Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer (13 page)

“A westerner, Admiral. She pilots one of our shuttles. Her family name is Lockerbie. She is…different from Chinese women.”

Huen smiled more broadly. “Shan, your penchant for understatement is matched only by the enormity of what you don’t know you are getting into. Let me be the first to congratulate you.” He reached out to seize and shake his bodyguard’s hand. “Felicitations.”

For once Shan’s equanimity seemed disturbed, but he managed a smile in return as he awkwardly returned the handshake. “Thank you, sir.”

“May you have many sons. Now, isn’t your shift ending soon? Send in your relief on the way out, and my aide and administrative assistant. Give your intended my best as well. We must have dinner together soon.”

Almost two decades after the Eden Plague had reshaped humanity, society found itself less changed than most people had expected. Human nature had been adjusted, but not perfected. On the sliding scale of morality, the normal setting had tipped a bit toward the social good, but there were still as many definitions of that word as there were people.

Violent offenses had dropped by over ninety percent, but people still found reasons to hurt or even kill. Property crime and exploitation crime had dropped as well, but not quite as much. It was easier to rationalize the usual rackets like drugs, smuggling and prostitution than knocking someone on the head for their wallet.

This reduction in crime was all to the good, because Absen knew it still took every ounce of effort to vault Earth’s military technology far enough forward to take down this world-killer on its way. He felt rather like a Napoleonic admiral trying to develop a way for his sail-powered frigates and ships of the line to defeat a World War Two naval battleship.

When the Council’s attendant nodded to him and opened the door, he entered.

Smaller than most people expected, it held one representative from each nation seated in three concentric rings, stepped down like a half-circle theater or indoor arena. Aides and onlookers occupied the outermost banks of seats, but were barred from the “floor” during the actual session.

Absen took the podium in the center and, after introducing himself, launched into the main part of his report. “The Ceres project is proceeding apace with no major snags. Barring surprises, we will have reached maximum efficient production in about three years. This leaves two to three more years to produce warships.”

A discreet red light flashed in front of the man directly before Absen on the first row. He had the right to ignore questions until he was finished with his initial speech, but given who had pressed the button, he decided that would be unwise. “Yes, Chairman.”

Daniel Markis leaned forward to speak into his stalked microphone. “I’d like to hear more about these warships. It’s all been kept very hush-hush, even from me, but we’re in the fourth year of our nine-year effort and I’m sure Earth’s leaders would like to know a bit more. There have been some disturbing rumors.”

Absen was fairly certain Markis knew the answers to his question, so he must be asking for the benefit of the others. Well, it had to come out sometime, and he was prepared. “Yes, Mister Chairman. Naturally EarthFleet wanted to be certain of our courses of action before they became known, to keep those rumors to a minimum.”

“But you are ready to tell us something now? About these suicide ships?” Markis prodded.

“Yes, sir.” Absen cleared his throat. “First, let me say that the name is not strictly accurate. Suicide, kamikaze, is a tactic of last resort, but we want to be sure we cover all possible eventualities. Given the stakes, I felt this was only prudent.”

“Admiral, just spit it out in plain language. Your job is not at risk. Nobody is gunning for you. We just believe it’s time to tell the people of Earth what nine years of sacrifice and hard work are going to buy, and going to cost.”

Absen looked down at his notes, on old-fashioned paper because of the restrictions on devices in the Council Chamber. He shuffled them for a moment, then folded the sheets deliberately and slipped them into the breast pocket of his dress whites. Then he lifted his eyes to Markis, locking gazes with him. “Fine. I’ll give it to you all straight, without any political bullshit. Just remember, sir, you asked for it.”

Sipping from the water glass on the podium gave him a moment to shift rhetorical modes. He decided to just talk to them as if they were his staff and not his masters.

“There’s a principle in wargaming called the ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Fallacy,’ based on Lanchester’s Laws regarding conflict. In simple terms, it says that cheaper and more numerous is more likely to win against expensive and few – in the long run. There are lots of corollaries and caveats, but all of our modeling has upheld the theory.” Absen leaned forward on the podium.

“The Meme employ this principle by overwhelming their enemies with cheap hypervelocity missiles in huge numbers, backed up by very robust and extremely maneuverable naval units – their ships, such as this Destroyer. To defeat them, we must mitigate three advantages.” He raised a finger.

“First, the large number of missiles they will fire. Modeling and simulation has shown that if we build big ships, they will be easy to hit and will get pounded to dust. The scout ship we fought hit
Orion
with nine hypers and killed more than half the crew, damaging the ship proportionally. Conservatively we expect this Destroyer to be able to launch hundreds, or more probably thousands, of missiles per salvo. Nothing we can build can stand up to that directly. Anything we could fashion – fortified asteroids for example – that could take the pounding, may not maneuver well enough to engage.”

Absen held up a hand at the flood of red lights that came on. “Allow me to go on. So, we don’t try to stand up to them. We make maneuverable ships that won’t get hit as often. I liken it to the PT boats of World Wars One and Two, each of which carried torpedoes that could sink much larger ships, and relied on speed and small size to avoid getting killed.”

“But what about this kamikaze notion?” Markis insisted.

“These attack boats, for want of a better term, will be heavily armed and lightly armored. Their job will be to press home against the enemy at speed, launch
our
overwhelming number of weapons, and if necessary, ram the Destroyer and blow their fusion devices.
If necessary
.”

“Why not just use robot ships to do the same thing?”

