Defying the Prophet: A Military Space Opera (The Sentience Trilogy Book 2) (7 page)

Xlan thought he may have discovered
some
commonality between his views and those of Harf, Region-Master of the reds of Region-2, but who really knew what Harf actually thought about anything? Harf was a political animal, whose public opinions shifted with every variation in the current political winds. Xlan wondered if Harf actually had any real convictions, or if he merely agreed with the opinions of the High-Rak around him on any given day. If so, Harf certainly couldn’t be counted on as a true progressive. 

Blug, on the other paw, was a modernist visionary — a true progressive in every sense of the word. It was no wonder that Xlan felt so at home here in Region-4, with Blug’s greens. Xlan knew he’d soon have to move on and visit the browns of Region-5. Region-Master Olin was relatively young, so Xlan hoped to find him having a firm progressive bent as well. 

Xior was healthy and still in his prime, but he certainly wouldn’t live forever. As Xior’s eldest, Xlan fully expected to succeed his father as Supreme-Master some day — and when he did, he’d sweep away the last vestiges of religious superstition and public worship of the ancient Raknii deity Dol, and all the rest of “the old ways.”

The Dolrak would always be necessary, of course, as it was only through their hypnotics had the Raknii been able to curb the bestial natures that predominated in their males. Some few Raknii males eventually developed sufficient mental controls to enable them to function within the boundaries of society without hypnotics. But for the vast majority, Xlan seriously doubted the hypnotically enforced rank system could have been implemented without them. 

But Xlan didn’t see the hypnotics as a gift from an ancient Raknii god, but recognized them as just another application of science. The Dolrak would become less priestesses to a superstition, but secular practitioners of a science, very much like modern healers, after Xlan ascended to the Raknii throne. Therefore Xlan thought it prudent that he personally visit all of the region-master’s households, to learn of them and determine who would be a natural ally, who a natural enemy and who would need manipulating. So far, Xlan had found one of each.

While Erig snored lustily, Xlan groomed his immaculate white fur, as he had been born with the same imperial markings as his father. By all outward appearances, one might have thought Xlan was almost as inebriated as Erig, but this particular evening Xlan had intentionally lowered his normal indulgence in the exotic intoxicants, which he and Erig regularly imbibed so abundantly on most other nights. 

Xlan had seen something
odd
… a fleeting glimpse of someone dressed all in black, but far too large to be a female Dolrak, for whom those colors were reserved, and it had given him a chill. Xlan had certainly heard all of the old dam’s tales — every Raknii cub had.  Although he couldn’t be sure exactly
what
it was he’d seen, the experience gave Xlan pause. Enough pause that he masked the fact that most of his drinks that evening ended up in the planter beside him, instead of inside him. 

A jeweled lesser-fang blade covered in purest gold rested beneath the pillow at his right hand. Thus it was that when the assassin came, it was the OverMaster’s eyes that widened in total surprised when Xlan suddenly moved unexpectedly, shoving the sharp golden blade violently between his ribs. Xlan looked down at the black-clad body, lying on the floor next to the slumbering Erig, with its strange onyx and diamond sunburst rank-stone. 

So it’s true… they really do exist!
 

Xlan hurriedly used his blade to carve the dead OverMaster’s rank-stone from his forehead and slipped it into his pocket. He then stripped the black silks off the body and hid them under his bedding, as he and Erig had been drinking and sharing stories in Xlan’s quarters. He then wiped the blade’s handle and placed the bloody fang-blade into Erig’s unconscious hand. He hefted the heavy body over the balcony, where it landed with a hollow thud amongst the wickedly thorned fang bushes, three stories below.

Tomorrow, the body would be found and a very confused Erig hailed as a hero. Regardless of his inability to remember any details of the event, it would be obvious to everyone that Erig had somehow thwarted an assassin, strangely dressed only in small clothes, from harming the Prince. Most would obviously question the missing rank-stone carved from the assassin’s forehead, but that, too, would remain a mystery.

Xlan considered the implications of such an assassination attempt. Only his father could have possibly dispatched an OverMaster, so Xlan was now warned. Why had his father sent an assassin to kill him? What could possibly have happened that had changed the mere philosophical differences between them into something the supreme-master decided required ending Xlan’s life? 

Fortunately for Xlan, the assassin had made a mistake. He’d become over confident in his rank-stone’s ability to make him invisible to all those around him. By Xlan’s coloring, he really should have suspected. Like his father, Xlan was
rogue.

* * * *

Chapter-8

War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.
— Major General
William Tecumseh Sherman

The bridge crew of CSS
Ghost
had their standing orders and, within seconds of receiving the “go” signal, buried within the Nork City media network holovision broadcast, the armored door to one of her
two primary launch tubes slid open and a single preprogrammed 400 millisecond fire-control scan gave the heavy yield, ship-killer missile its target, and it leaped away towards the stern tubes of the massive Union attack carrier that
Ghost
had been shadowing for several days. 

