The Prodigal Emperor (The Shadow Space Chronicles Book 3)

by Kal Spriggs

  Lucius heard cheers, both on the bridge and elsewhere in the ship as he cut the connection. Let them have their moment, he thought. He was proud that they had three of the vessels online, and though he'd felt more than a little tempted to transfer to another vessel, he felt attached to the destroyer he had used to put down the Dreyfus Coup. The Hector, he reminded himself, she has a proper name now.

  Chxor Force Alpha had just entered the gap between the Alpha and Beta bands, while Force Bravo and Charlie trailed behind to either flank. Both forces had more direct routes to the base, but Lucius knew that the Chxor battle plan called on them to trail behind and engage any human forces that sought to flank the main body. He had watched the missile salvo from the fighters with interest, mostly because it showed how well prepared the enemy formations would be.

  He had concluded that they were, unfortunately, very well trained. The enemy phalanx style formation had effectively negated the initial fighter missile strike. While those missiles were antiquated compared to the other salvos they planned to loose, the coordinated and overlapping jamming fields from Firefly systems as well as the interlocked heavy defense screens from the cruisers meant that they would have to either flank or destroy the cruiser screen before they reached the dreadnought core. No easy task when the enemy had over two thousand of the cruisers, literally more of those defending vessels than Lucius had fighters.

  Lucius looked at the timer on his display and then at the position of the Chxor's Force Bravo. They had just passed the closest point to the Periclum Mining Station at just over thirty thousand kilometers range. “All Second Fleet Elements, initiate phase one.”

  Force Bravo was now at its most vulnerable point. Force Alpha had entered the Periclum Debris Cloud and could not turn to support them without reversing course and exposing themselves to enemy fire while they extricated themselves. Force Charlie was on the far side of the debris cloud, within extended missile range at just over three hundred thousand kilometers, but only just.

  Lucius's force advanced just to the edge of the Beta Band before they loosed their missiles. The three converted Balor vessels together launched a hundred missiles, while the two Archer-class destroyers launched eighty missiles, and the rest of Second Fleet launched a hundred and twenty missiles. All of them were the two hundred megaton antimatter missiles with the best targeting systems that the United Colonies could install.

  Those missiles were launched at just under a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers range and Lucius's people had emplaced stealth drones in the sensor shadows of every bit of flotsam along the enemy's path... and they had excellent passive and active data on the enemy ships.

  The enemy commander reacted instantly to the launch with exactly the same tactics that High Commander Chxarals had used. His formation switched over into a tight phalanx and his dreadnoughts moved into position to direct overlapping fields of fire. The main difference was that Force Bravo had half as many cruisers for two thirds as many dreadnoughts... which meant that they had to form up in a frontal-heavy defense.

  Normally that wouldn't be an issue. Space was vast and the Chxor had excellent sensor readings from their network that covered the entire system. They knew that there was nothing to either flank or their rear... nothing but the mining station, which didn't have any weapons.

  Lucius smiled as his gaze caught the secondary countdown. What that station did have was many docking bays designed for hosting mining craft. Those docking bays could also hold a Hammer-class gunship... with some slight modifications. It had taken a large number of flights by the station’s mining craft to smuggle those Hammers aboard their station, each one limpeted to the hulls of mining vessels like a swarm of bats. Lucius had no doubt that the effort had been worth it.

  The Hammers lit up only thirty seconds before Second Fleet's flight of missiles entered attack range. The seventy two gunships fired a total of six hundred mass-driver rounds in only five seconds and then volleyed their full payloads of missiles, another two hundred and eighty-eight missiles with two hundred megaton yields.

  Force Bravo had no time to react. At one moment they had an unknown enemy force to their front with a dangerous but not devastating missile salvo, in the next, their dreadnoughts had already been engaged with tungsten tipped, uranium core rounds and almost three hundred missiles were only fifteen seconds away from impact... directly astern of all their defenses. All of this happened just before the enemy should have activated their firefly jamming systems.

