Planet Killer (A Captain's Crucible Book 4)

by Isaac Hooke

  “Not so fast,” Harv said. “I told you I could create a charged field around the destroyer, not every ship in our fleet. I’m talking about the Dammerung alone.”

  “Ah,” Jonathan said, sitting back. “Still, it’s a breakthrough. If it works.”

  “It will work.”

  “All right,” Jonathan said. “Care to tell me how you plan to achieve this breakthrough?”

  “We have to open up the geronium bomb... take out all the delivery vehicles. Remove half of the geronium rods from the warheads of each one. I’ve run the calculations. Based on the size of the moon, and the expected yield, half the rods should still be enough to tear off the crust.”

  “All right,” Jonathan said. “Let’s say we remove the rods like you ask. What do we do with them?”

  “We set the fleet to 3D-printing rack extensions for the reactor cores of the Dammerung’s engines. We shut down the cores one by one, apply the retrofits, and turn them back on. In a week’s time, we should be able to retrofit all the cores.”

  “How does that help us?” Jonathan said.

  “Even taking into account the SWAP-C trade-off, we should increase the power output upwards of 10x,” the lieutenant exclaimed. “Remember I told you once that there wasn’t enough power to create a charged field around a ship? That we could only do it with a fighter? Well with this technique, the Dammerung will be completely shielded. If we send her in first, follow her in, she’ll shield the rest of us.”

  Jonathan tapped his lips. “The charged field would only protect her from the enemy particle beam weapons. It’ll be useless against their laser ships. Or ramming attacks.”

  Harv cocked his head. “I’m not a miracle worker. All I offer is a way to improve our chances. And when I look at the different ship types out there, all I can say is, the enemy have a helluva lot more particle beam ships than laser ships.”

  “Though you forget the enemy fighters fire lasers, too,” Jonathan said. “There could be thousands of them housed in those capital and pyramid ships.”

  “True,” Harv said. “But at least we can outrun the smaller bastards. And their range is pitiful.”

  Jonathan exhaled slowly. “How long would it take to open up the delivery vehicles within the planet killer and remove the cores?”

  “Maybe a day, with the help of loader mechs.”

  “And a week to print and install the extensions for the reactor cores, you say?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Put together a 3D-printing plan,” Jonathan said. “And installation instructions for the Dammerung. And wait for my order to distribute it to your counterparts aboard the other fleet vessels.”

  “I already have the plan and installation instructions ready,” Harv said. “I’m just waiting on your word.”

  “Two steps ahead of me, as always, Lieutenant,” the captain said.

  Jonathan relayed the information to the vice admiral. The admiral approved the idea half an hour later, and Jonathan instructed Harv to release the appropriate materials to his counterparts.

  Jonathan called a meeting with Miko and Maxwell, and together they ironed out modifications to the battle plan based on the new charged field. He forwarded their results to the vice admiral.

  Admiral Ford convened another captain’s meeting half a day later. “I have important modifications to cover regarding our battle plan, courtesy of Captain Dallas and the fine men and women of his crew. If this works, it could definitely tilt the odds in our favor.”

  She proceeded to detail the modifications.

  twenty-two

  Ninety of the hundred human vessels departed the Slipstream region. Ten were left behind to guard the Builder and harvesters; after all, if some of the ships actually survived the mission, they needed a way to get home.

  Those ninety intrepid vessels traveled in an arrowhead formation, with the Dammerung at its head, and set a course for the colony world.

  A week passed.

  The two enemy fleets that had emerged from 2-Vac and 3-Vac converged on the gas giant, joining the two thousand ships in orbit above the colonized moon. That mass of ships had not gathered into any specific formation as of yet. Thermal signatures constantly flared above the moon as the enemy vessels made directional changes to avoid colliding with their two thousand companions in orbit.

