Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  Ferlant zoomed the display out to view the entire situation around Gehtanu. “That frigate has been a pain in our backside for too long. But, it has survived so long now, it would be almost a shame to kill it now. The destroyer is the more important target. Signal all ships to concentrate fire on the destroyer.”

  “Yes, sir,” Smeth acknowledged. “It will be some time before the Hertall can disengage,” he cautioned and pointed to the Ruhar frigate Mem Hertall on the display. “She will pass the enemy frigate in a few minutes.”

  “Very well, let the Hertall keep Target Beta busy. The other frigates will cut off Target Delta’s escape route.” His own cruiser Gastalo had been caught out of position when the Kristang jumped in, and likely would still be scrambling to change course when the battle ended. With four defending ships concentrating fire at a single enemy destroyer, and that ship being unable to form a jump wormhole, Target Delta’s life expectancy could now be measured in minutes. “Then we-”

  The main display zoomed out on its own, red lights flashing and warning horns blaring.

  Above the Gastalo, above minimum safe jump distance, sixteen Kristang warships jumped in. The enhanced task force now included a battlecruiser and two cruisers of Gastalo’s size. The additional ships had been dropped off at the edge of the star system by a Thuranin star carrier thirty three days before. The star carrier was not waiting for the Kristang ships to return, and indeed the Kristang task force could not afford to have their ships brought home. Their mission to the planet they called Pradassis was one-way, unless the Ruhar surrendered the world through negotiation. The additional Kristang ships had flown the slow way through normal space to the other side of the fourth planet, and waited there, without the Ruhar even knowing new ships had arrived. With the raids occupying Commodore Ferlant’s attention as the Kristang planned, Ferlant had been unable to properly patrol the star system.

  The Kristang ships fired one volley of railgun darts at a half dozen high-value targets on the surface, then their weapons went silent. They did not even fire at the defending Ruhar ships.

  The arrival of the Kristang task force came too late for the worn-out Glory. The little frigate survived its second pass with the Ruhar frigate Mem Hertall, but the Glory’s shields were now down to only 22% effectiveness. The shield emitters were so polarized from deflecting maser fire that they needed to be taken offline and restarted. Her sensor field was so confused by the intense cloud of high-energy particles clinging to the ship’s hull that the ship had lost track of an incoming missile. Her defensive maser and particle beam cannons were firing almost blindly, knowing that the ship’s weakened shields could not protect the hull from even a near-miss warhead explosion. The missile raced in toward the enemy frigate, jinking randomly to avoid defensive fire. If the missile had known the enemy’s weakness, it would have flown straight and true right into the frigate’s reactor.

  The arrival of the task force was perfectly timed for the Vergent, she had been attacked by four enemy ships and trapped, unable to climb to jump distance. Even if the pair of destroyers above had not blocked her access to jump altitude, the damping field those two ships projected would prevent the Vergent from jumping away. The Kristang destroyer was battered, maneuvering wildly to avoid maser and railgun fire, and her defensive batteries were smoking hot from exploding incoming missiles.

  Then, suddenly, incoming fire stopped as the enemy ships broke contact and climbed frantically for jump altitude. The two Ruhar destroyers above Vergent turned off their power-draining damping fields and fed power to jump drive capacitors and defensive shields, anticipating a hard fight with the powerful Kristang task force. A fight that never came.

  On the Vergent’s bridge, her crew exulted and her captain pumped his fist in the air triumphantly. He was about to order his ship’s railgun turned to fire on a now-retreating enemy frigate, when the task force commander ordered him to cease fire for the moment, and of all things, to use the Vergent’s maser cannons to intercept the missile that threatened the To Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious.

