by S. H. Jucha
“To be more specific,” Lucia interjected, “don’t think these six transports represent the same trap as was previously found in other systems. Now, each encounter with the Colony is likely to be different.”
Jess and Lucia stared at the foursome in front of them. They hoped the message had been delivered.
For Tatia, it had been. “Jess, tell me what you think the Colony might have done here.”
“I’m not sure I have the imagination,” Jess replied. “But, for instance, what if the Colony networked the charges aboard the six transports? You touch one, and they all detonate.”
“What if they’re not full of ordinary chemical explosives?” Lucia offered.
“Nuclear armament?” Julien inquired.
“Why not?” Lucia replied. “The Colony reds carried slug throwers for the longest time. Then in the spate of months, they observe the domes handling exposure to enormous amounts of energy. Suddenly, they’re carrying energy weapons. They’re now better prepared to repel the shadows and us.”
“What I hear the two of you saying is we’re to use our imagination in encounters with the Colony. Be prepared for the worst,” Tatia said.
“That’s what we’re saying,” Jess replied, with palpable relief. “On the other hand, we can’t shy away from confronting the Colony’s tactics. That’s what the insectoids would like us to do ... be intimidated by their aggression.”
“We’ll just have to more imaginative and more aggressive,” Tatia replied.
Jess and Lucia shared Tatia’s grin. Consensus had been achieved.
* * * * *
In the morning, Jess and Lucia descended with the first group of travelers carrying Sylians and shadows.
Pilots would spend much of the morning ferrying the Sylians and their shadows to sites around the planet. Long before dusk, they’d be reversing the process.
The SADEs laid out the search pattern, and it was expected that the fewer than three hundred adults who remained would be eliminated within a matter of days. Then the Sylians would join the hunt to exterminate the juveniles.
Jess intended a quick demonstration for the elders before the male villagers joined the hunt. Lucia and he landed early. In front of the elders and the hunters, Jess pointed to the sky.
The locals observed a swirling pattern of the visitors’ sky boats.
As swiftly as the travelers had appeared, they shot off to their grid locations.
When Lucia saw disappointment on the hunters’ faces, she realized that they thought the hunt was over for them. She whistled for their attention. When she had it, she pointed to the sky. Then she held her arms high above her head, adopted a fierce expression, and closed her fingers to imitate pincers. Then she pointed at the hunters and used her hands to show a measure of the juveniles.
Faces brightened, and heads nodded. The hunters knew their work wasn’t done. There were more young insectoids to hunt than adults.
Tacnock approached Jess and Lucia. He pointed upward and inquired, “Message delivered?”
“Delivered and received. We’re happy to say,” Lucia replied.
“Good,” Tacnock said. “This fight is going to get uglier before it’s won.” He clasped forearms with Jess. When Lucia offered her hands, he flashed his teeth.
“Just thought I’d like to be treated as an equal,” Lucia said, smiling.
“You always have been,” Tacnock replied and clasped her forearms.
Jess and Lucia wished the other veterans good fortune and sent them on their way.
The final two hunter teams, with the elders beside them, approached Jess and Lucia.
Two Sylians, with slung Loopah weapons, stepped off Sharon’s traveler and stood alongside Jess.
Tsotsia clapped his hands and cackled at the snow-white female commanders. He was delighted to observe another race.
Jess introduced the Sylians. Then he pantomimed that the hunters would accompany them instead of Lucia and himself.
Distrust wrinkled the hunters’ faces.
In two smooth, practiced motions, the commanders swung the launchers off their shoulders and fired their weapons without aiming. Both darts impacted the dead and charred trunk Orbit had planted for his demonstration.
Then two shadows scurried from each traveler and joined their assault leaders, who stared evenly at the hunter teams.
The disapproving frowns disappeared, and the lead hunters claimed the new strangers. Shoulders were clasped and foreheads touched.
The Sylian commanders motioned the teams aboard the waiting travelers. They presumed the hunters would take seats and were surprised when they sat on the ramps’ edges.
“Oops, forgot to mention that,” Jess murmured, when he saw the quizzical expressions on the commanders’ faces.
Jess introduced Julien. Then he said to him, “I don’t know how to communicate your importance and your mission.”
“Allow me,” Julien replied. He stepped toward the elders. “Greetings, Tsotsia,” he said in the villager’s language. Then he grasped the elder’s shoulders and touched foreheads.
“Metal being,” Tsotsia exclaimed to the other elders.
Julien motioned politely toward the village.
