Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer

  Comes The Destroyer

  By

  David VanDyke

  Copyright © 2013 by the author. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means whatsoever (electronic, mechanical or otherwise) without prior written permission and consent from the author. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my friends and fellow science-fiction authors Vaughn Heppner and B.V. Larson, for their tireless encouragement, for persevering and showing me the way.

  Thanks to my readers – my lovely wife Beth, my friend and fellow authors Ryan King and Nick Stevenson, and the members of our Friday Night Writes group – Jimmie Lee, Carol Scheina, R. Brian Roser, and Duane Lee, talented authors all - for their excellent critiques; their feedback has made me a better writer and this book a better novel.

  Cover by Humblenations.com

  * * *

  By David VanDyke:

  Plague Wars series:

  The Eden Plague

  Reaper's Run

  The Demon Plagues

  The Reaper Plague

  The Orion Plague

  Cyborg Strike

  Comes The Destroyer

  Stellar Conquest series:

  First Conquest (within the anthology Planetary Assault)

  Desolator

  Tactics of Conquest

  Look for them at your favorite book provider or visit www.davidvandykeauthor.com

  * * *

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  Year One.

  The great desert city in the Outback had fled piece by piece upon thousands of lowboys, what the Australians called floats, much of it heading west across the kilometers to Exmouth Spaceport along the brand-new Central Motorway. All that remained was the lunch bunker and the people and equipment it sheltered, and its raison d'être looming in the distance: Artemis.

  Unlike the launch of Orion, this sendoff seemed muted, almost routine, despite being only the second of its kind. Without the pressure of immediate alien invasion, it had taken on the ho-hum character of just another space shuttle firing – at least to the layman.

  For the myriad experts sitting in front of their control boards, it was anything but.

  Most of those men and women were engineers of one kind or another – mechanical, electrical, aeronautical, propulsion, nuclear – and with that expertise came the exquisite torture of the knowledge of just how much could go wrong. Because of that, and the innate conservatism of space controllers everywhere, they had used the tried and true. What worked with Orion they figured would work with Artemis.

  Thus she also sat atop thousands of tons of high explosive to provide that first, all-important push upward. Like an aircraft carrier’s catapult prior to the kick of afterburners, the chemical explosion gave the engineers a measure of confidence and control before lighting off that first nuke.

  Many people thought nuclear weapons engineering was an exact science, but it was not at all. Precisely because of the extreme accuracy and precision necessary, atomic bombs never quite exploded the same way. The tiniest fraction of difference in the machining, a nanosecond’s alteration in the timing of the initiation sequence, and the yield could vary by thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of kilos of TNT-equivalent force, so it was much safer to have the ten-million-ton Artemis and her mountains of cargo already heading in the right direction before the first real firecracker lit under her tin can.

  James Ekara, Australia’s Senior Under-Minister for Production, had seen Orion’s ascent from an even closer bunker just months ago, and was happy to be present for this one. A more insightful man than some gave credit, he realized that his presence there heartened his team, increasing their work output and job satisfaction – which in turn translated to more productivity. General Nguyen had made that principle quite clear to him, and he had taken it to heart: happy workers were successful workers, and successful workers made for successful, wealthy and powerful management.

  Therefore he made sure to factor in organizational psychology to his meticulously constructed plans.

  The countdown slipped under one minute, and Ekara checked his nails for the umpteenth time, a nervous habit. Last time he had pressed the launch button himself, at Nguyen’s direction. This time he had followed his master’s example and had given away that privilege to one of the control room crew, a name drawn randomly from a hat. The nervous young woman who’d won looked from the big mushroom-shaped initiator to him and back every few seconds as the numbers crossed ten and falling.

  “Three…two…one…fire in the hole,” the counting voice droned, and she mashed her hand down on the red plastic plunger. Of course, the thing did exactly nothing, but as long as she pushed it within parameters, no one would ever know that the computer actually fired off the explosives.

  An engineer like she should be the last one to expect a manual start, Ekara thought, but people tend to believe what they want to, not what makes sense.

  Rumbling shook the bunker and the direct visual blurred in a cloud of dust cast into the air by the explosion. A synthetic aperture radar picture, as well as screens showing several other spectra, provided the data the crew
needed as the great ship lifted off its resting supports and annihilated them in the process.

