Koban: When Empires Collide Page 31
“Isn’t Foxworthy taking some sort of toll on their fleet? The Scouts and her cruisers don’t have to Jump into their formation to attack.”
“The Thack Delos are using your tactics within their own formation, to frequently micro Jump, and they’ve started making frequent turns of their ships to avoid the black holes projected by the Scouts. Their fusion bottles aren’t clustered at the center of their ships, which is different than with other Empire craft we’ve encountered. We can’t knock out multiple generators with one hit. The rate of attrition will need to increase significantly to get them to leave before the planet suffers serious environmental damage, which could make many places uninhabitable for decades.”
“Maggi said you were trying to talk to them, to work on a deal to withdraw in exchange for helping them oppose the Thandol. What was their response?”
“No reply at all. I used the Thandol simplified pidgin language, and Ragnar Fotrol. What have your ten Scouts discovered at their home system? Did they manage to talk to them?”
“Like you. No reply. What few space defense forces they kept home were sent to try to find the stealthed Scouts, and they fired whenever they thought they might have found one. Never came close to our people, so our Scouts started attacking their space based facilities, and any military ships they found under repair, construction, or on patrol. That is likely less damage than they’re apparently willing to tolerate at New Glasgow.
“Maggi now believes they will refuse to abandon an existing agreement they have until it becomes grossly expensive to them. They surely have the same long-range instant tachyon communications of other Empire fleets, so there must be two or more ships they keep rotating in and out of Jump status, for communications with home. I’ll guarantee you they know our Scouts have attacked them, but they haven’t caused enough damage to force them to pull back.
“I’m in consultation with Max Born about combining Scout gravity projectors, trying to think of a way ten Scouts can trigger enough damage in their home system that the Thack Delos leaders will take notice and call their fleet home. Not being able to attack their surface installations deep in a gravity well is limiting our options.”
Caldwell was also listening to a crew member as Mirikami spoke.
“Uh Oh. My communications specialist, Andre, just picked up a general warning from Foxworthy to her ships in atmosphere, who are also defending cities like we’ve been doing. The TD fleet has mini carriers, which transport six oval ships, each slightly larger than a Scout. Fifty of their Egg Layers Jumped to the edge of atmosphere several minutes ago, launched their six Infiltrators, and then micro Jumped back to their formation.” He paused.
“Hold on. She’s sending an update.” It was brief.
“Damn. The PU sensors says those three hundred ships dove to low altitudes, and then turned towards the fifteen largest cities on this side of the planet. Sorry Tet, I need to go. Gonna be busy.” He broke the link.
****
Max Born didn’t have much to offer. “Tet, the Scouts can’t reinforce each other’s projection fields to combine their strength, say three of them to equal the confinement power of a Mark II’s single field. Your own ship’s projectors could extend a one-foot black hole all the way to the surface, and probably below surface a hundred feet, depending on local gravitational anomalies. Even using all ten Scouts together, their ten individual small event horizons would lose their Trap field tachyons, and evaporate at about the same altitude. Ten black holes, sent in a formation, would have little impact on the planet when they evaporated well above the surface. I suppose the gamma ray bursts would be hazardous.”
“Probably not to a Thack Delos.” Mirikami was feeling discouraged.
“Max, I’m looking for a way to combine the Scouts gravity fields to do something noticeable, to get the enemy’s attention at home, forcing them to recall their fleet before it turns New Glasgow into a radioactive wasteland.” He gave an example of what he meant.
“At Wendal, I had only five Scouts, and we pulled down the orbits of those Crusher pieces, then we sequentially attracted atmospheric bulges to higher altitudes to increase drag, causing the sections to fall out of orbit. There are no low orbiting large docks or stations to use like that, and they wouldn’t do the degree of damage we want to inflict.
“This species may be resistant to the radiation from their home binary stars’ solar flares, but they aren’t entirely immune. Athena Christopoulos, leading the Scouts, said they use heavy radiation shielding on installations above atmospheres. Their second inhabited planet keeps one face towards the central binary stars, but they only live on the backside, and use shielded equipment to mine on the side always exposed to the flares.”
“Ten Scouts could use large black holes to pull at their atmosphere, like you did at Wendal.” Max offered.
“To do what? I said there’s nothing large in low orbit to bring down with drag.”
“How about opening a hole for solar radiation? I don’t know how powerful a solar flare is from their binary stars but you might disperse the ionization layer that surrounds nearly every planet, or disrupt their planetary magnetosphere. Magnetic field lines, and ionosphere must provide protection from most of the charged particles.”
“You may have a point. As a Spacer, ships I’ve served on or commanded have encountered coronal mass ejections in various systems. But, the Thack Delos, as they evolved, have survived a million years of what must have been frequent increases in solar activity from their close binaries. Besides, we’d have to be patient and wait for a CME headed for the planet.
“In fact, Athena says the Scouts have had to micro Jump several times a day, to stay clear of random mass ejections as they navigated around that system. A CME at exactly the right time, and us thinning the planetary ionosphere and disrupting the magnetosphere would have to happen together to…,” Mirikami paused, and started pulling at his lower lip.
