Koban 4: Shattered Worlds

by Stephen W Bennett

  “Only, they hit us first. They knew how long the return time was for our radar echo and they started for us almost exactly when it would arrive. We lost the Kiwi for that mistake, and only killed one of them. We left them behind and went after the Olt’kitapi ship, which was gone when we arrived. It’s probably headed for one of your two systems.”

  Mirikami answered first. “Noreen, I’m not at Pittsburg II yet so I hope it isn’t headed there or to Earth next, because that would bypass me. I hope not, because think we’re better equipped to face them than the navy is. However, I still think it will arrive at Bootstrap shortly, with Thad’s squadron set to intercept. I don't know how fast it travels, but it won’t be measured in days for that short of a hop. I don’t think it left K1 until days after we did, and it still beat you to Meadow.”

  Thad said, “That big ship wasn’t detected arriving at K1 or at Meadow by gamma rays, so how will I know when it arrives here?”

  Noreen told him what had been her clue. “Watch for the Krall clanships to move to surround it for its protection. That’s their weak link. The Dismantler is hard to detect, but the clanships painted a bull’s-eye for us when they micro Jumped to meet it. If they did that at Meadow, they probably all have the same orders. The fighting that happened here after the Dismantler Jumped will be unknown to the four clanships at Bootstrap. They’ll repeat the same mistake.”

  Tet had an observation and a question for Noreen. “The Dismantler left before you got close, so its departure must be what allowed the clanships to Jump inward to attack you. They wouldn’t have left that ship defenseless to go fight you, since you or part of your squadron could leave them behind, as you did. It had spent two days there. It must have finished what it came to do. Did you see anything unusual before you Jumped to where it’d been parked?”

  Noreen answered in the negative. “We didn’t detect anything unusual, but at the velocity of light things can happen and you don’t know about them right away. What does the patrol boat observer say about Meadow? We were over an hour out from them in light travel time when we Jumped.”

  “Hold on. I’ll link to him.” Mirikami said.

  In a minute Tet was back. “He says Meadow is fine. Kelly Handler, our Comtap observer, is only a few light seconds from the planet. I wonder what in hell the Dismantler was doing for two days. I asked the patrol boat to Jump out near the gas giant, to see if the Krall clanships hung around there. I guess it’s possible the Dismantler Jumped in with them, and stayed out of way of the fighting, undetected, but close enough to start dismantling something. That’s a bit devious for typical Krall thinking, but we’re teaching them how to think that way.”

  After that, Mirikami spent a few minutes consoling Noreen, and the four captains with her, on the loss of those on the Kiwi. He had just told them he was only hours from a White Out at Pittsburg II, when a panicked Comtap link came from Kelly, directed only to Mirikami.

  “It blew up! The whole damn thing is coming apart. We have to get out of here and warn Meadow.”

  He cut off without more explanation. Mirikami could sense the link was still available, but nothing was being sent. “Kelly?” he inquired, widening his own link to include all of the Kobani ships in the squadron. He had a chilling thought.

  He repeated his call. “Kelly, I sent you to check on the three surviving clanships. What blew up?” He feared the answer he expected.

  The reply came hurried again. “Sorry Sir. I had to get my pilot moving, she froze. Thor is fragmenting. There are huge chunks of dark rocky type material punching out through the cloud tops, and the atmosphere has ballooned out hugely, with wide crevasses deep down between tears in the clouds. There are continuous giant lightning flashes that would fry an entire world.

  “There’s a tremendous amount of radio static at all frequencies from the lightning. The pilot was trying to radio Meadow defense command, when I reminded her we could Jump back there and tell them sooner. We just trapped a tachyon and are getting out of here barely in time. Some of the pieces I see tearing out of the cloud tops have to be larger than Meadow itself. Smaller pieces, perhaps the sizes of moons and asteroids appear to be glowing and molten. They must be moving faster than escape velocity, even from this huge planet. The enormous scale makes it hard to estimate speed because it looks like slow motion. Let me send you an image before we Jump.” It came, and then the live image ended as the patrol boat Jumped. However, the vison lingered in the minds of everyone Mirikami was connected to by Comtap.

