Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest) (21 page)

Seconds later, hundreds of thousands of Home Fleet antimissiles, StormRaven fighters, railguns and beam weapons saturated the void with energies. The crew on the flight deck gasped in unison as the dense cloud of hypers met a veritable wall of defensive fire. Multimegaton fusion warheads tore great gaping holes in the ranks of Meme projectiles even as lasers plucked thousands out of space in microsecond bursts.

“We’re winning!” someone said from below him, and Absen shook his head slightly to himself, eyes still fixed on the screen.

No, we’re not,
he thought
. Oh, the Home Fleet will fend off those hypers, sure enough…but what will they have left to take on forty-eight Destroyer-sized projectiles, each six thousand meters long, a thousand across, and made mostly of ferrocrystal composite rather than mere asteroidal rock? If only Huen had more antimatter weapons, or had saved what he had until now. He might have taken out two or three at a time, now that they are just driving straight for Earth.

Absen realized the Destroyer-bullets’ narrowed cross-sections made them much harder to hit or damage. At speed, they could withstand impact after impact, explosion after explosion from anything less than an antimatter bomb, and still keep their drives and animal brains intact. There was simply no way to target the stern of anything moving that fast. The best EarthFleet could do was to keep hammering on their bows, hoping to damage or deflect each one enough to miss the planet. In short, they would have to chew their way through every ship to kill it. None of them had any weak spots.

The defensive action gave one last flare of fireworks before it died down to a few remaining sparkles. Several hundred thousand hypers, the ones that had both missed Fleet ships and avoided being destroyed, accelerated onward toward Earth, targeting orbital facilities. In moments they had scoured the twoscore remaining fortresses and artificial satellites.

Absen watched, tremendously saddened, as the Orion station died. He grasped the railing in front of him with hands like claws, and told himself that in the grand scheme, one old rustbucket didn’t matter.

Now the Home Fleet reversed itself, continuing their withdrawal Earthward with momentum but pointing armored prows toward the enemy again, all except the carriers. Those continued to drift backward, still providing aerospace control to their fighter wings, while their gigantic sister ships – dreadnoughts, battleships and cruisers – formed up into a wall of battle.

The largest fleet engagement I have ever witnessed,
Absen mused,
and at these speeds, it will be decided in moments.
Like wet navy fleets before, much of strategy and tactics was maneuver, trying to put the enemy in the worst position possible, and retaining the best for oneself. In this case, the Meme plan was sound, akin to what he had himself used against them in the Gliese 370 system: force them to defend what they valued, limit their options, drive them into certain specific actions, and pound them to a pulp.

Being on the other side of that equation, he realized, brought with it a sickening sensation.

Too fast for human eyes to follow,
Conquest
’s sister dreadnoughts led the way forward, this time with no million colonists in their bellies to force their captains to sacrifice others. They held the center of a bullseye, a flattened cone like a coolie hat with its point toward the enemy, and sent forth all the death and destruction they could muster.

Home Fleet direct fire weapons blazed, and Destroyer after Destroyer bubbled, burned and crumbled, then exploded as residual fuel ignited in the uncontrolled fusion of their fracturing drives. As the enemy flared with fusors, the Home Fleet picked off Meme like a gunfighter knocking down targets.

Absen discerned their tactic, one he had hoped Huen would employ: sections of the fleet coordinated their weapons fire on one ship at a time, being forced to smash each utterly before turning their combined energies on the next. Configured as projectiles, the Destroyers were not able to strike back with their usual thousands of hypers. Those had all been expended.

Forty-eight Meme became thirty-five, then thirty, twenty-five, twenty and then fourteen before the two fleets interpenetrated.

For a fraction of a second all Absen could see was a mass of ships, like two blasts of birdshot fired directly at each other, slamming together in a cataclysm, and then it was over.

Seven distinct fireballs, massive beyond belief, showed where the seven Conquest-class dreadnoughts had thrown themselves deliberately into the paths of the enemy.

Two more Destroyers spun, broken, where dozens of lesser ships had rammed them.

