Live Free or Die-ARC Read online

  "We are unable to engage under this much power," the tactical technician said. "There is no targeting. We cannot respond."

  "No more gravitics or other emissions from the space fighter," the sensor technician said. "We could see it before the attack. It was not entirely destroyed, but effectively."

  "We will close to the planet and fire mass drivers on all control points for this laser system," the battle manager commed. "That taken care of we will reduce this planet to ash." There was a sudden shudder through the ship and a wail of alarms. "What was . . . ?"

  "Breacher round," the engineering technician wailed.

  "Shield sixteen has failed!"

  * * *

  After adjustment for the dual cockpit, The Tub had forty-two breacher rounds. Forty-one had drifted off into deep space and become really nasty navigational hazards.

  Round Seventeen was one that had been rather carelessly aimed. But between the nearly random maneuvering of The Tub and the maneuvering of the Horvath ship, it had just happened, by a stroke of not quite luck, to drift into the path of the ship. And, as programmed, having detected a high gravitational gradient, it spun up its breacher system.

  Four of the toughest, smallest, nastiest gravity plates Boeing could create were fed power by a half dozen equally small Honeywell carbon-nanotube capacitors. The amount of power was staggering, enough to run a nuclear attack sub. For, as noted, about a half a second.

  The Horvath were not technological gods. Their systems were barely beyond what Boeing had devised. More stable, more refined, but essentially similar. They used magnetic bearings, for example. Magnetic bearings designed to withstand one hundred gravities that were suddenly subjected to four thousand gravities of power in an area the size of a walnut.

  The backlash turned them into very small pieces of rapidly spinning molten bronze. Which, following simple Newtonian physics and a touch of thermodynamics, turned into a gaseous cloud of burning bronze.

  BDA complex twelve was pointed, more or less, at the hole created by the breacher. More or less because it was nearly three light-seconds away and despite better steering systems the BDAs were still not terribly accurate over that distance. So it was swooping all over the surface of the Horvath ship, out into space, back in, cutting across the shields and back out. The combination of the relatively low power of the BDAs and their poor targeting was the main problem with taking down the Horvath shields in the first place.

  So if the Horvath armor was, as all intelligence indicated, fullerene matrix, there was no way that BDA 12 should have penetrated. Fullerene was bound together complexes of carbon that were like geodesic carbon spheres. It was vaguely similar to diamond but far stronger. Two hundred centimeters of fullerene, which was what the Horvath claimed their armor consisted of, was beyond even the power of the VSA.

  As it turned out, though, the hull of the ship was, in fact, carbon fiber over steel. And steel was not much more than the stuff the BDA had been blasting out of Connie for the last year. Carbon was even less refractory.

  The beam swept across the opening at nearly six thousand kilometers per hour, which reduced its absolute power input even more.

  It didn't matter. Four terrawatts of power hit the thin steel of the Horvath ship and the 'invulnerable armor' flashed into gas. The beam was attenuated more by the gaseous carbon and iron than by the armor. But it was still moving at the speed of light and cut deep into the ship as it swept across.

  "Holy hell," the admiral said. "That was a solid hit!" Sensors were quickly picking up spectroscopy of water and oxygen being released by the ship.

  "I'm retargeting BDA twenty-four to visual," Dr. Foster said. "And . . ."

  Most of the Horvath ship was a mirror-like shield across which the BDA beams could be seen as bright as the sun that gave them birth. But one portion was clearly open and the telescope revealed a thick gash in the side of the cruiser that was pouring out water and air. As they watched, there was a flash of light and more damage was done.

  "I think that was twelve," Foster said. "It's at nearly three light seconds. If it can do that . . . Permission to open fire with VSA. It'll take about . . . three minutes to set up."

  "Do it," the admiral said. "Oh, yeah!"

  "Fire has ceased," the defense technician commed.

  "Compartments fourteen, fifteen and twenty-six are open to space," damage control commed. "Breach is sealed but another hit like that is going to take out our forward reactor and all forward screens."

  "Are they calling for us to surrender?" the Horvath battle manager commed. "Increase power to engines. Come about. We are leaving the system."

  "No call to surrender," the communications technician replied.

  "Shall I open fire on the laser clusters?" the tactical tech commed.

  "Negative," the battle manager said. "We do not know why they have stopped firing. We would prefer that condition remain until we can return with more forces."

  "Can the VSA target it?"

  "We were moving it out system," Dr. Foster said. "It's been cruising along, laying low, through the whole battle. It's got better anti-jitter controls, better targeting, better everything. So it's in a great position. The question is only how long it will last."

  "Full power coming to the BDA cluster . . . now," the laser tech said.

  "Permission to open fire, Admiral?" Dr. Foster said.

  "Granted," the admiral said, his jaw flexing. "Do it."