  Half a second before the first nuclear bomb blew, the bunker’s external covers snapped shut, sealing them in and all electromagnetics out. The shutters blocked all view by eyes or machines, leaving those watching on the ground in the dark.

  For the next minute or so their screens snapped to several external feeds from hardened sensors tens and even hundreds of kilometers away, watching from mountaintops and flying airplanes well outside the blast radii. These awesome and magnificent images were broadcast around the world, of the largest and heaviest thing humanity ever sent into space.

  Ekara gazed at his Rolex, watching the seconds pass as those around him stared at the long-range pictures until the one minute mark – or rather, until the sixtieth bomb exploded. “Open the bunker,” he ordered, confirming what they had already planned, and immediately some of the screens shifted to show the view from below as nuke after nuke, approximately one per second, forced the mountain of metal that was Artemis into the air.

  He breathed a silent sigh of relief; despite his apparent confidence, it had always been his nightmare that the launch would fail and the whole damned thing would collapse atop their position, killing everyone inside and out. “Well done, everyone. How is the telemetry looking?”

  Data relayed up to a satellite, then out to a ground station and back to the control bunker – the exploding bombs completely jammed any possibility of line-of-sight communication with the spaceship – provided his Chief of Flight Operations with the confidence to say, “All systems nominal, sir. Everything is five by five.”

  Ekara clapped his hands together, rubbing them theatrically. “Then I believe you ladies and gentlemen can handle it from here. I have a press conference in less than two hours back in Sydney, and I suggest that those of you who can spare the eyeballs watch it. I believe you will hear some good news.” A monetary bonus for everyone involved will further motivate them. Cheap at twice the price.

  With that, he took his leave, judging the moment right. Besides, the private jet waiting for him on the other side of the mountain was very private, and had entertainments aboard to which he eagerly looked forward.

  Chapter 2

  Aboard Artemis’ bridge, Captain Huen Xiaobo lay stiffly in the crash couch that the Chair became during heavy acceleration, feeling the hammering of the propulsion bombs. The resulting pogo effect gave him the sense not that he was accelerating upward, but that he was simply bouncing up and falling back down as the G forces varied between zero and eight gravities.

  He kept his eye on the master helmsman’s shaven head and snake’s nest of wires protruding from it, as if that would somehow tell him something sooner or better than simply watching the displays. Most of those snowed out, overloaded with the electromagnetic pulse of their own drive or simply shut down. Right now Artemis was nearly blind, relying on the finely honed instincts of her astronaut-pilot and the chips in his brain.

  Almost thirteen interminable minutes after launch, the rhythm of the blasts changed and the waves of pressure abated, slowed to one every few seconds, eventually diminishing to just a blast here and there. Finally the ship fell silent and the helmsman opened his eyes to turn them to his captain. “We have achieved minimum stable orbit, Captain. Fusion engines are running hot and nominal.”

  That meant the four cloned Meme bio-fusion motors installed in universal mounts at the cardinal points of the ship’s waist were now providing thrust, just a twentieth G or so. “Excellent. Secure from hard acceleration and begin standard routine.”

  As the ship settled and the creaks and groans abated, Huen could feel the slight pressure of the small, powerful engines sending them spiraling forward and upward. Eventually they would rise into a nice comfortable geostationary orbit and dock with the first of the tamed comets, dubbed Atlantis, to offload the initial part of the enormous load of supplies.

  Two naturalized satellites now orbited Earth, with more on the way, sent there over the last months by the former Meme scout ship Alan Denham.

  Their target ex-comet was one of them, forty kilometers across and full of ices of H20 and methane and other volatiles. They would be cracked for their elements – oxygen and hydrogen especially – as well as the water itself for use by human workers.

  The second satellite, a former asteroid called Hiera after the island supposedly containing the god Vulcan’s forge, was over eighty kilometers long and shaped like a lumpy potato. It would be mined for materials such as iron, nickel and silicon to provide a stepping stone to build further facilities as humanity marched outward into the solar system.

  One part of Huen sighed with regret, as the weapons Artemis had been designed to carry made way for innumerable cargo holds and passenger quarters. He had been reduced from the expected command of a warship to the skipper of the biggest freighter ever built.

  On the other hand, he had been promoted from the second in command of Orion under Absen, to both the rank and position of Captain, solely responsible for his enormous vessel.