The elders hesitated, and then they enthusiastically welcomed the opportunity to speak with the strange individual who inhabited a metal shell. They held up hands to Jess and Lucia and led Julien away.
Watching Julien walk with the elders, while he pointed at objects, which they happily named for the SADE, Jess commented, “He’s extremely good at this.”
“You did well here, Jess, but our work down here is done,” Lucia said. She recognized his reticence to leave a job he’d started but not finished. She slipped a hand in his and said, “Come. It’s time.”
The couple returned to the Freedom and met with Tatia and Reiko.
“It’s our opinion that the transports must be dealt with before the dome,” Tatia said.
“Why?” Lucia asked.
“They’re afraid the insectoids can remotely detonate the transports,” Jess reasoned. “If the armament is nuclear, and we’re trying to make entrance to the dome, the Colony could set them off.”
“Actually, we didn’t think of that one,” Reiko remarked. “We’re concerned for the assumptions you mentioned and the nuclear fallout over the planet.”
“Oh,” Jess uttered. The admirals and he stared at one another.
“Good idea to have this meeting,” Reiko finally said.
“I guess it’s the transports first,” Jess said, adding a shrug. “If we discover the transports are armed with nuclear devices, then maybe we don’t want to make entry into the dome tunnels.”
Lucia was struck dumb, and she stared at Jess with a horrified look. The thought hadn’t occurred to her that the Colony would go that far, but it made sense. The Colony never had a problem sacrificing numbers to achieve the race’s goals.
“Black space,” Tatia muttered. The captain’s ideas of what the Colony might do chilled her.
“How do you intend to eliminate the transports?” Jess asked.
“The best idea is to sacrifice a drone,” Tatia replied. “But the problem, as you know, is that we don’t know which ships are our suspects, and the odds aren’t in our favor.”
“What type of drones?” Jess asked. It was the first time that he’d heard that Omnians possessed this type of device.
“It’s a traveler, Jess,” Lucia explained. “We program the controller.
It’s extremely effective with static targets like the transports.”
Jess was appalled. “You’d sacrifice a perfectly good fighter?” he asked.
“We would, to ensure no one was hurt or killed,” Tatia said. Her eyes drilled into Jess’s.
“Well, I suppose if you have the coin, you can afford to do things like that,” Jess retorted. He wasn’t quailed by Tatia’s intense stare, and he wanted her to know it.
Tatia did see it, and she liked what she saw. Jess wasn’t easily intimidated — not by a rearing red and not by a fleet admiral.
“We’ve time to come up with a better idea,” Tatia said, “but drones will be our fallback option.”
When Jess and Lucia left the meeting, he guided her toward the grand park. Taking a seat on the grass next to a stream, he linked with Lucia and called Z.
Z’s response gave Jess pause. The historic data the SADE was referencing would have been accompanied by the loss of the pilots.
Miranda’s interjection was something Jess had become accustomed to hearing. Under these circumstances, he’d hoped to have it.
Jess added.
Z replied. There was a pause while the SADEs linked.
After the conversation, Z and Miranda linked with Alex and Renée, as the Freedom was their ship. Their communications were brief. The couple was in favor of any SADE idea.
25: Metal Balls
“It won’t be sophisticated, but in these circumstances, it needn’t be,” Z explained to his audience.
“How about the accuracy?” Reiko asked. Miranda’s expression had Reiko chuckling.
“By lacking sophistication, my partner meant it won’t track a moving target and place the slugs in its path,” Miranda retorted. “Captain Cinders and Admiral Bellardo came to us with concerns about repeatability of detonating dangerous transports at future systems. We’re offering an alternative that can be provided within three days.”
“What will it throw?” Alex asked, staring into the holo-vid, which displayed a mockup of the weapon.
“A cluster of metal balls held together by a new version of nanites,” Z replied.
“A single shot?” Jess asked, as his brow furrowed.
“Negative, Captain,” Z replied. “The cluster will be formed just before firing. The balls will hold together for the launch and separate immediately afterward. The separation will be minor.”
“Then the impact on a transport will be at multiple points?” Jess asked hopefully.
“At the distance Admiral Tachenko wishes the fleet to remain from the transports, the miniscule separation at launch will result in a pattern spread of several meters by the time the balls arrive on target,” Miranda explained.
“The value of the concept is that it’s an economical weapon with repeatable action,” Z said.
“But only from the Freedom,” Alex noted.
“Regrettably, yes,” Z said. “It would require a major infrastructure modification of a Trident to equip it with a rail weapon.”
