Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  Kekrando snorted. First with surprise, then with laughter. “Ha! Give me another hundred such men, and I will conquer the galaxy.” He flipped the pistol back to his guard, looked the at stricken sensor officer and demanded “Well? What are you able to tell me?”

  The sensor officer strode over to a secondary console and activated it with no mention of the nearly-fatal incident. “We were attacked by four projectors, Admiral.”

  “Only four?” Kekrando was surprised. During the vicious sneak attack, it had seemed like the entire planet below had sprouted projectors, spitting deadly maser fire up at his ships.

  “Only four,” the man confirmed. “They are oddly clustered together; the enemy’s coverage of the sky is poor with only those four.”

  “Four active, you mean?” Kekrando asked. “How many others?”

  “No, Admiral, there are only those four. The sensor data did not detect targeting signals from any other sources. Two of the four projectors, here, and here,” he indicated, “are nearly depleted. We can tell from the reduced power of their last shots.”

  “It cannot be possible that the enemy has only four projectors on the entire planet,” the Admiral stated.

  The officer did not back down. “According to clan intelligence, Admiral, it cannot be possible that the enemy has even one projector on Pradassis.”

  Kekrando looked at the man sharply, to see if the admiral was being mocked. No, the man had correctly directed his scorn at the clan’s intelligence group. “Ha!” The Admiral snorted. “Only two projectors to worry about, eh? We will see about that.”

  “Admiral?” The destroyer’s captain took the opportunity to step in. “Will we be pursuing the enemy ships?”

  “Some of us will, Captain,” Kekrando replied. “And some of our ships will be testing how many projectors the enemy truly has.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Can someone please explain to me what just happened?” Deputy Administrator Baturnah Logellia asked her staff in exasperation. She knew she was being unfair to her dedicated people. The Chief Administrator’s office had shouted at her moments ago, so she was shouting at her staffers. They would shout at their own teams in turn, all the way down. And no one knew anything useful.

  “You!” She pointed at her military liaison, who was engaged in an animated conversation through an earpiece in his right ear, and had a second phone held up to his left ear. “Why, and how, did we fire on those Kristang ships?” The cease fire had been thoroughly and very effectively broken. BAfter jumping away, Admiral Kekrando of the Kristang had warned of severe consequences from the remaining ships in his still-dangerous task force.

  The man lowered the phone from his left ear. “Pardon me, Administrator Logellia. We did not fire on the Kristang.”

  “I know that we didn’t,” she tried to control her anger. The military had taken rash action that put at risk the civilian population; people she was responsible for. “Commodore Ferlant-”

  “It was not Commodore Ferlant.” The liaison officer stated firmly. “I received a message from his executive officer a moment ago. They were as surprised as we were. The Commodore has no idea who fired. In fact, he accused us of doing something that he considers to be incredibly stupid.”

  “Well,” Baturnah threw up her hands in exasperation. “The planet didn’t shoot at the Kristang by itself.”

  “No, clearly,” he agreed. “They were projectors, powerful maser cannons.”

  “I know what a projector is, Slean,” she used the man’s surname. “Whose projectors, if not ours?” She knew one thing for damned sure; the Ruhar government had never installed projectors on Gehtanu. There was no way such a monumental effort could have been concealed.

  “It had to be the Kristang, ma’am. Before we first came to Gehtanu. Somehow,” it was his turn to throw up his hands, “someone activated them. Four projectors, at least, by our last count.”

  Baturnah’s head was spinning. “You think they have been buried here, practically beneath our feet, all this time?”

  “That is the only explanation we can think of, currently,” Slean responded somewhat distractedly. He was listening to another, or several other, conversations in his earpiece.

  “Now that we know what these projectors look like, we should surely be able to scan for them, can’t we? We must understand what we are dealing with, and who caused those projectors to fire without our authority.”

  “Yes, ma’am, we can scan, but the projectors are likely concealed by a stealth field and other countermeasures. That is why we never detected them before.”