“We considered that, sir. Two problems. One, we can’t program a computer smart enough to cover all eventualities, and two, the lightspeed delay makes remote control unworkable. We’ve run every simulation, ladies and gentlemen. There are strategies that are more efficient – that result in lower casualties – but none more
effective
. Without pilots willing to kamikaze, the best chance the wargames give us to win is thirty-one percent. Less than one in three.”

“And with the pilots?”

“More than fifty percent.”

Silence fell on the assembly for a moment, before murmuring started as representatives conversed with their neighbors. After a moment Markis, as usual the spokesman for the rest of the world, asked, “This was the best solution?”

Thank you
, Absen thought, as he realized the Chairman was carefully leading the Council toward the only possible conclusion. “Yes, sir. The best we could find. Now realize,” he raised his voice, leaning into his microphone, “that this is just the fleet strategy, of the mobile forces that will close with and kill the Destroyer. My monthly reports detail the defensive strategies using orbital lasers, railguns, missiles and a whole bunch of other technologies to mitigate its attack on Earth and to reduce the Destroyer’s options. I’d be happy to take questions on these items, but it’s likely that Production Minister Ekara or my J4, General Travis Tyler, can answer those better than I can.”

Despite this attempt at deflection, Absen spent the next hour addressing as many questions as he could, as Markis got out of the way to allow many of Earth’s hundred-odd remaining nations to speak. The admiral knew enough of politics to realize this consensus-building process was important, and that the horses all pulled harder when the whip hand stayed light.

The Raphael piece, with the memories of four thousand years, was amused.

“Glad it worked out,” he replied. “It gives us a redoubt of sorts, and more flexibility.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to just get rid of us?”

“Not at all…though it will allow me to do some running around that I couldn’t do before, while you all work at maximum efficiency here.”

Rae took the avatar in her arms. “How soon do you have to go?”

“In a day or three. Whenever. Besides some rearrangement of rocks, I want to concentrate on serious expansion of my combat capabilities, and I can’t do that with a bunch of kids running around inside me. I also thought I’d pick up Zeke and teach him some more about Memetech and…just have some father-son time, I guess.”

There. That will make her happy, and hopefully deflect her curiosity. She’s so smart in some ways, but isn’t really a good liar or detector of the same, while I…Skull…got quite good at it in my life.

“Excellent. The quads will benefit from some stability, and they can play with customizing the new base as well. By the way, have you thought about the secrecy issue?” she asked.

“As in, communications to and from this secret base? I configured our tame Sentry to act as a tightbeam relay. It’s happy and well adjusted now, and I upgraded its stealth capability so nobody should be able to track it or who it talks to without physically approaching it, and nothing of EarthTech can possibly catch it if it doesn’t want to be caught. Good enough?”

Rae nodded. “They can still figure out some things by transmission time lags.”

“Then don’t ever reply quickly. Make a policy of sending data packages, not messages, perhaps once per day. Think like Ilona this time. She was an intelligence officer.”

“Right.” Rae smiled like the sun coming out, and winked. “A day or three, huh?”

“Woman, have I ever told you you’re insatiable?”

“Almost every day. Is that bad?”

“No…” Alan thought for a moment. “I guess I just wonder how much is who, and from whom it’s coming.”

Rae’s face turned serious for a moment and she drew back to arms’ length. “You sure you want an answer?”

Alan’s avatar replied, “Rae…I’m less human than you are anymore. I don’t have much ick factor left in me. I recycle your wastes, I eat biomass and rocks and I produce the food you eat from my body. Hell, I eat it too, which is damned weird if you think about it. We have sex that isn’t really sex and we had kids after the first me’s body was dead. So yeah, I think I’m all right with you talking about things like that.”

Wryly, she shrugged and answered without reservation. “Okay. I’d say it’s twenty percent Ilona and eighty percent Raphael. To an inexperienced girl, it’s all a dream come true – I’m a physical goddess and I can have all the sex I want with complete control of my biology and reproductive system – no pain, no limits on what I can do, no matter how rough or weird. It gives new meaning to ‘consenting adults.’”

“That sounds like more than twenty percent.”

“That’s because you don’t understand the Meme physical drives. They are biological creatures, even more than humans. Theoretically, human minds depend on quantum brain states for some of what we call consciousness, free will, and the inability to make perfect copies. Trillions of neurons are packed into a few kilos of gray matter. Meme are more distributed, and at the molecular level, much more mechanical. They think more slowly, and their biology drives them more heavily.”

“So you’re saying the Meme sex drive is stronger than humans?”

“Reproductive drive, yes. Much stronger. Human psychology links conquest loosely with sex and dominance. With Meme, it’s inherent, hard wired. They are driven to spread their genes, both before and after blending, so that their bloodlines win out over others. With me, the drive is there; I just choose not to reproduce.”

“But you could?”

Rae cocked her head. “I still have some Skull sperm left. Or I could extract some of the children’s DNA and produce clones functionally identical to brothers and sisters of theirs. Or –”

Alan held up a hand. “Okay. My ick factor finally kicked in. I get it. You have enough self-control not to spawn offspring everywhere you go.” He thought for a moment. “Zeke has never met a girl. Other than his sisters. When he does…”

Rae laughed. “You’re only just realizing that. Maybe that could be one of the subjects of your man time. Now, if you’re done yakking…come satisfy some of my drives, you sexy beast.”

“Yes ma’am.”

In Vincent’s case, those each showed the thin loop of a second sieutenant in the South African Air Force. He’d considered the Navy, but given his father’s service in the US Air Force, he thought it appropriate he stay blue. Soon he knew he’d trade in his national uniform for that of EarthFleet’s Aerospace branch.