Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer

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Authors: David VanDyke
Scoggins and on behalf of EarthFleet’s Red Team, welcome you to its first report.”
    “Red Team’s mandate is to explore enemy COAs, based on his known and extrapolated capabilities and psychology. Our goal is to provide you, ah, Blue Team,” she smiled somewhat nervously, “with a set of scenarios to prepare for. Our hope is that, if we do our job well, when the Destroyer does show up, humanity will be ready for every eventuality, and will defeat the threat.”
    Absen nodded reassuringly, and Scoggins thanked him with her eyes. She then introduced the team one by one, and moved on to the first set of slides.
    “Our first, most obvious, and we believe most likely enemy COA, is a kinetic attack – to bomb Earth with objects – asteroids, comets, whatever they can find. There are hundreds of thousands of objects in the asteroid belt, many more in the Kuiper Belt, and billions on the Oort Cloud. This represents ammunition for the Meme. All they have to do is attach a drive and guidance system to accelerate an object on an interception course with Earth, or even as the scout ship attempted, to give a big one a push with its own drive.” She waved at a graphic depiction of space around the Solar System on the screen.
    A Blue Team member in the front stood up. “Dr. Julia Tralenski, Minsk Institute of Astronomy. If they perform this operation far away in the Oort Cloud, they could send many objects – perhaps thousands – in coordination, at speed approaching half of that of light. How can we possibly stop such a thing?”
    Several other Blue Team members popped up from their seats and began clamoring for attention. Absen turned, stood and snapped, “One at a time, please. You.” He pointed at the nearest, a young South Asian man.
    “Dr. Narindra Kadesh, Bangalore Institute of Applied Physics. Only directed energy weapons such as lasers or particle beams can possibly intercept such objects.” He waved a pad, continuing in lilting English. “I have already worked out the necessary specifications for such devices, and their energy requirements. Given sufficient resources, I am convinced a constellation of orbital weapons could protect Earth from this type of attack.”
    Absen said, “Thank you, Doctor. This is exactly the type of interaction we need down the line, but for now, let’s let Red Team lay out their initial findings. Most of you will all be spending the next weeks, months and even years working on this problem, right here.” Instead of sitting down in his seat, he moved off to stand in front of and below the podium, looking out over the audience, acting as a referee.
    The man sat down with a nod, and Scoggins went on. “The next possibility, which could be considered a corollary or additional version of the kinetic body attack, is to use hypervelocity missiles like we encountered before. These living weapons could achieve almost any velocity, if the Destroyer fired them before it slowed down. While much smaller than the kinetic bodies in the first COA, they would be much harder to stop. For example, if they achieved ninety percent of lightspeed, we would not even see them until they were nine-tenths of the way in from their detection point – and if they maneuver, that will reduce interception possibility to almost zero. So, something must be developed to mitigate this enemy COA.”
    Absen watched the crowd as they stirred and whispered to each other, discussing possibilities, but no one seemed to have an immediate and obvious answer. “I see this COA will take some effort to counter,” he observed. “Consider it your first major challenge, Blue Team: find a solution, or at least a theoretical approach. Go on, Scoggins,” he said over his shoulder.
    “The next possible enemy COA we came up with was to use some sort of energy weapons of their own. In the battle between Orion and the Meme scout ship, we saw evidence of directed fusion weapons using incoherent and broad-spectrum energy, in

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