Ep.#15 - "That Which Other Men Cannot Do" (The Frontiers Saga) (51 page)

“Yeah. Thank God we’ve got the biggest ship in the fleet,” the commander said.

“Biggest and toughest,” the captain added with conviction. “I can’t wait to start picking off those damned ships. Their captains won’t know what the hell is going on.”

“The smart ones will figure out we’re not on their side pretty quick.”

“At least they won’t see our jump flash,” Captain Roselle said. “That was a pretty good idea to jump in five light minutes out, and then FTL it the rest of the way to Nor-Patri. By the time they see our flash, we’ll already be sitting between the Jung homeworld and that damned ring station of theirs, blasting away at both.”

* * *

“All jump missile targeting data has been confirmed,” Lieutenant Monath reported from the tactical station directly behind Captain Nash’s command station. “The missiles are programmed, and their auto-jump sequencers are running. We are ready to start deployment.”

“Helm?” Captain Nash called.

“We are on course and speed for the first launch point, sir.”

Captain Nash looked at the mission status display on the console in front of him. There were only thirty seconds left until they had to jump into the outer edges of the Jung home system and start launching their jump missiles. “Very well. Mister Poschay, jump us in on schedule. Lieutenant Monath, stand by to launch the first wave.”

“Jumping in three…” the navigator announced.

“Aye, sir,” the lieutenant replied from the tactical station.

“Two…”

“Today, we seek vengeance for the people of Tanna,” Captain Nash stated proudly.

“One……jumping.”

Captain Nash briefly remembered the faces of the men and women he had trained, and had subsequently sent to their deaths in defense of their world, as the new Alliance frigate ‘Tanna’ jumped into the enemy’s home system.

* * *

Captain Iniga climbed the ladder into the flight deck of the old boxcar. “Damn, Hal, when are you going to fix the gravity in that tube so we can shoot up it without any effort like the rest of the tubes on this bucket?” he asked his engineer as he stepped onto the flight deck.

“Oh, I’ll get right on that, Captain,” the engineer replied sarcastically. “Assuming we get back alive from this bullshit assignment.”

“How the hell we went from hauling Ancotan grain and Palean engines to launching planet busters I will never understand,” the captain said as he took his seat.

“Just promise me you’ll get us back to the Pentaurus cluster eventually,” the engineer asked.

“You bet your ass,” the captain replied.

“Coming up on deployment time,” the ship’s navigator announced.

“Ready on bay one,” the engineer reported.

“Open the bay doors, Hal,” the captain instructed.

“Bay one, doors coming open. Weapon one, maneuvering thrusters show ready.”

Captain Iniga watched the view screen as the bay doors opened, revealing the view outside.

“Bay one doors are open.”

“Deploy KKV one,” the captain ordered.

“Deploying KKV one.”

Captain Iniga switched camera views to the external camera facing away from the boxcar’s converted cargo pod. The nose of the old Takaran comm-drone turned jump-enabled kinetic kill vehicle appeared, growing longer as it left the bay. In less than a minute, the device was clear of the boxcar. “Light her up, Hal.”

“Aye, sir,” the engineer replied.

The captain watched his monitor as the comm-drone’s main propulsion system came alive, and the vehicle rapidly accelerated away from them. “Kiss your little refinery goodbye, you Jung bastards,” the captain muttered. He took a deep breath and sighed.

“The weapon is burning hot and normal,” Hal reported. “She’s on course and accelerating rapidly. She should be at launch velocity in ten minutes.”

“Very well,” Captain Iniga said. “Let’s get the second one out there and on her way, just in case they decide to launch her as well.”

Hal looked at his captain. “You don’t really think they’ll launch the second one, do you?”

“I have no clue,” the captain admitted. “But if they do, there are going to be about a million Jung who are going to have a really bad day.”

* * *

A massive Jung tanker ship loomed low over the refinery moon of Promittel. Her engines burned silently at full thrust as she struggled to lift her fully loaded storage tanks off the surface, to take them back to the ring base at Zhu-Anok.

As the tanker ship rose from the surface, there was a brilliant flash of light that lit up the entire horizon of the small moon. Then a wave of destruction swept over the moon’s surface as the moon broke apart. The wave quickly reached the propellant storage facility. There was a flash of burning propellant, several hundred thousand kilotons of it, which only lasted an instant due to lack of sufficient oxidizer in the non-existent atmosphere of Promittel.

