Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (85 page)

He had just applied max thrust when a Novae missile intersected with the fuel tender next to him, who despite Krall reflexes, barely flinched from the blinding flash before the blast front composed of atomized metallic sleet tore his hull apart. He didn’t have to endure his regret very long.

****

Two hours later, the patrol boat gleefully reported the entire Krall force at Alders had Jumped. The patrol boat’s Tachyon Wave detector, when they followed for a short time, sensed they had actually departed, traveling in the direction of K1.

Initially, the Krall had gathered their forces together in a two thousand mile orbit. Even with two hundred seven losses from their initial seven hundred sixty eight, they still outnumbered the four hundred enemy heavy cruisers by a hundred sixty one. A clanship piloted by a Krall was more than a match, one on one with a heavy cruiser, but they hadn’t brought many anti-ship missiles, expecting to be gone before the navy could get a force here to counter them.

The raid came equipped only for ground attacks, and couldn’t send a significant force down against surface targets to weaken defenses while exposed to hit and run space attacks. They had lost two hundred and seven clanships on a raid where they had estimated they
might
lose thirty of them, perhaps 5% in the worst case. Instead, they had lost nearly 27%.They could have launched all of their heavy missiles at the cities before departing. However, the new raid leader knew that the navy with their anti-ship missiles, and the largely intact ground defenses could both fire on them as they did that, and they would have more clanship losses for a very limited attack success of their own.

With over half of the ground defenses still intact, launching missiles from too far out would result in most of the missiles being destroyed, and going down close would add to clanship losses from the navy and ground forces. As it was, a Maldo clan sub leader, now holding the highest status on the raid, decided that dead Pradop could absorb all of the lost status here today, and do so on behalf of his Graka clan, which had been lording it over the other Great clans since the battle at Telda Ka. Besides, he rationalized, even a twenty-five percent loss on a raid had always been an acceptable level for honor, where a raid commander was justified to withdraw and review the results.

****

The damage to the Krall at New Glasgow was less severe, with only half as many attackers. However, the initial White Out missile launches by TF 4 did significant damage, where the Krall, a conservative thinking race, was using the identical attack strategy as employed at Alders. This strafing method of wearing down a foe was apparently a tactic described in their histories, and it had worked in similar large raids against previous species.

Due to the lower number of heavy cruisers in TF 4, it was unable to engage all the eight formations orbiting New Glasgow. After the opening attack, the raid leader diverted half his force to guard against attacks, making the process risky for the humans. There were only five Novas with TF 4, and one of those missed it’s intended target, also a fuel tender, when the fast thinking pilot of the tanker pulled himself free of tethered clanships and had moved far enough that the White Out of the intended intersect found empty space. That region was quickly filled with energy beams. Without the interpenetrating masses intersecting upon the White Out, the Nova missile alone exploded with hardly a flash.

One finger clan, with less influence for gaining the supplies they had wanted, had received less than full loads of ground attack heavy missiles. Therefore, they had brought along additional anti-ship missiles, just so they would have something more to launch at the planet when the final days of the raid were ending. Their flexibility managed to destroy three heavy cruisers, something they would learn the raiders at Alders had failed to do.

The thirty Kobani ships arrived almost a day later, but they had been kept informed of the actions at New Glasgow. Individually, each Kobani captain received a more detailed set of images from the patrol boat observer. The exact location and identification of all forty-three of the Krall clanships that had fired the anti-ship missiles was noted by AIs. Each of the defensive screens around the eight Krall attack formations had some of those clanships with anti-ship missiles with them. The strafing runs had resumed, if at a slightly reduced level.

The Kobani, with greater maneuverability and more stress tolerant, had greater confidence in the performance of their ships than did the navy. Each one of them selected a specific ship to target. Via Mind Taps, sharing all the various Kobani tactics tried at K1, they slashed into the screens of the enemy formations in individual White Outs, right behind their intended targets. Firing all four heavy lasers at the side of a main thruster, followed up with a well-placed plasma bolt, the bell of the thrusters was cracked, and additional bolts and lasers did serious damage to the same clanships. They launched anti-ship missiles at dozens of other attackers prepared only to strafe, and then Jumped away before more than a few energy beam hits touched any of them. They killed thirty-six clanships on their first pass, and half of those were the clanships with anti-ship missiles.

