Koban 6: Conflict and Empire (18 page)

In a rush of hindsight, she realized he shared the same grace and economy of motion, with a sense of unusual strength, which she’d seen in Mirikami and a number of his people. And if Nabarone was what he called a
full
Kobani, he had Mind Tap. She’d heard that Admiral Mauss, a person she admired and respected, had become one.

Damn! She realized she wanted that too.

Nabarone guided the discussion back to the topic she had told him was the purpose of their meeting. It hadn’t been about Kobani conversions. It was about pulling his troops out of the dwindling fight, as the Krall were dug out of their last strongholds.

“I’ve already pulled my most effective troops out of the fighting on K1 and Bollovstic, to give them a break. It’s possible they’ll get involved if the Empire decides to invade Tanner’s world. Mirikami was told, by his sources inside the Empire, that their proxy fighters, the Ragnar in this case, are most often used in ground actions. Because this is to be a Thandol led punitive strike, they may not be used this time. I don't want to load my people onto your transports too soon, since being stuck on a troop ship for a month or two is boring and morale sapping.”

She nodded. “I’d considered that. I’m sending most of my cruisers early, to Dawson, the Rim colony ten light years from Tanner’s. It’s a pleasant place, I’m told, with natural leisure activities for crews with a month of leave, such as beaches, mountains, and ski slopes. There aren’t very many bars, or many other typical spaceport vices available, but to my mind, that’s a plus to have fewer drunken sailors to bail out of local jails.

“I sent an advance courier there to meet with their president, Shalane Gundarfem, who said the local economy would look forward to the surge of spending from thousands of navy personnel on leave. My troop carriers can stay here another month or two, until you feel the time is right to load them up and follow me to Dawson. If we have more wait time, they can take ground-side leave there as well, if that’s what you wish to do.”

“OK. I’ll start gathering the K1 troops I’ll send with you, and give them a bit of leave. I plan to use the same large island to gather them, where the Prada and Torki work on restoring damaged clanships for the Federation. That island was left relatively untouched by the Krall, because they didn’t particularly like being around Prada or Torki. It’s commercially undeveloped, of course, but there are beaches and a warm climate. The Prada have said they can turn out a few hundred small boat hulls, with tachyon trap powered motors in two days, at a low cost. I can ship fishing equipment, water skis, parasails, and other recreational gear from Poldark overnight. My units already have portable Smart Plastic housing that I can move there with them. Not glamorous, but not front line war either.”

She concurred. “I’ll land my transports for loading when you’re ready, and those crews can take leave with mine at the same time. My cruisers depart in a month for Dawson, and I may go with them. I’ll wait there and work on plans for coordinating with the Kobani fleet, at least until I receive word from Mirikami’s monitors that a Thandol fleet is inbound. It’s a short Jump to Tanner’s after I recall my people. I can Jump my combat units with about a day’s notice, to get them back from ground side.”

****

“Sire, the new departure target date you’ve set is ten cycles early. The eight Stranglers borrowed from security sector two won’t be here in time to swap the Finth crews with ours, and install the appropriate species adaptations. The smell in the crew quarters would be almost unbearable for several days after that anyway.”

Thond flipped a dangling left wrist and hand dismissively. “Those ships will have to follow us afterwards, unless that falgrat loving Thandol inspection team orders them to submit to a walk-through. If the Thandol commander doesn’t wish to inspect them, and with the Finth stink still inside they might not go inside, tell our crews to wear battle armor until those ships are cleaned of foul territorial scent marks.

“Regardless, we can’t hold to our original departure date, not with the inspection team arriving five cycles before that. A huge collection of ships in orbit would be impossible to explain. Particularly it’s warship ratio, comprised entirely of our ships, except for the Stranglers. Then there’s over five hundred loaded cargo ships, half belonging to alien species. Those captains would certainly complain to the Thandol about being commandeered by us. The inspectors would ask to see the mission planning, and then brief their High Command promptly. They, of course, don’t know what we’re doing, and would not approve if they did. We have to go early.”

“What if they arrive in a monitor ship, as such teams often do? To see if we appear to be hiding ship movements from them, which we certainly have been doing.”

