Conquest and Empire (Stellar Conquest Series Book 5), Page 2

  Using the same principles as the tubes that had carried a million colonists and crew aboard Conquest ninety years ago, these robust machines had kept hundreds of people in hibernation for the more than five decades since most of humanity had been scoured from the face of the Earth. Only those in shelters – some traditional underground living units and others like this – had survived to repopulate under the pitiless rule of Meme and Blend.

  The discovery of such bunkers had tapered off to nothing after ten years of systematic searching by the Meme’s underlings, but Spectre knew not all had been found. He’d asked for the detailed records from Conquest’s hard drives, uploaded in the intelligence dump broadcast toward Gliese 370 shortly before the final Meme assault arrived.

  Spectre’s searchers had located and excavated many heretofore undiscovered shelters. Those lacking coldsleep modules had become tombs filled with people unable to dig themselves out or attract enough attention for others to help. The fortunate had suffocated in the carbon dioxide of their own breaths.

  The less fortunate had starved.

  Of those with coldsleep modules, more than three in ten had been too badly damaged to preserve life. Fusion powerplants designed to run for a thousand years still succumbed to shocks and cave-ins brought on by the convulsions of a planet wracked by stupendous impacts. Sometimes the electricity still flowed, but the machines themselves had been crushed or the main cables had been cut.

  And some were like this complex, sufficiently intact to rescue hundreds of specialists from the times before the victory of the Meme. Only the most valuable personnel, judged so by ruthless computer evaluations, had been given space in the life capsules. One-way time travel into the future had been made mandatory: no appeals, no refusals. Not with the fate of humanity at stake.

  Spectre himself, in his earlier incarnation as Spooky Nguyen, had pushed for the program and was thoroughly glad that it had eventually been implemented, though long after he’d left aboard Conquest. He chuckled as he realized that this was a gift he had, at least in part, given himself.

  Now, that gift gave him what he wanted as the cover of the module lifted, revealing the clear tube within. Held at just above freezing to slow metabolism, the human body inside was kept in near stasis, its necessary functions attended to by adapted Meme technology that fed it, breathed for it and carried its wastes away.

  Spectre leaned over to brush at the thick glass, but still he could see nothing for the mists within. Master of a planet he might be, but here he had no power to hurry the mindless machine.

  Finally, the fog cleared with the whine of a fan and the retraction of semi-living gels that rolled themselves away from the bare skin of the inhabitant, leaving him naked and pink. Still stocky and muscular, with sandy brown hair and pale gray eyes, the man within looked the same as when Spectre had seen him last.

  “Hello, DJ,” he breathed as he spread his hands on the glass and gazed downward.

  Within the coldsleep tube, Daniel Markis, once Chairman of the Council of Earth, opened his eyes.

  Chapter 2

  Admiral Absen stared grimly at Michelle’s military-industrial projections littering his office desktop, showing economic activity balanced against the production of war materiel. Rubbing his eyes and sliding bars and widgets here and there, he tried to make them come out some way he was happy with, but couldn’t.

  EarthFleet Intelligence projected the attack of the next wave of Scourge “from zero to twenty-six months” with ninety percent confidence, which was a fancy way of saying they could arrive any time – today, tomorrow, next year.

  If only he could know for certain that he had a specific period of time, EarthFleet could take a breather and deploy its precious resources more efficiently, but with a mere sixteen minutes guaranteed warning, everyone had to be on high alert all the time, and every warship, every SLAM, every weapon had to be sent immediately to the front line.

  We have so little depth, Absen growled to himself. If only we could see them coming from a distance and from one direction…but faster-than-light emergence apparently proceeds randomly from wormhole termini appearing along the equator of a gravity well.

  The mechanics of FTL travel, as worked out by the old Ryss physicist Plessk and his team, showed stars to be the key. Power collected from a gravity well was twisted by the FTL drive of each mothership into a toroid singularity, opening a wormhole pathway to another star. Theory said even such exotic masses as black holes or pulsars could be used, but doing so courted gravitic disaster upon exit.

  That exit was the real point of danger, for the arriving ship must first survive the heat of the star. The Scourge did this by coating their one-use motherships with thick organic resin that ablated and insulated the creatures within. Human ships would use armor of nanoformed ceramic matrix, nearly impervious to heat.

  The next problem was that of escape from the arrival star’s gravity well. As long as the target stellar body was not much larger than the one at the departure end, there should be no problem. Velocity in equaled velocity out, it seemed.

  However, if the arrival star was much larger – and Absen had been shocked when he’d been shown that some stars were millions of times more massive than yellow Sol and large enough to encompass all the planets of Earth’s inner solar system – then the arriving force might never escape.

  This dynamic effectively created an FTL gradient from star to star. One could go from a larger star to any lesser one without difficulty. In fact, such travel became easier and easier the more the travelers proceeded “downslope.”

  Going upward, from smaller to larger stars, became a much more difficult proposition. A stairstep approach was necessary, balancing the speed of entrance with the required stellar escape velocity. If the ultimate target system held an especially large star, a starship might have to travel several “upward” legs, from star to star to star, before it could risk jumping for its destination.

