Koban: The Mark of Koban (32 page)

Thankfully, the lone carrier and ten patrol
ships stayed well away from the planet, their involvement predicated on a
successful elimination of Clanships and single ships, so that atmospheric
surface attacks could commence. Over optimism had brought them along, caution
had spared those resources any damage.

Mauss issued the general recall, and the battered
fleet started a ragged series of Jumps to the rendezvous point, a tenth light
year away. Invincible was the last to leave. In its polar position, selected
for improved observation of the mainly Northern hemisphere attack on the two
largest continents, she had to helplessly watch as six of the scattered surviving
disabled destroyers valiantly tried to fight off the hoard of single ships
swarming around them. It made her sick at heart, but over a hundred Clanships were
closing with the flagship. Invincible Jumped, leaving the doomed destroyers to
their fate.

****

Early in the After Action Briefing, Admiral
Hawthorne made an introduction. “Madam President, I am pleased to present Vice
Admiral Mauss. She has specifically requested to speak here today, to
personally answer your questions concerning the actions at K1, and to describe
our losses as well as our accomplishments.” Hawthorne turned to face the tall,
almost lanky Vice Admiral, climbing the three steps to the low stage.

Mauss looked resolved, perfectly willing to
accept the blame for their defeat, and she intended to offer no excuses. She would
be brutally honest about her failure to react sooner to changes in the battle.
She wanted to offer her first hand observations and opinions, so that in future
Krall confrontations, by different Naval commanders of course, they could learn
from her mistakes.

Hawthorne extended her right hand and Mauss
reciprocated. A handshake being offered rather than a salute while indoors. The
Chairfem moved to the edge of the stage and sat at the end of a row, joining
the other Joint Chiefs.

Mauss, left alone, faced her Commander in
Chief. “Madam President, I am at your disposal. Where would you wish me to
start?”

“Admiral, when the Chairfem contacted my
office two hours ago, it was the middle of the night on the east coast.  The
fleet had just made its collective White Outs near our Lunar repair facilities.
At that time, the Chairfem only knew we had lost thirty-five percent of our
forces in Operation Deep Lance.

“Vice Admiral Mauss, could you detail our
losses for me, and then I’ll allow you to describe what we faced at K1, and how
the events unfolded. I’m sure this is difficult for you, and I apologize that
this debriefing is happening so quickly after your arrival.

“However, the Fleet’s return is the top news
topic in the solar system, and the damaged ships and those that are apparently missing
are topics of hot discussion and speculation. I have no idea how the number of
ships comprising Operation Deep Lance was leaked.” She shot a look at the Joint
Chiefs, letting them know that more than Mauss’ ass was swinging in the wind.

“This was a
secret
military operation,
but the press even knows the types and names of the ships we sent. We’ll find
out if they also knew where it was going and when. I need to have a statement
prepared for a press conference in a few hours. Admiral, please proceed at your
own pace, and I’ll ask questions as they arise.”

“Yes Mam.” Mauss mentally girded herself for
this. The week spent returning from K1 had given her time to prepare, and
analyze. The Flagship’s AI, Jacqui, the newest JQ model available, had been
linked to every ship in Deep Lance, and had also monitored Krall transmissions
and movements.

“Our losses amounted to thirty-seven percent
of the fighting ships we Jumped with. I exclude the fighters and patrol ships,
which did not engage the enemy.

“We lost three battleships…,” She hesitated.
“Uh, Excuse me Madam President, do you wish the names of the ships lost?”

“Not at this time Admiral. I’m sure I’ll
receive those later. I only wish to hear the number and types, to gain a
perspective for your following analysis.”

“Yes Mam. As I said, we lost three
battleships, six heavy cruisers, ten light cruisers, and twenty-two destroyers.
Out of the one hundred ten ships of Deep Lance.

“Of those ships that successfully Jumped from
K1, there was severe damage to the other three battleships, lesser damage to
two battlecruisers and two heavy cruisers, and severe to light damage to
thirty-two destroyers. We lost nine thousand eight hundred thirty one Navy
personnel, and a hundred twelve civilian scientist and technicians. There are
injuries that are still life threatening to more than two hundred of the two
thousand three hundred twenty six wounded.”

Stanford interjected a few questions. “The
fatalities are much higher than the number of wounded. I thought that was
reversed in combat, more wounded than dead.”

“Perhaps that’s true for ground combat, Mam.
When we lost a ship to the Krall, it either exploded in a ball of gas, or was
taken by boarders in single ships. The Krall take no prisoners and don’t trade
wounded with us. Our only wounded returned with the surviving ships.”

“Of course, I wasn’t thinking when I asked
that. You listed civilians lost. Who were they Admiral?”

“Our ships operate with new and copied
technology, never used in combat by us. It’s still under development. We had
science and technical observers with us, some placed on each class of ship, to
learn what went wrong and what worked right. Many of them were as unlucky as
the naval personnel.”

“I understand, Admiral. I was comparing the
losses by class of ships, and I see that the largest, our battleships, aside
from the undamaged dreadnaught Invincible, experienced high losses and damage,
as did virtually all of the light cruisers. Why were our strongest, and our
oldest, the two most vulnerable categories?”

“Mam, that is part of the analysis I have
prepared, but let me first address an anomaly in that study, the light
cruisers. These were retrofitted older cruisers, with less effective point
defense protection. The Krall Worm missiles reached them all, and none of them
had failsafe fusion bottles as part of their original design. When one or the
other of their bottles ruptured, the plasma that released internally blew them apart.”

“Excuse me Admiral…, Worm missiles?”