The wave of debris slammed into the rising tanker, tearing it apart. Seconds later, the tanker exploded. Seconds after that, all that was left of Promittel was an expanding cloud of dust and debris spreading out in all directions, lit by the lavender light reflecting off the gas giant it had once orbited.

At the stable gravity point between Nor-Patri and Zu-Anok, the Jung battle platform Ton-Emora and her accompanying fleet of ships sat quietly in space. Other than the occasional training exercises, the Ton-Emora battle group had been stationed here for nearly forty years, ever since the Ton-Emora herself had been completed. She was the last of the battle platforms to be built by the Jung, and there was much speculation as to what design might someday replace what the Jung considered to be an invincible weapon. With fifty of them in service all over the Jung and Sol sectors, and beyond, there seemed little need to continue spending resources on ships of such mammoth scale.

Today, that perception of invincibility would be forever shattered.

The Ton-Emora’s shields flashed brightly as unknown objects struck them at great velocity. Her shields quickly failed, overcome by the kinetic energy of the relativistic objects colliding with them.

Three cones of debris suddenly shot from the Ton-Emora’s third, fourth, and fifth arms. Secondary explosions rocked her central core, and quickly spread out to the remaining undamaged arms. In fewer than twenty seconds, the Ton-Emora was completely destroyed.

A the same time, the shields of the Jar-Torigor, only twenty kilometers ahead of the platform, also flashed as two objects slammed into them at similar speeds. A third object struck the battleship’s now unprotected hull, blasting her stern apart. She was quickly enveloped by a wave of secondary explosions from deep inside her hull that rushed forward, consuming the entire ship. Within seconds, the battleship was obliterated.

A split second later, a dozen flashes of blue-white light appeared less than a kilometer away from the remaining cruisers and frigates. Having the weakest shields of the group, the four frigates immediately exploded as nuclear warheads riding on the tips of missiles, which appeared from behind the flashes of blue-white light, quickly reached their targets and detonated. The cruisers were also hit, but with four missiles each instead of two. They too were blown apart by the detonations.

The Jar-Aniram strike group had arrived in low orbit no more than a few hours ago. After two weeks of exercises on the outskirts of the Patoray system, her crew, and the crews of the cruisers and frigates that made up her strike group, were looking forward to returning to Nor-Patri to visit friends and family.

As the first few liberty shuttles left the Jar-Aniram, the ship suddenly came apart, debris spraying in all directions. Her bow was the first to go, then her midship. With her shields down, it took only two impacts to take the ship apart.

The rest of the ships in her group faced a similar fate, as flashes of blue-white light appeared no more than a kilometer above the strike group. Missiles appearing from the flashes rained down on them, enveloping them with nuclear detonations. None of the ill-fated ships had their shields up, and every one of them fell to the missile barrage.

The shields surrounding the asteroid moon, Zhu-Anok, and her massive ring base, were the crowning achievement of Jung shield technology. It had proven that it was possible to envelope something of such size with a shield just as they had done with their ships and battle platforms. The big difference, and the most significant one to the Jung, was the fact that this shield did not hug the landscape of the moon, or the hull of the ring base, as it did with their ships. This shield was a dome that surrounded the entire, nine-hundred-kilometer-wide asteroid, as well as her ring base. The Jung military saw it as the ultimate in protection for their precious ring base, as well as all the manufacturing and living facilities inside the asteroid itself. The Jung people saw it as a stepping stone to their true dream. A shield that could protect their entire world.

Today, the shield around Zhu-Anok would be tested. It too flashed brilliantly nearly a dozen times, as unknown objects traveling at near-relativistic speeds slammed into the shield.

But the shields around Zhu-Anok did not fall.

“Coming up on strike plus twenty seconds,” Mister Riley reported.

“Take us in on schedule,” Nathan instructed.

“Aye, sir. Jumping to Nor-Patri in ten seconds.”

“Flight ops reports all fighter launch tubes are ready to shoot,” Naralena reported.

“Three……two……one……jumping.”

The view screen flashed a subdued blue-white as the Aurora transitioned from her position outside of the Patoray system, into orbit above the Jung homeworld of Nor-Patri. When the screen cleared, Nathan could not only see the planet below, but also debris fields in the distance where a Jung strike group had once been positioned.

“Jump complete.”

“Debris field ahead,” Mister Navashee warned.

“Maneuver up range of the debris path,” Nathan instructed.

“Aye, sir,” the helmsman replied.

“Green deck,” Nathan instructed.

“Green deck, aye,” Naralena replied.