“That’s another reason for the fleet to depart well before they arrive, when they’re out of detection range. We don’t have everything as ready as it should be, but with the surprise route we’re taking, the humans won’t see us coming. I don’t think they would be as gullible as the Thandol, who actually saw the two disguised human raids approaching Wendal and Meglor. We will avoid Federation monitors at the border at the same time we fool the Thandol monitors.”

“Holy shit! Where did they all come from?” Athena Christopoulos, captain of the Hermes, and commander of the hundred ships in the flotilla at Tanner’s world, suddenly found her ten squadrons engulfed in a swarm of one thousand Ravagers, a hundred enemy ships per squadron of ten.

None of the patrol boat AIs, monitoring for tachyon wakes coming across the remote Empire border, had warned them of the inbound enemy fleet. They simultaneously appeared without warning gamma ray bursts, of course. Only Kobani reaction speed gave most squadron members time to launch anti-ship missiles, and then execute preplanned micro Jumps. These were actions they had not expected to take for four months, at the earliest.

One ship in the squadron with the Hermes, the Farquhar, exploded from multiple missile hits an inexplicably long three seconds after the enemy arrived. It hadn’t launched missiles, maneuvered, or fired defensive lasers, and none of its crew made a Comtap call. Clearly, the Farquhar’s Bridge had been left unattended for those critical seconds. Station keeping on constant patrol was a boring job, and this attack struck far sooner than was predicted.

For a frantic couple of seconds, the scramble of similar exclamations of surprise and needless warnings from the other ten squadrons filled everyone’s Comtaps, before a sense of organization rapidly prevailed, and most ships had Jumped clear.

Not every squadron had fared as well as the one where Hermes was a member. After her own ship’s preprogrammed Jump, Christopoulos suffered the shock of learning that thirteen additional Kobani ships under her command died within two seconds of the enemy’s arrival.

Her one hundred Kobani ships, divided into ten squadrons with crisscrossing equatorial and polar orbits, deliberately using only the weaker original Krall stealth capability, discovered just how hazardous being “bait” could be.

A thousand Ravagers had rotated into Normal Space, one hundred of them surrounding each squadron of ten Kobani ships. The Ravagers AI’s fired five self-guided anti-ship missiles from each attacker, at the very instant their event horizons quietly vanished. The Ragnar damn well weren’t going to give these fast reacting human bastards the same ridiculously long warning they’d been forced to provide them on the previous ambush, at the Federation colony world named Zanzibar. All of these missiles had actual warheads, without the useless denial chip logic the Ragnar were ordered to test with unarmed missiles. The Thandol High Command had caused that fiasco, and not a single human ship died in the initial salvo.

The only misgiving Force Commander Thond had, was the enemy’s use of the same type of stealth his ships used, and not the superior version employed at the Zanzibar colony after the fight had started. In uncharacteristic caution, he only sent half of his Ravagers on the initial strike, just in case they needed to Jump away from a far greater fleet of better stealthed human ships, or he could send in that other thousand Ravagers to ambush a modest number of unseen human ships if they appeared. He held back all of his six hundred Shredders, a smaller lighter armed ship, better suited for fleet defense than the sort of slugging and slashing assault the Ravagers were designed to conduct.

Instead, most of the enemy ships demonstrated that nearly instantaneous AI level of reaction by firing back, before they quickly micro Jumped to what were clearly precomputed higher orbits. That it was a preplanned action this time was obvious, when they recovered in ten compact groups, but with fourteen members missing. At Zanzibar, they had scattered randomly, like insects from a kicked nest, proving they had no reaction plan in place, and hadn’t expected an attack. This time, there was another new aspect to their response. They emerged in the higher orbit without the revealing gamma rays that had made them better targets previously.

He may have killed fewer of them than he’d expected, but he lost only three of his Ravagers from their rapid return fire. His ships had also promptly launched dozens of smaller anti-missile defenses, and used a combination of decoys, ECM, and small counter missiles, as well as defensive laser and plasma fire. Three of his overeager captains had made their exits too close to their prey, and their defensive measures had too little time to be effective for them. Still, he’d traded fourteen of the enemy ships for three of his on the first strike this time. Now he needed to maintain or improve on that kill ratio.

