Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (69 page)

The Krall fleet was lifting to confront the enemy now, as it had previously, but starting later due to the lack of advanced warning. The nearly fixed positions of the human ships within their formations suggested their greatest weak points when the first clanships could Jump into their midst. The clanships already in orbit were unable to sacrifice in that sort of battle of mutual destruction, because they were tasked with providing cover fire for the rising fleet, destroying many of the enemy missiles from behind, using their advantage of altitude and clear lanes of fire above cloud cover.

Something about the twisting ribbons of the tracking pattern of enemy missiles drew Telour’s attention. They were mostly smaller missiles, and seemed very agile as they swerved to seek cover behind clouds where available, thus avoiding or diminishing the power of heavy laser and plasma beams to harm them. He suddenly realized the humans were not acting quite the fools as they had in the past two attacks. His pilot again proved to be smart and perceptive when he spoke first.

“My Tor, they wisely target only our clanships and not the domes or the unprotected equipment on the tarmacs.”

Telour snarled deeply in agreement. “True. They seek to block our means of delivering an invasion force this time. They will find we are using automatic clanship defenses now, and our beam weapons will react just as fast as the artificial minds in their own ships do, once we close with them.”

He had rigidly enforced this requirement, following through on an idea Kanpardi had originally supported. Telour had forced every clan to accept this tactic, which went against their basic warrior instincts and met staunch resistance. Every Krall liked to kill the enemy as personally as possible, even when it was at a distance, by directly aiming and firing a laser or plasma cannon, or manually launching a missile. Letting a machine do that for them was repugnant to their warrior way of thinking, even if it had better results.

There would be losses today, but they were better prepared to meet the humans here and now than they were when they had lifted three thousand clanships from Poldark. That time at least half, or frequently all of the onboard beam weapons were directly controlled by warriors, standing at consoles like the one where Telour stood braced now. He was confident they would lose fewer ships here than the several hundred destroyed from Pendor’s fleet. He’d make certain the human fleet would pay dearly for those he did lose today. He didn’t intend to leave any of their fleet intact after this, or the shipyards that had built them. He would have them pursued relentlessly to their bases.

He ordered two and a half hands of clanship commanders, those with the appropriate equipment installed on their vessels, to activate their tachyon wave detectors, and prepare pairs of clanships to follow the human ships through Tachyon Space when they inevitably fled from here. They were told to track the five attacking groups when they retreated, suspecting they would run in five different directions, making deviations enroute.

It was a smart idea. It didn’t serve him as well as he expected. As it happened, the navy ships didn’t need to be present when the next round of destruction began.

Telour didn’t have the proper information to help him recognize the purpose of the few hands of larger and slower missiles the human navy had launched, which oddly enough activated the new stealth mode first seen in use at Poldark, and apparently stayed outside the atmosphere to avoid revealing where they were by creating contrails and turbulence.

They seemingly were seeking no targets, which in fact, they were not. Why should they? Their targets were rushing up to meet them and they didn’t need to hit them or even shoot at them. While stealthed, they didn’t need navy protection so their potential protectors left the field of battle.

Unexpectedly, Telour saw all five of the human ship formations vanish on his sensors as he left atmosphere, performing a nearly perfectly coordinated entry into Tachyon Space. Telour snorted in ill humor. “They flee, before our first missiles or clanships reach them, the cowards. They knew their formation of flat rings of ships had too little protection as we rose to kill them. When I know where they went, I’ll send two thousand clanships after them, along with the five hundred twelve clanships still to arrive from New Dublin.”

He was willing to delay the invasion for this chase if it was necessary. The humans could have no idea where the fleet was headed, because all of the planning had been done on secure Telda Ka, not on Poldark, where infiltration and spy bots had been possible.

Depending on where the sections of the navy’s fleet fled, and for how long they fled, he could either continue with the invasion launch after completing the loading, or he could park the already loaded craft and pursue the enemy with the many unloaded clanships he had immediately available.

He watched the icons of the tracker ships wink out, as they also entered Jump Holes to follow close on the trail of the five human formations. The sheer concentrated mass of the tight human formations, and their recent entry into Tachyon Space would make their energy waves easy to track, even if they used Jumps through various intermediate systems to throw off followers. They were not far enough ahead to lose his hunters, as one or two ships might be able to do. If they split up the large formations after Jumping, he had ten trackers on their five trails.

Telour started transmitting orders to the sub leaders of various clans, to send their heavily loaded clanships back down to where they’d departed, and to keep the more maneuverable partially loaded or empty craft in orbit. He was angered as seven more explosions ended more of his clanships, as some of the final surviving smart missiles evaded defenses and managed to strike home. That destruction stung far more than the degree of loss they actually represented. That was because his fleet had not killed
a single human ship
in this brief, but extremely heavy hit and run attack. The navy had done too little damage to thwart the invasion, and they would now provoke a response they could not have imagined. The living ship would be here within two hands of days.

The seven detonations from the last of the missile salvoes suddenly increased in a crescendo of many fresh orange blossoms of fire, some of which he could see spread out above this hemisphere of the planet with his own eyes. More than a hundred clanships that he could actually see died unexpectedly, and relayed sensor reports told of other explosions below cloud layers, or that were far over the horizon. The reports of this destruction was automatically being relayed to all the clanships of the fleet.

Icons were vanishing in clusters of relatively close together ships, suggesting they had launched from the same domes. He couldn’t see an indication of the trails of the missiles he assumed was causing the destruction, and his sensors detected no ionization trails through atmosphere from any type of extreme high power energy weapons that could do this. There were explosions even on the ground, below cloud decks where clearly no missile or beam weapon traces were detected.