  It could be far worse.

  As the next eight years would involve a frantic grueling schedule of full-capacity production, he had no doubt that this huge flying truck would get a workout. If he did his job well – and he intended to be as impeccable in his duties as he was in preparing his blazing white uniform and gleaming black shoes – he would be competitive for other commands, and hopefully he would be given some kind of warship.

  Not that he had a clue what such a thing would look like. Engineers worked at labs and technical centers across the globe, coming up with design after design to take advantage of rapidly advancing technologies and of the modular cloned engines. Better minds than his would decide the form of the spaceships to be built, just as master shipbuilders had created sailing vessels in the centuries before, not ship captains.

  Huen noticed that others now converted their crash couches to standard work chairs, so he touched the control that told the articulated structure surrounding the biotech filling to rearrange itself for work. Soon he sat in the five percent gravity provided by the fusion engines’ acceleration. He imagined them like outboards straining to push along a supertanker, but fortunately in space there was no resistance to slow them. As long as Artemis stayed above escape velocity, she would continue to climb as the motors thrust them forward.

  He reviewed his basic orbital mechanics one more time: forward goes up, up goes backward, backward goes down, down goes forward. This counterintuitive mantra meant, in this case, that pushing the ship forward made it rise until it found an orbit appropriate to the new velocity. Continuous thrust meant continuous gain in altitude and true speed, though apparent groundspeed would not change much, like a ball on a rubber string that stretched longer and longer around its central point as it swung.

  “Time to rendezvous?” Huen asked.

  “Fourteen hours, Captain,” the helmsman responded.

  Not Skipper yet. Absen had pointed out this moniker as a bellwether of crew morale, and Huen never forgot something a senior told him. “Have Commander Kessel report to the bridge in ten minutes, and pass the word that all other rotations will remain according to schedule.”

  Now was not the time to begin throwing new things at the crew. About half of the diminished complement of three hundred were veterans of Orion’s flight, but this was still a shakedown cruise and he wanted it to go smooth and easy.

  Nine minutes later he turned the Chair over to Kessel and told him, “I’ll be touring the ship. Pass the word to maintain standard operations. This is not an inspection.” Huen nodded at Schaeffer, his senior steward, who subvocalized something into his internal transmitter and led the way off the bridge, through the back door to the senior officers’ quarters.

  On the way they picked up the rest of the captain’s bodyguards. Two of them were also Americans, simply by virtue of the fact that only that nation had enough cybernetically augmented personnel to go around. The fou
rth, the newest, was a Han Chinese called Shan, from the People’s Republic. It was rumored that access to the newest cybertech had been the price of their continued support for the world military effort, and for keeping North Korea on a short leash.

  The new man loomed huge and squat, looking like a James Bond villain, with glittering eyes set deep within the hooded ridges of his brow. He moved like a mountain on gimbaled joints, his sheer bulk and easy grace impressive. Schaeffer had him take point, which allowed his Americans to keep an eye on him. They obviously trusted Huen, as he’d fought alongside them on Orion, and as a Hong Kong native, occupied a hybrid Chinese-Western status in their minds.

  Shan, on the other hand, had People’s Republic written all over him.

  The irony of Americans protecting one ethnic Chinese against another did not escape Captain Huen. Now that they had made it into space, he thought it was time to put the problem to rest, one way or another.

  At the door to his quarters, Huen motioned for Shan to enter first, silencing Schaeffer with a look. When he moved to follow Shan inside, though, the American steward tried to interfere.

  “Stand aside, Steward Schaeffer,” Huen ordered.

  “But sir –”

  “Am I Captain here, Mister Schaeffer?” Huen’s tone was deceptively mild.

  “Yes, sir,” the steward responded, his face turning as blank as a Caucasian was able.

  Huen smiled inside himself. Inscrutability was a cultural Asian trait, well developed in the Hong Kong upper classes by the dictates of manners, so the man’s attempt seemed quite inept.

  Still in the corridor, he reached over to shut the cabin door and dog it tight, which should make it nearly soundproof even to cybernetic ears. “Then if I remain Captain after my conversation with Steward Shan, you will cease this pointless waste of vigilance with regard to him and my person. Feel free to watch and see if he engages in any suspect activities, but I cannot operate with a dysfunctional personal security detachment. Do you understand?”