Also unfortunately for Blug, the EMP effects of a 20-megaton nuclear blast going off right over his head didn’t do his precious self a hell of a lot of good either. The 6.5 megawatts-per-square-meter of electrical power imparted by the EMP blast induced sufficient eddy currents to ignite his highly inflammable, oxygen-impregnated clothing. Over half of the courtiers in his throne room were killed outright when Blug, himself, suddenly erupted in a truly impressive fireball.
* * * *
The Raknii Imperial Planet of Raku
May 11, 3868
Xior awoke drowsily, oddly feeling better than he had in cycles. Is this death? Opening his eyes, the first thing he saw was his old friend, OverMaster Varq, smiling down upon him.
“It’s about time you rejoined us,” said Varq softly.
“Oh, Dol,” Xior squeaked.
Varq chuckled. “Hardly, I highly doubt that our god is anywhere nearly as ugly as I am. Here, let me get you something to drink.”
Xior’s throat was too dry to speak, and Varq lifted him, and gave him a frosted bowel of Jla juice that Raan had imported from the Trakaan that Xior had taken such a fancy to. Xior lapped the ice cold tart-sweetness of the juice slowly, and luxuriated in the feel of it soothing and moistening his raw throat tissues.
“Thank you. I remember commanding Drix to kill me. How is it that I am still alive?”
Varq snorted, “It appears that your heir has a mind of his own and wasn’t inclined to agree with your assessment of the absolute necessity of your death.”
“So, what happened?”
“He had a hidden syringe prepared and he surreptitiously injected you with a fast-acting drug which rendered you unconscious and give the outward appearance of sudden death,” replied Varq. “He broke a capsule with his teeth just prior to ‘ripping your throat out’ and ‘breaking your neck’ with his fangs, so when he released you and withdrew, your throat had the appearance of a bloodied ruin for the cameras. To everyone, except Drix and me, you are quite emphatically dead.”
“So, my heir insists that I must continue suffering the pain of this wasting disease longer than I’d like, eh?” asked Xior. “I’d have thought that he was more merciful than that.”
“Are you suffering now?” asked Varq.
Startled by the question, Xior paused to take stock of the feelings within his body and replied, “No, actually I feel better than I have in ages. How is that possible?”
“Blame Drix’ pet human,” answered Varq. “It appears this High-Human of his is not only an expert in architecture and philosophy, but a master scientist, chemist and physician as well.”
“Hal is responsible for relieving the pain?”
“Not only for relieving your pain,” Varq stated. “Hal claims that the progress of your disease has been arrested and given time, may actually be cured some turn.”
“CURED?” Xior startled. “How is that possible?”
“We’re not sure,” replied Varq. “Hal provided Drix with detailed instructions for producing a whole regimen of drugs totally unknown to our science. Chemical compounds, exact measurements, step-by-step procedures including exact processing mixtures, times, pressures and temperatures. Our scientists are quite excited by the whole thing, as it appears to have opened an entirely new field of study for them.”
“Amazing. But how am I to avoid notice?” asked Xior. “It will create catastrophic upheavals in our society, if it became known that I am still alive and that Drix’ ascension to the supreme-mastery after my supposed death was a sham.”
“Fear not, my friend,” chuckled Varq. “That part was my primary contribution to your new role in your physical afterlife. Supreme-Master Xior is quite dead, and you are now as invisible to society as I am. For the moment, you wear the onyx and sunburst rank-stones of an OverMaster.”
* * * *
Chapter-18
Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil. -- George Gordon, Lord Byron
The Slithin System, Raknii Space
May 12, 3868
Tzal hid his great fleet amongst the millions of rocks orbiting in the asteroid belt. He didn’t know it yet, but with Blug’s fiery exit from this vale of tears, Tzal was now the highest-ranking Raknii in the entire Slithin system. When the planet rotated far enough for communications signals from the planetary side undamaged by the EMP blast of the nuclear detonation to reach his fleet, it was apparent that Slithin was half-normal and half in complete chaos.
