A message brought Ki’antha out of her reverie. Across her headset came the order, “All senior pilots report to the briefing room.” Carefully, she rose from her bed and started heading down the corridor to the briefing room.
Chapter 3
"How the hell are they tracking us?" Othan asked Al'kena. "You're the analyst and planner. You said that they wouldn't be able to!"
Al'kena sighed "I don't think they are tracking us, Othan. They've been arriving after us, yes, but that doesn't mean that they are tracking us. To be blunt, no one off the Ouranos-vouno knows the route. Not even the politicians who assisted us in arranging the defensive fleet in Oly'ka'mas. It seems likely that they projected probable routes and sent forces to intercept after we ran head on into that exploration fleet on the second jump."
Othan glared at her. He had never been happy at being told by his government that he was being seconded to command a colony fleet, even after he found out its goal was another galaxy. When Al'kena had shown him the analysis, and projections based on it, he had seen how important it was. Very few people realized that this war was the fourth contact with these aggressive cyborgs.
The first and second had been thrown back with little effort. In fact, the first had been thought to be nothing more than a pirate fleet that was unusually large. The second had been large enough to cause most of the alliance governments to increase their military spending. It turned out both had only been probes.
The true horror of their enemies had been revealed during the third conflict. Only a handful of people in the colony fleet knew about the earlier battles. Most of the political heads of the Alliance didn't know about the previous encounters. A dozen worlds have been left in ruins in the First War against the Cyborgs. Their populations had been more than decimated by the cyborg’s land forces. And that wasn't including people that had been converted into part of the cyborg's support structure. The Alliance was, at best, wearing down to a slow but inevitable defeat. The Second War had already gone on for 30 years. There were now generations that had grown up knowing no other life but one in wartime.
Their technology was better than the Cyborgs in many ways, and they couldn’t duplicate the ability to draw on the planes. Something about the nature of their implants, it was thought. But they outnumbered the Alliance. By mining resources from barren systems, they had started out producing them as well… the only bottleneck they seemed to have was bodies and minds that could handle the shipboard duty. It seemed there was a limit to what their cloning technology could provide. The mind needed to be prepared and able to take a shipboard role and not every clone, even with identical training and environment, was.
He sighed and asked "Well, what are the other possibilities? Is it possible that there is something else giving us away?"
Al'kena shrugged and sighed "Of course it's possible. But as to what it might be I have no idea." She lied. It had only been after the fleets had launched with so many of Jove’s people, the Jehed, in stasis sleep that they had discovered that when the Jehed were in stasis, they gave off an astral signal. While it wasn't likely, that signal could be what the cyborgs were using to track the fleet.
She continued, "We are going to have to go with the contingency plan. Before the next jump, the fleet is going to split into three, with two distraction fleets going to secondary possible colonization points within this galaxy. The main fleet continues as planned."
Othan winced. Those colony ships would basically be bait to draw off the enemy from the final jump. One would probably jump from this galactic arm to the next and had a fair chance of survival. He continued, "We need more than that. For the final transit, we are going to have the fighters follow us through the Astral gate rather than returning to their ships for the jump if the enemy is attacking us." He raised his hand to forestall her objection, but she only nodded. The Valkar Norskrinjar squadrons regularly practiced that tactic, as the smaller the ship, the shorter the aftereffects of an Astral jump. If the enemy followed them through they could get several firing passes in on them before they recovered, if they recovered at all.
Of course, they took casualties from Astral sheeting in the medium to long run. Without the heavier hulls and shields of a larger ship, the pilots absorbed far more planar energy than was healthy or safe. It was like radiation poisoning, and the effects could be lethal over time. The results took from days to weeks to show up, however, and the Valkar had figured out methods of purging the energy.
Until an individual attempted it, no-one knew if the methods would work for that person. Al'kena's daughter was one of the flight commanders for Ouranos-vouno. "I'll pull Ki'antha for flight operations..." Othan started to say.
Al'kena shook her head "No. She'd never forgive me if you did. Besides, if we are followed through the gate, you'll need every pilot you have in fighters." She sighed. "I guess it's my family’s curse to be required for suicide runs." Al'kena had lost a brother, a son, three nieces and a nephew in holding actions. Her daughter was her last family... and she was willing to leave her where she was to improve the fleet's chances of survival by the tiniest amount.
Othan bowed his head to her in respect. "We need to inform the pilots of what will be required of them, and make sure Jove and his picked assistants are prepared to take the gate engine to full power."
Al'kena nodded and punched the ship-wide intercom. She spoke into it, “All senior pilots report to the briefing room,” and turned to head there herself.
Chapter 4
Ki'antha was annoyed. She fully understood and respected the reasons the fighters would have to jump through the Astral individually. If the cyborgs were willing to jump through the gate on the heels of the fleet, the fighters' systems would recover far faster than those in the larger ships. What annoyed her was Othan, and her mother had ordered every pilot to take tutoring from pilots within the Valkyr squadrons.
