The Orion Plague (19 page)

And he certainly wasn’t going to risk that.
He wasn’t in it for the glory, or even the unique opportunity.
Absen genuinely believed he was the best man for the job. He’d
served overseas and under them with other nations, he spoke four
languages, and he’d done his NATO tours in Belgium back when there
was such an organization. They’d offered him a third stint there,
but he’d turned it down for a shot at sub command, and he was glad
he did.

Now he walked the strange corridors of his
earthbound command, familiarizing himself with it before the dry
runs started next week. He nodded sagely at the scurrying workmen,
the hurrying crew, and the Marines with their unloaded weapons
racing hither and thither, assaulting empty rooms and getting in
the installers’ way.

His ship.
Orion
was strange, and
familiar. Metal bulkheads and ladders – stairways to a civilian –
cabling, lights, airtight hatches and doors – the same kinds of
things in every ship or boat on which he’d ever served, were as he
expected. But right now everything was sideways, as the normal
orientation of the crew would be feet toward the cylindrical skin.
Right now on the ground, everyone walked on the walls.

There were mockups in different places, of
course, to train the crew on damage control and repair, but it
wasn’t the same. The ship, assuming it even made it to orbit, was
an untested thing, the first of its class. If he succeeded, he
would make history.

If he failed, likewise.

Now, as much as he would have liked to
immerse himself in his incipient command, he had a long trip to
make, shortened only by his insistence on being flown in the back
seat of a double-seated trainer-model stealth fighter. Its
supercruise would reduce the trip, Australia to Richmond, from
seventeen hours to seven. Scant consolation, as in payment he would
be catheterized and wedged into a cramped seat. Still, less than
two months from launch, time was of the essence.

And mostly, as a bubblehead, he wanted to
take his first and maybe his last ever flight in a supersonic jet
fighter. If everything went as planned, soon he would be taking a
much more impressive flight.

Chairman Daniel Markis’ recommendation for
the cyberware implantation had been enough, as they expected it
would be, but in the end Rick Johnstone stayed home while Jill
winged her way back to Septagon Shadow at Patuxent River, Maryland.
For months he’d thought about returning and believed he would be
all right. After all, he wanted more – more access, more equipment,
more ability – but ultimately he just couldn’t face the thought of
going back under the knife, especially not in that place.

But that was where the cyber-bionics program
was. Governments are eminently practical when they want to be, and
it made no sense to spend scarce resources to transfer the lab.
Rick had also heard rumors that some of the staff had been kept on,
under the watchful eye of minders. He’d read the history of the
weapons programs after World War Two, where droves of German
scientists, some of them genuine Nazis, had been “rehabilitated”
and put to work. He was under no illusions.

Shari hadn’t been found, by that name or any
other, but every time he thought about going to Pax River, really
thought about how it would be, he got the shakes. Like holocaust
survivors who couldn’t bear to face the ovens and the camps, even
cold and empty of malice, it just wasn’t in him to go there. Not
yet.

So he left Jill to go alone, feeling ashamed,
burying himself in the virtual world of his head, learning to use
what he had rather than hoping for what he hadn’t. It may have been
running away, or it may have been therapy. Either way, it was the
best he could do.

Jill understood. Her heart was at peace as
she dozed on the long flight to Fort AP Hill. Rick had his demons,
she had hers, but getting fitted with this equipment wasn’t one of
them.
Anything that makes me more effective at my job is a good
thing.

The Burn Rooms held no horror anymore;
painkillers and pathway blocks turned the terrifying into the
merely miserable as her nervous system was rewired to accept the
impulses and the actual presence of the cybernetic connections. The
surgeons and cyberneticists were conservative; no more wholesale
experimentation on humans, even with their consent. It was a
step-by-step process from now on, this building of cyborgs, using
the tried and true.

Even so, the results were often spectacular.
Less than three days after the procedures were finished, Jill
Repeth - she'd decided to keep her own name after all -
bench-pressed one thousand kilograms. Her bones, laminated with a
new ferrocrystal substance derived from the technology of the
recovered alien probes, creaked but seemed in no danger of
cracking. Her muscles, augmented with electromagnetically-activated
expanding-chain polymers, worked smoothly to raise and lower the
ton of steel on the bar.