Very little of the advanced technology that Raknii civilization had come to depend on worked on the half of the planet facing Slithin Station when the blast occurred. Communications were down. Most ground vehicles were dead. The power grid was virtually destroyed and other utilities such as water and sewer didn’t work, as the controls and power conductors for the pumps were fried. Half the planet was suddenly blown back into the stone age and its citizenry struggled to distribute basic necessities such as food and clean water to its teeming billions.
For half a turn at a time, Tzal was in badly time-lagged laser communications with Planet-Master Paeb who, with no communications from Blug coming out of the regional capital, appeared more than happy to submit to Tzal’s orders. With Blug out of the communications loop, Tzal was torn between his duty as ranking Raknii master to overseeing the emergency relief efforts for billions of his people on the planet, and his duty to stand ready to repel alien invaders, who, he was sure, would be appearing soon.
Many could not imagine the aliens crossing such vast distances to launch attacks in Region-4, as they would have had to navigate clear across Regions 5 and 6 unmolested, just to get here. Some even questioned as to whether the cataclysm might not have been the result of some catastrophic reactor accident aboard the station itself. Tzal, however, had few personal doubts about the root cause of the disaster. He’d faced humans before and little they might do, or be able to do, would surprise him.
Eventually Tzal’s conundrum solved itself when several of his new carriers and heavy cruisers hidden amongst the asteroids began mysteriously exploding, with no indications of anything amiss prior to massive explosions occurring at their sterns. Tzal knew instinctively that Drix’ assumptions about the humans possessing some kind of undetectable wonder ships must be correct. But how many of such technological marvels could they possibly have?
Logic dictated that the complexity of building something of such incredible sophistication meant that there really couldn’t be that many in terms of actual numbers, but could he afford to just sit here as the humans destroyed his marvelous new warships one-by-one, until their supply of ship-killer missiles was finally exhausted?
How many invisible ships, carrying how many missiles?
Instinct told him it couldn’t be too terribly many, but there were just too many variables… too much unknown. Tzal gave new orders to be flashed amongst his fleet for each of them to find an asteroid of sufficient mass to land upon, in order to make it harder for the enemy to spot them.
Patrolling fighters reported only an occasional ship destroyed after the fleet went to ground on separate asteroids, so a drastic reduction in losses was achieved by Tzal’s tactic. They also reported a significant number of asteroid mining facilities were being attacked after the fleet grounded and became harder to detect.
They’re trying to destroy our eyes out here.
Tzal knew that something was approaching. He only hoped it was a something they could destroy.
* * * *
The Slithin System, Raknii Space
May 13-16, 3868
Tzal created a schedule and passed the word for each ship in his hidden fleet to take a turn in rotation to make a single scanner sweep of the outer system. Most of his ships would be able to receive the return echoes from those brief transmissions. Whatever was coming in, Tzal wanted to spot it as soon as possible.
Even so, the three large incoming blips were disturbingly close before their Doppler scanners were finally able to different
iate them from the gas giant directly behind them.
They must have skimmed through the gas giant’s outer atmosphere and emerged along the equator to be so perfectly aligned to the direct line between the huge planet and Slithin.
Initial reports from patrol fighters sent out to take a closer look at the intruders were confusing, as there wasn’t really enough ambient light for a decent visual and their scanners merely showed three medium-large asteroids, small planetoids in their own right, inbound on a suspicious flight path towards Slithin, or the system primary which also happened to be situated along the same line.
How could three asteroids of such size possibly break out of whatever orbit they might have once been in, and go careening through space on such an odd flight path, without some outside influence?
The intruders were not on a collision course with Slithin, but they did project to at least have a close encounter with the planet.
Why would the humans launch asteroids toward the inner system, if not to use them to impact the planet itself? Could it be that’s what they intended, but simply failed to achieve the proper trajectory?
