“Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the kind of thing more in your ballpark? I thought you soldiers were in charge of coming up with new ways to break things.”
“We’ve tried,” I say. “Once they’re on the ground, we can shoot them, but that’s difficult. Or we can nuke them, which is easier, but we don’t have the elbow room to fling around a lot of kiloton warheads on this moon. And nobody has ever cracked a seed ship.”
“Your nukes don’t work on them?”
“Not in space. Nukes aren’t all that effective in a vacuum. And those seed ships have hard shells. I’ve never heard of anyone actually cracking the hull on one, and I’ve been in a battle where a whole task force chucked every nuke in the magazines at it. Dozens of megatons, and not a dent in the trim.”
“I see.” Dr. Stewart leans back in her chair and crosses her arms in front of her chest. I can’t tell whether the expression on her face is amusement or incredulity.
We’re in her office in the science department of the admin center. It’s small and messy, just a desk with data tablets and printouts all over it, and a few office chairs that are weighed down with reference material. If a tidy office is a sign of a cluttered mind, then Dr. Stewart’s mind is as squared away as a boot camp recruit’s locker.
“Let me get this sorted out,” she says. “You people have been trying to figure out this problem for over four years. None of your soldier toys do the job, and all those military scientists haven’t come up with a solution in half a decade. And you’re asking me to solve it for you in seven days?”
“Earlier if possible,” Sergeant Fallon says. “So we can prepare the defense before the bad guys are overhead.”
“Once they are, they’ll start landing scouts, and every human settlement they find is going to get nerve-gassed from orbit. Then they’ll tear down our terraformers and set up their own, and two months later the atmosphere’s mostly carbon dioxide,” I say.
“I’ve read all the intel,” Dr. Stewart says. “At least the stuff they let us civvies read. And I have to admit it doesn’t make me overly optimistic.”
Sergeant Fallon smiles curtly. “That’s the understatement of the month. Personally, I don’t give a bucket of warm piss for this place if we have to go up against those things with what we have. My people are Homeworld Defense grunts. They don’t have the training, don’t have the right guns, don’t have the experience. I have two battalions of glorified riot police with popguns.”
“I have a pocketknife,” Dr. Stewart says. “A few containers of hydrochloric acid down in the lab. Two cargo rail guns that can’t be aimed at anything unless you coax someone into just the right spot in orbit. And our constables carry sidearms and stun sticks. Not exactly a mighty arsenal, I’m afraid.”
“What about those rail guns?”
“Those are for lobbing freight containers into orbit. Ship comes with empty cargo pods, they drop them on the moon for recovery, we fill cargo pods up with water, and up into orbit they go with the rail guns. Saves on fuel for orbital lifts. We have two sites, but they’re fixed. And they just generate enough juice to put things in a low orbit with the minimum amount of energy required.”
“Can we juice them up a bit?” Sergeant Fallon asks.
“Some, but there’s no point. They can’t be aimed. They’re just ramps in the ground. And even at full power, they won’t launch things fast enough to give you more energy than fifty gigatons’ worth of nukes. They were designed for putting payloads into orbit, not for use as planetary defense weapons.”
“So there’s not much we can do, and nothing we can do it with,” Sergeant Fallon says.
“That sounds like an accurate assessment.” Dr. Stewart leans back in her chair again and studies the computer screen that’s shoved into a corner of her crowded desk. “I’m not an expert on weaponry. I’m an astrophysicist. But give me a list of your assets, and I’ll see what we can think up down here in Science Country. I need to know what kind of ships we have, and their list of ordnance loadouts, especially anything with nuclear warheads. I also need to know the maximum power output of their fusion reactors, and their acceleration data.”
“We’ll get that to you,” I say. “It’ll be a short list. Right now we have two ships on our side, and one of them is a ratty old freighter.”
Dr. Stewart lets out a little sigh.
“Not much we can do, and nothing to do it with,” she echoes Sergeant Fallon. “Well, let me see if we can add something of value, Sergeant.”
“Seven days,” Sergeant Fallon muses as we walk back to the ops center. “If we don’t come up with a way to knock your aliens out of space in seven days, we’re fucked.”