The Orion Plague (26 page)

He wanted to get it over with, wanted to come
to grips with the enemy. The old prebattle bloodlust hammered at
the hatch of his iron will and he clamped down on it.
Not
now
, he crooned silently to himself.

The last days and weeks were all forgotten
now as he slammed shut the compartment where Zeke’s precious face
resided, and behind it, Raphaela’s. The very fact that it was his
child, rather than his…mate, he could call her – that obsessed him,
proved to himself that his so-called love for her was merely a
reflection of his perfect paternal pride in his son.

And so like any good father, Skull prepared
to put his body between the ravening wolf and his family.

Finally the landing shuttle docked at the
base, and commenced boring into the outer surface. Raphaela had
ensured that the base itself would not cooperate with the Meme in
any way – in fact, it would appear nearly dead, with just some
random residual bioelectrical signatures to mask Skull’s presence
and activity.

The thing cut its way slowly and carefully in
through the roof of the base, which on the inside served as the
floor because of the comet’s spin. This was all to Skull’s
advantage; the scout ship could only observe its lander for about
half the comet’s fifteen-minute rotation period.

Skull and Raphaela had argued desultorily
about whether one of the Meme crew would come down personally or
send some kind of teleoperated probe first. Raphaela turned out to
be right. The thing that crawled into the base was no Meme.

It was a crab-shaped biomachine, with at
least ten appendages fit for grabbing, grasping, cutting, sampling,
and manipulating. It searched the base room by room, finding
nothing but dead or inert Meme machinery.

Except for one fascinating piece of
equipment.

The semiautonomous robot tested the heavy
cocoon module, probing at it with biological and electrical
samplers, trying to find a connection to what humans would call a
computer. Finally it found something damaged and confusing in its
data, but enough.

The cocoon contained a human being retrieved
many cycles ago, its damaged memory seemed to say. It had been used
and kept alive for bio-experimentation to better tailor the
Lightbringer phages for the indigenes. Combined with the scout
ship’s own observations of the comet – it was clear the ball of ice
had been struck by a passing asteroid – the Meme accepted the
implied explanation: the base had been slowly dying ever since the
impact, and was in its last stages of failure; the three Meme
Watchers were dead, or had departed long ago in the missing
shuttle.

Skull watched through his sensors as the
crab-shaped thing crawled all over his cocoon, hoping Raphaela’s
preparations had been effective. He hated to think that it might
get into the module and cut him out like a lobster from its shell.
He had bet his life on his belief that they would want him and the
module alive and undamaged, to study and learn.
They will either
bring the cocoon to their ship, or they will land at the base to
take a look and to salvage, now that they are convinced it’s
safe.

Either way, they’ll let me come close enough
to hurt them.

Some time later Skull felt the module being
loaded onto the shuttle; apparently he would be brought up to be
examined before the Meme came down to look at the base. This was
another binary they had discussed: would they come down, or bring
him up? Apparently they took the safer course, that of tackling
fewer unknowns at once. They would examine him and his sarcophagus,
then when they had learned enough, they would look at the base in
person.

So now it was just Skull against the enemy
again, alone and unafraid. Well. He had to admit to a bit of
healthy fear. If you had no fear, they called that a death wish.
He’d seen it before in some men, who’d given up on life. They took
insane chances and often seemed like heroes, until they became dead
heroes. He wondered how many Medal of Honor winners were really
such men.

He tried to doze in the module as there was
nothing to do. The shuttle ride took hours. Casting his mind back
to his brief nanocommando training, and the exercises he had
practiced on the base, he visualized his planned movements in
microgravity, going over them step by step in his mind.

Finally there came a series of thumps and
then a slight but pervasive hum. He surmised he must be feeling the
normal operational vibrations of the scout ship.

The alien telemetry signal had snapped off
abruptly after just a few hours, but provided enormous information
to
Orion’s
crew.

