Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4)
Page 45
“Desai,” Chang reacted without hesitation, “move us away from the plasma. Back toward the microwormhole.”
“Colonel Chang?” Nagatha, who had been silent during the battle, called through the bridge speakers. “There is a potential complication that could delay our return to the microwormhole.”
“What is it, Ms. Nagatha?” Chang responded without taking his eyes off the main bridge display. He needed to get the ship back to the microwormhole to report their status. With a balky reactor refusing to shut down correctly, defenses degraded and likely other unknown damage, he was not in a mood for witty banter with the ship’s communications submind.
“I was successful in jamming the enemy’s communications; they were signaling but nothing coherent will be received. The enemy did launch message drones; Skippy was successful in preventing those drones from carrying any useful information.” While Skippy was on Kobamik and hacking into the jump drive navigation computers of the Stand and its escort frigates, he also had been able to slowly infect the flight recorder drones. The drones had been loaded with flight recorder data and launched normally by their mother ships, but as soon as the drones cleared their launch tubes, they erased all data in their memory banks. The Kristang had no idea their drones could never report what happened in the battle. “I am transmitting revised data into the enemy drones now, to match the rough events of the battle, but with information that vaguely points to an attack by the Black Trees. All drones in the area should contain our desired data within twenty four minutes.”
“Excellent. That is very good, Nagatha,” Chang replied, pleased. The operation had almost gone badly wrong, but the final results were everything he had hoped for.
“There is a potential problem, Colonel. While jamming their transmissions, I was able to monitor their message traffic. After we passed by, and just before they turned toward us, the cruiser launched four stealthed dropships.”
“What? Why didn’t we see that?”
“It is not the fault of the CIC crew that these dropships were missed; we were in the middle of a firefight, and backscatter from maser beams confused our sensors. Also, the dropships were launched unpowered, they coasted until quite recently. It is my fault that it took me this long to decrypt the transmission about the dropship launch; our jamming badly garbled the messages and I just now pieced them together enough to make sense of them.”
Chang cursed in Mandarin, which drew a look from Porter, who understood some of that language. “Do you know where those dropships are now?” Chang asked, his eyes scanning the bridge display.
“No,” Nagatha replied, her voice apologetic. “The Kristang did not include tactical data in their transmissions for security reasons. That itself is interesting, the Kristang tend to be horribly casual about Opsec; I suspect that is due to their arrogance. In this case, one of the dropships likely contains the senior clan leaders.”
Chang rhythmically tapped the command chair’s arm while he considered his options. He could chase after the dropships, which might have scattered in all directions and take a long time to hunt and kill. Or he could allow them to escape with whatever knowledge their crews had. “Nagatha, in those transmissions you intercepted, did you find any evidence that the Kristang know we are a Thuranin ship?”
“No. Perhaps I should be more clear, for I have observed communication problems between Skippy and Colonel Bishop. Yes, I have intercepted and decrypted transmissions in which the Kristang included sensor data, from when our stealth field was degraded after the second frigate exploded. They were not able to obtain clear enough data to determine what type of ship this is, so no, they do not know the Flying Dutchman is a Thuranin ship. In the transmission, the cruiser’s captain speculated that the design of this ship is unusual for a Kristang warship, based on their very rough sensor data. Colonel Chang, I hope you and your valiant crew do not take this as an insult; but the clumsy way in which the Dutchman maneuvered during the battle, and our poor weapons targeting convinced the cruiser that we must be a Kristang vessel.”
In spite of the circumstances, Chang gave a snort if amusement. “Our backward level of development worked in our favor for once? I will not argue with that.” He tapped the chair again. “The Kristang do not know we are a Thuranin starship. I am wondering whether we need to chase after those dropships at all.”
“Colonel,” Desai loosened her seat straps so she could turn around to look directly at Chang. “We need those Fire Dragon leaders to think we are a Black Tree warship. The question we have to ask is, how would the Kristang behave?”
Chang said another bad word. “The lizards would hunt those dropships, and kill every last one of them. You’re right, Desai, that’s what we have to do. Simms,” he checked the display and saw the surrounding space was empty, even when he toggled the image to show a wider sphere of space. “Do we have any idea where those dropships are now?”
“No, Sir,” Simms’ frustration was evident in her voice. “If they’re stealthed, we’ll need to conduct a grid search with our sensor field. We can’t do that from here, we’ll need to jump back into the engagement area.”
“The engagement area,” Chang mused. “Where that cloud of Kristang missiles we left behind will be desperately seeking a target. Desai, can we jump with a damaged reactor?”
Desai but her lip. “Our jump drive coils have an 57% charge, we have plenty of power. I do not know how the reactor would react to the stress of a jump. Or whatever damage we sustained.”
“Major Simms?” Chang tossed the ball back to the CIC duty officer.
