The Orion Plague (29 page)

“Aye, sir.” A pause. “Missile salvos.
Tridents away,” The shudders of two dozen launches ran through the
ship as the fifty-ton weapons ejected from their tubes. “Grackles
away. SM5s away.” Two hundred of each single-warhead nuclear-tipped
missile salvoed at maximum rate of fire. “Tracking.”

The larger missiles, the multiple-warhead
Tridents, would bore straight in after spreading their timing and
warheads out to eliminate nuclear fratricide. If all went as
planned, each missile’s twelve-warhead load, expanded into a ring
like a basketball net aiming to encircle the ball of the asteroid,
would detonate one hundred kilometers out. Each ring stationed
itself one hundred kilometers from the next with its controller bus
in the center, directing the warheads. Since they were all
travelling at better than one hundred kilometers per second
relative, the asteroid would be pounded by a series of twenty-four
multi-megaton-sized thermonuclear wreaths traveling through the
vacuum of space, lightning bolts to put Zeus to shame.

On the large screen Absen could see the cloud
of his smaller missiles spreading out to the sides even as the
railguns continued to fire. Lines snaked forward from the Grackles
and SM5s, future plots that took them outward, then curved back in
to strike the asteroid from all sides. It was a very tricky problem
in physics, as the missiles would still have so much forward
velocity that they would in reality rely on their proximity fuses
to detonate as soon as they flashed by the asteroid. It was rather
like a sword-wielding horseman trying to backhand an enemy as he
rode past, only a thousand times faster.

“CIWS salvo.” A long ten seconds of the small
Gatling guns threw out millions of aspirin-sized projectiles, a
cloud to follow the rest of the weapons and hopefully scourge the
enemy from existence. All of this reaction mass sent forward also
gained
Orion
a significant amount of deceleration, saving
several drive bombs. “Weapons fire ceasing.”

Absen nodded unseen inside his helmet.
“Sensors, I want a sharp lookout for anything happening from the
enemy. Helm, roll the ship and orient for deceleration. At the
first sign the enemy has noticed us, you are cleared to maneuver.
If it throws something at us – missiles, projectiles – feel free to
use the drive as a defense mechanism. I can’t imagine a missile
that can survive a nuclear fireball.”

Okuda nodded sagely, pleased the skipper had
seen what to him was obvious: that as they fell tail-first toward
the enemy, the drive itself could become a shield, or a weapon of
sorts.

All told,
Orion
expended approximately
one quarter of its ammunition in its first throw of the bones.
Arguments had raged over the numbers, with some of the officers
calling for up to half to be used, others pleading to save enough
for a long campaign. In the end, the simulations had decided what
numbers provided the best risk-reward ratio. Absen hoped the
computers were right.

***

One hundred eight minutes stretched the
crew’s nerves to a nail-biting tension. Now his long periods of
waiting in submarines paid off for Captain Absen as he sat calmly
in his reclining chair. He had long ago found a quiet place within
himself for those times when there was nothing to do but wait.

The rest of the crew coped as best they
might, talking or making quiet jokes between their routine reports.
Throughout the ship, men and women sat or stood at battle stations,
most of them blind within the bowels of the great vessel, sharing
the lot of all sailors since the days of wooden ships and brass
cannons.

Marines in armored spacesuits checked and
rechecked weapons, sipped at drinking tubes, wished they had hit
the head one more time before battle. Some availed themselves of
the capability of their suits to handle urination; others thought
to hold it until the battle was over.

At Reactor Four, a Russian engineering team
threw its heavy switch and watched the digital displays closely as
the molten salts approached critical temperature to initiate the
controlled fusion reaction. They had cut corners and skipped steps
to ensure the two railguns would be fed the megawatts of power they
gulped, and the crew hoped the thing would hold together long
enough to fight.

On the bridge, Absen awaited the moment when
he would see whether they came up craps, or winners. He watched the
digital countdown on the screen as it proceeded toward zero. When
it hit that magic null, the fireworks should start.

