Elian and I spent many hours discussing how a species could build such immense ships and then set out on voyages that began when our species was mostly illiterate; while at the same time they failed to develop a digital technology that for over three centuries had fueled our leap to the stars. Elian, as usual, was the one who asked a key question: if they didn’t have computers, at least computers as we knew them, how were their fighters energy weapons so accurate? How were they able to develop missiles that utilized immensely powerful nuclear reactions, yet not have discovered digital technology?
We didn’t know, but we hoped to learn the answers to these questions, and many others, without having to kill, or suffer our own casualties. Elian and I, along with WO Kana, spent many hours discussing this species. In the beginning we’d simply fought for our lives, later for the salvation of our own people. Finally, we felt we had the ability to eliminate them, and it was giving the three of us severe ethical problems.
We wanted our first pass to be at a relatively long range. Neither Elian nor I intended to totally trust the findings of our engineers and scientists, as we would be paying the bill for someone else’ mistake.
We went to battle stations at fifteen million kilometers. Our passive systems had been picking up emissions from a growing number of sources, spread across a very large section of space. These people didn’t seem to like running in close proximity to each other. They were still decelerating from what had been an extremely high relativistic velocity of as much as seventy percent of light speed. This made it easy to track their ships, and our initial readings indicated the same type and level of technology as we’d seen with the first five colony fleets.
One big difference between the colony and home world ships was their carriers. The bug colony mother ships housed all their fighters, but in this fleet, our scouts reported the existence of twenty-two ships that were launching and recovering fighter-sized craft. WO Kana speculated that the carriers were possibly tied to the purpose of this immense fleet; the destruction of the colony mother ships.
At the core of this fleet we could easily see three large globes, junior editions of the mother ships that had given me so many nightmares. It was believed that there had originally been as many as six, so possibly the missing ships had either been destroyed in their encounters with the three previously destroyed colony fleets, or they had simply failed during the voyage.
The question that was most often voiced was why a species would completely destroy its own colony, construct a fleet which must have consumed many years of the total economic output of the entire planet, then send it on a centuries long journey to destroy the remnants of that same colony? All indications pointed to a society that was totalitarian in the extreme, and that alone raised red flags in the minds of every historian alive.
We had to adjust our course to enable us to pass the fleet at the wanted five million kilometers. Our relative velocity was quite high, as they were still roughly two months away from reducing their velocity to match that of the now destroyed bug mother ships, so we fairly blew past them, getting rough readings on their larger ships as we passed, but little in the way of good information.
It took us four hours to reach the tail end of their fleet. We waited for thirty minutes, then we began accelerating at eight G’s, running our engines at significantly lower power settings than we thought they might be able to detect.
It took us nearly ten hours to come to rest, relative to their fleet before we slowly began to accelerate back towards it, now ten million kilometers off our starboard bow. As we closed on them we gradually reduced our acceleration. We wanted to make a second pass, still at five million kilometers distance, but at a velocity that would allow us to take better readings.
We ghosted back up the other side of the bug fleet, which was in a roughly globular formation. The three mother ships massed about fifteen million tons, easily three times the size of our own carriers, but very small compared to the colony’s ships. They were situated in the center of the fleet. Surrounding them were the carriers, which were rigidly equidistant to the mother ships and to each other. Elian joked that if thee beings had a religion, it was most probably math. In all my experiences with them, I’d never seen them do something illogical. We never failed to find a distinct pattern and balance to the ways they positioned their ships, as well as the design and construction of those same vessels. Elian said, “You know, it fits: their authoritarian structure would logically mean a centralized control system, with rigid adherence to one mind set.”
Their large complement of destroyers, cruisers, battle cruisers and even a couple of huge combat vessels, easily as large as our one battleship, were positioned at the outside of the globe of ships. We were still too distant to get good readings on fighter-sized craft, but we assumed that the large volume of space between the outer layer of destroyers and the inner layer of carriers would be filled up with them.
I had come to understand how this species had approached the task of traveling between solar systems without faster than light travel. The bug colony built immense, globular ships and stuffed them with everything necessary for multi-year voyages. They docked the dozens of larger vessels to the exterior of the mother ship during their crossings, and only used them during the time they were in a solar system. While I could at least see the possibility of raising and training generation after generation of people who would continue the original purpose of the expedition, I didn’t understand the type of society that would even think of doing this.
Our scans were bringing to light differences, both subtle and large, between what we now knew to be the colony fleets and this much larger home world fleet. I didn’t understand how they could dock all the ships I was seeing to the relatively much smaller mother ships. There had originally been six of them, so perhaps this group had approached the problem with similar solutions, but I saw no way that they could do it now.
