In short the missiles needed a boost, and this is what the engineers on all of the USC battle cruisers were busy doing. Each of these ships carried a huge number of antimissiles, which had been one of the major upgrades given to these class of battle cruisers. The engineers removed the warheads of these antimissiles, and slaved their control systems to the guidance computer of a nuclear missile. Slaving was a trivial operation, since all control systems had an interface data bus, used during production and maintenance to check the control systems by simulating signals form a hand held computer. They simply connected that data bus to the guidance computer of the nuclear missile, and let software do the rest.
Each nuclear missile got strapped with three of these “booster rockets”, which were welded to the sides of the missiles in a fashion very similar to the booster rockets that were strapped on to the multi-stage rockets launching from Earth to space. The only hitch in the entire design was calibration, or rather the lack of it. Despite the best efforts of the engineers welding those booster rockets to the sides of the nuclear missiles, it would not be possible to get perfect alignment between those booster rocket and the main rocket of the missile. In a formal production environment of booster rockets, the attachments are calibrated over multiple tests to ensure as close an alignment as human precision engineering allows. Even after that, the computer guidance computers usually have to perform minor compensation for the fact that all the booster rockets and the main rocket are not thrusting in exactly the same direction.
No such calibration testing was possible for these booster rockets, so the guidance computer would have to do all the work, which would result in minor inefficiencies, resulting in the lowering of the overall thrust by a percentage point or two. That performance degradation was perfectly acceptable, especially given the fact that there was no alternative anyway.
Unfortunately four of the human battle cruisers were dead, so the boosted missiles count had reduced by that much. The rest of the human fleet hoped that the lowering of the numbers wouldn’t make that much difference to the outcome that they desired. A single ship’s point defense system is overwhelmed fairly quickly with a surprisingly low number of missiles targeted at it. It had taken a thousand human missiles backed up by about twenty two Shaitan make missiles targeted at each of the Shaitan war vessels in the just concluded encounter to destroy each of the targeted vessel, and even then one of them had survived. This was because twenty four Shaitan war vessels were supporting each other in a dense mesh of point defense fire that thwarted almost any human missile trying to slip past it.
As had been observed in past battles, a formation of four Shaitan war vessels needed about one hundred and fifty missiles targeting each of the ships for the attack to be effective and to be able to overwhelm the point defense system. If the Shaitan formation of four could be taken by surprise, then even about hundred and twenty missiles were good enough, as had been found by the tin can fleet of Admiral Fabi Kalinin flying ancient Nautilus class ships in the first ever attack by Shaitans on the Solar system using war vessels. Fortunately these four Shaitan war vessels weren’t flying in formation. They could be picked off one by one, if they could be somehow reached.
That is exactly what the human fleet tried to do. Immediately on crossing the main body of the Shaitan fleet, the human fleet turned and headed at full thrust towards the four Shaitan war vessels. The ships used their thrusters to reach as close as possible to those Shaitan war vessels before the optimum launch point of the boosted missiles was reached. These boosted missiles, with the three boosters welded on their sides couldn’t be launched by the conventional missile ejectors. They wouldn’t even fit into those ejectors. They had to be hand launched from the hangar bay by manually pushing them out of the hangar bay.
Fortunately, human missiles didn’t weigh as much as the monster Shaitan missiles, but after the addition of the three boosters, they still weighed a lot, close to four and a half tons. On top of that there was full gravitational effect on the ships, because it was accelerating at its top 1G acceleration. So the missile assembly not only had a four and a half ton mass, but weighed four and a half ton as well. It required a lot of muscle to push out the carts from the hangar, with the work made complicated by the fact that it had to be done by suited and tethered crew, who had to ensure that their tethers weren’t entangled with each other or the missiles being released.
Fortunately only fifteen such missiles had to be released by the crew of each ship, because that was all they had been ordered to prepare, and in any case, in the time available, the engineers were barely able to finish making these fifteen ‘specials’.
That meant that each of the Shaitan war vessels would be targeted by just fifty two missiles. It was hoped that it would be enough, because when there was only a single Shaitan war vessel involved, their ‘heartless’ point defense algorithm which concentrated the point defense of all the ships in the formation to protect one ship would have no effect. The hope of the humans turned out to be correct. The fifty boosted missiles reached the individual Shaitan war vessels with barely any fuel left in their tanks, but were able to reach them. A few of the missiles actually ran out of fuel, and were theoretically ineffective, but the Shaitan point defense system labored hard to destroy those as well, because they were still visible on the radar of the computer.
Those fifty two missiles each were able to comprehensively destroy two out of the four Shaitan war vessels and badly damage the other two. All four were out of the fight. That left only four other Shaitan war vessels in this system who hadn’t tasted the wrath of the USC fleet. Two of those were on patrol and clearly visible rushing inwards into the system towards World #4. The human fleet ignored them for the moment. Those two patrolling war vessels would take well over a week to reach anywhere near World #4, to be able to join up with the remnants of the splinter fleet. It were the two missing Shaitan war vessels that interested the human fleet.