  A day away, fifteen hundred of the enemy assumed a thick convex formation, gathering in a three-dimensional, outward curving configuration thirty ships wide, ten ships tall, and five ships deep, with an average separation of five thousand kilometers between each vessel. Two hundred Reach-class and pyramid ships were spread out in a cylindrical tube a hundred thousand kilometers in diameter in front of that formation, and extending outward by five hundred thousand kilometers. Interspersed between them in three separate waves of vessels, a hundred each, were laser ships. Together, those ships formed a formidable barrier that would ensure the human fleet remained under a constant barrage of particle and laser beams all the way to the colony.

  “We’re going to swing around that formation on the starboard side,” the admiral sent. “I’m aiming for a flyby of no closer than five hundred thousand kilometers off its edge. We’ll fire a barrage of mortars and missiles to keep them from our path. I’m transmitting firing solutions and directional changes now.”

  The orders came, and were executed.

  Jonathan accessed the external front-facing video feed. Task Group 72.5 had pulled up directly behind the Dammerung so that the Talon was nestled directly behind the destroyer. Jonathan was charged with protecting the alien vessel at all costs.

  On the display, the ship’s hull looked slightly pocked. That was because the Talon had modified the members of its fighter escort, jury-rigging a form of mounting magnet to each unit so that the craft were attached to the mothership at the moment, covering nearly all the available hull space and allowing them to proceed at the same speed as the Talon.

  “Enemy ships are adjusting their formation to intercept,” Ensign Lewis said. “Laser ships are deploying, separating into individual lens segments.”

  Jonathan switched his attention to tactical display. “I see them.”

  “It’s too bad the moon isn’t closer to the ice giant,” Miko said. “The extra Delta V costs could have completely changed our strategy.”

  “If we planned to fight fairly, it certainly would’ve helped,” Robert said.

  “Oh, we’re fighting fairly,” Jonathan said. “Love and war, Commander. Love and war.”

  “Launch decoys,” the admiral sent over the fleet-wide main comm. “And tighten formation.”

  “Miko, launch the decoys from hangar bays four and five,” Jonathan told his tactical officer. He didn’t give the order to tighten their formation, as it didn’t apply to the already closely-spaced ships of Task Group 72.5.

  “Aye, Captain,” Miko said.

  At Jonathan’s urging, the admiral had borrowed a page from his tactical book: in addition to 3D-printing reactor core extensions for the Dammerung, each individual ship in the fleet had also 3D-printed several decoy objects, with emission sources installed to match the heat signatures of different United Systems warships.

  While those were launched, the fleet moved inward, compressing the arrowhead shape so that the heat signatures of multiple vessels merged, masking several of their number. To the enemy, it would look like half of the fleet had separated. Importantly, because of the way they had arranged the heat signature patterns of the decoys, the Dammerung would appear to be in the breakaway group. They had even placed spare geronium rods inside the decoy to mimic the radiation signature produced by the planet killer.

  “Enemy ships aren’t altering formation to pursue in any way,” Lewis said. “They’re not falling for it.”

  “Well, it was worth a try,” Robert said.

  Jonathan exhaled.

  Too bad.

  He felt a little embarrassed that the fleet had spent so much time and effort on an idea he had com
e up with, only to see it fail.

  Not all your tactics are going to work all the time, he reminded himself.

  He stared at the tactical display, and watched the laser segments separate and spread out as the minutes passed. The lead laser segments could engage starting anywhere from two hundred thousand to a hundred fifty thousand klicks away, though the most effective range was under a hundred thousand. If the laser ships combined their shots, they could increase that effective range, though because distance enlarged the spot area on the target, and exponentially reduced the megajoules of intensity, the enemy might squeeze only an extra fifty thousand klicks from such a tactic. If they were lucky.

  The human fleet had no beam-based weapons that could match that long range. Mortars, nukes and kinetic kills were the long range go-to weapons of the United Systems.

  But the human fleet hadn’t lobbed a single such weapon.

  “Maintain formation...” the admiral sent over the comm, as if sensing the shared unease among the fleet. A moment later she spoke again. “Actually, Task Group 72.5, back away from the Talon. Let’s make sure she has enough room to work.”

