For Honor We Stand (50 page)

DeCosta put on his headset and looked at the displays that, with the aid of the fighter’s transponders, showed him their exact location and what they were doing.  The fighters were in two groups of seven, each in a formation that was essentially a three-dimensional version of the classic “finger four” formation, the three additional ships stacked in the same arrangement as the other flankers but perpendicular to them, the seven ships making the shape of a cross when viewed from the front or behind.  Both groups were approaching the
Cumberland
rapidly from aft, both on the port side. 

With human-pilots, DeCosta would simply speak to the leader.  Things were a little more complicated when the language barrier was as high as it was between Humans and the Pfelung, whose spoken language sounded like (and was, in fact, derived from) bubbles being blown in soupy mud.  The system was set up so that DeCosta could speak orders into the headset which the computer would translate into Pfelungian text and transmit to the fighter group leader.  The leader, in turn, could speak to his system, have his speech translated by his computer into Standard text, and transmitted to DeCosta’s console.  The system, combined with the advanced sensor capabilities with which the Destroyer was equipped, enabled
Cumberland
to control the Pfelungian fighters in combat, vectoring them to targets and coordinating their tactics.

DeCosta had even put in a few sessions on the console directing simulated fighters, both Union and Pfelung, in simulated battles.  So, he knew the protocol which, first of all, required that he verify communication between his console and the group leader.  He pulled up the screen that provided the automatically-generated ID protocols for this engagement.  He was Starfish.  The first element was Halibut, the second was Tuna.  Max was Starfish Actual.  Who thinks up this stuff?  Each element had a leader, to be called Halibut One or Tuna One.  Halibut One was the overall commander.  “Halibut One, this is Starfish, comm test.”

A second and a half later, text appeared on the FTRCOM MAIN display:  “STARFISH THIS IS HALIBUT ONE STOP COMMUNICATION RECEIVED SIGNAL STRENGTH AND CLARITY WITHIN NORMS STOP QUERY HOW LONG UNTIL WE GET TO START SHOOTING AT THE KRAG STOP MESSAGE ENDS.”

“Skipper, comms with the Pfelung fighters verified.  They seem a little impatient, sir.”

“They’re like that, XO.  Intellectually brilliant, fantastic sense of humor, very fun-loving.  Occasionally a little immature, though, emotionally.  Nothing like the stodgy, lugubrious, but studiously mature adults.  Tell them to form up on this vessel, one group finbone star formation Port, the other finbone star formation Starboard.”

“Finbone star, sir?”

“That’s what they call that crossed finger four that they use.  The angles are like the bones in their fins, just like our fingers, and ‘star’ is because the drives of the two crossed lines look like a bright star when viewed from a distance.  Something like that, anyway.”

“Roger, sir.”  DeCosta confirmed the order and passed it on to the Pfelung who promptly took up station to the left and right of the Destroyer which, itself, was rapidly accelerating toward one of the Cruisers which, in turn, was rapidly accelerating toward the Destroyer and the fighters.  They would be within missile range of each other in seconds.

DeCosta’s console beeped.  New message from the Pfelung:  “STARFISH THIS IS HALIBUT ONE STOP QUERY ARE WE THERE YET STOP MESSAGE ENDS.”  DeCosta relayed the message to Max.

“I told you they were a bit immature,” Max said.  “Tell them Wing Attack Plan Romeo.  Execute on two red.”

“That sounds an awful lot like ‘Wing Attack Plan R,’ sir.” 

“Not an accident, XO.”

 DeCosta confirmed and passed on the order.  “The Pfelung acknowledge the order, skipper.”

“Very well.”  Max watched the range tick down.  This had better work, because a
Khyber
class Destroyer wasn’t even a good first course for a
Crayfish
class Cruiser.  More of an appetizer, like a nice shrimp cocktail with lots of horseradish in the cocktail sauce.  A few more seconds.  Right.  About.  Now.  “Mister Chin, blink two red on the port and starboard signal lamps, if you please.”

“Aye, sir.  Two red.  Port and Starboard.”

