The Orion Plague (20 page)

The other gun system mounted was a Swedish
Bofors-made close-in-weapons system, properly termed CIWS but
commonly called an R2-D2, after the famous Star Wars droid. Each
weighed twenty tons, but even so managed to resemble the famous
robot, with its squat round-topped cylindrical shape. Its
electrically-powered Gatling spat over eighteen thousand rounds per
minute, guided by an automated integrated laser and radar system
that not only aimed the gun but transmitted data to its bullets in
flight.

Of course, there was no air to fly through,
so no guidance was possible, but the system told each bullet
precisely when to fragment into one hundred forty-four individual
pieces, turning those eighteen thousand rounds per minute into over
two and a
half million
individual projectiles
per
gun
. This meant a mindboggling two hundred and fifty
million
individual projectiles could be vomited into
intervening space in one minute. It was these R2D2s that were
tasked with the final line of defense of the
Orion
, save
only the thickness of twelve meters of armor.

That armor was a wonder in itself, composed
of the most advanced materials developed by humans, plus a layer of
nano-constructed ferrocrystal duplicated from the recovered Meme
probe, thus turning their own technology against them. This
combination yielded the equivalent of one hundred meters’ thickness
of cold-rolled steel, sufficient to ward off even weapons of
another
Orion
, save only the nuclear blasts.

Last and finally came the beam weapons,
Larry’s babies: fourteen lasers to be mounted at the top rim of the
cylinder where it started to curve toward its rounded nose. This
allowed each maximum possible traverse, and by accounting for the
ship’s spin, all of them could be brought to bear simultaneously on
any conceivable target by the simple expedient of pointing the
ship’s nose directly at it.

Larry popped a second beer tonight. Hangover
was a thing of the past, except for diligent alcoholics, those
benighted souls that dedicated themselves to Bacchus as if
determined to prove the Eden Plague helpless against their
self-destructive tendencies. He wasn’t one of those, and two beers,
even the double-strong brews here, would have little effect on a
man of his superb health and body weight. He raised the big
canister in a toast to the men and women pouring their sweat, their
souls, and their blood into its construction. At least twenty
people had already died and hundreds had been severely injured as
they cut every conceivable safety corner, never-ending payment for
this great work of the hands of mankind.

He stared at his small contribution, the
regenerating stub of his right little finger that wiggled pinkly at
him like an unfamiliar larva.
No matter,
he thought.
What’s important is that I get the beam weapons working and that
I am going along.

The fight with Shawna had been fierce as such
things went, alternating shouting and tears, the children crying in
their rooms. It hurt his heart to remember it even now.

“Why do you have to go!” she’d screamed at
him. “You’re not military! You’re an engineer, you have children,
you’re needed here…” Then she’d collapsed in his arms weeping, an
unfamiliar action for such a strong woman.

Before he left he put down his A. E. Houseman
poems and wrote her a note in his own hand, drafting it over and
over until it was just right:

I have to do it, love. This is what men do.
It’s programmed into our genes, to stand with spear upheld against
the fall of night and all its terrors. We wouldn’t be men if we
failed to answer that call.

Nothing’s better for a man than to put his
gifts to use in service to a greater cause, and I’m the right man
for this job. It’s because I love you and the kids that I am going.
Tell them I love them very much, and try to understand.

I’ll see you when we’ve kicked their
asses.

All my love,

Larry

He heard someone else come up onto the roof,
and he swung around to see a female figure as he folded the note
into his pocket. “Jill? Jill Repeth?”

She sat down next to him, hugging him with
one arm. “Hey, Larry. I heard you came up here sometimes.
Contemplating our destiny?” She waved her arm at the harsh lights
that lit
Orion
like a machine-age monument.

“No doubt. Rick here too?”

“He’s here. He’ll be a Comms officer. We
called in favors with Markis.”

“I’d heard. Seems funny, him and me going.
Not being military and all.”

