Conflict!

by Dale Moorhouse

  “And yet here we are,” I replied. “What can you tell me about Mother of Righteous Anger?”

  “I’ve never been aboard, Jason. I think Blue Point has but I’ve never been, and I’m pretty sure Long Arm hasn’t. Long Arm wouldn’t have had a pleasant time there with its deformity and all.”

  I commed down to the cells and had the other two Squids brought up and placed on chairs alongside Livid. It turned out Blue Point had indeed been aboard the ship but not since the rebel Squids we recovered from several of the globe ships we had captured, were taken there. “Tell me what you know of Mother of Righteous Anger’s capabilities, things such as weaponry, armour and such.”

  He began with an overview, “The ship is fifteen of your kilometres long and wide and the all of the living quarters are in the sections at the end of each point except the rearmost where its main propulsion systems are. The reason it resembles a diagonal cube is it contains a large methane ocean at its centre where those of my kind, who are allowed, go to reproduce. The ocean takes up a little over half of the volume. The population is approaching twenty million and is being held there by denying many of us the right to fission. The same is true on our Ark, which is almost two/thirds liquid methane and houses three billion of my kind.

  “There are many weapons aboard the mothership but none that I know of on the Ark. We have four of the Ark ships as storage and fuel. Because of our oceans, we don’t have room to store as much of either on board our living vessels so we must frequently refuel while travelling.

  “The weaponry aboard includes all of the weapons you are already familiar with and some you have just learnt about such as the Kinetic Energy Weapons they used against your ships a short time ago. There are also some beam weapons, but they are mainly for defending against incoming missiles. The weapon is very, very powerful but only has a range of about a hundred kilometres. There are many of them all over the surface, and they have overlapping fields of fire. It will be a much tougher nut to crack than Mother of Vengeance.”

  I showed it images of the broken Ark, it was almost a centa before it spoke. “That, I had no idea about.”

  Another retching sound came from Livid, and a few ticks later Long Arm joined him. Blue Point turned away, and I could see it was having a hard time not joining them.

  The images of Mother of Vengeance seemed to impress Blue Point, and he asked if we were going to try the same tactics against the Mother of Righteous Anger.

  I answered, “Probably not, Since they were likely talking to Mother of Vengeance when we destroyed her and have already developed a defence against that tactic.”

  It replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. If it were me, I would approach from dead astern and aim for the area all around here,” pointing at the flats of the cube where the point was truncated to make room for the fusion torches. HePointed to the aft edges of the diamond and said, “There are more, smaller fusion torches along these edges. Most of the weapons except for point defence are along the leading edges here and here,” once again pointing to the image on the screen.

  “The command centre or bridge as you call it is not at the back of the ship but right in the very bow, while it is heavily defended it would only take one missile hitting right here or here to knock out all weapons control as well as most flight systems.”

  This got me to thinking about our long-range Cracker-2s which are smaller than the Cracker-1s and have stronger FTL engines with more range than either of the other two missiles in our arsenal.

  I left the room and had a guard watch them from the far corner with the detonator in his hand. Silent and Tuxedo were waiting for me when I came out, and I held up a hand saying, “I need a health break before I lay out my plan for killing that big ugly bitch out there.”

  When I came out of the head in my office, there was a steaming glass of tea on my desk and a couple of blueberry scones on a plate with a small pot of honey next to it. Silent and Tuxedo were sitting at my small conference table with tea and scones of their own. I walked to the door and opened it, “Thank you, Jacky!” I called out before closing my door again.

  “She takes care of you like a mother does her favourite cub,” Silent remarked. Tuxedo was patched in as well and chuckled saying, “Even if my mother could have baked like that, she was always too busy cleaning her armour and practising with her weapons.”

  “If it wasn’t for Jacky I probably would be losing weight, you know how I forget to eat when I get busy,” I answered.