Five blazed onward, now less than one minute from Earth.

“Dear God,” Absen gasped, whether a prayer or a curse, he did not know. Even though he knew all this had already happened, he could not help but settle the question with his next words. “Dear God, save them…”

But it seemed nothing could stop those five deadly projectiles.

Now past interfering with the five, the remainder of the Home Fleet turned to attack the lagging Meme reserve group of eight, which now skirted the edge of the battle area and employed their own weapons conventionally. Thousands of hypers leaped from those Destroyers, fencing and then knife-fighting with the disorganized remainder of humanity’s naval ships.

Even without the dreadnoughts, to Absen the two groups’ strength looked about equal, and so he dismissed that battle from his mind for now, to turn his attention back to the five.
Plenty of time to study it all later
. Along with the rest of the crew, now all on their feet below and staring, he gazed raptly at, he was nauseatingly certain, the imminent ravaging of his homeworld.

The view pulled back to encompass the ever-shrinking distance between the speeding death ships and Earth. Nothing near the home planet remained after the hypers, except…one anomalous icon, representing a squadron of fifty Thunderchiefs, appeared suddenly as if by magic. Perhaps they had hidden, powered down and EMCON.

The icon’s ID icon read
UNKNOWN,
though they were obviously EarthFleet vessels. Absen slipped back into the control room and asked Scoggins, “What do you have on those?” as he highlighted the marker with his cursor.

“We have no data. We’re just watching what the sensors have soaked up, and we’re lucky to get that. They’re actually stealthed pretty well, but once I figured out they were there, I adjusted my systems enough to see more clearly.”

“Good job.” As he watched, the squadron came to life and launched a spread of five hundred missiles.

“That’s odd,” Absen mustered. “The weapons aren’t guiding.” Now he wished he had brought Ford back in time for the battle, and then reminded himself of the way they watched. “Freeze it.”

Once Scoggins did, to an audible groan from the crew outside, he continued, “Someone get Ford back up here, pronto.”

A long two minutes later, the chastened weapons officer hurried in, still buttoning his tunic. “Sir?”

“Have you been watching?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why aren’t those missiles guiding?”

Ford stepped over to the plate crystal window and stared at the massed displays, and then down at the control boards. “At a guess, sir, they are aimed for a spot in space where the antimatter warheads will do the most damage. The enemy will fly into them, they’re going so fast.”

“Of course,” Absen breathed. “Sit down, Ford. You’re not out of the doghouse yet.”

The man quickly took a seat and kept his mouth shut, watching expectantly.

“Roll it forward now, half speed.”

Scoggins signaled her team, and all watched as the cloud of missiles closed on the five enemy ships. Those had arranged themselves in a ring about a thousand kilometers across. “There’s no way any one antimatter warhead can take out more than a single ship,” Absen said.

“True, sir. It looks to me like the flight of missiles is staying together to try to mask which are the heavy ones.”

“How many Exploders do you think there are?”

“No idea, sir. No way to tell.”

“If I am right, and Huen reserved half his warheads, there may be as many as seven,” Absen said.

Ford shrugged, still staring at the screens. Absen let it pass.

“There!” the weapons officer said, standing and stabbing a hand at the display. On the screen, the flight of five hundred missiles divided itself up into groups of one hundred and altered course to directly intercept the modified Destroyers, burning their drives furiously. As they closed, fusors came to life and plasma fire blossomed, trying to pluck the human weapons from space, but seemed desultorily aimed, confirming the suspicion that the vessels had no Meme guiding the defenses.

As with each engagement before, this ended in less than one second as surviving missiles detonated nearby or slammed into the enemy.

Three titanic blasts wiped an equal number of Meme ships from space.

Two flew onward, now less than thirty seconds from Earth.

“What happened?” Absen asked, turning to Ford, but he already knew, and answered his own question, overriding his subordinate. “There must have been one or two antimatter bombs per Destroyer, and against these two, our luck ran out. They must have been picked off by fusors.” He cleared his throat, realizing Scoggins had slowed the view to a crawl at one-tenth speed. “Is there any chance now?”

