The Orion Plague (32 page)

A score of single-warhead missiles curved
inward now, approaching the seemingly helpless enemy. The bridge
held its breath as the ring of rockets closed in, converging on the
alien ship.

Klaxons blared as several things happened at
once. The target on the screen leaped toward
Orion
, its
drive flaring, avoiding the missile attack. “COLLISON – ALERT.
COLLISON – ALERT” blared the automated voice, over and over.
Okuda’s fingers danced over his controls as the ship shuddered with
drive-bomb induced G-forces. Gyros screamed and the gimbaled bridge
swung wildly.

“Conn: Sensors, bogeys from the drones.” Each
enemy drone launched a hypervelocity missile, which lined up on
Orion
with frightening velocity.

“Fire!” yelled Absen desperately as he saw
his quarry closing at high speed.
If they ram us we’re all dead.
Fair trade for the home planet.
“Ford! Fire!”

Skull ran along the corridor toward the
side-branching openings. He had no idea where to go, but anything
was better than blundering around in the confusing warren of the
bio-cells.

Until now most of the interior had been lit
with a pale greenish light, and he had a bioluminescent head-lamp
of his own, but the first branch was dark and he skipped it.
Something about the layout made him think he should go onward,
toward that end of the ship. He wasn’t sure whether it was the nose
or tail, but he was guessing that the massive tubes at the other
end supplied the drive. Maybe something important and fragile, like
weapons or the bridge, would be up front.

The third branch was lit, and had stripes as
well. He looked back over his shoulder and saw a mass of white
cells rolling sticky along the central corridor, and made his
decision.
Something interesting down here, and if not, back to
making holes in walls.

The tube terminated in a wall, which he
slapped with both hands as he ran. It opened before him to reveal
quite a different scene from anything he had yet witnessed on this
ship.

It was clearly a control center. And it was
clearly occupied by Meme.

One of the huge amoebae turned an enormous
eyeball toward him, then extended pseudopods in several directions,
manipulating controls and reaching for him at the same time. Skull
threw the bio-bomb in his hand and watched in despair as the Meme
batted it away to stick on a far wall. It began to necrotize there
but would make no critical difference.

Touching another place on his suit, a
bread-loaf sized chunk fell to the floor – gravity! – he realized,
and he picked it up and folded it in half. This activated the
chemical explosive inside and he pitched it high like a horseshoe,
aiming at the farthest Meme and control console.

Looking back over his shoulder he saw his
escape route sealed by white cells. Running awkwardly to the right
in the unexpected gravity, he hurried toward the back of the
control center away from the Meme and his bomb. Pseudopods reached
for him as he slapped frantically at the wall. Somewhere he had
dropped the metal bar, and so he rolled a pair of balls into his
hands, one bio and one nano, and tossed them at the goo as a hole
opened behind him.

Skull threw himself backward just as the
explosive charge detonated, launching him into the next room like a
shell from a mortar tube. He would have been fine in the suit, had
not a new force like the hand of a demented demon suddenly picked
him up and slammed him backward. He felt his bones break, and then
he felt no more.

Ford at Weapons stabbed at a key several
times, the heavy pogoing making him miss twice. “Firing on
automatic.”

Beams blazed out and Behemoth railguns threw
tons of steel shot in the seven seconds it took for the enemy
frigate to charge toward
Orion
. Desperately Okuda struggled
to keep the ship’s tail pointed toward the alien ship in controlled
but all-too-justified fear of whatever it would launch at them. He
had no choice but to ignore the missiles incoming from four other
directions.

On the screen the enemy frigate wobbled, then
began to tumble as its drive winked out. Flashes of coherent light
blazed off its length as it rotated end for end. Thrusters flared
in spots, slowing its spin, but it was clear to Absen that the
alien ship was not entirely under its own control.
We must have
hit it someplace vital
, he thought. He felt the railguns
continuing to fire.