  I brought up the best image I had of Mother of Righteous Anger and put it up on the wall screen. It was an excellent composite Rusty had put together at one time, and I just remembered having it. I turned the ship, so it was quartering away from our point of view and told them what Blue Point had said earlier. Then I rotated it back around so that it wasn’t quite pointed directly at us and pointed out the other vulnerabilities Blue Point had shown me.

  I said, “I want to use AI Swift Fangs for the attempts because they have demonstrated a degree of accuracy and control most pilots can only dream about. Our pilots are amongst the best there are, but the AIs have much quicker reactions, I’m counting on that giving them the edge for this mission.”

  Then I told them about using Cracker-2LRs, “We built those as a long-range stand-off weapon which is why we gave them the legs they’ve got. As it turned out, they weren’t as useful fighting the Plague because of the tactics the Plague seems to prefer. For what I have in mind they are perfect.”

  I went on to explain what I wanted doing, and when I finished, both agreed they had nothing better to offer. I asked Silent to track Mother of Righteous Anger for a half deca while Tuxedo chased down the ordinance we needed.

  I got back to them after I returned from the new hangar decks where the AI Swift Fangs were kept. I’d taken Rusty with me in case I needed help getting across what I need them to do. It turned out they were pretty quick to pick up on the nuances of the mission and the need for extreme precision at the distances they would be shooting from. They suggested multiple teams each armed identically and said they would each take turns until one of them got a hit at either end. The entire deck wanted to go, but I said no, that would probably attract attention, and that was the last thing they wanted. I didn’t think an AI could express disappointment, but I could tell there were a number that would have gone on the mission even if they had no chance of survival. In the end, I had the eight AIs with the best marksmanship ready for their weapons loads.

  Four cycles later after picking up their weapons from an armoured freighter the eight ships headed out to make their strike on Mother of Righteous Anger. It took them over six cycles to catch up with her; speed in the Belt is difficult with all the junk floating around even for our AIs.

  They positioned themselves four to the front and four to the rear, careful to stay out of detection range of the Squid Ark. Mother of Righteous Anger which was heading away from the Ark and around the Kuiper Belt at .05 C. As the first two ships were about to fire, Mother of Righteous Anger began a slow turn that when completed had her pointing in-system. The Swift Fangs repositioned themselves and fired their first shots far enough away for their weapons to go FTL.

  The bow shot hit a little too far to one side, and while it didn’t destroy the bridge, it did kill a KEW launcher, that was a good thing. The stern shot was right on the money and blew out the propulsion section. Just as I thought we had the big ship cold, it started to shimmer that odd red that Squid FTL does and the Swift Fangs saw it too. Before the Mother of Righteous Anger could build her field to jump, four Cracker-2s hit her from each end, two of the eight were money shots, taking out the bridge and the engineering section just ahead of where the propulsion section used to be.

  The others spread destruction down each side of the big ship but she still had some fight left and over the next few centas sent KEW after KEW towards Terra. When the AI Swift Fangs finally put Mother of Righteous Anger down for good, she had managed to launch over two hundred KEWs inward.
We didn’t know what the target was, although we suspected it had to be Terra, and we had no way to stop them.

  43

  CHRISTMAS OF 2029 CAME WITH some very unwanted presents. It took more than thirty cycles for the KEWs to impact the surface of Terra and they began falling on the pretty blue world Christmas Eve. The last ones hit nearly twenty-four Terran hours later. There was some good news though, not all of the KEWs launched in Mother of Righteousness Anger’s death throes hit Terra. She had launched two-hundred and sixty-two KEWS and less than a hundred had actually hit the planet. Some were so far off target they hit the moon, it was eerie to watch it slowly come apart as we approached.

  My science officers on Thermopylae told me it would be hundreds of cycles before the pieces finished slumping into a belt circling Terra and eventually its orbit would decay and the belt would appear in the sky as a shower of meteors that would last generations. The thought of no more romance under the beautiful moon saddened me. Lab Rat and our HE3 miners had all evacuated when we sent repeated warnings to Terra.