Before Chin could confirm that the signal had been sent, DeCosta saw the two Pfelung formations spring faster than any Union fighter could, their fusion-based sublight drives augmented by a gravity polarizing technology that was the first step on the long, steep, difficult road to a pure reactionless drive.  As they neared the Krag Cruiser, it appeared to DeCosta that the Pfelung adolescents had abandoned their formation in favor of clumping together in some sort of random, swirling, chaotic aggregation.  On closer examination, however, he saw that the fighters’ movements were not random at all, but resembled those of a school of fish.  While the individual craft were always in motion relative to one another and fighters kept changing places creating a visual impression of constant movement and absence of structure, at any given moment in time the formation was the same “finbone star” formation the fighters originally adopted.  But, with all the shifts, and the continual rotation of the formation itself, its structure was not apparent.  It would certainly be difficult for an enemy to select one fighter, engage it, and target it with weapons.   

Both groups approached the Cruiser, from roughly amidships, continuing to accelerate.  As soon as they got near the range at which the Krag point defense systems would engage them, each formation adopted an evasive pattern that again resembled the movements of a fast-moving school of fish, deviating from its base course by darting unexpectedly in one direction and then another at seemingly random intervals, each individual fighter flying perfectly in formation with the rest as they made their abrupt jigs and jags, too fast for any weapons battery to follow.  The combination of the swirling movements within the group and the evasive darting of the formations as a whole seemed to be doing an excellent job of confusing or staying ahead of the Cruiser’s defensive weapons, as the pulse cannon blasts all seemed to be missing.  At the last moment, both formations dispersed and the fighters veered away from the Krag ship, fanning out in all directions more or less at right angles to their original bearing, like a stream of water spreading out when it strikes the pavement, until they surrounded the Cruiser.  They then swerved violently to point their noses at the flank of the vessel, perfectly aligned for an attack that would launch their missiles at the ship’s “waistline” to go for a classic simultaneous circumferential detonation.  The computer that controlled the Krag defensive systems recognized the maneuver and threw itself into reorienting pulse cannons, transferring deflector power, and focusing the ship’s point defensive systems to respond to such an attack.  Following twisting, elusive, corkscrewing, erratic paths, the Pfelung fighters bored in toward the Cruiser’s midline in their uniquely evasive, fish-like way. 

Just as the Krag systems fully committed to defending against this tactic, the Pfelung fighters, as though controlled by a single mind, veered again, catching the Krag systems flat-footed.  Still tracing elusive, impossible to follow, weaving, dodging, corkscrewing paths, they all made for one target, an unimportant looking bulbous protrusion at the nose of the Cruiser.  But, notwithstanding all of the other wild variations in their course, all of the Pfelung fighters maintained almost exactly the same range from the Cruiser—between 4.885 and 5.033 kilometers, a narrow seam between the ship’s area defense perimeter defended by pulse cannon and the point defense perimeter defended by rail guns, short range particle beams, and interceptor missiles.  In theory, there was no gap, but extensive testing of captured Krag ships showed that, in practice, the Krag computers’ efforts to avoid the duplication of defending any particular zone of space with more than one system created a thin layer where, under the computational challenges posed by actual combat, neither defense layer would energetically engage the attacking fighters.

As the Pfelung fighters were mounting their attack, the
Cumberland
had continued to accelerate, her main sublight drive firewalled.  Knowing that the Cruiser was busy dealing with fourteen dazzlingly evasive fighters, Max ordered that the Destroyer eschew any evasive maneuvers in favor of getting as close to the Cruiser as possible as fast as possible.  Ordinarily, the Destroyer would be firing its pulse cannons, helping to confuse the targeting scanners for the Cruiser’s pulse cannons.  As it was, Krag weapons were attempting to engage the Pfelung fighters skimming between the Cruiser’s primary defense zones.  It would only be a matter of a few more seconds, though, before some smart Krag figured out that the Destroyer was a major threat and manually redirected the fire of at least one of the pulse cannon batteries from futile efforts to keep up with the fighters to firing on the far less elusive destroyer.

“Threat receiver just started going wild, skipper,” Bartoli declared.  “Looks like pulse cannon and missile targeting scanners trying to get a lock.”  So much for a few seconds.

“Countermeasures?”  Max probed turning his head in the direction of that console.

That officer was already furiously working with his Back Room to defeat the Krag scanners and buy a little more time for his shipmates.  Sauvé said, “I can give you ten seconds, maybe twelve, then they’ll get burn through and have us like a bug on a pin.”

