, and hoped, believed, that it meant his crew was behind him in this. Of course, if they rammed the bastard, someone would be court-martialing a corpse. No, not a corpse. Just a bunch of floating plasma, and a memory.

The number clicked up to eight, and then nine, as they closed the range. “Ammo?”

“Twenty percent, sir. I’m rationing it so that we will run out just before we cross paths. We won’t have another chance, at the rate we’re closing.” Tsing reached out to adjust something on his board.

“Five minutes remaining,” Macduff called. “Here’s the countdown.” She made another number flash, then moved it to rest near the hit percentage and ammo readouts.

A very competent woman
, Deke thought.
Yes, I’ll definitely have to sound her out. A man could do a lot worse.
Then he laughed inside at himself.
Not exactly the most romantic endorsement, Deke. “You seem competent, Jennifer. Would you like to have dinner?” You’ve been out of the game too long, Deke, since Lana died.
That memory was enough to chill his fantasies and bring him back to the present.

The number crossed four minutes and the hit probability clicked up to twelve, then thirteen. “I can see our bursts striking now, sir, I think. Either that or the other ships have taken to firing similar patterns. I think it’s having some effect.”

Chuks put a shaky optical up on the screen, unsteady despite the best computer stabilization could offer as the Behemoth railgun’s intermittent firing vibrated the whole ship. Without the cladding to absorb the recoil,
Innsbruck
shuddered and slewed as Macduff fought to keep her aligned with their target. The picture showed flaring bursts of plasma as groups of a hundred metal balls hammered into the Destroyer, tearing new craters each time.