“And it would eliminate a Trident’s grav drive capability,” Miranda added.
“What about the new carriers that Sol is building?” Alex asked.
Miranda and Z smiled cordially. It was a subtle delaying tactic, while they linked with the SADEs, modeled design options, selected the best one, and refined it.
The holo-vid display changed. A carrier rotated to reveal its bottom. A pair of long hatches interrupted the shell along the midline, and a rail gun extended from the interior. It could swivel.
The SADEs’ audience grinned.
“When your details are complete, send this to Cordelia,” Alex said. “Modification of the delivery schedule is acceptable to incorporate the changes.”
“Done,” Z replied.
“Well, I like it,” Tatia pronounced. “Anything that saves travelers is good by me. Thank you, Z and Miranda.”
“We merely designed the weapon, Admiral,” Miranda replied. “Your thanks should be directed toward these two,” she said, placing powerful Frederica hands lightly on Jess’s and Lucia’s shoulders.
“Imaginative thinking,” Z added.
At the praise, Lucia beamed, but Jess ducked his head. In the presence of individuals who’d been through so much more than he had, it made him uncomfortable.
Immediately after the meeting, the SADEs went to work in a city-ship bay, which housed a beam weapon. They removed the components, stripping down the weapon to the rail that extended the barrel from the bay.
The SADEs fabricated a length of magnetic accelerator, which they wrapped around a spun ceramic tube. They reserved the beam weapon’s energy banks to power the electromagnets.
The aiming system was elementary. But, as Z had said, a complex delivery system wasn’t required for proof of the experiment and to answer the captain’s questions about what the transports held.
Producing the nanites, which would encapsulate the cluster, was a simple matter of programing a version of the nanotechnology that was used to seal a hatch, ramp, or landing gear of the shell-hulled ships.
With an hour to spare in the anticipated construction schedule, the SADEs were ready to fire the city-ship’s new rail gun.
In the late evening hours, Tatia ordered the fleet to clear the space around the transports. Pilots launched their travelers. They were on standby to eliminate the fallout of debris into the atmosphere.
Essentially, Z was the weapon’s gunner. After the Tridents had evacuated the danger zone, Z moved the city-ship to a position that allowed any missed shots to continue past the planet. Then he rotated the vessel to bring the aiming system to bear. It was a laser mounted in parallel to the launch tube, and he sighted on the nearest transport.
Tatia and others stood on the Freedom’s bridge to observe the action on the ship’s enormous holo-vid.
In turn, Miranda operated a simple device that aggregated one hundred metal balls into a sphere fifteen centimeters across. Nanites injected into the mass locked the balls together. Then she extricated the solidified sphere and tossed the cluster to Z, who loaded the launcher via a manual breech.
Z signaled the energy supply circuitry, and the accelerator was activated. The electromagnetic chain sent the metal cluster hurtling through the launch tube.
Within moments of the cluster clearing the weapon’s barrel, the nanites dissociated. Then, as the cluster flew through space toward the target, the balls drifted apart. It was the minute twist in th
e launch’s internal diameter that provided the impetus for the balls to separate.
The vacuum of space offered no resistance to the metal projectiles. They kept the velocity imparted to them by the magnetic accelerators.
Despite the rail gun’s crudeness, the ingenuity of the SADEs’ work wasn’t to be denied. One hundred metal alloy balls tore through a transport’s hull. Most of them passed entirely through the ship.
The SADEs had targeted the transport’s bridge. It was proven to be the vulnerable spot when rocks were first thrown at the Colony’s armed transports.
The results of Z’s first shot were anticlimactic. The metal balls shredded the transport’s bow, but there was no explosion.
“One down,” Reiko remarked.
“And one drone saved,” Tatia said, eyeing Jess and Lucia.
Alex placed congratulatory hands on Jess’s and Lucia’s shoulders.
Z guided the city-ship to align the rail gun on the next target.
Tatia shook her head at the primitive nature of the hastily constructed weapon. Although, as a test bed, she had to admit it was serving its purpose.
A few moments later, Z sent,
Z and Miranda continued firing clusters until six of them were hurtling through space.
Both SADEs knew the odds were against the six rounds finding the six armed transports. However, there was a practical reason for stopping at six. If there were too many detonations, the Trident and the traveler pilots would have their hands full clearing up a significant amount of transport debris headed toward the planet.
A few moments later, Miranda sent,
There was no need to report on shot four. The fleet’s holo-vids displayed the transport’s bright white flash. The ship was an expanding ball of flame, hot gases, and shrapnel.