The Orion Plague (27 page)

She tapped a thruster and turned the craft
into a trajectory that would keep the comet itself between the
shuttle and the Meme spaceship, then ramped up the fusion drive
until she was well away from the mile-wide planetoid. Then she cut
the thrust, eliminating the telltale hot flare of her engines. Now
she was just one more drifting chunk of rock as far as sensors were
concerned, and a small one at that. The shape of the shuttle was
naturally stealthy to radar, curved and low-reflective.

She reached over to draw Zeke gently out of
his cradle-cocoon. He cooed and smiled, waving his arms in the zero
gravity. Letting him go, she watched as he flapped and wiggled,
instinctively trying to swim around the room. He got as far as
arm’s length before she snagged a toe and reeled him in, to feed
him at her breast.

Knowledge flowed into him with the milk.
Raphaela had simplified her explanation of the physical processes
for Skull. In reality he did not have all of Raphael’s knowledge
firehosed into his little brain; she was feeding it to him in his
milk, drink by drink. The millions of RNA-like carrier molecules
made their way through his digestion and into his bloodstream,
eventually to deliver their memories directly into his developing
mental structure. It was a very efficient system, much better than
that of ordinary humans.

For Raphaela had, of course, emphasized her
humanity and minimized her differences, in hopes that Skull would
overcome his stubborn resistance and love her as a woman. And for a
few brief days, perhaps he had.

She rubbed her belly, inhumanly certain that
more of Skull’s children grew inside her even now.

“How close is our nearest approach to the
asteroid, and when?” Absen asked.

“We are more than a week away, and assuming
no change, we will pass it at approximately thirty thousand
kilometers, sir.” Helm replied. Okuda seemed highly competent, and
also seemed to understand his captain’s mood. He put on no airs.
He’d probably already heard about deLille.

“And how long until they match up with the
rock?”

“About fifteen more minutes, sir.”

“All right. Comms, sound general quarters.
Secure for high-G maneuvering. Reduce spin to fifteen percent using
gyros only. Maintain silent running. Make all ready for nuclear
drive. Maneuver only on my order.” Absen waited as his instructions
were relayed in terse tones and the thrumming of precessing gyros
set their teeth on edge.

“Mister Okuda, give me your expert opinion on
what they might do.”

The former astronaut nodded, closing his eyes
to commune with his computers through implanted cybernetic links.
“They are reducing deceleration smoothly. Approach curve shows they
will come to rest relative to the asteroid in approximately twelve
minutes.”

“Does it appear they will pass behind the
rock?”

Okuda blinked. “Behind? Relatively speaking,
sir…I do not know. They are too far away to tell.”

“I want to know the instant you have a
prediction. Is the spin off the ship?”

“Fifteen percent, sir.”

“With gyros only, compute and orient for a
course that will intercept the asteroid.” He rubbed at his cheek.
“Mr. Okuda, as a sub driver I could keep maneuvers in my head, but
now I’m out of my depth.” He waited a beat, and a couple of the
bridge crew got the droll joke. “I’m going to rely on you to
interpret my orders and make this ship do what it needs to. Do we
understand one another?”

“Perfectly, Captain,” the African said with a
thin, white smile.

“So if that frigate goes behind the rock,
completely behind it, mind you, I want all ahead standard – what’s
that, eight Gs? – in hopes they won’t see our drive flares.
Otherwise we just keep drifting.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The gyros vibrated the ship
again, dragging the
Orion’s
nose to the correct orientation
using nothing but stored kinetic energy, the same principle that
allowed a child’s toy gyroscope to seemingly defy gravity.

The alien frigate’s drive abruptly flared
out, and Sensors pulled the display back to show it and the
asteroid designated minor planet 2005UP460. Colored circles sprang
up around the two now-tiny dots as they slowly grew closer. Every
few minutes the Sensors officer adjusted the screen, bringing
magnification back up, until eventually the shapes of both objects
could be seen again.

The asteroid seemed enormous compared to the
enemy, fifty times as long and thousands of times as massive.
“Opinions?” asked Absen.

