As arranged by Telour’s two representatives and the high status clan leaders that had been sent to verify the request for use of a living ship, they were waiting inside the large airlock. They all raced down the ramp to form a rank on each side for the Tor Gatrol. The guardians of the living ship did not leave their charge, with eight of them surrounding the shackled soft Krall, now moved away from the command deck circle deep in the ship.
Another sixty-four guardians stood with plasma rifles held across their chests, crouched and ready along both sides of the wide inner corridor, facing the closed transparent inner airlock portal, observing the scene outside through the opened outer portal. Anyone inside the large airlock would be visible to them. They would defend the ship if there were signs of interclan warfare to contest control of the vessel, and would kill the soft Krall captive, preventing use of the ship as a weapon against other clans. It was something that had never happened, but ancient protocol held sway.
There was another reserve of four hundred and forty guardians distributed in multiple large compartments within the big ship. Some of these were workrooms where instrumentation controls would have been used by the Olt’kitapi to perform manipulations of the masses of material they wanted to sort, separate, and move. There was far room within the ship for more than the five hundred twelve guardians aboard. However, protocol would not permit more than sixteen visitors inside the ship anyway. More guards than that was wasteful, and required too much in the way of food. For some ancient and forgotten reason, Raspani meat was not permitted aboard these ships, not even dried as jerky. Some old stories claimed the living ships had objected for some reason. There were always alternatives of local native animals to use for provisions.
Protocol also limited visitors that would accompany the ship when it departed on a “mission” to punish an enemy world. The fewer that knew what it did and how, the fewer could plot to seize control. Interclan warfare had been very violent at times in the past.
The two ranks standing in front of the ramp raised their left arms in unison, talons out in a salute. Telour took no notice, and stepped onto the ramp. With the recognition of him by the group salute being observed by those inside, when Telour stepped onto the ramp the warriors in the corridor lowered their weapons to their sides. When he entered the airlock, and the outer door irised closed and the inner door opened, they too saluted the Tor Gatrol. Telour, as tradition required, did return their salute in kind, for having delivered the ship safely and securely.
For the second time Telour noted the alluring scents of an atmosphere that was modeled after the Krall’s destroyed home world. He was now the commander of the ship, or at least he was the one that would tell the soft Krall what to instruct the ship to do.
Out of sight of the image recorders, he gestured and told one of guardians to lead him into the ship to meet the soft Krall pilot. He needed to explain the mission he had planned, and to describe the speed with which it must be executed. Each of the steps was to be completed quickly enough to prevent the ship from learning what it had been duped into doing too soon.
He would explain personally, to be certain the soft one understood the speed with which he must proceed. Together they would scout the systems to be passed through on the living ship, showing the guardians where the soft one would be directed to execute the Tor’s orders. Then he would have the guardians rehearse with the pilot until the complex procedure was well known.
The time of travel would be short between any of the list of stars that Frakod had provided in the human Hub region. It wasn’t the time of travel between the stars limiting how many solar systems could be hit. It was the time needed to produce each event in a solar system, which set the limit.
There naturally were no truly straight lines through five different inhabited systems, and his efficient new staff member had provided four lists of six possible stars, each having inhabited planets that matched Telour’s specifications as a Hub world, and in combination led generally towards the final target. The plots, on a navigational system, resembled slightly bent spokes, all radiating away from a central point.
Telour would select one of those routes, and he decided he would shorten the string of system candidates so that the ship would enter only four of them, not five or six. Telour would send four clanships ahead to each of the systems he would select, to stand off and wait for the Olt’kitapi ship to arrive. The ship could arrive without revealing itself by gamma rays, but if was somehow noticed and investigated, it had no defense other than to Jump. The clanships would ensure the living ship was not interrupted when it created and held the Trap fields in place for long hours, and then rotate the mass back into this Universe when ready.
The fewer number of stars to visit, after he reconsidered the list, reduced the chance that before the attack in the final system could be initiated the ship might cease to respond. That would happen if it somehow detected mass deaths in any previous systems visited. In that case, the final point Telour was trying to make with his statement to humanity would be lost.
At the end of an inadvertent bit of stellar punctuation, the dot below the stellar exclamation point was Earth!
****
In the first week of the patrol boats performing their monitoring, they reported multiple clanship White Outs. Some appeared to be scouts that popped out in a system, and left without firing a shot. They didn’t come close to any planet, and only performed active scans. It appeared these could be seeking any concentration of navy ships.
The navy had their three task forces positioned in uninhabited systems, each near several Hub worlds that were close enough to the side of Human Space nearest K1 to be at greatest risk of attack. The reconstituted TF 1 was poised to guard four Hub worlds within a hundred light years of their position. TF 2 and TF 5 each had similar size volumes to protect. They were prepared to Jump on short notice if any sizable Krall attack was initiated.
If there were raids of only a few clanships, they were prepared to dispatch just enough force to counter them. If the enemy sent their entire fleet against a single system, all three task forces, and some of the Kobani would respond, if the Krall split up, they would adjust for that.
