The Thunder of War (Thunder in the Heavens)

by Dietmar Wehr

  “Very well then, let’s proceed. As you know, our recon ships have been recording FTL transmissions between Tyrell-held star systems, and those transmissions, when filtered using a certain algorithm, appeared to be speech. For a long time we weren’t certain if that’s what these transmissions were since sending an analog voice recording via FTL waves is not possible. The Tyrell transmissions were not analog, but their exact composition was not clear. We have now determined what those transmissions are based on, and we’ve been able to decipher the meaning of those messages. In other words, we’ve broken their code.” She paused again and allowed herself the luxury of a small smile.

  Eagleton heard Cate say, “Oh my God,” in a very low voice that only he could hear. He looked over at her, but she was still focused on Mirakova. The murmuring among the other officers quickly died down when Mirakova cleared her throat.

  “We’ve started the long process of decoding and translating all of the thousands of recorded transmissions, and when that process is completed, they will be carefully reviewed in chronological order. That will give us a much better idea of how the Tyrell Empire operates, with insights into its long term plans and, we hope, how it intends to respond to the raid on its home system, Omega1, and the attempt at liberation of Korel-C. In testing the decryption algorithm on the most recent transmissions, we did learn something important.” She paused, and Eagleton felt a shiver go up his spine as Mirakova shifted her gaze to look directly at him. “We are not the only ones experimenting with smaller ships and craft. The Tyrell have designed and are deploying a certain number of small craft that we think will be able to conduct the same kind of picket duty as their sensor drones and at the same time have some offensive weapons capability that could be used against our corvettes. It seems that for now at least, they’re only using these small attack craft in the system defense role, with their home system getting first dibs on production. And while we don’t know how small these craft are or what kind of weaponry they carry, it would be prudent to assume that they’re a lot smaller than our corvettes, and therefore they’ll see us before we see them if we continue to rely exclusively on corvettes. Commander Eagleton—“ all the officers turned to look at him “—your stinger concept will now be getting more support with a higher priority as a result of this information. You undoubtedly will want to adjust the conceptual studies so that stingers will be able to engage and defeat small Tyrell attack craft as well as their super-ships.” Eagleton nodded.

  “Now I’m certain that some of you are already asking yourselves the question of whether or not we will share the decryption algorithm, or at least the information contained in the transmissions, with the Alliance. The answer to that is no, at least not for the time being, and the reason is that sharing this information, or even just the knowledge that the Tyrell code has been broken, carries the risk that the Tyrell will learn about it from captured Alliance ships and/or crew, and they will then change their code, and we will lose a vital weapon. Just to give you some idea of how useful this decryption breakthrough will be, we can now estimate the number of super-ships at each of their controlled star systems with an accuracy that increases over time. Tracking their ships will also tell us which star systems are the most productive in shipbuilding and where the Tyrell will attack next. It is therefore vital that the Tyrell not learn about this breakthrough from other Alliance races, so you are ordered not to discuss this breakthrough, or even hint at it, with any member of an alien race. If this secret gets out, and I discover that one of you is responsible, I guarantee you that the abrupt end of your career in the EAF will be the least of your worries. I hope I have made myself perfectly clear.”

  “Now that I’ve dealt with that unpleasant issue, I will turn to the new strategic plan that the decryption breakthrough makes possible. First, I’ll discuss what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to conduct additional raids on the Tyrell home system until we have enough operational stingers to deal with the new system defense craft the Tyrell are deploying there. Trying to penetrate that kind of defensive capability with only corvettes is considered too risky. We are also not going to defend Alliance member home systems from the planned Tyrell attacks, because the Alliance will undoubtedly be trying to do that themselves. I am not prepared to place our carriers under alien command, and going in separately without co-ordination is asking for a disaster. What we can and will do is identify star systems that have a lot of space-based infrastructure and attack those assets. When our new stingers come online, we will then seriously consider a series of raids on the Tyrell home system. By going after their shipbuilding infrastructure and eventually their home system, we’ll avoid the problem of losing the ability to decrypt their messages if we intercept their fleets at staging areas so often that they get suspicious about their message security. All of this will eventually lead up to the point where we think the EAF, and hopefully the rest of the Alliance in renewed co-operation with us, will be strong enough to liberate and hold indefinitely a conquered star system. If we can push the Tyrell to commit a significant portion of their entire fleet of super-ships to a single battle, and if we win that battle and destroy those super-ships, then the strategic initiative will shift to our side. Ultimately, we want the combined Alliance fleet to be big enough to deploy task forces against every conquered star system’s infrastructure and mobile assets in a wave of strikes that will smash the Tyrell Empire before they can react. When every conquered race has been liberated, our combined fleets will descend on the Tyrell home system and disarm them permanently, even if that means bombarding them back into the Stone Age. However, there’s a lot of fighting that has to be done before we get to that point.”

  After a slight pause, she continued. “I’ve now said everything that I’m prepared to share with you, and therefore I don’t think there’s any point in taking questions. This briefing is concluded.”

