The Orion Plague (28 page)

But he knew that the Meme would not ignore a
series of nuclear explosions marching across the solar system
toward them. Even if by some chance they did not realize the bombs
constituted a spaceship drive, they would investigate. They would
seek, they would find, and they would easily destroy.

Earth’s only chance as he saw it was for
Skull to pick his moment, some critical juncture, where his attack,
his sacrifice, would give
Orion
a chance at victory.
One
well-placed nuclear warhead and it’s bye-bye Meme…and bye-bye
Skull.
To save his son, and Raphaela, and all those others on
Earth…he was at peace with that notion.

Just as long as he had a chance to
strike.

If only I had an atomic weapon
, he
thought again, but there was no way to make one and even had they
been able, it probably would have been detected and not brought
aboard. No, he himself, a bio-weapon, a Trojan Horse, was the only
thing the enemy would allow inside.

He’d sensed many different things lying in
the coffin. Movements, shocks, noises like the slurping of
gustation and the gurgles of digestion. Whines, buzzes, taps, a
gamut of sounds impossible to interpret without looking outside.
Once he had felt acceleration, first in one direction, then
another. Then a shudder went through the ship, something different
this time, a feeling as if they had run into a wall and
stuck
.

Skull wasn’t sure what it was, and he was
tempted to begin his assault right then, but held back. One big
impact did not a battle make. He had to know for sure that the
alien was engaged, that in the confusion whatever internal defenses
it had would not swat him like a bug.

So he waited.

With two days until arrival, Absen made the
best use he could of his time. Rather than interfering with the
crew, he did a bit of wandering around, showing himself to his
people, shaking hands with Marines and engineers, talking to the
officers. This seemingly pointless exercise was actually part of
the glue that would hold a complement together in combat, to know
that the Skipper cared enough to leave his lofty command spaces and
visit them.

As he was returning from taking a look at the
ring of lasers circling the forward edge of the fuselage, the
lights went out in the passageway. This wasn’t an unusual
occurrence; there were still plenty of power fluctuations
throughout the ship, and lighting panels were getting to be in
short supply already.

“Crap, not again,” cursed Jill Repeth,
snapping on a mini-light from her belt. Her counterpart, Schaeffer,
pulled one out as well, and he reported the anomaly through his
implanted comms. “Repair crew has it now, let’s move on.”

When the pressure hatch in their direction of
travel slammed shut, however, Absen knew it was no accident. He was
about to warn his two Stewards when he heard the hatch behind them
slam as well, leaving them in flashlit darkness.

“Lights out,” hissed Jill. “Switch to night
vision.” The Stewards snapped off their flashlights and activated
their ocular implants, allowing them to see in the near-dark.

A smell of pine came into the enclosed space.
“Gas!” Schaeffer barked, and reached into his cargo pocket to pull
out a mask. Instead of pulling it on himself, he handed it to
Absen. “Put it on, sir!” he urged.

“What about you?” Absen said with his last
breath, not using it.

“I have internal oxygen, remember! Now put it
on!”

Absen pulled the thing on and the pine smell
went away. Slightly woozy, he remembered his recent visitor, and
lunged for the wall intercom, but it was dead. They were cut off.
Then he remembered his Stewards’ implants. “Can you get through to
the shipwide channel?”

“I think so,” Repeth answered.

“Put this out, then, just as I tell you.” He
read the reference number from the bulkhead. “Now hear this,
emergency, Mister Winter, report immediately to C-4-13. Repeat it
at fifteen second intervals.”

Puzzled, Repeth did as he told her, then
briefly switched channels to call for the other Stewards. Out of
the corner of her eye she saw someone standing at the hatch behind
them, peering in through the tiny window. “Get down, sir, on the
deck. Lay down. Act like you’re overcome by gas. Schaeffer, watch
the other end.” She slipped down the darkened passageway to wait in
a short dead-end side passage.

She heard the hatch open, and a rush of feet.
I can’t open fire, or they’ll fire back, and the Captain isn’t
even an Eden. In this passageway, automatic fire will ricochet down
and probably kill him.