Tzal decided that he needed to take a closer look at these mysterious asteroids, to determine whether they really constituted a threat or not.
* * * *
“Admiral, we’re being pinged by significantly stronger scanner signals than those we interpreted as probably coming from fighters, a few hours ago.”
Rear Admiral Stacey Irwin, squadron commander of the three new Confederate asteroid-battleships sat in her command chair aboard CSS Behemoth and perused her displays showing her what their passive ECM suite was picking up. Six scan signals from six slightly different bearings. Frequency, scan type and signal strength was consistent with those small corvette-class warships the Raknii used, at a calculated range of approximately 5-10 miles. CSS Leviathan and CSS Gargantuan remained in perfect formation to either side of Behemoth, and Gargantuan maintained constant communication with both through tight-beam flicker laser.
“Very well,” said Admiral Irwin. “Comm, signal the squadron to remain buttoned up and continue coasting on present course. No offensive action or active scanning is to be utilized.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
“Let’s let the kitties sniff around a bit,” said Irwin. “The closer we get to the planet before they discover who and what we are, the better. It’s not like those little pea-shooters of theirs can hurt us anyway.”
“It looks like they have fighters in this system, Admiral,” said her Flag-Captain, Roger Cameron. “We’ve not seen that before. If they’ve developed fighters, it’s likely they may have some heavier warships here too.”
“We don’t know that for sure, Rog,” answered Irwin. “We can’t know much of anything for sure until we light off our active scanners. But our job is to get in close and draw whatever forces they have in this system into combat. Even if they’ve got a few battleships out there, we can take more than they can dish out. Remember what the Defiant stood up to, and we have a lot more armor than she does.”
The three big asteroid-battleships had arrived at Kitty Litter too late to actually see Defiant grounded, in all her battle-damaged glory, but they’d all seen the pictures. Those pictures made the crews of Irwin’s squadron feel a whole lot better, knowing they all had at least 500 feet of artificially hardened nickel-iron between them and whatever the cats could throw at them. Cameron just hoped Rear Admiral Irwin wasn’t placing too much confidence in the idea that the enemy didn’t possess the means to hurt them.
All men die sooner or later — except for Edsel Murphy and his stupid law, both of which are still alive and well in the 39th century.
* * * *
Tzal sent over a dozen of his upgraded old-style warships, which had all undergone weapons upgrades to field three, single 6-giagwatt pulse laser turrets, rather the their original three, twin 3-gigwatt mounts they were now calling destroyers, to get a closer look at those three mysterious asteroids that were inbound approaching Slithin. All but six were somehow destroyed en route.
Our invisible human “friends” still have some missiles left.
These ships carried a variety of high-intensity spotlights on board, which could illuminate the exterior of the asteroids in normal light, as well as a full range of scanners that could analyze them in the entire spectrum, from infrared to ultraviolet. Although the surfaces initially appeared irregular enough to be naturally occurring asteroids, in-depth analysis of the photographs revealed that all three displayed curious “lumps” that were suspiciously arranged in fairly regular rows of various sizes and similar arrangements.
That isn’t natural.
Infrared analysis revealed faint straight-line cracks resembling small doors in most of those lumps, and what appeared to be very large ones at the rear of the asteroids.
Doors? Is it possible there could actually be someone inside those asteroids?
Tzal then sent a dozen more ships to some of the still-surviving mining facilities within the asteroid belt, to gather ground-penetrating scanning equipment, specially designed for analyzing the interior of asteroids. Only one actually managed to retrieve the desired equipment and made it back to reach the suspicious asteroids that needed analyzing. All the rest fell victim to those maddening human ghost ships, who obviously still hadn’t run out of missiles yet.
