“Why aren’t you in your bunk as well? You took part in that mutiny business, too, as far as I recall.”
“I’ll go when Sergeant Fallon is up,” I say. “Somebody’s gotta be down here keeping an eye on things, in case the Indianapolis up in orbit has news to share. They’re sort of our eyes and ears right now.” I point at the admin deck. “That thing is linked with my armor’s computer so I can stay tapped into the telemetry.”
“Is that your job? Communications? I thought you were, you know, a rifleman or something.” She nods at the M-66 carbine leaning against the desk.
“That’s for personal protection. That”—I point at the screen of the admin deck again—“is for calling in the real guns. I’m the guy on the ground who calls in airstrikes, coordinates attack runs, that sort of thing. I can do a lot more damage with the data deck there than with that rifle.”
“I see.” Dr. Stewart takes a sip from her mug and makes a face. “Lukewarm now,” she says. “And too strong. It’s been sitting out too long.”
“So why aren’t you sleeping at this hour?”
She puts down the mug and picks up her data pad.
“Your little science homework,” she says. “I’ve been trying to think up a way to turn this dinky little water stop into a threat to Lanky ships, but so far I’m not coming up with anything. I guess I’m not used to thinking like a soldier.”
“We could fight them on the ground if all those troops dirtside were in bug suits and had bug weapons,” I say. “We have a lot of boots on the moon right now. The trouble is that they all have guns for shooting people, not Lankies.”
“So we can’t really take them on once they land,” Dr. Stewart says. “What about before they get into orbit? I mean, you’ve said that nobody’s ever destroyed one of their seed ships, but have they ever made one turn back, run away?”
I shake my head. “They’re hard to kill on the ground, but impossible to kill in their ships. Those things are immune to anything we can throw at them.”
“They’re using organic weapons, right?”
“Yeah, some sort of penetrator. Get close enough to a Lanky ship, they launch a few thousand of ’em. Goes right through the laminate armor on our ships.”
“Have we tried doing the same?”
“Our main ship-to-ship stuff is missiles. Nuke-tipped for the Lankies. I don’t think they’ve ever made any difference in combat.”
Dr. Stewart taps around on the screen of her data pad and furrows a brow.
“If the fleet would be a little more forthcoming with data on the Lankies instead of treating every little thing as a state secret, maybe we would have found a solution already. But I guess they don’t want to upset the civilians.”
She looks up at me with a frown.
“Anyone ever hit one of their ships with something really big?”
“Some cruiser skipper rammed one with his ship once. Didn’t work. Our biggest ships are a hundred, a hundred and fifty thousand tons. Those seed ships are a few kilometers long. They probably weigh a few million tons. You drive a twenty-K cruiser against a seed ship, it won’t even slow ’em down.”
“That would depend on how fast you drive it,” Dr. Stewart says. “Their hulls may be so tough you can’t crack them with shipboard weapons, but those creatures are living, organic beings. They can’t be immune to physics. I guarantee that if we hit one of those seed ships hard enough, it’ll kill every living thing inside.”
“We haven’t made a dent with a few hundred megatons of nukes. You’d have to go pretty fast to hit them a lot harder than that.”
Dr. Stewart smiles and slurps more of her cold coffee.
“See, I may have a hard time thinking like a soldier, but you think too much like one. Forget gigatons. Start thinking like a scientist. Think exajoules. Petajoules. We don’t want a battle, we want to cause an astronomical event you’ll be able to see on Earth with a telescope in twenty-five years.”
I can’t help but smile at the idea of turning a Lanky seed ship into a new star in the Fomalhaut system.
“I’m all on board with that,” I say. “But how do we get there from here? All we have is that ancient unarmed freighter and a patrol ship. Like I said, not exactly a fearsome task force.”
“Think physics, not guns. A fist-sized rock isn’t so fearsome, right? But throw it at something at one-tenth the speed of light, and the impact energy would be enough to make life really interesting on this moon for a short time.”
She picks up her data pad again and starts scribbling on the screen with her finger.
“Say, how much does that freighter weigh?”
“Five, six thousand tons maybe,” I say. “Fully loaded, three or four times that. But you can’t just ram the thing into a Lanky ship.”
“Why not?”