Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (77 page)

Using Comtap, he tried to open a connection to Marlyn, but he felt no mental connection. There had been frequent flashes of gamma ray bursts from her group, and she had let him know they were trying micro Jumps as a way to keep Krall pilots confused. A larger number of clanships had shown up there to fight, only because they happened to be in a closer orbit to TF 4, and could get into that fight sooner. As Marlyn’s group performed rapid micro Jumps, they were successfully keeping the enemy pilots off balance, because they were unable to concentrate their greater firepower on targets that stayed in Normal Space.

The mental icon for a failed connection indicated the Comtap address wasn’t found, in Normal or Tachyon Space. With a sinking heart, Mirikami knew what that flash had represented.

Suddenly he felt a highly distressed and emotional link from Carson. His recently captured ship was flying with Marlyn’s group.

“Uncle Tet, Aunt Marlyn’s gone. Everyone on the Beagle is. We can’t contact any of them and we saw a flash. We were Jumping in and out, and when the missiles arrived and the Krall lost manual fire control, they followed our example and started random Jumps to avoid the missiles and us. It may have been accidental, because there’s no way to pick out fast moving targets… Hold it…” There was a momentary pause.

“Ethan is calling, he’s with my mom. They know about the flash over here. What should I say? Mom couldn’t raise her on Comtap either. Uncle Thad will want to know.” His mental anguish was obvious and his normally cool manner was absent.

“Don’t answer any of them yet. I’ll speak to them shortly. I’m pulling everyone out of here but my group. Standby.”

Using the Universal Comtap link, he sent a simple message to every Kobani in the system, which was now represented only by the hundred nine Kobani ships, because TF 2 and 5 had departed in the seconds of time needed to receive Carson’s emotional link.

“All Kobani ships but those in the Mirikami group, Jump to Wait Point 1, Ghost there and watch for Krall pursuit. Break: all of the Mirikami group, Jump to two hundred miles over the K1 southern pole for Shadow recovery. IFF switched off and stealth disabled before you White Out. Open all portals for recovery. Jump now.”

In seconds, only the ragged remnants of the once dominating Krall fleet remained in nearly equatorial orbits of large and spreading debris fields, which now nearly wrapped around Telda Ka, some fields reaching out beyond a thousand miles.

The appearance of the thirty-seven Kobani clanships, arriving unstealthed at only two hundred miles altitude, were low enough that the curve and bulk of K1 blocked their gamma ray bursts from detection at the lower equatorial orbits of the Krall clanships. Their lack of human style stealth and no IFF signals also would delay investigation, Mirikami hoped. Even if an enemy scanned them, they would appear to be normal clanships. They should seem less suspicious, and could easily be ships from any clan.

He contacted the Shadow pilots by Comtap, and was pleased to see that some of the planes had already arrived, and they would only need to linger here another five or six minutes, for the several tail-end-charley craft to arrive. The Mark picked up one Shadow, and Mirikami and several other ships then flew towards the farthest ones, to shorten the meeting time by several minutes. They discovered they were unable to double up two of the long sleek space planes in a cargo bay, not and still be able to close one of the portals with the second plane’s tail sticking out. Mirikami thought for a time they might have to leave some of the space planes behind, and take only their pilots because they had thirteen Shadows to double up in his thirty-seven ships. He’d sent all of the other ships away before he remembered this limited space issue. The loss of the Beagle had distracted him.

Maggi, helping to extract a gradually recovering Mauss from her sticky suit, overheard Tet talking to the crew down in Mark’s hold and with the other ships. She asked him, “Why the hell worry about closing the portals?” She was unaware of the inner turmoil presently affecting her husband’s normally sharp thinking. Carson’s link had only been to Mirikami. They didn’t know.

“Uh…, we won’t be fully stealthed with a portal open.”

She and Mauss both glanced at each other oddly, and then back at him. Maggi asked the obvious question. “If we’re jumping to Wait Point 1, why the hell do we need to be stealthed in Tachyon Space?”

“Right.” He mumbled, face turning red. On Comtap, he said to all, “Leave the portals open and tie the Shadows down after we Jump. Let’s head for Wait Point 1 now.”

Suddenly, the last humans at K1 were gone. At least those that were alive and able to leave. The first of the dead heavy cruisers were now entering atmosphere. With their masses and tough construction, they would definitely leave sizable craters and mushroom clouds where the forty-four of them hit.

As other heavy fragments fell over the next days, weeks, and months, the nuclear winter effect would render the climate of Telda Ka much less agreeable to the Krall than the one that originally drew them to this world.

****

Telour, spittle flying from the traces of near berserker’s rage he’d barely suppressed, snarled over the encrypted planet wide communication channel. “Hunters, if you have not jumped in pursuit, do it immediately. Find where each of their formations fled, or never return on penalty of death challenges from those who fought here.”