  “Meadow is doomed.” He stated with certainty. “They can’t possibly evacuate more than a fraction of their population in the days or even weeks they have left. Noreen, they’ll be in a panic and I can’t blame them. Take your ships in to transport as many people you can to…,” He paused a moment. “There isn’t any place safe in that entire solar system. Take them to the nearest habitable world. I don’t know how long before any debris reaches inward to Meadow, but even the smallest fragments I saw from Kelly’s image are large enough to sterilize the surface of any terrestrial world they strike. Significant sized small pieces may take weeks or only days to fall inward. It’s going to be random.

  “Fragments blasted away against orbital motion will fall inward sooner and many pieces will arc outward then fall back in comet like new orbits through the inner system. This will make the Late Heavy Bombardment of Earth’s solar system, four billion years ago, look like a rainy day with a few hailstones. Every inner planet in that system will be pulverized.

  “You can Comtap to get more ships headed there for evacuation before then, but it will be hell loading them in an orderly fashion with the panic, and there isn’t going to be enough capacity for more than a few percent of the population. Its certain death to stay behind anywhere in that system. Mobs will be tearing things apart to get their families off Meadow.”

  Noreen added a thread of hope for more survivors in the hard days ahead. “The orbital stations and habitats are mobile, they have Normal Space drives. They might be able to climb above the ecliptic and inward over the star, at least for long enough to avoid fragments until they can be evacuated. Most orbital factories had Jump drives to originally deliver them where needed. They may be able to reactivate them in time, and escape with as many people as they can carry.”

  Mirikami shuddered. “Two billion, four hundred million people and most of them are going to die, no matter how hard we try to save them.

  “Thad,” he said. “Bootstrap is probably next. Telour has found a way to stave off the mass deaths long enough to let the Dismantler trigger destructions of multiple systems. That ship will have time to repeat this several times before the planetary fragments of the outer giant planets fall in and kill the populations. I think he intends to march down the line and smash all four inhabited worlds with just that one ship, saving Earth for last, using Jupiter as his weapon there.”

  Chapter 19: Travel Time to Destruction

  Mirikami’s squadron reached Pittsburg II, and just as Noreen and Thad’s groups did, his six ships performed a White Out shielded from the Krall by the only outer giant there, a Neptune massed planet that had a large rocky core with a puffed up atmosphere that made it larger in diameter than Neptune. A dense asteroid belt and another rocky, iron rich planet inside Pittsburg II’s orbit provided more of the resources for which the metal rich system was noted.

  He let Noreen and Thad know he’d reached his destination, and heard a follow up report from Noreen about the inevitable panic already started on Meadow, and the exodus of nearly a thousand crammed Jump capable ships, which would have time for multiple return trips. Most were headed for a lightly populated Hub world nine light years away, Atlantis, which produced mostly aquatic foods and products on a planet eighty five percent covered by seas.

  Even local system ships, without Jump drives, were boosting to points out of the ecliptic and above the poles of the star, to outrun debris long enough for rescue. Commercial, and some military ships, were inbound for orbital pi
ckups of people ferried off planet, alerted by Comtaps in patrol boats at other systems. A few cargo ships were coming from Atlantis and others from Hub Worlds that were close enough to try. The race was on for orbital stations and factories to accept people brought up by shuttles, and then to start to move away from the swarms of debris that eventually could overtake them.

  Mirikami didn’t want to seem disinterested or detached, but he couldn’t affect things or help Noreen or Meadow from where he was, and he needed time to confer with Thad. He wished her good luck, and advised that he had just had a very unpleasant set of Comtap relays with Medford and Bledso, whom he eventually and frankly told that he couldn’t spend any more time debating with them about how the K1 attack had triggered this Krall reaction. Not while the second stage of the threat was advancing on Bootstrap.

