Koban: Rise of the Kobani (82 page)

Maggi had noticed the clanship’s track had adjusted course, but not towards the Beagle. “Hard to be certain without active tracking, Marlyn, but are they headed for that migration ship? It’s one of ours, and in a middle orbit. Our crew has to be fully powered and ready to activate their Traps, because they’ve been on board for two hours. It looks like the Krall may want to know what was wrong with that ship that we looked at, and then evidently abandoned it to look at another ship. They’ll see the heat increasing, and a sensor sweep will confirm the fusion bottle’s magnetic field is active.”

Marlyn shook her head. “I wanted them to march right over here to us and ask us what we were doing. If I try to intercept at that distance they’ll know something’s wrong when we charge over, and we can’t get a missile there fast enough to surprise them. Plasma bolts and lasers are instant, but we can’t hurt them seriously enough to disable them from several thousand miles away. We need to draw their attention away from the defenseless targets, and they’ll remember exactly which ships we visited. If one powered itself on, they’ll figure they all did. They don’t even need to destroy them to make them useless for our immediate needs. A few laser hits on the Trap field emitters and they can’t go anywhere, and they can always call for more clanships to launch.”

Alyson offered a comment. “Sarge is down below, with the transfer crews. On the way here, he told us stories about the attacks on K1 by the PU Navy, and how the Krall broke into their defensive formation on the second raid. I think he said they micro Jumped in, from close range, instead of boring in from the outer edges of the globe of ships and bypassed their concentrated defensive fire.”

“There are just the two of us up here,” Jorl pointed out. “There’s no defensive globe defending either side.”

“I don’t think that’s her point,” Maggi said. “Alyson, you mean us micro Jump over there, right? Good thinking.”

“I’ve never tried one so short.” Marlyn sounded doubtful. “In test Jumps for training at Koban we would go to Haven, or to the Ort cloud.”

Maggi reminded her, “We did dozens without moving at all, to test long range Tapping for communications.”

“Yes, but we applied no vector for those, or moved a significant distance in Normal Space. This is really a short hop. Even if I zoom in maximum on the console, there is a small uncertainty in destination coordinates. We might White Out as an intersect!”

Intersect was the term Spacers occasionally used to describe the extremely rare occurrence of a Jump terminating within a material object, fatally and explosively so.

Maggi, temperamentally disposed to make daring or aggressive moves, argued for the Jump. “The alternative is to let a single clanship destroy or disable our fifteen occupied ships before we can catch and stop them. We’re faster in Normal Space drive than a clanship, but they can get off plenty of missiles and plasma bolts while we chase them. What if we fire multiple rockets as we come out, and let them self-seek?”

“Self-seek will go after any target. These are Krall missiles, not smart munitions.”

“Kap can selectively disarm or self-destruct any missiles that chase after our own people. We have to do it before they close with the ship they’re headed for. We can’t wait if we’re going to do this.” Maggi knew, from past conversations with her younger friend, that it was to avoid making decisions like this that Marlyn had wanted to be an explorer. However, the luxury of safe choices was for other missions.

Marlyn stood up. “Kap, give me high magnification of that clanship on my front view screen, with a destination designator on the main screen when I tap the navigation display. I want see where we
should
make the exit. I’ll try to get in his six o’clock position.”

She obviously planned to use Krall manual piloting techniques.

“Mam, if you specify the distance behind the clanship you prefer as an intended White Out point, I will place a designator on your view screen, and move it as the target does.” Kap just reminded her why they used AI’s, rather than follow the reckless Krall examples.

“What is the recommended range for optimal target acquisition and tracking for a self-seek missile?” She was embarrassed, but adaptable.

“Recommended minimum distance is just over two miles from the target, which is a much greater distance than the half mile of uncertainty of such a short Jump. To ensure missile lock and arming after launch, that only requires a half mile of missile flight time.”

“Kap, place the exit point one mile behind them, and show me on the screen.” A red pip appeared behind the clanship, and the zoom backed out so they could see both.

“Kap, select four anti-ship missiles spaced evenly around the ship, and launch them all as we pop back into Normal Space.”

“Ready, Mam.”

“Alyson, Jorl, open all your gun ports, and fire any weapons that bear as we exit.”

They leaned forward to tap at their own consoles, and kept their hands near for firing commands. Kap could do this as well, but they trusted their decisions better as to what part of the clanship to selectively strike first.

“Kap, Jump.”

Even with their enhanced nervous system and eyes, they didn’t see the galactic sky wink out and back, it happened so rapidly. The quadruple vibration of the four launches was felt, but that was a few hundredths of a second after they had happened. The orientation of the planet below had instantly shifted, and they found themselves one mile nearly directly behind the clanship.

Alyson immediately fired a finely aimed plasma cannon shot, which at near light velocity hit the cover port of the plasma cannon she could see on this side. Jorl, a thousandth of a second behind her fired two heavy laser pulses at as many enemy laser port covers. Their intent was to try to heat fuse them closed. The Krall would have sensor warnings of the four missile launches, as they each used active scans to find a target, but there would be no warning from the cannons or lasers before they hit.

The Krall reaction was still swift, because using a magnified view screen of the clanship, they saw one of the laser ports Jorl had hit manage to slide open. The other two ports remained closed, unable to fire on a missile that was inbound, coming from a position the one opened port could not fire at anyway.

The Krall pilot made a fine effort, as the attitude thrusters pivoted his ship hard, to allow open gun portal to bear on that missile, as well sight weapons on them. The hypervelocity missile was a small target, and it was unlikely to be hit by manual firing before its acceleration pushed it into their near side. Tracking showed a second missile had also selected the clanship, and was turning to intercept from farther away as it curved back.

