“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.
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“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.
Again, it was like a repetition of the previous attacks the Federation had conducted in Empire Space. Massive damage done while using few attackers, and employing stealth, or deception to get close to relatively undefended military targets, and employing unusual tactics and weapons. They seemed to always chose targets that were presumed safe because of where they were located, or in the case of Rogue 2, at base so secret that it wasn’t even known to their security species, the Finth in this region.
Fendrel, even without the benefit of the hindsight that would eventually evolve, already knew there wasn’t many of the enemy, and they had run out of ammunition, or their weapons had a limited number of repeat shots possible, like a plasma cannon after the ceramic barrels cracked and needed replacing.
He linked fleet wide again. “I call on every ship in orbit, or that can reach orbit. I believe the enemy has ceased firing at parked ships only because they are unable to do so anymore. They have done significant damage, but five hundred destroyed warships are but a tenth of this great fleet’s strength. What they are attempting to do now, by crashing our two Crushers in a controlled fashion, is to damage or destroy thousands of our parked ships.
“It is too late to alter the track of Farlol Ascendant, which will impact near the white dome. However, I order you to continue firing missiles and plasma cannons into Detab’s Victory from the north side, to shift him to the south, away from his present track to strike the gold dome and our ships parked there. Both of our Crushers are doomed, and have already suffered severe damage. We cannot save them, but we can thwart the enemy by saving as many of our other ships as possible, and those of our people trapped in the gold dome. To those operating the additional ships that have just lifted, I order you to join with the rest of us in deflecting the weapon they have made of that great ship.”
Renewed explosions tore into another side of the Victory, as it rolled like a wounded animal, trying to escape its tormentors. It presented a new face to the weapons that were ravaging it, and they pushed it slowly on a more southerly track. It was almost enough.
As the humongous craft neared the surface, one corner struck the plain ten miles from the south side of the gold dome, but he would obviously smash through some of the ships clustered farther south of the dome. A tremendous spray of ancient gray regolith spread ahead and to the sides of that corner as it dragged, like some vast plow turning over the soil.
That pressure applied incredible stresses to the structure, and hull plates and structural members bent, then tore free. The vessel’s slow roll turned into a ponderous tumble, as the pyramid’s corner dug deeper, finally meeting the unyielding underlying bedrock. The stress fractured the rigid thick trusses that formed the edge framework, and one face swung down quickly, to smash into the plain nearly face down on that side.
The entire structure of the enormous ship shifted, twisted, and shattered, as a vast spray of dust, rock, and structural material from the ship flew ahead and to the sides, with some sections of the internal modularity of the ship’s construction tearing free of their neighbors. It was still miles from the southern edge of the hundreds of ships on the dome’s south side. However, it was apparent that the debris, some thrown higher as the tumble accelerated, was spreading wider, and huge sections would rip into and shatter many of the parked ships, and fragments would even strike the southern side of the two-mile-wide dome.
There was no atmosphere to keep the dust suspended very long, but it also didn’t hinder it’s rise, as the five miles per second velocity of millions of tons of metal smashed into the surface, vaporizing some of the planetary rock, along with the structural steel of the deepest penetrating bulkheads and decks. This was nearly as violent as would happen with an asteroid impact, although this collision was at a considerably lower velocity than most of those were.
The huge spray of surface impact debris flew ahead of the heavier material, covering the ships and dome with the light surface dust and small rocks, concealing view of the destruction as the shattered ship and fractured bedrock smashed their way through any opposition.
Fendrel couldn’t see how widespread the damage was below his shuttle yet, and might not for long minutes as the high flung dust settled. The images from the few Smashers on the opposite side of the planet, who had made a heroic but futile effort to divert the Ascendant, revealed the shallow impact angle of that instrument of destruction had been accurately targeted. It struck the surface no further than a half ship length from the outer edge of the targeted plain, which was covered with parked ships, and it would sweep through the center of their clustering.