  As with the other briefings, Harrow tried to join the group of flag officers who clustered together to discuss what they had heard, but she and Eagleton ended up joining the other commanders in their own little huddle. It didn’t last long, and Cate and he agreed that they hadn’t gained any new insights from it.

  The next day, Eagleton went back to the stinger design team. He had difficulty in getting the rest of the team to take seriously the idea of a small Tyrell craft that the stinger would have to deal with when he couldn’t tell them why that was a real concern. However, in his own mind, he was coming around to the idea that a small, anti-tachyon projector might actually be more useful against small enemy craft than against super-ships. And if that was going to be the case, then what would the stinger use against super-ships?

  Six days later, the engineers tested the new beam projector prototype. It worked well enough that the test and the design was deemed a success that just needed some additional tweaking to boost the design’s efficiency and reliability. The problem with the design was that the prototype had a long focusing rod in order to keep the beam of anti-tachyons concentrated narrowly enough to be able to penetrate the kind of armor that the EAF knew Tyrell super-ships had. That long focusing rod would not be a problem if the weapon was incorporated into the structure of the stinger craft the same way as the larger version was built into the corvette, thereby requiring the craft to maneuver in order to aim the weapon. But Eagleton had a hunch that aiming the weapon that way when faced with small enemy craft, which would almost certainly be very agile and therefore hard to hit, was not a good idea. If the beam weapon were built as a turret that could be rotated independently of what the craft itself was doing, then aiming a weapon massing a few hundred tonnes would have a better chance of hitting an enemy craft than trying to maneuver the entire hull massing almost sixteen hundred tonnes. However, getting the mass of the weapon down meant a much shorter focusing rod, and that meant a wider dispersal of particles that would damage but not penetrate a super-ship’s hull with a single shot. It would, however, be perfect for use against small enemy craft that had
far less armor. The wider pattern of particles would make it easier to hit a fast-moving target. Unfortunately, the design team would not accept that option, no matter how hard Eagleton pushed the idea. He was left with only one choice. He requested and was granted a meeting with Mirakova.

  “I take it you’re having a problem with the stinger design team, Commander?” asked Mirakova after Eagleton was seated across from her desk.

  “Yes, Admiral. I’m trying to get the team to consider how a stinger can best handle small enemy craft, but I’ve been careful not to reveal that the Tyrell already have that kind of craft, because if I do, I’m concerned that they’ll ask me how I know, and obviously I can’t tell them how. As it stands now, the concept the team is focusing on will probably work well against super-ships but probably not so well against small, agile craft. I’d like your permission to tell them that we know for certain that the Tyrell have small craft and, if necessary, how we know that.”

  “Before I decide on the request, I’d like to know more about why their concept would not work well against small craft.”

  Eagleton filled her in on the built-in weapon with the long focusing rod aimed by maneuvering the stinger itself and why it would have a lower hit probability on small, agile enemy craft. He then described how a shorter focusing rod in a turreted weapon would have more aiming flexibility by being independent of the craft’s maneuvering and would have a higher hit probability with its dispersed cone of anti-tachyon particles covering a wider area.

  “It seems to me that we’d be assigning a lower priority to inflicting the maximum damage possible to their super-ships, of which they have hundreds, in order to more easily defeat their small craft, which right now they have less than a hundred of,” said Mirakova. “If our corvettes are no longer effective against their super-ships, then we have to develop something else that is effective. Having said that, I’m aware that you’re operating with one hand tied behind your back as far as what you know but can’t divulge is concerned, so I’m authorizing you to let the design team know that the Tyrell are deploying small craft, but you’re not to tell them how you know that. If the team can come up with a solution that can deal effectively with both threats, then that’s even better, but if they can’t, then super-ships have to be the first priority.”

  As he left Mirakova’s office, Eagleton had the nagging suspicion that she was making a mistake in making the super-ships top priority, but he couldn’t find any fault in her logic. There were far more super-ships than small craft, so why wouldn’t the larger and far more numerous ships be the biggest threat? Maybe he was making the problem bigger than what it really was. The long-rod, fixed weapon stinger might still be able to handle enemy small craft well enough, especially if the Alliance or EAF fleet had numerical superiority in small craft. If only those super-ships didn’t have the FTL kinetic energy projectiles. The projectiles’ ability to micro-jump meant that it had almost unlimited range if it could be aimed accurately, and the energy transferred from projectile to the target when it hit at 60% of light speed was of the same order of magnitude as a small fission warhead would cause. Eagleton remembered that someone had asked the engineers why the Tyrell hadn’t just put fission warheads on their projectiles, and after some careful analysis, the answer was quite simple. At that speed, the warhead would be shattered into a jet of white-hot plasma before the fission chain reaction had a chance to start. For all the simplicity of the KE projectile, it was a quite effective weapon if it could be aimed accurately enough and fired fast enough.

