by Kali Altsoba
They fire up old fusion-drives and tear away for the outer system, straining for attack velocity. Making a Don Quixote run directly at a host of enemy windmills. Krevans will later recall this utterly useless and utterly brave sally-forth as the “Death Ride of the Bantams.”
The frigates take the lead, four astern. They’re followed dangerously closely at just 2,000 klics by ten police attack boats arrayed in a ragged ‘strike’ pattern. It’s a military formation held only with difficulty by the untrained police crews, more used to darting and dashing after small and highly-evasive smugglers, half-hoping and planning to let them get away so the game can go on another day. There’ll be no rematch this time, however. This one is for glory and to the death.
The four frigates and ten police boats somehow keep together on their fast approach to a double-wedge line comprising 40 brand new DRN destroyers. It’s Aleksander’s forward screen. The fleet escorts are in two wedges of 20 ships each, flying side-by-side in standard ‘double-vic’ formation. Far better armed and armored, the destroyers blow right through the Krevan flotilla.
As the two sets of warships fly past and through each other at breakneck velocity, the destroyers spit only blue and green lasers while the frigates fire forward pulse cannon, sending eruptions of white plasma shells ahead. Plasma near-misses lightly damage two destroyers. In return, the destroyer wall scores major hits on all four frigates. One old girl is mortally wounded, her back broken. She tumbles wildly on an upended axis, bulwarks smashed amidships, plasma venting from a cracked containment chamber in the main engine room. Crew pods pop into space fore-and-aft, but not one gets away from the open cavity and raging fire in her broke-open guts.
The other three frigates are all heavily damaged as they pass through, all 40 DRN escorts blazing at the streaking bantams with brilliant colored lasers. No one fires plasma missiles. The frigates hold back, seeking range to Aleksandr’s capital ships, to do max damage. The destroyers don’t have any. Daura exists until today in isolation from the fusion miniaturization revolution. Its navy doesn’t know how to contain plasma in torpedoes. It only has old-style nukes.
The frigates are badly hurt, but three are coming right at Aleksandr! They loose six missiles toward his battle fleet, two each from forward tubes. The target for the first two is the Leonine, which brakes and banks hard and sends out a thousand effulgent flares. But it’s hard-to-impossible to pull evasive maneuvers on streaking missiles with a century-old battleship.
That’s what all the heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and swarming escorts are for. To ensure that the battleships, the biggest and baddest targets in any fleet, don’t take missile hits. That’s why three brave frigates and crews are utterly annihilated, hitting a wall of energy from an inner screen of 25 destroyers and 10 light cruisers. It’s a second escort wedge preceding the main body, ahead of the capital ships, drop-ship transports, ammo-ship factories, oort-ice tankers, salvage tugs, shturm ships, fat reserve infantry transports, and follow-on supply hulks.
One weaving missile explodes harmlessly, 80 klics prematurely. Cause unknown. Age maybe. Three veer, chasing a flock of thermal, luminosity, and motion decoys from the escorts and the Leonine herself, until they blossom harmlessly 200 klics away, well off the battle fleet’s flank. The last pair are shredded to shrapnel by forward rail-guns on two of the heavy cruisers. The carry-tubes break up before contained plasma in the warheads comes within range to do damage. The two walnut-size warheads erupt containment chambers in flashes of harmless white energy that the big invasion armada flies past and ignores. Not one ship in the Dauran fleet is hit.
There are no survivors on the four destroyed frigates. The three that fired missiles are simply obliterated by sheets of fire from all the battleships, heavy cruisers, and other warships firing all at once. Chunks of armor, deck ribbing, gun batteries and wastage of white-hot metal-spirketting spins away, along with chunks of ripped-up or intact bodies of over 900 suicide crew. The debris cloud glints in reflected light. The fourth frigate is finished off by the fleet rearguard, every tumbling pod tracked on Weapons Stations and lased until it collapses in or flies apart.