  The VSA cluster consisted of seventy-two BDA mirrors, each taking retransmissions from dozens of other BDAs, many of which had been attacking the Horvath cruiser up until a minute or so before. Now they gathered about half of the Very Large Array, even the VSA couldn't handle the full power, and concentrated it on those BDA mirrors.

  The cluster then took the power, bounced it around twice until the power was gathered into thirty-six narrow beams and pointed all that raw power at the single VSA mirror. It, in turn, sent out the standard coffee mug beam at the Horvath ship. The difference being it was not four terrawatts in a three inch diameter circle. It was one hundred and forty-four terrawatts.

  And it missed. Instead of hitting the small patch of missing shielding, it impacted directly on the powerful forward shields of the Horvath ship.

  "Shields are fa . . . !" the engineer tech wailed.

  The beam of coruscating energy punched through the forward shield, through the forward compartments, through the command center, through the engine room, jittered around cutting compartment after sealed compartment and only really stopped because the beam wandered off the target. Every portion that it hit the shields not only failed, the beam went right through the Horvath cruiser.

  The immense swath of damage caused every gravity plate, every power system, to fail in near simultaneity and the powerful Horvath cruiser came apart in a flash of gas and plasma. Which the VSA continued to shred until Dr. Foster, delayed due to light lag, realized he was just cutting up scrap.

  He terminated power to the VSA, which was going into redline after only six seconds, and looked over at the admiral.

  "Mission accomplished, sir."

  "Hell," the admiral whispered, rubbing his forehead. The ship that had dominated earth for so long had been destroyed almost faster than an eye blink. "What have you created?"

  "As I think Mr. Tyler would have put it," Dr. Foster said, "a little temporary security. Now let's work on that liberty thing."

  "How's your O2?" Steve asked.

  "Fine," Tyler said. "Unfortunately, I can feel my eyeballs starting to pop out. And I now know what the bends feels like."

  Whether from the damage inflicted by the Horvath cruiser or the damage inflicted by the gun, the cockpit had developed a leak. It was a small leak and the air compression system was fighting it, but the onboard O2 was about exhausted and Tyler could feel the pressure dropping around him.

  "I think that slow decompression is going to be worse than rapid," Tyler said. "I get to experience it in slow motion."

 
"That's going to . . . suck," Steve said.

  "Puns I don't need right now," Tyler said. "I'll try to keep my screaming to a minimum."

  A shadow flashed across the small porthole. Tyler was sort of getting used to those. The rubble of the multi-billion dollar space fighter, in keeping with microgravity conditions, was trundling along with them. He'd even gotten a look at the separated tail-section. From the clean-cut look that had definitely been a laser hit. At present he was wondering if taking a direct hit wouldn't have been better.

  But this shadow persisted. Then he caught a flash of gray hull metal.

  "Mr. Vernon . . . ?" a voice said in almost a whisper.

  "Hello?" Tyler said. "Somebody there?"

  "Stan . . . y."

  There was a feeling of gravity to the side and the cabin thunked against something. Suddenly, light flooded in through the porthole. But not sunlight, artificial light. There was a distant clanging. And Tyler felt the pressure in the cabin start to go up. His ears popped, hard.

  A Glatun face appeared at the porthole. An unsuited Glatun face.

  "How do you open this thing?"

  "The plague is hitting full stride," Steve said, reading the news feeds. "The distribution got jugged in Indonesia. They're taking a major hit. And Africa is totally hosed."

  "It always has been," Tyler said, looking out the porthole of the Glatun shuttle. The alien docs on the Glatun ship had been able to fix him right up. It was, after all, a medical support ship. With, as it turned out, a pressurized shuttle bay. He had to get him one of those. And a space suit.

  The ship swept around in a bank and Lake Washington was revealed in all its horror. The Potomac went all the way to 7th. And it was now connected to the Anacostia along the line that had been Pennsylvania. The actual creeks into the lake were small since they had had to cut through the wall of rubble around the hole. That looked about a hundred meters high. About the only memorial he could spot was the Lincoln which had been truncated at the base. The rest of the city, in a circle about four miles in diameter, was flattened. And then there were the fires.

  Superfires were something that had, prior to the Horvath attack, been stuff of theoretical studies. Superfires where what happened when a wall of plasma hit a modern city. Everything in its path caught fire. In a circle six miles on a side. There was no way for conventional firefighting to manage that, even where there was functioning water. The only way to fight it was to destroy everything in its path and nobody had had the guts to do it.

  The DC superfire had torched practically everything in DC on the inside of the beltway. There were areas that had survived, but not many. Every major structure had taken at least some damage and the capital of what was still the most powerful nation in the world, as well as virtually its entire citizen body, had died screaming.

  The hit in Frisco had destroyed every bridge then torched everything from Marina to Millbrae. Most of the population that was trying to get out was headed across the Golden Gate or the Bay Bridges when the strike hit. Or, rather, stuck in traffic on the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridges. Ninety plus percent were now in the Bay.