  The Balor's enhanced sensors let him see the actual impacts of the mass driver rounds, which came directly astern of the enemy dreadnoughts. The Chxor had some experience fighting projectile weaponry, but their defense screens had been optimized for energy weapons fire, which was far different to the best settings to deflect the heavy rounds. Each of the seventy two dreadnoughts targeted took multiple direct hits, most often in their engine pods.

  Lucius watched as one dreadnought took five direct hits to just one of its engine pods. He felt just a moment of disappointment as there was no apparent effect... right up until the entire aft end of the dreadnought vanished in a chain of massive explosions as the engines ripped themselves apart in a cascade of catastrophic failures.

  All across the rear of the Chxor formation, ships dropped back; engines shattered or knocked offline... the entire Chxor formation shuddered as dreadnoughts swerved to avoid damaged ships ahead of them in close proximity... and then the combined missile salvo struck.

  Here and there a dreadnought maintained formation and fired in its assigned lanes, but they were the rare exception. Across most of that huge formation, dreadnoughts either maneuvered to avoid collision or to put someone else between them and the incoming missiles. When they fired, they fired only to protect themselves... or sometimes to clear their path from another ship in their way.

  Lucius felt a grim sort of fascination as he watched the entire formation come apart in an avalanche of armored steel and flaring defense screens... and then the missile waves struck.

  They had carefully considered the targeting parameters that went into the missile launches, with the enemy dreadnoughts being the primary target and cruisers being targets only as a last resort. Lucius's reasoning was that the cruisers shouldn't have the opportunity to interdict the rear salvo while if they did get off their firefly systems, the first missiles would hopefully penetrate those defenses and open up attack routes for the follow on missiles.

  He had not expected the formation to come apart so completely.

  Almost six hundred missiles swept in on the two hundred dreadnoughts of Force Bravo. Only three of them lost their targets as they came in, and those three wasted themselves on cruisers that were too distracted by the chaos behind them to even produce defensive fire.

  The other five hundred and eighty-five swept in on the dreadnoughts, whose sporadic interceptor fire killed only thirty of them. The other five hundred and fifty-five swept in unopposed and rolled over the dreadnoughts of Force Bravo in an unstoppable wave of detonations.

  When the flares of actinic light faded, not a single dreadnought remained, their destruction was so total that only incandescent gas heralded their existence.

  “Message to Second Fleet and the War Dogs,” Lucius said in a voice that felt far too calm for the shock he felt at the destruction of so many ships and people. “Good engagement, move on to Phase Three.”

  ***

  High Commander Chxarals's hand shook slightly as he zoomed in on the destruction of Force Two and Fleet Commander Fhxud. The elimination of its combat power was complete, and rendered in so little time that the Fleet Commander had not even had time to report it before he was dead.

  “Identification of the enemy forces?” High Commander Chxarals asked.

  “Fleet Commander Thxanal says that the forces based from the mining station appear to be an unknown, possible archaic, class of gunboats mounting mass drivers. Those within the outer band appear to be light vessels, destroyer and cruiser size or sma
ller. He was not able to get full energy emissions data on them before they withdrew, although three of the vessels are outside of normal human spectrum and match the Chinwan that were encountered at the Faraday system by Fleet Commander Kxull.”

  High Commander Chxarals nodded at that. The term Chinwan meant unknown alien and Fleet Commander Kxull had reported detecting Chinwan vessels at Faraday just prior to his destruction by those forces. If these Chinwan were in league with the humans, it somewhat explained their success against Force Two.

  “Order the remaining cruisers to link up with Force Three. Order Fleet Commander Thrxil to destroy the mining station,” Chxarals said. In all likelihood, the humans had probably expected that, but it would be foolish to allow them a base of operations at his rear. I should have sent teams to secure the station, but I did not think that the humans would be brazen enough to emplace attack forces there, he thought. I will note my failures for the Benevolence Council to address after the battle.