Admittedly, traveling outside the carrier through an Astral gate was a specialty of those pilots. But Ki'antha would have preferred to spend the time left to her with her mother and her flight mates. It didn't seem particularly likely to her that a few days training, even a few weeks training, would significantly improve her chances of avoiding Astral exposure sickness. The Valkyr trained for months before making the first jump outside the carrier. Even then, less than half of them survived without exposure effects that left them unable to pilot craft again afterward.
Still, orders were orders. She would just have to try and spend as much in her free time as possible with her mother and flight mates. The first problem they had to sort through was, of course, the “dreamlike” or semi-trance state that long jumps in the astral triggered in most people. The Valkyr had long since come up with a combination of measures that neutralize this problem. The first was a burst of stimulant into the air feed of the flight suit when the fighter returned to normal space. The second was a raucous buzz through the suit audio systems. In combination, these measures could get a pilot back to reality within five to ten minutes, rather than anywhere from half an hour to two hours. That would give them twenty minutes at a minimum to rip into any ships that followed them through the gate.
Unfortunately, they would not know if those ships had already been disabled by the astral transfer, but it was still a worthwhile effort. It seemed unlikely that there would be so many ships transporting through the gate before it closed that the fighter squadrons wouldn't be able to severely damage most of them before they could reach active status again.
What bothered her most about the lessons was that she had already been given similar lessons by her mother when Al'kena had started learning from the Sages. Moving to the Jehed homeworld had been a dislocating experience in her teenage years, but her mother had insisted. With her father already dead, it was either go with her mother or stay with her uncle, and she couldn't stand her cousins. The Jehed had an interesting philosophy on how to best access the planes. But learning it had been an incredibly painful experience for her mother. Her mother had been captain of h
er own ship during the First Cyborgian War and had lost a leg in one of the battles. As was standard for military officers in the Graki service, she had been given a mechanical replacement. Other Navies allowed personnel to choose between artificial limbs and regeneration, like the Norskringer and Keltoi, or did restoration as a matter of course, like the Ajeptos and the Jehed. The Jehed Sages had insisted that she go through what had become an excruciatingly painful regrowth process to recover the leg rather than use the artificial limb.
Her mother had accepted it with grace and serenity that to the teenage Ki'antha had been completely wrong. It also didn't help that she had been a teenage alien on a planet where often the women who didn't find their bond-mate, didn't form relationships at all. About a quarter of Jehed women never entered into long-term partnerships. This meant she was a teenage female alien on the planet of a nexus race. One that was genetically compatible with most aliens. She became the target of many unwanted advances by teenage male Jeheds who felt that they would never find their bond mate and that she would be a reasonable substitute.
The bonding could occur at almost any age but usually happened before the eighteenth birthday. She had been fifteen when her mother had moved to Priathias (New Home, in one of the old Jehed tongues). That had made her an acceptable age to court for many of the Jehed up to the age of twenty-one. She hadn't been interested, and in a couple of cases the Junior Academi, Jeheds studying towards the title of Sage, had to be called to intervene on her behalf. Going back through a similar exercise always brought up bad memories.
The most important part of what the Sages taught, at least according to the Valkyr, was the importance of purging any energy you drew in from your system. For long jumps in small, unshielded, ships that meant as soon as you were conscious and able, you had to push out the energy. The pilots needed to strip as much of the absorbed energy charge out from themselves and throw it through the converter array into weapons or engines. The Valkyr admitted they weren't sure if the converters would even be up to the loads that they would be forced to handle after a jump of galactic distances.
This is where Jove was unique. He was the senior Sage of Priathias before he had agreed, along with several of his associates, to power the massive gate engine on ' Ouranos-vouno.' His ability to manipulate Astral energies was unmatched, even amongst the Jehed’s own records. He had explained that the main reason that the jump was even possible was that there was little astral or physical detritus between galaxies. It wasn’t the amount of energy required, precisely, although that was a factor. It was the subtle manipulation that would be needed for a jump of the proposed length.
This was important for the suggested strategy of having the fighters traveling alongside Ouranos-vouno and their other carrier ships. There would be less energy to absorb than in a standard long Astral jump. In theory, it should be as safe or safer than a long jump inside a galaxy. No one liked risking possible suicide missions, and that is what it would have been considering the extreme length of the transit for anyone in a fight if astral conditions had been normal.
The reason they needed such a powerful engine was to initiate the tunnel across the vast distance, not because they were punching through 'harder' astral regions. It also meant that the cyborgs would find it difficult, if not impossible to follow with their method of faster than light travel. Punching a hole through the time-space continuum through that distance wouldn't just have potential risks. Some of the theories that had been proposed stated that it would potentially destroy the galaxy it came from. Space-time was simply not meant to be warped in that way normally. To do it across such a large distance would have been insanely dangerous. It seemed unlikely in the extreme that even the Cyborgs would risk it.
Still, Ki’antha practiced the variations on purging exercises that the Valkyr had worked out. If nothing else between that and trying to spend as much time as possible with her mother left her little time to worry about the upcoming battles.
