Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (76 page)

The surviving heavy cruisers of the three task forces formed themselves into a milling constantly moving globe of AI controlled movement, a sphere surrounding the downward drifting disabled ships. They made frequent random course shifts and velocity changes as Mauss directed their AIs to copy those used in Operation New Lance. This would help avoid making predictable targets for enemy intersecting Jumps, with navy weapons kept on automatic and AI controlled. They maintained at least five miles between ships most of the time. That was expected to discourage other Jump and grab attacks that might catch two or more navy ships at once. Mauss didn’t think the Krall leader really wanted to trade ship for ship anymore, not with the losses they had already suffered.

The Kobani ships, only 36 or 37 craft placed in each flight quickly formed a shield between the descending Krall and the lower defensive spheres of navy ships.

Many of the Krall pilots or their clanship commanders, held to traces of berserker’s rage. They were closing to engage what they expected to be easy pickings, against enemy held clanships, which couldn’t possibly match Krall strength, stamina, and reaction speed at navigation and weapons consoles. Most clanship pilots had flown by instinct for their entire adult life, as warriors specifically promoted for their exceptional flight skills. They had repeatedly engaged the PU navy, planetary defense missiles, rail guns and beam weapons at Poldark. The great majority of time they had emerged untouched. There were no ground-based threats against them here at all, only fragile humans that needed AIs to think and act for them.

These humans, operating stolen clanships, offered a particularly meaty treat because they would have only manual navigation control of those craft, which they couldn’t possibly use to maximum capability because their minds and bodies were too weak and slow.

Mirikami was counting on that overconfident and mistaken belief. Dozens of emotionally out of control warrior pilots had accelerated ahead of the rest of the pack, to earn the glory of raking their metaphorical talons through the imagined intestines of these first kills, destroying the humans that had dared use Krall tools against their rightful users.

The incoming attackers knew where the human operated clanships were located, because they were all using the new low frequency radio detection methods. However, the low detail and poor target resolution made energy beam shots less precise at long range, and missile tracking on them had proven worthless, at least until the missile guidance systems were modified for lower frequency use. For now, they intended to close with the enemy quickly, and fight them up close. That proved to be a wish better in conception than when granted.

In groups, as decided among the individual Kobani flight leaders, the first squadron of nine Kobani ships each picked out a close oncoming clanship, one that was only several hundred miles out. When they micro Jumped, they emerged at points their targets had just passed. As they made the White Out, they quickly flipped end for end, and fired all plasma cannons and heavy lasers at the rear thruster nozzle of their selected target, which was quickly pulling away from them, but only a few miles distant.

Mirikami led the first squadron of ships from his flight. There was no need to wait to see the effect after they fired their weapons. At that short range, with all eight of the heaviest beam weapons focused on a single point, one side of the bell mouth of the main thruster, the sudden local temperature increase and the impact of multiple plasma bolts cracked them. The cracks instantly widened or pieces were blasted away by the enormous exhaust pressures, and this caused a sideways vector of hot ultrahigh velocity gasses. This promptly turned the clanships sharply off course and into a tumble. The smaller attitude thrusters, instantly activated, were unable to counter the ships from flipping end over end until the main engine automatically shut down. The crews inside, if not killed, were severely battered and plastered against some bulkhead, which had suddenly become the deck.

The nine Kobani ships had promptly reversed the calculation for their micro Jump, and were back near their starting points before their nine victims, now pin wheels in space, even knew what had happened to them. Their clan mates, several hundred miles behind the most reckless and over eager warriors, saw exactly what happened. They would be ready to defend against this tactic, and would instantly fire on any target that suddenly did a White Out behind a companion ship.

Eighteen Kobani ships from each flight prepared to Jump next, but they first rotated their ships slowly, and each released four objects from ports on their sides, attached by cables that acted as tethers. They swiftly swung them out to over several hundred feet at the ends of the cables. When the ships entered their larger than required Jump Holes, the tethered objects went along for the ride. These three sets of eighteen ships completely bypassed the next leaders of the charging pack, and
very
briefly flashed into existence in the center of clusters of hundreds of clanships. They then executed their return Jump so quickly, in a few thousandths of a second, that the nearest Krall to them at first thought they hadn’t fired a shot.

What wasn’t apparent was the much smaller Jump Holes created for the return, and the suddenly severed tethers of the two hundred and sixteen attached objects. Those had remained behind, located beyond the deliberately smaller event horizons of the return Jump Holes.

Without power through the electrical cables to continue to suppress thruster ignition, the now released anti-ship missiles, warheads jury rigged to arm on ignition, suddenly accelerated and sought non-IFF equipped targets. Not so coincidentally, those all proved to be the nearest Krall clanships.

Warriors, standing alert at weapons consoles, watchful of their sensors, had rapidly triggered manual energy beam fire at what the automated defenses would have considered a “friendly” clanship. However, because of the aiming required and activation time, they were too late to score any hits on an enemy that vanished so quickly. The powerful beams fired were a greater threat to clanships that just happened to be down range of the departed targets. Several glancing hits occurred, provoking angry exchanges.

The now always activated automated defense systems on clanships, which
would
have taken control of the weapons from the warriors, had received no sensor warnings of radar guidance for missile launches. That’s because the high frequency burst of radar targeting data never took place. The automatic systems failed to detect that a missile assault was underway before the majority of the weapons were too close for effective beam targeting. This was a new technique, which the Kobani had experimented with, and the results as they looked back at the nearly one hundred hits, proved its worth.

The third flight of nine from each group was preparing to try yet another type stunt, when dozens of enemy clanships suddenly started popping out of Tachyon Space all around them. Clearly, the
charge at them with guns
blazing
concept had been abandoned in favor of a
get in close now and mix it up
tactic.