“Incoming!” The enemy missiles screamed in,
accelerating at nine hundred gravities. They struck
Orion
at
much lower velocity than the earlier five, only about twenty-five
kilometers per second, but they appeared to be much better
targeted. Each approached from a different angle, easily avoiding
the bomb drive, and with incredible precision each slammed through
a narrow railgun port. They tore swaths through
Orion
and
only stopped when they struck the opposite side armor.

More casualty and damage reports flowed
across the secondary bridge screens, and more red icons flared on
the control boards of its officers. While the first five enemy
missiles had been spears driven through
Orion
’s breastplate,
these were arrows fired into the gaps in her armor. Captain Absen
watched the readouts with horror, then pushed them from his mind in
the age-old way of the warrior.
Be sick later, grieve for the
dead later. For now just fight and win
.

“Salvoing!” called Ford, launching another
score of missiles. “Hits from the railguns.” Screens confirmed his
report as parts of the enemy’s snow-colored skin turned spotty with
steel balls impacting at ten thousand meters per second. Numbers on
the range readout fell to below twenty, then below ten kilometers
with the enemy’s headlong spinning plunge toward them.

“Keep hammering him!” Absen yelled into the
intercom, a pointless exhortation as the computers were running the
show now. He noticed Johnstone with that link wire plugged into his
board, and he wondered what the cybernetic Comms specialist was
doing. Whatever it was, at least he wasn’t getting in the way.

“This situation is impossible!” Commander
blasted communication molecules in all directions, echoing off the
walls. “The asteroid is destroyed, we have infections in the ship,
we cannot control our observers, our drive is damaged and unsafe to
use, and the human weapons injure the ship faster than it can
heal.”

“Sir, we must initiate escape protocol.”
Executive keyed in the sequence without confirmation.

“Agreed,” Commander said swiftly. “Set the
ship on automatic to maneuver for maximum damage to the enemy. I
will enter the life-probe first, then Biologist, then you,
Executive.”

“Confirmed.” Executive frantically issued
instructions to the semi-intelligent ship, so that in its absence
it would sacrifice itself to maximum effect.

Commander touched a control, then forced his
mind-molecules to bind closely together in a compact mass, which
flowed to the bottom of its pool. From there it oozed through a
short pipe, abandoning most of its protoplasmic body, to dump
itself into the tiny life-probe.

Biologist was next to join Commander.

Just as Executive concentrated his mind at
the bottom of his pool, a creature came in – an alien of some sort,
horrifying in its form – and threw an object. It did not stay to
find out just what sort of thing the object was, but hurried down
the short tube to cram itself into the life probe, thence to
launch.

Inside the bizarre world of virtual space
Rick fought his own battle with the enemy telemetry link. He and
the piece of the KimPark not needed for weapons control had been
grinding away at the hexadecimal encryption, adding his own
intuition and expertise to the raw power of the supercomputer.
Then, thirty-six seconds ago, that telemetry had changed. From a
relatively small number of data packets, suddenly it had ramped up
to a thousand times as many, all transmitted from the frigate to
the four recon drones.

Immediately, the drones had launched
missiles, clearly commanded by the mother frigate. With a flash of
insight he knew the enemy frigate was wounded, perhaps damaged by
the pounding it had received in the surprise attack, and was now
reaching for every weapon at its disposal in a desperate bid to
survive. The drones might have more missiles, or they might simply
turn themselves into much larger missiles. If the aliens’
biotechnology was as advanced as the intel team thought, it was
entirely possible that their ship could heal itself if given enough
time.

Reaching out with his cyber-senses, he seized
half of
Orion
’s powerful phased-array radars normally under
the control of the Sensors board, and poured power into them.
Focusing the electromagnetics on the four drones, he threw an
avalanche of their own encrypted signals at them: recorded, chopped
up and remixed, amplified hundreds of times. In simple terms he
yelled at the drones louder than the frigate could, using its own
recorded, garbled and boosted voice, and kept yelling.