“Sorry Mam. I was ahead of myself. The Krall
used a weapon we have named the Worm missile, which we had never seen, probably
because we have not had a significant naval engagement with them prior to K1.
These are fiendishly effective weapons, and deceptively small.

“The ones we have captured, or rather some
that ran out of fuel inside our battleships are about four and a half feet
long, and just under four inches in diameter. They are a slender tube, with a low-tech
reaction style drive, burning fuel and generating thrust. Instead of a warhead,
they have a device in their nose that will bore holes through virtually
anything it encounters. Not a drill, but one of the scientists that examined
them, described it as a quantum decoherence
device. Another scientist thought it might be a quantum probability
controller. Believe me Mam, I’m only parroting their speculations, I don’t know
what they mean.

“However, personnel that saw them in action,
indeed a number were unfortunate enough to
feel
what they did, have
called the warhead a disintegrator beam.”

“My God! They used these beams only in
missiles? Why didn’t they just carve us up at a distance?” They had been afraid
of what hidden advance technology the Krall had in their arsenal.

“Mam, none of the scientist understand how
they work.  However, they found circuitry inside that can switch the effect on
and off, and adjusts the apparent focal length from a few inches to a maximum
of just over a hundred twenty feet from the device. These are apparently short-range
beams, and the quantum device itself looks like it was adapted to fit on the
missile nose after the fact, and probably not originally intended for such use.

“The beam always has a narrow four inch cylindrical
coverage, and any material we have tested with it simply converts into its
constituent atoms, breaking every molecular bond. It forms a gas that expands
in the cavity created. That gas expansion tends to oppose the progress of the
missile until a vent hole disintegrated in front releases the pressure and it
continues forward. It has a simple guidance system that seeks the most potent
magnetic field source. Namely, they seek a fusion bottle’s magnetic confinement
field.

“That’s how we lost all of our light cruisers,
when a bottle catastrophically ruptured with no way to safely vent the released
plasma to space. The newer ships all survived the loss of a bottle due to the
failsafe designs. Some ships, like the Gauntlet and Mace even lost all three bottles
and Jumped home. The Worms match their name by passing through a ship, turning
back and doing it again and again, until their propulsion gives out.”

“If that explains the loss of all ten of the
light cruisers Admiral, what killed the newer large ships?”

“Kamikaze Krall Clanships, Mam.”

“An alien word Admiral? What does it mean?”

“Sorry, it’s a word from the old Japanese
language on Earth Mam. A military historian, as a lot of us Navy types are,
will know the reference. They committed suicide with a damaged Clanship that
was out of the fight. They still had Jump capability, and using the precision
of T squared drives, with the target so close they can see it, they made a
short Jump and performed a White Out inside one of our ships.”

“I didn’t think that was possible, or at least
it was almost impossible.”

“With our original Jump drives we didn’t have
the precision, and also couldn’t Jump such short distances. This was a use of T
squared capability that hadn’t occurred to us. Obviously, the Krall have had thousands
of more years to think of ways to kill.

“I thought every Krall’s goal was to live to
breed and make baby Krall just as dangerous as the parent. Doesn’t suicide
circumvent this?”

“Not if you have your sperm or unfertilized
eggs preserved for use if you prove to be a credit to your race or clan. Our
AI’s have been slowly learning the Krall language, or rather both of them. They
have a low frequency and a high frequency language.

“In any case, the suicide ships each received
or made a transmission before their self-destruction. The rough translation
seems to be of two forms. One, from a Clanship, was an announcement of
intention, and a request to preserve their bloodline. The other messages, from
various domes on the planet, appear to have caused Clanships to copy this
action. The order given was approximately phrased as ‘do it for the roadway and
clan’ or perhaps ‘for the path and clan’ is more accurate.

“I believe leaders of the Krall told certain
ships to make the sacrifice. This only began after the Gauntlet Jumped to
safety, at my explicit order. They apparently wanted to prevent any more of us
from escaping.”

“Can we counter the Worm missiles and suicide
ships? I know you have just returned, but you had time to consider and confer
with your officers on the way home.”

“Mam, the suicide ships were more successful
because I let my ships maintain fixed formations and orbits, making them more
predictable targets. That was my error. New tactics can eliminate most of that
sort of predictability. We can also supplement our point defenses with more flexible
close-in laser systems than our movable triple beam pods, intended for single
ship protection. The Worms were easily knocked out if hit, nevertheless, once
inside the optimum defense range of the laser pods, it was harder to hit them.

“The main cause of our mission’s failure was
in not totally surprising the enemy. They were forewarned, and some were
waiting for us, with others rising to meet us as we arrived.”

 A dangerous tone to her voice, Stanford
asked, “Do you think there was a leak, like that the press obviously received
to announce what ships were being sent?”

“That press leak is surely a public relations
problem, Mam. However, it couldn’t be responsible for the warning the Krall
had. For one, the enemy would have had all four thousand Clanships up and waiting
to surround us front and rear if they knew that far in advance.

“What we observed were a few hundred Clanships
that apparently arrived just before we executed our White Outs. It was
not
a random distribution, and they clustered only between the
battleships
and the planet. There were none clustered below the battlecruisers or the other
ship divisions, even though they represented more overall combined firepower.
Furthermore, the first Clanships to arrive had
already fired
Worms at
the points where our battleships were about to pop into Normal Space.

“They knew not only we were coming but also where
some ships would emerge. Specifically they knew where the
battleships
would be, and they didn’t know it very far in advance.”

Stanford sensed a confidence in Mauss’
declaration. “If the Krall had no general warning of the overall operation,
Admiral, do you have an idea how they only zeroed in on our most powerful, most
massive ships?”