Mirikami had known that the Krall were waiting for additional human ships to go help defend the rescuers. However, it wasn’t surprising they would Jump in close sooner if they continued to suffer these Kobani sniping attacks.

Accordingly, Mirikami had designated that someone would stand ready at a secondary navigation console for when that happened. For the nine ships about to Jump into the center of another Krall formation, there was an alternate programed Jump destination. All of the Kobani ships had a similar Jump like that preprogramed.

The instant the White Outs started popping among them, the superfast reactions of the designated Kobani on each ship triggered the backup Jump, performing a global scatter for each group. This took them three hundred miles away, in a circular plane centered on the area they had just vacated. A few hundred miles below them, the navy defenders in each of the defensive globes had been told by Mauss to watch for this move. Their AIs promptly launched several hundred anti-ship missiles towards the
former
location of the Kobani ships, even as clanships continued to emerge there.

In another coordinated move by the navy, TF 3 and 4 launched missiles at the same regions, and fired others at the larger mass of Krall ships moving in for the final kills.

As soon as the Kobani ships had made their exits several hundred miles away, they also launched missiles back at their old positions. If firing those missiles were all they planned to do, most of the clanships would survive and simply continue onward, to attack the navy rescue ships.

Much as Telour had held his forces back to allow the navy to go to the rescue of their comrades, thus putting more ships in his three target zones, Mirikami did something similar.

In a completely unexpected and reckless seeming move, the Kobani Jumped right back into the centers of their now heavily targeted volumes of space. Navy missiles were streaking in from above and below, and their own missiles from the sides.

Fifty or sixty clanships had penetrated each of the former Kobani shield formations, but as they arrived, their human enemy appeared to be fleeing again. The Krall pilots had started to turn their attention on the lower down navy ships, which the humans in stolen clanships had suddenly abandoned. The rapid return of the Kobani ships surprised and initially pleased the Krall pilots, eager for this fight.

Except the rapid fire from, and agile twisting and huge accelerations of the human powered ships, exceeded the built-in limits for the Krall clanships. The Olt’kitapi built-in acceleration and performance limiters had been removed for the Kobani and their ships were free to stress the operators to the greater limits of their bodies and faster reactions. The Krall were taking hundreds of quick laser and plasma bolt hits, but they were not accumulating as much damage as could have been accomplished, and many of them could have been disabled or destroyed. Too great an early success would have caused fewer Krall to join this dogfight. Once engaged, the Krall were forced to focus on the enemy right up in their muzzles. Clanships kept arriving, struggling to hit these impossibly fast moving craft. With enough numbers, they knew they would eventually prevail.

They definitely scored hits on the near phantoms, but their constant twisting, turning, changing velocity, and their indistinct stealthed shapes distributed the power of the hits over more of their hulls, and prevented accurate targeting of weapons ports and thrusters.

The Plasma cannons of both groups of combatants quickly exceeded the rate of plasma regeneration, and it became a close order laser duel with less powerful weapons, because it was impossible to fire missiles at this close range. The Krall had poor tracking on the human ships anyway. After observing the confusing mass of mingling ships, with the humans apparently achieving the upper hand, Telour ordered additional clanships to jump into each congested region. Amazingly, there had been no major collisions with the better stealthed ships, because the enemy displayed an astonishing ability to outmaneuver the Krall pilot’s efforts to ram them.

Just as new White Outs of fresh Krall arrivals began, the forgotten waves of incoming missiles penetrated the three entangled swarms of clanships. Explosions started happening throughout the outer edges, and worked their way towards the center. The automated defense systems of all of the clanships, most without the depleted plasma cannons at their disposal, took defensive control of the heavy laser systems of the ships that had been fighting the longest.

Now clanships started to fall to the suddenly more effective laser fire of the Kobani ships, which with their IFF systems active, devoted no effort to ward off the swarms of missiles that refused to target them.

The debris from damaged or destroyed clanships began to make the scrambled regions hazardous to navigate, and random impact damage took its toll on both sides. Mirikami reluctantly Jumped away when the Mark lost three attitude thrusters on the same side, and he knew even his milder maneuvers, made at the periphery of the fighting, had rendered Mauss either unconscious, or at least unable to issue command to the navy ships. He knew that the transfer of crews from the damaged ships was nearly finished, based on direct reports of his Comtap people.

The rescue ships intended to Jump as soon as they had the last of their people aboard. Mirikami, with Mauss unable to communicate, instructed the Comtaps to pass the word to their captains in the three crippled task forces, that they should all Jump to Wait Point 1, their first planned wait point. The Kobani ships, and the two mostly intact task forces, would disengage as soon as the damaged task forces were safely gone.

In just a few minutes, the remnants of TFs 1, 3, and 4 Jumped, in poorly coordinated and ragged looking exits from K1. However, they were gone now, with all those hundreds they saved.

Next, Mirikami ordered the Shadows to withdraw. “All Shadow pilots. Head for the southern pole at suborbital velocity, climb to two hundred miles when reaching there. Stay on stealth and we’ll Jump to get you.”

He knew their smaller radio wave profiles and low altitudes wouldn’t be easily detected in their stealth mode, and they would be just above the atmosphere with a turbulence free back trail. He’d perform the extraction above the southern pole, which was mostly covered by ice and water, and therefore unused by the Krall.

Mirikami had just passed word to the commanders of TF 2 and 5 to Jump to Wait Point 1, when he saw a brilliant blue flash from at least a thousand miles away, where he knew TF 4 had just departed. That was Marlyn’s position.