Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (83 page)

That not even a Krall could have survived some of the maneuvers that were observed by the human controlled ships was restricted knowledge. Telour had managed to keep this from becoming widely known outside his staff so far, but the witnesses of the actions of enemy controlled clanships would share stories and opinions. Stories of humans that could outperform a Krall was too alien a concept, to a species that had spent nearly twenty five thousand years of selective breeding to become the physically superior masters of every race.

By a com set communication from one of his aides aboard the ship, Telour had ordered the large Olt’kitapi craft, five times the volume of a clanship, to land near the dome entrance with its unopened side hatch facing the dome, so he could make a highly visible approach to the ship, all alone. Unlike Kanpardi before him, Telour understood the value of self-promotion. Perhaps he thought this was needed because he was less well respected than had been Kanpardi, who had acted for the good of his race more than he had for himself or his clan. Telour’s image would be sent to every dome and repeated to any clanship commander or pilot that chose to watch. Other than some resentful surviving Tanga clanships, nearly all would be watching. It was a great day for him.

Having this moment recorded also would prevent, or at least delay, the alteration of the histories over the millennia. Graka clan was in ascendency now, Tanga clan had once been, and others had been highest in different eras. The histories gradually “evolved” with the passages of time, to shift credit, or blame, for events that a rising clan wanted to display as their own exaggerated contributions in the distant past, perhaps diminish their failures or exaggerate failures of other clans. The events themselves were seldom altered, but who had been most responsible for a good or bad outcome could be. Telour wanted his role to be well documented, to make historical alteration difficult for later clans.

As he neared the center of the side of the ship, moving at a more deliberate pace than the typical Krall run, a tall portal irised open and a low ramp was extruded from the hull material below the opening. It was not a metallic slab extending out and dropping to the ground as with a clanship, it was slower and silent.

As arranged by Telour’s two representatives and the high status clan leaders that had been sent to verify the request for use of a living ship, they were waiting inside the large airlock. They all raced down the ramp to form a rank on each side for the Tor Gatrol. The guardians of the living ship did not leave their charge, with eight of them surrounding the shackled soft Krall, now moved away from the command deck circle deep in the ship.

Another sixty-four guardians stood with plasma rifles held across their chests, crouched and ready along both sides of the wide inner corridor, facing the closed transparent inner airlock portal, observing the scene outside through the opened outer portal. Anyone inside the large airlock would be visible to them. They would defend the ship if there were signs of interclan warfare to contest control of the vessel, and would kill the soft Krall captive, preventing use of the ship as a weapon against other clans. It was something that had never happened, but ancient protocol held sway.

There was another reserve of four hundred and forty guardians distributed in multiple large compartments within the big ship. Some of these were workrooms where instrumentation controls would have been used by the Olt’kitapi to perform manipulations of the masses of material they wanted to sort, separate, and move. There was far room within the ship for more than the five hundred twelve guardians aboard. However, protocol would not permit more than sixteen visitors inside the ship anyway. More guards than that was wasteful, and required too much in the way of food. For some ancient and forgotten reason, Raspani meat was not permitted aboard these ships, not even dried as jerky. Some old stories claimed the living ships had objected for some reason. There were always alternatives of local native animals to use for provisions.

Protocol also limited visitors that would accompany the ship when it departed on a “mission” to punish an enemy world. The fewer that knew what it did and how, the fewer could plot to seize control. Interclan warfare had been very violent at times in the past.

The two ranks standing in front of the ramp raised their left arms in unison, talons out in a salute. Telour took no notice, and stepped onto the ramp. With the recognition of him by the group salute being observed by those inside, when Telour stepped onto the ramp the warriors in the corridor lowered their weapons to their sides. When he entered the airlock, and the outer door irised closed and the inner door opened, they too saluted the Tor Gatrol. Telour, as tradition required, did return their salute in kind, for having delivered the ship safely and securely.

For the second time Telour noted the alluring scents of an atmosphere that was modeled after the Krall’s destroyed home world. He was now the commander of the ship, or at least he was the one that would tell the soft Krall what to instruct the ship to do.

Out of sight of the image recorders, he gestured and told one of guardians to lead him into the ship to meet the soft Krall pilot. He needed to explain the mission he had planned, and to describe the speed with which it must be executed. Each of the steps was to be completed quickly enough to prevent the ship from learning what it had been duped into doing too soon.

He would explain personally, to be certain the soft one understood the speed with which he must proceed. Together they would scout the systems to be passed through on the living ship, showing the guardians where the soft one would be directed to execute the Tor’s orders. Then he would have the guardians rehearse with the pilot until the complex procedure was well known.

The time of travel would be short between any of the list of stars that Frakod had provided in the human Hub region. It wasn’t the time of travel between the stars limiting how many solar systems could be hit. It was the time needed to produce each
event
in a solar system, which set the limit.

There naturally were no truly straight lines through five different inhabited systems, and his efficient new staff member had provided four lists of six possible stars, each having inhabited planets that matched Telour’s specifications as a Hub world, and in combination led generally towards the final target. The plots, on a navigational system, resembled slightly bent spokes, all radiating away from a central point.

Telour would select one of those routes, and he decided he would shorten the string of system candidates so that the ship would enter only four of them, not five or six. Telour would send four clanships ahead to each of the systems he would select, to stand off and wait for the Olt’kitapi ship to arrive. The ship could arrive without revealing itself by gamma rays, but if was somehow noticed and investigated, it had no defense other than to Jump. The clanships would ensure the living ship was not interrupted when it created and held the Trap fields in place for long hours, and then rotate the mass back into this Universe when ready.

