“Aldry and I looked in on them yesterday, and their beautiful blue eyes were wide open, watching us carefully. They both tracked my gloved hands as I reached in to touch them. They have such little claws, and they extended them to bat at my fingers. Has anyone tried a frill contact again, since our married couples went on honeymoon?”
“No. Both couples made additional frill contacts under controlled conditions and monitoring before they left.” Rafe shrugged. “The cubs now seem to have imprinted or bonded on the first human minds they contacted. The ripper mother was first of course, but she’s gone. It seems like they have each chosen two new ‘parents’ as replacements. Kit imprinted on Marlyn and Thad, and Kobalt bonded to Noreen and Dillon. By the way, those are the Koban sounding names the couples picked for the cubs.”
“I’m eager to try frill contact myself,” Maggi admitted. “However, I’ll let Noreen or Dillon serve as a filter for my first contact with Kobalt. They tell me it can be overwhelmingly intense the first time. I’m intrigued that the cubs seem to intuitively grasp our alien thoughts and respond to them in kind. Such as our naming them, and then learning the rippers use individual names for one another. Who would have ever expected that level of self-awareness? They know their biological mother was named Merki, the more remote father was Bolar, and there are names embedded in other images from the pride their mother was from.”
Aldry had thought about this as well. “In a roundtable discussion with a number of our people, we rather think that the only reason rippers don’t have a full-fledged symbolic mental language with words for everything, as we do, is that a picture really is worth a thousand words. The cubs may be able to grasp our words quickly with picture reinforcements.”
“What are we going to do when they get their teeth and reach a size that’s really a risk to us? Put them in a cage? Wild animals on Earth always remained wild at heart, and could have a bad day and turn on the humans that loved them. Hell, Maggi, you even shot Dillon in the balls with a jazzer when he pissed you off once.” His grin was short lived.
She directed her notorious “sweet little old lady” smile towards Rafe, which suddenly made him wish he had not made that last comment to the legendary “Tiger Lady.”
“How flattering, to be compared to a wild animal.” Then she fluttered her small hands, as if dispelling another thought before offering her opinion.
“Unlike thick headed humans, mostly male, I’m hopeful the cubs will accept all humans as part of an extended pride. We may be able to instill a need for self-control more firmly in these cubs, simply because we can send pictures and feelings.”
“I guess time will tell,” was Rafe’s answer.
13. New Lance
Admiral Hawthorne had just returned from the Presidential Palace, and made her way to the depths of the War Room, below the Defense Department complex. Stanford had requested the Chairfem and Joint Chief’s deliver the New Lance mission briefing there. That was because the President’s reelection campaign manager had wanted news footage of the Joint Chiefs arriving to brief the President and her Cabinet.
The planned fleet operation was secret, and it wouldn’t be revealed until the mission was over. However, a successful attack on K1 would help Stanford’s reelection chances.
Admiral Mauss waited in the War Room for her superior to arrive. Newly promoted from Vice Admiral, she was again the commander of an operation against the Krall base. Only this time it wasn’t just a task force, she was effectively the Fleet Commander, without the rank, because nearly the entire fleet was going to K1 this time.
Hawthorne cleared the last security post and entered the War Room, the heavy door closing behind her and electronic security and jamming activated. No one believed the Krall had penetrated their security the last time, since they didn’t seem to care what their enemy had planned. The heightened security was to guard against leaks to Tri-Vid news companies, which had known almost as much about the previous strike as some of the Joint Chiefs.
“Golda, she signed off on New Lance, just as you predicted she would. She didn’t even have many questions this time. I had my doubts she would approve. She got burned badly after the last raid, and in an election year I thought she might play it safe and wait.”
“Nancy, for Stanford’s administration this is put up or get out of town time. She has been the Navy’s friend, she listened to us, lobbying for money for repairing the fleet, and for making the changes asked for ship defenses. Her reelection eggs are all in the Navy’s basket. Our fates are linked.”
“Speaking of fates, what have we learned from the recon drones?”
Mauss indicated the big monitors with the pictures and radar data. “We have been going over the last drone reports from K1. Those sixteen orbiting stations at five hundred miles are as large as dreadnaughts, with large bore ports for Plasma beams, and presumably heavy lasers behind those shield doors we can see. The undersized thrusters suggest they are not very maneuverable. Those probably are to adjust orbits and attitude, more so than to move to engage an enemy. They obviously have Jump capability, since all of them appeared virtually overnight three months ago.
“They must be vulnerable, because there are always eight Clanships near each of them for protection. That makes one hundred twenty eight Clanships active and in orbit at all times. No matter, I’m staying with my plan to avoid close-in action with the platforms, which means our White Outs will occur at one thousand miles above planet, and thus five hundred miles above any of them. Whatever new technology they offer, we will be more respectful of that possibility this time.”
Mauss noticed Hawthorne was looking at images of the newest mystery objects orbiting K1. “I see you have spotted the newest items we found in orbit this time. I decided to call them ‘Eight Balls’ because they are shiny black, and spherical. It’s not easy to tell the scale from the zoomed image you are seeing on that screen, but they are only about thirty feet in diameter.”