He had just tallied clanship losses for this attack, unconcerned for now with domes destroyed, since those couldn’t travel to kill the enemy where they had fled.

He had one thousand five hundred sixty one clanship icons showing as being in space or sitting on the ground. Of those, at least one hundred six had pilots or commanders that had entered codes registering their clanships as marginally combat capable, thirty-three others had weapons but were unable to Jump, and some of those had unusable main thruster systems, meaning they could not even land for repairs.

One of his aides, far across the command deck, feeling safer there on the other side of the control console, informed him that only nine of the appointed hunters and trackers had survived the combat, but that the sensor icons for them indicated they had Jumped, even before he issued his ultimatum.

He merely grunted, indicating that was as expected. That simple grunt failed to account for why he issued a threatening warning to those hunters, before he knew it was warranted. He’d briefly gone berserker.

That disrespect might not sit well with many warriors, who had also done their expected duty in a major battle, where they had endured the greatest losses in their long history. With the only exception being when they had revolted against the Olt’kitapi, twenty two thousand years ago, and had lost their home world.

Telour reopen the planet wide com channel. He continued issuing his edicts. “Every clanship without invasion equipment aboard and is combat capable, will remain in orbit in case these treacherous animals return to insult us again today.

“All others will land and unload their equipment and excess warriors, or remove equipment from those clanships in orbit that require repairs. Load as many anti-ship missiles and ground attack missiles as you can carry, and return to transfer them to those that need resupply. Return to orbit with Prada, Torki, and their tools for repairing our damaged ships. Those that can land will go to factory domes for repairs.

“Clanships that will pursue the enemy to their home will not carry more crew than is required to fight a battle from space. There will be no ground raids. Load enough rations per clanship to distribute to each ship for ten hands of days for those crews. We will pursue the enemy to their bases when we know where they went, and spend that time attacking them.

“We will do this after the clanships from New Dublin arrive. Therefore, we have almost three rotations of Telda Ka to make repairs and load missiles. We will go all together if the enemy fled to one world, or we will divide our fleet if they fled to many worlds. We will attack any of their surviving fleet ships we find, and destroy the shipyards that built them. You will attack the large population nests where their source of support lives on those worlds.”

He switched off the open channel, and looked at his aides. “This is only the first step, to allow all clans to participate, and it will be underway and distracting their navy when I take my personal revenge. I will destroy more human worlds than any has thought possible, using but a single living ship before it learns how it has been used. I want a survey of inhabited solar systems in Human Space that is inside the volume they call their Hub. Find me four stars that host an inhabited planet, where the stars lie in nearly a straight line. With the speed of the Olt’kitapi ship, the distance between the stars is not as important as the direction of the line, because the line will guide us to the final target.”

Frakod felt confident enough to ask questions now that he’d been promoted to the Tor Gatrol’s staff. “This is an ambitious plan, my Tor, and I will help find such a line for you. I understand when you say that a straight line is important to you. However, you have not said where you are going. What is at the end of that line?”

“It must point to the final solar system that must be destroyed. The star where Earth orbits.”

The navy had departed K1 in multiple group Jumps, TF 2 and 5 leaving simultaneously, and the remnants of TFs 1, 3, and 4 more or less together. The Kobani left shortly after them, so there were ample wakes left in Tachyon Space for the Krall tracker ships to follow. However, they had all departed K1 in pursuit of the larger navy formations, ahead of the three smaller and less massive Kobani groups, which would be harder to trace.

Once the Krall K’Tals, one in each of the nine clanships that followed the human ships, had determined their mass detectors had found a significant energy wake of passage from one of the human fleet elements, they could follow that wake. They would adjust their navigation to remain on that wave front, to where it eventually narrowed to a precise point. That would be the White Out coordinates in Normal Space, where the massive formation of ships being followed ceased to move through Tachyon Space.

The destination, named Wait Point 1, was a name suggested by Mirikami. The actual coordinates had been provided by the PU’s Astrophysical
Research Consortium, after Mirikami described the hellish conditions that he thought would exceed the stresses that a clanship could survive for more than a few seconds. The best candidate for his proposal was found about 260 light years from Earth, in the constellation of Virgo, at the double giant star system of Spica. Spica is a close binary system whose components orbit each other every four days. The primary star is midway between a subgiant and giant star, having ten times the mass of the Sun, with seven times the radius, and a total luminosity 12,100 times greater. It was predicted to end its life as a Type II supernova, but not anytime soon. It was a Beta Cephei-type variable star and it was that variability, which was being taken advantage of now.

