The Complete Thunder Series (Thunder In The Heavens)

by Dietmar Wehr

  “I agree.” She patted him on the shoulder and said in a low voice that only he could hear. “You did good, Gort.” He nodded as he headed for the exit.

  It was 44 hours later when a drone reported the first sighting of what appeared to be sunlight reflecting off a metallic object. That gave Harrow and Eagleton a bearing, but the enemy fleet could be anywhere along that line. They needed a second and ideally a third sighting by different sensor platforms to figure out the range. Sighting number two happened five point five hours after the first, and a third sighting came less than eight minutes later. Once again Eagleton was standing beside Harrow at her Command Station. The main display was showing the new tactical situation.

  “Well well, isn’t that interesting,” said Harrow to no one in particular. “The Tyrell Fleet Commander decided to move his fleet to a point that’s exactly the same distance from the planet but on a vector that’s exactly 90 degrees from their previous vector.”

  “It is interesting if we assume that the whole Tyrell fleet is still together. There could be just three ships at that point, with the rest of the fleet somewhere else, you know. They might even be using those three ships as bait. I recommend we wait a while longer to see if any other sightings show up somewhere else,” said Eagleton.

  Harrow took her time responding. “I’ll wait for another 12 hours, but not longer than that. They’re obviously looking for us, and what I don’t want is for them to decide to move somewhere else because they’re not detecting us from that position. If you think there might be a small number of ships there being used as bait, then come up with a tactical plan to deal with it.”

  “Understood. Twelve hours will let my pilots get a good sleep and be rested when we attack. I’ll have some tactical options for you by then, Admiral.”

  Harrow was not exactly thrilled with Gort’s anti-ambush tactical plan. It required that the 120 RD1s already deployed in the three-star formation be ordered to move at maximum velocity toward the position where the three ships were sighted. But because those drones didn’t have jump capability, they had to travel all the way through normal space. And even at 65% of light speed, the distance was so large that it would take them almost half an hour to get within mass detection range. That meant more waiting, on top of the 12 hours that was already making Harrow nervous. Once the drones confirmed how many ships actually were at the sightings location, then the carriers could be re-positioned accordingly. If all 57 enemy ships were still together, Gort recommended moving Third Fleet to within 100 light-seconds, and then launching all their remaining stingers. While the stinger squadrons were racing towards the enemy fleet, the carriers would micro-jump to a rally point on the other side of the enemy fleet. If the drones only detected a fraction of the 57 enemy ships, then Gort’s recommendation was to move the carriers and drones further away from each other to get in position to detect the missing ships from even more potential angles of reflected sunlight.

  “I wish we had brought more RD2s with us,” she said with a sigh. “If we had, they could jump within detection in a matter of seconds. I hate the extra waiting. If that enemy commander decides we’ve left the system, he might withdraw his carriers too. Losing the rest of that fleet wouldn’t bother me all that much, but we can’t afford to let those carriers get away, Cag.”

  “And I’ll bet you your opposite number is thinking exactly the same thing about us,” said Eagleton.

  You’re probably right, thought Harrow. I wouldn’t assume the enemy carriers had left the field of battle this quickly if I was commanding that fleet out there. “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Get those drones moving, and while we’re waiting, I want all your pilots on alert status, Cag. If that fleet is where we think it is, I want the attack to be ready to go.”

  “Oh, it will be,” said Eagleton with a feral grin.

  Thirty-four minutes later, they had their answer. All fifty-seven Tyrell ships were at the location where the three sunlight reflections had been detected. Harrow opened a channel to Flight Ops. “Fleet Commander to Cag. They’re all there. Launch all your stingers now. Tell your pilots the carriers will micro-jump to the rally point as planned. Tell them I said good luck and good hunting.”

  Eagleton’s response was immediate. “Launching has commenced. They heard you, Admiral.”

  Harrow watched the tactical display. As each squadron of 12 stingers was launched, it headed for the target at slightly less than max velocity so that successive squadrons could catch up. When all 192 stingers had come together, they would accelerate to maximum, then decelerate to 10% of light speed as they reached attack range.

  “Are Waterloo and Ranger ready to jump to the rally point, FAO?”

  “They’re ready, and so are we, Admiral,” said the Fleet Astrogation Officer.

  “Fine. You can initiate the countdown as soon as all stingers have been launched.”

  It didn’t take long for all the stingers to be launched. Harrow suspected that Gort had motivated his pilots to set a new launch record.

  “This is the FAO to all carriers. Five second countdown for micro-jump to rally point is commencing…now!”

  Tyrell carrier Natron:

  Torq paced back and forth in front of the main display. There had been no sign of the enemy carriers or their attack craft for almost two day-cycles. His officers were trying to convince him that the enemy had left the system and that the Fleet-of-Fleets should return to planetary orbit to render assistance to the five crippled Ships-of-Battle and their wounded crewman. But he was not convinced that the enemy had fled. He was becoming more and more certain that the three Metrone ships they had already destroyed had merely been bait for a carefully crafted trap that so far had failed. For the enemy to withdraw now, after all that effort with only five of his ships crippled, made no military sense. He paused to check the status of the two groups of attack craft that were patrolling around the Fleet in place of the standard shell of sensor drones. They were almost finished their patrol shift, and the next two groups were getting ready to launch to relieve them.