It took us another forty hours to pass back up the other side of the fleet. When we neared the head, we decelerated until we were dropping back past them while edging in closer.
For two weeks we cruised back and forth, gradually closing to within one million kilometers. We ascertained that the inner sphere was indeed filled with large amounts of fighters, leading me to the conclusion that this bunch was just as much on a war footing as the colony ships had been. Unfortunately for the colony fleets, they found us first. Now, we had found the home world fleet, and we didn’t know what to do with it.
We withdrew our Dresdens out to a distance of twenty million kilometers and launched the two Kestrels. We were going to try to sneak them inside the destroyers, and if possible, inside the carriers as well. Our studies of the ways they utilized their fighters and larger ships revealed a mathematical organization that didn’t seem to correspond to what we had learned about warfare over the centuries, which was that chaos reigned supreme, and if its influence wasn’t taken into account, you were going to get dead. They were intensely logical and once we began to decipher the way they thought, we were able to predict their ship movements and scouting patterns with more precision. We figured that if we could do it, their enemies could have as well.
We sent the two Kestrels away from the enemy fleet and the two crews played with the stealth modifications we had cobbled together. They tested it under varying conditions of acceleration until they were satisfied that it worked much as our tests had predicted, at which time they turned around and came back
They passed by us on their way in, and we accelerated after them, trying to get readings off their drive systems. At distances greater than ten thousand kilometers and accelerations below three G’s they were simply impossible for us to see, and we hoped it would be the same for our possible enemy.
We drifted up to three hundred thousand kilometers of the outer layer and shut down our laser comm systems while the Kestrels continued to ghost in. Within less than an hour the two attack craft were out of range. We would have to wait twelve hours until the
y returned.
We pulled back out to a half million kilometers and rested our crews while we awaited word. The Kestrels were not to communicate with us unless they came under attack, at which time we would attempt to help them exit the formation by launching capital missiles at the ship or ships that were attacking them.
Time passed extremely slowly. We were unable to see any changes in the basic operational tempo of the formation, which seemed to indicate our fighters hadn’t been discovered. At a little over eleven hours into the mission the two Kestrels communicated with us via encrypted radio. We turned on a beacon and one hour later the two docked inside our tiny bays.
Their sensors had recorded a huge amount of data. Their verbal report indicated that these beings were armed to the teeth and at what seemed to be a steadily growing state of combat readiness, despite the fact that they were approximately two months away from contact with the colony ships.
Elian, his exec and the Kestrel crew shuttled over in their Kestrel to our ship and we docked it to the outside of the Grant, a technique learned from the bugs. The four of them suited up and crossed a few meters of intervening space and into our own shuttle bay.
We gathered in the wardroom. WO Kana sat in on the meeting and the nine of us went over the sensor readings, as well as the personal observations of the Kestrel crews.
They reported that their ships were practically black holes and they’d had virtually no problems during the ingress into the center of the bug fleet. They circled around the three mother ships and exited past several carriers before passing through the fighters and finally the outer layer of destroyers. They said that at no time were they in any danger of being detected, and were generally thrilled with their new technology, which they described in glowing terms, reminding me of our own reaction when we first utilized it on the Dresdens. Elian reminded them that they were only ‘nearly invisible’ to passive systems, and that an active radar search could have found them. That quieted them considerably.
They reported that the mother ships maintained constant communications with the carriers via an analogue carrier wave. It was almost as if they were controlling the huge carriers remotely. They saw no similar communication between either the mother ships or carriers and the outer layer of ships, but there were periodic transmissions. Our computers had been programmed with a ‘translator’, derived from the colony’s computers and our own recordings, but it could not decipher the intense amount of message traffic that was passing between ships. Once again, it was logical, as they would have had to possess communications that were not readable by their opponents.
We discussed the data for a couple of hours and decided that we had accomplished our mission goals. We had a great deal of information on the sixth fleet, and it was now time to get it home.
I waved to Elian and two hours later our two Dresdens began accelerating away from the fleet. At no time had we been detected, which of course was good, but we did not have any firm data on how good their sensors were. The only way to gain that information was to get detected, and I was certain that following on the heels of our detection would be a host of angry and well-armed beings.
We accelerated away from the incoming fleet at a steady three G’s. After six hours we increased to ten G’s. Elian and I set up a comm link between our two wardrooms and we sat down with our exec’s and a select few ComTech’s, PowTech’s and Etech’s to begin preparing a synopsis of all that we had learned during our visit to Bug Central.