“Pulling in for fuel?” responded Weapons.

“They’d probably use a comet for that,” Rick
Johnstone demurred. “They might be getting ready to push it at
Earth.”

Absen asked, “Helm, if that 300 gravities was
their max power, how long would it take them to launch it to hit
Earth?”

“Within what time frame, sir?”

Absen raised his eyebrows in puzzlement.

“If they have a year, they will only need a
nudge. If they want it to strike within, say, a week…perhaps a full
day of that acceleration would do it. Do you need a more precise
answer?”

“No, that’s fine. How quickly can we get
there?”

“It depends on how many drive bombs you want
to expend, sir.”

“Say…one hundred. Leaving us…”

“Two thousand one hundred and nine. About
five days if that is all used for acceleration. About seventeen
days if we use part each direction and intend to come to relative
rest at the asteroid.”

“Five days!” Absen cursed. “Mr. Okuda, I am
putting us in your hands. We need to intercept the enemy. To do
that we need to lunge in his direction when he’s behind that rock
and can’t see us, then coast to get silently within range. We also
have to be close enough for our Tridents to chase down and nuke the
rock, deflect it from hitting the Earth or break it up. If he sees
us, he can run away – hell, he can run rings around us and go find
another asteroid halfway across the solar system.”

“I understand, sir. Please allow me to
concentrate.” The Master Helmsman put his head back against the
padded rest and closed his eyes.

Absen paced the bridge for long minutes, then
realized he would just cause needless delay if Helm had to fire the
drive, so he sat back down. Breathing deeply, he tried to relax,
musing on how many subtle and gross differences there were between
a sub and this spaceship, none of them favorable as far as he could
see.

“Captain, my computers are still working the
problem but I predict that the enemy will pass behind the rock
within two minutes, assuming no adjustment on his part. However,
none of this may matter.”

“And why?” Absen asked patiently.

“Because, sir,” Okuda explained carefully,
“we are approximately eight light-minutes away from the target.
What we see on the screen is already eight minutes in the past. You
must decide, sir, if we should risk initiating the drive now,
hoping the frigate stays behind the rock. If it doesn’t, but passes
to the other side, they will see us.”

Absen bit his bent thumb knuckle in thought.
He remembered another time when he played it safe, avoiding taking
the
Tucson
under the ice for fear of scraping his boat. Two
hundred million people might have died because of that caution.

“Light it up, Helm. We take the risk. Use
your best judgment as to method.”

“Aye aye, sir.” He lightly brushed a
touchpad. The bridge crew settled into their couch-seats and
tightened their restraints.

A computer voice filled the ship with rich
feminine tones. “Now hear this, now hear this. Acceleration to –
eight – gravities in – five – seconds. Five – four – three – two –
one.”

“Thank you, mother,” Absen mumbled as a
madman with a rubber jackhammer tried to shake his ship apart.

Mere minutes of nuclear shuddering seemed
like hours to the crew, great soft rubber mallets of pressure
pounding over and over again. It ended abruptly, as it must, with
no decrease: one moment a bomb; the next, silence broken only by
the ringing in their ears.

“Report.”

“Intercept in approximately two days, sir.
One hundred forty-six bombs expended. The enemy remains hidden
behind the asteroid.”

“Thank God.” Absen dug himself out of the
gel-filled cushions.
Two days. Right
. “Secure from general
quarters. Bring the spin up to sixty percent. Return to normal
watch rotation. Okuda, schedule yourself so you are Helm when we
approach combat. If we engage early, get up here ASAP. You are now
my go-to guy.”

“Thank you, sir.” Okuda glowed quietly with
this acknowledgement.

“In fact, I want all of you back when we go
in. Make sure you get your shifts adjusted. Fine job,
everyone.”

Captain Absen saw Commander Huen come down
the ladder into the CCC, to stand by the command chair. He checked
his watch, saw it was time for relief, and turned the ship over to
the Chinese officer. As he left with Tobias following faithfully,
he heard the bridge crew reporting their status in turn, and went
to his cabin for some rest, confident the ship was in good
hands.