The eighty-six surviving enemy ships had reappeared five thousand miles farther out from the planet, without the gamma ray splatters, so only active radar scans found them. They obviously had improved on their ship rotations from Tachyon Space, and the speed with which they had made that change gave Thond pause. At least his flagship’s sensors could still see their shimmery stealthed outlines, like those seen for his own ships, as viewed from his observational vantage point, located twenty thousand miles above the planet’s northern pole.

Then his distrust of how visible the enemy ships had been on their arrival was rewarded, if that was the appropriate term. In mere seconds, they all vanished from his view screen, which was fed by data from their electromagnetic sensor suite.

He growled at one sensor specialist, sitting at a nearby combat center console. “Sensors, did they Jump again?”

There was a moment’s pause as the operator checked a new screen, recently added to his station. “No, Sire. Mass detections show they remained close together after the Jumps, but when we lost sight of them on electromagnetics, mass detection shows they all started moving out of their new orbits, probably spreading out to avoid our possible follow on missile and plasma fire. These mass detectors are considerably less precise than our electromagnetic sensors, unless we get much closer.” He looked at the recently added Thandol built mass detector screen closely.

“Sire, they seem to be spreading out much wider, and multiple smaller masses are harder to follow manually. We don't have the Thandol mass tracker computers, only their sensors.”

After the attack on Meglor, Ragnar technicians learned from studying transmitted and preserved combat performance recordings, that prior to the Empire’s Trumpet’s first internal explosion, on the Crusher’s primary Bridge, they had fired Decoherence bombs at a nearby mass detection, which had produced no electromagnetic returns near those same coordinates.

Thond’s own analysts, applying his suspicion of a better stealthed human ship, thought there was evidence that the Thandol’s after-action analysis had missed. They thought it was a mass sensor glitch, or a reflection they had fired at, caused by the thousands of pieces of spinning debris from exploding docks and ships.

Thond thought it could have been an electromagnetically hidden human command ship. Which meant that a gravitational mass detector still might be able to locate them, although not as accurately, at long range. He wanted some of his ships equipped with such detectors, which the overlords never provided to the Ragnar, who were not given Decoherence bombs and launchers either. The Thandol didn’t share their most effective and proprietary weapons technology with their security forces.

Fortunately, every Thandol operated Smasher normally had high quality mass detectors installed, even if they didn’t have a Decoherence bomb launcher. As part of the species adaptation package, when a Smasher was loaned to one of their security forces, those modular detectors were removed, and the ship’s controls and console language markings were swapped out with custom panels for use by the Ragnar, Finth, or Thack Delos.

At Meglor, there had been many Thandol operated Smashers destroyed, with pieces sent pinwheeling away from the docks. Showing how helpful the Ragnar could be to their Empire overlords, Thond had sent Ragnar recovery teams to help gather up the dangerous large debris fragments filling space in chaotic orbits around Meglor. The master race hadn’t noticed that the Ragnar teams focused mainly on Smasher debris, and that not all of the scrap was returned for reprocessing. Now the Ragnar possessed a number of higher quality mass detectors, systems they had never found a need for, since they had no Decoherence bombs to launch anyway.

“Are there additional hidden ships present here?” The mass detectors didn’t work from Tachyon Space, and he’d only been in Normal Space for a short time. Until the human ships activated better stealth, after their micro Jumps, he’d not thought to ask for a mass detector report.

“No, Sire. The ships we first saw are now the only unseen masses indicated.”

“Good.” Then he made what would eventually prove to be a miscalculation, and ordered his ghosting ships to make their exits from Tachyon Space. He should have ordered constant monitoring of the total number of observed mass detections. Instead, a courier ship Jumped into Tachyon Space and transmitted his orders to the rest of the waiting fleet. Another three thousand six hundred and forty-one ships, of all types, promptly appeared over Tanner’s world. He was starting the invasion. A mere eighty-six enemy ships couldn’t do more than harass this size fleet.

****

Mirikami acted quickly. “Athena, I’ll order the nearest fleet elements, two flotillas like yours, to join you. They should be there within three hours from the closest two of our colonies, but that will only be two hundred more ships. We can have two thousand there in thirty hours, with some hurried preparations here at home.”