The result of our first session was that we believed that we could destroy the bug fleet with virtually no losses, although we couldn’t do it in one attack. This conclusion was far different from that held by most Fleet experts, which assumed that the immense size and makeup of the sixth group could easily destroy our entire fleet. That belief would have been accurate one year ago, but not now. Today, we had learned to stealth our ships, making it much harder for the bugs to find us, and we had brought into service the Hawks and Kestrels, and especially, the Dresdens. These new weapons dramatically tipped the scale in our favor, to such an extent that I felt it would be possible to eliminate every single bug ship with virtually no loss of life on our part.
This crushing victory could be won by first attacking their carriers with an overwhelming launch of capital missiles, with the aim of destroying their fighter bases. The Dresdens alone held twelve hundred missiles, with the Hawks and Kestrels adding approximately one hundred and twenty more, which should be more than enough to eliminate the carriers.
Following the initial attack, our ships would rearm and launch a second attack, this time at the three mother ships. By eliminating these three ships we would destroy their ability to launch an attack on Lubya or the other two closest human occupied systems. We could not be certain, but we believed that were we to simply leave the destroyers, cruisers and battle cruisers alone they could not operate for very long before running out of consumables, and especially, out of water for their fusion plants. However, if even one made it to Lubya, the results could be catastrophic.
If we had to launch three separate attacks, we would require approximately four thousand capital missiles. I was not certain, but I didn’t believe that our fleet held that many, but it had been six months since the admiral federalized the company responsible for supplying the Mark 67 series of missiles. There might be enough of them by this time to meet the demand.
Once the general outline of what we believed would be the most effective tactics for eliminating the bug fleet, I asked everyone to remain and examine the threat level these beings posed to humanity. It didn’t take more than ten minutes for everyone to reach the same conclusion – they represented a huge danger. Probably.
Finally, I asked everyone to discuss what alternatives we might have to what amounted to the destruction of their species.
Elian’s exec said, “Since it appears that the bugs found a system that meets their needs, or at least, possibly meets their needs, what if we were able to open communication with them, prove to them that both of their worlds had been destroyed, and that all the colony ships had as well. It might be that these beings, when faced with their imminent destruction, would agree to do what the mother ships had wanted to do, colonize a solar system. I suppose we would have to prove to them that we had already accomplished their own purpose, and we might also have to demonstrate our own military superiority.”
I looked around for a raised hand while I wondered if Elian’s exec actually believed that what he had proposed was even remotely possible. WO Kana looked at me and I nodded. He said, looking at the screen, “We have not been able to achieve any form of communication with this species, other than warfare. According to most of our so-called bug experts, they are organized along the lines of an absolute, totalitarian dictatorship. They destroyed all life on their own colony world, which apparently did the same thing to their world. After a voyage of two thousand years in which an unknown but probably large number of generations of beings had to be born or hatched and raised in such a way that the original purpose of their mission would continue, they saw our ships, and they immediately attacked us. We don’t know if they thought we were their ancient enemy, or if they simply attack anything that moved. What we do know is that they searched for and destroyed our ships, and left no survivors. I do not believe that we could trust this species to not attack us at the very first opportunity, even if that opportunity was two thousand years in the future.”
This was possibly the longest speech I’d ever heard from WO Kana. His reasoning mirrored my own, but it was for this very reason that Elian and I had decided to hold the meeting. We had an immense dilemma: Should we wipe out the last remnant of an intelligent species? Or, should we allow them to continue on their journey, colonize a new system and thereby run the very real risk that they would one day launch an attack against us. Another attack.
After four hours we ended the session without being able to answer that last question. I hadn’t thought that we would be able to, but I h
oped that someone would pose an idea or new thought or approach that might allow us to not have to contemplate the destruction of this species.
My exec put the results of our discussion together and I sent a copy to Elian. We had a lot of time to go over it.
We ran at ten G’s for twenty-four hours and then jumped into the region of our fleet. We came out within one million kilometers of the leading elements, and resumed our acceleration towards our second home. My exec had plotted the jump and I quietly praised her highly accurate computation. We had been gone for several weeks during which the fleet had moved, and yet she had brought us in almost too close, judging by the spooked reaction of the destroyer that hailed us several minutes after our insertion. Dresdens were very stealthy vessels, but when a ship jumped in it generated a large gravitic pulse, much larger than when it jumped out.
We were ordered to shuttle over to the Constitution as soon as possible, so Elian and I hitched rides with the two Kestrels and within ten hours we were walking up a passageway towards officer country.
Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk) Page 75
