Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire

by Stephen W Bennett

  The Ragnar knew the Empire’s withdrawal demonstrated more than simple caution by the Thandol; it was a fear that went deeper than the threat of a barbarian horde with high tech weapons. The Ragnar military command, which was also the local governing group of their home world and their two colonies, had long ago decided the Thandol didn’t want any of their three security forces to witness exactly how the Krall had overthrown their more technically advanced masters. The truth was probably a composite of fearing the Krall, and of allowing their security force races to see a dangerous example of a successful revolt against powerful scientifically advanced overlords.

  It was only within the last orbit the Thandol told the Ragnar that the Krall had been swiftly defeated by a new species that horde had recently encountered. They were beaten by a far less imposing looking young race with low technology, which had also used borrowed technology left behind by the Olt’kitapi. The weapon systems stolen by the Krall were specifically designed with a species based DNA key, which was required to activate those systems.

  The new species, who called themselves humans, had somehow obtained and successfully used a technology that the Olt’kitapi had failed to implement properly during the Krall revolt. The humans had disabled the Krall’s keys ability to activate their own weapons.

  Thond decided that what the Thandol were telling them was plausible, and that the human victors represented a lesser threat to the Empire. Otherwise, the Emperor wouldn’t take the risk of provoking these new aliens. The humans had only beaten an effectively disarmed enemy, which made them clever and opportunistic, but not necessarily tough or dangerous.

  The Thandol were careful to inform the Ragnar that the same key disabling technology obviously didn’t apply to the Empire’s weapons. However, they thought the DNA key disabling tactic might work again, to disarm the same weapons these humans had taken from the Krall. The Ragnar were provided with a number of nondestructive missiles to test against the ships the humans had captured. They were not intended to destroy the rugged ships directly in combat, a task that was said to be difficult. The test was to see if the ships became unresponsive to the humans controlling them. Even if that didn’t work, the Ragnar were confident of their ability in war using their own ships, and hundreds more built by the Thandol, which supplemented their fleet.

  The top Ragnar military leaders had long told their people, confidentially, that had they met the Thandol at an earlier time in the overlord race’s expansion, they were confident that today it would be a Ragnar led empire. Thandol trunks would be nuzzling furry Ragnar rumps in gratitude, for ruling and protecting them.

  The scout ships they used were Thandol designed craft, spherical shaped which traveled in the third level of Tachyon Space. They used Thandol gamma ray suppression technology, which permitted them to exit to Normal Space in stealth mode, close to the target world. Undetected, they passively observed activity for two planetary rotations.

  They reported forty-one ships in orbit, not spread out in a proper defensive posture, such as using staggered and crisscrossing orbits and altitudes, and they were not using active sensor scans or stealth. One ship was large, but it was one of the crab creature ships, which were not armed. There were twenty additional ships, all parked at one place on a large island, with apparently very few crew aboard them. Only ten were warships, the others cargo craft.

  The humans from those warships, their species identified using the description and pictures provided by the Thandol, appeared to be helping other humans unload ten supply ships of a different design than the former Krall ships. Those supply ships did not appear to be armed.

  This island was obviously the site of a completely new city, just being established on this colony world, despite the fact that there were three older cities. There were no large spacecraft parked anywhere else on the planet. The three other established cities had no defenses that were visible. They only had three modest sized shuttles each, parked on otherwise empty tarmacs. Those cities would be secondary targets, since the strongest defensive forces were in orbit, or parked at the newest colony city. Most of the crews of the grounded human ships were off their ships, performing manual labor such as unloading the cargo ships, and setting up prefabricated structures.

  Force Commander Thond made a minor change to force dispositions. “As the Emperor’s Observer requires, I will send only fifty Ragnar ships to launch the individual test missiles against the Krall made craft, to learn if those will completely disable the ships the human’s captured. At least one missile will target each enemy craft aloft. This will obviously alert them to our attack, therefore in a second wave, the remaining four hundred fifty four ships, the two hundred Thandol Smasher class ships added to our three hundred Ravager class cruisers, will Jump and launch missiles with active warheads as soon as those first missiles reach their targets.

  “In the second wave, the entire fleet will emerge and combine with our first fifty Ravagers, placing ten or eleven ships behind each human ship, and they will promptly fire all particle beams and heaviest lasers against every ship they find in orbit. The Smasher AI on the Empire’s Demand, the one carrying the Emperor’s Observer, has already assigned targets for each of us.” This Thandol interference galled him, since he felt his strike force should also simultaneously initiate their ground attack.

  “When we have eliminated orbital defenses, the four Strangler’s and their Debilitater projectors will enter atmosphere over all four enemy cities, and subdue the civilian populations, leaving them helpless and in agony for our landings. For our main target, the newest colony, the Debilitater must strike swiftly, before the crews outside their ships can return to arm their plasma cannons and missile systems. They will learn what it is like to face an enemy that is more than a barbarian carrying a plasma rifle or flying a stolen ship.”