The smaller secondary member of the binary was no slouch, because it had seven times the mass of the Sun. Wait Point 1 was at coordinates located roughly midway between the two close and orbiting large stars, at their common center of gravity. The conditions there were hellish in the best of times, except the primary star had recently undergone a repetitive and predictable violent eruption, with huge coronal mass ejections that represented trillions of tons of mass in the form of hot plasma. The combined mass of the two stars, and the strong magnetic field of the secondary star, caused much of the material to swirl wide around the backside of the smaller star over a period of several weeks, and return to blast through the magnetically twisted region between the stars. That hot turbulent return of plasmatic mass was in progress now at Wait Point 1, which was why more distant Wait Point 2 was the backup destination.

The length of the Jump from K1 to Spica gave Mirikami and all of the Kobani a chance to talk for six days, via Comtap. It was difficult to experience the grief of Ethan and Thad over Marlyn’s death, and to be unable to comfort them directly. Emotions and feelings were easily shared by Comtap, but millions of years of evolution preferred physical contact, an arm around a shoulder, a hand held. It wasn’t only grief for Marlyn that was shared remotely. Her crew of twenty and those of the Pride of Gaul were also intimately known and understood by all of the Kobani,
because
of shared Mind Taps, and the tremendous amount of personal detail their improved memories now retained of their lost friends.

They found themselves sharing new knowledge of those that were lost, details that had been held private between different groups of friends. It was painful, but cathartic, to learn all of the fun things, all the pleasant memories and the love and caring shared between those that were gone and those that were left to carry on.

There was the unreasoning guilt of some survivors, as well as the gratefulness for the random events that had saved those that otherwise would have been on the two lost ships. Carson had been serving on the Beagle as his Aunt Marlyn’s weapons operator, and his wife Alyson, had been her navigator and backup pilot, much as Ethan was serving with his Aunt Noreen on the Avenger.

Carson’s duty had changed when he led a small team that had stolen one of the three new captured clanships, which they joined with the Kobani fleet to train with Admiral Mauss. He took the new ship as his own, borrowing a few friends from other crews, some from the Beagle, which were all replaced by fresh volunteers before the K1 raid. Alyson, carrying her and Carson’s child, had been sent back to Koban on the Falcon, after Chief Haveram brought additional Kobani to join the assault on K1.

However, because of Comtap, everyone on Koban and Haven now knew what had happed at K1, and so did a number of people on Poldark and Heavyside. Thad and Marlyn’s two other boys, Bradley and Danner, still too young to participate in this fight, felt particularly alone and miserable, with the rest of their family and those they considered like family being so far away. The Kobani, and even the alien community on Haven, where the boys had been working on a building project for the Raspani, rallied around them and around the others that had lost friends and family. In this new era of long range communications, joy and tragedy both spread literally faster than the speed of light.

Yet the mission to K1 wasn’t completely over.

Mauss had been speaking to the Task Force commanders, indirectly of course, with Mirikami and Comtaps acting as her normal intermediaries. Any of the Kobani on the Mark could use their Comtaps for this purpose when they were all in Tachyon Space, but Tet had wanted to provide this liaison personally. To understand the navy losses as well as to convey his own.

Mauss had been highly impressed with how he had used his much smaller force to achieve greater destruction of Krall assets than had the thousand ships the navy brought to the game, and he had suffered proportionately fewer losses. The navy lost thirty-four percent of their entire force, while the smaller and more deeply involved Kobani flotilla lost two ships, or one point eight percent. Of course, percentages never told the whole story.

Having recently experienced, firsthand so to speak, how intensely the Kobani could share thoughts and emotions, she wasn’t surprised at how personally they all seemed to share in the immediacy of the loss of their comrades. However, she wasn’t aware that their mental sharing was also a part of Comtap communications. She had assumed that link was more like the navy’s transducer communications, except extended out to many light years.

Mirikami told her that only three of his captured clanships had had AI systems, and that the one on the Beagle was gone, so they had virtually no recorded information about how Marlyn’s ship was lost, or what went on as TF 4’s survivors were defended by the Kobani ships. He requested that the navy AIs of TF 4 be queried about what they may have recorded of what happened in the dogfight near them, between the Kobani ships and the Krall.

Marlyn had tried a new space combat tactic of frequent and short distance micro Jumps. Mirikami wanted to know if that method was more effective than the Normal Space high speed maneuvers he and Noreen’s group had mostly used, and also if one of her Jumps had accidently caused an intersect with a clanship.

On review of the navy data, the evidence pointed to it being a clanship, probably intersecting more by accident than actually planned, appearing where the Beagle had just performed a White Out. The Beagle had just fired a salvo of four lasers and one Plasma bolt at the main thruster of a clanship when it suddenly exploded in a massive blast. Based on the observations of the other Kobani ships in her flight, and the average length of time between White Outs and the next Jump, the Beagle should have been on the verge of a Jump when hit. The same explosion also destroyed the clanship she had just shot at and hit.

Overall, the Krall were less precise in their efforts to use rapid Jumps to get behind an enemy, to fire on them from that vantage point, so the intersect explosion was more likely one of those random things that the confusion of combat created.

