Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) (14 page)

Eventually Rae spoke. “I will bring your proposal to my SystemLord, and will recommend that he agree.”

So you lied when you said you were equal to it?

“I did not. We have protocols to follow. Just as you and I must agree, he and I must agree.”

I understand.
The Meme withdrew its touch and, a moment later, began to flow out of its bowl.

Confused, Rae stepped forward to renew the contact, going to one knee to do so. “SystemLord, I should have an answer within a day, if I use electromagnetic communication. Please do not depart.”

I understand.
Then it flowed away faster, its large eyestalk focused backward as if in reproach.

“Not for free,” Vango Markis said. “To buy an alliance that we need. Do you know how fast they can increase their raw military capacity with those living ships?”

“Yeah, I do, flyboy. That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

Vango surged to his feet, his South African accent coming out strongly in his anger. “I know you’re afraid. That’s why you hide under five hundred meters of armor while real men go fight your battles for you.”

Captain Absen slammed his hand on the table. “Stand down, you two, unless you both want to be cleaning the heads for the next month. Quan,” he said, looking at his chief engineer, “what do you think about buying them off this way?”

Quan Ekara shrugged, a precise, rehearsed motion. “It’s not going to affect me one way or the other. You have to decide how much it levels the playing field. I mean, what can a stardrive-equipped Meme ship do? How ugly can it be?”

“Not as bad as all that,” Ellis Nightingale rumbled, his arms crossed over his massive chest. “Without direct-fire weapons, or antimatter Exploders, it’s far less effective than
Conquest
.”

Commander Scoggins said, “Less effective in a standup fight with us, but it still hands them a big strategic boost. With a stardrive, we can no longer see them approaching Earth system and counter them. That’s huge.”

“And they can use it as a suicide weapon,” Ford chimed in. “They can do what they did to Earth, but worse – put a Destroyer on autopilot and stardrive it into an inhabited planet. That’s unstoppable.”

Nightingale and Absen exchanged glances, their shared secret now hinted at by Ford’s passing deduction. “He’s right,” the weapons engineer said when Absen gave him the nod. “They could easily come up with something just like our SLAM.”

“Slam? What’s a slam?” Ford asked.

“Stardrive Lightspeed Attack Missile. Something the boss has me working on,” Nightingale replied when Absen gave him the nod. “Make the smallest lightspeed drive we can, fit it in a big, special missile, and we have an undetectable bullet that will vaporize the first thing it hits.”

“My God,” Ford gasped. “I could bombard Earth’s moon from Jupiter! That’s a war-winner!”

“Yes, but which war?” COB Timmons murmured at Absen’s elbow.

“That’s right,” Absen said, “it’s a war-winner, and I intend to win a war with it. But Ford and Scoggins have a point. If we give the Meme stardrive tech, there’s no way to limit them to using it the way we’d like them to. Our advantage will narrow.”

“Sir?” Conquest spoke through her Michelle android avatar. “If we can truly ally with the Meme, it won’t matter. I mean, no one is concerned that Desolator, or the Ryss, or the Sekoi for that matter have the tech.”

“Because they are allied with us, against the Empire,” Scoggins said. “And they all got screwed by the Meme, so they have a common grudge.”

Rick Johnstone ran his fingers through his hair, rolling his eyes. “You know, it’s pretty pathetic if that’s the only thing holding us together – a shared hatred. Me, I got friends among the Ryss and the Sekoi both. That’s why I trust them. That’s why they trust us. That and mutual self-interest.”

“That’s a weak reason,” Bull ben Tauros growled, glancing at Trissk and Bannum sitting silently near the back, representatives of their peoples at this human-heavy conference. “I’ve fought against and alongside Ryss and Sekoi. They’re both admirable, honorable races. We have a lot in common. We live on planets, form societies, raise families, create art, value freedom…but I don’t see the Meme in any of that. They’re as alien as you can get.”

