“Quick, get to the shuttle and fly off to the side for the triangulation. Margo has my authorization code to start a preflight for you to save you a few minutes. With the shuttle, we can use their radio signal direction, as well as a visual recording of their position to get a triangulation angle for a size and distance measurement. Be sure to record everything with the sensors.”
She shifted to issuing instructions to the AI. “Margo, select whatever frequency they’re using and let me try to speak to them before the end of their message. They might decide to leave again as soon as the recording is finished, so I’m not doing to wait this time.”
Tolvert started running towards the shuttle, as he saw the side hatch open and the external lights activated, which then flicked on and off in a pattern, as part of the AI conducting the preflight check. He was a few hundred feet away from the com shack when he heard a soft pop behind him, followed by a loud rush of air past him, which diminished rapidly.
He looked back, and the shack was gone, with a large gray mist spreading up and away, drifting on the evening breeze. In the starlight, he saw what looked like a dark circle drawn on the pavement where the shack had been. Suddenly, the image shifted into proper perspective for him, and he realized there was a round pit where the shack had been, not a dark circle on the surface.
“Pesh, did you kill the power in the com shack? Margo said the transmitter and receiver circuits quit feeding her data, and…” Pesh interrupted her.
“Gale, the shack is gone! There’s a hole in the ground where it was.”
Another soft pop sounded, with a slightly weaker sound of rushing air. That too was behind him because he had turned around to face where the com shack had vanished.
He knew before he turned to look, that the shuttle had just vanished in a puff of air. There was a smaller sized circular pit where it had been parked, and misty gas spread from where the craft had been.
“Gale, sound an alert. I think we should get everyone away from the settlement. The shuttle also just vanished, leaving only another hole in the ground and a burst of gas, just like the com shack did. I think we’re under attack by some sort of weapon from that triangle shaped object.”
“You could be right. All we have are fire and severe weather alarms. I think only a fire would get them out of the buildings. Margo, sound all of the fire alarms and send a broadcast message to each person’s transdu…” Her voice cut off in mid transmission.
The sound of distant pops, unaccompanied by flashes, reached Tolvert just as he heard the fire alarms. One of those pops, and a burst of gray gas, came from the main administration building, where Gale’s personal quarters were located on the second floor of the low four-story extruded plastic building. That was so the colony leader could always be at the center of activity, coordinating the work to be done day or night. He knew she had just been at the center of unexpected deadly activity, and was now part of the gasses he saw expanding from there.
There also were rapid multiple bursts of wispy mists from the residence halls, which jetted out through ruptured windows or missing walls from the internal gas pressures. Parts of the buildings fell into spherical voids that suddenly appeared at the base of the structures, others at points well above ground level. The material of the building’s walls and rooftops fell inwards, dropping below ground level. There were no basements under these buildings, so the pits they fell into had obviously just formed.
Tolvert stood frozen in horror for long seconds, as he realized every building, and everyone in the small colony, was being systematically vaporized by some bizarre weapon. It arrived invisibly and struck suddenly from within the structures, and disintegrated the material in a spherical volume hundreds of feet in diameter, making only a deceptively soft sounding “pop,” followed by the sudden expansion of the gasses thus formed. He glanced up at the triangle shape, and it looked exactly as before, a shadow blocking starlight. He knew whoever was in that thing, or controlled it, was killing everyone and destroying everything in the town, without mercy or warning.
Or had the transmissions been some sort of warning, which they couldn’t understand? How could they understand? It wasn’t sent in any language they knew.
Along with the shock of the mass killings, happening as he watched helplessly, came a dose of reality and a desire to survive. Tolvert, turned and ran at a right angle to the path he’d followed towards the shuttle, racing between the animal pens of GMO cattle, sheep, and pigs, kept away from the town for odor reduction. He barely noticed the smell now, and his lungs gasped for air to feed his clone mod enhanced muscles, suitable for the 1.15 standard gravity world. He was running faster than he’d ever ran in his life, and when he heard a pop off to his left, in a cattle pen, he knew it wasn’t fast enough.
The snorting and grunting noise came from animals for which a nearby mild pop sound wasn’t as alarming to them as was the sudden puff of gas that briefly enveloped those at the edge of a circular pit. On the other hand, or hoof, terrified bellowing and an extremely improbable sounding screech from a cow was a testament to the pain and confusion that one cow experienced. Her rear quarter had vanished, and she fell backwards, entrails and organs spilling, into a newly formed shallow pit.
More pops, puffs, snorts, grunts, and bellows, but no more screeches, followed from the cattle pen. Those were accompanied by species varied equivalent sounds of alarm from the pig and sheep pens, as they too were assaulted.
Tolvert assumed he too was, or would be a target, and he desperately looked around as he ran, seeking a place to hide. Although, the buildings of the residence halls hadn’t protected or concealed the others very well. He ran past a drain cover’s grillwork in the paved walkway he was running along. He slid to a halt as he quickly backtracked in a panic. He bruised his fingers as he jammed them into the grid work of the iron cover, and tilted the seventy-pound weight onto one side. He raised it enough to drop through, and let it fall back into place with a deafening clang. There was only a five-foot drop to the bottom of the rain drainage culvert. Something he knew about, because he’d help lay this drain line. It was one of his assigned work tasks, right after they experienced their first heavy rains on Paradise, which had flooded the new streets laid out for the future town, when they still lived in Smart Fabric tents.