Simms refrained from biting her lip, she could not spare the mental capacity to move those muscles. “Reactor Two has vented all volatiles and is in its shutdown process, it won’t explode. Colonel, without Skippy, we do not know how a jump would affect a damaged reactor. The jump control system is reading yellow, but not red. Nagatha,” she addressed their onboard submind, “can you interpret the internal sensor data?”
“As I was constructed for the purpose of communications, I am not capable of performing a detailed structural analysis,” she reported in a soft voice. “However, I am able to communicate with the jump drive control computer. It is telling me a jump at this time would not be preferable, but it is possible. No major damage is anticipated from a jump.”
That was all Chang needed to hear. “Desai, can you jump us back? Close to where the cruiser ejected those dropship, not the location we jumped from?”
“Ah,” Desai and Porter shared an anxious look. “That’s not an option Skippy programmed for us. We’ll need to program the jump by ourselves.”
Chang sat back in the chair. “Consider this a test of how well ignorant humans can calculate a transdimensional jump, using alien technology we don’t understand. Do the best you can.”
“Yes, Sir,” Desai turned her full attention back to her console. The best she could? The best they were capable of, might simply be to avoid emerging inside a planet.
“Thirty one thousand kilometers off target,” Desai announced at the end of a nerve-wracking two minutes verifying their new position following the jump.
“Thirty one?” Chang asked with an arched eyebrow. “That is good!”
“Not, uh, quite,” Porter admitted. “We just realized we input one of the calculations wrong. We got lucky.”
“Luck is a legitimate factor on the battlefield,” Chang assured his crew. In combat, both sides inevitably had screw-ups that needed to be balanced by good fortune, and you should never take good luck for granted when it happened. “A grid search with our sensor field will take a long time, even with the field extended to maximum range?”
“Yes,” Simms agreed.
“Then let’s not do that. Can we Yankee search? Ping for those dropships with an active sensor pulse?” Starships rarely used active sensor pings because unlike a sensor field, any ship in the area could track the pings straight back to their source, giving away the searching ship’s position. Confident the only enemy vesse
ls in the immediate area were dropships, Chang was willing to take the risk. “We can do that without giving away that this is a Thuranin ship?”
“We can,” Simms was relieved to provide good news for a change. “Skippy added a setting to the active sensors, so it mimics the search signature of a Kristang ship. That’s what you want to do, Colonel? We’re ready, the active sensor system is active and warmed up.”
“Do it. I want to locate those dropships as quickly as possible. How long until we’ve scanned the entire area?”
“To send out pings and get a return, that will take,” Simms waited for one of the CIC crew to give her the information. “Eight to nine minutes, with our current assumptions of how far those dropships could have traveled.”
“Best we get started, then,” Chang suggested, and on the main display, he saw the active sensor pulses begin radiating outward.
The group of Kristang missiles, on their way toward the last gamma ray burst, now detected another gamma ray burst with the exact same signature. It was their target ship; that ship was now behind them! The missiles quickly ran calculations, only eleven of the missiles had enough fuel to arrest their forward momentum and turn around to continue chasing their quarry. The eleven missiles gave a collective digital shrug and immediately turned to decelerate.
The remaining missiles, with no hope of reengaging the enemy, powered down to await further instructions from their clan. If such instructions did not arrive within the next ninety seven days, the cluster of missiles would deactivate permanently, to pass out of the star system and continue on into the cold darkness of interstellar space.
It did not take nine minutes to complete the search, not even eight. Rather than having to search 360 degrees around the ship, they found all four dropships within a 140 degree slice of the sky. Three dropships were traveling in formation together; one was rocketing off into deep space by itself. “Excellent work by your team, Major Simms,” Chang said happily. “We can’t hit them all at once,” he mused to himself while tapping the chair. The situation was far better than what he had feared; that of the four dropships heading off in four directions.
“There is a complication, Colonel Chang,” Nagatha interrupted his happy thoughts. “No matter which dropships we pursue first, the other will be able to transmit in the clear before we can intercept it. My jamming coverage has a limited range.”
If the Kristang aboard those dropships did not know the Flying Dutchman was a Thuranin ship, Chang did not know whether he cared about one of the dropships escaping. Except that the Black Trees would care, would want to kill all four dropships, so he had to care also. Clandestine interspecies warfare was much too complicated. “Nagatha, do you have any information about which dropship, or ships, those two clan leaders are aboard?”
“No, Colonel Chang. The Kristang did not include such sensitive tactical information in their transmissions.”
“We have to guess, then.” The clan leaders may seek the safety of numbers by being aboard one of the three dropships traveling in formation. An attack could be countered by two of the dropships falling back to engage the enemy, while the dropship with the VIPs flew onward.
Or, the Kristang may know an enemy expected them to think that way, and the VIPs could be aboard the single dropship flying off by itself. Without knowing his enemy, Chang would be making a wild guess. “Nagatha, can you run any sort of predictive algorithm, to give us insight into what those two clan leaders would have done?”
“No, Colonel. I am a communications submind.”
