Koban 6: Conflict and Empire (51 page)

“Look at Detab’s Victory,” he directed his officers. “He’s deorbiting, even without atmospheric drag, or a Normal Space drive. Everyone aboard him that could get out, has done so. We can’t let him crash where the enemy wants. I think they are guiding him to crash on the domes, or the parked ships. We need to fire on him to try to change his course.” Thandol ships all had an assumed male gender, and Fendrel saw this guy needed to be deflected.

“Sire?” His weapons officer implored. “Shuttle weapons can’t do that.”

“No, not us. I mean the ships we have in orbit have to fire on him. It isn’t simply crashing, it’s being guided.”

He ignored the confused questions and protests of his own officers. There was too little time. He used his memcache, selecting Fleet Command mode, an authority which by right had been granted to the captain of Detab’s Victory, the Emperor’s second cousin. But he wasn’t answering calls, and even if he was alive, he was trapped on the planet and didn’t know what Fendrel now was certain was happening.

He addressed every Thandol at Rogue 2 that was able to receive the radio link. “Attention. This Captain Fendrel, I am assuming emergency command of the Emperor’s Fleet of Vengeance.” That was the designation the fleet would have when it was ready to depart.

“I am certain we have been attacked by a stealthed Federation fleet, using new high inertia projectile weapons, which rip through our ships with a single shot, and which disabled both Crushers. They have somehow caused the Crushers to start falling out of orbit. I can no longer see Farlol Ascendant, but both of them have become weapons in the trunks of our enemy.” The metaphor didn’t fit, but Thandol had no hands.

“I believe the Crushers will be used to smash into the gold and white domes, or into the clusters of ships parked near them. It’s too late for us to reach my ship, Farlol Ascendant, but we may be able to divert Detab’s Victory enough to save the dome, and our ships parked there. We need to combine our fire, using our missiles on one side, to try to force it to shift aside before it hits where it is being directed.”

There was an uproar from even low ranking officers on the ships that had joined his puny shuttle above Rogue 2, objecting to firing on one of the greatest symbols of the Empire’s might, only on the word of one officer in a small craft. They didn’t actually know who was linked to them.

Despite outranking them, they were in larger warships and felt a Thandol male’s reluctance to follow another male they were not certain had authority over them. None of them were the assigned captains, but there was no time for Fendrel to shift his command to a more impressive vessel.

He was forced to send a mute code to their memcaches, using the authorization he had granted himself. It wouldn’t hold long, not if over half of the other officers elected to send a response code to remove him as the self-declared Fleet Admiral. He had to convince them to listen, before the small window of opportunity closed.

He rushed to repeat his pilot’s observation, as if it had been his own, and described quickly how the Crushers had been disabled, and were now falling out of orbit, despite their drives being offline. He explained that he was confident the mass of the huge ships was to be used as artificial asteroids, to destroy more parked ships and the two domes.

His attention was briefly divided, because he saw a half dozen more ships, of the thousands that were still intact, ripped into on the plains near the tan dome, the one he could presently see the best.

A voice suddenly intruded on his general link, despite the mute command, and he discovered was now in a private link with only one individual. “Captain Fendrel.” He knew that arrogant style of trumpeting, and the snobbish inflection of his high notes. It was Captain Shanthot, who was senior to him in rank, and nobility, and the rightful Fleet Commander. “You say you want to destroy my ship?”

“No, Sire. I want to deflect him before he crashes and destroys the gold dome, where you are, and the ships parked near there. The enemy has killed his power, and are somehow guiding him down to impact with the planet, using it as a massive weapon against us. He is doomed, no matter what we do.”

“What of your ship?” he asked coldly.

“He’s on the other side of Rogue 2, and will strike the white dome, I believe. We are not in position to affect his path.”

“I heard your explanation. Have life pods cleared him?”

“Yes, Sire. As many pods as apparently were able, almost two of three of your crew survived the strike. Your ship and mine were both badly damaged, the fusion generators went offline, and the Bridge crews are dead.”

“I will miss him. You have command of the fleet until I can join you in orbit, if I live. Good fortune to you, and to us. Act quickly.”

The fleet listeners must have wondered at his brief pause, and he wanted no more questions. He resumed the fleet wide link. “Captain Shanthot just spoke to me. He’s in the gold dome, and has ordered us to act quickly to deflect his ship from the path selected by our enemy.”

His authority now bolstered, he gave the most painful orders he’d ever issued. “All ships, shift north of the equator, towards the north end axis, and launch missiles and plasma bolts into the north facing hull plane of Detab’s Victory, to force it to drift south of the equator.” The planet had no magnetic field, so one axis end had arbitrarily been determined to be planetary north for Rogue 2.

“The enemy is somehow guiding both Crushers towards impacts on the gold and white domes, or the warships parked there. We can’t reach my own ship in time, but we have an opportunity here. Fire as soon as you are able, there is little time remaining.” The huge ship was less than a quarter of an orbit from impact, and was descending faster.

How are they doing this?
he asked himself. He had an inspiration.

“I want mass density reports for Detab’s Victory. Something is pushing or pulling it lower.”

He had actually been thinking of some sort of giant stealthed tug, but one large enough for this task seemed outlandish to build, and then he had a flash of insight. There had not been a single report of a detection of the only known class of Federation warship, the captured and converted Krall clanships, and not a single missile or energy beam had yet been fired at a suspected enemy target. Where could they be?

The best trained officers from the ships aloft were on the surface, but the highly automated weapons systems and sensors on the Smashers could be controlled by voice commands to each ship’s AI, by even half-trained enlisted crew members. If those Federation ships were present, they were either far away, or perhaps so close to the Crushers that their mass distribution profiles merged with the huge mass next to them. He noted that, despite being unpowered and having no gravity control or active drive systems, the big ships had not started to roll or tumble as they were moved out of what should have been stable orbits.

