Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest) (2 page)

“I shall use the new TacDrive capability to jump in front of the Destroyer,” Desolator replied in his usual rich, warm tones. “I will deploy one Exploder, enable its targeting, and then jump away. This operation will take less than four seconds.” As with many other things, the crew and the AI now used Human standard measurements of time and distance, for simplicity and commonality.

Chirom nodded approvingly. “And one Exploder will be sufficient?”

“More than sufficient. In times past I have destroyed as many as three Destroyers with one Exploder.”

The short-range antimatter missiles called Exploders are fearsome weapons,
Chirom thought.
Our ancestors harnessed the most powerful explosive force conceivable: the total conversion of matter and antimatter into energy. It awes me still.

“Is there anything the crew need do?” Chirom asked.

“Serve your battle stations according to plan, Captain Chirom, as I serve you.”

Even after years, I’m still not used to being called Captain,
Chirom thought. He’d been elevated to what was essentially an honorary position early on, an elder past his physical prime and useless for the repopulation of the Ryss race. There were not enough females to go around even for the young, and with the newly reinstituted monandry, it seemed he would never be glorified, never sire kits…and he wasn’t going to wait fifteen more years for one of the new litters to come of age, and him old and decrepit, barely able to rise.

There were some advantages to the ways during the war, without this one-to-one mating scheme, the oldest of old ways. But I have resigned myself to bachelorhood, and perhaps someday, an honorable death. My achievements are all behind me now.

“You serve all three races of EarthFleet,” Chirom replied, repeating an old discussion that soothed him somehow. “I thank you, old friend, for your kindness, and all your faithful service.”

“You are most welcome.”

The helm officer, a human male, spoke. “Captain, TacDrive capacitors at ninety-nine percent.”

Chirom nodded in acknowledgement. “Desolator, you are cleared to proceed according to plan.”

The TacDrive system was a modified version of the old photonic interstellar drive, which created an inertial suppression field throughout the ship, reducing Desolator’s effective mass by factors of millions while simultaneously propelling it directly forward in a perfectly straight line at nearly the speed of light. In effect, they disappeared from their original position and flew as fast as the known laws of physics would let them, protected by the field and the same gravitic compensators that allowed the crew to walk around as if they were on a planet.

The major innovation to the TacDrive over the interstellar drive system was the addition of seventy-two auxiliary fusion reactors, as well as a sixfold increase in energy storage capacitors. Now, instead of waiting hours to power up one interstellar jump,
Desolator
required mere tens of minutes to fill a capacitor bank, and could jump up to three separate times before recharging.

The Apes, that is, the Humans, came up with this idea,
Chirom mused yet again. Instead of fighting an enemy head on, tooth and claw, their leader Absen had argued, giving
Desolator
this prodigious mobility would allow him to fight, run, fight and run again. It smelled faintly of dishonor to the Ryss, but they were not in charge; the Apes were, and had convinced the Hippos and Desolator himself.

Thus the enormous superdreadnought, more than ten times the size of even
Conquest
and far more technologically advanced, had repaired, refurbished and reengineered himself using, Chirom grudgingly admitted, the best ideas of three races. Simulations had shown that now, at full strength,
Desolator
was quite possibly an entire order of magnitude more capable than before. He was a fleet-killer and a world-shatterer now, with antimatter fuel and explosives gleaned and distilled from star-stuff, armor composed of layers of neutronium and collapsium held in a ferrocrystal matrix, and energy weapons able to reach across planetary orbits.

Desolator
alone might now be more powerful than the entire Ryss fleet at the final battle for their homeworld.

“One hundred percent,” the helm officer called, and at that moment came the vertigo and strange vibratory silence that accompanied the TacDrive.

“Hologram display, please,” Chirom said, and the central area filled with an exquisite rendering of the system.
Desolator
’s glowing symbol proceeded at perceptible speed down a line toward its rendezvous with battle, even as the enemy Destroyer moved along its own.

“Desolator, the enemy symbol is a prediction, correct?” Chirom asked into the air. He’d never been in the control center during a battle, though as Records Historian he had viewed all of the videos of
Desolator
’s engagements.

“Correct, Captain. Under TacDrive our ability to collect data from the rest of the universe is limited.” Desolator meant, going at just under the speed of light, outside light was redshifted to darkness or blueshifted to hard radiation. Were it possible to view space while traveling, to their front would be nothing but blazing
unlight
as they slammed into every electromagnetic wave they traveled through, and behind them would be darkness as they nearly outran the rest. In a perpendicular ring around them, they would see a narrow band of visible light apparently split into a rainbow – a starbow, some called it – by their trajectory.

Essentially they were blind, and had to rely on Desolator’s previous analysis of their projected course, a course clear of any debris large enough to damage them. While their armor was proof against almost anything known, a big enough impact at such high speed could be devastating. This is why the stardrive, now TacDrive, had only until now been used in the great empty spaces among the stars.

It had been tested recently, of course, but this was its first use in actual battle. Chirom could not help the way his blood pounded and his heart sang as the symbols in the hologram display sped toward each other. Forty minutes of outside time compressed to under a minute, and he realized that, in this form of battle, only the AI could truly fight the ship.

Before, captain and crew had been essential.
Now
, he thought,
we are merely…helpful. I dearly hope we have not unleashed a monster.

“Pulse ending in three…two…one,” said the Ape at the helm, and suddenly the outside view flashed onto the large wall screens, and the holographic display flickered as it updated its data. The views showed nothing but a spray of stars against a black background.

