Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (70 page)

He had been wise to be cautious. He narrowly avoided the raking talons that swiped through the space his muzzle had just vacated as he drew back. “My Tor,” he rushed, “the sub leaders say there are no wave fronts to follow.”

Telour’s red pupils blazed with fury when he shouted, “They Jumped! There must be five trails in Tachyon Space.” It was fortunate that none of those sub leaders that had failed to follow the humans were here, because Telour barely restrained himself from attacking his aide, who was merely the messenger.

He gathered his thoughts in an instant, knowing this had to be a datum of some importance that he needed to understand. “How did they explain this?”

“None of them can say. It was as if the enemy never Jumped, despite what we saw. The detectors found no energy wave fronts moving far away from us. Only echoes of ripples spreading in all directions from their five entry points.”

Telour spun to examine the sensors showing the closest spaces where two of the enemy formations had been. The Krall missiles that had homed on their selected targets had passed through long ago, now low on propellant, or empty, and awaiting recovery by some small clan with low status. The single ships and clanships that had risen to meet the enemy had now moved into orbits over Telda Ka. Some had already been ordered by his aides to seek out the oddly recalcitrant large missiles the human fleet had fired, which had not attacked them, and had entered the new human stealth mode when they were in low orbit. The odd missiles had not Jumped, he felt certain of that. They were slightly smaller than a single ship, and could not have Jump capability, although they might have small tachyon Traps, as did a single ship.

Telour was no longer too angry to think clearly. “The enemy did not want us to find those devices for study or destruction. Find out what they did during the attack.”

From wide spectrum communications recordings, two of his staff quickly learned that all of the objects had apparently been the sources of a briefly transmitted simple series of strong pulses, at a frequency and pattern most often encountered when it was used by specific human military ground forces. Those forces called themselves special operations teams or commando units, and were small units within the main human army, similar to small clans, but they were normally not part of navy forces.

The small human combat teams were the kind known for setting demolition charges, and who performed sabotage. Like the sabotage that had happened on Poldark to their heavy plasma batteries. Their explosive devices were often activated remotely by signals similar to that detected from these missile-like objects. Telour felt confident he knew now how they had been used. They remotely triggered multiple hidden explosive devices in the loaded equipment, resulting in the destruction of so many clanships from the inside. The enemy fleet had left them behind when they fled, to activate their typically devious method of fighting.

He explained his reasoning to his aides. Each was equally outraged by the trickery, and by the enemy’s refusal to face them in combat, displaying no bravery or honor whatsoever.

Hothkar, in a cloaca kissing statement designed to placate his angry superior, said, “The cowards crawled away before they could face your retaliation, my Tor. They did it so quietly that their frightened steps in Tachyon Space could not be heard.”

Not well versed in physics, this non-K’Tal’s illogical remark, about the human navy making quiet steps in Tachyon Space, was intended only to prove that he was clearly backing his leader’s explanation. Telour heard the words, and the odd expression instantly triggered a thought that the enemy had done no such thing as sneak away. He believed he knew how there might be no trail to follow. His thinking was interrupted by Frakod’s timely report of multiple White Outs.

“The enemy returns to fight my Tor. Many White Outs and their ships approach very fast, from the direction of the northern pole.”

Telour quickly saw on the sensors that the many hands of objects were too few and too small in mass to be the heavy cruisers of the human navy, the mainline ships now favored over the massive battleships and dreadnaughts. He had just anticipated the return of the human fleet, but this wasn’t what he expected. Regardless, the threat required immediate action, because the objects had appeared roughly ten thousand miles out, with such high velocity that they were an imminent threat to anything in orbit. They had so high a velocity that he had no time to transmit a useful warning that could be acted upon in an effective manner.

At two thousand miles per second, the nearly sixty medium sized ships streaked inbound, in a wide ring centered around the planet’s axis, first appearing above the northern hemisphere. The fast approaching midsized ships provided barely five seconds for pilots and ship commanders to react, but the laws of inertia prevented a clanship from moving very far in reaction in that time, even with internal inertial compensation protecting the occupants.

Nevertheless, this was still a great deal of time for a warrior to anticipate what needed to be done, and more so for their automated defenses. Clanships were able to activate their defenses, and all of them fired on the fast approaching targets. That fire ultimately proved inadequate, even though some of the incoming high velocity craft were split into parts.

Multiple bright impacts flashed in low orbit, as clanships that had docked with damaged craft for unloading all vanished in a spray of shattered debris. Cones of high velocity fragments struck and damaged a number of other clanships, located downrange of the eight impacts that Telour observed on this side of the planet. Surprised transmissions, relayed from orbiting clanships beyond the horizon, proved the attack had found targets there as well.

The intense white initial flash of the metal vaporizing impacts changed to orange, as clanship thruster propellant and oxidizer merged in gaseous clouds near the points of collision. Even in a vacuum, the fuel and oxidizer burned if mixed, although in smaller fireballs and for a shorter time.

The dazzling explosions in space had drawn all eyes for a moment. Telour knew that barely a quarter of the objects had struck targets, but because they preferentially struck docked pairs or triplets, fragments of forty-two shattered clanships now filled low level orbits with their spreading debris fields. The velocity of the incoming ships had been too great to have much ability to change course significantly to evade them, a clanship not prepared to Jump couldn’t get very far from the track of one of these self-guided high velocity suicide craft. A frozen sensor image provided enough detail to reveal what had attacked them. These were the ships humans called destroyers, and they had finally found a better use for them than as sacrificial missile catchers.