After a dozen scouting missions to Hub systems, and none to Rim worlds and New Colonies, the Krall sent two equal size attack forces, with seven hundred sixty eight ships in each group. Alders world and New Glasgow were their nearly simultaneous targets, and they were attacked with considerable fury, showing more planning than the Krall had used on raids in the past, but less preparation than used for an invasion landing.
The clanships did White Outs all around each of the two planets, and the initial attacks were on facilities and weapons in orbit. The numerous rail gun platforms were hit first, then orbital transfer stations and manufacturing centers, which also had anti-ship missile pods and plasma cannons mounted on them. The missile pods on a factory and passenger terminal were new to the Krall clanship commanders, and entailed a new learning experience against what had been undefended soft targets at Rim worlds. The education cost them four clanships.
The next targets were to be command and control centers on the surface, the anti-ship missile launch facilities, and the massive plasma cannons placed around the largest cities. The choice of Krall targets strongly suggested they intended to stay awhile in orbit, and were eliminating the greatest source of risks to their suddenly more precious clanships, leaving them free to pound on the population centers after the defenses were weakened. There were no single ships launched, or any landing of raiders attempted as there had been in past small lightening raids. They were here this time to inflict damage on what they believed humans valued most. Lives and property.
The planetary defenses had been on hair trigger alert, and had fired under AI control at the first White Outs close to the planet. Civil ships had been instructed to hold Jump energy tachyons in their traps at any port of call, and within minutes of the start of the attack, dozens of ships separated from the orbital platfo
rms and Jumped, using less distance than was normally considered safe between ships and stations to form a Jump Hole. The Krall were the greater risk now, and if you received a fine later, at least you were alive to pay it or argue your case in court.
The rail guns had been modified to fire more than the simple slug rounds used early in the war, containing only a tracer chip to signal when it accidentally struck stealthed enemy clanships. The former diamond tipped rounds were also gone, as was the Eight Ball threat they were designed to meet.
Thanks to Kobani furnished technology and information, a stealthed clanship wasn’t as invisible as before, particularly by use of reflected low-resolution radio waves. With clanship detection improved, the rail guns were better aimed instead of being an area coverage weapon. They fired new explosive rounds with a molten copper penetrator, and used reaction mass steering of the slugs to try to stay on target. Guidance for them was done via signals sent from surface AIs that made use of the same long-wave radar detection equipment.
Target resolution wasn’t sharp and detailed, but there were a great many guided shells fired. Individually, the new shells were not very destructive but had deeper penetration, and two or three hitting at random on a clanship had better odds of damaging a missile launcher or plasma cannon port, and they might hit attitude thrusters or the main thruster, disabling the reaction mass steering of the thruster system.
If they were really lucky one or two slugs might hit where the molten copper could pierce the hull at midship, and punch through to reach a reaction mass fuel tank. Two such hits, one per tank, and the leaking binary chemicals could mix and spontaneously ignite. That bit of bad luck cost the Krall seven clanships, turned into orange fireballs in the first minutes of the attack, before energy beams finally killed the rail guns. Thirteen other clanships had to dump fuel and vent them to space to avoid the risk of a penetration of a second tank, forcing them to rely entirely on their Normal Space drives. This had little effect on the clanship’s overall maneuverability in space, except that the power drain required by the reactionless drives limited the energy available for rapidly reheating depleted plasma chambers, which fed star hot bolts to the heavy plasma cannons. The cannons couldn’t fire as frequently on those ships using Normal Space drives.
The command and control centers on Hub worlds had been made mobile, smaller, and more of them. Even though less protected they were harder to find, and they used line-of-site laser com communications to nearby relay stations to eliminate transmission intercepts. The Krall wasted heavy ground attack missiles on the former bunker locations, where spoof signals led them to believe enemy command bunkers were still in place.
The planetary defense’s ground-based anti-ship missiles were still launched when they were needed, despite the Krall’s expectation they had just neutralized the people and AIs in the bunkers that controlled them. That assumption cost the Krall 21 more clanships, which had descended into atmosphere to start low-level attacks on the heaviest plasma batteries placed around the population centers. Those big guns, designed to hit nearly overhead orbital targets, had limited low elevation capability at which they were effective, because of thicker atmospheric effects that quickly reduced the power in their bolts at shallow angles.
In the first hour, the Krall found they had lost more than four percent of their clanship force before they had even fired at the population centers. However, they “knew” they had as much as a week before the news of their attacks could reach wherever the navy had retreated. Then at least another week before the slow to act humans could reach the planets under attack. They intended to safely wear down the defenses and conserve clanships.
The patrol boats, poised a half million miles from the two Hub worlds, didn’t seem worth the effort of chasing to any of the Krall pilots, since they were small and had Jump capability to allow them to flee. However, mere seconds after the Krall arrived in each system the Comtap in the patrol boat reported enemy numbers and actions to each task force and to Koban. The relay of decisions of which force would go where was instantly shared between the three spread out naval task forces. They had been on constant alert for the past week, expecting a shoe to drop. They had contingency plans if two or even three shoes dropped.