  Manhattan was more or less toast. The same damage had happened to the bridges as in SF and even most of the ferries were destroyed by the combination of the plasma wave and the very small, very intense, tsunami that had been kicked up by the strike which centered more or less on the Chelsea Piers. Then the fires had started and raged across the entire island. It was estimated less than a million people had made it off.

  The LA superfire had been the real doozy. The strike hit when the chaparral of the LA valley was ready to burn, anyway. They had seen the smoke from the LA basin during descent. You could spot the fire from the moon. There wasn't an LA anymore. What wasn't crater was a cinder.

  "It's just buildings," Tyler muttered.

  "What?" Steve asked. The shuttle was coming down pretty hot and the sound-proofing could be better.

  "It's just buildings," Tyler commed. "And people. People die. Buildings crumble. Britain suffered worse in the Blitz. Germany and Japan far worse under our tender ministrations."

  "Practicing your speech?" Steve asked.

  "Had it memorized when I was nine," Tyler said. "Honor, duty, country, blah, blah. What can't be killed is a vision of freedom and liberty."

  "Very nice," Steve said, clapping. "Very touching. Amazing how decompression can focus the mind."

  "Yeah," Tyler said. "I'm not sure about the addition, though."

  "Which is?"

  "And a determination that not only will no Horvath ship ever again get more than a hand's span out of the gate, we're going to pay this back in spades."

  "Speak it, preacher," Steve said.

  "Funny thing," Tyler said as the shuttle was landing. Unsurprisingly there was a delegation. Tyler was faintly relieved that all the police present were being used to hold back the crowds.

  "What?" Steve said.

  "Despite all this horror and damage," Tyler said, "despite all the deaths, despite a damned near crippled economy . . . Earth is probably a better loan risk than at any point since the gate opened. Maybe now we can really get going."

  * * *

  "I wish we'd detected this initially," Xiy Gigum said. The 'Glatun' doctor was an Ananancauimor specialist in epidemiological attacks. It was hard to tell body language with a three foot long beetle, but he looked embarrassed. "We actually did detect it before we came into the system. But with all the problems with distribution . . . it didn't come up."

  "Which is?" Dr. Cline asked, tilting her head to the side.

  "There was an additional packet with the last virus," the Ananancauimor said. "A retrovirus addition."

  "A genetically changing addition?" Dr. Cline said, getting very still.

  Retroviruses actually referred to a particular class of virus, the HIV virus being the most well known, that were simple chunks of DNA or RNA. They didn't have a protein shell, just a strand of DNA.

  But since they were also the type of virus most often used in genetic modification the terms had become somewhat mixed. Any virus used for genetic modification was generally termed a retrovirus.

  "Yes," Dr. Gigum said.

  "And the nature of the packet?" Dr. Cline asked, trying to stay calm. The earth had already taken enormous losses from the plagues and the viruses, before being stopped by the Glatun medications, had spread through some 95% of earth's surviving population. She was trying to not think of legions of cannibal mutants and failing.

  "There is no easy way to say this," Dr. Gigum said. "So I'm going to tip-toe around it. This is the probable thinking on the part of the attacker, whoever that might be. They anticipated success in this attack. They did not think that Earth would detect the viruses or to spread the word. Most planets are not at this level of advancement when contacted and most would not have had the ability to respond within a scant seven years of first contact. They were also under the mistaken belief that if they left a significant number of workers available to collect maple syrup that the Glatun and other races would not respond strongly. This is, in fact, the first true epidemic we have had to respond to in several hundred years. It does not mean we were not prepared, however.

  "And all that means?" Dr. Cline asked. "Let me just ask a question. Is it going to cause us to go insane or something?

  "Not . . . quite," Dr. Gigum said. "Let me proceed in my estimation. This left, however, the problem of workers. In pre-industrial conditions, when there is a severe loss of life, there is a very fast population growth in the aftermath. Populations spring back very quickly."

  "Noted," Dr. Cline said. "Various examples. The Black Plague comes to mind."

  "However," the beetle continued, "in conditions in which a society is sufficiently advanced to have reproductive control, population levels dip after severe losses. Individuals engage in recreational pseudo-reproductive activity, if the species is bent that way. This is a way of dealing with the death."

  "Also known," Dr. Cline
said. "Not something we like to talk about, but . . . Known."

  "But if there is reproductive control, actual birthrates drop," Dr. Gigum said. "And your attackers were looking at an already severely reduced population. One due to lack of population unable to be useful . . ." The beetle paused, as if trying to think of a polite term.

  "Slaves," Dr. Cline said, her jaw working. "We know the term."

  "As you say," Dr. Gigum said. "I understand this tribe used them until historically recently."

  "Specifically," Dr. Cline said, "those who were of darker skin pigmentation. Such as myself."