Knowing what the Krall pilot was doing to gain a firing angle, Marlyn tapped for a short burst of Krall crippling thrust forward, and a hard sideways attitude thrust to bring their bow around to point at their enemy, creating a somewhat slimmer silhouette. The Krall laser gunner got off a beam just as Jorl put two of his beams on that now more visible gun port.

The Krall gunner had aimed where the Beagle was expected to be, but his target had shifted enough that when the speed of light beam was triggered by the warrior (a laser was something they could
not
dodge), it was aimed at a spot they had just vacated. He didn’t get another shot with that weapon, because the portal opening suddenly glowed red and vapors and melted droplets sprayed into space. The beams themselves were invisible, but their effects were not.

Alyson was prepared to fire two plasma bolts at the already open cannon portal, rotating around on the clanship and coming into view, trying to come to bear on the Beagle. That was when the first missile spoiled the Krall’s plan. The silent bright flash on the side of the nearly diamond-hard hull coating was evidence that a missile had stuck. If it worked as designed, the front part of the warhead, with its molten metal penetrator stream had opened a six-inch wide hole in the hull, and entering through that maelstrom of molten material was the bulk of the ultra-high explosive main charge.

A less bright explosion followed, because it happened inside, but the volume of debris and hull plating flying from the side of the clanship was impressive. The reaction of the ship to the explosive ejection of material halted its pivoting, or slowed it was more accurate, because the pilot had maintained the side thrust at the top, despite the major damage. This ship would never land on a planet, but it could still fight.

Alyson saw a blue bolt of ionized plasma from the cannon port she wanted to hit. However, the plasma wasn’t directed at the Beagle since the weapon couldn’t bear on them yet. She realized they must have detected the second missile arcing around as it sought its target. They missed
hitting the fast agile missile, now up to a truly high velocity. On the zoomed in screen, Kap projected that it would impact near the bow, just below the command deck.

The angle for her to fire on that plasma port improved over the next second, as its plasma chamber would be recycling for a last effort to hit the now straight on missile. This was a better opportunity than they had on the first effort, to hit the missile as it was curving.

Alyson surely ruined the gunner’s day when she blasted the plasma cannon opening with both of her bolts. Two seconds later, a second bright flash and then hull plates flew from the bulkhead of the deck immediately below the command level. That top deck did not have a decompression seal for the stairwells between those two decks. The pilot and gunners experienced the explosive overpressure, followed by rapid decompression. They were doomed if not in armor, which was unlikely for a flight up to orbit just to see what a fellow clanship was doing.

“Missile fired!” was Kap’s warning, letting them know that the last act of the clanship was to try to avenge its own destruction. Unlike the Beagle, which had full stacks of missiles in all of its launchers on this raid, Krall ships normally didn’t leave them loaded while sitting on the ground, as this ship had been, not expecting to find an enemy out here. They must have sent a warrior to load at least one rack, the closest launch bay being three decks below the command level, where it would be below the blast and decompression doors. A warrior there could have survived the hit that disabled or killed the crew above, and had launched a missile.

Marlyn realized if she applied emergency thrust, they would only close the distance, because their bow was aimed at the broken clanship. If the missile was on self-seek, they were the most probable nearby target.

On the captain’s view screen, Kap displayed a computer track and prediction for the missile. It had been launched away from them, but like their second missile, it was curving around, obviously locked onto them.

Jorl recognized that manual firing in this case wasn’t required for a human to select the best of several targets. There was only one. “Kap, take laser control and fire on the missile.”

Instantly, the two invisible beams being fired were displayed on the view screen as representative of where they were focused. As soon as the intersecting lines met on the target icon, the missile activated its mirror finish, and twisted and turned to prevent any hot spot from burning through too quickly. The range was already so short that the seconds needed for laser penetration weren’t available. The missile also happened to be inside the coverage area of the two plasma cannons that Alyson had just fired at the ship it came from. Her recycle time for those two cannons needed more seconds than they had. The enemy was either dead or dying. They would likely not see the results on the Beagle, but they had struck back effectively.

To TG2’s, with superconducting thinking processes, the passage of two seconds before the impact was like watching a slow death coming. There was no way for thrusters or Normal Space drive to outrun a nearby hypervelocity missile as they overcame their massive inertia. Even dead or dying, the Krall could be dangerously fatal.

Maggi blinked and started slightly as the view screen picture suddenly changed, with no missile track shown. Had the missile exploded early, or the lasers gotten through? “Huh? What happened?”

“You didn’t think I was just going to sit there and let them screw up my pretty ship did you? Close your mouth, and try to look smarter than that young face and blonde hair suggests.”

“Marlyn! I mean, Captain, you Jumped!” Alyson shouted, almost in disbelief.

Giving her the
of course
look, Marlyn said, “I saw no reason to wait around, did you? I held onto the rest of that Jump tac energy because I was leery of getting so damn close to them to make our own shots count. That caution was right. Next time we go in, shoot at their asses, and we get out right away.”

Jorl asked the obvious question that seemed to elude the other swift thinkers. “What’s that missile going to do now? It’ll seek a migration ship.”

Marlyn agreed. “Right, let’s Jump back and shoot it out of the sky.”

They returned, with several hundred miles of buffer for time to take defensive action, discovering the missile had turned to seek a migration ship in a lower orbit. The new target wasn’t one of theirs, and Marlyn decided to let it hit its new target. They didn’t plan to leave it for Krall use anyway. She asked Kap about the other two missiles they had fired, and had left them in the AI’s trusty digital and metaphorical hands. She had been so focused on self-preservation that those two had faded to unimportance.