The replies, from watch standers on several Smashers at once, surprised him. One forceful sounding lieutenant, claiming he was the officer assigned to his ship’s sensor division, stood out to Fendrel. He looked at the shuttle communications console and identified that respondent’s ship tag. “Emperor’s Smasher 2-1427, repeat your report.” This ship was normally stationed in the second security zone, and one of thousands of such in this Finth patrolled region.

“Sire,” came the nervous trumpeting. “There are large and indistinct masses registered, two of them actually, both below and on either side of him.” The
him
being the Crusher, of course.

The young sounding officer was clearly not of a noble educated class, and had the grammar and accent of some small Thandol colony from the central Empire region, yet he sounded competent.

Fendrel reconsidered. Perhaps there
were
stealthed tugs, with two of them working together to crash this ship on target. Except, they were below the Crusher. Cables to pull such a massive object down so strongly would surely snap, and how and where could they be attached? There were no attachment points for such a purpose. The only practical method he could envision, to do what was happening, would be to push the Crusher somehow, from above. It was a wrong assumption, but two powerful gravity fields, being remotely projected below each Crusher, naturally wouldn’t be his first or second guess.

There was no time to waste. “All ships fire on the north facing hull immediately to deflect its course. Lieutenant, on 2-1427, I want you to fire your weapons at the center of both of the masses below the crusher, and report the results to me immediately.”

The first task was to divert the course of this Crusher, if possible. The other was to see if the detected mass centers were actual enemy ships. Stealth wouldn’t protect them from energy beams and missiles. If an enemy were revealed, he could focus retaliation on them, and without their interference, the Crusher might enter a perilously low orbit, instead of continuing its descent.

Perhaps a quarter of the hundred thirteen Smashers, and at least half of the roughly two hundred Guardians in orbit, forgot his orders to fire only missiles and plasma cannons at the Crusher, and lasers wouldn’t alter its momentum in any measurable way. Even plasma bolts wouldn’t do much, but a spray of debris away from the north side of the ship would have some reaction. At least they were doing something. The explosions among parked ships appeared to have diminished, if not halted. More of them were lifting to join him. His warning that they were being targeted by something, with explosive results they could definitely see, had spurred enlisted crew members to take chances they would normally have been too cautious to attempt.

The shuttle pilot, a long time Bridge officer, was performing far above a mere pilot’s rating. He had the tracks of both Crushers presented on a split screen at his console, with a projected future track of each. The arc of the tracks was steadily updating, shifting the points of predicted impact closer and closer to the Crushers current locations, moving closer to the two domes. This shifting of impact points proved beyond a doubt the two huge craft were being steadily pulled lower faster than Rogue 2’s gravity dictated. To Fendrel, each track’s rate of adjustment looked as if they would plow into the planet in the vicinity of the two domes. The enemy had created their most potent instruments of destruction today out of the Thandol’s prized symbols for projecting their might to their subservient species.

The missiles and plasma hits on the side of the Victory was producing a slight deviation in its previous course. Aside from the impacts, there were sizable sections of hull plates, decks, and bulkheads blown away from the north facing plane, which added to the small change in momentum towards the south.

“Sire,” it was 2-1427’s lieutenant. “All beams and missiles passed through the two mass concentrations without any affect. They encountered nothing solid. Although, the missiles were deflected slightly from their tracks.”

“Thank you lieutenant. It is a mystery we will not solve today, but you have provided a useful observation and a test of what the enemy is doing. Join the other ships in our attempt to prevent the Federation from destroying the gold dome, and the ships there.”

The bombardment of the Crusher continued, and the ragged north side spewed more of the ship’s innards, and slowly, the vessel started to roll, presenting another side to target. It’s projected track now indicated the impact would just miss the dome to its south, and would no longer pass through the center of the parked ships as it struck.

His pilot and other Bridge officers, frustrated to have no means to fight back directly, instead had sought signs of the enemy, and looked for traces of the projectiles that were doing the damage to the domes and parked ships. Their extreme velocity and apparent small size enabled them elude direct detection. Nevertheless, based on the directions of debris sprays from hundreds of hits all the way through their targets, their shuttle’s AI system, not a top notch system, still had arrived at useful conclusions when they directed it to examine where the shooters were.

“Sire, we have evidence that there are no more than ten sources for the projectiles, and probably fewer if the same attackers target us from different positions. We thought perhaps they were shooting from close to the surface, but a single ship appears to fire a series of ten projectiles and then pauses, and moves slightly for another series of ten shots. Using the angle between the individual ten shots, and then from the change in direction for the next ten, we estimated the point from where they were fired. It repeatedly has been roughly a thousand miles above the surface, always at a range the provides a shallow impact angle for the arriving projectile. This increases the chance for a hit as the projectile passes through a cluster of ships. These are not as well guided as a missile is.

“There also has been a sharp decrease in the rate of hits in the last small fractions of a cycle. It is not for a lack of targets. We still have thousands of ships that were empty, or did not have flight qualified personnel aboard, and are easy stationary targets. This may indicate fewer craft, with limited ammunition stores. There have been nearly 500 hundred hits.”

All of the numbers the Thandol officer mentioned, and were calculated by their AI, were stated in their base four numbering system, of course. The clustering of ten shots in a row, and previous hints that humans used a base ten numbering system, led to an eventual estimate of only five ships involved in this raid, with repetitions of ten shots before they required a reload. A ridiculously low number of enemy for the hideous damage so few of them accomplished.