It didn’t take a genius to guess where those two war vessels would be. Standard Shaitan operating procedure, which the Shaitans called ‘Warrior doctrine’, required that all war vessels should take the first opportunity after a long journey to top up their fuel tanks from a nearby gas giant. With the three month absence of the human fleet, the Shaitan Warmaster would have been lulled into feeling secure enough to let a few of his ships top up their fuel tanks by turn. If there was any doubt about this fact, then it was dispelled by the observation of the acceleration of one of the four Shaitan war vessels that the humans just destroyed. It was accelerating at almost half the rate as the other war vessels, despite the luminosity of its thruster emissions being the same as that of the other ships. It was accelerating at half the rate despite using maximum thrust because it weighed twice as much as the other ships. Roughly half the mass of a fully laden and fully fuelled Shaitan war vessel is fuel. That particular war vessel was fully refueled! So the Shaitan war vessels must have started the process of refueling.
The human fleet needed to slow down, turn around and finish what it had started. They decided to use the superior acceleration of the human ships to do that in such a manner as to try and pick off a few more of the Shaitan war vessels at almost no risk to themselves, should these two missing war vessels be where the humans guessed they must be.
The line of travel of the human fleet wouldn’t exactly take them near the gas giant Marissa, since they were coming in from a direction north of the plane of the system, but it wasn’t a huge diversion either. Instead of using their thrusters to reduce their velocity, the human fleet used their thrusters to change direction. Using the full throttle of their engines, the human fleet was able to change the direction of their travel just enough to head in the direction of Marissa. The fleet would fly by close to the gas giant. Depending on whether a space craft enters the fly by in the direction of motion of the planetary body, or enters the fly by from behind the direction of motion of the body, the spacecraft can either brake and lose some of its velocity as it e
merges on the other side by imparting some of its momentum to the planetary body. Or the spacecraft can gain some speed by stealing momentum from the planetary body. This is known as gravity assist braking and gravity assist acceleration respectively.
To the surprise of the Warmaster, who had been lucky to be in one of the war vessels not targeted, and hence lucky to survive, the human fleet did not enter the flyby to brake. Instead they entered the flyby to get a gravity assisted boost to their speed. The tactics and the intentions of the human Warmaster became obvious to the Warmaster. It was simple, efficient, and something that he would himself have done, if his war vessels were capable of such acceleration. The human fleet wasn’t going to wait, or give the four war vessels scattered around the system, a chance to join up with the seven war vessels remaining in the formation. The human fleet would turn around Marissa at a boosted speed, and keep on accelerating preparing for another high speed pass at the remaining seven war vessels. This time the speed of the encounter would be higher than the previous pass, making their long and narrow formation strategy even more effective.
This time, the Warmaster would not hesitate to take the step that he should have taken in the first encounter. He would form a single file formation, similar to the enemy formation. He may have been conservative, but he was not a foolish obstinate. He had seen the point defense effectiveness of the long narrow formation, and he was a convert.
The worst part about the path that the human fleet was taking as far as the Warmaster was concerned was the planetary body they had chosen to do a gravitational slingshot. Whether by design or by dumb luck, there was a real danger that two of the war vessels of the Warmaster’s fleet which were safely hidden could be discovered by the human fleet, when those two war vessels were in an extremely vulnerable position. It was definitely by design. While the human fleet would slingshot around Marissa, they would be able to scan more than fifty percent of the skies over Marissa. As far as the humans were concerned, the odds were good of locating those two Shaitan war vessels if they were down there skimming Marissa’s atmosphere.
Lady luck was with the human fleet. As the human fleet approached the gas giant, they were able to spot the two Shaitan war vessels down at the edge of the atmosphere of Marissa skimming the atmosphere oblivious to the turn of fortune for their species on this system. The two Shaitan war vessels didn’t remain oblivious for too long. Shortly after the human fleet spotted the two Shaitan war vessels, the human fleet was spotted by the Shaitan war vessels as well. Electric and radio storms raging on the gas giant may have forced a radio blackout, and it may be impractical to be on a tight beam laser channel when skimming the atmosphere. That may have forced the two Shaitan war vessels from being cut off from their fleet communications, but when the human fleet flew high above the two Shaitan war vessels, the human fleet was visible in plain sight. More precisely through the reflected infrared light of Marissa. That is how the humans spotted the two Shaitan war vessels, and that is how the Shaitan war vessels spotted the human fleet.
The Shaitan war vessels made a desperate attempt to climb out of the gravity well of Marissa hastily, but it was too late. Each of the USC battle cruisers released just five missiles, targeting each Shaitan war vessel with thirty five missiles. It was enough. The two Shaitan war vessels had kept a wide separation between each other of a few thousand kilometers in order not to be caught in the other’s wake and turbulence. The missiles hurtled down at a frightening pace, assisted by the massive gravity of the gas giant, while the antimissiles of the Shaitan war vessels valiantly fought to cut through the thin atmosphere and then fight the massive gravity in order to be able to meet up with the incoming missiles far enough. It was a fruitless fight.