  When I got the final images of Terra’s surface, it was plain to see severe tidal activity was still pounding the coastlines all around the planet. The impacts of the KEWs had been caught on a number of the satellites we had left in orbit. Our AI was able to stitch them together in a timeline, and we watched the event compressed to a clip five and a half centas long. As I studied the damage, it seemed clear to me that if the Squids had actually wanted to kill the planet, they would have sent fewer but much larger rocks and they would have sent them at a much greater velocity. They wanted to hurt Terra, and by extension, me. They wanted a long lingering death.

  We had hit them back, destroying both of their motherships and over three billion of their people. One of their supply Arks had been destroyed uncovering the fact that at least a part of the Squid population was feeding on sentient methane breathers, the Droumb, who had been found somewhere along the original alliance’s long trek to escape the Plague. I had seriously considered destroying their Ark and the rest of their race but never got to the planning stage. I didn’t want to doom an entire species to oblivion if the good part of it could be saved. That was a problem for another cycle.

  Ninety-one rocks of varying sizes hit Terra and forty-four of them hit dry land. The rest hit in various bodies of water around the planet, causing tsunamis in all of the oceans and larger seas that drove water inland as much as eight hundred kilometres on the more massive continents and most of the island chains in the Pacific were simply gone. Japan and Taiwan survived, they had gotten their domes hardened up in time although some tidal surge had damaged the shallow areas around them.

  South Korea became an island when a KEW glanced off their shield and ploughed through the mountains just West of Wonsan. KEWs landing in the Bohai Sea and the Sea of Japan washed out the rest of the northern part of the peninsula almost to the Chinese border causing eruptions in what had been dormant volcanoes putting even more crap in the air. Most of the cities around the western rim of the Bohai Sea were flooded out, our estimates were less than 5 per cent of the population had survived.

  Hits in the Eastern Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico and in the Gulf of Mexico turned most of Central America and Southern Mexico into a chain of islands where the backbone of a chain of mountain ranges ran from the US to the Panama Canal. A second hit in the Gulf of Mexico sent a wall of water nearly a kilometre high up the Mississippi River wiping out the Midwestern US all the way North to Sioux Falls, South Dakota and from the Eastern Rocky Mountains to Lake Erie. Most of the East Coast US was simply gone from New Hampshire down to Florida and to the Caribbean Islands. Many of the larger islands were still there but much reduced in size and barren.

  The US West Coast was not quite as bad, suffering tidal damage that took out most of the cities but left the land intact. Bellingham, in Washington State, fell under the Canadian Shield when it was brought up to full strength and survived, they were already squabbling with Spokane over which town was going to be the new state capitol.

  Two more KEWs struck Greenland, and the combined energy from the strikes melted the glaciers and snowpack turning it to steam which would turn to rain and refreeze as the temperatures plummeted in the coming nuclear winter. With all of the dust and junk blown into the atmosphere, Terra was going to be a frigid place for the next hundred years and likely much longer.

  Much of Europe was flooded. Nothing below a hundred metres in altitude survived although most countries had a fair number of survivors. They had learnt to pay attention when we spoke and used most of their time evacuating their populations to high ground.

  Russia was hit with a string of KEWs from the Bering Sea to the White Sea by Archangel, Northeast of St. Petersburg. The KEWs were gravel compared to the ones that hit elsewhere and were some of the last to strike the planet. It looked like the Squids were firing anything they could wrap their tentacles around at the end, like spiteful, wilful children lashing out because they didn’t get what they wanted.

  India traded in their nuclear weapons when they decided to work with the Eastern Consortium and had just finished working out a deal with Pakistan who also decided survival was a good thing. When they got the alert, India merged their shield with Pakistan and extended it to the East to cover Bangladesh, saving Nepal and Bhutan in the process. There had been disputes between three of them off and on for years and probably would again when the crisis was over, but when the crunch came, they did what needed to be done. Thanks to the shields, most of their populations survived.