The ‘double-vic’ of lead destroyers is undisturbed by its passing encounter with the dying Don Quixote frigates. Just two ships suffered light, external scoring. The sole casualty among escort personnel will be the screen commander, who doesn’t know that he has less than an hour to live for allowing three boats to get past him and fire six missiles right at Aleksandr’s nose.
Aleksandr doesn’t hesitate. He gives the order to have the forward-screen commander executed. Krump looks over eagerly, offering to do the chopping personally. Aleksandr won’t allow that. ‘Bad precedent, to let Shishi punish military infractions on the first day of this war.’
After this action against the bantams ends, before reaching Krakoya I, he’ll have the miscreant captain spaced. He’ll be stripped of rank and DRN insignia and dropped into vacuum, but not just pushed out an open Lock Room. That’s too easy for someone who offends against Daura at war and Jahandar at any time. No, the man will be stripped naked, bound, and loaded into a conventional, nuclear missile tube on his own boat. As he scoots down and out the long chute that runs 1/3rd the ship’s length, he’ll be scalded skinless by propellant catapult steam. After that, dying fast in vacuum and cold is almost palliative. Aleksandr promotes the inner-screen commander in his place. Already, Daura’s war is breaking some careers, making others.
Without slowing or breaking formation, the two wedges of destroyers hit the line of ten Sancho Panza police assault-boats that courageously charge. Every converted cutter is wrecked at a distance, long before their forward lasers and small-caliber kinetic weapons come into range.
A second cloud of debris, this one full of dead and dying police, tumbles uselessly away. Wreckage and waveson spin toward the wide gap between the inner, rocky planets and a distant gas giant circling the Twin’s parent star, an unremarkable and indifferent Class-M red dwarf.
There’s nothing left to defend the Twins. Nothing betwixt a Dauran battle fleet and army and two coveted, green-blue jewels that hang against the dark like necklaces, waiting to be stolen and brought by slaves to their dire master in the Caesarium Selo in Astrana on Nalchik. Nothing to stop Röhm Krump, klack! klack! and his terrible night dogs from dropping with terror from the sky to hound and sweep the surface of two worlds. Nothing to stop the streets of all cities on the Twins from reddening under descending terror in the setting red light of a dim dwarf.
A few frightened Exodus ships still hiding behind the inner gas giant’s moons or in its shadowed girth race on all burners to the last open LP, to hot-jump out of a system closing down to any-and-all Krevan traffic. They just have to catch an edge before any pickets get there, a rim shot where quantum-drives can detect a gravity echo and ride it out of the system. They’ll all make it out, but very few will make it to safety where they’re going. None will make it back.
“Piece of cake, ya? Come on!” signals the first captain to try. Anything is better than staying. Anywhere else is better than being here. Slim chance is better than none. They jump...
***
Admiral Fedor Aleksandr turns an insincere smile on General Royko as the last KRN attack-boat blows apart. The gesture is not reciprocated by the shorter, overflowing man. The admiral meets only a hard return glare that says: ‘Did you expect anything less from my plan?’
‘Royko’s the biggest bag of shit in the Army.’ Aleksandr thinks it, but says nothing as he turns to hard business. His orders are to eliminate resistance to Royko’s landings on the Twins, by any means necessary. Then he realizes, ‘there’s nothing left to eliminate.’
“Move into the drop zones, six by five. Advise when assault ships reach their launch points.”
He wrinkles his nose. ‘Standing close to Royko is like visiting a fishmonger on one of our backward, red meat worlds.’ He served on such a world once. He didn’t like it, and never intends to go back to the place again.
‘He reeks of dead cod and fish eyes. Gods, what a stench!’
“Infantry transports are in the drop zones, admiral.”
“Drop the first tranche.”
The krasnos will go in first, secure ground perimeters around landing zones for the huge shturm and armtrak carriers, then advance direct on foot to targeted cities with armtrak support, leaving the countryside to the follow-on night dogs of the Shishi Corps. That’s the new, quasi-military term for his terror killers Röhm Krump insists on using. He’s even got medals ready.