The fewer number of stars to visit, after he reconsidered the list, reduced the chance that before the attack in the final system could be initiated the ship might cease to respond. That would happen if it somehow detected mass deaths in any previous systems visited. In that case, the final point Telour was trying to make with his statement to humanity would be lost.

At the end of an inadvertent bit of stellar punctuation, the dot below the stellar exclamation point was Earth!

****

In the first week of the patrol boats performing their monitoring, they reported multiple clanship White Outs. Some appeared to be scouts that popped out in a system, and left without firing a shot. They didn’t come close to any planet, and only performed active scans. It appeared these could be seeking any concentration of navy ships.

The navy had their three task forces positioned in uninhabited systems, each near several Hub worlds that were close enough to the side of Human Space nearest K1 to be at greatest risk of attack. The reconstituted TF 1 was poised to guard four Hub worlds within a hundred light years of their position. TF 2 and TF 5 each had similar size volumes to protect. They were prepared to Jump on short notice if any sizable Krall attack was initiated.

If there were raids of only a few clanships, they were prepared to dispatch just enough force to counter them. If the enemy sent their entire fleet against a single system, all three task forces, and some of the Kobani would respond, if the Krall split up, they would adjust for that.

After a dozen scouting missions to Hub systems, and none to Rim worlds and New Colonies, the Krall sent two equal size attack forces, with seven hundred sixty eight ships in each group. Alders world and New Glasgow were their nearly simultaneous targets, and they were attacked with considerable fury, showing more planning than the Krall had used on raids in the past, but less preparation than used for an invasion landing.

The clanships did White Outs all around each of the two planets, and the initial attacks were on facilities and weapons in orbit. The numerous rail gun platforms were hit first, then orbital transfer stations and manufacturing centers, which also had anti-ship missile pods and plasma cannons mounted on them. The missile pods on a factory and passenger terminal were new to the Krall clanship commanders, and entailed a new learning experience against what had been undefended soft targets at Rim worlds. The education cost them four clanships.

The next targets were to be command and control centers on the surface, the anti-ship missile launch facilities, and the massive plasma cannons placed around the largest cities. The choice of Krall targets strongly suggested they intended to stay awhile in orbit, and were eliminating the greatest source of risks to their suddenly more precious clanships, leaving them free to pound on the population centers after the defenses were weakened. There were no single ships launched, or any landing of raiders attempted as there had been in past small lightening raids. They were here this time to inflict damage on what they believed humans valued most. Lives and property.

The planetary defenses had been on hair trigger alert, and had fired under AI control at the first White Outs close to the planet. Civil ships had been instructed to hold Jump energy tachyons in their traps at any port of call, and within minutes of the start of the attack, dozens of ships separated from the orbital platforms and Jumped, using less distance than was normally considered safe between ships and stations to form a Jump Hole. The Krall were the greater risk now, and if you received a fine later, at least you were alive to pay it or argue your case in court.

The rail guns had been modified to fire more than the simple slug rounds used early in the war, containing only a tracer chip to signal when it accidentally struck stealthed enemy clanships. The former diamond tipped rounds were also gone, as was the Eight Ball threat they were designed to meet.

Thanks to Kobani furnished technology and information, a stealthed clanship wasn’t as invisible as before, particularly by use of reflected low-resolution radio waves. With clanship detection improved, the rail guns were better aimed instead of being an area coverage weapon. They fired new explosive rounds with a molten copper penetrator, and used reaction mass steering of the slugs to try to stay on target. Guidance for them was done via signals sent from surface AIs that made use of the same long-wave radar detection equipment.

Target resolution wasn’t sharp and detailed, but there were a great many guided shells fired. Individually, the new shells were not very destructive but had deeper penetration, and two or three hitting at random on a clanship had better odds of damaging a missile launcher or plasma cannon port, and they might hit attitude thrusters or the main thruster, disabling the reaction mass steering of the thruster system.

If they were really lucky one or two slugs might hit where the molten copper could pierce the hull at midship, and punch through to reach a reaction mass fuel tank. Two such hits, one per tank, and the leaking binary chemicals could mix and spontaneously ignite. That bit of bad luck cost the Krall seven clanships, turned into orange fireballs in the first minutes of the attack, before energy beams finally killed the rail guns. Thirteen other clanships had to dump fuel and vent them to space to avoid the risk of a penetration of a second tank, forcing them to rely entirely on their Normal Space drives. This had little effect on the clanship’s overall maneuverability in space, except that the power drain required by the reactionless drives limited the energy available for rapidly reheating depleted plasma chambers, which fed star hot bolts to the heavy plasma cannons. The cannons couldn’t fire as frequently on those ships using Normal Space drives.

The command and control centers on Hub worlds had been made mobile, smaller, and more of them. Even though less protected they were harder to find, and they used line-of-site laser com communications to nearby relay stations to eliminate transmission intercepts. The Krall wasted heavy ground attack missiles on the former bunker locations, where spoof signals led them to believe enemy command bunkers were still in place.

The planetary defense’s ground-based anti-ship missiles were still launched when they were needed, despite the Krall’s expectation they had just neutralized the people and AIs in the bunkers that controlled them. That assumption cost the Krall 21 more clanships, which had descended into atmosphere to start low-level attacks on the heaviest plasma batteries placed around the population centers. Those big guns, designed to hit nearly overhead orbital targets, had limited low elevation capability at which they were effective, because of thicker atmospheric effects that quickly reduced the power in their bolts at shallow angles.