  South America lost all of its coastal cities, and much of the Amazon basin was flooded with salt-water. The Parana River above Buenos Aires and most of the farmland around it survived with little damage when a pair of small KEWs hit Montevideo and the small earthquake that ensued took out Buenos Aries leaving no structure over two stories high intact. The Andes Mountain chain saved most of Western South America limiting the tsunami damage to only a few kilometres inland. The Northwestern part of the continent where the mountains were more inland was pretty much washed away, getting pasted by tsunamis from either side. When the Isthmus of Panama was wiped out, the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea created a surge that flushed away the lowlands almost to Medellin.

  Once I got a handle on what was really needed, I relayed the information to Stan and Dimitri. We soon had more shuttles down to lift mothership interior parts to areas without housing. They could be rapidly stacked and enclosed in re-engineered outer hull sections, making apartment blocks for thousands of survivors who had nowhere to go. It only took a few Terran days to assemble an apartment block and finish the interiors, and we had a lot of help from the survivors. We set up kitchens by some of the shuttles with rows upon rows of food replicators. After a few hot and plentiful meals and some changes of clothing, we had more workers than we needed. As more came forward, more of our people pulled back and assumed the role of security and support, letting the survivors build up their stake in their own survival.

  By the end of January 2030, the process of assuring short-term survival was humming along, and we needed to start considering the long term. On 31 January I went back to Sunrise.

  ◆◆◆

  Ginger

  As the most senior officer in the assembled fleets, I had the dubious distinction of giving the final orders to launch our Armada. We were heading back to the small system where a growing mega-swarm had been joined by the one surviving FTL capable globe ship. Scouts left in the area had been reporting back almost continuously for many cycles, and we needed to do something about the new mega-swarm as quickly as we could. We also had to make sure the FTL capability ended with them or nowhere in the universe would be truly safe.

  Jase had advised us that the Squids at Sol had attacked our shipyards two cycles after we left. One of their motherships had launched Kinetic Energy Weapons at Terra, and a good deal of assistance would be needed when they finally impacted. His orders were to continue with destroying the mega-swarm
then return to Terra to help.

  Our launch had been delayed while our AI fighters had been equipped with a much-improved stealth package developed especially for them. The AI fighters had proven on many occasions they could inflict considerable damage on the enemy, making them almost equal to Swift Fangs in a toe-to-toe fight. The Swift Fangs had more endurance and better shields while the AI fighters were faster, very manoeuvrable and hard to hit. With the new stealth modules, they would be all but invisible and almost impossible to hit—you can’t shoot what you can’t see. We were counting on the fighters making a significant difference in the upcoming fight.

  Our armada arrived ten cycles after we left and entered the area under full stealth taking great care to watch for pickets and sentry satellites, something the Plague had never used but with the Squids now in charge was likely to change. We took the time to unload our fighters and let them deploy their “wings” then armed them with detachable pods carrying the small FTL damper missiles that would stick to Plague ships and keep them from going FTL. We had thousands of fighters with us and millions of missiles, and we were going to tag all of the enemy ships before we jumped in to engage them.

  Phase one went off without a hitch, and while they were gone, we launched over a million Dopey Joe Mark IIIs. The fighters all made it back to refuel and rearm, this time with Cracker-3s and Goblin Guns then headed out for phase two which was to try to sneak in close to the globe ships which were all here. We had their signatures recorded and made sure the one vessel we knew was equipped with FTL engines was in-system.

  As the DJ-3s and AI Fighters worked their way into the swarm, we launched our bombers holding the second wave close to us while the others picked their areas of combat and set their jump-drives to take them there. Two-thirds of them would stay on the periphery to take out runners while the rest would jump into the middle of the swarm and raise hell. We had our ships deployed in an englobement formation, it would take a fortunate and determined Plague ship to break through.