“No,” Leslie Denham said from her seat, hands tucked into her yellow-gold sleeves. “Not as alien as the Scourge. However bad the Meme are, the Scourge is a thousand times worse.”

“Yeah, yeah, so you say,” Bull retorted. “Better the devil we know.”

“Yes, that’s just the point!” Leslie snapped. “I –”

Absen held up a hand, and the Blend subsided immediately. The captain knew that his staff already distrusted Leslie, and her arguing in favor of an alliance with the Meme would make acceptance less likely, not more. And he had become convinced over the last several days that humanity really had no choice. Like the Allies who needed the might of Stalin’s Soviet Union during World War Two, humanity, in its current weakened state, must have the Meme on its side, no matter what humans thought of their morality.

Survival demanded it.

Now the only trick was to get his people to want that alliance too.

Sure, Absen could just order it, and they would follow instructions. But the farther away from his EarthFleet professionals those orders proceeded, the less enthusiastically people would comply. He might even find himself policing dissenters, especially among the Skulls, the most fanatically anti-Meme faction of the resistance movement. Hell, he could hardly blame them, but…

“Yes, Bull,” Absen finally said, dropping his hand. “Better the devil we know, to help us against these new demons that are ten times worse.”

Absen let the discussion rage until he believed they had a rough consensus. Acceptance might be reluctant, but everyone there at least was on board. Once they took the next step, though, there would be no going back.

Almost a day passed, the journey to Earth slow enough even under the hundred gravities or more that the living ships and their protective gravitic fields could sustain. Rae wondered what it must be like to use a lightspeed drive; a trip from planet to planet would take just relativistic moments inside the ship, and only minutes to hours outside. Within her bio-VR cocoon, she could make the trip
seem
that quick, but such was an illusion.

Ever since the digital revolution began in the twentieth century, the virtual worlds of the mind seemed to dance counterpoint with external reality, streaking ahead into realms of fantasy and science fiction, only to fall behind as some great technological breakthrough reversed the field. What mankind –
mindkind
, to coin a term – conceived could be first envisaged in VR, and then created in the real world, sparking even more imaginative virtual realms.

In the beginning was the Information
, she quoted to herself wryly.

When the two vessels approached Earth’s planetary system – no longer mere moon and
monde
, but a dense whirl of orbitals, satellites, captured asteroids and comets belying the damage the Blue Planet had suffered five decades ago – they diverged: the Meme toward its menacing constellation of eight looming Destroyers, Rae to plunge into the Pacific Ocean.

Once settled below the waves, she proceeded in submarine mode to the main insurgent base at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Made of the same living bioplasm as all Meme ships, it was as comfortable there as it would have been in space. More, perhaps. Here, easily digestible biomass, water, oxygen and minerals were abundant. As the pure Meme left the administration of planets – including the suppression of rebellion – largely to underlings, and the Blends and their reluctant enslaved humans had access to recovered technology hardly progressed from the twentieth century, they had never found the hideout.

Had the liberation of Earth played out as Rae had expected, the resistance movement would have eventually spawned enough military forces to seize the planet in a coup. In fact, when
Conquest
attacked the Meme scant weeks ago she had beamcast an encoded message to be passed to her son Charles, to get his people ready for the long-awaited campaign.

He was about to get a surprise.

Embracing Charles as she entered the base, Rae looked over his shoulder to see a fascinating lineup. Spooky Nguyen, the dangerous little sneak, she knew, of course. A giant gray biped, looking like nothing so much as a hippopotamus on two legs towered over an upright clothed cat rendered less than huge only by the size of the other.

And then she saw the last figure, and her knees weakened.

“Mother?” Charles asked, holding her up as she swayed.

“Ezekiel,” she breathed, kissing Charles’ cheek absently as she stepped out of his embrace and then opened her arms to her eldest son. Tears poured down her cheeks as she stroked his hair. More than four decades had passed since she had seen him, and only now, when she smelled him with the exquisite senses of a Blend, did she remember how much she missed him. Without thought she opened herself to him, their skin-to-skin contact exchanging molecules, passing a richness of shared and new memory that threatened to overwhelm her.

