Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer Read Online Free PDF

adjustments needed.
    Only a year, and already humanity has leaped forward decades by using these Meme biotech fusion motors. As if Greek galleys had been given outboards, the hybrid lift-ships were ugly but they functioned, shuttling people and materials from the surface to orbit and back again as easily as airliners flew from city to city.
    Speaking of materials…the next rock is mine . The Alan Denham approached the one he had picked out, a chunk rich with a nice balance of volatiles, water ice and minerals, about twenty meters long and ten wide. Lining up on one narrow end, he caused an intake, a mouth really, to open in the nose of himself, and began to swallow like a snake with a rabbit.
    Several hours later the materials were broken up and distributed in cavities, to begin their processing as food. Gestating a fusion engine was a slow and complex thing even for such a wondrous organic machine as he, but every motor represented another ship that could fly, and Earth desperately needed vehicles to do the endless tasks of its nascent space fleet.
    Denham could make almost anything inside his body, given enough time for his nanobiologicals to build it molecule by molecule – but at the moment high-efficiency motors were the most vital. That would change, eventually, as Earth science and manufacturing ginned up to produce mechanical copies, but for that, it needed orbital factories – platforms and materials – and that’s what the asteroids were for. Soon there would be hundreds of them parked around Earth and the Moon, and after that…well, there was no reason to keep everything right there. Venus and Mars and free-floating asteroid bases could be developed, and then the moons of Jupiter and Saturn might be colonized.
    If humanity survived.
    With fusion ships Ceres the dwarf planet, or super-asteroid if one preferred, would become the arsenal of Earth. At least, that was the plan he had heard about, listening in to Earth’s radio traffic. Almost a thousand kilometers in diameter, it contained all the raw materials needed to build whatever Earth’s technology could design…whatever they could make in time.
    Aye, there’s the rub, he thought. Time. Eight years or less until the Destroyer gets here, but we have to be ready earlier, because we have to presume they will find out we kicked their asses before that. Maybe they will speed up, or maybe they will slow down and wait for reinforcements, but in any case we’re under the gun here.
    Even as he digested his food he sent himself toward the next target, timing his arrival by the readiness of the new engine he would birth.

Chapter 7
    Rae Denham presumed the time had finally come to meet with Earth’s leaders, to resolve issues about space and the solar system. Not that there weren’t endless rooms full of minds dedicated to just that, but the advisors she’d talked to couldn’t really decide and move forward on policy. The movers and shakers all resided near the top of their respective pyramids, and she reminded herself she was one of them.
    Admiral Absen had invited her to the meeting on psychologically neutral ground: the Orion space station. A fitting location, it hung permanently between the heavens and Earth, bustling with activity as it rotated slowly on its long axis to produce pseudo-gravity.
    Repaired and refurbished, the hulk of the battleship made an excellent base for administration and research. Heavy industry grew elsewhere, on the hundreds of relocated asteroids and comets that now crowded the Earth-Moon system.
    She arrived in her old shuttle, since rejuvenated, and guided it in for docking at what was once the nose of Orion . Now the prow constituted merely one of two ends, each of which provided low-G access to the interior.
    She’d left Alan Denham far out in space, continuing his mission of adjusting the locations and orbital paths of the solar system’s asteroids, but did not want to leave her newborns long. Logically she knew they would