“Commence drops.”
Royko doesn’t actually smell like fish eyes, but Aleksandr has fish on his mind as the prows of 30 drop-ship transports lift like so many shark’s jaws about to close on panicking prey-fish. Instead, schools of smaller ships swim out and head directly for the upper atmosphere.
They're stolen prototypes, Kaigun-design assault-craft capable of landing on, and take-off from, any planet up to 2.0 standard Gs. Jahandar had the designs smuggled in on Green Ship four years ago, along with seven kidnapped designers and shipwrights from Glarus and Zug.
Hundreds of landing-craft drop toward the surface with a first wave of nearly two million krasnos who’ll assault Krakoya I before this grim day is done. There are bulky armtrak-carriers, ungainly ground-artillery loaders, and chunky heavy-assault equipment transports. Most of all, there are dozens of squat, infantry landers with a quarter-division of krasno infantry, over 20,000 men and women, crammed inside each one.
In pitch darkness.
Strapped into hard seats.
Never before off their homeworlds.
Barely recovered from their first vapors.
Astonished to be falling out of the sky.
In a building-sized block of carbyne and ceramic.
It’s a dense mass of conscripts coming down, but less than a modern army. The krasnos are underequipped and barely trained in basic weapons use. They’re a brawling herd of uncomprehending dogsbodies, whose sheer numbers comprise the main strength of the outdated Dauran Revolutionary Army. But like any large herd of dumb and frightened beasts, they’ll be lethal to, and unstoppable by, anything that gets in the way of their stampede.
***
There’s war in the skies! And immense warships overhead, and falling drop-ships and rising beams of lethal light. And all the brilliant vanity of the stars, cold and indifferent to it all.
Armed drone scouts are tearing into the upper atmosphere of Krakoya I, now diving down to look for optimum landing sites for the big infantry and shturm drop-ships. A little desultory ground-fire rises in blue beams to meet them, but does no harm. The skies are open.
Much farther up and out, beyond any unaided ground vison, yet glinting in rose light from the Twin’s dwarf star, two clotted clouds of battle wreckage float off aimlessly on inertial momentum: broken frigates and cutters, bits of hull and useless lasers, slow-spinning crew. Their death ride inflicted no damage on the Dauran fleet, barely scoring the fresh carbyne-paint on two destroyers. But there were witnesses, on the Twins below and more looking through rear scuttles as they left the system. The Little Ships will carry the story to Harsa and the sanctuaries. It’s just the kind of tale of futile heroism the exile movement needs. It won’t be long until the songs start.
Aleksandr remains in high-orbit on Leonine with two-thirds of his unopposed fleet. The last-third splits away in escort of 20 more transports, heading to drop orbits above Krakoya II. It’s over 40 hours fusion-drive time away, at outmoded Dauran Navy speeds, to make just 17 light-minutes to the far side of the parent star. The bulky ships of the Krakoya II assault group carry another 900,000 krasnos in older drop-ships and new landers. Another overwhelming ground force to easily overrun the system’s smaller, less populous, undefended second world.
“All’s in hand,” Royko says with deep contentment. He’s pleased to enter open skies, but only because he knows that on the ground he’ll force his way through city gates, refusing to have them opened to him. It’s his right as a conqueror. All that’s missing is a big white horse to ride.
Otherwise, he’ll push through broken gates like so many have before him, not waiting patiently like Allenby in Jerusalem for his horse and an invitation. He’ll refuse any surrender offer until he crashes through, to make the conqueror’s point. He’ll do it like Scipio at Carthage or Napoleon at Berlin; like Yu Fong at the head of the Red Horde after Mars III; even like Karl Ferdinand Oetkert, terrible founder of his House, known as the ‘Jade Eye’ to Orion, felling walls and trampling the conquered as he overran Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden for the Ordensstaadt.
If there’s resistance, like the dread men of the past he so admires, Royko will lay cities waste with plasma fire from his heavy artillery. He might do it anyway, to play the conqueror and for his pleasure’s sake. “What a spectacle! War is terrible and I grow ever more fond of it!”