  At first, the Vergent’s captain could not believe the order, it must have been scrambled in transmission or in the decryption process. He held his railgun fire anyway, wary of angering his commander. Then confirmation was received. The Glory’s sensor field had lost track of an enemy missile, and the Vergent was the closest ship, the only ship capable of destroying the missile before it blew the little Glory into dust. The Captain turned to his weapons officer. “We are ordered to intercept a missile that is tracking the Glory. You will do your best to comply. However,” the Captain’s lips curling in a grimace that was the Kristang equivalent of a smile. “It is unfortunate that our own sensors have been degraded by recent action.”

  “Yes, Captain. Understood.” The weaponeer acknowledged and turned his attention to the console in front of him. “Engaging maser cannons now.”

  The missile had its own problems, having to keep track of a target that was surrounded by a cloud of high-energy particles. Debris from other missile warheads cluttered orbital space, and the missile’s brain was confused by overlapping sensor fields, only one of which was its own. The missile’s sensor field distorted unpredictably, making it momentarily lose track of its target. It also detected defensive maser and particle cannon fire, and the missile jerked side to side violently to throw off the enemy’s aim.

  A maser came close, this beam from a different direction. Alarmed, the missile’s brain changed course and fired thrusters in an attempt to now escape two opponents.

  “I am sorry, Captain,” the weaponeer reported in a casual voice. “We are unable to effectively target the missile from this range. We risk hitting the Glory.”

  “That in unfortunate,” the Captain said, now bored. He still needed to make it look good for the task force commander. “Continue trying, weaponeer.”

  The Ruhar missile regained a lock on its target, which it identified as a particular type of Kristang frigate. In fact, it was a specific frigate that was well-known to the Ruhar defense force. That type of ship was thought by the Ruhar fleet to have a gap in sensor coverage just aft of amidships, so the missile altered course to approach from that angle. The missile fired thrusters and its engine swung around to propel it almost sideways, flinging it across empty space.

  And right into a maser bolt from the Vergent.

  “What?!” The Captain of the destroyer shrieked. “You idiot!”

  “I’m sorry, Captain,” the weaponeer cowered in his seat before his enraged Captain. “It was an accident! The missile flew right into our maser beam!”

  The Captain fumbled for his sidearm to shoot his traitorously incompetent weapons officer, but as his hand closed on the pistol, he thought better of it. A dead weapons officer would be difficult to explain. Instead, he would make the man’s life miserable. “Very well,” the Captain’s lip curled in a sneer, but he never finished the thought.

  While the attention of the Vergent’s crew had been focused on the two Ruhar destroyers and pair of frigates, and then on their task force and finally the hapless Glory, they forgot about the single Ruhar cruiser. Forgetting about that ship was somewhat understandable in the heat of battle. The Ruh Gastalo had only recently been able to complete her turn, and only now was the cruiser able to accelerate toward the Vergent.

  Her railgun, however, did not rely on its host ship’s velocity or course. As the Gastalo reached the point where her velocity relative to the Vergent was zero, her railgun had pumped out six shots. Four of the darts flew onward and eventually would escape the star system and galaxy. The other two, one following close behind the other, hit the Vergent. The first was deflected by the destroyer’s defensive energy shield which then immediately collapsed from the strain. The second dart plunged through the subatomic particle cloud left by the first dart, and punched through the Kristang destroyer’s relatively light armor. The dart missed the reactor by mere centimeters, marauding through the Vergent stern to bow, to cause a tremendous e
xplosion that ripped the ship’s bow off. The crew in the bridge was instantly transformed into water vapor before simultaneously boiling and freezing in the vacuum of space. As the dart ripped through the ship, it created shrapnel, one piece of which flew backwards and ignited one of the Vergent’s own missiles. The missile exploded in the launch tube, cooking off its warhead.

  The destroyer was torn in half, and chunks of its own debris tore through the reactor shielding, causing the reactor to lose containment and triggering a release of titanic energy from the ship’s drive coils.