“Carry on, then, that’s all I’m going to need.  Weapons, set missiles in tubes one and two for simultaneous detonation, nostril attack.”

“Simultaneous detonation, nostril profile, aye.” 

Meanwhile, having so far evaded the Krag defense systems, all fourteen Pfelung fighters fired two missiles each.  Their minutely staggered firing intervals were chosen, in conjunction with the slightly differing ranges of the fighters, to result in all twenty-eight missiles arriving and detonating within microseconds of each other. 

Which they did.  The Pfelung missiles were small, elusive, and agile.  All but three penetrated the Krag point defense grid and exploded their comparatively small 31.3 kiloton fusion-boosted fission warheads.  Greatly attenuated by the Krag deflectors, the explosions were not sufficient to destroy the Krag Cruiser.  In fact, they were not enough to inflict any structural damage on it at all.  But, they
were
enough to create an electromagnetic pulse (“EMP”) of sufficient intensity to trip the protective circuitry designed to prevent nearby nuclear explosions from causing EMP damage to the sensor array used by zone and point defense systems for the Cruiser’s forward section.  These were the sensors that told the ship’s computer the location of incoming ships and missiles near the forward area of the ship, as well as to let it know when a warhead was detonating near the ship so the system could surge power to the deflectors to counteract the force of the explosion.

No one, least of all the Humans who had been fighting them for more than three decades, would accuse the Krag of being fools.  Accordingly, the EMP protection system was designed to trip, not when any nuclear weapon detonated in the vicinity of the ship—in which case it would leave the vessel vulnerable quite often—but only when hit by extremely powerful EMP from very close.  In addition, the system was designed to reset itself automatically, and to do so in the shortest time possible while still allowing for multi-stage detonations, residual and reflected radiation effects, and similar events—just over five seconds.  For those seconds, the defenses for the forward one third of the Krag Cruiser would be blind.  In most contexts, five seconds isn’t very long.

In space warfare, five seconds is a lifetime. 

As the fighters were pulling screaming, hard G turns through the now inert defenses of the forward section of the Cruiser and clearing its vicinity as fast as possible, the
Cumberland
had continued to close the Cruiser at the best speed it could make.  Countermeasures sang out, “Cruiser’s targeting scanners just achieved burn through.”  Those scanners were mounted on retractable masts all around the ship and had not been damaged by the fighters.  “They’ll have a lock in about four seconds.”

Not today.

“Weapons, fire tubes one and two and reload with Ravens.  Maneuvering, execute evasive Hotel Papa.”

Two Talon missiles lanced from their tubes toward the Cruiser, after which the Destroyer made a hard, swooping turn to carry it away from the Cruiser and bear it towards the Union Frigate still in a desperate battle with the other Cruiser.  The Talons were programmed for a “nostril attack,” so named because they were aimed to fly “right up her nose,” their aiming points twenty meters apart just on either side of the point of the Krag vessel’s bow.  Three tenths of a second before the Krag EMP protection circuits reset themselves, both 150 kiloton thermonuclear warheads exploded, easily ripping through deflectors and overcoming explosion dampeners running at their standard battle settings instead of being surged to counteract the effects of two hydrogen bombs with a total explosive yield nearly nineteen times that of the primitive fission weapon that killed 70,000 human beings 370 years before and forever inscribed in the collective memory of mankind the name “Hiroshima.” 

Initially, the Cruiser’s deflectors and blast suppression systems surged by the still operating threat sensors in those sections of the ship shielded the aft two thirds of the vessel from the explosions, but as the forward section dissolved into dissociated highly energetic atomic nuclei and wildly careening electrons, the fireball flowed around the ship’s shielded hull, through the area previously occupied by the forward section, and into the ship’s interior, the glowing plasma consuming everything it touched and gutting the vessel.  For seven tenths of a second, the vessel’s tough hull held together.  But then, the greedy fireball ingested the intricate systems that chained and harnessed the fusion inferno at the ship’s heart, causing the Cruiser’s reactor to lose containment.  Union plasma met Krag plasma and, finding themselves kindred, unleashed a détente of destruction that vaporized the rest of the ship in a second explosion nearly as brilliant as the first.