And she knew that if she wanted to, she could
have thrown the thing across the room, limited more by leverage
than power. Theoretical limits put her strength at more than twice
that, but testing those boundaries might result in a fiasco, such
as complete detachment of muscle from bone and concomitant healing
time.

More important was the endless physical
therapy that taught her to use less, not more, of that power; how
to control it, so that she could stroke a baby’s cheek as well as
snap a tree in half. She was glad Rick's Septagon cyberware had no
physical combat components; she knew he would hate himself if he
made a mistake and hurt someone.

Training sessions for the less kinetic but
still useful systems – cameras in her eyes and comms in her inner
ears and jaw, an oxygen extender next to her lungs, an artificial
heart to augment or replace her natural one, and several other
interesting modifications – were long, and intense. Still, she
relished it all, and once she had passed all the tests, she was not
surprised to be sent to Richmond on the regular turboprop
shuttle.

Ironically, almost two hundred years after
the city had made its bid to be the capital of a new nation, it was
rapidly becoming something like that now. With New England
devastated, it was a center of East Coast rebuilding. As the great
shipyards of the Norfolk area were only just starting to be
cleared, the always-politically-savvy US Navy had established an
administrative headquarters here, close to another center of
power.

A civilian, not a Marine or even a sailor,
led her to the briefing room inside that HQ, and the woman rebuffed
her gentle attempts at finding out why she was here. The room
contained eight other cyborgs; the equipment might not show but
they were unmistakable to her by the way they moved. Most of them
wore military uniforms, as she did, but she was the only woman.
Nothing new with that.

The two men who walked in and shut the door
were definitely not cyborgs, and as one wore eagles on his lapels,
the first uniform to notice called the room to attention.

The civilian was an Eden that Jill
recognized: Special Envoy Travis Tyler, a retired full General who
now acted as one of President McKenna’s personal troubleshooters, a
position of vast power within the zone of martial law. He looked
quite a bit like his dead son, whom he had personally executed for
treason and worse. She shuddered when she thought of what that must
have cost him.

The other was an older man, meaning by
definition a normal, non-Eden. Wearing the working khakis of a Navy
Captain was her first tipoff. She used her telescopic implant to
read his nametag: Absen.
I know that name from
somewhere…

Her musings shut down as Tyler said, “At
ease, take your seats.” Once they had, he went on, “I’m Travis
Tyler. If you don’t know me, ask someone later, but I’m not here
for me. This,” he gestured at the other man, “is Captain Henrich
Absen, and the reason you are all here. He’s your new principal,
and you are now his personal security detachment.”

The room fell silent, with no muttering or
whispering to test discipline. Tyler nodded. “Some of you know,
some have figured it out: Captain Absen is to be
Orion
’s
skipper. With a crew from over a hundred nations, the captain’s
safety will be paramount. I know some of you were hoping for
something a bit different – a bit more offensive in nature. Dreams
of heroics, capturing or killing aliens, perhaps. And that might
happen. But your only priority right now is to train and integrate
yourselves, to become the most capable personal security detachment
ever created. And in keeping with your clandestine nature, you will
all be known as, and trained as, ship’s Stewards.” Tyler’s eyes
swept his audience. “Captain?” He nodded to Absen, nodded also to
the rest, then took his leave.

Absen cleared his throat as he stepped
forward to stand in the aisle between the seats of the first row.
“Good afternoon, lady and gentlemen. I’m your new principal, and
I’m going to spend a lot of time with you because of that, but I’m
not your team leader. This man is.” Absen indicated a fit-looking
black man in a suit. “His name is Dwayne Tobias, and he comes to us
from the Presidential detachment of the Secret Service. He’s in
charge because of his experience in this kind of work.”

