Koban: When Empires Collide Read online

  “Good. The other subleaders and I agree with your assessment.” Kisstas had already conferred with the Delta and Gamma leaders of their own Superior Predators pack, so presenting a united front, the Beta pack of the Finth wanted to attack the enemy.

  It was likely the Gamma pack, the Killers of Prey, would make the same choice. The weakest group, the Delta pack, named the Tribalt Hunters, were currently aligned with the Alpha pack. To turn back now, when the threat at home had evaporated, and their prey was so close, it was probable they too would vote to attack. That left only the Sky Hunter ships commanded and crewed by members of the Stalkers of Sissbalt. They would need to return home in the face of the other less dominant packs, who would presumably be earning glory here, in combat.

  Seeing them facing the old cliché, of being caught between an avalanche or jumping from a cliff, made their dilemma delightful for the other three packs. The Alpha pack would suffer internal fractures if they stayed, or if they returned home as the Alpha leader had ordered the entire fleet to do.

  “I will contact the other pack leaders when we next emerge, and tell them of our decision. I have little doubt that they will eventually join us, even if we must convince the Stalkers to stay with us. We will see the Prada cower before our attacks in but another cycle.”

  ****

  Carol was puzzled. “Are they afraid to attack? I wouldn’t expect the Finth to cower from anyone, and certainly not the Prada.”

  Sergey agreed. “They’ve been paused below the disk for almost a full day. They started out with determination. What happened?”

  Mirikami, who had convened the group Comtap link, suggested a reason as he fingered his lower lip in thought. “You may be responsible, Carol. Your Scout squadron, I mean. At T-cubed travel speed along their extended track, they should have been almost halfway here when your ships hit their shipyards, orbital docks, Stranglers and random ships left behind at their home star.”

  “So? They didn’t hesitate to attack us there, at Pack Command. They aren’t an introspective species. They had at least a day or two to talk matters over before their exit out there. Now they took a day delay to think things over?”

  Mirikami shrugged. “I don’t think they could talk it over with all their ship commanders. They don't have Comtaps with access to low energy tachyon modulation, and only a few of their ships will have the tachyon receiver/transmitters. You said they’re factional, with four major political divisions, or packs as they call them. It might take them time to decide on the proper course of action now. They left their home worlds nearly defenseless with their fleet gone. What if we hit them again?”

  “We can’t do that, we’re all here…,” she reconsidered. “Well, all the spare forces we can bring to bear are here. The rest are also defending other Federation worlds. Why didn’t they make up their minds now, after a day?”

  “They don’t know how thin we’re spread, and the instantaneous Tachyon Space communications of the Empire only function when the equipped ships are in Jump status. We know the Ragnar don’t have that technology on all their ships, and I doubt if the Finth do either. The Thandol can’t trust their security forces with that much flexibility. They randomly inspect security force ships for forbidden weapons and other technology. The Finth couldn’t talk matters over with their entire fleet until they made a preplanned exit to Normal Space, for final coordination with all their factions.

  “Thanks to your squadron, I think they had a lot more to talk about, and a decision to make. It can work to our advantage. The patrol boat AI that detected their approach provided us the position and size of their formation. If Thad’s and Wister’s two squadrons can make their appearance before the Finth Jump inward, they’ll suddenly have more to think about.

  “After I shared your crew’s Mind Taps and frills of the two Finth you caught, I’m convinced their natural pride, and innate species aggression will win out, and they’ll launch their attack. They are impulsive, somewhat like the Krall. Why Jump for home, to defend against attackers that have departed?”

  ****

  Thisster wasn’t pleased with the fleet’s new segmented disposition. “I should not have granted the Stalkers the right to lead the first wave. He used the orders to return home to their advantage, to let Alpha Pack lead if we continue the attack. If their captains did not have command of six hundred of our eight hundred Eaters, they would still have attacked second, behind our seven hundred thirty Carnivores and seventy Eaters leading the way. I am the Dominant Flight Commander, and I still should lead the attack, even if in front of the Stalkers formation.”