As the attackers came abreast of her she
snapped her leg out at the first one, a roundhouse kick that folded
the figure up like a taco. She felt ribcage crush under her shin
and, holding tight to a standing pipe, used its stability to reset
the leg and kick again, and then again, three strikes within the
space of less than a second.

Screams followed, and gunshots, then she was
among them. Bullets slammed into her chest, and she felt them
penetrate her body armor and skitter off her ferrocrystal ribs.
Something heavy and armor-piercing,
she thought as her
forearm chopped across a masked face. The man dropped to the deck,
poleaxed, and she snatched weapons out of others’ hands and tossed
them behind her. Then she unsheathed her claws.

Tiny blades extended from her fingertips,
razor-sharp, piercing her own skin with cold pain before she healed
around them. She dragged them across enemy flesh, not going for
kills. She needed some alive. Instead she raked a man’s masked
face, ripping flesh from bone, and blinded another.

They didn’t go down easily.
Must be
nanos
, she thought as she fought the three that remained on
their feet.

Jill felt a burning in her calf and looked
down to see one fallen attacker had stabbed her from the ground.
She stomped on the hand and was rewarded with a scream. Then came
another loud boom, and she staggered with a pain in her gut. The
round had come up under her armor and penetrated her abdomen.

Dimly she heard Schaeffer in the midst of his
own fight.
They must have come from both ends
, she thought,
and put up her arms as she saw a gun muzzle come up.
This is
going to hurt
, then it did. Submachinegun rounds tore into her
arms as she covered her face, trusting to her armor and bones to
defend her vital organs. Some slipped past, or through muscle, to
bounce off her ferrocrystal-coated skull, but one found its way to
her throat, and agony shot through her as it tore out her esophagus
and part of her carotid.

The weapon clicked empty, its thirty-round
magazine expended, and the gunman expertly popped it out to insert
its taped twin. Jill’s systems flooded oxygen into her bloodstream
to compensate for the blood loss but she felt herself going under.
She barely noticed it when her head hit the deck. Despair was more
painful than bullets.
I’ve failed
, she cried to herself as
the grey mist took her.

Jill came to with Schaeffer’s hands at her
throat. She almost clawed him before she remembered what had
happened, and froze as she felt his gentle pressure trying to hold
her tissues in place to let her body heal itself. She tried to
swallow, then to speak, but gave up.

Captain Absen’s face swam into view and she
relaxed with relief. Long minutes later a medical team arrived;
some expert field surgery later her head was immobilized and her
throat was stitched into place. “You’ll be all right in a few
hours,” the almond-eyed doctor with the precise British accent
said. “Just don’t move and you’ll be as right as rain.”

Then Jill remembered her cyberware and
training. “
What happened?
” she subvocalized carefully
through her comm implant.

“I don’t know,” said Schaeffer. “One minute
we were getting creamed. The next, some kinda ninja showed up and
went through these guys like they were standing still. I never seen
anything like it. He made us look slow.”

Jill closed her eyes.
Thank you
Spooky
. “
Captain secure?
”

“Yeah. Called all the Stewards here.”

“
Who?
”

“I dunno. Asians. Little bitty guys. If I had
to guess…North Koreans?”

“
Get intel on it. Tell Tobias check all
Asians
.”

Schaeffer licked his lips. “Racial
profiling?”

Jill snorted painfully. “
PC worth dying
for
?”

“Okay, point taken, but he’ll have to do it
quietly or things could get ugly.”

“
Get South Koreans to help
.” Jill
winked at him.

“Oh.” Schaeffer smiled. “That’s
brilliant.”

“
Thanks. Now I’ll rest
.” With that
Jill closed her eyes.

For forty-six hours the
Orion
echoed
with repeated klaxons. Absen had ordered simulations run with
bridge and auxiliary bridge crew, as well as exercised every other
naval function from damage control to virtual targeting.