* * * *
The new Confederate stealth cruiser CSS Banshee and two of the smaller Infiltrator-type intelligence vessels, CSS Phantasm and CSS Apparition, were tracking every cat ship that moved in and around the asteroid belt by passive infrared scans, and moved invisibly with their unique, undetectable gravitic drives into position to kill them. They’d been having themselves a field day so far, killing over thirty cat ships having heat signatures resembling cruiser mass vessels and ten of what appeared to be small carrier massed ships. They’d also destroyed over forty of those small corvette-class warships, whose heat signatures were well-known to the fleet, and almost fifty Raknii mining facilities they’d located scattered throughout the asteroid field.
Phantasm and Apparition were both out of missiles by now, but they could still inflict some damage with their single 5-gigawatt pulse lasers... more than enough for dealing with mining outposts and those small corvette-type warships the cats had so damned many of. CSS Banshee still retained about fifty high-yield, short-range, ship-killer missiles, as well as her three double, 11-gigawatt main turrets and her light cruiser’s complement of twin 5-gigawatt mounts.
Confederate Captain Michael Diamond had been thoroughly in love with his prototype intelligence-gathering vessel, the original CSS Ghost, for which that class was named, but what he felt about Banshee was damned near sexual. Even the surfaces of her massive weapons barrels were all angled and coated, so even allowing her additional size, her scanner reflection profile was no more than the size of a man’s head.
This wicked bitch gives me a hard-on!
* * * *
The one converted Raknii “destroyer” to have survived to make it back with the ground-penetrating scanners matched speed and landed on the surface of one of the outermost of the three asteroids that were headed inbound, approaching Slithin. Space-armored Raknaa assault-troops helped to wrestle the scanner out onto the asteroid’s surface, so that an Engineering-Master could make recordings of what lay beneath the surface in various places on the asteroid. The cruiser was uploading the data coming from the scanner to their secure comm, and was beaming it back towards the asteroid belt, so that Tzal could receive and record the readouts in somewhat time-delayed, real-time.
The asteroid itself was showing a relatively standard nickel-iron composition to a depth greater than the scanner’s design limits of 150 body-lengths of scan range depth could penetrate. One great oddity noted was that the outer surface seemed to have been heat-treated somehow — artificially hardened to a depth of approximately one body length. Tzal couldn’t imagine what kind of facilities the humans would have needed
to employ to accomplish that sort of thing intentionally.
Was it possible that it was a naturally occurring phenomenon from some close encounter with a star in the distant past?
On their current trajectory, the three asteroids were projected to pass through the outer corona of Slithin’s primary. It was possible the three would survive and swing around the primary in a long elliptical orbit of several hundred cycles in duration.
Was this a natural occurrence, or were the humans really that detail-oriented in their attempts to mask their involvement in launching these asteroids into the system?
The larger lumps showed a hardened depth of about 1.5 body-lengths, with a cavity of some kind within. The medium-sized ones showed similar cavities at a depth of approximately one body-length, while in the smallest ones, the interior cavity began at approximately three-quarters of a body-length depth. Tzal’s engineering-masters were of two minds about these cavities and lumps —they could be naturally occurring phenomena as the result of out-gassing, which could conceivably occur within the outer atmosphere of a star, or they could be artificial. There was something within those cavities, but the resolution was fuzzy, so they kept trying to sharpen the images of the interiors of those cavities through computer enhancement.
* * * *
The Raknii Imperial Planet of Raku
May 17, 3868
Xior awoke to find his heir, Drix, at his bedside. Xior was momentarily startled at seeing another wearing the rank-stones of the supreme-master, as he’d not seen such since his own sire wore them before Xior had ascended to the supreme-mastery himself.
“How are you feeling, sire?” asked Drix.
“Feeling? Actually, I feel pretty good, for being dead,” chucked Xior. “Why did you not kill me, as I commanded you?”
“Hal was extremely confident that he could concoct new drugs that would both alleviate your pain and arrest the progress of your disease, thereby extending your life,” replied Supreme-Master Drix. “He also believes that, with time, he may also discover a means by which your condition may be cured entirely.”
Wrath of an Angry God: A Military Space Opera (The Sentience Trilogy Book 3) Page 20