Desolator spoke. “Target confirmed. No change. Deploying Exploder missile.” A small fusion drive leaped away from Desolator, visible on the screen. “Engaging TacDrive.”

And then all was again silence, relieved only by the
hum
and
thrum
of the drive. Within its field, to the crew little seemed altered, except for the vertigo that all races seemed to experience to some degree. Voices carried through air, liquids poured and pooled, and gravity seemed the same. Yet Chirom could not get out of his mind the scene he had viewed as the damaged and insane Desolator AI of more than twenty years ago had engaged that same drive, but deliberately neglected to turn on the gravitic compensators within the control room. Thousands of effective gravities had left the tough machines untouched, but Senior Captain Juriss and the rest of his officers had been rendered into a biological paste in a microsecond, spread over the walls like food sauce.

On the holograph,
Desolator
’s symbol moved out of the way of the Destroyer just a pawspan –
a few inches
, Chirom reminded himself – and then the helm officer said, “TacDrive shutting down in three…two…one…”

Again they regained normality as the field cut off, and the views on the screens swung rapidly as
Desolator
turned himself around to point back along his own path. Telescopically the optical feed leaped forward until it focused briefly on the Exploder, now drifting. It zoomed backward again, expanding in view until a caret showed the
Destroyer
entering the picture, only seconds from the waiting weapon.

“Can’t it see the Exploder?” Chirom asked.

“Effectively, no, sir,” answered the stolid Hippo at the observation control station. “Not at point seven lightspeed. Even if they see it, they cannot react in time.” It must have been he who had gotten the views on the screens up so fast. He seemed a most competent officer. Chirom reminded himself to learn the names of the aliens under his command, but they were so hard to pronounce.

The weapons station officer called, “Detonation in three…two…one…”

The screens turned white, then black, then gray as the optical processors compensated for the blast. The view they showed slowed to a crawl, an ultra-slow-motion shot of a fireball without scale. The observation officer must have realized this dilemma as well, as a polar grid appeared around the expanding detonation.

At the moment it reached eight thousand meters in diameter, a smaller circle, highlighted by a computer caret marker, flew into view, very fast even in motion slowed thousands of times. About three thousand meters across, the Destroyer entered the expanding sphere of antimatter hell and, like one fruit striking another, both of them disintegrated into a fan of material composed of nothing but stripped ions and plasma.

In a fraction of a second, a Meme warship powerful enough to denude planets of life simply vaporized, converted into atomic particles.

The three Ryss in the control chamber roared in triumph, and Chirom found a rumbling cheer coming from his own throat. The Apes gibbered and struck hands together, while the Hippos stomped their feet and snorted.

“Well done, everyone,” Chirom said as the view continued to show the roiling ball of hot gas slowly dispersing. “Realtime view, please, Lieutenant,” he said to the Hippo at the observation station. With the touch of a control, the view pulled back and changed to show nothing but wisps of vapor rapidly cooling in the vacuum.

For a few more years, anyway. As safe as they could be in a hostile universe.

The emotion also resulted from the realization that he was now freed of a burden and a fear he had borne for decades. That weight had only grown while he was in charge of EarthFleet and the defense of Earth’s solar system for so many years. When Task Force
Conquest
had launched, he had gladly handed over the reins to Admiral Huen, happy to be a fighting fleet commander again instead of a grand strategist and a symbol.

Now this real test, this perfect success, meant he could begin the project he had longed for from the moment he had landed the colonists on Afrana. He’d thought it would take decades of intense work, another economic buildup in the Gliese 370 solar system until it could produce the hundreds or thousands of ships needed to defend itself against the Meme. It would have grown into a twin to Earth’s vast architecture of Pseudo-Von-Neumann factories, and a launching place for new task forces to conquer again.

Absen had committed himself to the long war against the Meme. He knew – he’d thought he knew – that it would require plans and operations executed over decades, campaigns taking centuries, a forever war to defend humanity and free Earth from the threat of the enemy empire. The only way to do that would be to crush his opponents while spreading human life across the stars, making allies like the Hippos and the Ryss along the way.

But he was happy to give up that daunting prospect for a new way of replicating warships like
Desolator
.

That’s what this new success really meant. It meant the responsibility wasn’t all on him anymore. It meant, really, that he could go back to being what he always wanted to be. A bubblehead. A submarine commander. He’d worked it out over the last year, once he knew what RyssTech systems could be fitted to
Conquest.

She would be his U-boat, and with her, Absen would make the Empire bleed.

“Let’s see some of the operation,” Absen said to Captain Mirza from his flag station.

Mirza did not bother passing the order; Commander Scoggins had instantly filled the holotank with an ultra-realistic image of
Desolator
and the asteroid his minions now consumed.

The rock had originally been half the size of the Ryss ship, but now was just a pebble less than a tenth of that. Zooming in, the remnant expanded to show a view of seething ants swarming across its surface. A little closer and the ants resolved themselves into individual machines ranging from the size of rats up to elephants.

“Look at that,” Mirza said in awe. “They’ve mined more than ninety percent of that thing, and it wasn’t the first. Where did it all go?”

Commander Johnstone at CyberComm cleared his throat, a habit before speaking to his superiors. “Some went to manufacture collapsium and neutronium for the armor, which is far more compact, of course. Billions of tons of repairs to the ship itself, and hundreds of internal factories to make more machines to make more gear to make more machines to mine more asteroids…
Desolator
is a true Von Neumann. He’s able to self-replicate.”

“I know that,” Mirza replied mildly, “but knowing it and seeing it are two different things.”