The unfamiliar stab of an emotion Telour had never experienced worked its way into both hearts in his chest. Did the humans have a new type of secret weapon? One that couldn’t be detected by clanship sensors, and was perhaps fired from ships in Tachyon Space after the humans fled. His reign as Tor Gatrol would be a short one if he couldn’t counter this new and unprecedented threat.

His observant pilot again offered a first clue, based on his noting which clans suffered the greatest losses, with what was shown by the shape and color of the icons that vanished from his sensors.

“My Tor, Tanga clan has lost the most ships, followed by Graka, Dorbo, and Maldo clans. Those Great clans are hardest hit, and the Major clans were also hit, but they lost fewer. Only the ships that are flagged as having finished loading equipment seem to be those that are killed. Of the empty ships, only two died, and they were killed by the last hands of enemy missiles.”

Telour instantly saw the battlefield above and on the planet in a new way, after his pilot spoke. There were dozens of ships still sitting on tarmacs that had not lifted, yet they had exploded. They were securing equipment after a partial loading when the attack had started. His examination of the four Tanga clan tarmacs, on high magnification from orbit, found other signs of smaller explosions than that of so many clanships. The smaller explosions were visible among equipment parked between ships, which although potentially damaging to nearby ships, were smaller explosions than what was needed to penetrate and destroy a tough hulled clanship. Therefore, it wasn’t only clanships being hit. However, why waste such a powerful weapon on easily replaced equipment, bypassing some of the more valuable clanships, partially loaded and motionless on the ground.

He quickly saw there were curiously wide spaced explosions among the long lines of parked mini-tanks, and in rows of two types of plasma cannons, one type the heavy orbital reaching cannons, and the other was those mounted on small carts.

An even closer spacing was seen in the ranks of the few hundred unloaded armored heavy transports, which took longer to load and store their double segments. This damage was all to equipment that hadn’t been moved for loading, due to the congestion on the Tanga ramps. The pattern his battlefield sense detected was only apparent among the lines of waiting equipment, and not for the destroyed clanships. There was a gap of nineteen mini-tanks and nineteen plasma cannons between the points of explosions for those. The gap was only nine vehicles between the larger heavy transports. These were sets of decimal numbers, which fit into the human numbering system much better than a random pattern, or in the Krall octal system.

He didn’t believe this mysterious weapon would have bypassed hitting a choice target of a clanship, and instead strike every twentieth mini-tank or cannon cart, or every tenth heavy transport. This was literally the ten digit hands of human sabotage at work, and they had spaced and revealed their handiwork using their own counting system. Some of those pieces of equipment happened to be loaded onto clanships when they exploded, which led to the loss of the clanship if several of them detonated inside simultaneously.

How or when humans had planted the explosives he had no idea, but that didn’t require the development and fielding of an entirely new type of technology, and a weapon system never seen before. It would have needed to be perfected in the short time since they had tried and failed to halt the fleet leaving Poldark, where they clearly had known that launch was coming.

A large bundle of explosives was implied by the force involved. Having such charges placed in or on so many pieces of equipment, it seemed that they should have been seen or explosives smelled when warriors drove each of them onto the clanships. A timer mechanism on the explosives would not have worked as they did today, because they couldn’t know when Telour would recall the clanships from New Dublin to be loaded. It had to be a remotely triggered event, because they all went off at the same time, when the damage could be maximized.

He had multiple things to do, and his pilot had shown unusual intelligence. “Pilot, you are promoted to my staff. What is your name and clan?”

“Frakod, my Tor, of Dorbo clan. I am honored you selected my clanship.”

“Your ship was selected at random, Frakod, but it was a fortunate choice. I grant you authorization to speak for me as you organize an investigation. The humans have placed explosive devices on our unguarded war material at some time while it sat on our tarmacs. They detonated them after being loaded and we launched. In my name, order all mini-tanks, plasma cannon carts, and heavy transports searched for anything unusual that could be a bomb. Inspect what destroyed the isolated equipment on the tarmacs. Send every loaded clanships to land at the nearest clan dome immediately, before we lose more of them to internal explosions. Not all of the damaged clanships that were airborne were destroyed, and some have reached low orbit. I must know what happened inside of those. Assign clanships with empty holds to dock with them to transfer usable equipment, and send K’Tals to learn if orbital repairs are possible, or if we must use the damaged clanships for parts.”

He ignored the acknowledgement, convinced that he had a competent warrior following his bidding. He had already turned to use a hand signal, gathering his other staff close, to explain what he now knew, and to plan his next actions since the fighting had ended here.

There had been nearly six hundred clanships destroyed, and he needed to revise the invasion plans to account for those losses, and to implement a new plan and schedule before the Joint Council could be reformed. Many council representatives had died from the comet-like blast, and for probably the next hand of weeks Telour and his aides could act as the sole decision makers for all of the Krall. Even damaged as his fleet had been, he could still mount an invasion force as strong as the one he’d given to Pendor. He also wanted to attack the human fleet, no matter where it went, and he would use the Olt’kitapi living ship, when it arrived, in any manner he decided, without a Joint Council to interfere. At least he could if he acted quickly and decisively. Something he was noted for, even among impulsive Krall.

However, internally he cursed the humans, who refused to do what he expected of animals, even if they were the worthy enemy they had sought for thousands of years.

Hothkar, the third highest status aide on his staff spoke cautiously, uncertain how Telour would react to the news he’d just received. “Tor Gatrol, the tracker ships have reemerged, here in the Telda Ka system.”