Their second pass was even briefer, and two Kobani ships were assigned per target, killing another fifteen of the enemy, firing a heavy salvo of missiles and energy beams without suffering a loss. The last Krall craft with anti-ship missiles were now drifting debris fields.

The raid leader, mindful of Telour’s injunction to preserve clanships if possible, recognized the punishing blow planned for the planet was less than a tenth done, and could not be fully successful. Unlike at Alders, he ordered his clanship commanders to launch a heavy bombardment from five hundred miles, concentrated over the two largest cities, and then they Jumped for K1.

Some of the still operational heavy plasma batteries around the cities, combined with navy missiles, cost the raid leader six more clanships. However, the onslaught of so many heavy missiles coming directly down on them was too massive for the defenders to stop all of them.

There wasn’t anything the navy, a thousand miles out, could do to help. They physically couldn’t react quickly enough. However, trusting their IFF systems to prevent friendly fire by the AIs that controlled the ground defenses, the Kobani Jumped in close as the Krall left, and managed to take dozens of the missiles out. The ones that hit home caused considerable damage, with nearly mile high structures collapsing. The death toll for the four days of the attack would be in the hundred thousand range, but the larger buildings blasted at the very end had been evacuated in the first days, the worker and residents now in underground bunkers.

Those two raids represented two firsts for humanity. No raiders, certainly not on this scale, had ever been driven away from a city let alone a planet, not until the Krall had completed what they came to do. The attacks were usually finished before any reaction force could arrive, due to the delay time for Jump travel to notify the PU military.

However, it was difficult to take solace while looking at the smoking ruins of the centers of the two cities on New Glasgow. Nevertheless, the PU military could see this might be a turning point in the war. It was, but not the one they thought they saw.

Telour confidently walked away from the living ship, thinking that after this week, his insistence that these vessels be described as
death ships
would appear in the histories, a term attributed to him. He had just traveled to ten systems in four days, but the combined time of all Jump travel was less than eight hours total. He and his two aides, and the sixteen ship guardians on the command deck with them, spent most of the time looking at the current planetary orbits of the outer giant planets in each system, in relation to the settled inner worlds.

Only one of the candidate systems was reversed from the usual habitable arrangement, with the only two gas giants present orbiting closer to the star, with the inhabited world placed well outside their orbits. That candidate system was rejected by Telour, although a K’Tal said it shouldn’t matter for what the Tor Gatrol intended. Telour persisted in thinking objects could only fall deeper into the gravity well of the star.

He finally chose three stars systems in the Hub region of Human Space that had a gas or ice giant presently in an orbital location on nearly the opposite side of the star from the inhabited planet. The stars also lay along a relatively obvious line towards Earth’s sun. The planetary positions provided him with the time delays he had counted on in his proposal to the Joint Council. He wanted to stay with that idea, even though he effectively
was
the council for now, until a new one was formed. He could have changed his plan if he decided to do so, and answer to no one. However, he couldn’t change his original proposal significantly because the multiple systems he wanted to target required this delay strategy.

At least until the last system. He didn’t need to visit that one because it didn’t matter where any of the large planets were in relationship to Earth. The closest or largest would do fine. Perhaps more than one could be used. The more destruction the better.

With the targeted star systems identified, the soft Krall knew exactly what he would be instructing the ship to do. They had always visited each system by exiting well beyond the outermost planets, and used the navigation console to project a holographic layout of each system as it looked from their remote location. The known habitable planet was a mere speck in the display at that scale, which they never examined at all. They studied only the large outer planets for where they were in relation to that speck, and selected one of them to use in another week, when the ship returned without Telour aboard.

Through orders given to the soft Krall, the living ship was told only that a series of massive construction projects were under study, and the potential systems for the projects were being visited. The standard instruction to the ship, learned from hard experience by the Krall many thousands of years ago, was for the soft Krall to tell it not to monitor or to send any electromagnetic signals until instructed differently.

That communications restriction needed to be applied before the ship even Jumped, because it moved so far so fast. It would not be allowed to detect the radiations emitted by the technological civilizations in each system.