  ****

  Trevon Caldwell, captain of the Thresher, had released his entire crew to earn extra Federation credits working ashore. So had the nine other Kobani captains parked at New Mombasa, here on Zanzibar Redoux. The young Kobani, without the benefit of an Earth based education, persisted in saying Zanzibar 2. To them, Redoux came from a “dead” language, as if Standard itself wasn’t a compilation of multiple old Earth languages.

  The new colonists were already at work unloading the supply ships from Tanners world, when the ten Kobani ships landed. These helpers had quickly earned the respect of the new colonists, and generated considerable amazement and envy among them, when an individual Kobani was able to lift five times the weight a colonist could manage. This was with the colonists already feeling the strongest they had in their lives, after receiving clone mods on Haven.

  With the gravity greater than that of Earth’s, the colonists had marveled at how light they felt upon landing. Their nearly doubled clone muscle strength made manual tasks easier, easing some of the anxiety they had felt about starting life over on this new and undeveloped planet. They soon received a preview of what the Kobani mods would do for them, when those were implemented sometime within the next year. Most of them were soon more eager to make the transition.

  Twenty Kobani per ship, from ten ships, had made the need for the limited number of supply ship forklifts nearly redundant, provided there was room to crowd enough Kobani around bulky equipment to be lifted and moved. The Rim World crews of the supply ships had been impressed at the energy of the new colonists. Then the efforts of the Kobani, when they arrived later that same day, blew them away. The shipping companies weren’t very thrilled, since their contracts provided higher payments by the colonists the longer the ships were grounded for unloading. The Kobani presence guaranteed that they would be released for departure earlier than expected.

  For equipment that had to be moved all the way across the growing town, where newly extruded Smart Plastic roadways were appearing hourly, a forklift was still a better option. The Kobani often muscled items off the ships onto cargo lifts to be lowered to ground level, where a forklift took them to their destinati
on for final assembly and activation. The Kobani did that work even faster, and set new equipment up flawlessly after a single team member read the set up instructions. Then, after a joint handholding session, every team member on a project suddenly knew the entire manual. The teams would rapidly set each system up as if they were the expert technical representatives the colonists had been too poor to hire.

  Caldwell wondered if there was enough work for five rotations of crews. They intended to rotate another ten ships today, twenty more tomorrow, and the last ten on the third day. That was so every ship could earn some extra Fed credits for the crews, doing interesting new things and mixing with the first Earth born humans the young Kobani had ever had a chance to meet.

  He was in a Comtap link with Macy Gundarfem, the former Motorfem from the Flight of Fancy, who was the mission commander for the defense of Zanzibar. “Macy, I think you’d better plan on rotating another ten ships down in an hour. These youngsters don’t know what working by the hour means, when it comes to earning more of those Fed credits. After six hours of energetic work, each ship’s team down here is trying to outperform the other teams.

  “If you want every ship’s crew to spend six or seven hours working for their money, you need to get them on the ground before the heavy work runs out. Unlike us old farts, these youngsters don’t know how to milk a job when they are being paid by the hour. In three more days it might be too late for the last ships, if the colonists are in a position to take over all of the remaining work.”

  He sensed her amusement through the link. “Trevor, I think you’re right. I used scans to observe the town on each pass over you, and the gray roadways and base slabs for buildings bloomed like spreading branches of some fast growing vine. I wish I’d used stop action Tri-Vid shots on each pass, just so we could play it back for the people on the ground.

  “I’ll pass the word to the next ten ships to get ready. They’ll not have room to land until after your group reaches orbit. Have one person from each of your ships Comtap what the team was working on and what they had learned, and send it to one person on their replacement ship.

  “Just before you linked, I’d advised Captain Gotin of the Blue Seas, that he should start their random Jumps back to Haven. None of the other colony towns here reported any people that are unhappy enough to abandon the life of a colonist yet, ready to ask for a ride back. This means the Blue Seas can head home before the crew’s water pool needs to be replenished. The Torki get cranky if their soaking water gets too stale, and they don’t like the odor of the algae that lives in the oceans here. The detours to protect Haven’s location will already take them nearly four weeks of travel.”

  “Do you think the Empire is watching us now? Our patrol boats have about half of our border covered with the Empire. They could be sending a fleet and we wouldn’t know it if they happened to bypass our first few monitors.”

  “I don't think the Thandol want to mess with us. Not if the Krall had them worried, and we took care of the Krall.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  ****

  FLC Grudfad passed along the alert from the Bridge sensor division officer. “Force Commander, the large crab ship has activated tachyon Trap fields for a second level Jump. It could capture a particle and be gone at any moment. Should we let them go, or…”

  Thond’s reaction was immediate. “Fire the test missiles from the Ravagers and launch a parasite mine to attach to the large ship, set it for detonation if it initiates a Jump.” Not all of the stealthed Ravagers were as close as he’d wanted yet, but they were all within range of their assigned targets.

  Grudfad repeated the orders via the embedded com system to the fleet’s Weapons officer. The reply from him was prompt. “Mine and missiles away.” Fifty stealthed missiles, armed only with some mysterious chip that potentially could disable the enemy ships were on their way. Ten of them had been redundantly sent against duplicate orbital targets, because their stealth would be lost if they entered atmosphere to go after the ten warships on the ground.