  He continued his complaints. “Agreeing to let the four packs change our integrated fleet forces to group by clan was a bad compromise, or else the Stalkers would have returned to Home Den, as an unnecessary defense force. I no longer have the flexibility and authority I should have, based on the original hurried plans the Thandol forced us to make. Now we have this last moment improvisation, of four separated packs taking turns in the attack.

  Kisstas, his second in command of the thousand ships of the Superior Predators pack component, offered a half sarcastic comment. “Those heavy cruisers, with their single fixed massive plasma cannons, are inaccurate during low atmospheric passes. They cannot alter aim without effecting their track through the sky. They might fire on this flagship if we were below them and in the lead, they would claim it was an error.”

  “The other packs would not believe that.”

  “We would not be there to argue our case, so the outcome of the debate would not matter to us.” He hissed in sour amusement, and added an observation.

  “It may not benefit the Stalkers to go first anyway. The initial pass may not even strike the most strategic targets. The single Thandol scouting mission, conducted beyond the outer planets of this star, reveals there is only a single continent on the Prada world. It is roughly a ring around the equator of the planet, with but one shallow gap that joins the northern and southern seas. Only five cities have spaceports, and the scout ship would not approach closer to learn details of their defenses. The Thandol were too cautious.”

  Having been better briefed, Thisster explained their reasons. “The Empire lacks the Federation’s superior stealth, and the Thandol High Command said the Ragnar learned that enemy sensors can faintly detect stealthed Empire ships. The scout could not risk seeking where the Prada’s strongest defenses were based, without revealing our discovery of a new Federation world. There are no massive orbital defenses, which, if they helped fight the Krall, should have been present. The Thandol say they could have been destroyed in that recent war.”

  Thisster curled a lip in rejection of a stupid Thandol opinion. “The Kobani, who spoke to the Ragnar, said the Prada were freed from Krall servitude. They could not have fought in that war, and were slaves for over twenty thousand orbits. They are weaklings and cowards.”

  Kisstas shivered his hairy head crest in agreement. “If they have weak space defenses, we will punish their laxity. Perhaps we should have brought our Stalker Troopships, with a half million Hunters of the Forest, and ten thousand Crawlers. With but a single continent, and a few large islands, we would own the planet in forty cycles.”

  “The Thandol would punish us for that, and we would lose our right to collect taxes from a portion of the annexed species.”

  “Someday we will break their shackles.”

  “Yes. But today we have a new enemy to punish, as a proxy for the Thandol, and new glory to earn in battle.”

  He looked at his consoles on the bridge of his flagship. Each pack had eight hundred ships, the Stalkers having strung out in a thick column of their ships at the front, their six hundred heavily armed and armored Eaters in the lead, with two hundred Carnivore light cruisers spread around them, for an overly thin escort against peripheral attackers.

  The other packs had from fifty to seventy Eaters each, with the remainder of their eight hundred ships comprised of Carnivore light cruisers, with the Super Preda
tors Beta pack now positioned second, then the Killers of Prey, and the Tribalt Hunters grouped last.

  Despite Thisster’s wishes, the groups were in the same order of pack dominance of the current Finth society, of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta rankings. He’d been forced to yield the lead the Beta pack should have had, based on his overall Command. That was done to keep the Stalkers with the fleet, and retaining their large heavy cruiser contingent.

  He waited to issue the order to Jump to the Prada world, while the previously integrated forces completed reorganizing into the four pack groupings.

  He suddenly gained an appreciation of his position as leader of the second group.

  ****

  “Wister. I gave you and your ten ships the honor of first defense of One Land. Don’t wait. Fire, before they Jump again!” Greeves was annoyed, calling him via one of the hand devices the Prada used for instantaneous long range tachyon communications.