“Three…two…one…” he counted under his breath,
riveted on the display of the asteroid looming large. The
lightspeed delay was now negligible, less than a second, so just a
moment after the digit zero froze round, the viewscreen whited out.
It adjusted under computer control, dimming to show a picture still
difficult to comprehend. Brilliant blazing rings entered the screen
from the left to impact the asteroid, wreaths from titanic Roman
candles.

Growls and cheers filtered over the intercom
before Absen heard Lieutenant Commander Ford intone, “Conn,
Weapons: Trident warheads confirmed on target.”

The next shock Skull felt was unmistakable:
a wave that shook him inside his cocoon-suit, slamming his head
against the crystal faceplate, the only inflexible part of the
thing. He saw blood on the surface and felt it run from his nose,
to quickly dry up as his nano healed it.

More shockwaves came in close succession, and
he knew the time for action had come. He pressed the place on the
cocoon to set its conversion in motion. From a sarcophagus shaped
more like a coffin than a man, it morphed, splitting to form arms
and legs, shrinking away from the faceplate to allow him to see,
and molding it to him, a living life-support system and armor that
would allow him to survive inside the inimical Meme
environment.

Skull saw he was in a kind of cargo hold,
with what looked like ore netted by biological ropes, and
irregularly-shaped containers of who-knows-what. The crab-thing
that had retrieved him sat unmoving in a corner.

That had to be his first target. The shocks
had bumped him up into the air as the gravity vanished. He had no
idea why that happened and no time to speculate; he had trained in
the suit and in microgravity so he had no trouble using his feet
and hands, adhesive to the Meme surfaces, to maneuver over to the
quiescent bio-robot.

As he approached it, it twitched, and he
grabbed a nearby bar of metal, one of a stack of raw materials he
presumed, and with nano- and suit-assisted strength he pounded the
thing until it was fluid-leaking dead. Then he tried to leave the
room.

The mitten-like coverings on his hands,
Raphaela assured him, were encoded with the Meme command “open,”
and did not fail. Slapping his hand against the wall formed a
fleshy iris, and he stepped through.

Organs of inscrutable sorts covered the
walls, and some kind of vessels, veins that distributed liquids
around the interior of the ship.
As good a place as any to
start
, he thought. Putting down his ichor-covered bar, he
touched a control on the suit. A baseball-sized glop of sticky
dough rolled into his hand, and he slapped it against one of the
organ-things, which immediately began to turn an unhealthy shade of
crimson-black.

Picking up the metal bar again he ran to the
opposite wall and slapped himself another hole. He knew the
necrotizing disease Raphaela had engineered would eventually be
contained by the ship’s internal immune systems, so he had to
spread havoc as fast as he could. In rapid succession he visited
several more rooms, planting his deadly pestilences.

The three Meme quivered like jelly in their
pools as the ground shock transmitted through the rock. “Have you
destabilized the asteroid with your ‘engineering’?” Commander asked
with the meme version of sarcasm.

“No, Commander, look at the radiation
detector. It is showing readings thousands of times above
background,” Executive replied.

“Is that dangerous?”

Biologist answered this time. “It is within
tolerance though the ship will be stressed with repair protocols.”
The shocks increased, but the artificial gravity of the control
center kept any harm from coming to the controlling aliens. “I also
have an infection of some sort among the digestion-conversion
modules.”

“Infection?” Commander expressed
astonishment. “That is…unusual.”

“The immune system should handle it without
difficulty. I will monitor…but from whence come these shocks? They
are increasing.” Biologist looked accusingly at Executive.

“Commander, there are thermonuclear fission
reactions occurring all around us at a range of approximately three
kilometers!”

“The human ship! You failed to detect it! We
must get free and maneuver!”

“Initiating separation,” replied Executive.
“It will take some time. I am ordering missile formation within the
ship and the observer drones.”

“Why were the missiles not already formed?”
Commander asked harshly.