Alders world was the shortest distance, located almost midway between two of the navy groups. A one-day Jump from TF 1, and it was almost two days from TF 5, so both forces would combine and Jump there, coordinating their timing to White Out simultaneously. TF 4, and thirty Kobani ships in a flotilla, would make slashing attacks on the Krall raid at New Glasgow, where their two hundred thirty ships would be outnumbered by more than three to one. The Kobani ships were three days away, and the navy only two, so the navy ships would attack first, to try to draw many of the clanships back up to orbit, and ease the attacks on the planet.
TF 1 and 5 would make their arrival at Alders world thirty-nine hours after the Krall started their attack. That would be roughly a week and a half sooner than the enemy would expect. The Comtap observer reported the attacks on the cities at Alders were apparently not being pressed as hard as possible, to soften the defenses and preserve clanships and missile loads for the end of the first week. By then, the ground defenses should be hard pressed to keep the Krall missiles from doing their maximum damage.
Planetary lasers and plasma cannons initially could knock many incoming missiles down, but slowly and surely, the defensive ground batteries were being knocked out along key corridors leading to the largest eight cities, done via weapons that couldn’t be intercepted. There was no shortage of power for clanship lasers and plasma bolts, so missiles could be saved for hitting structures after the city defenses were weakened.
After all, the Krall expected to spend a week of this softening-up and a week of destruction after that. The heaviest strikes would come near the end, when the clanships flew lower in greater safety. They were staying in higher orbits now, to prevent anti-ship missiles fired from highflying aircraft platforms from climbing quickly into space and reaching them in large numbers. Those human missiles were subject to laser and plasma counter fire all the way up, and only two more clanships had been destroyed in the second eight hours of fighting. Even then, it took massive and wasteful salvos.
The Krall set up a rotation of clanships, where a clan or finger clan would send their clanships down for repeated laser and plasma bolt passes over one of the eight cities for an hour or two and different clans would strafe the other selected seven cities. Then in rotation, a new clan would start strafing runs, to maintain a steady series of attacks on all eight cities, designed to wear down defenders that had a need to sleep every day. A continuous week of this and humans would be making more mistakes, unable to keep up with repairs and equipment replacement, as the Krall had long noted on Poldark and Bollovstic before that.
Their frequent high passes managed to take out a few more of the defensive batteries every hour, and they hit a large antenna array of a long wave radar system the Krall had figured out was being used in tracking their stealthed clanships. This radio wave detection system wasn’t new science, but it was a different application of old technology to the Krall, which reduced their stealth capability. It was similar to the detection system they had used on the newer and more effective human stealth coatings at K1, but in a slightly different radio frequency spectrum. However, once a clanship entered atmosphere their stealth partly vanished anyway in the stream of turbulence they left behind them, so the loss of full stealth wasn’t a critical weakness, once they understood what the system did and how. The surprise factor was gone after the initial losses suffered, and they had adjusted to the threat.
All that was required to leave these cities in flaming ruins, with bodies lying in the streets was the mere passage of time.
****
The spec ops observer in the patrol boat stationed at Alders world sent his mental images to the multiple Comtaps in TF 1 and TF 5, showing them the Krall’s present deployment formations and orbital parameters ar
ound the planet while they were enroute. They received updates every few hours, and made and adjusted their plans for arrival accordingly. Outnumbered perhaps seven hundred twenty to their four hundred ships, they knew they couldn’t expect the same full stealth capability as when they entered battle at K1, and they didn’t have the faster Kobani ships with them to draw away attackers. They could attempt the frequent Jump tactic, but without the reaction speed of the Kobani and the same high accelerations, that method was out of the question.
Their goal was for the two task forces to White Out close to the enemy, fire hundreds of anti-ship missiles, and leave ten Nova missiles behind under AI control, which should kill at least ten more clanships. They would Jump close to an outer planet, and let the patrol boat observer describe what the Krall did in reaction. Then decide on their next attack.
Almost half of the Krall force was in eight feeder formations attacking as many cities at any given time. By orbiting at nearly a thousand miles out, above effective missile attacks, these formations could provide continuous waves of swooping attackers, which maintained day and night strafing of the defenses. Most strafing clanships also fired lasers and plasma bolts on human nests in suburbs they passed over, as they were gradually able to fly lower. They hit some of the outlying buildings and industrial sites on the outskirts of the cities before climbing back to orbit, just after firing on the dwindling numbers of defensive batteries and missile sites. The defenses gradually weakened as the Krall worked closer towards the hearts of the cities. The uncharacteristic tactics were proof the Krall had adjusted to the new reality of shortages and were conserving their ships, taking more time.
Many of the large plasma cannons on the outer periphery, on the sides of the eight cities where the Krall focused their attacks, had been knocked out. Replacement big guns were being moved from the sectors not under constant attack. That decision weakened other approaches for Krall attacks, which would be arriving from new directions next week.
Koban 4: Shattered Worlds Page 69
