Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer Read Online Free PDF Page A

is.”
    “Daddy, let’s play a wargame. I wanna play Stellar Conquest.”
    “Sadly, son, I have something I have to do for your mother.”
    “The private thing?” He cocked an eyebrow at the spy-eye. “But she left on the shuttle.”
    “Not with your mother, for your mother. You just like to ask that question because you hate not knowing. When you’re older your mother and I will explain all that to you.”
    “But I want to know now .”
    Alan thought for a moment. “Here, I have something for you.” Concentrating, he extruded a barbell made of dense biomass, weighing perhaps forty kilos. “Pick that up.”
    Ezekiel, always eager to please, stood up and grasped it with both of his chubby hands and lifted. He failed utterly. “Turn off the gravity.”
    “That wouldn’t be fair, would it? You wouldn’t actually be lifting it on your own, that would be just a cheat.”
    “But it’s too heavy for me.”
    “Yes, and so is the knowledge you’re asking for. You have to grow some more.”
    Ezekiel sat down and scrunched up his face with thought. “So giving it to me now is like turning off the gravity?”
    Alan laughed, and the sound echoed throughout his inner body. “Such a smart kid you are. I love you Zeke, but I have to go now, and do work things. Just call me if you really need me.”
    Leaving Zeke there, Alan moved his attention to the nursery, where four children lay in four miniature cocoons, biomachines that saw to all of their physical needs, and fed them selected memory molecules from time to time even as they whirled their tiny minds within virtual worlds. He checked the system status and made sure they were doing fine, and reminded himself to go in avatar form later to hold them, rock them, sing to them.
    Afterward, he withdrew his attention to his cockpit.
    That’s how he named the control room of the ship. It used to contain three Meme and all the biodevices they needed. The young vessel it directed had not grown intelligent enough to do more than follow orders or react to obvious stimuli. Now its mind was mostly subsumed in Alan’s and though he could run the whole thing without putting his consciousness here or there , he found it kept him more human to do so.
    Settling his avatar into a man-shaped chair, he ran his fingers over the consoles, even though the controls were also part of him. If he’d had to explain it to someone, the best he could have done was to liken it to playing a musical instrument, wherein all the senses engaged and the machine and the man became one.
    Or perhaps there was no point in trying to describe it at all.
    Vacation’s over, Skull, with nothing really resolved…I’ll have to push more later , he thought as he gently started the fusion engine in the rear of the ship. At some point I may just have to tell her I know what she did to me and damn the consequences, but we’ve both been telling these lies to each other for so long that the truth is going to sting quite a lot . He – and she too, he felt sure – kept putting off the inevitable emotional showdown.
    Maybe if he put it off long enough, they’d never need it.
    Artificial gravity built into his ship-body ensured the occupants felt hardly a pull, even at an easy thirty Gs acceleration. Alan Denham the ship surged forward, a spaceborne greyhound at an easy lope.
    A few hours later he sidled up to the first asteroid on the list, a medium-sized hunk of mostly iron five hundred meters in diameter. Extruding a pre-grown fusion-engine pod, he slapped it on the spot closest to its center of mass and waited a few minutes for it to bind to the surface with biological nanofibers. Downloading instructions into its primitive brain, he moved off and triggered it.
    At very low thrust, a highly efficient one hundredth of a G, it began to move along a path that would eventually insert it into Earth orbit, to join the other two dozen there. As it approached the planet, Orbital Control would take over and make any