“Shit,” he chose a swear word the entire crew could understand. “Would the two leaders be traveling separately?”
“That I can answer,” Nagatha’s voice perked up. “Because of intense rivalries and distrust between clan leaders, it is highly unlikely they are separated. Based on historical data I do have access to, there is an 86% probability the two clan leaders are in the same dropship.”
“That makes it a bit easier,” Chang’s voice did not express any happiness. “We’re back to guessing, then. Are those clan leaders the type to take a risk by flying in a lone dropship, or would they want whatever protection they can get?”
“They rose to power in a Kristang clan,” Porter suggested. “They must have taken a lot of risk along the way.”
“Yes,” Chang agreed. “Some people will take risks to get what they want, but once they have it, they won’t risk losing it. Risk tolerance can change with age or status. Again, we’re back to guessing, unless Nagatha can calculate how risk averse those clan leaders are.”
“No, I cannot.”
Chang again regretted not being able to instantly contact Skippy. “We could flip a coin-”
“However, I do not need to perform an analysis of my own,” Nagatha interrupted. “I have access to Black Tree clan intelligence, which indicates those two particular Fire Dragon clan leaders have a relatively low tolerance for risk. Their risk aversion level is five point six out of eight, according to the Black Trees.”
“That’s good enough for me.” Chang said with satisfaction. He had a target, he knew where it was, and he knew how to hit it. As a bonus, by chance they had jumped in closer to the three dropships than to the one by itself. “Desai, can we catch those three dropships?”
“No,” she answered immediately, having already run those calculations. “They are going to run out of fuel if they continue accelerating, but we can’t match their rate of acceleration. And they have a big head start on us. This ship is just a big clumsy bus, Sir.” Anticipating Chang’s next question, she passed a course plot to the main bridge display. “We have to get ahead of them, we can jump ahead of them. Even if our jump is fifty thousand kilometers off target, their momentum will carry them into our weapons range before they could turn and burn to change course.”
Chang nodded. “The ability to instantly jump ahead of a fleeing enemy still seems like dark magic to me; almost an unfair advantage,” he mused. “But, since humanity has one stolen pirate starship against an entire galaxy of aliens hostile to our very existence, I will take every unfair advantage I can get. Desai, program us another jump. I want to get this over with and bring us back to the microwormhole so we can report in.” The mission had already taken far longer than planned. “Major Simms, we can paint that single dropship with active sensors, to guide a missile?”
Simms, momentarily startled by the question, hurriedly conferred with her staff in the CIC. “Yes, Colonel. That is near maximum range for one of our missiles,” she meant the home-built units Skippy had constructed, because standing orders from Colonel Bishop was to conserve their few real Thuranin ship-killer missiles for emergencies. “I recommend we launch two missiles to be assured of a hit.”
“Agreed. Launch when ready.”
While Desai worked with Porter and the CIC crew to program another jump, then triple and quadruple check the numbers input to the jump controller computer, Simms kept the ship’s active sensors locked on the single speeding dropship. The targeted dropship tried every setting of its stealth field, changing course, ejecting countermeasures that flooded space behind it with chaff, flares and electromagnetic radiation to confuse the sensors of the two missiles burning hard after it. None of the dropship’s desperate actions worked; with the missiles merely needing to home in on the powerful reflected pulses on sensor energy from their mother ship, they might as well have been tracking a small star. There was no way they could miss the dropship.
And they did not. At the last second, wary of the dropship’s defensive cannons, the missiles deployed their own countermeasures, sending out pulses of wide-spectrum radiation to fuzz the enemy sensors. The missiles coordinated their attack patterns, coming in from below and starboard, where intelligence indicated that type of Kristang dropship had the least effective sensor coverage. If it had been a contest, the second missile might have been disappointed to impact thirty microseconds after the first, so the second missile detonated in what was already a cloud of debris.
“Outstanding. Nagatha, did that dropship send off a clear message?”
“One moment, Colonel. I am collating the data now; there was a lot of interference from their attempts to lose our missiles. Yes. They sent a message, they were able to transmit for nearly three seconds when they passed beyond my effective jamming range. The message, I am decrypting it now, it, says, hmm. It does not contain any new information. They still think we are a Black Tree warship.”
“Outstanding again. Desai, those three dropships are going somewhere in a hurry, apparently there is a party we were not invited to. We need to teach the Kristang not to be rude.”
“Yes, Sir,” she replied with a grin. It was good to see Chang restored to his usual good humor. Their executive officer had been wound tightly as a spring since the battle started. “Engaging jump now.”
By luck or pure chance, and certainly not due to any skill by the humans who programmed the jump, the Flying Dutchman emerged from jump less than twenty four thousand kilometers in front of the formation of dropships. That was twenty eight thousand kilometers off target for the jump, a fact that had Desai biting her lip in frustration. She had wanted to be farther away from the dropships; with their disparity in speeds, the small enemy ships would zip past them in a flash, leaving little time in weapons range.