  In less than two hundredths of a second after the first railgun dart impacted her shields, the We are Proud to Honor Clan Sub-Leader Rash-au-Tal Vergent who Inspires us Every Day ceased to exist as an organized collection of molecules. In the space she had occupied, there was now an expanding glare of mesons and rapidly-cooling exotic particles.

  “Cease fire! Cease fire!” Commodore Ferlant ordered. He had been too late to stop his own free-flying railgun darts, and saw with satisfaction what they had done to Target Delta. “All ships, cease fire and proceed to rendezvous coordinate Alpha.” As he listened to the ships in his task force acknowledge his order, Ferlant reflected on the message he had received from the Kristang commander. A message he thought he would never hear from a Kristang.

  Admiral Jet-au-Bes Kekrando, commander of the Kristang task force, could believe his own message even less than Commodore Ferlant had. The message had left such a bad, sour, cowardly taste in Kekrando’s mouth that he had been forced to lock himself in his quarters and practice saying the hated message word by word. When he had been unable to get through reciting the entire message, he had ordered the ship’s AI to mimic Kekrando’s voice and record it for later transmission.

  The message, forced upon Admiral Kekrando by his clan leaders, offered a truce with the Ruhar on Pradassis. The clan wished not to recapture the planet by force, but instead merely to give the clan a much stronger hand in negotiations. When Kekrando had protested that such a cowardly act was unworthy of the warriors in his task force, he had been taken aside by three senior clan leaders. Rather than berating him for insubordination, they had commiserated with him at their being forced to negotiate with the disgusting Ruhar. They were negotiating, the clan leaders explained, because a forceful military action to retake Pradassis would result in destruction of Ruhar ships and widespread deaths among Ruhar on the planet. That would almost certainly provoke a strong response by the Ruhar fleet. The clan was too weak for a major campaign against the Ruhar, and other Kristang clans would be more likely to help the Ruhar than help a rival clan. The clan had barely been able to scrape together the funds to pay the Thuranin to carry Kekrando’s task force to Pradassis; they could not afford to send any more ships. Thus, he needed to avoid becoming involved in a major fleet action with the Ruhar. Although it certainly felt cowardly and beneath the dignity of a warrior, a carefully restrained action would accomplish the clan’s goals, whereas a typical Kristang slash-and-burn invasion would do the opposite in this case. After the meeting concluded, Admiral Kekrando could understand the clan leaders’ reasoning and see the long-range wisdom of their decisions. He also decided that he never wished to become a senior clan leader. It involved too much of a distasteful word called politics.

  When his task force ships jumped in, Kekrando had waited crucial seconds after his ships fired one volley at surface targets that had been approved by the clan leadership. He was supposed to jump in, verify the tactical situation, fire one volley, and then transmit the message offering a cease fire and safe passage for the Ruhar ships to escape. Instead, he had waited, with the excuse that he was waiting for sensor data to give him a more complete view of the tactical situation. In reality, he had waited in the hope that the destroyer and frigate who had jumped in first as bait could score significant hits on enemy ships. Instead, the destroyer Vergent was now dead because of his delay, without substantial damage to the Ruhar ships. Kekrando had ground his teeth at that setback; the Vergent’s captain had been incompetent and the task force was better off without him, but Kekrando could have put another man in command of that destroyer. Now his task force was already depleted by one ship, without any damage to the enemy.

  Warily, the little frigate To Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious dipped closer to the planet in order to give a wide space for the Ruhar task force to climb out to jump distance. Seeking glory in battle was indeed glorious, but on that day the ship’s crew had enough of battle and simply wanted to survive the next ten minutes. A cease fire could break down at any moment, and the Glory’s shields were unable to stop even a low-power maser at the moment. To prevent shield projectors from melting down and exploding, the Glory’s crew had been forced to take them offline and let them cool. Until the generators could go through the long process of being reactivated, the ship was essentially defenseless. Inside the ship, the crew held their breath until the last Ruhar ship, a cruiser, jumped away.

