Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer (44 page)

“Or even antimatter,” Sensors chimed in.

“In any case, in the future I expect more care,” Huen said. “Are we functional?”

“Yes, sir. Backups are effective.”

“Bring us in slowly over the…crater.”

Hovering ten kilometers up in the slight gravity, the large but fragile ship floated into position only a short distance off to one side of the hole in the ground that had replaced the center of the base. Some outlying buildings, and a lot of the Aardvark pads, had survived, but everything that had made Grissom base itself was gone. The central park, the Quarter, the Marine and Aerospace barracks, the family housing units and recreation spaces: annihilated. The heavy weapons emplacements in a ring around the base were twisted and melted, though their control centers beneath might have survived.

“Find a place to set us down, helm. Make sure it’s firm. That heat and shock might have destabilized the ground.”

“Aye aye, sir. I’ll be ready to lift us if we settle too much.”

“Perhaps the Aardvark pads would make for a firmer landing…at your discretion.” Huen knew he was micromanaging, but his confidence in his helmsman had been rattled, and he found it difficult not to.

“Aye aye, sir.”

Almost half an hour of careful hunting went by before they settled slowly onto Callisto near the most intact piece of the base. Guns had enjoyed a small workout as scattered enemies popped out from behind cover or dug themselves out of holes and fired at Artemis. While her lasers were small for a warship, they still outranged and overpowered the hand weapons or even the beetle turrets of the handful of survivors, and so quickly fried every one of them.

“Stay vigilant, Guns. We can’t be sure there aren’t more of them.” Huen sat back in the Chair and thought. “Get our Marines out there for a recon in force. I want every one of those things dead. And get me the XO.”

“Auxiliary control here,” the executive officer answered over the comm a moment later.

“Ms. Rikard, stand down auxcon and get a team together to plan and execute actions to restore as much function to whatever’s left of this base you can, and start figuring out how we’ll safely open up those bunkers.
Artemis
will have to do some heavy lifting again, and they’ll be depending on us.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Now Sensors,” Huen went on, “see what you can get us off the EarthFleet net and check the battle status. And Schaeffer, now that we’re down, go to my quarters and brew the bridge some tea and some coffee. I suspect we are in for a long day.”

Schaeffer pressed his lips together. “What about Shan, sir?”

Huen held his steward’s eyes for a moment. “We will mourn our dead later. For now, do your duty.”

If we could turn and chase them, we could maybe kill off the guidance packages,
he thought, but the ops planners had vetoed that idea. As fast as the rocks were going it would be very difficult to catch them even with missiles, and if they did, all those Aardvarks would be out of the fight with the Destroyer.

No, his fight was with the big ship. The fortresses, cruisers and their escorts would have to fend off the rocks.

Lark
occupied a position to the upper left, as one looked at the force of attack ships from above. In three dimensions, they actually formed an enormous thickened lozenge, constantly adjusting to keep itself between the Destroyer and the Earth.

The Meme ship had stayed behind its rocks for the first hour or so, then had changed course and blasted to its right, Vango’s left, and “upward” in the plane of the solar system, using the third dimension to separate itself from the mass of asteroids it had launched. He wondered if that was part of its plan all along. Did it send the rocks as a distraction, a second attack, or had the enemy commander simply changed its mind after seeing EarthFleet’s deployment?

He projected the Destroyer’s track and known acceleration parameters, and determined that it could not dodge completely around the cloud of attack ships. However, it could cut through them where only a small fraction could engage, like a footballer racing down the edge of the field to avoid most of the defenders.

General Hyser, the A-24 fleet commander, apparently could see this as well as Vango, for the lozenge of ships constantly adjusted to try to keep within their engagement envelopes. That’s why this formation, unlike last time, had some depth.

Also, the Pilum IIs they carried were smarter, with software that made better decisions. Sometimes the missiles would explode, and sometimes they would just slam into the enemy, with calculations based on the intelligence gathered from the first fight. And, although the kamikaze bombs were still aboard, their use had been tightened and limited to only the best, most damaging parameters.

Or the pilot’s decision.

“What do you think, Token?” he asked his wingman. “Looks like we’re near the front this time.”

“Looks like,” came Token’s even voice. “Why, you scared?”

“Hell, no,” Vango replied, but deep inside he wasn’t so sure. The first battle had been the culmination of training, like a fireman finally getting to go into a burning building for the first time. In a way, it was now harder, a kind of stress fatigue, as he knew what to expect, and remembered how many friends and comrades had died that day.

And what about Stevie?
Is she better off now, or should I have never said or done anything?
He forced those thoughts away.
Keep your focus, Vango
.

“It’s turning,” Token noted, and Vango turned his attention back to the big picture.

“Turning outward…” He ran the projections. “It’s gaining on us.”

Orders soon came to turn inward, using their interior lines to cut across the chord of the enemy’s turn, staying always between the Destroyer and Earth.

An hour later they continued in this position, except… “We’re heading for Mars,” Token pointed out.

“Why?” Vango asked. “There’s nothing there. Just a few defense installations. We’re way off the direct path, a long ways from the incoming rocks. What’s it doing?”

“Beats me. I’m just a fighter pilot,” his wingman replied.

Vango racked his brains, looking at the plots, the cloud of Aardvarks falling slowly back and sideways, preventing the Destroyer from getting around them. “If we keep doing this, eventually we’ll be pressed back into Earth’s defensive zone. Maybe it’s trying to make its move at the same time as the rocks hit, slashing through us while the planetary defenses have their hands full.”

“Or maybe it’s heading here.” Token threw up a very speculative track that showed the Destroyer passing behind Mars and swinging around toward the
Orion
station parked ten million klicks behind Earth. “All
Orion
has is point defenses – pretty good ones, I hear, and new armor bolted on, but nothing to beat a Destroyer with. Losing Absen and all the HQ staff would seriously cripple our war effort.”