  This was analogous to the way sailing ships of old operated, tacking laboriously upwind to gain the weather gage, the position of greatest maneuvering advantage. Similarly, the larger stars constituted the strategic high grounds of space, giving the force that held them the edge.

  Unfortunately, Sol was not a large star at all, and so securing it was like defending a valley. An attacker could arrive from any number of larger stars within hundreds of light years, while a task force departing Sol had far fewer options: to aim only for stars smaller or one size class more massive, in other words.

  But these were considerations for the future. For now, Absen’s job was tactical rather than strategic, and that was headache enough. If he were the Scourge, he’d send a much larger force to attack a star system that resisted the first wave. With endless forces and the individual Archons’ desire for territory, there was no reason not to do so.

  In fact, thought Absen, if I were them, I’d mass maximum force on anyone resisting. The trick is coordinating task forces from more than one star system. Fortunately, that takes time.

  The physicists said arriving together from different stars couldn’t be done with any accuracy, at least not with the FTL technology EarthFleet had captured. Travel times were too unpredictable and communication was only possible via drones that took just as long as a fleet to travel from star to star.

  Therefore, to arrive as a unit, any task force had to be assembled at a star larger than the target before launching together as one convoy.

  And to do that, drones have to fly from place to place with messages and orders, coordinating a fleet’s assembly, for light is far too slow. We really are back to the Age of Sail, Absen mused, where fast packet boats physically carried dispatches from place to place.

  Perhaps in the future, new technology would provide solutions, such as some kind of FTL carrier transmission wave. For now, he had to work with what he had.

  And what he had was a hodgepodge, a mishmash of weapons hastily produced and just as hastily deployed in hopes that the inevitable attack w
ouldn’t be too much for them to handle.

  Absen checked his watch and realized his next staff briefing was coming up in less than an hour. “Michelle, cancel the 1300 daily with apologies to the presenters. I don’t think I can stand another data dump. Instead, let’s have a 1600 discussion brief in the small auditorium. That should give people enough time to change gears and bring whatever they have to the table. Can you put together an updated summary of our defenses?”

  “I keep that information ready at all times, Admiral,” Michelle replied with a hint of reproach.

  Damn the machine-brained woman, Absen thought. She’s getting more pissy all the time. We really have to find her an AI companion, whatever that might mean.

  “Then you should also have information at your fingertips on figures of speech and command questions that are actually polite orders,” he replied with some irritation.

  “Sorry, sir. No excuse, sir.”

  “In the meantime, I need some LBWA time and some lunch.”

  “Understood, sir. Shall I accompany you?”

  “Aren’t you already with me everywhere aboard, avatar or not?”

  “The admiral should understand figures of speech that are actually polite but advisable suggestions, sir.”

  Absen made a strangled noise in his throat, half sigh, half growl, before exiting into the corridor. One of Michelle’s humanoid avatars fell in half a pace behind him as his detail of four Stewards preceded and trailed him.

  While he spent the next hour “leading by wandering around,” he marveled at the change in Conquest. The ship and crew had traveled from Gleise 370 with a minimum of personnel, but now, with every space-based platform in high demand, the warship had been turned into a mobile command center and teemed with as many people as could live aboard, at least twenty thousand at last count. She’d been designed to hold that number, but after so long with so few billeted aboard he felt crowded.

  Absen laughed at himself. You’ve grown soft over the years, old man, he thought. You’ve forgotten what living for months at a time in a cramped nuclear submarine feels like. This is positively empty compared to that.

  His first stop was the new PDCC, the point defense control center, a place dedicated to increasing anti-Scourge weapons coordination by several orders of magnitude. Holding over a thousand trained gunners linked within shared VR space, like pilots and helmsmen, it was the test-bed for new tactics and a proving ground for an idea that he’d drawn from his wet-navy days so long ago: the U.S. Navy’s Aegis anti-air and antimissile system.

  The large room looked more like an infirmary than a control center, with rows of VR coffins stood vertically so the gunners could walk in and out of them upright. Right now, about half of them stood open, the other half filled. One monitoring tech came to her feet as Absen entered, but the admiral waved her back to her seat and looked around.

  He knew the cheap autonomous point defense modules that had been slapped onto Conquest’s skin were all gone now, replaced by uprated and networked laser emplacements. Each still contained its own powerplant in order to minimize the need to send energy from beneath the great ship’s armor, dramatically reducing weak spots such conduits caused.

  In order to provide comms between the PDCC and the weapons, thin cables ran through the tiniest of holes laboriously bored in the armor. More importantly, hardened wires ran from each module to all of its nearest dozen neighbors, forming a network that meant all twelve connections had to be severed before it became isolated and reverted to autonomous mode. Each also contained a short-range transmitter for a separate and redundant wireless network.

  With an extra half-meter of spray-on ablative covering the cables and much of the modules, simulations demonstrated that this system, while not perfect, was the best they could install with the resource constraints they had. In fact, Conquest had been hogging the PD module production for the last month in order to cover every excess square meter of skin with lasers – almost sixty thousand of them for the whole of the six square kilometers of surface area.