His sudden smile implied a plan had occurred to him. “Thanks Max. I have questions that are outside your field of physics, but I know where any Spacer can get the answers. I need to talk to Athena when I have those answers.” He turned away, already engaged in a Comtap link.
****
Mirikami established a link. “Admiral Foxworthy? Mirikami here. The Federation may be able to apply some leverage for you, against the Thack Delos at home. If it works, their fleet may be recalled. I have ten Scouts in their home system now.”
“Hello Tet. I hope you’re right. Things on the planet just turned very bad thirty minutes ago, after they sent in three hundred of those small Infiltrators, launched from Egg Layers. They have an estimated seven hundred seventy-four more of them to use, although few of the three hundred they sent in the first wave are going home.”
“How bad is it?”
“Wallace, the capital, was hit with four small nukes, all low-level airbursts. And Aberdeen, their largest city, took a larger heavy attack missile, and five small ones, and they will have massive losses of life. Governor Lamore Goodfem was in a deep shelter below the Wallace government center, and she can radio out to us. She and her staff are safe, but blast effects and radiation are taking their tolls on people that couldn’t get to deep and insulated shelters with air filtering. There were nearly three million residents in Wallace before evacuation started two days ago, and roughly half were outside the city when the missiles broke through our defensive cover.”
“Caldwell was speaking to me when he told me of your warning about the Infiltrators. He was with some of your ships, protecting Wallace. How did the missiles get through?”
“They detonated a heavy missile just inside the atmosphere above the city, before we could destroy it from orbit. The EMP messed with our sensors and they couldn’t detect all the low altitude missiles incoming. There were three hundred Infiltrators, spread between twenty of the larger cities. Wallace is the capitol and second largest, and Aberdeen the largest city, so they each received a greater share of attention. Twenty Infiltrators,
with ten nuke missiles apiece attacked them from tree top levels.
“They would have been hard pressed to stop them all anyway, but the EMP was coordinated to come just after the small missile launches, so their sensors were effected during the critical seconds they needed to bring them down with lasers and plasma bolts. As each missile detonated, they added to our sensor problems.”
“Howard must be upset. He thought your ships and his could hold them off.”
There was an awkward pause. “Tet, I’m sorry to tell you this. Howard didn’t make it. His clanship and one of my light cruisers were struck directly by two of the small nukes. Those are apparently repurposed anti-ship missiles, and when the EMP hit, the enemy missile targeting systems must have used the intense reflections from our stealthed hulls to turn directly towards them. They were positioned over the city, almost in their path anyway.”
“Oh Damn. Howard was one of the people I first met in Human Space, when we got off Koban and reached Poldark. We’ve been friends a long time.”
“Me too. I was a squadron leader assigned to defend Poldark when the Krall invasion started. He was my friendly buffer when I had to deal with the more abrasive version of Nabarone. Henry became much more mellow as the war wore on, and I can finally attribute that to his secretly becoming a Kobani. I learned yesterday that Howard had converted too. I’ll miss him, and I know Henry considered him one of his best friends.”
“I’ll have to break the news to Chief Haveram. He’s mine and Howard’s friend, and his business partner. I was calling to tell, you, and him afterwards, that if you can hold them off another day, the TD might decide to go home and clean up a mess my people are going to make for them there. At least I hope so. Watch for signs of a pull out, within a day or less.”
“How can ten Scouts there do what forty of them here couldn’t do? I’m down to twenty-four Scouts now, and the TD fleet shows no sign that their somewhat slowed, but still continuing losses are too much for them to bear. They must consider the damage they’ve delivered is worth the cost. They surely expect to return here to claim this radiation damaged world if we can’t force them to leave early, because they are the only species from the Empire that can live here after they pollute the atmosphere. What will your Scouts do that we can’t?”
He was a bit cryptic. “They’re going to try to hit their home planet with something they normally don’t worry about, and make them more vulnerable when that happens. If it works, I’ll tell you how it’s done, if it doesn’t work, I’ll blush, because it’s my idea, and then try something else, just as soon as I can think of anything else.”
“Gosh. I can’t tell you how inspiring and reassuring that sounds.”
“Well, stay tuned for my next pronouncement. It could be a dandy or a dud. In either case, all it requires of your fleet is to keep banging away at them. I’ll bet you were going to do that anyway.”
“I hope you don’t mind if I try to bang that drum harder and faster.”
“Admiral, I hope you bang the crap out of these immoral bastards. Even the Krall said nukes were forbidden. Although, it wasn’t out of their sense of mercy. Mirikami out.”
****
Athena looked at the two red suns from the side, with the gap between them showing the tidal bulges of their mutual attraction. “OK, folks, let’s start a family argument between mom and pop Delos.”
Ardan O’Brian, who had served and fought with her before, asked a frivolous question. “Which is mom, and which pop?”
Captain Salada Gupta quipped, “Doesn’t matter. Smack ‘em both and start the fight. The AI shows we only have eighteen minutes to start their argument, or wait almost a day until they return to this point in their binary orbit. New Glasgow can’t wait that long.”