The town’s storm drains, all of them dry tonight, led to a large creek, or shallow river, depending on your definitions, about a half mile from the animal pens. It was too low inside for him to stand in the culvert, but he could scurry in a bent over position. He made it all the way to the open end, located in the stream bank, eight feet above the slowly flowing thigh deep water. Upstream, it went into the forests that surrounded the town on two sides, and it was clean, cold, and clear water that originated as mountain snowmelt, coming out of some foothills where the forest ended. A few miles downstream of the drain outlet, the creek led to a larger, muddy, and wide river, well away from the cover of the rather Earth-like forest. Shivering, he waded upstream and vanished into the woods, accompanied by the distant sounds of continuing soft pops, and the sounds of animals screaming and bellowing in distress.
****
Mirikami was stunned. “Under attack, and Margo was cut off? How much did the AI say about the attack before then? They can send even faster than we can via Comtaps.”
Thad shrugged. “The data started out as an automatic report, saying they were getting a repeat of the same message format that Paradise reported previously. Margo was using Instellarnet, via a Prada link the colonies all take with them. The link was located in their administrative building. The first strike was apparently on their communications center, when Gale tried to talk to them via radio, routed from the antenna out there.”
“Communications center? When did they have time to build that? All I saw last month when we delivered supplies was a Smart Plastic cube, ten feet on a side, by the landing pad.”
“OK, fine. The colonists called it a com shack, and the AI said communications center. So
sue Margo for its AI precision. The com shack is what was hit first, according to the transducer report from the watch stander, a Peshawar Tolvert, who was enroute to their shuttle when it happened, and then he said the shuttle was hit the same way.”
“Do we have the recording of the transducer reports he made? We might pick up on the sounds of the explosions he heard.”
“That wasn’t recorded, but what he said was passed along, and knowing an AI, it was probably repeated verbatim. According to his description, the shack and shuttle both vanished in bursts of gas, leaving holes in the ground. He thought it was an attack from a triangle shaped object in the sky. He thought it might be very large. Gale was talking when her transmission cut off, and the AI finally recognized the urgency and it sent everything that had been said through Instellarnet. You heard her last word, cut off as I think she was telling the AI to warn everyone via their transducers, once the fire alarms had them awake. I hope only the link was cut, but I fear the worst. That Prada com device address isn’t online now. None of the smaller prospecting outposts have anything but local radios, and they would be out of transducer range of anyone in Elysium.”
“Alright then, we need to send enough armed ships to find out what happened, and render any aid we can. I’ll have Maggi organize and collect some relief and medical supplies, and leave after us. It’s only a twenty-six hour Jump, but she can probably get underway before we even arrive.”
“Who are we taking?”
“The Mark, of course, your ship the Ripper, Sarge’s ship, the Sneaky Bastard, Avenger with Noreen and Dillon, Carson and Ethan on Wanderer, Maggi will captain the Vanguard when it comes a day later. How many do you think we should take altogether?”
“At least ten ships, all armed to the teeth, and we spread them out so we don’t make a cluster target when we arrive. We still make a blast of gamma rays on arrival, at least until we make the software changes Max’s team tested last week. Unfortunately, we can’t wait that long for the production version trials. I think we’re about to meet a high tech opponent, since that triangle craft didn’t produce gamma rays.”
The captured Krall clanships would never have the fine control of their event horizons as did the Dismantlers, with their many millions of tiny Trap field emitters spread all around their hulls. Yet, Max Born and his team of physicists had discovered how the Olt’kitapi had managed to “swallow up” their own gamma ray bursts at a White Out.
If they maintained two of the three layer event horizons a few millionths of a second longer, as they rotated out of T-cubed, T-squared, and finally the single rotation out of level one Tachyon Space, they could draw each successive wave of photons inward, rather than releasing them outward into Normal Space.
By doing this, all of the gamma rays generated would be drawn into the event horizon of each staged rotation out of Tachyon Space, allowing precisely for the light travel time and the space-time curvature of gravity to pull the high-energy gamma ray photons into Tachyon Space. T-cubed travel wasn’t difficult to achieve with the proper hardware mods, but preventing gamma rays required exact timing adjustments by the software, which the Olt’kitapi had written for the quantum computers that were specifically designed to operate the clanships. Humans had previously learned from Pholowela how to code to do the third rotation into Tachyon Space for T-cubed travel, and this was a refinement of that knowledge.
The skill to rewrite the Olt’kitapi code was being mastered by human scientists, something that even the Raspani and Torki had to learn how to do from them. It had always seemed too risky to try adjusting something the Raspani and the Torki didn’t fully understand, and they were slow to try risky experiments to learn new tricks. The Olt’kitapi had spent a very long time before developing that capability, proof that they too had been cautious.
