Turning to the Comm/science officer of the boat. "Burp laser flash to all boats. Attack plan delta 5 in one minute." Then turning back to the Ensign. "Cue initiate in 50 seconds on my mark Ensign."
"Eye, Eye Captain. Command ready on your orders Captain."
Jack took a deep breath wishing there was some other way to do the attack but still could not think of a better approach. Nor had anyone else at any of the meetings they had had over the last week. Trying to go over the rough rocky surface of the bubble on foot to get to the Battleship would have taken them months since the horizon from the top of the Battleship sticking up out of the bubble, was a thousand miles across. "Three, two, one, deploy."
The Ensign tapped her finger on her screens icon. The last Assault Transport in each of the V lines peeled off in opposite directions followed by the next and then the next, until Jack's Transport was all by itself flying straight and true.
Jack took a deep breath knowing that they were committed now. Turning around he looked over his shoulder again at the tall thin creature in a chin to floor length narrow suit that looked like a dress with huge breasts that were not just breasts but storage sacs for oxygen when she needed them. "Can you talk to the slave crew on that battleship yet Pan?"
"I am so sorry Captain but with all the interference and the curvature of the bubble, I may not be able to contact them until we are in line of sight."
"Oh just great. Pop our head up over the horizon just in time to get it shot off." Jack started easing the Assault Transport closer to the mass of rocks and slag covering the outside of the bubble. What looked like a huge field of gold boulders laying flattened across the surface of the bubble streaked past. Jack knew the outside shell of the bubble was turning out to be a cornucopia of heavy metals concentrated from trace particles over billions of cubic miles of cloud by the rapidly expanding plasma bubble from the explosion the size of a small sun, scooping the particles up and concentrating them. Then as the rapidly expanding bubble of plasma slowed from friction hitting the mass of cloud particles and the viscosity of the plasma, the lighter elements were thrown off while the heavy particles concentrated in the plasma, rose to the outside surface of the molten carbon in rough piles of concentrated elements. In some cases element pure rocks and boulders. In others, simple large pools spread across the surface. Depending on the elements and the characteristics of the section of cloud. Jack did not think much of it as all the Assault transports had been set up to survey and record the surface of the bubble as they flew around the bubble. Though they had been flying a loose formation to save some mass (formation flying always used more fuel or mass having to jockey the throttles to stay in place) on their way around to make sure they all arrived at the same time to coordinate their attack. Only spreading out over the last few minutes to make it harder to see them as the crossed the ship’s horizon. They would be taking different routes back once the battleship was destroyed or had to retreat, first to make sure they were not followed back to the Station and then they would start surveying as much of the bubble as possible. Though it would take a hundred boats a hundred years to survey every square mile of the entire bubble. It was turning out to be one frigging big bubble.
An eternity later Jack finally started slowing the Transport down as they approached the horizon of the enemy Battleship. "Pan, anything yet?"
"Sorry Honorable Captain but I am picking up nothing."
Looking up from the tactical screen, Jack spotted the closest of the Destroyers that had been flying along just inside the cloud several thousand miles above the bubble that had spread out as well when the Ensign had issued the attack order. Jack watched it bank over into a dive to attack the huge Spider Battleship. Its 8 inch gunned turrets started firing into the hulk as the little arrow shaped ship rapidly maneuvered to avoid the sporadic fire from the battleship. Shaking his head at the sick bright pee yellow beams from the Destroyer that were lucky to knock out the battleship’s small turrets let alone penetrate the hull and then cringed at the bright blueish white beams from the Battleship streaking back at the little rapidly maneuvering Destroyer. One hit by the blueish white beams would destroy the Destroyer but none came close. He hoped the Assault Transports would have the same luck.
Jack slammed his throttles forward pushing the Assault Transport ahead at the end of a pair of long bright streaks of reaction mass trailing behind it and lunged for the Battleship as it appeared over the horizon. The 11 other Assault Transports came into sight at the same time as the Battleship. Jack hit his ship to ship Laser Comm. "Hold your fire guys. No sense in advertising we are here with the Destroyers going to all the trouble to get their attention. Just keep it low according to plan."
As soon as the Assault Transport was headed straight for the Battleship at speed, Jack pulled the throttles back to idle and the bridge seamed to suddenly be much too quiet. They had been running the engines at cruise power for the entire trip around the bubble simply because they had to keep turning to stay with the ever dropping surface of the bubble and down out of the cloud bank that started again a few thousand miles above the bubble. The clear area making it possible to fly faster than they would have been able to if the cloud had dropped back down to the surface of the bubble. Jack just hoped the experts were right and that the cleared area was still slowly expanding (though the rate was dropping) and would stay clear for at least several thousand years.