  Thad’s ten Kobani crewed Scouts would have fired the instant they made their own stealthy exit, only fifty or so miles from the side of the vanguard of the three thousand two hundred ships of the Finth fleet. Startling enough, the enemy had positioned many of the choicest targets conveniently together, right at the front of their elongated clumpy formation, like plums to be picked, hanging there in space.

  It was the slower reactions of the Prada that made the shooting seem so long before it started to Greeves. All they had needed to do was issue the commands to their AIs. They finally did that, selected targets, and project small, fist sized event horizons, which promptly swept at high speed through the center of each enemy ship targeted, puncturing one or more fusion bottles.

  The exploding, ultra-high pressure, stellar core temperature plasma, first vented into the engineering sections, started vaporizing everything it contacted once outside their powerful confining magnetic fields. Organics need not even be touched to break their weak molecular bonds, and the technical crews of the Finth engineering sections were never aware of what killed them.

  The bulkheads that were penetrated to reach the fusion generators, passed the terrible ravening fires through to adjacent compartments, cooling as the plasma expanded, but it retained its lethal heat and glowing radiation, deadly to organics. The plasma remnants erupted in long streams, through the entry and exit holes made in the thick hulls of the Eaters. Armored hulls that were like thin tissue to the short range but immense gravity of the small black holes that drew that crystal lattice matter into the holes in space-time.

  The Kobani waited only until the ten Prada generated black holes had dealt visible fatal blows. Then they drove their own hungry space-time holes through multiple ships in a savage frenzy of destruction, taking advantage while the Finth fleet was all but frozen in space, apparently distracted, as it drifted at a high velocity, which seemed imperceptible compared to the galactic disk a thousand lightyears away. In just under a half minute, three hundred twenty-seven heavy cruisers died, and sixty-two light cruisers with them, that were conveniently in-line with the preferred heavier and deadlier targets.

  Even without Kobani nervous systems, the Finth were fast, and their AI’s even faster. Thisster, realizing the forward element of his disorganized fleet was being ambushed, quickly ordered the entire fleet to Jump, which, because it was relayed to the command AI’s for proper coordination, was executed by the still operational ships of the fleet instantly.

  The damaged ships, tachyon power lost, unable to Jump and Normal Space drives disabled, still had operational AI’s, and backup fusion bottles for emergency power. The AI’s were insulated in the separately armored bridges at the bows where some of the command crew members survived.

  They used what weapons were still operational, and that remained connected to fire control computers, seeking enemy targets. Several fired the heavy plasma cannons placed in the nose of Eaters, but there were no target detections, it was simply that if there was any chance to hit an invisible enemy, it was better than not surviving long enough to fire the weapon at all.

  That didn’t mean they found nothing to aim at with the more flexible weapons systems. Scout hulls remained undetectable to Finth sensors. However, the movements of gravitational anomalies, generated at a point in space, and subsequently moved along a linear path to penetrate a Finth ship, presented a traceable line to mass sensors, which if extended backwards from the origin of the trace, might point to where the ship that had generated the black hole was, or had been.

  A Kobani pilot was always a dynamic flyer, in that their ships were kept in constant motion, changing direction at unpredictable intervals, performing micro Jumps, because they all had received Mind Taps from the most successful Kobani combat pilots.

  The Prada had received Mind Tap training, but didn’t have wolfbat memory matrix retention, nor a superconducting nervous system for the rapid execution of maneuvers, and no practical combat experience. Not all of them were so negligent, but four pilots, so enthralled by the sight of the exploding destruction, they failed to alter course before firing again, and yet again, believing if they maintained a linear motion in coast, that this was enough to confuse the enemy. If not for the Finth AI systems, that might have proven correct.

  The Prada lost four Scouts before Greeves shouted at them via their tachyon communication devices, to Jump back to One World, to chase after the enemy fleet.

  Greeves linked to Mirikami, to warn him of what was coming his way.

