“You keep telling us you make the incredible look easy, so I’m sure you did an awesome job with this,” I said hopefully.
“We’ll know when the Dutchman reports in through the microwormhole.”
“No way for us to get a sneak peek at the action?”
“Not anything accurate enough to matter. The Dutchman had to leave the microwormhole behind, and I can’t see much from that distance. I’ll let you know if the plan worked. Or, if, you know, the Dutchman explodes.”
Although I wasn’t up there, I appreciated the difficulty Chang faced in his assigned task. Skippy had not been able to construct enough new real ship-to-ship missiles with the limited time and resources available, so Chang had to use kludgy short-range missiles that were more like mines. The Dutchman had flown around in a pattern, saturating the target area with mines. A lot of mines; sixty seven to be exact. The plan was for the mines to ambush the Fire Dragon ships just after they jumped in. When the plan was explained to Chang, he recognized it as being similar to the operation that had destroyed the Thuranin surveyor ship and its escorts. Except this time, they had short-range mines that were much less capable than the missiles used against the surveyor. And with Skippy on the planet, the Flying Dutchman had no way to flatten spacetime so they could predict exactly where the Fire Dragon ships would jump in.
What Chang did have working for him was the incredible awesomeness of Skippy. And of course Skippy had taken every opportunity to remind Chang and the entire crew of just how incredibly awesome the beer can was. To the point where the action to destroy the Fire Dragon ships was named ‘Operation Awesome’. While he was on the planet, Skippy had slowly wormed his way into the jump drive systems of the None Can Stand Against Us and its two escort frigates. I say ‘slowly’ wormed his way in, because I figured he could quickly take over the ships using the Thuranin nanovirus. Man, was I wrong, and Skippy let me know it.
The three Fire Dragon ships had been away from contact with a Thuranin star carrier for long enough that the nanovirus infecting them had degraded to the point it was unreliable. And for some reason Skippy could not explain, one of the frigates was not infected at all. Regardless, using the nanovirus was never an option. Our whole plan involving those three ships was for them to jump away normally, then appear to be ambushed. If Skippy had seized control using the nanovirus while the ships were in orbit, every sensor platform on or near the planet would have known something was seriously wrong, and all Skippy’s infiltration of the sensor networks would have been for nothing. So I shut my mouth and let Skippy handle the tricky technical details of taking control over the jump drives of those three ships. This was a case, Skippy told me with typical beer can tactfulness, when the monkeys needed to let the adult do the tough part of the mission.
The reason Kristang jumps were so notoriously inaccurate, Skippy explained, was not only the fault of their pathetically crappy hardware. Their jump controller computers did not know anything about hyperspatial jumps, according to His Awesomeness it was like they just randomly input coordinate numbers and hoped for the best.
Once Skippy had access to the jump drive systems of the three ships, he had been able to examine and measure every component involved, tweak the hardware settings, and replace the controller code with something at least vaguely related to hyperspatial navigation. I remember how astonished and frustrated he was after he had painstakingly reviewed every element of code in the Kristang navigation systems. “Joe, I swear, you could replace their navigation computers with a Donkey Kong cartridge from the 1980s and the jumps would be more accurate.”
“Wow, that’s amazing, Skippy,” I had said while absent-mindedly playing solitaire. “What, uh, what is Donkey Kong?”
“Joe,” he sighed. “Your knowledge of pop trivia about the late 20th century is woefully lacking.”
“Uh huh. Tell you what, when we get out of this, you can smack me with trivia knowledge for hours.”
“If we get out of this.”
“You are filling me with confidence, Skippy.”
“I’m just being realistic, since this is, you know, your tactical plan.”
Anyway, with Skippy controlling the jump systems of those three ships, they jumped to a different area than they had planned. The target jump point was still within the imaginary cube of space designated as a Fire Dragon rally point, but the ships emerged inside Chang’s minefield rather than the empty space they had been aiming for. And the frigates emerged much closer to the heavy cruiser than they wanted to. In my original plan, I had wanted Skippy to make the ships emerge on top of each other and collide, but even he wasn’t able to make a Kristang jump drive that accurate given the distance they were jumping. So, we settled for Plan B of having them emerge in an area saturated with our mines.