  He was still looking at the display when the alarm sounded, and the main display shifted from showing status data to a tactical view of the Fleet and its surrounding space. Multiple red icons representing his Ships-of-Battle were now flashing to indicate they’d been hit. Before he could say anything, he felt Natron shudder alarmingly. The Enemy had found them again!

  “Launch all attack craft immediately,” said Torq in what he hoped was a sufficiently calm voice to avoid triggering battle lust among his staff. “Patrolling craft are to fire their weapons in whatever direction they’re facing and maneuver to sweep the maximum area of space with particle fire. Report on battle damage.”

  By the time he had a complete report on his carrier’s battle damage, it was obvious that the attack was over. His Weapons Master was of the opinion that the enemy attack craft could only carry one missile each. And after firing them, they had to break off to return to their carriers to re-arm. It seemed a reasonable theory that would have to wait for a less urgent time for a more careful evaluation. His own attack craft had still not detected any enemy craft or ships, and he had ordered them to stop firing blindly because the danger of hitting their own warriors increased as the number of patrolling craft also increased. Natron had been hit by three hyper-velocity kinetic-energy missiles similar to what his ships-of-Battle fired. The enemy missiles had penetrated surprisingly deeply, and there was some evidence that the hull had also been hit by anti-matter particles from a wide beam, thereby weakening its ability to withstand KE fire. Some of the crew had been killed and others wounded, but the carrier could still maneuver, jump and conduct launch and recovery operations, although at a slower pace. Damage reports from other ships were now coming in too. The carrier Sortron had taken four hits and was in worse shape. It was no longer jump capable, nor was it able to recover all of its attack craft due to hangar space damage. The rest of his ships had each taken at least three hits. Almost all the ships that had
suffered a lot of damage in the first attack now had to be considered badly damaged. Thirty-three of them could no longer jump, and only four of those could still maneuver at all. The only good news was that he still had all of his attack craft. If he had some idea of where the enemy carriers were, he would send his craft to attack them right now, perhaps catching them as they were recovering their own craft, but he had no idea where to send them. Staying in this location was not an option, and micro-jumping to a new location with those ships that still had that capability, would effectively reduce his Fleet’s fighting ability by almost two-thirds, and with no real improvement in the probability of finding the enemy carriers. As much as he hated to admit it, the first Battle of Metrone was lost. It was time to salvage what he could and jump back to Tyrell space. Five jump-capable Ships-of-Battle would jump into planetary orbit to evacuate the crews of the first five cripples, while the crews of his new batch of cripples would transfer to other ships. If the cripples could still maneuver, they would be set to crash into this system’s sun on auto-pilot, and if that was not possible, his own attack craft would render those cripples useless with their own particle cannon. When that was done, the Fleet-of-Fleets would jump home. He took a deep breath and started giving orders.

  Forty-six hours later:

  Eagleton had to see it with his own eyes. His stinger coasted slowly among the wreckage of the five Tyrell ships slowly orbiting the planet. Three of the five had been literally cut in two by highly concentrated anti-tachyon beams fired at close range by Tyrell attack craft in order to render those cripples useless to anyone else. The other two ships had deep gouges along their entire length that looked for all the world like a giant animal with claws had slashed at them. That, plus the damage they had taken from the stinger-launched missiles, rendered them unsalvageable. He had seen a Tyrell super-ship up close before when the Sheepul had donated one of their constructed ships to humans for reverse engineering, but seeing one of those monsters cut in two, with both pieces slowly drifting apart, was an awesome sight. He could also see Metrone craft carefully getting as close as possible to the wreckage to search for who knew what. Humans were doing the same thing with the wrecks that were further out at the last battle site.

  “FC to Cag.”

  Eagleton smiled. He had wondered how long Cate would let him joyride around before yanking on his leash. “Go ahead, Admiral.”

  “The Metrones have advised us that your stinger’s close passes on the wreckage is making them nervous, and they’ve requested that you leave the area. They also made it very clear that they aren’t happy with the way this ambush was set up. They didn’t actually accuse us humans of deliberately using them as bait, but the implied message was exactly that. Apparently their admiral in command of their three carriers only narrowly escaped death. During the Tyrell attack, his shuttle left his flagship mere seconds before the flagship was smashed to pieces. I think you can imagine his feelings towards us now. So given all that ill feeling towards us, I’d prefer not to increase it by making them nervous with further stinger flybys. Besides which, Cags are supposed to stay on the carrier, or didn’t anyone tell you that?”

  Eagleton couldn’t resist pretending ignorance. “No! No one told me that. I’ll head back to the barn right now, Admiral. Thanks for setting me straight on that.” He heard Cate utter a half-vocal ‘huh’ before she cut the channel off. As he steered his stinger to a vector that would take him back to Kursk, he wondered how long it would take for the Tyrell to come back to this system and try again. Based on their past behavior, that’s exactly what they would do, and the EAF was counting on it. Waterloo was already heading back to Sol to pick up more stingers and more drones. The Saratoga might be operational again in time to join Waterloo on the return trip. Having a fourth carrier in the fleet would help a lot, but he wasn’t looking forward to the next battle. The Tyrell tended to err on the side of caution when it came to follow-up attacks. He’d be surprised if they sent less than 120 super-ships next time. It was obvious from a preliminary examination of the wreckage at the battle site that both enemy carriers had not been crippled. He and Cate had to assume that they got away and would be back.