Hawthorne shook her head slowly, obviously worried. “How many of them are there? Do you know when they arrived or have a clue as to what they are? I don’t like surprises just before we launch an attack.”
“We counted sixteen, and apparently each came docked with the platforms. Clanships moved several of them while our recon drones watched. They docked with the orbital stations, detached the balls from their hulls, and towed them several miles from the orbital stations at full thrust. They have to be immensely massive because of the amount of thrust and time it took the Clanships to move them even that far. Because of their small size, they have to be extremely dense, almost unbelievably so. The initial estimate is in the thirty thousand ton range.
“When the Clanships released them, a warrior in a suit appeared to enter a hatch on the balls as the Clanship moved away a safe distance. Shortly after that, the balls accelerated with what had to be Normal Space drives and went into polar orbits spaced between the platforms. A super zoom image of one of them reveals small little bumps symmetrically spaced on their surface, which are surely emitters for Trap Fields. They may even have Jump capability. After they were in polar orbits, the Krall removed the operators by Clanship.
“We tried to get more data on them using wide aperture radar on one drone, to get a sharper microwave image. That was how we first noticed the small bumps, but the image was in data collected by several different drones and assembled here by our scientists. That was because the inbound microwave radiation had changed frequency on return. The balls are nearly perfect blackbodies. They absorbed the radar frequencies and re-radiated the energy in a different spectrum in a classic blackbody curve. However, no sooner had we ‘pinged’ a couple of balls, which revealed the location of that formerly passive drone, the Krall Jumped a Clanship near and were scanning for other passive drones. The AI’s Jumped the drones home, to save what they had recorded.
“Our technical experts say the ‘Eight Balls’ mass as much as a battlecruiser, based on how hard a Clanship had to work to move them and the speed
attained. They must consist of some form of collapsed matter. They aren’t nearly as dense as neutronium, such as material from the core of a neutron star, but perhaps a hundred times as dense as lead, and they are hollow because there must be a control room inside for Normal Space drives, and at least a fusion bottle. That has to be cramped for the pilot.”
Hawthorne watched a replay of the positioning of spheres in fast play mode. “They don’t appear to be extremely maneuverable, and need an operator that doesn’t stay aboard. Admiral Mauss, I’d suggest you target them as soon as you pop out. Take them out of the equation early. I must say, however, they don’t seem very big or dangerous.”
It looked like the cozy first name mode of address was shifting in the direction of professionalism, and of telling Mauss how to do her job.
“Mam, if they are made of some form of collapsed matter, a conventional warhead might not do much damage. We weren’t initially very worried about the Worm’s size either, which was small and relatively slow.
“These balls have an unknown capability and purpose, and clearly display a materials technology we don’t understand. Our scientists say we can’t make stable dense matter like that outside of a lab, and even then only with tiny diamond anvils. We can make it in pinhead quantities that last for a few microseconds when pressure is released. They claim there is a theoretical stable crystalline structure of certain elements that might maintain stability after the pressure is released, but the binding energy of the material potentially could release in a powerful explosion if the crystal is broken or cracked.”
Hawthorne shrugged. “Well Admiral, we won’t find out what they do with our fleet sitting in the Rhama system. The President needs to show that the money spent on the Navy can at least slow down Krall attacks, if not stop them.”
Hawthorne was clearly not going to accept another delay from Mauss, simply because they didn’t know the enemy’s new weapons capability. The truth of the matter was that only by going up against them would we discover what the Krall had in store for the fleet.
“I might add that the President was very impressed with your proposed counter measures for the Worms. I told her they did have sensors that steer them towards nearby powerful magnetic fields, such as fusion bottles. Your idea of putting unshielded fusion bottles on the outer hulls with magnetic confinement fields active but no dangerous plasma inside was outstanding. Like moths to a candle, they made perfect decoys in testing of the captured missile steering systems. I don’t know how well the new internal magnetic shielding will work against them, but they shouldn’t get that deep with more enticing targets out where the new reactive armor can sheer them into pieces when they penetrate the decoy modules. I too was impressed that you had a better and simpler solution than our big brained scientists came up with.”
Chuckling, Mauss accepted the praise with a caveat. “Having missiles fired at your ass tends to focus your mind more sharply than the intellectual challenge of a chess match. Besides, an engineer from Gauntlet accidentally gave me the idea. In a hospital visit of our wounded, she mentioned to me that she wished she’d been off to the side rather than standing right in front of a bottle. A nearly expired Worm missile entered the Drive Room compartment, found room to turn, and drilled through her thigh enroute to the bottle. Obviously, it wasn’t after her. She simply stood close to the magnetic field it was designed to find.”
“What if a Worm still gets deep inside a ship? Will the new magnetic shielding conceal the bottles?”
“Not totally, Mam, but we have other internal decoys to activate and draw them, and we can spin the ship and alter internal gravity to throw off missile guidance. That will play hell on the Drive Room crew’s equilibrium, but saving weapons power for the ship is more important than their vertigo.”