For Lt. Colonel Chang Kong, current captain of the United Nations Starship Flying Dutchman, waiting was the worst part. They had received a faint, compressed signal through the microwormhole that was now far behind them; the signal indicated the ground assault phase of the operation had begun and was successful. Kristang clans, even those not affected by the assault, had begun skirmishing. Joe Bishop was evaluating their options about where the ground team should hit next for maximum effect with minimum risk; but the next critical phase of the operation would take place far from the planet’s surface.
Chang knew he had done everything he could to assure his part of the mission would be successful. The Flying Dutchman had jumped in far away from the imaginary cube of space that was the Fire Dragon clan’s designated rally point. If the Fire Dragons had detected a strange jump signature near their safe zone, they would avoid it. So the Dutchman had jumped in far away from the target rally point, then used a device Skippy built, to emit a gamma ray burst as if a starship had jumped away. As soon as the yoyo string had safely lowered the five dropships to the planet’s surface, the Dutchman had reeled in the cable and proceeded at high speed through normal space toward the Fire Dragon rally point, arriving with sufficient time to perform her next task; that of a lowly minelayer ship.
“Three ships just jumped in!” Desai reported excitedly. “Mines engaging automatically.”
“Take us in,” Chang ordered. “Extend our damping field,” he added in an anxious tone. The Flying Dutchman’s damping field had been cobbled together by Skippy, and the beer can had warned it would not last more than seventeen minutes before burning out. Rather than projecting the damping effect in all directions around the ship, Skippy’s homemade creation could be directed at a particular object, although that ate up tremendous power from the Dutchman’s reactors.
“Damping field is active, reaching full strength,” reported an officer from the CIC behind Chang. “Our field is now at full strength, those ships can’t jump.”
“The first mine will impact in three, two, one, impact.” Desai said in a voice she tried to keep calm.
The frigate which had dipped down into the atmosphere to protect the Fire Dragon clan’s VIPs, was also the first to be hit by the homemade mines. That ship’s captain had taken the damaged forward shield projectors temporarily offline, so burned-out components could be replaced. Until the forward set of projectors was repaired, the amidships and aft shield projectors would be angled forward to provide coverage. Doing so weakened the overall protection, and the captain understood the risks. He thought that, with a potential wide-spread civil war looming, he needed to bring his ship to full combat capability sooner rather than later. With his ship making a jump into a designated safe area, and the inter-clan fighting so far confined to the planet’s surface, he thought the risk was minimal.
He was wrong.
That frigate’s luck continued to run against it. Of the three ships, it did not emerge from jump closest to a waiting mine. The heavy cruiser Stand had that honor; popping through its jump wormhole almost on top of a mine. That mine near the Stand was unfortunately so close to the wormhole that it had been rendered inoperable, and literally bounced off the cruiser�
�s flickering shields. The frigate emerged in the center of a triangle formed by three mines, which eagerly raced to see which one of them would be first to impact.
The first mine attacked from aft, and penetrated halfway through the weakened shields that were still trying to regain coherence, after passing through the spatial distortion of the wormhole. That first mine, realizing it could not get any closer to the frigate’s hull, exploded shortly after passing its sensor data to the cluster of mines that were still on their way.
The second and third mines, coming in to attack the ship’s forward hull less than a second later, had the advantage of the shields pulsating to cope with the explosion aft. The second mine’s sensors guided it to dive in through a particularly weak spot in the shields. It, too, failed to penetrate through to the hull. Its brain made a snap decision to channel its stored energy not into an explosion, but instead into a pulse at the same frequency as the shield generators’ output. The shields flickered, blowing one relay after another just as the third mine streaked in to impact amidships. That mine’s heavily armored warhead punched through four decks, and its momentum was carrying it up and toward the outer hull on the other side when it exploded, cracking the frigate in half.