“Yeah. Usually I get all the fun.”

He laughed. “Well, my fun meter’s been pegged
ever since I got here.” He finished off his beer with a slurping
sound. “You know I see Spooky now and again. He’s a two-star now.
Runs the Space Marine program, when he isn’t doing some new voodoo
with the aborigines.”

“I’d like to see that in action. Catch me up
on everything, will you?”

Larry rolled to his feet. “Let me grab a
couple more beers and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Spooky Nguyen observed the disciplined ranks
of his Space Marines with an immense feeling of satisfaction. In
formation they faced the towering ship as it loomed over them.
Awe-inspiring, even for me,
thought Nguyen.
More so for
them, their first real encounter with the warship they will fight
from.

On his right, their left, stood the
hundred-odd men and women of the training cadre. Their role as
trainers was transformed today into an advisory one. No longer
instantly and blindly obeyed, now they would provide expert
evaluation as the so-called White Team for the continuing
exercises. And as soon as this group was done, they would start on
another. It took a special kind of person to train those who would
go off to fight, knowing you had to stay.

In the center, four hundred and fifty strong,
were the Line Marines, the result of selection and training and the
best possible version of nanites compatible with Eden physiology.
Although the ship’s crew was drawn from many nations – an
inevitable concession to obtain the other powers’ help – the
Marines were all Australian citizens he had personally selected.
Not all were born on that continent – several mountain-bred Nguyens
stood among them, for example – but all had sworn allegiance to the
nation, and all were Edens.

He laughed to himself, though his face
revealed nothing. In the days of sailing ships and iron discipline,
Marines were a ship’s Captain’s insurance against mutiny. The
modern age had largely forgotten this fact, but Nguyen hadn’t.

Thus, on his left stood the smaller formation
of his enforcers, innocently termed Guard Marines. Free of the Eden
Plague’s confining moral influence, these were uninfected full
nanocommandos, infused with the most powerful version of combat
nano available. As Mao had said, all power comes from the barrel of
a gun, and his enforcer Guards could impose their will – his will –
at any time, with calculated violence.

He did not think they would be needed in that
role, but he did not obtain and maintain his position by being
careless. And their superior combat abilities might mean the
difference between success and failure, even while their superb
ruthlessness allowed them to do things Edens couldn’t.

The shockingly high percentage of full-nano
carriers that went mad was something of a problem – perhaps one in
nine - but the deadman switches he had ordered installed had
functioned adequately. As soon as a commando exceeded certain
physical parameters, precursors to madness, a tiny bead of
explosive nestled next to his heart shredded that vital muscle. “An
unfortunate side effect of the nano, quite unpredictable,” the
medics declared when it was used.

It was even true, in a way.

Each body was buried with full honors of
course, after all evidence was removed. The Guard Marines accepted
this attrition in stalwart fashion, a fair trade for their supreme
status.

Nguyen brought his mind back to the task and
raised his voice to carry his speech to the troops. “Ladies and
gentlemen of the Free Australian Space Marine Corps, you are the
elite of the elite. You have the best equipment, inside your bodies
and out, that the human race can provide. In less than two months
you will be boarding this ship and you will be launched into space.
Along with your naval counterparts, your mission will be nothing
less than to save Earth from potential destruction by implacable,
ruthless aliens.”

“Until then, you will train on site. You will
become thoroughly familiar with this vessel and every possible
method of attack and defense. You will train with vehicles, weapons
and every tactic the think-tanks have invented. You will become,
like Marines of seafaring nations before you, jacks of all trades,
able to fill in for the crew to run the ship, able to defend the
ship, and able to assault the enemy ship or ships.”

“I salute you and encourage you to engage
with your officers and the White Team as you train. Blind obedience
is not needed here; there is much that is new, and every man or
woman needs to have input until orders are issued. Train well, so
that you may fight well.” With that he turned the formation over to
Colonel MacAdam, who he knew would keep them well in hand.