Aleksandr silently agrees. He’s confident, too. Not in Royko or his ‘Grand Design,’ but in himself and his grand fleet. So confident he picks this moment to leave the Combat Bridge. Or truth be told, the moment picks and pulls at him, twisting his gut. He has to abandon the joy of the first battle of his naval career to hurry to answer an extremely urgent call of nature.
‘It must the damn venison steak I ate last night. Was it off or too rare? I’ll have a stern word indeed, with the chief cook. I’ll flog him bloody for making me miss my perfect moment.’
A direct call from his XO reaches Aleksandr seven minutes later, while he’s washing up in his private captain’s cabin, having re-tucked a starched white shirt back into starched white trousers. Having won a minor battle with his bowels. OK, not so minor. He’s a bit weak-kneed. Still, he heads back to the Combat Bridge, pain and a threat of humiliation stabbing in his bowels but the XO calling him to return to a different urgent duty. ‘What’s the fucking problem now?’
He walks carefully onto the Bridge, clenching his buttocks against unfinished urgings of his bowels and sphincter, determined to see the first DRN assault landings in 300 years. As he expects, the XO shows him confident waves of assault craft scudding down in serried files across Leonine’s Main Scuttle, heading through the upper atmosphere. They're dropping hard and fast.
Too fast, and too many inside sudden cloudbursts of white light and smoke, full of vaporous death and wreckage. The assault is not totally unopposed as he expected, after his escort screens wiped out the ridiculous Bantams. As the drop-ships plunge through the upper clouds into mid-atmosphere, the big ungainly boxes, his highly vulnerable troop carriers falling like residence tower blocks through the sky, are taking extremely heavy casualties.
Ones are throwing up a final challenge to Aleksandr and Royko and to distant Jahandar’s overreaching will. Or rather, a last gesture of defiance before their ancient homes and small but independent civilization fall under a long night of murderous Dauran tyranny. Massive ground batteries, hitherto silent and concealed, are firing upward as the falling drop-ships brake to slow.
The big ground laser and tokamak batteries held fire until the droppers reached intimate ranges, even as Aleksandr hurriedly unbuttoned his over-buttoned dress-uniform trousers and plonked himself down in the Captain’s Head. The batteries fired almost straight upward and all at once: lasers, masers, and most unexpected and shockingly, big tokamak white-plasma cannon. That’s when the XO called him back to the Combat Bridge, on the triple.
Tokamaks dwarf even the biggest plasma guns mounted on Aleksandr’s battleships. They spew jets of extreme white plasma, contained magnetically in chambers at completely unnatural temperatures up to 150 million degrees Celsius. That’s ten times core temperature of a medium stellar mass. Thousands of times the hottest spots on the surface of Krakoya’s red dwarf. Such last-line-of-defense weapons actually fired from the surface of an inhabited world is desperate contumacy, an astonishing act of self-destructive defiance.
Superheated gases rip colossal tears in the lower atmosphere, boring vacuum tunnels of incinerated oxygen
and water vapor that roil the sky. The effects are instant. Violent storms race williwawing down to the surface where they uproot forests and tear at cities with cyclone winds, pounding and blowing fleeing people and vehicles with fist-sized hail, emptying big lakes and raising oceans over coastlines in tsunami-surges the like of which Krakoya I never saw before.
Plasma arcs also disintegrate armtrak-carriers, arti-transports, and infantry drop-ships in immensely violent eruptions that light up the night-side sky. They remind a watching astronomer of celestial fireworks of novae, then of nascent stars bursting into light inside the immense womb of a nebula, a seeded remnant of some colossal explosion in the cosmic past. These incandescent novae over Krakoya carry no hope inside. They’ll leave no rich residue from which new worlds and life might one day arise to redeem so violent a birthing. They’re pure death.
“Admiral, why aren’t you protecting my drop-ships? Do you see what’s happening out there?” Royko’s face is reddening visibly, his collar choking him.