  Jonathan relayed the order to Miko, who coordinated with the various ships to retreat slightly from the Talon.

  A few minutes later Ensign Lewis announced: “Lead laser segments are nearing their effective firing range...”

  “If this doesn’t work,” Miko said. “They’ll riddle us with laser bores and the battle will be over before we launch a single volley in return...”

  “It’ll work,” Robert said.

  Jonathan pressed his lips together. He wasn’t going to say anything to jinx it.

  “Captain Dallas, initiate Operation Mangle,” the admiral sent a moment later.

  “Yes, Admiral,” Jonathan replied. He turned toward his comm officer. “Lazur, send Barrick the order. Begin Operation Mangle.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Lazur replied.

  A moment later, Ensign Lewis reported: “The Talon is moving out from the cover of the Dammerung.” She paused. “It’s in the clear... I’m detecting multiple gamma ray bursts from the alien vessel. The first was dispatched toward the moon, but every subsequent burst has been directed toward a different laser ship.”

  Jonathan nodded slowly. That pulse contained an encrypted message meant for any sleeper cells aboard. Essentially, it read: “Activate the Trojan.” Because Valor didn’t know which ships harbored sleeper cells of Zarafe, the Talon had to send the message to as many vessels as possible and hope one of them responded.

  “Is anything happening yet?” Jonathan said.

  “No,” Lewis replied. “Not a thing. It doesn’t look like the communications are having any effect. The Talon is continuing to relay pulses to different ships, but so far none of them are doing anything. The laser segments aren’t stopping their acceleration, while the remaining ships beyond them are maneuvering in front of us to cut off our escape route. The only difference I’ve seen so far is an uptick in gamma ray exchanges between the enemy.”

  “Could be chatter,” Robert said. “They’re wondering just what the hell we’re doing.”

  “I’m wondering the same,” Jonathan said. Were we fools to rely on the Elk sleepers, and Valor’s word? Has he led us into a trap?

  Jonathan shuddered as he reminded himself that the past year and a half might have been a carefully planned ruse by the Raakarr to steal a planet killer from humanity all along.

  “You’re thinking Valor betrayed us,” Robert said quietly.

  Jonathan raised his noise canceler about himself and the commander. “All this time, we’ve...” He shook his head. “I think we’ve been betrayed. There is no Trojan. Valor must have made it up, to give us hope. To make us deliver the planet killer directly to the enemy.”

  “Why is the Talon still transmitting gamma ray pulses, then?” Robert said. “Look at external camera F22. Their ship is still rotating in place, almost frantically so, no doubt targeting other enemy vessels to receive its beam.”

  Jonathan regarded the aforementioned camera. “You’re right. Though maybe it’s still a ruse, to prevent us from blowing the Talon out of the stars a while longer.”

  “Or maybe the Zarafe have fewer sleepers out there than Valor realized,” Robert said. “We probably should have started the transmissions much earlier. And never allowed those laser ships to get so close.”

  “Well, whatever the case, we—”

  “Wait,” Lewis interrupted the cloaked conversation she couldn’t hear. “The chatter between enemy vessels is increasing exponentially, so much so that it can’t be natural communications. It has to be the self-propagating code.”

  “So the Trojan exists after all,” Robert said.

  Jonathan nodded. “And a sleeper finally received the Talon’s message to activate it.”

  The captain rescinded the noise canceler.

  Years ago, according to Valor, members of the Zarafe faction hidden in the Elk hierarchy had purportedly planted the equivalent of a Trojan in a devious software patch distributed to all ships. That patch embedded the malicious code fragment deep within the core computing environment of the AIs that ran their vessels.

  When activated, the code essentially caused the ships to repeatedly transmit the Trojan execution signal to all other nearby vessels. Because of its status as a defector vessel, the Talon didn’t have remote execution abilities of its own, which was why Valor had to rely on sleeper cells to set the process in motion. While a hindrance, its pariah status also served as a boon, because the Talon wouldn’t be affected by the Trojan, either.