  He watched dispassionately as Fleet Commander Thxanal volleyed missiles at the station. All two hundred of his dreadnoughts fired. Before Chxarals could see the result, however, his force had traveled too far into the debris cloud.

  Fleet Commander Thxanal could still communicate, however, so Chxarals focused his attention on his own forces survival and victory.

  The narrow assault corridor wound its way through and around the four main debris bands before terminating before the fifth and most dense area of debris. He had retained the most number of screening cruisers in order to prevent just such a flank or rear attack as had destroyed Force Two.

  Almost immediately, the lead cruisers and dreadnoughts began to fire. They did not have any accurate map of the debris cloud and so his formation slowed to a crawl as they engaged anything that met their targeting parameters. Had High Commander Chxarals been as inferior as to be subject to emotions, he might have felt frustration as their pace slowed and then slowed further.

  Yet he had no other choice. Sections of hulked vessels as long as half a kilometer were mixed in with boulders the size of shuttles and mines, missiles, and bombs whose payloads varied from chemical explosives to antimatter warheads... all of it in a drifting, overlapping set of belts that required constant attention.

  Even with the snail's pace, here and there a bit of wreckage or debris penetrated the overlapping fields of fire. Most often it seemed to be something small, but the many impacts began to stagger the lead cruisers, despite their defense screens and heavy armor. “Switch defense screens to impact settings,” Chxarals said. If the enemy made use of projectile weapons, then it would be better to go that route in any case, although the defense screens would be less effective against the enemy's energy weapons.

  No use to allow my lead ships to be battered to pieces by debris before I even engage them, he thought. “Begin rotation of lead elements as damage reduces combat power to seventy percent,” he said. They had rehearsed this before, but he knew the process would be more difficult in practice, particularly in the dense debris field.

  Still, he thought, this will not stop us. The humans have made their play, they have destroyed one of my three forces, but they must have used much of their capabilities to do so.

  ***

  Admiral Collae gave a tight smile as the ships of Bravo Force died. Better than the good Baron Giovanni projected, he thought, which is good for me because it means I'll face a shaken enemy.

  In many ways, Collae felt common cause with the Chxor dispassion... though he admitted that he was not without emotion. Nor, did he think that emotion was something to be hidden away, but it was meant to be controlled.

  I must deny myself such libertine virtues in order to bring a day where others may live more freely, he thought, and my efforts will be central to that endeavor.

  The eighteen custom-built cruisers were part of those efforts. Twelve of them were built around the main battery capital grade fusion cannons from the Chxor dreadnoughts. The craft were ships only in the most basic sense of the word, they had no other purpose than to serve as mobile weapons platforms. The Hellbore-class cruisers would be the base of firepower for his force... but they were far from all that he had brought. Eight other cruiser-class ships, what his engineers had labeled “Quads” and he simply called Fours, were four of the dreadnoughts' secondary fusion cannons together on a hull. They had more individual firepower than the Hellbores, but were designed for sustained, alternating fire of their weapons rather than single shots.

  For additional fire, he also had ten Liberator-class cruisers, which normally mounted the older-style of railguns commonly available across the Colonial Republic. Liberators were solid vessels, but they were designed before the fall of Amalgamated Worlds when the Colonial Republic had limited military technology. Few had seen upgrades in the past decades. He had modified his Liberators, four were the more modern Liberator-C's with their railguns replaced by mass drivers, while the other six were original variants where he had stripped out their railguns and replaced them with a mix of weapons technology he had purchased at Port Klast and Tanis.

  In reality, he hadn't been entirely honest with the Baron about his purpose here. He viewed this engagement as something of a proof of concept for the ships that he had designed. And though the offensive firepower of the Liberators, Fours, and Hellbores were a large part of that test, the true core of it lay in the twelve modified Chxor vessels. Although there were three basic designs to those ships, each had substantially different parameters within those designs. Four were what he labeled the Mimic-class, four were Hellraisers, and the last four were Hemlocks.