In the meantime, assisted anonymously by
“Mister Winter,” the combined US-South Korean investigation
uncovered another cell of North Korean assassins among the enormous
crew. They had initiated suicide protocols when discovered, so
Absen might never know why they had been ordered to do it. Did the
North Korean government prefer Huen to him?

Absen wondered how many other stowaways,
benign or hostile, they had aboard, and blessed Travis Tyler for
his foresight in providing the Stewards – and Spooky Nguyen for
saving his bacon. He didn’t think Repeth and Schaeffer knew who had
helped them, and Absen was determined to keep it that way as he
turned his thoughts back to the coming battle.

The operational planners had refined their
scheme as much as possible, but they still expected only one crack
at the enemy. They had to make it count. Then he made sure everyone
got a few hours of sleep before they initiated the attack.

The target asteroid was visibly moving now,
accelerated slowly by the hidden frigate, apparently not using its
full drive power. Perhaps the ship’s structure could not accept the
strain of shoving an asteroid at full thrust; perhaps they were
just conserving fuel. In any case every minute brought
Orion
six thousand kilometers closer to the rock.

The battleship’s plot would pass “behind” the
asteroid’s direction of travel. Because they would be decelerating,
the nuclear explosions in front of them would create a storm of EMP
that might have some effect on the enemy, as well as potentially
blinding his sensors. Once they fell past the frigate’s axis of
acceleration, the battleship’s nose – and thus most of its weapons
– would bear on the enemy. It wasn’t too different from the old
fighter pilot’s trick of letting the enemy overshoot, except
appearances were that they flew backward and the enemy stood
still.

The disadvantage of this maneuver was that,
once they passed, any kinetic weapons – missiles and railguns –
would have to play a mad game of catch-up, overcoming their
backward motion before accelerating toward the enemy. It was like
throwing baseballs backward off a fast-moving flatbed truck.

Surprise was paramount. If they did not
cripple or destroy the enemy frigate on the first pass, they would
have to settle for harrying it around the solar system, deflecting
asteroids and buying time for the Earth to build more warships.

“Spin at fifteen percent, Captain,” Master
Helmsman Okuda reported.

“Bring it down to five percent.” That was
enough to allow the ship’s two pinnaces to launch from their bays
if necessary, and to keep people’s feet on the floors they
preferred. “Battle stations.” He watched as the bridge crew locked
their clear fishbowl-like lightweight breathing helmets down, a
final line of defense if the ship were badly damaged. “Helm, roll
the ship. Weapons, initiate your program when stable.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The gyros whined and thrummed
again, and the crew felt a strange sideways wrench as the great
ship twisted to present its broadside to the distant asteroid,
still hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. It now appeared to
be flying sideways toward the asteroid.

“Conn, Weapons: Railguns firing.”

The massive Dahlgren Behemoth magnetic
drivers spat streams of fist-sized steel balls as they bore in
turn, aiming at the asteroid. Most were not expected to hit the
thing at this range, but if they did, all the better. Any strikes
on the rock would fill the nearby space with chips and dust, to the
detriment of the frigate thrusting on its other side. More
importantly, Absen hoped, the enemy might stick his nose out from
behind and catch one as it went past.
Winning is about putting
yourself in a position to get lucky.

It was critical to launch their first salvo
of kinetic weapons now, rather than when closer, for as they
approached their target
Orion
would travel more and more
slowly as it decelerated drive-first. Right now, to launch was to
gain free energy already imparted by the ship’s own velocity.

Even if the kinetic weapons did not happen to
damage the frigate, Absen hoped they would give the enemy fits,
forcing him to react and defend rather than bringing whatever
offensive systems it had to bear on
Orion
. Thus he was not
happy to hear the weapons officer’s next call.

“Conn, Weapons: failure on DB three and five.
Gun crews report power overdraw and scram on Reactor Four.”

“How long to get them back on line?”

“Scram procedures require six hours,
sir.”

“Dammit. Tell Engineering to get power to
those guns at all costs. Reroute, override, I don’t care how. They
have one hundred ten minutes.”