Less than three seconds after the frigate jumped in, it was torn into two pieces. Half a dozen more mines homed in on the two pieces of wreckage, until all that was left were chunks of debris and exotic high-energy particles, and three more mines were left to buzz around the cloud of debris like confused and angry hornets.
The second frigate was more fortunate, surprisingly surviving more than thirteen seconds, before its defenses were overwhelmed by the cloud of mines that was suddenly on top of it. The second frigate’s point defense cannons claimed two mines before they could impact the shields that were still partially discoherent from the effect of the jump. If the computers controlling the point-defense cannons took a moment to congratulate each other for their initial victory, it was a short-lived celebration. Four seconds later the frigate ceased to exist, as a mine dove directly into the jump drive capacitors and exploded, releasing the stored energy in a spectacular explosion.
An explosion that caused unanticipated trouble for the Flying Dutchman.
“Two down, one to go!” A crewman in the CIC exulted, as sensors clearly showed a second frigate disappearing in a white-hot explosion. Without Skippy aboard, the sensor data had to be interpreted by the human crew, and no one was brimming with confidence at their ability to provide timely and accurate data to Chang. The destruction of the two frigates, however, could be detected by merely looking out a porthole, if the person wished to be temporarily blinded.
“Status of the cruiser?” Chang replied without emotion, setting an example not to declare victory before the battle was over.
“It’s taking hits,” the CIC crew responded after comparing sensor readings from three consoles. “We recorded seventeen explosions in the vicinity of the cruiser, before that second frigate blew up. Our sensors are partly blinded now, they’re resetting. We think we’re seeing additional explosions near the cruiser, Sir, we can’t tell if they are real or sensor ghosts. And now we’ve lost target lock on the cruiser. Attempting to find it again, there is a lot of interference.”
“Do your best.” Chang turned to the pilots. “Pilot, slow us down a bit.” If they didn’t know where the cruiser was, he did not want their beat-up star carrier to stumble into it.
Porter looked at Desai, and she caught his unspoken question. “Sir, do you want us to reduce our acceleration toward the target, or do you want us to slow our rate of approach by decelerating?”
Once again, Chang was reminded that space combat maneuvers were very different from driving a tank or ship on Earth. “The second one. Reduce our forward velocity,” he clarified the order. “If that cruiser’s jump drive explodes, I don’t want us to get peppered with debris.”
“The shields should protect us, Colonel,” Desai said in a tone that Chang took to mean she did not want to trust her life to the shields. Not without Skippy aboard to fix any problems.
“I prefer not to test our shields,” Chang replied without a smile.
What made the None Can Stand Against Us a heavy cruiser was not its armament, because it actually had one less railgun and two fewer maser cannons than a standard Kristang cruiser. Compared to a The Brave Shall Always Know Victory-class standard cruiser on which the heavy cruiser type was based, the Stand had six fewer missile launch tubes, and carried thirty six fewer missiles in a typical loadout. What made the Stand a heavy cruiser, heavy in terms of mass as well as power, was its extra defensive capabilities: It had more armor plating, more defense shield generators and point-defense maser cannons. Its offensive capabilities had been sacrificed to protect the Stand’s precious passengers; the leaders of the Fire Dragon clan. To compensate for the significant additional mass of the ship, the normal-space engines had also been upgraded, because the ship was intended to run from trouble rather than fight. For any other ship, running instead of fighting would be considered cowardly; it was the necessity of protecting the clan leadership that excused what would otherwise be shameful behavior.
Against the instincts and traditions of the Kristang warrior caste, the None Can Stand Against Us should have turned and run. The ship would have run under normal circumstances. In this case, the captain of that ship saw his powerful cruiser ambushed, his escorts destroyed, and his jump drive disabled by a damping field. Clearly, the unknown enemy had advanced technology that very likely would make any attempt to escape fruitless.