  He quit answering their further requests for a Link, and told Thad to do the same until they had decided what to do, and had done it.

  Mirikami felt extremely frustrated to be so far from where he expected the next action to take place and yet be able to know, almost instantly, what was happening there. His AI’s best estimate, for travel time of the Dismantler ship from Meadow to Bootstrap, was much less than a day, simply based on a roughly estimated departure from K1, and the repositioning of the clanships at Meadow that had signaled its arrival there.

  He was torn as to what might be the best advice to offer Thad. One option was to attack the four clanships immediately, eliminate them and lie in wait for the Dismantler to arrive close by, then move in and attack before it could escape. Perhaps Thad’s squadron could wait where they were until they knew it had arrived, based on clanship repositioning movements to show them where it was. They could Jump to attack it then, presumably before it started the destructive process.

  Tet told the Comtap specialist on the patrol boat to get in touch with the local government, and try to get them started on organizing evacuations. To check with Bledso’s and Medford’s Comtapers if he needed help with influencing the Governor to act.

  Thad’s squadron, 1.3 light hours away from the four clanships, wouldn’t know when the big ship arrived unless the visible clanships Jumped to reposition to where it appeared, creating new gamma rays that would take over an hour for him to detect.

  “Thad, you are in a position where you can observe the clanships, right?”

  “Sure. We’re positioned near the outer planet here, and we each have acquired a passive view of them. We started looking at the White Out coordinates provided by the patrol boat as soon as we arrived. I don't want to warn the bastards with an active scan this time. We are boosting towards them on Normal Space drive so they won’t see us coming without them using active scans of their own, which they didn’t use at Meadow.

  “However, they’re too many hours away even at high acceleration unless we micro Jump. In Normal Space movements, we can’t shave much off the hour and eighteen minutes of one-way light time from them, not in the time we probably have. Their location in the outer system makes them hard to pinpoint for a micro Jump if they move very much before we go. I don't know how to estimate the amount of time we have left after the Dismantler gets here, or which world they’ll destroy.”

  “Thad, it took two days to blow up that super Jovian, which had seven times the mass of Jupiter. I have an opinion as to which target world it will be, but which one does your gut say it might be. I think that choice is a clue to the time they will require to be done and leave there.”

  Thad thought a moment before answering. “Well, the hot Jovian near Bootstrap’s star is the largest, at nearly five times Jupiter’s mass. However, Bootstrap is the third planet out, and fast fragments climbing out of the star’s gravity might take so long to reach Bootstrap that they could evacuate too many people to make the Krall happy. The second world out is about the size of Mars, and I don’t think it’s enough bang for those overachievers to use. They can’t kill Bootstrap directly, because the intelligent ship can apparently find out about the deaths too fast. Even if we don’t know how it does that.

  “Therefore, I’d expect them to blow up the next planet after Bootstrap, where we did our White Out. I think this ice giant is larger than Neptune is in Sol system. Tet, how does that tell you anything about the time they need?”

  “Well, you homed in on the same planet I picked, and I have one more argument to support its selection. The Krall did their White Out far out from the planets, which places them twice as far away from the very largest planet, compared to the one they used at Meadow. Right now, they’re much closer to the big Neptune, which you and I both picked. I also don’t think it will take as long to destroy this one, which lets them move on to Pittsburg II sooner.”

  “Why is that?” Sarge asked over the link.

  “That was a core explosion at the Meadow system. Not perfectly symmetrical, from the pattern of metallic spectrum debris Kelly saw shooting out, but that material certainly came from deep inside the core. Jakob told me that its core was mainly metal, composed primarily of iron and silicates and about 20 to 25 times Earth’s mass, surrounded by liquid metallic hydrogen and helium, buried far below the tops of the crushing atmosphere. There is no real base to the atmosphere or a definitive hard surface, since the density and pressure increases continuously with depth. The planet had a radius of about sixty five thousand miles, and had about 2,200 times the mass of Earth according to Jacob’s data. It would take a lot of energy to blast it apart so completely against that pressure and gravity.”