  “Tet, we found the Finth fleet, three thousand two hundred strong, close to where the patrol boat said they were. They seemed in a state of disarray, in the process of reorganizing their arrival formation into four distinct formations, something I’d think should have been determined before they departed Home Den.

  “The lead formation is the only one we hit in the thirty seconds they gave us, before they executed a strangely delayed Jump. The ones that Jumped did so precisely together, and the patrol boat AI told us the tachyon wave is moving in your direction. You have about four minutes to prepare.”

  “How many and how grouped, Thad?”

  “My AI says the forward group of eight hundred ships had the largest collection of Heavy cruisers, their Eater class. There were six hundred of those, screened by two hundred Carnivores. If they intended to make that first group conduct the hardest hitting pass, with their increased firepower, it’s missing three hundred twenty-seven heavy units, and sixty-two light cruisers. Expect four hundred eleven ships in the first wave, two hundred seventy-three of those are Eaters.

  “The remaining three groups have far fewer Eaters, about sixty each on average, with the remainder of the eight hundred ships in each group being Carnivores. Thanks to their slow reaction and our surprise arrival, we killed about 12 percent of their total force, the heavy cruisers taking the brunt of the kills.”

  “So, the Prada fought well, then?”

  “Tet, they fought well enough for the first time, and I believe hit every target they went after, but we lost four of them because they failed to alter course after they started their firing runs. They became predictable. I have no doubt the six survivors will take to heart our flying advice on the short trip back to One Land. My ten ships had no losses.”

  The trepidation was clear in Mirikami’s next question. “Whister’s Scout?” The second eldest Prada had led the first of his people to face combat, at least in thousands of years. He was a very influential member of their race, a Federation Council member, and a longtime friend of Tet and Maggi.

  “He’s fine, but shaken by how fast combat decisions need to be made. I’ll reassure him that they’ll do better now they’ve had this experience, and he’ll surely pass along the hard lessons learned to the four other Prada squadrons. With only a pilot, and a weapons director for the AI system, they have no complicated elder hierarchy to filter decisions through, so long as the pilot is always the eldest, and there is only one subordinate.

  “The pilot selects the targets, and he or she releases the weapons director to advi
se the AI on what they want it to do. Maggi’s suggestion about limiting crew structure may have saved more of their Scouts, because of that time saving simplification. I think adding more Prada to combat crews could result in deferment of instantaneous decision making, when other various aged team members could have conflicting opinions, they might pause to consult. That may work OK for manufacturing decisions, but not in combat.”

  “I assume your ships have Jumped inbound as well?”

  “All but one Scout, Tet. I ordered Jorl Breaker and his crew to stay behind for a short time. I want a prisoner from one of the heavy cruisers, a captain, if any survived. A Mind Tap from a prisoner isn’t likely to happen before their fleet reaches One Land in a few minutes, but any information might be useful if we can’t drive them away quickly.”

  “Thanks to your information, knowing they’ll come in four groupings, I’m redistributing forces. The sixty Scouts here, and five Mark II’s will be in one group to greet the first arrivals with event horizons poised to hit the Finth hard when they emerge.

  “Your ten Scouts and the six Prada ships will be following on their heels, attacking the final group from behind. In the last two hours, we barely managed to get half loads of missiles distributed to our two thousand clanships, but only twenty of the novae bombs. It may be selfish, but I left most of those bombs on our ships based around Koban and Haven.

  “Here, A thousand clanships each will attack the two middle groups, and then focus on the final group as they approach.

  “We aren’t as badly outnumbered here as I feared, since they didn’t bring as many total ships as the Ragnar sent to Tanner’s, and no destroyer class ships. However, all these are fighting warships, and none are troop landers or supply vessels. Their anti-ship missiles and energy beam defenses can’t block our black holes, formed by eighty-one independent gravity projector ships. We produce one steerable black hole at a time if we use both projectors, but clanships can fire salvos of missiles.