  Mimics and Hellraisers were outwardly the most similar to the original Chxor vessels. In both types of ships, he had stripped out the original Chxor firefly jamming systems and replaced them with more efficient human electronics systems... though still backed by the massive reactors that the Chxor had installed.

  The Hellraisers were the closest to the Chxor standard, though their jamming systems were an order of magnitude more powerful than the firefly systems, with phased directional jamming designed to burn out enemy sensor systems and blind enemy targeting systems.

  The Mimics were designed to simulate the emissions of other ships, each one designed to portray not just one vessel, but an entire squadron operating in close proximity. They were the ships that Collae felt the least certain about, yet he thought that this was the best situation to test their specific abilities.

  The Hemlocks were attack vessels of a different sort. While Hellraisers were designed to attack the enemy's sensors, Hemlocks were designed to penetrate the enemy's communications. They had the systems to intercept and override communications, with decryption computers, analysis software, and enough transmitters to capture, decrypt, modify, and transmit intercepted communications.

  That was the theory, of course. Now it was time to see them in action.

  ***

  “Give me evasive pattern five charlie,” Garret snapped out as the inbound fire shifted from the annihilated mining station to his squadron. He wasn't exactly happy with that change, though the destruction of the station made him feel worse.

  The miners had known that their home would become a target when they allowed Azure Wing to dock there. That hadn't stopped them from opening their home to his people. In fact it almost required force to get them to evacuate prior to the battle and they had told him that they just wanted an opportunity to do their part.

  He was glad, though, that they were safely evacuated, as the ionized gas cooled where the station had once lay. Chxor Force Charlie had fired over six hundred fusion warheads at the station, more than enough to destroy it.

  Unfortunately for him, they had sent a few extra missiles his way as a parting gift, it seemed. His Hammers were fired dry, they had nothing to even defend themselves with. Nothing, that was, besides their small size and the gradually increasing distance between his Hammers and Force Charlie.

  On that cue, he saw several of the inbound missile
s go dark. As he counted off the seconds, the remainder of the enemy flight ran out of power. Now a hit on one of his Hammers was more a matter of bad luck than anything else.

  I wish we had time to rearm, he thought, but by the time we did, the battle would be over.

  It was the downside to manning a gunboat like this. Five seconds of fun and hours of being nothing more than a flying target. At least he knew that Halcyon's forces would be of use, along with the rest of the War Dogs.

  Then again, he thought, we did pretty much single-handedly destroy two hundred dreadnoughts... that's got to be worth some beers at the bar back home.

  ***

  Nova Roma

  (Contested)

  May 22, 2404

  Sub Officer Galt ducked down as gunfire rattled against his barricade. Next to him, the hulking Hrak chambered a round in his pump-action grenade launcher. Hrak fired the grenade down the corridor and the detonation splattered bits of green blood across the Chxor's face.

  Hrak gave a smile, “Good. Funny.”

  Galt sighed, “No, Hrak, that isn't a joke.”

  Hrak peered at him with confusion, but then again, Hrak was of the Crxom soldier caste and they weren't exactly known for intelligence or original thought. “You say joke make smile,” Hrak said. “Floppy dead bodies make Hrak smile.”

  “I think his analysis is correct,” Trxinal said as she fired her riot gun down the corridor.

  “Of course you do,” Galt said. In truth, he knew he had only a vague appreciation of humor himself, it being a new thing for him. Still, he felt that he understood it better than both of his underlings.

  Galt leaned around the barricade and picked off another of the ground force attackers who had tried to slip along the bulkhead. In truth, he enjoyed killing them. Ground forces often contributed the police who enforced many of the oppressive Chxor laws. Thugs, he thought, who wouldn't recognize a good joke.