  Metrone shuttle in planetary orbit:

  Admiral Napelon watched the human attack craft veer away sharply and shook his fist at it. Those arrogant humans had deliberately used his planet and, more importantly, his fleet as bait to lure a Tyrell attack into an ambush. His superiors were still saying there was some doubt about that, but he was absolutely certain that’s what had happened. And regardless of the First Speaker’s willingness to let this aggression go unanswered in order to pursue the defeat of the greater danger that the Tyrell posed, he, Admiral Napelon, was not willing to simply shrug his shoulders and write off the death of his people as mere ‘collateral damage’ as the humans so bloodlessly described it. Somehow, somewhere, he would make the humans pay for this outrage even as a tiny voice in the back of his mind told him he would have done the same thing in reverse if the opportunity had come along. It took a while for him to acknowledge that tiny voice’s message. He would not jeopardize his first priority, which was the defeat of the Tyrell, but after that, he would find a way to teach the humans a painful lesson. He owed that much to his dead comrades.

  EAF HQ on Earth:

  Mirakova entered the conference room where her planning staff were waiting and sat down at the head of the oval table. “You may start your presentation, Commander Holden,” she said.

  “Thank you, Admiral.”

  As the young officer got up to stand in front of the wall-mounted computer screen, she noticed once again how much he reminded her of Gort Eagleton and not just because of his physical resemblance.

  “As you know, we received the engineers’ report on their examination of the Tyrell super-ship wreckage, and we’ve analyzed their data and conclusions. This first real field test of the stinger-KE missile combination has generated the proverbial good news and bad news result. The good news is that our KE missile was able to home in on the energy emissions caused by the interaction of anti-tachyon particles on enemy hulls. The number of missiles that missed their targets altogether was less than the 3% we projected. A related piece of good news is that penetration of enemy armor was also greater than expected due to weakening of the armor from the heat and radiation released from the matter/anti-matter annihilation of the particle beam.

  “The bad news is that those KE penetrations did less damage to critical systems than we expected, and we think we know why. It’s a bit counter-intuitive, but what seems to be happening is that when the KE warhead hits the weakened hull, it doesn’t impart as much concussion on the target vessel as it normally would have if it hit armor that wasn’t damaged at all. Less concussion means less internal damage from sudden and violent jerks which affect the entire ship, not just the section that was hit. My staff have come up with a possible solution.” A schematic appeared on the display. “If we substitute uranium 235 for most of the tungsten that our KE missile warheads are currently made of, and if we configure the uranium so that two sub-critical portions smash into each other at the moment the warhead impacts the target, the combined uranium mass will exceed critical mass, and we’ll get a fission reaction. Keeping in mind that the warhead is still moving at a high fraction of light speed, the fission reaction, in theory, should happen after the warhead has penetrated the hull armor and is inside the ship. My staff has run simulations, and a warhead with an explosive power equal to that of 34,000 tons of TNT would release enough energy to vaporize everything within 610 meters, and the resulting blast wave would shatter the rest of the ship into thousands of pieces. One missile of that type per Tyrell super-ship would dramatically improve the ability of stinger squadrons to defeat large numbers of Tyrell ships. The engineering aspects of fission warheads is well known, and we know how to enrich uranium relatively quickly too. A test warhead could be ready in 21 days from the initial go ahead. We’ve done a survey of available supplies, and ther
e is enough U-235 in storage, left over from the 20th and early 21st century cold wars, to build several hundred warheads of that size. The stored U-235 would have to be re-manufactured into the right configurations, so production will take some time to produce large numbers of warheads.”

  Mirakova was impressed. Instead of maybe crippling a super-ship with half a dozen hits from tungsten type KE warheads, one fission warhead missile would be enough to destroy it outright.

  “That certainly sounds like what we need to offset the Tyrell’s enormous quantitative advantage, but I can’t help wondering why the Tyrell haven’t used this same idea themselves? Surely they have the technology and engineering knowhow to build fission warheads, don’t they?”

  Holden nodded. “We’re certain that the Tyrell could build these kinds of warheads if they wanted to. When we simulated fission warheads hitting undamaged armor, we found that the resulting damage is more or less localized because the armor is so thick that most of the energy from the explosion is used up in vaporizing the armor. It’s our consensus that the Tyrell realized that thick armor neutralizes fission warheads to the point where they can get almost the same amount of damage from KE missiles using tungsten or depleted uranium, both of which are easier to obtain in large quantities. It’s the weakening of the armor from the anti-matter particle shower that makes fission warheads so effective. If we assume that the Tyrell are more interested in the fighting rather than the conquering, which is what our Intelligence Psych people are telling us, then using KE weapons would prolong battles, and fission weapons in combination with anti-matter beams would make conquests too easy for them.”