The Confederate
Infiltrator
then closed her missile tube door, immediately reoriented and raced away on her revolutionary gravitic drive, boosting herself into a higher orbit and began the chase of the light carrier in front of her, at the maximum speed she could make without achieving escape velocity and leaving orbit altogether. A massive explosion ripped through the attack carrier’s stern, destroying her engine and reactor compartments, depriving the great ship of power.

Strangely, the Yankees must have already been at high alert status, as the first light carrier had already managed to get six fighters launched by the time
Ghost
made it into ideal attack position and shot her last big ship-killer missile directly up that carrier’s stern tubes, as well. An alert destroyer crewman somehow evidently spotted this second missile, as it
seemingly appeared out of nowhere, as it left
Ghost’s
launch tube. But, as they were unable to get any kind of scan-lock on whatever had fired the missile, their own missiles were useless. It took mere seconds before the destroyer began blind-firing her twin 5-gigawatt pulse lasers into the area where the ship-killer missile mysteriously originated. 

But
Ghost
was no longer where she had been, as Captain Diamond again sent
Ghost
racing towards the third Federal carrier. With the task force’s flagship suddenly without power, the Union’s command and control structure was temporarily broken, as it would take precious time for a Federal cruiser to respond to the Union admiral’s battery-powered comm signal, so the admiral’s flag could be transferred to another ship still having power.

* * * *

Confederate Admiral Eileen Thorn transitioned most of her fleet a mere 30 light-seconds out from Tensee and began launching her
Raptors
and
Lightnings
immediately, as her fleet barreled in towards the planet at their maximum normal space speed. The startled Yankees were sluggish, as it was mid-sleep period for most of their crews. Vice Admiral Carlos’ apparent disregard for any possibility of being attacked had radiated down his chain-of-command and reduced their response capabilities considerably. Within 18 minutes, all 725 of Thorn’s Confederate fighters were screaming in on the single battle-ready Union task force and the flotilla of damaged ships they shepherded. 

Again, just as Chris Rawley had surprised Loggins on the first day of
2
nd
Tensee
, Thorn’s fighters were amongst Carlos’ task force before most could even get their pants on. Carlos’ flagship, the attack carrier USS
Valley Forge,
was the first to receive a massive barrage of anti-ship missiles from Thorn’s 350
Demon
fighters, outfitted in an attack configuration and fully loaded with anti-ship missiles. Thorn’s 375
Raptors
raked the bridges of both of the Federal light carriers with charged-particle beam projector fire, as they awaited the Union’s fighter response. Having blasted the stern of Carlos’ flagship into a flaming ruin, the Confederate
Demons
swung around and headed back to their carriers at top speed for rearmament. 

Thorn’s
Raptors
employed ECM and popped thermal flares to escape the few anti-fighter missiles fired
from the Yankee’s escort ships, as they dived down to meet the first of the Federal
Cobra
in-system Planetary Guard fighters struggling to climb out of the planet’s atmosphere. The Federals hadn’t waited to get all of their fighters launched, but climbed towards the battle in squadron strength from multiple bases on the planet’s surface. At a 2:1 numerical disadvantage in total fighters already, these small clumps of rising, green-piloted
Cobra
squadrons were decimated by Thorn’s veterans, coming down at them in overwhelming numbers. 

As soon as the Confederate fleet came within maximum anti-ship missile range, a fire-suppression salvo of long range missiles was launched, followed by a second, and then a third, as fast as their auto-loaders could cycle new missiles into place. The Union task force came apart, as the missile barrage from three times their number was also accompanied by the incredible firepower of eight converted missile-battleships, and a massive energy weapons barrage from CSS
Defiant. Defiant
was the single battleship which had not completed missile conversion yet, but had had her engines, fire-control and scan equipments thoroughly updated.

* * * *

Ghost
finished off the third Federal carrier, with all four of her medium-yield, anti-ship missiles disappearing up her drive tubes from directly astern. This one managed to get 47 of her 65 fighters launched before the
Tydlich Bundesgenosse Gespenster…
the
Lethal Confederate Ghost
, took her out of the fight. Captain Diamond wished that he’d been able to get them all sooner, but a mere 53 Federal fighters should prove no problem against Kalis’ almost 700. 

Diamond’s orders had been emphatic, with no room for interpretation. With her part of the battle concluded, Diamond reluctantly turned
Ghost
away from the Union fleet and accelerated away from the battle, lest she inadvertently be caught in the crossfire by units of both sides, neither of which could detect she was there. 

God, I love this ship!
  Diamond thought.
I just wish she could carry a few more of those big ship-killer missiles. 

Diamond and his small crew felt utterly invincible in this little
Infiltrator
and somehow, taking three Federal carriers out of the battle single-handedly just didn’t seem quite enough, in such a target-rich environment. He determined to find the words to get whoever had engineered this marvel to come out with a bigger version, capable of carrying a LOT more ship-killer missiles, in his after-action report. The long range high-yield missiles weren’t really necessary, as
Ghost
had to get close enough to her target before firing that there was no time for ECM to be employed against her surprise attacks. 

Could a new type of specially-designed short range, high-yield ship-killer missile be made small enough that these beauties could carry more of them?