Those destroyers that missed impacts vanished into space beyond the southern axis of the planet. However, none of them could be seen from the radar or laser ranging data, displayed on Telour’s console. Even at their high velocity, radar would have had little trouble detecting the dwindling targets. They had Jumped.

Telour didn’t need Frakod’s warning this time, when dozens of new White Outs occurred, at barely five thousand miles this time, spaced again in a wide ring around the northern axis, which allowed them to pass down all sides of Telda Ka. There was only half the time for reaction, although automated defenses on the now forewarned clanships lanced out with heavy laser beams, and the searing star heat of their plasma cannon bolts. There were hits on many of the objects, only forty four of them on this pass, and three were seen to fragment as they were struck multiple times. Those shattered destroyers still combined to destroy or severely damage seven clanships, when their tumbling debris passed through their crowded target field. There was a surprising amount of massive material in the fragments. Their gamma ray White Out spectrums revealed they were much more massive than were the original craft.

Four others of the destroyers, used as missiles, had solid hits on individual clanships on the opposite side of the planet. These impacts were all clustered in a relatively low, three hundred mile high equatorial orbit. That was where the Krall had expected to gather the fleet for a coordinated mass Jump to New Glasgow. With no reason not to follow the original plan after the human navy had withdrawn, many pilots stayed in that low orbit.

Telour quickly gave the order for all ships in orbit to scatter more widely, to avoid the clustering that would draw the subsequent passes close to them. Passes, which he informed them, would be repeated. He certainly understood this mode of attack. It was a low mass version of a Hammer style of attack. A destroyer didn’t have the near indestructible structure of the collapsed matter of a Hammer, but they obviously were deadly, even if only good for a single impact.

The Krall knew how to defend against this when the tactic was recognized. “The humans are using the tactic of repeated passes and Jumping back to pass again at high velocity. Spread out and change your vector between passes, so they will not find you in the same orbit when they return. At high velocity, they cannot adjust course very much to adjust to your change in movements. We will blast them as they pass though until there are no more.”

There,
he thought,
let them fly through a shifting cloud of particles and hope randomly to strike any more of us.

****

Mauss noted the dispersal of the clanships after the second pass of the old destroyers. “They have this one figured out Tet. Spreading out and changing orbits after a pass reduces the risk of a chance encounter when one of our AI guided rams return. Of course, they assume our D-Rams can’t receive position updates after their previous pass, which isn’t the case with us passively watching. It looks like all they did was angle away from their previous orbits, or boosted speed into a higher one. If they hold the new vectors until the next pass, Jakob can predict where some of them will be, and you can pass that along.”

The old destroyers, proven too vulnerable to fight Krall clanships, had been slated for scrapping. It was Mauss’ idea to use them against the Krall in much the same way the enemy had used the Eight Balls against her second fleet. Mirikami’s contribution, to make them more unstoppable, was to have the otherwise empty AI piloted ships filled with dense iron rich asteroid material. That provided more momentum, and the pieces acted as scatter shot if the hulls were blasted open, releasing the high velocity pieces to deliver their damage over a wider area.

Mirikami had also seen the orbital dispersal, and had the data from Jakob placed on a screen. The most confident predictions of future locations of a handful of clanships, those that had promptly altered directions and then held to the new orbit were better targets. “I’m sending these orbital parameters to Carol Slobovic, to relay to the AIs of the D-Rams before they jump back.”

Carol was positioned out on the Oort cloud, where the D-Rams returned after a pass. There their AIs could receive updated coordinates for the next Jump inbound to Telda Ka, so they adjusted their exit into Normal Space better lined up with one or more clanships.

The fifty-nine obsolete destroyers had already claimed twice their number in enemy ships, adding to the overall attrition, with nearly a thousand Krall craft either destroyed or seriously damaged.

Mirikami shook his head. “If we’d had more of those Raspani Q-rupters, we could have let them finish loading all of their equipment, and then blow the majority of the clanships to hell once they were in orbit, ready to Jump. There’d be a dark equatorial ring around this planet for them to have to duck around for decades. The Krall don’t have any of those scavenger ships, like Poldark uses to clear up space trash.”

Mauss smiled. “I’m happy your Raspani friends made as many as they did before your scouting mission, and thrilled they went unnoticed. What if the Krall had found them and they were removed. Then, instead of rupturing fusion bottles in their Dragons, trucks, and plasma cannons, they’d have had a couple of hundred new warheads for Worm missiles, to use against us.”

“That wasn’t likely, Golda. We have the same standard Krall fusion bottles to test with, and our devices were colored and curved to look like the metal on the outside of a fusion bottle. They’re made to lie flat, instead of being mounted on a hand held handle. They attach magnetically to the underside of a bottle, completely out of sight. Those fusion bottles of theirs last for decades without maintenance, and only need fresh hydrogen fuel every couple of years.

“These are like much of the oldest designs of Krall machinery, and were designed by the Olt’kitapi to be failsafe. They knew the Krall would be careless and reckless, abusing any tools they were given. Nevertheless, even the best designers probably never anticipated our willful sabotage. Not when a four-inch hole suddenly appears all the way through their magnetic plasma containers. The Krall never bother to shut down fusion bottles on anything they fight with, so the equipment is always ready for use. They leave them on idle, fusing hydrogen to maintain plasma to power their own magnetic confinement fields.

“We had a tamper circuit on our Q-rupters, designed by our spec ops troops. If one of the devices were pulled free for examination without being disarmed, it would have activated and opened a hole through the fusion bottle. The violent and sudden plasma venting wouldn’t leave much to investigate, since the bottle would largely melt from the plasma venting, and there’d be no one alive that saw it close up to ask what had gone wrong. The Krall aren’t very curious, and they don’t value life enough to worry about safety.”