  By the time Eagleton had returned to the office he was using while assigned to the design team, he was contemplating modifications to the KE projectile as an exercise, just for the fun of it. If the projectile had a low-powered laser with a beam that became wider the further out it went, then the projectile could search for laser light reflected back from the target and make minor course corrections to head straight for that source of light. But that would only work if the projectile dropped down into normal space far enough back that the guidance system had time to look for the reflection and adjust the trajectory. The problem with that idea was if the Tyrell ships had hull sensors scanning for laser light, they would be warned of an incoming attack and might be able to take counter-measures such as rotating the hull so that the reflected laser beam didn’t return to the attacking missile. Without the reflection to home in on, the missile would probably miss. If only there were some way to pinpoint the target’s exact position without giving away the fact that a missile was approaching.

  As he stepped into his office, he glanced at the wall-mounted electronic board that could be used for making notes or diagrams with the tip of a finger. It was showing the very simple comparison of the two stinger concepts that Eagleton had drawn the day before when he was trying to convince the team’s leader of the merits of the short-rod, turreted weapon concept. One diagram showed a narrow beam penetrating into a super-ship hull and out the other side. The other diagram showed an expanding cone of anti-tachyon particles hitting, with thousands of tiny explosions, a wide area of the hull where individual tachyons had previously hit and destroyed a few molecules of hull armor in an act of mutual annihilation that generated all kinds of radiation, including heat and visible light. That anti-tachyons ‘shotgun’ blast, as he liked to think of it, would cause a hell of a light show if a person was close enough. As he continued looking at it, he had the ‘aha’ moment. The light caused by that kind of shotgun blast would be radiating in all possible directions; at least some of it would be likely to hit the passive sensors of an incoming KE missile, and there wasn’t a damn thing the Tyrell could do to prevent it. So a short-rod turreted stinger, in conjunction with a kinetic energy missile, could fire on and hit a super-ship, and the stinger would also be able to fire shotgun blasts of anti-tachyons at Tyrell small craft because their hull was thin enough that even a dispersed shower of particles would tear the craft to pieces. Now the question was how to co-ordinate the missile and the stinger so that the stinger fired at the super-ship a fraction of a second before the missile got within terminal guidance range. Firing the missile from a carrier was out of the question. They weren’t designed to do that, and carrying missiles externally on a corvette hull would not be easy either.

  That left only one possibility. Eagleton called up one of the conceptual designs for a stinger and then had his desk computer display a Tyrell projectile with the same scale along side the stinger. Damn! The projectile was too big to carried by the stinger. The combined mass would be over 2,500 metric tonnes, and that would make the thing detectable within 1.1 light-seconds, which violated the detection parameter set by the EAF High Command. Not only that, the much higher mass would degrade the stinger’s agility to the point where it would maneuver like a turtle. He took a closer look at the Tyrell KE projectile design. It looked very much like a large calibre bullet, with a narrow front end and a thicker back end. The tungsten rod was in the front section. The power plant, inertia drive and jump drive were in the back section, and therefore required more room. What if the jump drive were removed? If the human version of this missile was going to be carried by and fired from a stinger craft, then it didn’t need its own jump drive. After requesting the detailed schematics of the Tyrell version, he told the computer to delete the jump drive and re-compute the remaining mass. That brought the combined missile and stinger mass down to 2,113 tonnes. Detection range was just a hair over the 1.0 light-second threshold. Eagleton cursed out loud and that drew the attention of Ferguson, one of the engineers on the team, who happened to be walking by the open office door.

  “That’s sounds ominous,” said Ferguson as he stopped and leaned through the doorway.

  Eagleton chuckled and shook his head. “Ah, it’s just that I had this idea for a new weapon system, and I’m this close,” he held up his thumb and forefinger, “to making it work, but I don’t how to get the rest of the way.”

  “Oh really?” asked Ferguson as he stepped into the office. “
Show me what you’ve got so far. Maybe I can offer some suggestions.”

  Eagleton explained what he’d done. Now it was Ferguson’s turn to shake his head. “You just can’t let that Tyrell small craft idea go, can you? If there was proof that they exist…” He stopped when he saw Eagleton smile and nod his head. “There is?” asked Ferguson.

  “There is, but don’t ask me how I know that. It’s so classified that if I told you, I’d have to kill you and then kill myself.”

  “Son…of…a…bitch,” said Ferguson slowly and softly. “Okay then, let me take a closer look at this stinger-carried KE missile concept.” After about 15 seconds, he put his hands on his hips and said, “I think I’ve got a solution for you. When you deleted the jump drive, you kept the overall shape of the missile the same. So as it stands now, it’s got this empty space inside where the jump drive used to be. If you eliminate that wasted space by shortening the hull, that would reduce the overall mass by enough that the combined missile/stinger system would come in under the mass threshold. Just barely mind you, but it would be less than 1.0 light-seconds. And if we designed the whole thing from scratch, we could probably get it down even more. Damn, Gort, I think you’ve got something here.”