The micro Jumps, as analyzed by the navy AIs indicated that in the crowded environment, where Marlyn’s ships were using this tactic, revealed that her people had disabled at least twenty percent more of the enemy ships than had either of the other two observed Kobani space dogfights. After conferring with the other captains from Marlyn’s flight, Mirikami learned that they had also suffered fewer hits on their ships on average than had those in his or Noreen’s flights. The Mark had been forced to Jump clear of the close-in combat, when too many attitude thrusters on one side were damaged.

It appeared that spending more time in Normal Space, twisting aside and accelerating faster than a Krall could tolerate, still left them exposed to a higher number of hits as broadsides. The ships of Marlyn’s flight spent more of their time behind an enemy after a Jump, where the clanship couldn’t fire on you, while you were able to hit them in a fragile area. Only a clanship’s neighbor might be able to fire on you before you Jumped again.

In addition, Marlyn found a system for her people to conserve their slow recycling Plasma cannon bolts. She had them fire all four lasers at one side of a clanship’s main thruster nozzle, and then fire a single plasma bolt there, to trigger the vibrating ringing or impact shock, which caused the overheated brittle section to crack. One plasma bolt per pass on a clanship made better use of the plasma regeneration chambers, and lead to a greater number of disabled clanships, which could be more easily killed later.

It wasn’t something to share right now, but it was a legacy from her quick thinking, which could be passed on by Mind Tap for later use. The war had a long life ahead of it.

A half day before the first of the navy ships would reach the Spica system Mirikami received a report from Dagger, under command of Bob Danker. He had Jumped Dagger from observing the New Dublin system, which was closer to Spica than K1, to confirm the status of the erratic binary system. His long-range observations of the dangerous system verified the coordinates for Wait Point 1 were still good.

“Tet, just as you quoted to us,
all things come to he who waits
. If the Krall followed you, that’s a great place to wait.” He finished with a bad pun. “Just don’t give up the Ghost.”

“Very funny, in a sick sort of way, Bob.” He jabbed back, in better humor after five days to reflect.

He told Mauss and Maggi what Dagger had reported. “Golda, with your approval, I’ll confirm that Ghosting at Wait Point 1 is a go. All paths for our ships lead to Spica. I don’t know if any of our Kobani ships drew followers or not, but we’ll wait there too.”

“I agree. You can pass that word from me. I don’t see a better way of shaking a tail than this one. Of course, they’ll still come searching for us, and they surely know where the orbital shipyards were, at least where they were before the attack.

“Lela and Bledso learned that lesson after my experience with New Lance. This time we had our shipyards in low population mining and industrial systems, almost everything orbital, and on mobile Jump capable orbital stations. It’s too late for the Krall to try to follow those, and they’re split up now anyway, moved to completely uninhabited systems. We’ll recombine factories to start building ships again, after the initial Krall retaliation dies down. They’ll have to go back to supporting their two invasion forces. General Nabarone and General Cadifem are stepping up resistance on the ground at Poldark and New Dublin.

“That was Lela’s suggestion too.” She looked sad at the mention of her former protégés name. Mirikami remembered yet again that the navy had suffered far more losses than his people had. The fact that he didn’t know them didn’t mean Mauss didn’t feel the losses deeply. Her battleship, the Lancer, was now the last of the large capitol ships in the navy. She’d surprised Chatsworth and Bledso by traveling with Mirikami on the Mark. Which she now thought was only part of the ship’s full name.

Mirikami and his people openly referred to themselves as Kobani around her, and she saw a written reference to a “Mark of Koban,” which she deduced was the full name of the ship in which now traveled. Their personal friendship, after Mirikami’s people essentially rescued Operation Forestall from probable failure, wasn’t going to grow weaker, so she decided they had time to talk about the future.

She leaned back in her acceleration chair, morphed back to that from its former couch configuration, and idly picked at a bit of dried jell on an armrest, left behind from her time in the full acceleration suit bolted to the deck next to her.

“Tet, you and Maggi, and the rest of your crew when we eat together and share stories, have relaxed enough around me that all of you use the term Kobani. I think the Mark is actually named the Mark of Koban, and from that, I believe the name of the planet where you all are from is called Koban. Is that correct, or should I pretend I don't know that?”

Maggi smiled at her, and briefly touched her husband’s hand, revealing to a now more knowledgeable Mauss that they had just shared some thoughts. She’d seen them doing that from time to time, before responding to her, or to an inquiry from commanders of any of the task forces.

Mirikami grinned. “Gee, that took you a lot longer than I expected. I lost a bet with my wife days ago, when she assured me you would be slow and cautious about bringing up a subject we told you could mean life or death for all of our people. That is, if the Krall found out where we lived.”

Grinning back, Mauss said, “So Koban it is, and you’re no longer worried about anyone spilling the beans?”