Such an instruction by itself would have raised a suspicion in the mind of any Krall, and probably for many species. However, these ships were machines that were built by a trusting species that had never thought to use them improperly. As intelligent and capable as the ships were, and alive to the extent they repaired themselves almost organically, they followed the instructions they received when they came from a trusted source. An adult Krall’tapi was such a trusted source for this ship, if the representative had an embedded quantum key, and that key reported a genetic pattern that was not designated an untrusted species. The Krall’tapi was easily distinguished from the other genetically related creatures that were aboard now. Those passengers also had an embedded quantum key from the builders, but their genetic pattern was specifically identified as untrusted, and no living ship would accept instructions or requests from them. They were permitted to go on board but not to instruct the ship’s operations.

The discussions held between the two species could normally be overheard, and was in a language the ship understood. Unless the ship was told to seal a compartment, which it did when it was ordered by the trusted one to grant them privacy, it heard all conversations. The ship knew that the trusted operator sometimes listened to and repeated instructions from these others, but it relied on the operator to direct the ship in a proper, safe, and constructive manner. Just as its long absent designers did.

The ship was aware that much of the structure and pattern of its internal mind, its built-in restrictions and sense of what was proper conduct, was a direct copy from the minds of its designers, the Olt’kitapi. It trusted an operator with a key provided by its builders, if the operator had no restrictions on them as defined by the builders.

The ship was not aware that it, like an Olt’kitapi’s mind, could not be forced into taking actions an Olt’kitapi considered immoral. It sometimes discovered there were things that it might not know it couldn’t do until confronted with the instruction to do the thing. It encountered one of its few known examples when it was instructed to depart from its long time resting place.

By relay, the soft Krall issued the instruction for the ship to travel a modest distance through the galaxy to a planet, and told where to land on its surface. The navigation system had already been marked with the destination, including a specific area on the zoomed in image of the surface of the planet. However, the ship advised the trusted operator, even before it would move that it could not safely exit the alternate travel universe directly to the surface of any planet.

It surprised the Krall, who had not expected the ship to attempt a surface White Out at all. The soft Krall, who had never left his home dome, hadn’t wondered about this at all. The Krall only wanted to show it the place where it would land after a White Out at a safe distance. With that precaution to be observed, the ship then departed directly from where it was parked, and traveled for slightly greater than twenty-eight hours to traverse the approximately seven thousand one hundred twenty four point two light years to Telda Ka. It could have crossed the disk of the visible portion of the Milky Way galaxy, close to 100,000 light years in diameter, in ten and a half days. The average energy of third level tachyons was so vast, and the geometry different, that like a leaf blowing in a hurricane, it required a much shorter time of travel to reach the equivalent coordinates in Tachyon Space that translated into the Normal Space coordinates of the destination.

With this greater energy level came the attendant precision on an even smaller scale. T squared travel provided for an arrival into Normal Space that was accurate to within less than a mile, compared with the original accuracy of one or two Astronomical Units, possible when only a rotation into the first level of Tachyon Space was used.

T cubed Jumps theoretically yielded an uncertainty to within millimeters, provided the quantum computer used for the complex computation had adequate speed and precision. The Olt’kitapi system was reasonably close to optimum. It could target a spot within several feet of a designated coordinate point. 

With this precision came the ability and need to better control the White Out, and the Olt’kitapi staged the exits so that as they rotated from the third level of Tachyon Space, the energy released by the expansion and dissipation of the event horizon was released into Tachyon Space at level one before the final rotation. There was no need to expose nearby Normal Space objects to potentially damaging gamma radiation. Nor should the final rotation into Normal Space be virtually instantaneous, to allow more time for matter, such as thin atmospheric gasses to be gently shoved aside. The arrival exit was safer and less noticeable by design, and didn’t happen with a bang or dangerous radiation.

However, a departure could generate a rude and inconsiderate thunderclap if you ordered your ship to depart when it was enclosed by dense atmosphere, as the gases slammed together to fill the vacuum left behind. The process was safe for material objects close to the craft (if they could withstand the thunder-like concussion). The entire skin of the ship was dimpled with microscopic Trap emitters, so the Jump Hole itself was formed to exactly the dimensions of the hull. It never took more than an atom or
molecule
of external material with it when it Jumped, if even that.