  Right now, Conquest was far and away the most effective capital ship in EarthFleet. She also functioned as the flagship, holding the majority of command and staff, and was the most powerful TacDrive equipped vessel in the solar system. It was therefore imperative that she be able to go deeply into harms way, strike the enemy hard, and then escape.

  But that uniqueness would change soon, Absen vowed. After the next attack or, if they were lucky and the enemy held off, before it, entirely new ships would be completed, specifically built to fight the Scourge.

  “How are the sims coming?” Absen asked the tech, who smiled nervously and stood up again at being addressed by EarthFleet’s supreme commander.

  Before she could speak, a loud voice came from behind him. “Very well, sir,” it said, and Absen turned to see Commander James Ford, Conquest’s senior weapons officer, hurry across the room.

  The man visibly smoothed his permanently combative expression in the presence of his admiral. He spoke briefly in the tech’s ear before turning to Absen. “I’m working them to the limits the psych people will let me, but I’d like to add some hours. I think we could increase proficiency a few percent.”

  Absen shook his head. “I saw your request on the last report, Commander, and the answer is still no. Twelve hours a day in VR, six days a week, is enough.”

  “But sir –”

  “Sorry, no. That’s final. Overtraining is almost as bad as undertraining, and we’ve already had to send two of your people to VR rehab.” Absen thought about his own brush with VR syndrome during the first battle with the Scourge and shuddered. Nothing since nanocrack was quite as unbalancing as the godlike feeling of virtual space – and the depression of having to leave it.

  Ford said, “You know, I heard from Ezekiel that the Meme VR sarcophagi don’t seem to cause VR syndrome, or not as badly. If we could use that technology…”

  “There are a couple dozen technologies I’d like to fully exploit, James, but we’re stretched to the limit trying to incorporate the upgrades we do have. We can’t let the good idea fairy get us off track.” The good idea fairy was shorthand for the tendency of people to want to make just one more improvement, as in “I got a good idea!” If allowed to run rampant, time-tested and efficient systems would end up worthless as they were constantly “improved,” because every upgrade caused disruption, introduced unintended consequences, required retraining of personnel and needed a period of adjustment.

  “Yes, sir,” Ford subsided.

  Absen slapped the younger man on the shoulder. “The PDCC is a quantum leap over anything we had before, so be happy with what you have. Tell me how much more effective we’ll be.”

  “Well,” Ford admitted, “once both shifts are trained and in place, we’ll be about ninety times more lethal to any swarm we encounter.”

  “Ninety percent?” Absen knew his assertion was wrong, but wanted to throw Ford a bone by letting the man brag about his new system. Nothing was more effective in getting someone to invest in a project than having him defend it in front of a potential critic.

  “No, sir,” Ford replied with a distinct air of pride. “Ninety times, which is more than nine thousand percent better. But that’s still not enough. I want to be able to stand in the middle of one of their swarms and lay down a base of fire so intense that they can’t overcome it.”

  “And I want the Scourge to catch the common cold and their whole race to die off, but neither of those things is going to happen.”

  Ford laughed ruefully. “War of the Worlds, right, sir?”

  “You got it. Too bad it’s never that easy. Keep up the good work and tell your people I appreciate their efforts. They’re going to be vital to our survival.”

  “You just told them yourself,” Ford said with an uncharacteristic grin. “Miss Surwal here is recording our conversation, and it will be replayed for them on the next break.”

  “Unedited, I hope.”

  “Of co
urse, sir.”

  “Carry on, then,” Absen said before departing.

  “Are you certain Commander Ford is the best man for the job?” Michelle murmured on Absen’s ear as they walked.

  “Yes,” the admiral said firmly. “I’m sure you could come up with a dozen theoretically better people –”

  “– or a thousand…” Michelle retorted.

  “Okay, a thousand, but not one of them would have been with me and this crew for as long or know us so well. People aren’t interchangeable, Michelle. They form relationships, like fine roots that connect them to others. Ripping them out is a last resort, especially after a long time in place.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, sir,” Michelle said in a tone of disbelief.

  Absen stopped and turned to the avatar. “You know, I think the first of the new dreadnoughts will need a good AI. Why don’t you give me a detailed plan on transferring your consciousness to the Constitution when she’s finished?”

  “What?” The AI had built her avatar’s face sufficiently expressive to display utter shock at the admiral’s words. “You can’t…” Then the android seemed to relax. “I see by your biometrics that you are practicing deception on me, Admiral. You’re trying to add an emotional component to your argument.”

  “If by that you mean I’m trying to show you how you’d feel at getting treated like an interchangeable part instead of like a human being, then yes, that’s exactly it.”

  “I understand, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “You’re welcome.” Not for the first time Absen worried about the AI. If human beings could grow up seeming normal but manifest signs of insanity later in adulthood, why not a machine intelligence? Especially one continuously given increments of greater responsibility. Plenty of politicians succumbed to megalomania as their power grew. Every despised dictator had to start somewhere.

  “What’s to be our next stop?” Michelle asked.

  “You want to tip them off?”

  “Is that unwise?”