* * * *

Thorn lost only 36 fighters in taking out the Union’s meager fighter contingent they managed to get launched against her. With such a gross disparity in firepower and the loss of their fighter cover, not a single Yankee ship escaped the system before the hopelessly outgunned Federals surrendered.

Thorn then summoned her transports awaiting word at the designated rendezvous point, just outside the solar system, and began negotiations with the commander of the Alliance Fleet Marine contingent down on the surface of Tensee, advising him as to
the full extent of the hopelessness of his situation. 16-gigawatt pulse lasers from real battleships did terrible things to the human body, and pretty much anything else that got in the way of those massive plasma bolts — and Thorn had
nine
of them. By the time Thorn’s transports carrying 25,000 Confederate Marines finally arrived, Union Marine General Maxwell Klinghoffer wisely decided the mere postponement of the inevitable was insufficient reason to throw away the lives of his 50,000 Fleet Marines. 

Klinghoffer was understandably bitter at the incredible ineptitude shown by the Alliance Fleet in general, and Vice Admiral Marin Carlos
in particular. Instead of focusing upon the defense of Tensee, Loggins and Carlos had both spread their assets much too thin, letting two-thirds of their strength go to waste, for the dubious purpose of blockading Missip, Arka and Souri, where Thorn could pick them off piecemeal at her leisure… just as she had retaken Tensee. 

* * * *

Confederate Fleet Admiral Kalis’ 345
Raptors
had no difficulties in disposing of the 53
Raptors
that managed to launch from the Federal carriers, nor the mere 97 in-system
Cobras
that lifted for battle. Kalis lost only 37 of his fighters in the melee, as his pilots were veterans of multiple battles, while the Federal pilots had very few actual combat veterans among them. Some things just couldn’t be learned in a simulator. 

Kalis’ ships used evasive action and ECM to avoid much of the missile and pulse-laser fire coming from Nork’s orbital forts, as they maneuvered to cut off the outnumbered Federal ships that were scattering in all directions. As this attack wasn’t intended to reduce the planet’s defenses in preparation for an invasion, Kalis’ ships merely tried to avoid the orbital forts as much as possible. His
Demon
fighters caught and mauled the heavily outnumbered Yankee ships who tried to use the planet as cover to escape behind it, in a course that was intended to take them as far away as possible from the incoming full Confederate fleet.

Unbeknownst to the combatants swirling angrily in Nork space high above the atmosphere, an incredible number of electronic banking transactions began moving an even more incredible amount of money between accounts — a virtual tsunami of transactions dwarfing even the heaviest business day in history by a factor of thousands. Governmental accounts, Consortium corporate accounts, Consortium executives’ personal accounts, and the numbered accounts in foreign banks of where corrupt federal officials stored their ill-gotten gains, were virtually emptied into thousands of dummy accounts, where they were then immediately shifted again into yet other dummy accounts. Accounts were transferred in their multiple millions of hop-scotched transactions, until they eventually were converted into gold certificates deposited into hundreds of dummy corporate accounts in British, German, Australian, Italian, Russian, Japanese and Chinese banks. Stock market records were wiped. 

A full third of the Confederate fleet ships, not actively involved in hunting down the surviving Union task force ships trying to flee the system, launched multiple, heavy-yield, ship-killers to designated coordinates on the planet’s surface — the coordinates of storage houses where the off-site archive records that backed up data for the banks and stock markets resided. These normally would have been used to recreate the previous records for all those emptied accounts and wiped records. The Yankees were going to have the devil’s own time,  trying to recreate those records without their archives. 

* * * *

Faced with overwhelming firepower that made his position entirely untenable, Union Fleet Marine General Maxwell Klinghoffer reluctantly reached the only logical conclusion available to him that would not simply waste the lives of his troops for no possible gain. He formally surrendered his command of 50,000 Alliance Fleet Marines to Confederate Fleet Marine General Jack Schmitt’s mere 20,000 Confederate Marines — Marines
who had the backup of a fleet with nine
honest-to-God
battleships at their disposal.

Federal Vice Admiral Marin Carlos was also not a happy man. When emergency power had finally been restored to his flagship, enough to reestablish communications, he discovered that Rear Admiral Harold Bentley had already formally surrendered all Federal fleet forces in the Tensee system. With their life-support systems still offline and those of their combat armor fading, the captain of the USS
Valley Forge
reiterated his ship’s surrender and allowed Confederate Marines and damage control personnel to come aboard without resistance. They began transferring the Union crew onto Confederate transport vessels, in which their marines had recently arrived. Carlos had to be physically restrained, sedated and carried off, belted to a stretcher, guided along in the weightless confines of the ship by disgusted Union officers.

Confederate Admiral Eileen Thorn wrote up her after-action report and sent it off to Fleet Admiral Kalis at Ginia, aboard a Consortium-owned commercial spaceliner that had been confiscated, with a Confederate crew manning the cockpit. Slowly the Tensee government came out of hiding and reestablished civilian control of the planet. Thorn wasn’t going anywhere until she had enough forces to hold Tensee, while she freed Arka, Missip and Souri. She wasn’t going to make the same mistake the Yankees had.