“Holy…” Mister Navashee exclaimed, excitement in his voice. “Captain, I have never seen this much debris at once. In orbit, at gravity points… I’m even starting to pick up signs of destruction from Nor-Patri’s gravity points… One, Two, Four, and Five.”

“Are you saying we killed them all?” Nathan asked in disbelief. “In a single strike?”

“No, sir,” Mister Navashee replied. “Not all, but a whole lot of them, sir. I’m only picking up about twenty frigates, and ten cruisers…and some of them are pretty badly damaged as well.”

“First wave of fighters is away,” Naralena reported.

“What about Zhu-Anok?” Nathan asked.

“One moment,” Mister Navashee replied. “No, sir, she appears to be undamaged.”

“Are you sure?” Nathan asked, concern in his voice.

“No, sir, I’m not. That whole battle group that was at Nor-Patri’s first gravity point is obscuring my sensors. I’m basing my findings strictly on the fact that I’m
not
seeing any debris behind that group. The ring base
could
have taken damage from the JKKVs
and
the jump missiles, and I might not be able to see it yet.” He turned to look at the captain. “The Jar-Benakh should have just arrived, sir. They should be able to get a better read on Zhu-Anok.”

Commander Goodreau set his jump selector to altitude mode as he pitched his Super Eagle down toward Nor-Patri’s surface. Behind him were seven more Super Eagles, for a total of eight ships in his flight. The next group of eight was loading into the Aurora’s launch tubes and would be en route to attack a different location on the surface of the Jung homeworld shortly.

He activated the jump control link system on his display, slaving the jump systems of the rest of the Super Eagles in his flight with his. “Blue Flight, Leader. Sync-jump in ten, down to one thousand.” He checked his jump link and verified that the other seven Super Eagles had good links to him, then he activated the jump sequencer at the five-second mark. As the sequencer counted down, he cut his throttle and armed the plasma cannons that protruded from the side fairings on either side of his ship’s nose.

His canopy turned opaque as all eight Super Eagles jumped down into the atmosphere, coming out in a row of eight, simultaneous blue-white flashes, only one thousand meters above the planet-wide city.

At an entry speed of twenty times the speed of sound on Nor-Patri, the sonic booms were a frightening scene to behold. At such speeds, the booms would come several seconds after their jump flashes. By the time the citizens on the surface of the Jung homeworld had overcome their initial shock and looked up to the skies, they would already be several kilometers downrange.

“Blue Flight, Leader. Break now.” The commander rolled his ship onto its left side and pulled on the nose, taking it into a gentle turn. With his throttles closed, he immediately started losing speed. However, it would take a lot of turning to bring him down to normal maneuvering speeds, and until then, he had to keep his turns wide to avoid tearing off the Super Eagle’s wings.

He quickly activated his targeting systems, which immediately locked onto a sewage treatment plant still two hundred kilometers away. The system automatically canted his plasma cannons down to their maximum deflection of five degrees.

He executed two more wide turns as he closed on the first target, gazing out the sides of his canopy as the endless expanse of cityscape slid past him in a blur. Never had he seen a world so entirely covered by urban and suburban sprawl. He found it hard to believe that there were no open spaces left on this world, but he had yet to be proven wrong.

The distance to his first target closed to atmospheric firing range in less than a minute. His auto-flight system took over, making tiny adjustments to his course to ensure a direct hit. His plasma cannons fired four pairs of plasma bolts in rapid succession, which struck the plant still twenty kilometers ahead of him.

The auto-flight system released control of his Super Eagle, and the commander entered another wide turn to bring his speed down even further.

“
Leader, Three. Bandits, fifty clicks, bearing one four. Looks like they just took off.
”

“Three, with me, forty-five from target’s right. Two and Four, from target’s left. Five by five, in ten.” Commander Goodreau watched out of the corner of his eye as the acknowledgment lights for the other three ships in his flight lit up for a few seconds, indicating they had received and understood his instructions. It was a feature that the commander had insisted the Alliance technicians add to their Super Eagles, as it saved considerable time, and was standard procedure for Takaran fighter pilots.

Another shallow turn and a short jump, and the targets were forty-five degrees off to their right, just over five kilometers away. The commander turned to the right, bringing his nose in line with the targets, then jumped again, putting all of them directly in front of him.

The commander and his wingman opened fire, walking their plasma cannons across the flight of enemy fighters, breaking them apart before they even realized their attackers were on top of them. The other two Super Eagles did the same from the opposite direction, tearing apart what few Jung fighters remained of the group that had taken off on their intercept mission only a few minutes ago.