  As more enemy ships activated and re-transmitted the code, more and more execution cycles would be devoted to handling all that incoming data, exponentially eating up the processing power of the computing cores, not to mention degrading the available communication bandwidth; it was a form of self-inflicted denial of service attack more than anything else, and it would bring the Raakarr internal network to its knees, forcing the AIs to initiate a full reboot to restore system functionality. Unfortunately, during that reboot, the aberrant code would be identified and quarantined, relegating the cyberattack to a one-time offensive. On the plus side, the reboot could take up to an hour per vessel to complete, and the affected craft would be completely helpless during that time.

  It would give the battle group the respite they needed to break through to the planet.

  During all of that, the few sleeper cells distributed among the enemy were supposed to stage an uprising, so that the Elk would have to contend with strife both within and without.

  “It’s working!” Lewis said. “The thermal signatures of the nearest laser ships are beginning to drop in intensity, and they’ve stopped emitting gamma rays.”

  That matched up with what Valor told them to expect when the internal systems rebooted.

  “I’m seeing a similar drop in thermal signatures and chatter across the enemy fleet,” Lewis continued. “Laser, capital, pyramid, and Reach classes are all going offline. However, so far the dart ships are continuing to transmit.” Valor had warned them that the dart class of vessels had a higher tolerance for network overload, and it would take them a while to go down. “They’re accelerating to close the gap ahead of us, attempting to cut us off from the moon. They’re trailed by two hundred plus fighters the pyramid and capital ships managed to launch before shutting down.” According to Valor, those fighters wouldn’t be affected by the Trojan at all. It was a good thing the enemy hadn’t been able to launch more.

  The minutes passed.

  “We’re a hundred thousand klicks out from the closest laser ship segments,” Lewis said.

  Jonathan glanced at Robert. The commander said: “Now we see if it’s all one big ruse.”

  “Indeed,” Jonathan replied.

  “Launch kinetic kills,” Admiral Ford sent, fleet-wide. “Observe the following targeting parameters.”

  Jonathan forwarded the parameters meant for the Callaway to Miko. When the weapon
s were away, he saw that the fleet mostly targeted the disabled laser ships, with a few missiles heading for the incoming dart ships.

  “We’re ninety thousand klicks out from the closest laser segments,” Lewis said.

  “Eighty thousand.”

  “Seventy.” She looked up. “They’re not firing.”

  So not a ruse after all.

  Jonathan studied the tactical display and watched as the United Systems missiles spread out to find their targets. Meanwhile, the dart ships still hadn’t deactivated; the lead vessels would intercept the human fleet in a few minutes, with the slower alien fighters arriving several minutes after that. None of that latter group were close enough to protect the laser segments from the missile barrage.

  Jonathan’s fingers dug into the armrests. The number of dart ships out there was utterly demoralizing, and overwhelming. If those ships didn’t shut down soon...

  “Dammerung, activate your charged field,” the admiral sent. She spoke the direct order over the fleet comm as a courtesy to the other captains.

  “Field activation successful,” Captain Marik of the Dammerung replied.

  The reactor enhancements provided enough power to create a charged field that only just encompassed the Whittle layer of the destroyer’s hull. Any other ships that wanted protection from the enemy particle beams would have to form up behind it.

  “Fire a last barrage of missiles, mortars and nukes at the incoming dart ships,” the admiral said. “Three waves. And deploy fleet into Penetration formation.”

  The Talon moved back in behind the Dammerung so that the two vessels were separated by about five hundred meters at their closest points. Basically touching, for all intents and purposes—a dangerously close position at their current speeds. While flying so near to the destroyer was perilous, it was also the most protected position in the fleet. A suitable location for the Talon to assume at the moment, considering that it was the second most important vessel the humans possessed, a vessel the enemy would want to terminate with extreme prejudice, fearful that the Talon had other programs besides the Trojan it could activate.