“Enough,” he murmured to her after long minutes went by and the others began to grow restless. “There is time to catch up later.”

“Yes,” she replied. “We will.” Turning to the others, she said, “I apologize, but…”

“No need to explain,” Spooky said. “But I will tell you, we’re eager to be updated, and get moving on the liberation that Charles and we have planned out. He wanted to start days ago, but I convinced him to wait until you arrived.”

“It’s well you did,” Rae said, reluctantly letting go of Ezekiel. “I’ve brokered a truce with the Meme. A loose alliance, really. It would have been premature to start taking over by force what we’ve just inherited by diplomacy. The Skulls aren’t happy about it, though.”

Spooky laughed, humorless. “Diplomacy is merely war by other means. Without the danger of these Scourges and the threat of our superior technology, the Meme would have laughed at you.”

“The Meme don’t laugh much, but I agree with your meaning.”

Spooky said, “And I’ll take care of the Skull….” He looked at Charles. “So now we implement the plan.”

“You sure you want to go through with it?” Charles asked.

Rae spoke up. “Go through with what?”

Ezekiel and Charles broke out in similar smiles. “Oh, you’re going to love this.”

***

In the belly of the undersea base, behind walls that opened only for Rae and her descendants, Spooky entered a cramped, humid chamber. A man of lesser certainty and strength of will might have glanced over his shoulder at his comrades standing discreetly back, but he ignored them, just as he ignored anything not relevant to his own goals and desires.

Spooky had once ruled Australia with the iron fist of the covert Direct Action organization, as first among the Committee of Nine, a junta cloaked by the velvet glove of a civilian government composed of unsuspecting Edens. Had he wished back then he could have eventually taken explicit control of the entire world, but that would have left him little time for any enjoyment in life, and among other things, he was a careful connoisseur of pleasure.

That made taking the step he now contemplated even more enticing. He’d always seized every opportunity to acquire the latest advances in technology to enhance his personal lethality and power. When combat nano was perfected, he had gladly embraced it, reveling in his newly turbocharged body. Then, after the bugs were worked out of human-implanted cybernetics, he’d gotten those upgrades, eschewing only anything attached to his brain, at least until robot surgery was perfected and he could program the procedures himself.

Now Spooky stared at the next step of destiny in the form of a quivering pool of amoebic protoplasm.
So this is a Meme
, he thought,
captured long ago from the remains of a salvaged Meme ship and hidden here for decades. I can beat it,
he told himself.
I’ve never met my match in willpower, or in ruthlessness. If Sofia Ilona, a mere young woman of no particular achievement, can remain herself and yet become something greater by blending with a Meme, I can certainly dominate this pathetic bowl of jelly.

Yet he balked for some time at this irreversible step that would mean the end of Tran Pham “Spooky” Nguyen and the birth of something – someone – new. Any man would have such concerns.

He calmed his mind and meditated, using Dadirri deep listening techniques taught to him long ago by Maka, an Australian Aboriginal mystic. Then he transitioned to a Zen combat state akin to that used by the greatest of martial artists, a mental place where thought was banished in favor of pure action and reaction.
No-Mind
, it had been called, or
Void
, a zone he easily inhabited when contests grew physical, he intended to use it for his first, and hopefully not his last, psychophysiological combat.

Stripping off his clothing, Spooky stood naked in front of the pool. “Do not interfere, whatever happens,” he said to those within earshot. “If I die, it will be my own fault, and if I become something impossible to tolerate…kill me quickly and cleanly.”

Without further words, he stepped forward.

At first the baglike skin of the unknown Meme resisted him, and then it flowed around his legs, and he felt, heard and even saw thoughts form near him, concepts that seemed to be his own yet did not originate from him.
Who? What? Why?
These things and many more whirled around and through him, yet he clung to his calm center.