I realized later that two things got the Flying Dutchman into trouble; Kristang being Kristang and Skippy being Skippy. And me being stupid. Ok, that is three things. The None Can Stand Against Us was supposed to run from fights in order to preserve the clan leadership. What the ship should have done, after it survived the initial impacts of our mines, was to run in the opposite direction from the Dutchman. What the captain of the Stand did instead, because a Kristang warrior’s first instinct is to attack, is turn toward the Dutchman. That was the first example of my stupidity; I should have anticipated that once the captain of the Stand realized his ship was caught in a damping field and could not jump away, he would choose to strike the Dutchman, hoping to disable the source of the damping field. What I would have done, because I am not a bloodthirsty hateful lizard, was to at least try accelerating away in normal space first, and turn and fight only if running didn’t work. Clearly, the captain of the Stand had not recently read the Joe Bishop Rules of Space Combat, because he went to full thrust straight at our pirate star carrier. The Dutchman had its stealth field activated, but the violent explosion of the second frigate had saturated the entire area with high-energy particles, temporarily rendering the stealth field less effective. Once the heavy cruiser got a sensor lock on particle wake created by the Dutchman, Chang couldn’t get away.
The second issue, Skippy being Skippy, was only a problem because of Joe being Joe, meaning me being stupid. Skippy had given Chang and the crew a list of options if the battle went one way or another. That was all great and helpful. What was not helpful was that Skippy had planned all the options as if his all-seeing self was aboard the ship. And that was my fault for not catching that goof-up. If Skippy had been aboard the Dutchman, he would have been able to see right through the sensor interference and warn Chang the cruiser had turned and was headed straight for our pirate ship. Without Skippy, the duty crew in the CIC did the best they could, with sensor panels the Thuranin had designed for emergency backup use only. By the time they got the sensors reset and were able to interpret the information, it was too late. If I had not been a complete and utter moron, I should’ve thought to have Skippy train the CIC better on how to compensate for the sensors being temporarily blinded. And I should have left instructions to Chang that if he lost sensor contact with the enemy, he was to turn and run. In defense of me and Skippy, neither of us anticipated that a frigate would be turned into a short-lived s
un by our mines. The mines Skippy had manufactured were not fast or powerful; he expected they would only disable the Fire Dragon ships, so our pirate ship could use maser cannons to punch through the armor around their reactors or jump drives. The battle plan, every scenario we ran in preparation for the attack, anticipated the Dutchman would need to participate directly in the attack to some extent. If he could, Chang was supposed to destroy all three ships, so we could totally control the message traffic coming from the battle. The priority was to kill the heavy cruiser; if Chang could destroy that ship first, he was to use his judgment on whether to pursue and engage the pair of frigates.
If the unknown attacking ship pursued the fight until the Stand and its VIP passengers were dead, that would be seen as a direct threat to the clan’s existence and would require massive retaliation against the Black Trees. One way or the other, Chang needed to destroy the None Can Stand Against Us or our plan might fall apart. Toward that end, he ordered our pirate ship to close with the cruiser’s last reported position, with the Dutchman’s maser cannons ready to finish off the crippled enemy ship. It was a simple plan, it should have been easy.
“Sensors are almost finished resetting, Sir,” Simms in the CIC reported. “Skippy could do this much faster. Data is coming through now, it’s- trouble!”
Chang saw the threat on the main bridge display before the CIC crew could explain it to him. The heavy cruiser had somehow survived the onslaught of mines directed at it, and was charging straight at his ship! “Desai, get us-”
“I see it,” she interrupted, her fingers flying over the controls as Porter did the same on the console in front of him. “Colonel, we’re going too fast; our momentum is going to carry us past the enemy. They are,” she took a moment to verify, “they’re turning to intercept us. Yes, they’re definitely following our move.” She turned in her seat to look at Chang. “We will fly past them, the closest approach will be less than seventy thousand kilometers.”
Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4) Page 43