The human attitude seemed to be; “Well, if we don’t try, we won’t know. The worst that can happen is it will kill us.” Despite this cavalier attitude, there still were willing test pilots ready to take calculated chances.
Fortunately, with human AI’s available, a technology that had never occurred to the Torki and Raspani, and the Krall had declared it a form of weakness to the Prada, there was no risk of human life for the early trials. Some of the first test craft failed to rotate back to Normal Space, but after recent repeat successes, human pilots were about to fly with the new software. But not this week.
A short time later, ten ships, with a full load-out of anti-ship missiles, one Nova missile, and a number of stealthed mines, the flotilla winked out of Normal Space for the twenty-six hour Jump to Paradise, only five hours after the first report of the attack.
****
The Mark was the only ship that selected a White Out point two hundred miles above the town of Elysium, with the remaining nine ships spread out at longer ranges all around the planet, weapons at the ready, everyone linked into a group Comtap circuit.
“Anyone see anything on active scans?” Mirikami asked.
Several had a report. Carson spoke first. “Their communications satellites are still up, but would we even see a stealthed ship? We see the small camps of prospectors. They actually seem to be working as usual, as if nothing happened.”
“The main transmitter is down, and the attack came at night. They might not know about the attack. The only witness saw a dark triangular shape blocking stars, and that was by naked eye at night. At least it apparently wasn’t stealthed during the attack.”
There was a pause, before Mirikami delivered the bad news. “Almost the entire town is gone. Even the animal feedlots have numerous pits of various sizes in them. I see a deep pit where the com shack was, and a smaller one about where the shuttle may have been parked, which match with the only visual observation of the start of the attack. From all the pits I see, and the small amount of debris, it looks as if almost everything was disintegrated. I don't see anything moving down there, other than a few local birds. It’s peaceful appearing right now.”
“Yea. The peace of the dead,” muttered Sarge.
“I’m descending. I’ll leave Jake in control for even faster navigation control if any of you spot anything threatening.” Then the Mark started down quietly, on Normal Space drive.
As the ship drew within a quarter mile altitude, Mirikami, using zoom on his screens, noted something. “The pits in the ground are perfectly semispherical on the sides, to various depths, from a hundred feet to only a few feet deep. Except where the walls or roofs fell into them and gouged the sides. They aren’t heat glazed as if from a laser, and I haven’t seen any sign of fires, or even blast damage spread over a wide area. The buildings were all made of extruded Smart Plastic, and the roofs, which had slight peaks for better water runoff in this rainy region, look to be intact. I don't see any holes in them, where a projectile or a beam entered from above, to vaporize the structure and contents. It looks like the buildings were gutted from the inside, by a weapon that made no entry holes.”
The Mark set down silently, the only noise coming from the whoosh of the four portals, as they rushed up into their recesses. Five hundred Kobani, armored and stealthed, merely kicked up some dust as they deployed, leaping out and spreading towards the destroyed town, with a few tracks leading to the two pits on the paved tarmac, and some others going towards the animal pens.
Only platoon leaders were authorized to make reports, unless hostile opposition was encountered. It stayed mostly silent, except for platoon leader comments.
“The sections of roofs and walls, those that are still partly intact, have circular cuts removed from them, which have a similar radius to the pits in the ground.”
“There are some dead animals, cleaved in half, or some along their length, which fell into the pits here in the pens.”
“I found a hand and a foot. Both lying on the ground, under a half collapsed building portico.”
“Hold it.” It was Mirikami. “Who found the human remains?”
“It was Jorl, Captain.” Jorl Breaker flashed
his suit’s icon for everyone to see on his or her visors.
On the map overlay they all had for the town’s layout, as recorded during the previous month’s supply delivery, Jorl was standing right at one of the four entrances to a residence hall, where a rain and sun awning had stood, over a set of double doors.
“Everyone else continue searching for survivors. I’ll join you Jorl. Remember, each of us needs to continue to send images and reports back to Haven and the other ships.” If they were attacked, there would be a more complete record for those that followed.
“Alyson, you and Jakob have the ship.” He leaped over the railing, and dropped easily the eighteen feet to the next deck, the 1.15 g’s of Paradise of no concern. He leaped down the stairs, barely pausing to touch the landings as he descended faster than he could have fallen, using the side rails to pull himself down faster than gravity or the ship’s lift system would have allowed.
In minutes, he was at Jorl’s side, looking at the remains. There was a right-angled metal frame, with a cleanly sliced bit of glass still attached, lying next to the front part of a bare right foot and a slice of the shin and part of its bone. There wasn’t much blood from that small amount of tissue. The heel and entire rear of the shin bone and calf muscle was missing, not to mention the remainder of the body.
Jorl, without a word, lifted the fallen rear edge of the canopy, which had been attached to the vanished building. Under it, there was a left hand on the walkway, fingers curled, and an inch of the wrist. Both appendages were cut as if a razor had done that, with no tearing or ripping of soft tissue, or any burns showing at the edges of the wounds.
Leaving the body parts where they were, Mirikami picked up the piece of metal and glass. He held it upright close to the ground, a couple of feet from where the building entrance had been. Thought a moment, moved it slightly and angled it a bit.
Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire Page 47