The hardest thing about the training over the
next few weeks – besides forever stumbling over the construction
teams and vice versa – was their inability to spin the ship.
Designed for its floor and bulkheads to be largely interchangeable,
it was impossible to get an accurate feel for operating within the
ship until they got into space. Once there the
Orion
would
turn constantly on its long axis, providing several critical
benefits.

The first and most obvious was gravity.
Humans were used to having up and down, with their water pouring
from carafe to cup and falling from shower-head to drain. Without
gravity a thousand systems would have needed reworking, whereas
with it they were able to use many commercial off-the-shelf items.
Toilets were the most obvious example: a simple water-powered
machine with gravity, an engineering nightmare without. People also
lost strength and bone density without gravity, and they had no
idea how long they would have to live on
Orion
. It was
certain that they would never be landing the ship itself on
anything larger than an asteroid.

Then there was weapons fire. Spinning the
ship was a cheap, relatively surefire way to ensure most if not all
weapons could be brought to bear on any target in turn, a kind of
rolling broadside. Computers stabilized everything, making the
difficulty of aiming into a relatively simple process.

The third benefit was distribution of
incoming fire across the available armor. If a concentrated barrage
of enemy weaponry were to strike one place on the ship, it might
break through. Constant rolling spin would help ensure separate
strikes hit different parts of the armor, increasing the chance of
avoiding damage.

That was the theory, anyway. No one really
knew what it would be like in practice.

But Nguyen’s – MacAdam’s – Marines tried as
many crazy, unorthodox, and difficult things they could on the
ground – attacks and defenses of parts of the ship, from inside,
from outside, from underneath and above, with their assault suits
and without, in every conceivable condition.

Nine more died, from skyscraper falls and
weapons errors, and from madness. The full combat nano and the Eden
Plague apparently were still the most violent of dogs and cats,
brought into close proximity only at peril. This was demonstrated
most graphically when they found a Guard Marine and a Line Marine
dead, locked in an intimate embrace. The Guard’s grimace of madness
evidenced the reason for his death, hers less so. Eventually the
investigation showed that in his convulsions he had wrenched the
Line Marine’s neck and spinal column apart. They found her short
blonde hair glued to the floor by her own blood.

***

In the end, Major General Nguyen did not hold
Ekara to his promise to join the crew of the
Orion
; once the
great ship lifted, it would never come back to land, and he knew
the R&D minister would be needed to continue the work of the
shipbuilding program. There was some talk of having a shuttle
aboard to return some personnel to the Earth after launch but in
the end this extra complication was discarded.

Instead, Nguyen settled for ensuring Ekara
would be present in the bunker a mile from launch. This placed him
within the crash zone if the
Orion’s
drive failed early in
its liftoff. Though the risk was small, at least Ekara would face
the chance that millions of tons of falling battleship would crush
him for any negligence.

Of course, if the
Orion
failed, the
Earth was likely doomed as well. Even so, Nguyen found that
immediate consequences usually had more influence on the thought
processes than delayed ones.

Now that this issue had been settled Nguyen
tuned his thoughts to the makeup of the ship’s complement and
ancillaries.

Aside from the Marines, more than three
thousand men and women would crew the ship, mirroring an oceangoing
vessel. They included pilots, gunners, engineers and machinists,
specialists in computers and power generation and nuclear weapons
and intelligence and communications – the list seemed endless.

Every job had a roster in depth, a luxury
almost unheard-of in naval ships. Many oceangoing vessels of the
past had failed for lack of a critical skill-set, which was also
why cross-training was always a high priority. Nguyen remembered
tell of one US frigate that sat in port for two weeks unable to
deploy – by the book – for lack of its two ASROC gunners’ mates.
They finally obtained one from another obliging ship, only to find
out that the man, though qualified, was a dedicated Satanist with a
penchant for painting pentagrams and erotic art on the deck around
his workstation.
Guess what
, he mused.
They went to sea
anyway
.