They had remassed the Shuttles only an hour before from the promised tanker. Mostly to give the Assault Transports more shielding from weapons while making it possible for the ones assigned as medevac's to make a high speed run back to the Station when needed. While he had equipped two of the Assault Transports as a Hospitals complete with Doctors as far as humans went, they only had the basics for the Red Apes and Bigfoots. He was told that the alien hospital equipment could not be dismantled and then packed into the assault shuttle soon enough for the Attack. Too much of it was power and central computer dependent and very large. Too much of the enemy equipment seemed to be over engineered to last forever or at least a very long time. Hundreds of years by what Jack had noticed with rows of consoles and equipment that had been replaced when repairs became impossible leaving the old consoles and equipment to deteriorate and fall apart in place. Jack had been surprised to find that some of the Spider technology was not only 10,000 years old but was a mix of primitive even for human standards that included Vacuum tubes mixed with tech that they could barely understand. Vacuum tubes with IC micro circuits with the primitive cathode ray tech inside of them just did not make sense.
Jack had stopped being surprised at the discoveries the Red Pepper’s crew was making daily working with the ex-slaves that he was sending on to The Rock in his weekly reports. Jack could not wait for the scientists and engineers to arrive that were on the list he had been shown by Vice Admiral Bingamton., the Wing Commander of the Destroyers before he had left. Most of the engineers and young scientists were the ones he had been working with before being put in Command of the Red Pepper hulk.
Though Jack had been shocked to find out that the Assault transports packed with crewmen, exslave engineers and Spider Tech he had sent to the last surviving pair of fleeing Transports during the battle months before had never made it to The Rock. Jack had then turned around to stop the last enemy squadron from following and destroying the English Transports loosing track of them and taking it for granted that they had gotten away clean, back to The Rock. That is until he had talked to Admiral Halsey after they had settled into the hulk Station weeks later and found out they had not been seen or heard from.
His requests to search for the Transports and the Alien Assault transport boats he had sent with the load of advanced Technology had so far gone unanswered by The Rock. While Vice Admiral Bingamton had simply said he was too busy and had no orders to search for them. Jack was starting to think that the fool Captain/Commodore of the Republic Transports had gotten himself and the two ships left in his little squadron lost in the cloud.
He had heard of it happening before and that it was easy to do. Admiral Halsey warning him of that very fact when he had given him the Red Pepper’s hulk to try to get to The Rock instead of blowing it up with part of its crew still trapped in the forward section of the ship. Jack again had opened his mouth saying he could fix the damn ships engines good enough to get the ship underway and the Admiral had simply said “Good, you are in Command, just get it done.” To Jacks shock. Telling him he would have the permanent rank of Commander if he got the ship to The Rock.
The last thing he had wanted was the Admiral giving him the hulk to Command. Though as short as the Navy was in Officers, he could not fault him with the quality of the officers he first had to work with. But The Game had taught him how to deal with all kinds of incompetent officers and he soon had the ship going again only to make (what he had thought at the time) the worst mistake in his life when he decided to make a short raid into a Spider Battleship hulk they had to fly close by as they started to run from the Spider Fleet chasing them. But then he had to stop again anyway to do more repairs after an incompetent Engineering Chief had screwed up the engines. Which was the reason they had quit in the first place when the ship had been hit on the bow of the ship far away from the engines. The engines simply needed a competent engineer and a little time. So Jack had stopped the ship to change Chief Engineers and make the needed repairs and in a brief brain fart had decided that assaulting a 6,000 foot long enemy Battleship with a hand full of marines was a good idea. The fact that he was a little curious about who the so far unknown enemy was, was beside the point. Even if the Battleship did look like it was dead.
The problem was, up until the Red Pepper had slid up alongside the Spider Battleship, no one had seen a Spider Battleship up close and lived to talk about it (at least made it back to human space alive). Jack had finally realized after his brain fart had dissipated, that finding out who and what the enemy was, was more important than the ship surviving the encounter as long as he was able to get the information back to the Republic. But somehow Jack and the ship had survived. Liberating thousands of slaves while steeling incredible technology that had allowed him with a lot of luck and ex-slave help to defeat a whole squadron of enemy Spider Battleships using their Achilles Heel.
Jack’s mind turned back to the attack as he watched the Spider Battleshipthey were rapidly approaching. He ran over the arguments in his head as to when to send the first medevac back to the Station yet again in his mind. If they waited too long to get a decent load of casualties, the ones hit early would suffer and could even die by the time they made it back to the station. What surprised Jack the most was that it was the human Doctors making the case for making the first run as soon as they had the first casualties? While the aliens who would benefit the most from returning early simply said they would endure until an Assault Shuttle had a decent load and hope for the best. They understood Jacks reasons for wanting to delay even one of the heavily armed Assault Transports from leaving as long as possible. The firepower of even one Assault transport could be the difference in keeping the heavily out number troops from being overrun. Jack was planning on bringing several of the unarmed transports along piloted by the slow reacting carful aliens to act as dedicated Medevac's but they simply did not have enough reaction mass to get them all around the bubble and the tanker Captain refused to leave his assigned rendezvous coordinates, leaving the Destroyers high and dry even for a few hours. The fact that after the Battleship had been taken care of, the Tanker and the Destroyers would transfer to the Hulk Station, was beside the point.
