Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) by David VanDyke

twitch of his lips. “No problem. Defense forces?”
    “They’re loyal enough on the surface, but we’ve made special efforts to penetrate them, so they are riddled with Skulls.”
    “Skulls?”
    “A nickname for resistance fighters. After my father.”
    “Of course. So…I’m particularly interested in the heavy orbitals around Earth.”
    Leslie paced a moment, leaning over Absen’s desk without comment to pick up the ashtray he had used earlier. “You’re wondering if they will turn against the Meme like the Sekoi did at Gliese 370.” She smiled at Absen’s clear surprise. “I was highly placed in the defense forces, Captain. I’ve studied your battles…all of them.”
    “So will they turn?”
    “I would have said no before you destroyed the Earth-facing Weapon, but now…if the right moment comes, our agents may be able to precipitate a mass defection, like they did here in the Jupiter system.”
    “All right. That’s all I need from you for now. Michelle, take her down to be thoroughly debriefed by Fleede and his team. You sit in too. Make it exhaustive and detailed. He’ll love that.”
    “Aye aye, Captain,” Conquest ’s avatar replied.
    “Captain,” Leslie asked as she ground out her cigarette, “we’ve waited a long time. It’s 2161. When are you going to free Earth?”
    Absen stood. “Have patience, Ms. Denham. Aren’t Blends famous for it? Believe it or not, I’ve already started.”
     

Chapter 14
    Latest reports since conquest of the Jupiter system two weeks ago showed more than eighty percent of the PVNs on Ceres back up and functioning, churning out spare parts and new war materiel. Conquest was now in orbit above the planetoid, with Michelle updating and reprogramming the thousands of factories to build more modern gear, as well as previously forbidden items like fusion warheads and missiles.
    In that time, the eight Destroyers had not moved from their position near the moon. Absen wondered whether the top Meme leadership had been eliminated with the destruction of the gargantuan Guardians. Certainly their ships seemed to be doing little beyond eating captured asteroids, presumably fattening their stores and fuel.
    The human defense forces also seemed paralyzed, as if waiting for Absen’s next move. It chafed at him to delay, but he wanted Conquest at full capability, and incorporating the best of the defecting humans in the Jupiter system to supplement his Marines and Aerospace rosters took time.
    While thousands had volunteered, he had only so many trainers, simulators, and fighters. Even the pilots among them had never been allowed to fly armed spacecraft; they were limited to ground and orbital defenses. Obviously the Meme did not trust their underlings, and for good reason.
    Absen was glad the purges were over with, though. Of the over one million human workers, crew and defenders scattered among Jupiter’s moons and satellites, a hundred thousand had been killed, often in pitched hand-to-hand battles between loyalists and defectors. Once those opting for freedom had won, more loyalists had been hunted down and executed without any semblance of due process. Some were hardcore supporters of the Empire, but others probably died to settle personal scores, or simply by mistake, caught in crossfire. Even a small-scale civil war was an ugly, brutal thing, and he simply didn’t have enough people to bring order by force.
    Absen wondered where the Eden Plague’s virtue effect was in all of this. Doctor Horton believed that, without any tradition of freedom or morality beyond the laws of the Empire, there was little conscience to enhance. Cast adrift from the twisted ethics of subservience, it would take time for society to adjust to a more just and benevolent model, even with all the new information the populace was being bombarded with. He wasn’t so sure; instinctively he thought humans must have a sense of right and wrong apart from purely learned behavior.
    Nature versus