“I was working to capacity with setting the
asteroid on course. Perhaps if one of you would do something
instead of remaining inert in your pools, the situation would
improve!”

Biologist was now quite frightened, not
having a combative disposition. Still, he loaded his best
short-term effort, a metal-eating phage, into the missiles that the
ship was growing within it, in hopes his contribution would make
the difference. It knew the phage was weak, lacking the usual
hardiness of bio-weapons, but after all it had created it from
scratch in a very short time.

For the next twenty-four seconds, Absen
watched as 288 ravening nuclear fireballs pounded the asteroid.
There was no way to predict what the effect of such incredible
energies would be – would the asteroid crack in half, break up into
pieces, explode or melt? Much depended on the makeup of the
rock.

“Sensors, can you cut through that mess to
see anything?”

“No, sir. Unless the enemy accelerates
laterally under full power and gets out of the glare, we won’t be
able to see a thing.”

“What’s he going to do,” Absen muttered.
If I were him I’d run as fast as I could, directly away, staying
in the asteroid’s shadow before the warheads shatter it
. “If
we’re lucky, we caught him napping and he’s getting pummeled,” said
the Captain to no one in particular.

The light show ended and the display
normalized, showing a much-changed asteroid. Parts of it glowed
white-hot and molten, until the computer adjusted for the infrared.
Globules and pieces formed an expanding cloud, and the scale thrown
over the image confirmed that more than half the rock’s mass had
been stripped away by the waves of heat and blast.

“Conn, Helm: sir, there is one effect we
forgot about.”

“Yes?”

“The warheads acted much like our drive does.
The asteroid has been pushed away from us at a considerable
speed.”

“What do you mean, considerable?”

“We were closing on the asteroid at one
hundred kilometers per second. Now that rate appears to be
approximately eighty-five to ninety KPS.”

“Weapons,” Absen snapped. “What effect will
that have on remaining missile targeting?”

“Computing.” A pause. “Sir…it might actually
improve things. Since the missiles are approaching the asteroid
more slowly, it will give the proximity fuses a few more
microseconds to work, make them more accurate.”

Absen let out a sigh of relief. He had been
worried the change might cause the entire salvo to miss. Unlike
beneath the ocean, visualizing the situation in space was still not
easily done in his head. “Someone throw up a schematic of the
battle as seen from a point above it. Plot all of our weapons, us,
the rock, and anything else of significance.”

A moment later the view on the screen shifted
to a place seemingly above their course.
Orion
’s track now
plotted to miss the rock, passing it on the other side from their
original intention as they overtook the asteroid more slowly. He
knew Helm could easily compensate for that, though. Much more
critical were the plots of the weapons
Orion
had fired.

The estimated position of the cloud of
railgun projectiles now led off to the side of the asteroid,
followed by the larger, slower mass of the Gatling bullets. “How
much will the guns miss by?” he asked.

“Ten to fourteen klicks,” Weapons
replied.

“Damn. We wasted those shots.” It was a
one-in-a-billion chance that any of those would strike a target,
now that the asteroid and presumably the frigate had moved.
Fortunately the missiles’ guidance systems were optically locked on
the asteroid as a reference point. “What’s our range now?”

“Passing thirty-six thousand kilometers, sir.
About eight minutes out, if we don’t decelerate.”

“Damn. I screwed up. Didn’t predict that
shove we gave the rock.”

“It was my fault, sir,” replied Okuda. “I
should have known.”

“It’s a new playing field. We’re all
learning. Here come the missiles.”

The bridge crew watched as dozens of icons,
each representing multiple Grackle or SM5 missiles, closed at an
angle to intercept the fleeing rock. No sign of the enemy had yet
been seen, so they had to hope that the frigate was lying doggo, or
perhaps had been damaged and was unable to maneuver away from its
shielding asteroid.

“Come on, babies,” Ford muttered as the first
missiles passed the rock. Each would use up the last of its fuel
decelerating and positioning itself for maximum effect. As they
flashed past, their fuses detonated.