Absen pursed his lips. “Now I know all of you
are probably supercharged alphas, ready to take charge of every
damned thing around you. That’s why I am making this perfectly
clear. Every one of you is an Eden. Every one of you is a Septagon
cyborg. Every one of you is at the top of your profession. But this
man has more than thirty years of experience in personal security,
and as of now every one of you serves at his whim. If he doesn’t
think your attitude is correct for this work, you’ll be sent
packing for some
Earthbound
assignment. No appeal. No
Orion
. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” they answered in near-unison.

“All right, then. I’ll turn you over to him,
and then I’ll see you all on the plane in…” he checked his watch,
“…an hour and forty-five minutes.” Then he walked out.

“Plane?” said one of the men in front of
Jill.

“Plane,” responded Tobias. “We’re all going
to Australia, to train on the
Orion
. Now I got a short
briefing for you, and then you all go get your gear and hustle back
to the bus at the front of this building.”

To Larry Nightingale
Orion
looked
rather like an oversized Iowa corn silo sitting atop an inverted
bowl of equal diameter. It was far from the elegant birdlike
designs of science fiction warships. In fact, it most resembled an
old-fashioned rocket or missile itself, merely upscaled a dozen
times in every dimension. He sat and stared at the thing from the
roof of his trailer parked a mile away, and still it looked big,
like a larger and uglier cousin of that London Gherkin. Almost
every night, or perhaps he should say morning since he seldom
stopped work before midnight, he wound down by drinking a beer
while watching it poised in the actinic glare of the sunlamps that
illuminated the technicians’ single-minded hive-like activity.

More than four hundred meters tall and a
hundred wide, it could have been a round art-deco skyscraper having
more in common with a classic jukebox than a modern spacecraft.
Those dimensions made it seem squat, menacing, and brutish, despite
its enormous size.

Structure and superstructure completed, now
the
Orion
swarmed with technicians installing the myriad
systems that would put flesh on her bones. They laid massive cables
of mingled copper, gold, silver and platinum alloys throughout, the
wealth of nations. These would carry the incredible flows of
electricity that would power the internal systems, external
mechanisms, and most of all, the stupendous and numerous
weapons.

Generating these rivers of power were the
Russian-supplied fusion-fission hybrid molten salts reactors. These
used fission to build heat and pressure sufficient to initiate
controlled fusion, yielding enormous power for their size. They
were also highly experimental, temperamental, and took a team of
Russian experts countless man-hours to keep them running.

Along with these vital installations came all
the lesser but still necessary fittings – electrical motors, fans
and air ducting, water and sewer lines, bunks and lockers, tables
and chairs, computers and screens, sensors, fire controls, and of
course, weapons.

The offensive missiles went in first. The
weapons engineers first installed a gross of enormous converted
Trident SLBMs akin to the ones that had murdered two hundred
million people so recently, each in its own canister below the
armored outer skin.

Next came an even thousand Russian Grackle
hypervelocity anti-ship missiles, and another thousand US-made SM5
multipurpose guided missiles. Each was fitted with a miniaturized
nuclear warhead. These weapons they mounted in box-launchers of one
hundred per rack, bolted in a ring to the waist of the ship. The
engineers took to calling this “Orion’s Belt.”

The launcher arrays had no armor and just
enough shielding to protect their electronics from cosmic
radiation. These were expendable, made to be fired quickly in
massive missile salvos. Once a rocket flew free, each emptied box
would be pumped full of expanding foam that rapidly solidified,
forming a layer of ablative armor that also guarded against chain
reactions in case of damage.

After this came one hundred twenty
British-made Arrowfish rotary counter-missile launchers, able to
spit out hundreds of small seeking weapons designed to destroy
incoming projectiles.

Then came the kinetic weapons. Twelve
Dahlgren-made Behemoth electromagnetic railguns were set in
internal turrets, their traversing mechanisms directing not the
barrel, but rather the entire gun, to minimize the size of the
external firing port. Operating in vacuum, these would spit
one-kilo steel spheres by the thousands, accelerating them to ten
thousand meters per second, sufficient force and velocity to
pulverize asteroids.