The human missiles didn’t actually destroy the two Shaitan war vessels. It was the atmosphere of Marissa that killed the Shaitans and their two ships. Human missiles simply helped in the process by exploding close enough to those Shaitan war vessel that the shock wave of those blasts made them spin out of control and plunge into the unknown depths of the gas giant. It is said that a gas giant doesn’t truly have a surface, although it is disputed by other scientists. Whatever be the truth, the Shaitan war vessels were surely dead before they found out, as the atmospheric pressure increased to millions of time the standard earth pressure. If the Shaitan war vessels finally rested on solid metallic hydrogen surface, as some scientists conjecture, then there would have been no way of finding that out, because the war vessel itself would have been crushed into the shape of a lump of metal no bigger than perhaps a shuttle.
When the human fleet emerged from the other side of Marissa, they presented their first surprise to the Warmaster. The human fleet split into two. Seven battle cruisers turned ninety degree in one direction, and the other seven turned in the opposite direction. Since the fleet already had significant velocity in the direction they were travelling, to the Warmaster, it appeared as if the human fleet had split into two and each part was moving away from the other in a ‘Y’ shaped path. Neither of the two parts of the fleet was any longer heading towards the remnants of the splinter fleet!
What trickery was the Ka-Baal Warmaster up to now?! Splitting one’s fleet was an absolute no-no for any sane Warmaster. Even a novice can tell you that the moment you split your fleet into two, the point defense effectiveness reduces to a third or even less. The Ka-Baal Warmaster was definitely not a fool. So what trick was he up to this time?
The Warmaster got his answer when the human fleet, which was still travelling in the general direction of the remnants of the Shaitan splinter fleet due to its original direction of travel, was about a third of the way to the Shaitan fleet. By this time the two parts of the human fleet had separated from each other by a fair distance, accelerating continuously away from each other. The two parts of the human fleet turned around and started accelerating towards each other! What in the name of Ka, was the Ka-Baal Warmaster doing?
Then, in an epiphany of sorts, the Warmaster knew the game plan of the humans, once he had visualized the path of the human fleet as the approached near the fleet of the Shaitans. The human fleet hadn’t added any velocity in the direction of the Shaitan fleet after emerging from behind Marissa. They were coasting towards the Shaitan fleet at the same velocity. Instead the human fleet had used their engines to move apart from each other, which appeared as a curved ‘Y’ shaped path of the two parts of the fleet splitting up.
When the two parts of the fleet turned around and started accelerating towards each other again, they didn’t immediately start moving towards each other because of the momentum they had built previously in moving away from each other. Within some time though, the human warships were able to overcome that momentum, and started closing in towards each other once more. From the line of sight of the Shaitan fleet, it appeared as a curved path that the two parts of the human fleet were taking and closing in on the Shaitan fleet from two different directions at an angle of roughly thirty degrees.
What advantage could the human fleet get by approaching this way, which could offset the massive disadvantage of having to split up their fleet and reduce their point defense capability massively? The answer to that question was the epiphany that the Warmaster had. It wasn’t about advantage or disadvantage at all. It was about forcing the hand of the enemy. By approaching from two different directions, it would be impossible for the Shaitan Warmaster to arrange his ships in a straight line formation, because it couldn’t face both the approaching parts of the fleet head on at the same time.
This would mean that the Shaitan fleet would be denied a relatively safe defensive formation, which the human admiral ensured even at the cost of having to split up his own fleet, thus denying themselves the benefit of superior numbers that they enjoyed in the second encounter with the remnants of the splinter fleet. The intentions of the Ka-Baal were clear. This was to be a fight to death. The Ka-Baal war vessels were running low on missiles, just as missiles were running low on the war vessels of the Warmas
ter’s fleet. The Ka-Baal were likely to throw whatever they had in this encounter. It would be advisable for the Warmaster to do the same. There would be no later. This was the final skirmish between the two fleets, and only one could emerge alive from it.
On further contemplation, the Warmaster realized that the Ka-Baal Warmaster hadn’t taken such a big risk in splitting up his fleet as the Warmaster had initially thought. Each of the two parts of the split fleet were coming towards his fleet in a single line formation of seven Ka-Baal war vessels each. The Ka-Baal were effectively present the profile and exposing only two of their war vessels – the ones at the forefront of each of the two formation. Due to the greater speed of approach in this encounters, there was far less risk to the war vessels behind the one at the absolute front. Curved missiles would find it much harder to target those war vessels behind.
With that minor compromise of having to expose two ships instead of one, what the Ka-Baal had ensured was that all of the seven war vessels of the Warmaster’s fleet would be targetable directly by the Ka-Baal fleet. It was aggressive and a fairly good strategy.
The Warmaster had guess the USC fleet admiral’s intentions correctly. Out of the one hundred and eighty missiles that were left in the inventory of each of the battle cruisers, the admiral ordered the release of hundred and seventy, keeping only ten missiles in reserve on each ship, for the two Shaitan war vessels racing in towards World #4. Those two Shaitan war vessels would reach in just over a day, but that was another battle. The admiral took one battle at a time. The best chance to destroy these seven war vessels was now, and he was going to take that chance without holding back anything.
Triumph & Defeat (Shaitan Wars Book 4) Page 47