They had taken recorded observation of the two stars and fed their orbital positions, relative to where Dolbor Gen Delos was in its planetary orbit, to a more powerful AI than a Scout had, to calculate when to trigger instabilities in the magnetic field lines between each of the red dwarfs. The shallow depth their largest black holes could descend into the gravity well of each star meant they wouldn’t come close to surviving to touch the photosphere, the surface of the stars. Nevertheless, they could affect the extensive plasma filled coronas of each of them, and apply twists and tweaks to magnetic field lines out there, using rapid gravitational interactions to shift the plasma that guided the field lines.
Much like sharply snapping the end of a rope, doing that to a magnetic field line hoop in the corona, well above the photosphere and above the most intense gravity, it should generate waves down both sides of the magnetic field loop, which carried energy between the photosphere and the corona. That way, they could indirectly reach down to the region where the Scouts couldn’t send their event horizons. It was believed this would spur surface activity near the photosphere, which in turn would react to snap the magnetic field lines back in the other direction. The goal here was to trigger multiple such magnetic “snaps” on each star at the right locations and at the right time, to provoke more powerful magnetic interactions between the two stars at their closest points, where they bulged towards one another.
Intense magnetic field changes were the source of most flares from stars, and those were often followed by coronal mass ejections. If they could force CMEs at all, they wanted to do so just as the gap between the orbiting stars was moving towards the target planet in its more distant orbit. There was uncertainty in how quickly a CME would be generated after a flare, if it did at all. However, many generations of solar astronomers observing various type stars up close had taught humans that smaller stars reacted more quickly to magnetic fluctuations, and they had two of them here to play with.
Athena had them start the process before the alignment was reached, to build up tension in five magnetic field lines of each star, to twist them. “Group 1, on my mark, let your AI’s work with mine to project your gravitational focal points in the sequence Tet’s AI on the Mark, thinks should yield a series of magnetic snaps. Group 2, follow O’Brian’s lead on the same mark. Let your own AIs rotate the holes out of Normal Space all together, to produce five simultaneous magnetic kinks above each star. Then we watch what happens.
“Ready…, start now!” Her AI was the master time keeper for this, based on calculations of Jake, back at Koban. By spreading out the timing of five kinked field lines on each star, it was hoped a wide pattern of flares would be triggered, and perhaps the CMEs they needed, sent in a broad sweep towards Dolbor Gen Delos, the home world.
Because of the rapid rotation of the two stars, the large black holes generated were not allowed to pull at the corona and magnetic lines for long. Otherwise, the lines might snap free on their own, out of sequence. In barely a minute, in rapid succession, ten event horizons rotated into Tachyon Space, instantly releasing the pull that had retarded the movement of the coronal plasma, which sustained the magnetic field lines.
Through the heavily filtered images on their view screens, it didn’t look like anything had happened. They were looking initially at the wrong places, where their targeting screens had indicated the focal points had been for their gravity projectors. The action wasn’t up there.
It was far below those places, where the first indications of a back reaction appeared. It was a darkening of the photosphere in a string of spots on each star that proved they had done something. Dark was a relative term, since the sun spots on the stars were radiating light from matter at intensely hot temperatures. But not as high a temperature as the surrounding photosphere. They had manufactured ten small active regions, five per star.
Suddenly, evidence that the field lines had sharply readjusted came in a brightening of the coronal plasma, where those magnetic lines had snapped back to where they should have been, heating the already hot plasma by millions of kelvins, producing electromagnetic radiation across the spectrum. An impressive sight initially, but that was tepid compared to what came next.
The magnetic field lines be
tween each star clashed, and converted the two star’s orbital speeds into a magnetic smashup that rapidly grew larger and more intense. The glows in their coronas above the opposing sun spots brightened rapidly, and streamers of glowing matter, composed of electrons, protons, and heavier ions, started rising and following the arcs of the magnetic lines, now becoming more visible with their glowing presence. A series of five coronal mass ejection was starting, and it was increasing far beyond what the Scouts had expected to initiate. Mom and Dad were pissed, and smacking the crap out of one another.
Athena said, “We need to get out of here. This is getting intense, and we’re too damn close. Jump half the way to Dolbor Gen. We have time to watch from there, and check on how large a CME this will be, and what direction it will take when it breaks free of the magnetic fields.”
Because the system’s habitable zone was so close to the two dim suns, half the distance to the planet was only about two light-minutes from the star. A CME travels far slower than the speed of light, but the rising glow of material flowing out from between the suns was quickly evident. It took minutes longer to observe the spread of many billions of tons of solar plasma, heated to tens of millions of kelvins, to determine that the outward motion of its hottest and leading edge wasn’t centered on the targeted planet. They had fired a bit too soon it seemed, and the fastest, most energetic material would arrive before the planet did when it crossed its orbit in five or six hours. However, it was an extended and broad CME, and the middle and trailing parts of the plasma would sweep past the planet, staying mostly in the orbital plane of all the planets.