Koban: Rise of the Kobani (109 page)

This warning didn’t really speed boarding, because that was already proceeding as fast as TG2 coordination could make things happen. The shuttles and four-ships had smoothly and swiftly, slipped into the empty bays. Only the pilots that had set the destruct systems on the abandoned craft were running to leap twenty feet into the open portals. As the last one entered, the portals were slammed shut, and Noreen selected passive tracking for the weapons system, and tied four missile launchers with five missiles in each rack to Alyson’s console.

Noreen was about to tell everyone to grab their socks and hold on, when Slasher broadcast again. “The second clanship, or a first cousin, is coming back over the curve of the northern hemisphere, and also clearly coming your way. Somebody else will surely be coming out to the moon to see who the hell is talking in a strange encryption mode. You start your lift and I’ll be at the outer atmosphere before they know I’m coming. Retief out.”

Noreen warned them. “Get down now. Max performance lift in one second.”

She was generous and allowed one point five seconds, which is considerably longer feeling to a TG2, at ten times the reaction and thought processing speed of a normal human.

The main thruster and attitude thrusters contributed slightly, but Noreen had retained tachyons in Avengers Traps for the Normal Space drive, which did the real heavy lifting this time. They left a plasma trail in a literal blue streak as the ship rose at close to the TG2 tolerance for this level of g force, limited only by the atmospheric resistance the hull could accept. That was when all of the personnel were in acceleration couches. Almost half were not, and if they survived the next five minutes without destruction, some of them would fly home in a med lab. Otherwise, a med lab would be superfluous.

Unnoticed behind them, the ECM pods went off in minor explosions on top of the wrecked dome, and oddly, the parked fleet of small craft lifted off as well and moved away from the dome. Before they were five hundred feet in the air and a quarter mile away, the ships still trapped under the fallen wall exploded powerfully, as their fusion bottles suddenly ruptured. The already shattered dome hardly suffered any meaningful damage, but more of the ground managed to fall into the factory below.

At an altitude of just under ten miles, Alyson used her suit communications to send a launch command, via Karl, to initiate the high scan rate targeting radar, and to start firing anti-ship missiles as the atmosphere thinned enough they could safely clear the launch ports. At the hull searing passage through the now diminished atmosphere, it wasn’t possible to fire them even a mile lower. The stealth capability of the burned and damaged skin of the leading edges of the hull was ruined, and would have to be replaced. Stealth wasn’t needed now, because there wasn’t a thing sneaky about this departure, and the Krall could see other stealthed clanships anyway.

The clanship that had been overhead and decelerating may have thought it was coming to the aid of the supposed accident at that dome, which had been mistakenly declared that by Droktad, and he was never able to correct that error. It wasn’t using high rate target scanning at all, suggesting it had not been expecting to need to launch missiles as it flew a possible rescue mission, and it needed a few more seconds to get ready, which it didn’t have.

However, its commander or pilot activated its instant-on automated defense system, and it spewed targeting decoys, and started firing lasers as Avenger’s eight hypersonic missiles used the twenty miles to build velocity. Another four missiles were launched after a brief few second delay, when Alyson recalled how the previous clanship had nearly survived four short-range shots, with even less time to react.

Next, an event that sealed the descending clanship’s fate occurred. A gamma ray burst flared above them, only a hundred ten miles above the planet and less than thirty miles above the clanship. Slasher came out swinging. She quickly launched a stream of ten missiles, five at the clanship below her, and five in the general direction of the much farther away second clanship. That particular distant opponent had seen Avenger’s hostile actions, and had just fired a hand of missiles towards her, but at five hundred miles of separation, Avenger wasn’t at great risk from them. She and Slasher would both be able to Jump before those threats drew near. It was that nearby clanship that Avenger had to get past.

The closer clanship, caught between Avenger and Slasher, couldn’t defend effectively from heavy attacks from two directions, dividing its laser fire, and two of Avengers missiles struck home. One aft, and one at midship, and it blossomed into an orange and black lumpy bubble of fire, nevertheless a thing of beauty to the human ships. Their extra missiles, of no danger to the two human ships designated as “friendlies,” were redirected towards the second clanship, in the event they could cover that distance before being destroyed.

It was Avenger and Slasher against a single clanship, which was a bit too far away to be a threat. Even though there were launches seen from tarmacs at several domes, initiated after the fighting just witnessed had started, they would be too late to join this battle. Slasher was high enough to Jump again right now, and Avenger would join her in less than a minute.

That was when the Krall commander in the second clanship reacted as they sometimes did, for “Path and clan.”

The Slasher was positioned just above the atmosphere, relatively motionless after her micro Jump from behind that moon, and the Avenger, within the upper reaches of atmosphere, was deviating around the spreading pieces of the exploded clanship she’d killed, and was presenting a screeching fast and accelerating target to the approaching distant clanship. One too difficult to predict manually.

The unexpected micro Jump, now termed an “intersect maneuver” by the PU navy, had no known defense. The Krall clanship winked out of this Universe, and before the light from that event could arrive (therefore, even computer reaction speeds did not matter), it reappeared within part of the volume of the Universe occupied by Slasher!

The resulting staggering blast was only survived by Avenger because there was no concussion in a vacuum to transmit the force of the relatively nearby nuclear force detonation. There were no damaging radiation effects to worry about, which the ship’s hull might have protected the crew from in any case, at a distance of seven miles. However, the larger high velocity fragments could have penetrated and shredded Avenger’s hull had it not deviated around the previously blown up clanship fragments. Noreen had naturally chosen the direction away from the second clanship’s missiles, and coincidentally farther away from Slasher. As it was, the sleet of the fastest fine particles of both friend and foe peppered and pitted her upper hull, as she barely slipped past the more dangerous larger debris.

Operation Fast One had become a costly success, and not as fast or so slick as planned. The underwater explosions in the factory happened a few hours later, as flooding reached the detonation sensors. At least that all-important goal was achieved, as a return on the lives invested in its destruction.

In a sidelight, where Alyson would never have confirmation, she would be pleased at the results from her last moment instructions to Karl. When she was about to release the AI to destroy the small ships they were forced to abandon, she had a moment of inspiration. She remembered how the AI had remotely flown a single ship down to the surface of Heavyside when they were there. This time, the AI was also instructed to program each of the flight capable ships to fly somewhere, providing them with navigational coordinates of an alternate target dome on the northern hemisphere of the planet. This was where production of other war material was conducted. The small craft were all sent at ground hugging altitudes, like ancient cruise missiles, set to fly into the dome and detonate their fusion bottles. They might not totally knock out the underground factory, but it was a good use of the sacrificed small ships to slow production there.

Mission completed, the Avenger entered a Jump Hole a hundred fifty miles up, and she limped home by a devious route, to foil possible attempts to trace the direction of her travel. Today, the majority of the raiders went home, with some very painful exceptions. The equipment lost also hurt the Kobani efforts, particularly the Slasher. In sharp contrast to the Krall, material was far less important to them than their people were. Koban and Hearth had a small production base, so replacing the material would take months, but valiant friends could never be replaced.