Jack had cursed the pig headed Tanker Captain for not being even a little flexible. But then he could remember Port and Custom's officials all over the Republic just as pig headed as well as he was growing up on his families Tramp transport the Turner Joy. Not to mention a certain Battleship fleet Admiral only months before that had cost the Republic hundreds of Battleships and hundreds of thousands of crewmen when he refused to accept the fact that the Republic fleet was out gunned and out engined with the enemy battleships not requiring the use of massive amounts of reaction mass for their ships. Instead the Admiral had insisted on trying to rescue the system his family was trapped in though Jack suspected their being another hidden motive since many of his actions just seemed so strange in the reports he had read since the battle.
The result of Presidential politics interfering with Command appointments. The Admiral had used his friendship with the President and political congressional pull to get himself appointed as the attack Fleet Admiral against the advice of the Admiralty at The Rock. The surviving Battleships were still trickling back to the Cloud. Jack just hopped his best friend’s ship was amongst the survivors and that he was alright.
The problem was that the Republic now had basically no fleet to upgrade with new weapons and new engines even though they now knew how to build both ships that would fly rings around the enemy and weapons that would blast them from space. That is if they could build enough ships and then attack the enemy’s huge walls of supper battleships from their unarmored sterns.
Jack studied the huge Battleship as they coasted closer and closer. It was one of the first Battleships hit by Jack and the Red Pepper during the first part of their battle of hide and kill against Spider Battleships as the enemy fleet had worked its way into the cloud hunting the Republic squadron of transports the enemy was following. Looking to capture the ships and find The Rock, the Republic's single most important and biggest military construction and supply base.
Jack could clearly see that the first of the huge 1500 foot across 50 foot thick armored deck plates making up the front of the Spider Battleship ahead of him were buried deep into the wall of the carbon crystal bubble. The Battleship’s ass sticking straight out some 6,000 feet from the surface of the Bubble.
Jack was suddenly surprised by the rings of pure metals at the surface of the bubble surrounding the Battleship. Evidentially put there by the ships still active navigation particle shield's effects on different metals in the rapidly cooling plasma wave as it hit the ship. The force shields separating the different metals into the pure rings according to their atomic weights instead of solidifying into random rocks or pools.
Jack's eyes raised up to the narrower stern half of the ship housing the crew with the weapons and engines hanging out on long pylons or arms. The Spider ship still looked damn near undamaged even with all the holes (blasted by the Red Pepper’s slave enhanced weapons) out of the forward part of the thousand foot wide hull that included the Ship's main Primary Bridge, God Officers decks and hopefully even most of the Battle Ape hibernation decks, like they had done on the ex-enemy Battleship hulk they were now using as a repair base for the Red Pepper. Only Jack realized that not only did the holes stop only a few decks down into the Black Ape hibernation decks but it did not look like the crossed beams from the Red Pepper’s new weapons had done as much damage hitting from the side as they had done hitting down the throat of the other Spider battleship they were now using as a base. Their beams down the throat had taken out and gutted the whole forward half of the ship that included the bridge, officer and troop hibernation decks making it possible for the human crew Jack had left behind to simply move in with no opposition. The fact that the Spider Battleship’s undamaged Black Ape Hibernation decks meant that they were looking at having to take on thousands of enemy Apes. But then Jack had already realized that from the photos taken by the Destroyers even if he was hoping it would have changed once he got his Mark 2 eyes on the ship. From only feet above the rocky surface of the bubble Jack had a much better perspective about the damage done to the huge Battleship and the only void that seemed to go completely through both side of the ship was the Officer and Command decks, the hibernation decks were intact. From the Destroyer video’s taken from above it had looked like the holes were in the Ape Hibernation section. With the realization that the Officer Decks had been completely obliterated by the crossed beams of the huge captured Spider Battle
ship Guns the back of Jack’s mind tried to tell him something important but he was much too busy studying the damage and the Battleship and wondering why the enemy guns were not hitting anything.
Though it was impossible to tell for sure just how much damage had been done to the insides of the ship. It was clear it was never going anyplace again with its huge front flat pancake shaped shield deck completely stuck deep into the cooled surface of solid carbon-carbon Diamond crystal bubble.
Only now that they were approaching the Battleship, Jack realized that it was different than the ones he had been on or seen so far. This Spider Battleship had a much longer troop and equipment section than the others. The section from where the blasted command decks once were to the main weapons section above the power and slave decks was 2 to 3 times longer at least. Jack suddenly had a sinking feeling as he realized that as big as the damn troop hibernation section was they were looking at a lot more Black Apes to deal with. At least several tens of thousands more instead of just a few thousand.
Jack’s mind raced at the devastating news but he could not think of a better plan. It just meant that the initial strong points they were establishing at both ends of the troop decks would have a few more Black Apes to deal with. He just hoped that they could deal with 2 or even 3 times the numbers of Apes attacking them. Though he again wondered why the Spider Ship had not launched fighters. He knew they had plenty as he had seen them on the Hulk Station he had just spent the last 6 months on. Yet the Destroyers had reported none being launched. The only thing he could figure out was that they had killed all the pilots when they took out the Officer decks. But then looking at the devastation where the Godofficer decks once were he suddenly realized he was missing something important and his apprehension suddenly took a giant leap. He knew he was missing something so important that it could cost all their lives but just could not put his finger on it.
Battleship Destroyer 2 (Battleship Destoryer) Page 2