“What about the kamikaze Clanships? I told the president you would be zig zaging to be more unpredictable. The Krall pilots fly mostly by eye, based on our analysis of their flight tracks. So our navigational AIs will randomly shift courses, and you say they can compensate our targeting systems by feeding the upcoming course changes to the fire control AI’s for offense and defense?”
“It works in training, Admiral. That’s all I can say.”
“What does it feel like internally, with all that shifting and turning?”
“Better take your motion sickness shots early. However, we are finding T squared gravity compensation can improve inertial stability considerably more than we expected originally. We didn’t foresee a need for so many quick maneuvers when we kept the inertial compensation reaction speed at rates we had always used.”
The Chairfem next stepped dangerously close to a forbidden line. “No matter our own prohibitions, don’t you wish you could nuke those orbital platforms and Eight Balls and go in deep for a knockout punch?”
Mauss wondered if this was a test of her sense of duty and discipline, or if the Chairfem was exploring the boundaries of how far Mauss would go if given free reign. The brief hesitation before she answered proved she had considered her reply.
“Mam, the Krall have made it clear that weapons of mass destruction, if used against them on any of our worlds would result in the total eradication of life on those worlds. We may be attacking a world where they have already killed all humans, but they are definitely not going to accept that as prepayment if we used nukes on or near K1. There can be no doubt they are temperamentally capable of destroying all life on one of our worlds, even Earth itself. They would not hesitate to kill as many billions of humans as it took to drive the lesson home.”
“Oh, of course Admiral. We could never take that risk. I was just thinking of how this strike’s chances of success would be assured if we could knock out those platforms. Only…, don’t you wonder why they presented us with that ultimatum? They have never landed a large force where such mass destruction weapons could find a concentration of warriors. Except, those forces concentrated on K1.”
“Admiral, they say they intend to make war on us for generations. We had over seven hundred twenty worlds when the war started. They took one lightly populated world as a base, and we have withdrawn from several others that were more private corporate property than real colonies. As a race, as a civilization, we haven’t really been hurt so far. People living on Hub worlds see the war on Tri-Vid, but have not been personally a risk. However, if we greatly increase the level of our attack on K1 and can’t contain them, the Hub worlds or Old Colonies might pay the price.
“K1 is only a forward base in our space. We still don’t know where the Krall come from, and where their ships, orbital platforms, and other weapons are built or stored.
“We don’t even know how many of them we face. Autopsies of dead pregnant female warriors revealed dozens of eggs. They can probably reproduce much faster than we can. The tattoos of most warriors sent on raids show us that we mostly face novices each time, with the most experienced warriors placed in charge of Clanships, and slightly lower rank warriors lead octets or groups of octets. Where do those newly experienced novice warriors go after extraction?
“We kill twenty-five percent of their surface raiders overall, and sometimes thirty to forty percent on more prepared and disciplined worlds like Poldark. Yet the rank and file warriors all have empty throat tattoos on the next raids. I think the Krall are holding the experienced survivors in reserve. They are probably waiting for us to build up our own ground forces, applying increasing pressure on us to build our armies until they can mount wider scale large raids. Only then does the prohibition of weapons of mass destruction make sense, because it is on our own invaded worlds we would be most tempted to use them. In my opinion, the hundred four million people that have died so far are only the prelude.”
Hawthorne wasn’t pleased with her remarks. “Admiral Mauss, I’m somewhat relieved you didn’t go with us to brief the President and her Cabinet. Aside from you needing this final recon data, I’m afraid your views might lead the President to mistakenly shift spending from the Navy to
the Army, and also to our newly reconstituted Marines and Air Force.” When she laughed, Mauss thought she detected a twinge of nervousness.
Hawthorne reinforced that thought. “We need to reward the President’s loyalty to the Navy, the only force she commands that has taken the battle to the enemy. If we knockout the Krall on K1, we can go looking for their bases and production worlds in their own space. We’ve long thought we could make them pull back if we hit their home worlds for a change.”
“I originally thought that myself Mam. However, the Krall don’t display as much concern for their own warriors as we do for our livestock. They don’t value the same things we do. I doubt a threat to one of their worlds would provoke strong protectiveness, even if we find some of them. Not as that same threat would draw us to defend a human world.”
Hawthorne shook her head. “Let’s hope that isn’t the case. Forcing the Krall to pull back is our best hope of preventing the slow destruction of our society. We don’t believe we can ever match them head to head in ground warfare. They have matched us in every single weapons and armor improvement. The Army analysts think the Krall deliberately lag a bit behind us so that our troops appear to have a slight equipment advantage. However, their physical capability, speed, instincts, and strength, always outweighs the equipment advantages.
“When that physical advantage isn’t quite enough due to our new equipment, the very next raid against our equipment uses Krall weapons or armor suddenly improved enough to restore the near balance. Poldark has seen their thirty to forty percent kill ratio diminish to about the same twenty-five percent level as on worlds that have not kept up with Poldark’s push for better equipment and tactics. Krall raiders are better equipped on Poldark, but not on other worlds. They tailor the raiders to match the opposition.
Koban: The Mark of Koban Page 26