Mirikami knew he’d failed this flotilla leader and her captains. “I’m sorry that we let you down. We didn’t believe the Thandol were capable of reacting so quickly, a month instead of five months. Your lowered stealth level was for Empire scout ships to report back how weak we appeared, and our fully stealthed fleet was to be posted in-system when they arrived. They struck when we were actually as weak as we appeared. I’m sorry.”

“Tet, we wouldn’t have seen them coming anyway, even four months from now. They hit us without making tachyon wakes along our border with them. I checked repeatedly each day with the patrol boat AI’s. Unless the Empire found a new way to travel fast through Tachyon Space, without making any wakes, they didn’t come straight at Tanner’s from the heart of the Empire.” She offered her speculation.

“Sir, they took a page from our tactic at Meglor, and went around the border monitors to come in from another direction. There isn’t a single patrol boat posted in Human Space because the PU isn’t a threat to us. I think they came from the galactic core side of Human Space, across the gap between the Orion Spur and the Sagittarius Arm.”

Mirikami agreed with her on-site assessment. “They must have anticipated we’d watch for them at our common border. It only adds two or three days to the travel at T-cubed level. I should have thought of that. Even so, we wouldn’t have been ready, because according to reliable information the Thandol never conduct a major attack with so little planning time.”

“Tet, it may not be a Thandol operation. From our sensors reports there isn’t a single Smasher among the ships that attacked us. They were all Ravagers. A thousand of them, and they split them into ten groups, a hundred surrounding each of my squadrons. I lost fourteen crews. At least that’s how many ships haven’t reported. It’s only been a few minutes, but for us, that’s a long time. I want to hit back.”

“Athena, if you move to engage them, don’t risk being enveloped again, or take unnecessary risks. Even when the next two hundred ships arrive, you’ll still be hugely outnumbered. Although, I’m surprised they only sent the Ragnar with just a thousand ships. That’s not a lot for a planetary bombardment, considering all the resources they have available.”

“Well, they didn’t even pursue us when we Jumped up to 5K orbits. We dispersed of course, but instead of following us, they promptly started attacks on the major cities, using mostly plasma and laser cannon fire. Missiles would be largely ineffective if fired at the large cities from space, at least until the PDF’s space defense laser batteries are knocked out. The Krall raid defenses were already up and…” there was a midsentence pause.

“Damn, Tet!” It was a mental shout over the Comtap link.

“There must be thousands more of them. A swarm of ships has just emerged over and around Tanner’s world. Give me a second. My AI’s gathering data from squadrons on the other side of the planet…” Mirikami anxiously waited for her to send the bad news.

“So much for that
small
thousand ship ambush that puzzled you, Tet. Another three thousand six hundred forty-one ships popped out, and all we managed was to kill three Ravagers during the initial attack, and we lost fourteen.”

She offered her blunt opinion. “Reference the two thousand two hundred reinforcements, which you mentioned a minute ago? They don’t sound so damned massive to me now.”

“Right. We’ll have to send more; we already were preparing to do that, but not as quickly. About two thousand ships are gathered at Koban and Haven now, two thousand or so are spread out near our colonies, and some are being recalled from the Rim worlds, where they were hauling cargo. We need to get more of them home, to arm them with the new nova bombs, and Mind Tap the crews on their use.”

He asked for more details. “In addition to the Ravagers, how many Smashers did they bring, are there Stranglers, and did they send a Crusher?”

Christopoulos again checked with her AI, which had continued to gather specifics for the other ship’s sensors.

“Uh…, there was another thousand or so Ravagers, nearly six hundred smaller sized ships, which the AI says are called Shredders. However, we haven’t seen a single Smasher and no Crusher, but there are close to eighty of the Debilitater equipped Stranglers. There are eight long bodied new design ships, which have small craft attached to their outsides. Those small craft are separating as we watch. They’re about the size of space planes, such as our Shadows and the navy’s Starfires. The eight ships they came on must be carriers. We also see four hundred of some fat bodied ships with one flat side, and two angled ends, which reminds me of the PU’s troop ships. Those navy landers can carry foot soldiers and armored vehicles, unloading from a single forward ramp. If that’s what these are, they might have ramps at both ends, to offload faster. There are over five hundred of various designs and sizes of ships that stayed well out from the planet, and appear to be cargo vessels.”