  Cheers rang throughout the ship. The Glory had survived another day, survived a very close call, with the last-minute surprise assistance of the destroyer Vergent and that ship’s valiant crew. It was not only a day they had survived, not only a battle; they had survived an entire campaign. The Kristang task force had established complete supremacy in the space surrounding Pradassis. The raids were over. Combat was over. They had sought glory in battle and in retrospect, it had been glorious. And now, her crew fervently hoped, it would be some other ship’s turn to seek glory.

  Negotiations for the formal cease fire agreement took less than half a day; with the Kristang battlegroup in complete control of the planet, there was not much for the Ruhar government to do other than accept the terms offered. The terms were surprisingly generous, almost unprecedented. Commodore Ferlant’s small task force would not be allowed within eleven lightminutes of the planet, although eventually Ruhar civilian transport ships would be allowed into orbit. The Kristang would land troops and equipment in the northeast of the northern continent. That area had been fully evacuated before the Ruhar came back, reducing the disruption to the native population as the Kristang established their presence at abandoned Ruhar military bases. The cease fire agreement also established a zone between the Kristang and the Ruhar areas, where no aircraft could fly.

  The agreement left open the ultimate status of the humans on the southern continent. While the cease fire was in effect, either side was allowed to take action against the humans, and neither side could provide any form of assistance. Shortly after the formal agreement was signed, humans on Lemuria noticed the tractors and other equipment provided by the Ruhar suddenly stopped working. Calls to the Ruhar went unanswered, until the government contacted UNEF HQ, to state that no additional equipment or materials would be coming from the Ruhar. Humans were on their own, until the ultimate status of the planet had been decided.

  At which point, humans would be screwed, one way or the other.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Flying Dutchman

  After leaving the derelict relay station behind, our ability to practice the raid was limited to using parts of the Flying Dutchman as a stand-in for a relay station. Because the type of relay station we would be boarding was a converted warship, the arrangement of the station’s interior was not much different than that of our pirate ship. Corridors were the same dimensions, doors the same height and width, blast doors located about the same distance apart. Major Smythe had people run through assault drills over and over, always adding some wrinkle or problem that his team needed to adapt to. It was unnerving to see people in Kristang armored suits charging down corridors, firing simulated ammo and using simulated rockets and grenades. Combots were used by Smythe’s team, and by Skippy acting as the Thuranin opposition.

  The extra practice time gave Smythe’s team opportunity to refine their assault plan; still, both Smythe and Skippy expected substantial casualties. In some simulations, the assault team suffered 50% losses, when one of our two dropships was blown up in the initi
al operation to force the team’s way into the station. “The problem, Colonel,” Smythe said to me after one particularly bad simulated assault, “is forcing our way through the interior of the station. The enemy’s defenses are substantial. I asked Skippy if there is a way he can disrupt those defenses, and he told me he cannot do much, until we get him past the shielding and into the station’s core. There are going to be casualties, Colonel.”

  Sitting in my office, I was trying to avoid thinking about how many of the Merry Band of Pirates we were going to lose in the upcoming operation. My way to avoid thinking involved playing a mindless game on a tablet. The game got my mind off-

  “Skippy,” I said slowly, and almost never finished the thought.

  “Oh no.” He groaned. “Oh I hate my life. The universe hates me. This is so unfair.”

  “What?” He had me alarmed.

  “You’re going to tell me one of your brilliant freakin’ ideas that I should have thought of with my ginormous brain power. And I am going to sink ever lower and lower into ultimate despair until I long for the gentle embrace of death,” his voice trailed off.

  “How did you know that? About the idea, I mean.”

  “When you say something slowly like that, especially when you say my name super slowly, it means that you just had an idea form in your monkey-meat brain.”

  “I do not.”

  “Yes you do, every freakin’ time. You speak slowly because you are finishing the idea while the signal is crawling along from your brain to your voice box, and as glacially slow as your brain works, it takes a while.”