For now.

The radiation scanner changed color,
signaling anomaly. Biologist ignored the thing; it was Executive’s
bailiwick, not its. It contemplated bringing the readout to
Commander’s attention, then decided that would be pointless.
Executive was in favor now, and anything Biologist did would be
looked upon badly. It turned deliberately away and went back to its
own work.

Executive briefly noticed the radiation
anomaly but had its entire attention focused on the asteroid in
front of them. Landing on the rock, analyzing it, plotting its
center of gravity, setting up the ship to send the massive thing
plummeting into the Blue World’s gravity well, all of these things
and a dozen more consumed its attention. It had no time for
radiation anomalies. It was probably just some fissionable ore
within the rock.

Commander noticed the display, but it would
be beneath its dignity to check on it. It contemplated ordering one
of its subordinates to do so but that risked either of them telling
him it was nothing to be concerned about. Better to remain aloof.
Command could be a lonely position.

Raphaela watched the Meme scout ship on
passive optics as she drifted, impersonating just one small rock
among many. Her cousins were arrogant; they must have been
monitoring the television transmissions of Earth, many of which
would have mentioned
Orion
’s construction, even if the
operational details were classified. Yet they ignored the obvious
implications.

Then she remembered the loss of Earth’s
satellites. Perhaps now that the vast majority of communications
went via fiber-optic cable or direct microwave transmission rather
than to and from orbiting objects, the danger wasn’t as obvious. Or
perhaps they could not conceive Earth’s technology being any threat
to them this far out in the solar system.

She wished she could transmit to the
Orion
ship she knew must be even now speeding – or lumbering
– out from Earth. To do so would be asking for discovery. The Meme
might be ignoring or misinterpreting the myriad signals of Earth;
they would not fail to notice something out here with them. She
wished she could do
anything
. But revealing her ship as
artificial in this vicinity would bring swift investigation, and
disaster with it. She could not risk her children.

Once the battle began, perhaps she could move
closer, though what her tiny unarmed shuttle could do was
debatable. So she merely watched as the Meme accelerated with
incredible power.

When she saw this she choked back a gasp of
fear for Skull. The Meme had gravity control within their ships,
over very short distances and using vast amounts of power, so she
knew they would use that technology to keep themselves safe from
the crushing of the massive acceleration she witnessed.

But Skull…she had to hope that they would
realize that subjecting a human body to hundreds of gravities would
destroy its usefulness, and that they would safeguard it from harm.
She had to believe it.

She observed as it maneuvered toward an
asteroid large enough that, were it to impact the planet, would
probably erase all their worries along with most human beings.
Those remaining would be powerless to resist, and Raphaela was sure
that, given the choice, the aliens would accept a devastated
ecosystem.

Now, with nothing to do, she wished she had
communicated more with Daniel and Elise Markis on Earth, or with
others there. But the risk had been too great. Any transmission
directed her way might have been intercepted by the incoming Meme,
and once she was committed to Skull’s vision of his mission, she
had to make sure that the aliens were not warned.

This was doubly so now that their children
grew within her. She knew without undue pride that she might now be
the single most important organism in the solar system. If all else
failed, she had the means and the technology to find another home
for humanity – a new sort of human – and rebuild Eden on her
own.

She chuckled darkly to herself. Some wondered
where Cain got his wife.
Maybe sometime in the future they will
wonder where Mother Raphaela got her husband.
The answer
wouldn’t fit the common morality, but survival was a brutal master,
and needs must when the devil drives.

She hoped that scripture would never be
written.

Skull remained quiescent but on edge. He
knew
Orion
had been launched; the nuclear explosions would
have been impossible to conceal. Hopefully the aliens would not
realize what they meant, or if they did, would discount the threat
to themselves. After all, at normal rocket speeds it would take
weeks to get out this far. Raphaela had told him that a nuclear
drive should allow them to reach the enemy in only days.