The drones responded by scattering jerkily in
all directions, leaving their quadrilateral stations, thrusting
randomly. No one but he noticed this as the rest of
Orion
’s
crew had their hands full dealing with the frigate’s lunge for the
Earth ship.

Rick kept the radars locked on the drones,
jamming the alien signal, deafening them out of the fight. He felt
the frigate change its signals, hop and skip frequencies, and boost
its signal strength. Unknown and unsung, he grimly fought his
electric battle, countering each move of the aliens with human
intuition, cybernetic clarity and supercomputer speed.

Back in the jungle of the real, the bridge
crew saw the alien frigate stabilize itself suddenly with its
fusion thrusters, then spit a missile from its flank. But instead
of turning toward
Orion
to attack, the thing accelerated at
hundreds of gravities, shooting toward deep space. The crew had no
time to wonder about it now as, less than one kilometer away, the
alien frigate played its trump card.

It swapped end for end even as the
Orion
’s beams, guns and missiles converged on it, pummeling
it. The motion, though jerky and imprecise, lined up its fatter
rear end on the battleship.

Its drive end.

One last time it fired, in fact overloaded,
that perfect fusion engine, now hopelessly damaged by shock and
sleeting hard radiation and the impact of thousands of hard-driven
low-tech projectiles. Magnetic fields that once elegantly
controlled the perfect conversion of matter into energy now
stuttered and failed, but not before one last stupendous blast of
starfire flared blazing, reaching orange-white for its Earth-built
tormenter.

Reacting on instinct, Master Helmsman Okuda
initiated the drive without warning, throwing a bomb into the way
of the belching jet of sun-hot plasma, ionized gas and naked
particles, but the weapon barely detonated before it was
overwhelmed by the incoming firehose of energy a hundred times as
large.

The Meme frigate came apart about a third of
the way from its stern, its bow and waist flung brutally away by
the shattering of its own rear piece. Like a lizard shedding its
tail, the main portion of the alien ship had ditched its damaged
drive section in hopes of living to fight another day.

Orion
’s thick hydraulic shock plate,
made to withstand the heat and pressure of nuclear weapons,
vaporized just slowly enough to save the life of everyone on board.
The one drive bomb carved out a bubble that deflected enough of the
jet of energy that much of its ravening fury expended itself along
the cylindrical length of the battleship’s fuselage. Like a candle
lowered into a blowtorch,
Orion
melted; she burned, and she
howled in agony.

All weapons, sensors and equipment on the
back half of the skin of the great ship simply vanished in the wash
of plasma. That gaseous jet slammed into Orion’s Belt, the external
ring of box-shaped missile launchers, and ripped them away,
throwing them spinning at high speed past the battleship’s nose and
into space. In so doing the gas imparted enormous thrust for a
moment, approaching twenty gravities.

Orion
groaned and, in places, buckled.
Inside, any crew not in their maneuver couches or at least flat on
the rearmost bulkhead fell and broke every bone in their bodies as
the new floor rose up to smash them like flies. Most died
instantly, and those who survived conscious lay in horrible pain,
hoping their bodies could heal before the next blow struck.

The plasma also found the holes in
Orion
’s torn skin, reaching with boiling hot fingers to sear
her guts, igniting wherever they touched. Several Trident missiles
blew in their tubes, propellant crumbling and exploding, gutting
everything nearby. One more hybrid reactor broke, its molten salts
melting steel like wax and nearby crew like pats of butter.

The great battleship juddered and stumbled –
she wailed in pain as her inhabitants were snuffed out – she fell
broken to her knees.

But she did not die.

The enormous push threw
Orion
sideways, then end for end, but instead of being consumed, she
found herself tumbling sickeningly through the void. Inside the
bridge the harrowing rollercoaster lessened as the gimbaled
stabilization system brought their relative motion under control, a
tribute to its Japanese engineering. From his sunken seat in its
center, Okuda frantically strained
Orion
’s single remaining
gyro and four forward thrusters, fighting to tame the bucking
vessel.