First, the signal proved easy to crack, an
elementary two-level digital control signal encrypted with a simple
sixteen-bit key. Once deciphered, the cryptologists and computer
experts working in tandem reported their belief it was used to
control some kind of remote, a teleoperated robot or probe. Perhaps
it had something to do with the comet lazily spinning a hundred
miles away from the signal. Intel noted that the Raphael alien had
said he had occupied a base on a comet. Perhaps that was it.

Second and more critical to combat concerns,
the signal allowed the ship’s optics, especially its one-meter
telescopes, to find and fix on the enemy spacecraft, held firmly in
view by NASA-designed computers originally made for orbital space
telescopes. As long as it made no sudden maneuvers,
Orion
’s
crew could see the alien ship and, they hoped, it would not notice
them.

Absen stared at the enormous central screen
of the CCC as the alien frigate, as he thought of it, hung in its
center. Shaped like an elongated and reversed teardrop, it appeared
that when under power it would fly with its point forward, its
fatter end back. Intel surmised that this would allow it to deflect
debris and weapons with maximum efficiency by pointing its
needle-nose toward its direction of travel or its enemy, like the
armored prow of an oceangoing ship cutting ice or deflecting
shells.

Other than that, it showed an
undifferentiated black skin in the visible spectrum. No radar
antenna, no structures, no doors or hatches, nothing. It was just
matte-black. With infrared sensors it glowed warm enough to be
easily tracked, so Absen thought it unlikely the black was a
stealth measure. It was probably simply the most efficient color,
collecting the tiny bit of solar energy available this far out,
using it to maintain power.

But what were its weapons, Absen wondered?
Inquiries to Chairman Markis had supplied all the data they had, or
so they said, from Raphael and Raphaela, but they had never
debriefed him – her – it – specifically about Meme weapons. From
some fragments and deductions, Intel believed they would have
hypervelocity missiles. That would be an obvious application of
efficient miniaturized fusion drives such as had been recovered
from the Demon Plague probes.

Perhaps they would have projectile gun
weapons, powered with fusion or superconducting rails. With fusion
power, beam weapons were also easily within reach. Some of the
wilder speculations included aggressive biologicals – a plague of
killer insects, for example, that scurried everywhere and poisoned
everyone they stung, or destructive Von Neumann machines that would
try to dismantle the ship piece by piece while replicating
themselves with the materials.

In truth, they simply had no way to know.

The bridge let out a sound of collective
surprise as the picture on the screen abruptly altered. The alien
ship changed orientation, from half-toward the
Orion
to
pointing almost directly at it. Now the image appeared as a circle
with a small point to one side altering its black perfection.

Cilia deLille at Helm spoke up in smooth
French-accented English. “Bogey has turned in our direction.” She
adjusted a control with a feather touch, accessing her feeds. “I
have fusion flare from behind it. Without active pulse I cannot be
certain, but it makes sense that they are accelerating toward
us.”

“Passive Doppler confirms,” the Sensors
officer said, “accelerating at…ah…this can’t be right…”

“Just report the figures, Lieutenant.” said
Absen with icy calm.

“Ah, about three hundred Gs, sir.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” breathed the
COB.

“That’s enough.” Absen spoke mildly. “We’re
not here to admire them, we’re here to kill them. We all know they
have advanced technology. But they can’t outrun lasers, and right
now they are coming right toward us. That’s good.” He stroked his
jaw, leaning forward in his chair. “How long until they reach beam
range?”

“Uh…” the Sensors officer frantically tapped
keys, buttons and touchscreens.

“If they continue on present vector and
acceleration, they will pass us within two hours.” The Master
Helmsmen bobbed her shaven pate as she ran her fingers over
screens. A moment later a plot appeared that showed the frigate’s
course curving past
Orion
, headed nowhere in particular.
“Closest approach will be approximately one hundred thirty thousand
kilometers.”

“Two
hours
? Helm…are you sure that’s
correct? Aren’t they out beyond the orbit of Uranus? That’s…weeks
away, normally?” Absen wasn’t sure he should reveal his lack of
astrophysical sophistication to everyone but it just didn’t make
sense to him.