  “We weren’t looking before,” Baturnah said hopefully. “We must immediately begin to scan the subsurface for-”

  “Excuse me, ma’am, but we will not be able to spare any aircraft for scanning projectors or even to investigate and secure the four we know of. Administrator, please come with me, we need to get you to safety.”

  “Why?” She did not budge from behind her desk. “The Kristang have gone,” she pointed to the ceiling.

  “Their ships are gone for the moment, yes. Administrator, we are faced with an almost unique military situation. With neither side having ships in orbit, combat aircraft become the most powerful means of securing control of this planet. I was just informed that the Kristang have launched waves of aircraft targeting our own airfields. The situation is very dangerous.”

  “We must be responding with our own aircraft?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Slean said, gesturing for the Administrator’s personal security team to hustle her away to an air raid shelter. “No one has fought a pure air battle like this in several generations. Unfortunately, ma’am, we are about to see firsthand whether all our theories of air combat strategy are worth the training time we invested. I suggest you be someplace safe when theory meets reality.”

  Baturnah nodded, accepting the pleading look from her personal security team. “Very well. In my experience, Mr. Slean, whenever theory meets reality, theory loses.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the military liaison officer agreed, and turned his attention to coordinating crisis response teams. For this was certainly a crisis.

  For the initial wave of air attacks by the Kristang, they quickly launched dropships to fly high cover and provide the massed aircraft below with long-range sensor and targeting data. With laser links between the attacking aircraft and the three dropships, the attackers could stand off at a safe distance and launch missiles at well-defended targets. Once the Ruhar defenses were degraded, the aircraft could fly in to attack their primary targets.

  The three dropships were perfectly positioned for their role in the attack. They had climbed high so their sensors swept the area between the Kristang aircraft and the Ruhar airbase, and with their active sensors able to detect a roughly location for even stealthed Ruhar aircraft, the Kristang aircraft were able to hug the terrain at low altitude and remain in stealth. Because dropships could climb above an atmosphere, they could not be effectively engaged by aircraft, so the Ruhar had to send their own very limited number of dropships to counter the Kristang. At the start of the massive air battle, the Ruhar were at a serious disadvantage in combat power. Until the Kristang battlegroup arrived, the Ruhar had assumed their defensive needs could be handled by Commodore Ferlant’s small task force. The Ruhar federal government had not wanted to ship combat aircraft and dropships all the way to a remote planet they intended to leave. Most of the combat air power the Ruhar had at the start of the air battle was left over from when humans had used them during the evacuation. Due to need for regular maintenance on the worn-out aircraft and lack of spare parts, thirty percent of the Ruhar’s combat aircraft were unavailable when the Kristang launched their attack.

  Thanks to Skippy, we had a complete view of the developing air battle that would become known among humans as The Great Paradise Furball. With hundreds of aircraft tangling in intense dogfights, it was like a ball of fur rolling around and around in the sky. The Ruhar and Kristang had similar nam
es for the battle, and no one involved ever forgot a single detail.

  The first shot in The Great Paradise Furball wasn’t fired by the Kristang, or the Ruhar. It was fired by a shiny beer can. Those three dropships looked like trouble to me. While I wasn’t a fighter pilot, my infantry experience had taught me the value of high ground, and those dropships had the high ground. “Skippy, can you do something about those three dropships?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I got it, Joe. No problemo.”

  “No problem? You told us that each projector can only cover twenty eight percent of the sky from its position,” I reminded our smart-ass AI.

  “Twenty eight percent on a projector’s normal settings, Joe. I am going to cheat.”

  “Of course you are,” I rolled my eyes. “Please, Oh Greatest of Great Ones, allow us mere mortals a glimpse into your awesomely wondrous plan.”

  “Oooh! I like that. Damn, Joe, that almost sounded sincere. Hmmm, from now on, I’m going to make you monkeys address me that way when you want something, like me programming the jump drive.”