“In the long term, maybe, but for today, for now…everyone knows their jobs. No, that doesn’t make sense. But…” Vango looked at Token’s plot. Something about it…he froze it in place for a moment. “Let me know if anything happens, all right? I’m going to do some 4D predictive modeling.”

“All right. If you feel a mallet upside your noggin, it’s me telling you to pull your head out of your assets.” Token’s lame double-entendres had become more frequent lately.

In his VR simulation, Vango ran several possibilities forward and backward in time, varying the Destroyer’s path. Sure, others on
Orion
or one of the cruisers or even other Aardvark pilots were doing the same thing for sure, but some of those were almost a light-hour away, and might not even have seen the enemy’s change in course yet.

Mars. Something about Mars was bothering him. As Token had asked, why would the enemy be heading toward Mars, with all of space around. Its facilities were bare bones, because it was off the direct path to Earth. Except now it was on that path, because the enemy had turned to go behind it.

Behind it. Could it make a sudden course change behind the planet? But in terms of the speeds involved, it would flash past Mars in mere seconds, not enough time to pull any surprises.

Sure, dragging the Aardvarks so far off the direct path had made them burn fuel, and they’d lost a few dozen birds to unplotted asteroid strikes and mechanical failures, but not enough to be tactically significant. Tankers shadowed the attack fleet, well back, and grabships and repair craft traveled alone and unafraid in the areas of low danger, searching for surviving pilots and repairable A-24s. No, all that wasn’t significant enough.

What was the enemy’s game?

Course change. Course change, planet. Planet, course change.

Course. Of course. Change course.

Vango modified the VR sim, running his theory several times in different ways. All of them worked out. “I got it!” he cried.

“What?”

Vango frantically packaged his data up with text notes, fearful it would not be soon enough. The attack fleet was spread out over more than a light-minute, and then there was the system’s time to process, and the human time to react. Once he fired it off at flash priority, he explained to Token. “Open up that package and follow along. Look at the Destroyer’s path.”

In the shared VR sim, the enemy’s projected track dove toward Mars, skimming its outer side, away from the Aardvarks, just above its thin atmosphere. At the same time the virtual Destroyer rotated to point its drive almost directly toward the planet, forcing itself in the tightest partial orbit it could without striking Mars air and burning up.

Pulling the view back out, Vango showed Token how the Destroyer’s future path had changed. “This maneuver gets it a completely free course change, along with an unexpected burst of speed. A slingshot maneuver, like a footballer briefly grabbing another player as he goes by. It will give him enough velocity to get past us.”

“How long do we have to change course?”

Vango shook his head, unseen. “We can’t. I mean, it’s already too late.”

“Can we fire missiles?”

“Let me see.” Vango quickly had the VR launch missiles and aim for a point to meet the Destroyer on its new, faster track. “Yes we can, but it will be a high-deflection shot for some, and a stern chance for others.”

“How many missiles will engage it?”

“Umm….about seven thousand.”

“Dammit, Vango,” Token said, shocking his wingman with even this mild profanity, “we fired over a hundred thousand missiles at the first two smaller Destroyers and we barely got one of them. How can seven thousand take down this monster?”

“They are Pilum IIs. They should be a lot more effective. And there’s the cruisers, and their escorts. And the planetary defenses.” Even to his own virtual ears Vango’s words sounded hollow.

Vango felt
Lark
shift under him as a command override turned the entire fleet. He watched the orders propagate at the speed of light, the simulation doing its best to reflect reality, as the mass of attack craft turned and blasted at emergency maximum acceleration in an attempt to intercept.

At the same time, all but two of his missiles launched themselves. Apparently Hyser had wasted no time in getting the Pilums on their way. Once they had launched,
Lark
’s missiles came back under his control, more or less. The network constantly assisted him, creating a kind of man-machine feedback loop that, once he was used to it, allowed him to fly them as effectively as possible.

Token said, “Maybe the ones that do intercept will slow the bastard down, or knock him off track. Force him away again.”

“Maybe,” Vango said doubtfully, “but it looks like we’re going to miss the fight by about twenty minutes.”

“Bastard is clever, very clever,” Vango muttered in frustration.

“Bastard,” echoed Token. Now that they were edging toward failure and the potential destruction of humans on the planet, it looked like he was learning to swear.

“The cruisers and Aardvark escorts are moving to intercept. Their missiles will reach just after ours do. Maybe that will do the trick.”

“Bastard,” Token said again. “Dammit!”

Vango remembered that Token had a wife and baby daughter back on Earth, and understood what was going on in his wingman’s head. It must all be getting too real. For his part, all he had to lose were his parents and friends and brother and sister…which once he thought about it seemed just as ugly.

Compartmentalize, Vincent
, he told himself.
Just like Aunt Jill always said. Wall it off until the combat is done.

With hours more to go still, thoughts of Aunt Jill made him bring up the VR feed of Grissom Base on Callisto, and he got another shock. It was
gone
. Nothing but a smoking hole five hundred meters deep remained, and he had to zoom out quite a bit before any of the outlying surface platforms could be seen.

Some kind of big explosion or impact. I guess the Meme got them after all, despite the big weapons. Hope to hell everyone got underground into the bunkers
. Suddenly he felt sick at the possibility Jill might be dead, and grief on Uncle Rick’s behalf intruded.

Compartmentalize, dammit
.

Vango racked his brain for Token’s real name. “Get a grip, Josiah,” he said, actually talking to himself as much as his wingman. “We have to keep fighting, and we have to keep hoping. We beat them once and we can beat them again.”