“It’s hard to understand for the layman,”
deLille said condescendingly, “but that’s what the calculations
say. If they continued at 300G acceleration, they would be at fifty
percent of lightspeed in roughly fourteen hours.”

Absen swallowed, letting her attitude pass
for now. “Then there will be no way we can catch them. Not a chance
in hell.”

***

“Where the hell are they going?” Absen asked
to no one in particular, and not for the first time.

“Forward,” responded Helm as if to a child.
“No change. Correction…bogey has reduced acceleration. Doppler feed
now shows zero G.”

“They dropped from 300 to zero G?”

“That
is
what I said.”

Her vowels were liquid with her accent,
Quebecois if Absen had to guess. He would have to hear her speak
French to be sure. His legendary calm demeanor was starting to fray
from her attitude. “Any idea why, Lieutenant?” he asked with
deceptive mildness. “This isn’t a guessing game. Come on, people. I
need information.”

“Asteroid,” Scoggins at Sensors spoke up.
“There should be one about five kilometers in size two million
klicks ahead of them, according to the surveys.” She grinned in
satisfaction at having beat deLille to the punch.

Helm spoke up. “Bogey is changing
orientation. Reversing.” The bridge crew saw the frigate turn end
for end within the space of seconds, then the screen whited out for
a moment. When it came back it was in a false-color representation
different from before, with a point near its fat now-front end
blacked out by a virtual disc to hide the glare of its drive.
“Deceleration. Doppler is not able to cope with the fusion flare,
but interpolation of data indicates similar energy expenditure. If
I had to
guess
,” she said, turning her supercilious gaze on
the Captain, “I’d say they were decelerating just as fast as they
accelerated, in preparation for matching velocities with minor
planet 2005UP460.”

“That’s the asteroid?” Absen asked.

The Helm’s smile was wintry, superior, her
eye-roll definitive. “In common parlance.”

Absen had had enough. He straightened,
speared her with his eyes. “Miss deLille, call for your
relief,”

“What?”

“That’s
what, Captain
. I said call for
your relief. I want you off this bridge immediately.”

“You can’t do zat! I will report zis to my
government, I will…” Her excellent English began to break down
under stress.

“COB, do you have your sidearm?” Absen
flicked his eyes at his Steward Tobias, who suddenly quivered with
alertness like a hound spotting a squirrel. He shook his head
minutely at the man.

Master Chief Timmons patted his holstered
pistol.

“COB, remove this insubordinate officer from
the bridge and confine her to quarters. Cut off all comms and net
access, post two Marine guards and arrange for a rotation. Bread
and water. If she resists, shoot her, treat her, restrain her, and
sedate her.” Absen turned to the steward. “Mr. Tobias, get me a new
Master Helmsman please. Weapons – what’s your name?”

“Ford, sir.”

“Lieutenant Commander Ford, slave Helm to
your board until the station is occupied.”

The COB took the stunned helmsman and
frog-marched her off the bridge. A few snickers from the younger
officers echoed around the hemispherical room.

“Secure that garbage, people, unless you want
to follow her down,” Absen snapped. From then on he heard nothing
but professional chatter.

Seven minutes later the new helmsman stepped
onto the bridge, Steward Tobias behind him. “Master Helmsman Okuda
reports for duty, sir,” he said, his midnight-black face impassive.
His accent was also tinged with French, and the sounds of Africa.
One of the former French colonies, then – Mali, Congo,
Chad?

“Take your station. Sensors will brief you.
Everyone back to work.” Absen sat back, putting his chin on his
fist, a calculated pose, and stared at the main screen. He quivered
with anger within, but showed nothing but dead calm. It had been
ages since anyone under his command had tested him like that. He
knew the story would scuttlebutt fast, and hoped it had been the
right play.

Raphaela lifted the shuttle gently away from
the comet to avoid creating any signature visible to the incoming
Meme. She had used up much of the residual biomechanical capability
of the base to refurbish the shuttle, so it responded well to her
touch on the controls.