  He had a thought about that, and even though he was in a mental Comtap link with all of his and Thad’s squadron, he spoke his next words aloud for another listener.

  “I don't know if the energy required to destroy the planet came from anti-matter, or by initiating a stellar type fusion reaction, or some means like anti-gravity. That size planet was nearly a failed star, and was held together tightly. Jakob, do you have any information on the energy available from the ideas I mentioned, that could break up that planet from its center?”

  Jakob’s reply came over a speaker, and Mirikami included what he was physically hearing as part of his group link. “Sir, the force of the breakup was greater than would occur from somehow initiating a stellar level fusion reaction in the liquid hydrogen surrounding the metallic core of the planet in question. The heat and density there is not great enough to sustain a fusion reaction on its own or else it would already be a small star.” He continued.

  “If a powerful and extensive fusion reaction could somehow have artificially been started in the complete shell of liquid hydrogen, it would have compressed the core, which would not result in core breakup or the large molten fragments that were observed escaping. Fusion reactions attempted in the iron core itself would consume more energy than was released, which is why Super Novas undergo stellar collapse when natural fusion processes reach the atomic mass of iron at their centers.

  “The rate of fragment expansion we observed proceeded much faster than a hypothetical anti-gravity affect, and gravity was still functioning normally because the atmosphere did not fly away as fast as the core material was ejected through that. I have no data that describes a large scale antimatter reaction, nor how a large quantity of antimatter could be created, and then placed within the core of a planet.”

  “Thank you Jakob.” Mirikami didn’t need any more discussion, even if the AI had more alternatives to offer.

  “OK, people, so the planet exploded violently somehow, and I think the time needed to produce this effect is tied to how powerful an explosion is required to break it apart. For the Krall’s purpose, I believe it’s related to how massive the planet is that’s being destroyed, and how fast the fragments will travel. I think the number and speed of fragments is the key to their strategy.

  “At Bootstrap, and at Pittsburg II, it will likely be the Neptune type ice giants to be exploded. Thad and I jointly suspected the ice giant was better positioned for use at Bootstrap. Such a world is much less massive than th
e super Jovian they just used at Meadow, and has a far smaller core of perhaps four or five Earth masses, sitting deep inside a planet with only about twenty times the mass of Earth. The core detonation doesn’t need to be as powerful to blow one like that apart, and if the blast is too great, the fragments might start striking Bootstrap and kill the population before the next two systems can even be attacked, which could cause the Olt’kitapi ship to shut down. I know that Earth is their final target, so they won’t overdo it at Bootstrap or here.

  “For that reason Thad, I don’t think the smaller explosion required there will take as long to produce. You can’t count on a two day delay this time.”

  “OK. Then we won’t wait to confirm the Dismantler has arrived first. We already see its clanship reception committee, so we’ll Jump and attack them as soon we can…” He paused to check with his squadron.

  “We go in about two minutes, with all weapons ready, and four targets divided between the six of us. We’ll kill the clanships and then wait for the Dismantler to appear nearby. With four of our ships set to match Krall clanship stealth standards, we’ll Jump over to meet it while they think we’re friendly, and blow it to pieces. The other two fully stealthed ships are backups if we fail.”

  “OK. Good hunting people.” Mirikami said. “Keep us updated.”

  ****

  Pildon was worried. The smaller pieces of the first destroyed planet were spreading rapidly, and he feared he might not be able to complete the full mission. His family might pay the price if it was incomplete.

  Huwayla, despite their already considerable distance from the “disrupted” planet initially, in local speed of light terms in the outer system, had just Jumped to begin travel to the next targeted star system. Nevertheless, the ship was somehow able to show them a relatively close view of what was happening near the shattered planet.