  This way the Emperor’s Observer would confirm that fifty test missiles had been used, and there were fifty formerly Krall owned ships. Although, ten of them were down on the planet and thus not targeted. Mere moments later, dozens of fully armed missiles were launched at the same forty-one orbital targets. If the human ships were disabled and showed no activity after the first missiles reached them, the second salvo was unnecessary. They would destroy helpless ships and crews. No matter, for this attack all of the Federation ships in orbit were going to be destroyed, whether disabled or not. If they were helpless, then it bode well for future attacks using fewer missiles and causing less orbital debris.

  “Signal the remainder of the fleet to Jump to the attack now. I want those ten warships and crews on the ground captured if possible, destroyed if not. The unarmed cargo ships are defenseless, so I also want them intact if possible.”

  ****

  Gundarfem’s AI, Caroline, provided the first clues via its Comtap link. “Mam, I have detected encrypted radio transmissions close to Zanzibar, and there were multiple flickers of small visual reflections that disappeared from sensors, as if there was a brief loss of stealth from multiple locations of a small size.”

  “Like weapon ports that opened and closed?”

  “Possibly, Mam.”

  She made an instant decision. “Caroline, micro-Jump five miles higher right now.” Even before the AI could initiate the Jump, she used a general link and warned every Kobani and Torki in the system of a hostile presence.

  “All personnel, probable enemy craft. All ships micro-Jump, activate stealth and active scans. The AI detected radio signals and possible missile launches.” Her ship, Ricco’s Revenge, had the only AI system installed on any of the fifty warships at Zanzibar, and it was perpetually alert, of course. The Revenge completed its Jump within three seconds of the AI alert to the captain. Kobani thought processes were slower than an AI’s, but fortunately, they were still considerably faster than any organic minds yet encountered.

  Caroline promptly furnished another warning. “More weapons ports were seen opened. Active scans have confirmed numerous stealthed missiles approaching from the rear of every Kobani ship. Should I engage lasers?”

  “Yes. And start emergency heat for plasma cannons.” Still on the General link, she glanced at the sensor screen and gave another warning to every Kobani. “Missiles launched at us, all from our aft positions, and unlike ours, these are weakly stealthed missiles. Luckily, we can still see them. Jump or maneuver immediately.”

  She switched to a ship link for her crew only. “I’m seeing fifty unknown ships in weak stealth mode. I’m about to fire missiles, so get clear of the launchers. Carline, fire lasers at any missiles that are closing on any of our ships.”

  “Yes Mam, firing.”

  Pavil Kamal was suddenly spotted flying over the Bridge railing, in a powerful but risky leap from the lower deck, eighteen feet below. Had the ship maneuvered sharply while he was airborne he could have been killed. It had taken him only four seconds since the warning to race up four decks. Macy merely pointed to his designated weapons station.

  Thirty-seven ships made a successful micro-Jump before the first missile reached them. Three others reported they were actually struck, but for some reason the warheads failed to detonate. For some strange reason, there were an additional ten missiles fired from each of the ships of unknown type, even before the first single shots could reach any of their targets. It seemed strange that the large salvo came after what should have been perhaps a finale finishing shot. All of the enemy ships had arrived undetected in gamma rays, even though they were visible as ghost outlines when active scans were used.

  Captain Gotin linked in by Olt to say the Blue Seas had been struck once, but as reported by the Kobani ships, the missile had not exploded. “I intend to leave the system.”

  Gundarfem agreed. “Jump to safety Gotin.” A migration ship was too unwieldly to f
ight, and flight was its best defense. She grew to regret her words, but it was the reasonable action to take, and the Torki captain would have executed that Jump in any case. Regardless, stay or Jump, the ship was doomed.

  There was a violet flash on the side of the huge ship, just as an event horizon started to form. The weakened ruptured hull started to crumple inward under the uneven gravitational stresses as the event horizon started to form, shrink, and then suddenly vanished. Immediately after that, a salvo of ten missiles hit the Blue Seas and it vanished in multiple intense flashes of silent lights, as the big ship blew apart. There was a momentary inarticulate link from Captain Gotin, which was cut off. The other fourteen Torki aboard never tried to link. They died with their ship, unable to reach escape pods in so short a time.

  Gundarfem mentally processed a stream of incoming Comtap reports, even as she linked to Mirikami, reporting the attack. “Tet, Zanzibar is under attack. They snuck in on us and caught us unprepared without gammas on exit. We lost the Blue Seas to multiple hits. First missiles were all singles, but some made contact, but no explosions. Next salvos of ten per ship had real warheads. One other ship hit with plasma bolts but operational with minor damage. We’re in a pure defense mode now, and only our reaction speed saved our asses. We’re launching our missiles now against weakly stealthed targets. Plasma not hot yet, but lasers killing some of their missiles and hitting their ships.”

  She could imagine his lip tug, despite the rapidity of his reply and the speed of Comtap mental links. “Macy, ask if your AI just detected a key disable code for humans. The first missiles sound like what we did at K1 to the Krall.”

  A check by Caroline verified that an encrypted lock on a prisoner compartment had been altered to deny use by humans. No other encrypted key systems remained in use on the former Krall ships.