  “That sounds like an excellent deal, Skippy. And from now on, I’m going to move you from your personal escape pod man cave, to a little basket on the side of the toilet next to the galley.”

  “On second thought, Joe, you can just keep calling me Skippy the Magnificent.”

  “How about Asshole Almighty?”

  “I’m sure we can reach a compromise somewhere in there, Joe.”

  “I’m sure we can. Is this where you’re going to warp spacetime to bend the maser beam, or something like that?

  “No, Joe, I am not going to bend a beam of light, you moron. I can only do that over longer ranges. And I can’t warp spacetime so close to an inhabited planet; that’s too dangerous. Do you want to hear what I’m going to do?”

  “No, you talked too freakin’ long, Skippy,” I pointed to the display with symbols for the dropships, which were now at about their maximum altitude. They were about to launch missiles at a Ruhar airbase. “We don’t have time for talk. You need to show me.”

  Skippy did show me, and I would give that show a five out of five in terms of entertainment. The Kristang dropship pilots didn’t leave a review after the action because they were, you know, dead. I’m thinking their review would not have been five stars.

  The three dropships very reasonably thought they were safe from attack by projectors. The dropships were at high altitude; higher than an aircraft could fly, but not so high that they were above the atmosphere. The dropships were to the south of the direct path from the Kristang airbase to their Ruhar targets; going to the south brought them out of the targeting cones of the four projectors they knew about. The dropship pilots were aware that they were being used as bait to determine whether we had projectors we hadn’t used yet. Still, they surely must have thought they were safe from being struck by the four projectors they knew about.

  They should have been safe. They did not know about Skippy.

  “Hey, Skippy,” I pointed at the display. “Those dropships are in stealth. How can you determine their position closely enough to target them?”

  “Simple, Joey. I asked them to tell me.”

  “Huh?”

  “Following standard Kristang practice, those dropships are sharing data with a tightbeam laserlink. That allows them to, for one thing, avoid crashing into each other while they are in stealth. The problem for them is that while the laser beam is narrow, it does bounce off air molecules, and because I am the all-seeing Skippy the Magnificent, I can tell exactly where those ships are. Now, shut up for a minute and let me do my thing.”

  Skippy being the genius that he is, he was able to make the projectors do things they had not been designed to do. When the projectors had been installed, they were lowered into the ground in one piece, and then motorized magnetic pistons were attached to aim the beam. Skippy made some of those pistons retract to their original position way down in the hole, where they had been before explosive charges blew away the dirt over the buried projectors, and the business end of the projector’s muzzle was extended above the surface. With the set of pistons off balance, the beam projector was knocked to one side. Knocked to the side toward the three Kristang dropships.

  That still wasn’t enough of an angle to bring those dropships directly into the targeting cone, so Skippy used another trick. He defocused the beam. Normally, you want a microwave laser beam to be as narrow as possible, so it can put all of its power on one target. So it can slice an armored starship in half, for example. Skippy fired the projector on low power in a series of broad pulses; more like a flashlight than a thin beam. The maser pulses scorched a broad area of the air as they traveled through the atmosphere. Scorched the air enough that the dropships, which were at high altitude but still within the atmosphere, were suddenly subjected to extreme overheating as the air around them was converted into plasma. The air around them briefly became like the photosphere of a star, and backscatter from the defocused maser pulses reflecting off air molecules struck the dropships directly. In less than a second, the extreme heat caused the dropship powercells, missiles and warheads to explode.

  “Did that do the job, Joe?” Skippy asked. “Let’s see. There were three dropships up there, and now I count, hmmm, not three. No, not two either. Or one. I count zero dropships. Zero is less than three, right, Joey?”

  “Let me kick my boots off so I can count on my toes, Skippy. I am a dumb monkey, remember?”

  “Ok, I think we’re good. Unless you consider disorganized pieces falling toward the ground as a ‘dropship’.”