Good manners dictated that before a departure you lifted to a low atmospheric pressure, or even to vacuum, to prevent a noisy departure. It was no surprise that this was not the usual Krall preference. They always departed with a crashing boom, according to the histories. They liked to make an impression.

Telour addressed the throngs of clan representatives in the great central hall of the larger Graka clan dome. The Prada workers had just finished erecting a central platform, with another raised dais on that, for the gathered sub leaders of the Great and Major clans to stand just below him, the Tor Gatrol.

“I will send a hand of a hand of clanships ahead, as escorts for the Olt’kitapi
death ship
, as I now order all to describe these ships, as a more appropriate description. The pilots will be selected from the Great and Major clans by lottery. Four clanships will wait near the designated exit points in each system, where I will furnish them with the arrival coordinates. They will leave today, to be there waiting for the arrival of the death ship later this week. Their task is to protect the death ship from possible human investigation while it works. In the unlikely event that they notice its presence in their remote outer solar systems. The secondary task is for the ships to observe what happens after the death ship departs, and to record and bring back the images.

“The ship says the time needed will vary in each system. Some targeted solar systems may require four or five hands of hours, to as few as three hands of hours to trigger the result required. The violence of the event varies by how long of a delay is needed. That is subject to factors we cannot predict exactly. I am the first war leader ever to do this.

“All of you heard me describe the method of punishment. There is no possibility the humans can pursue the Olt’kitapi ship itself because it travels too fast. However, as it nears its final target, the star system where Earth is found, a week may have passed, perhaps allowing them to understand the fate that is approaching their home world. We cannot be stopped, but humans may try to search the enormous volume of each star system seeking the point from which we will attack.

“Their navy forces will not be close enough to help them search. As I speak to you, the two halves of our fleet are attacking two of their Hub worlds, and their navy will Jump there too late to find more than flaming ruins where we drew them. They will emerge to learn that those worlds were the lucky ones. Those worlds will live to experience our invasions, as we slowly crush them.”

He paused to lift his arms dramatically, talons extended, and roared his next words, “Humans will never defy our warnings again, after I have killed the billions living on the four planets I will destroy. We will run along the Great Path after this victory!”

The raucous screams of support vibrated the struts supporting the dome. The noise level was great enough to force the warriors on the higher platform to retract their ultrasonic ears to guard their hearing. It lasted for minutes before the greatest Tor Gatrol, in Telour’s mind anyway, waved them to silence.

He looked down at the eager muzzles of the Great and Major clans waiting for his next orders. “Select your sixteen pilots and their clanship crews, which I have honored you to send, as witnesses to how I will force even this most Worthy Enemy to bend to our will. Send them today, so that we can start this great punishment!”

More screams of encouragement sounded, as he climbed down, his ears protectively retracted, but still hearing the satisfying sounds of overwhelming support. The humiliating attack on Telda Ka, and the retaliation he was about to mete out to the enemy cemented his position, as the great leader he wanted to have described in future histories.

It was nighttime at the dome when the sixteen clanships had hurriedly launched, four of them designated per star system, more as ceremonial honor guards, sent primarily to furnish eyewitnesses to what happened, something Telour wanted described in his legacy. Collectively their stories would build to the conclusion Telour wanted every living Krall to hear. That this Tor Gatrol did more than merely invade the enemy worlds to punish them for transgressions, because that was a fate they had already earned by existing.

It was daylight again before the first wind was removed from the puffed up chest of Telour. The tattered formation of clanships sent to Alders world raggedly performed their White Outs over Telda Ka. There were too few of them. More than two hundred too few in fact. Telour, tired in basking in the admiration of warriors from clans he didn’t actually like, had withdrawn to the highest level of the dome. He was there when the watch standers and orbital clanships reported the unexpected and early return of a large number of clanships.

Telour’s flash of fear, a rare emotion for any Krall, was that these were part of a fleet of human controlled clanships come to hit Telda Ka when it was nearly defenseless. That sort of wasted attack on mere
property
would not be a Krall strategy, but might be what an irrational human reaction could be. He was on the verge of bolting down a stairway again when he learned this was the Alders attack force.