Over a thousand ships vanished under the onslaught of dust, which spread over them and concealed them ahead of the advancing destruction. The white dome was struck by more and larger debris that was the gold dome, and that would increase the lives taken there.
Fendrel had a self-serving thought. If Shanthot has survived, he will have to explain this military disaster to the Emperor, not me.
****
Sarge summed it up nicely, with an odd sounding complement to Mirikami. “Well, that’s another fine mess you’ve made.”
“Thanks. I try.”
“What do we destroy next? They still have at least three thousand ships here.”
“Nothing worth the risk.” Tet told him. “Our Grav gun magazines are empty, although we do have twenty anti-ship missiles left between the five of us. They can’t do a lot of damage compared to what we’ve already done, and they’ll reveal our locations, and how few of us there are if we launch them.
“There’s nearly a thousand of their ships aloft now, and they’re so gun shy that they’ve fire wildly at even the scraps that were blown off the Crushers. We’re in Scouts, not heavy cruisers. We might not withstand a heavy laser or plasma bolt hit, should they accidentally connect during random return fire, directed towards where we were when we fired. I’m sending you four home, and as we told you previously, Maggi and I are going to visit the Hothor and Olt’kitapi.”
Noreen asked, “What were you going to do there? I don’t recall you saying.”
Maggi, who had planned the visit, answered. “I have ideas to share with them about how to disrupt the Imperial Court with false rumors. They have thousands of Hothor employed on Wendal, or by other noble families on other Thandol planets. There are dozens of extended and powerful Thandol family herds that are not part of the Farlol line.
“The Hothor also know which other species have similar employment placements, and which ones might be willing to share the risks of planting evidence of a coup in the making. I have one hundred additional Prada com sets to give them, and a few dozen subversive seeming files that could implicate influential Thandol, who might plausibly wish to replace the Emperor, or support someone else who wants the throne.
“Most of what I want to plant is in the form of digital files, although I have some subversive slogans written in Thandol script, recorded on an erasable crystal matrix they sometimes use for temporary private communications. We found some of the crystal tablets in the section of the Crusher I sheared off and took with me.
“Those can be left, accidentally of course, where allies of the present Emperor can find them. In addition, we have
the memcache addresses of a large number of mid to high level military and political leaders. We’d have to ask the Hothor to use the Prada com sets at relatively close range, on the same planet that is, to send these files to their memcaches. We have unlimited range with our Comtaps and Prada com devices, when those operate in tachyon modulation mode, but Thandol memcaches only use radio, with a range that is considerably less than planetary distances in a typical solar system.
“The subversive files I’ve created were tested for their effect on our two Thandol officers. It produced the proper outraged reaction in those loyal Farlol the 84th supporters, and they would have reported those communications to higher authority, as I want to happen. I used their thoughts to improve the grammar and phrasing, to alter them to ensure they were subtle enough, with no clue as to who sent them. These are tentative solicitations for the individuals I’ll target, to inquire if they would accept future roles of greater importance, either within a new Imperial court, the military High Command, or if they would like to rise in power and influence within some department of government. These solicitations would imply the positions would only become available should the Imperial Throne become vacant, for any reason, in the near future.”
Dillion was puzzled. “How does this involve the Olt’kitapi, Maggi? If you give more of the com sets to the Hothor, you bypass the need to communicate with the Hothor by relay through the Olt’kitapi. Those isolated insect representatives of their species have been in hiding a long time, and they appear to have withdrawn from a leading role in guiding developing species, as they once did. I’d think you would want them to become more involved, not less.”
She sounded enthusiastic and excited with her reply. “That is changing, I think. At least according to the Dismantlers, who have furnished them with the full history of their once glorious past. They now wish to understand how our Comtaps work, and particularly how their own designs for Olts and mind enhancers do, because we do not experience the overwhelming emotional impact that they, and their Dismantlers suffer, when mass deaths of millions of intelligent minds occur, and they are responsible in any fashion.
Koban 6: Conflict and Empire Page 42