Ford shook his head in misery, his voice a whisper. “No, sir.”

“Then roll it, Scoggins,” Absen husked, his throat a desert. “Just roll it.”

Turning slowly back to her board, the commander ran her finger up the slider that controlled the speed of display advance, until it reached one to one.

“Five…four…three…” Absen murmured.

“Two…one,” the rest joined him.

Widely separated, the two fireships crashed into Earth, exploding to sunlike brightness as they struck atmosphere. Compressed solid as steel, nitrogen and oxygen fused into the higher elements of the speeding vessels. Pinpoint light swelled and shock propagated through the filmy air of the planet. The crew of
Conquest
watched as, at fifteen thousand miles an hour, incomprehensible energies scoured humanity’s homeworld in two expanding rings, like annihilating ripples in a pond.

Except this pond held the thin sheath of life covering the verdant planet – air, water, topsoil, crust.

People.

Absen could hear screams, cries and weeping through the door to the flight deck, echoed from within the control room. He walked out onto the catwalk and shed tears for his race, watching them drop ten meters to the textured deck below. Then he sank to his knees, overwhelmed, still clutching the rail, until he had collapsed onto the metal mesh of the walking surface.

Vision graying, great gasping breaths, almost sobs, tore from his chest as he contemplated the death of billions. Worse, he knew that EarthFleet had just lost its battle. Humanity’s best efforts had not been enough.

After long moments Absen felt a hand on his shoulder, and he turned to see COB Timmons, his oldest friend, sink down to sit next to him on the catwalk. “Shit,” the chief said without heat. “That’s one hell of a setback.”

This simple steadiness, this prosaic practicality common to chiefs everywhere, brought him back, and he realized he could not afford to mourn right now.
Leadership is about rising above disasters
, he told himself.

“Yeah,” he said. “One hell of a setback. But you know what? It’s not over yet.”

“It’s not me you need to tell, Skipper.” Timmons pointed out over the flight deck, where his people staggered or lay on the deck, or sat in chairs, holding each other in grief. On one side two women scratched at each other in rage until a Marine broke it up. Another couple looked like they were about to have sex in a corner behind one of the parked weapons lifts.

Insanity and breakdown lurks. They can’t lose hope.

“Right. Thanks.” Absen pulled himself to his feet, took three deep breaths, and then began speaking loudly.

“Men and women of
Conquest
! Human, Ryss and Sekoi! Listen to me!”

In ragged clumps, the human officers and ratings turned to look, joined by the Ryss and the Sekoi clustered in their own groups, keeping well away from the apes. “This is a tragedy, a horror none of us truly ever expected to face. I feel as you do. In fact,” he choked back a brittle laugh, “I’m only standing because I have my hands clamped to this railing. But remember – this all happened
more than twenty years ago
. What’s past is past. We have to pick ourselves up and face the future, no matter how much we don’t want to believe it.”

Several more breaths fortified him as he spoke. “Now as much as I want to charge straight in and rip the guts out of the enemy with our new weapons, we still have over twenty-three light-years of realtime distance to go. By the time we get to the solar system, the enemy will have had at least forty-six years to enslave and rule the remnants of the human race. Rushing there unprepared to save a few days or weeks will not serve anyone.”

Absen ran his fingers through his thin blonde hair, and then waved his hand out over the crowd as if in benediction. “So now, as strange as it may seem, we’re going to just sit here in deep space for a few days, on minimum watch rotation. We’re going to mourn, and grieve, and get drunk and talk and comfort each other. Then we’re going to rest, and evaluate, and study our enemy. Eventually, when we get over the shock, we’re going to sort ourselves out, get back into fighting shape, and as soon as we can, we’re going to stick it to the Meme.” He paused, throat working, and then finished, “We’re going to kill every last of them.”

A cheer began from somewhere, the Marines he thought taking it up first, and soon five hundred throats roared and yelled themselves raw as words coalesced into a chant.

“
DEATH TO THE MEME!”

“
DEATH TO THE MEME!”

“
DEATH TO THE MEME!”