  “No, you did it. Thank you, Skippy.”

  “You’re not thanking me on behalf of those dropship pilots, are you, Joe? Because if you’re hoping to get a fruit basket from them, you will be waiting a while.”

  “Wow,” I whispered. “That’s a whole lot of aircraft.” On the dropship’s display was a total view of the developing air battle, or I should say battles. There were seven distinct clusters of aircraft approaching each other at high speed; and as I watched the fighters on both sides began turning to maneuver to gain an advantage. Thanks to the magic of Skippy the Magnificent, I had perfect situational awareness of every aspect of the battles, even though almost all of the aircraft were still in stealth mode.

  “Yup,” Skippy agreed. “This is going to be quite some show. There hasn’t been an air campaign like this in a very long time. Although perhaps ‘campaign’ isn’t the correct word, since I expect this whole thing to be over in a couple hours, max. Joe, do you want to grab some popcorn and watch the show in real time?”

  “No, Skippy, I do not want any popcorn,” I was angry at his insensitivity. “It is not a show. This is real air combat. People are going to die. You may be immortal, the rest of us are not.”

  “Joe, I am terribly sorry,” Skippy said, and this time he sounded sincere. “You are right, I should not have said that, it was insensitive. You are a pilot now, and a soldier. I should have considered that.”

  “Apology accepted, Skippy,” which were words that I never thought I would ever be able to say. Skippy apologizing? “Is there anything we can do?” Already, I could see aircraft on both sides firing masers at long range. They weren’t likely to hit anything; the point was to keep the enemy at long range. Keep the enemy from closing on you until you wanted them closer, on your terms. With the aircraft of both the Ruhar and Kristang using stealth fields to confuse enemy sensors, defensive shields to deflect maser beams, and maser turrets to destroy incoming missiles, aircraft couldn’t rely on fire-and-forget missiles like the US Air Force did on Earth. Air combat in the war between the Ruhar and Kristang was a close-range affair like WWII. Get close to the enemy aircraft, hammer it with maser pulses to degrade its shields, then finish it with a volley of missiles. Thinking about it, I shuddered. What I knew about flying was strictly peacetime maneuvers. I would hate to be in the skies above Paradise right then.

  “Anything we can do? You mean is there anything
I can do? Sure, Joe, there is a lot I can do. It would surprise me if we got permission to do much of it.”

  “You? Since when do you ask permission to do anything?”

  “By ‘we’, I meant you, Joe. And by ‘permission’ I meant an Ok from Count Chocula.”

  “Oh, shit.” I’d almost forgotten that nagging little detail.

  “Most of the things I could do, that would be effective in giving the Ruhar an advantage over the Kristang, would risk being too obvious.”

  “The Kristang would figure out that some higher-technology had been messing with their aircraft?”

  “Exactly. What’s worse is that the Ruhar would review the after action sensor data and realize someone else was messing with the Kristang. The Ruhar would logically conclude that the Jeraptha must have been involved on their side, but when they inevitably ask the Jeraptha about it, the Jeraptha will certainly know they didn’t help in the air battle. And that will start the Jeraptha asking uncomfortable questions and looking into things that are better left alone.”

  “I can see that would be a problem.”

  “That reminds me of something that has been troubling me for some time, Joe. The Thuranin are not stupid; their intelligence people surely by now have heard a rumor about a human escaping from a Kristang jail, and that same human stealing a Ruhar Dodo. That Dodo was taken aboard a Kristang frigate, and both that frigate and its star carrier mothership disappeared without a trace. I am surprised that the Thuranin have not been investigating the incident. Or maybe they are, and we don’t know it yet.”

  “Shit, Skippy, that’s not good.”

  “It is most certainly not good at all, Joe. Which is why we must avoid any significant risk of me interfering in the battle to help the Ruhar in any way that looks suspicious. Count Chocula is annoyingly correct about that; we can’t risk exposing our presence.”