Chapter 5
Othan tiredly scrubbed his face as he looked at the screens. It had been several weeks since he had a decent sleep. It kept feeling like another bell was about to toll. The Ouranos-vouno was nearly finished charging and targeting the gate that would allow the fleet to travel to another galaxy. The last jump had been thankfully quiet, which made Othan more on edge that something had to go wrong now.
But it was almost over. He had almost succeeded in shepherding this fleet and its colonists to their new home. He saw the propagation of a flat gray sheet of space that signified the gate opening. He allowed himself to lean back in his chair and relaxed slightly. It was almost over.
He relaxed too soon.
A raucous alarm sounded, and three points in space surrounding the fleet spewed first light, then enemy ships. Othan cursed softly, then turned to Al'kena. "Report," He said as her fingers flew across the screens and data analysis. She started swearing, and after thirty seconds of refining the data, turned to face him.
"The enemy seems to have dropped a small planetary assault fleet into our proximity, sir," Al'kena answered with military etiquette appropriate to the situation. She was senior to him on the civilian and colonization charts, but for conflicts against the Cyborgs during transit, he was her senior. "That's not the worst of it. There are at least six Krahkhan class assault transports in the fleet, almost all they managed to capture over the wars. As well as two Nemjen class assault landers." Othan met her gaze with a feeling of dread. Somehow they'd pinpointed to the location they planned to leave the galaxy. They wanted to take over the colonization effort, feed the colonists into their systems and gain access to a whole new galaxy. "All ships except carriers and battlecruisers are through the gate. Enemy forces have closed weapon ports and increased power to shields. They are on a vector for the gate."
Othan paused then looked over at his screens. There was a need to employ the tactic he had hoped to avoid. "Order all fighters to launch and proceed directly through the gate. Battlecruisers are to fire torpedoes as they cover the rest of the fleet’s exit, then dump mines at the edge of the gate before entering astral space. Ouranos-vouno will proceed through the gate at best speed, placing itself between the battlecruisers and the carriers."
Even Ouranos-vouno lurched as the fighters launched, their departure adding to the momentum the ship was building toward the gate. A standard phased launch wouldn't have done that, but the expedited start was necessary to get them into space before Ouranos-vouno was too close to the gate for the safety of itself or the attack craft. "All parasite crews, man your ships. All hands prepare for Astral transit," he calmly stated, passing the order over the all-hands intercom.
He saw the icons of the fighters disappear from the tactical display and suddenly a half dozen of the enemy destroyers swerved towards Ouranos-vouno. This was not a tactic he'd expected. The great ship would be needed to widen the exit gate from the Astral so ships could return to normal space. Without it, the fighters would be lucky to be close enough to a ship with a gate generator that punched through and escaped. The Colony fleet as a whole would be scattered across the galaxy without the link signal from Ouranos-vouno.
Al'kena looked up and moved towards the tactical display. Running her fingers across it, she nodded to herself, before turning toward Othan and saying, "I suggest that we have three of our suicide destroyers launch and target the three leading enemy ships. That will help reduce some of the expected damage to the Ouranos-vouno. Our shields will be capable of recovering to acceptable levels after the impact of up to six of their destroyers before we enter Astral space."
"I concur," Othan responded quickly, and three parasite destroyers detached from the command ship and rushed towards the enemy's lead destroyers. "Intel, Why would they be targeting their only hope of a clean exit from the Astral?"
Al'kena paused for a moment, her eyes flashing into that glazed stare that indicated that she was using her ability to look at probabilities. "Two broad possibilities exist. The first is that due to the
technology they used for faster than light travel, they don't understand that we need to open two points. Their space-time warping technology literally punches a hole from point A to point B. Only one ship needs to make it, like with our Astral gate, but that ship can remain behind."
"Another possibility is that the planetary assault component of the fleet is merely a backup. That their primary goal is to prevent Alliance colonization of another galaxy, one which they would be unlikely to be able to reach. They may feel that the Alliance would continue to be a threat under those circumstances."
They both turned back to the screens and watched the smaller parasite destroyers closing in on the Cyborg suicide ships. They were normally without the larger power plants used on smaller fleet ships to run shields capable of protecting the crews from Astral transit. The mothership's shields would protect them, and they could be smaller, more agile and faster. Although the Cyborg ships tried to dodge out of the way, the three in the lead were obliterated as the reinforced and, probably, redlined shields of that damaged craft mutually destroyed their target's shields. There were three distinct flashes as the immense kinetic forces of collision destroyed all six ships.
Othan saluted the display in respect to the crews of those ships that had sacrificed their lives so the fleet might get through. He hoped to see them in the Halls of Rest when his life ended, for their sacrifice had surely earned them a place there.
He returned to his seat, as did Al'kena, and sent over the intercom, "All hands, brace for impact. Repeat, multiple enemy ships on a collision course. Brace. Brace. Brace." The first two destroyers rammed and sheared off slightly less shielding than Al'kena's prediction of damage. That was good. Better for her to be low than high. The third had slowed slightly. It looked like it might not finish its run before they hit the gate for a moment, then it accelerated and collided at speed.
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