Koban: The Mark of Koban (36 page)

It looked like the cozy first name mode of
address was shifting in the direction of professionalism, and of telling Mauss
how to do her job.

“Mam, if they are made of some form of
collapsed matter, a conventional warhead might not do much damage. We weren’t initially
very worried about the Worm’s size either, which was small and relatively slow.

“These balls have an unknown capability and
purpose, and clearly display a materials technology we don’t understand. Our
scientists say we can’t make stable dense matter like that outside of a lab,
and even then only with tiny diamond anvils. We can make it in pinhead
quantities that last for a few microseconds when pressure is released. They
claim there is a theoretical stable crystalline structure of certain elements
that might maintain stability after the pressure is released, but the binding energy
of the material potentially could release in a powerful explosion if the
crystal is broken or cracked.”

Hawthorne shrugged. “Well Admiral, we won’t
find out what they do with our fleet sitting in the Rhama system. The President
needs to show that the money spent on the Navy can at least slow down Krall
attacks, if not stop them.”

Hawthorne was clearly not going to accept another
delay from Mauss, simply because they didn’t know the enemy’s new weapons capability.
The truth of the matter was that only by going up against them would we
discover what the Krall had in store for the fleet.

“I might add that the President was very
impressed with your proposed counter measures for the Worms. I told her they
did have sensors that steer them towards nearby powerful magnetic fields, such as
fusion bottles. Your idea of putting unshielded fusion bottles on the outer
hulls with magnetic confinement fields active but no dangerous plasma inside
was outstanding. Like moths to a candle, they made perfect decoys in testing of
the captured missile steering systems. I don’t know how well the new internal
magnetic shielding will work against them, but they shouldn’t get that deep
with more enticing targets out where the new reactive armor can sheer them into
pieces when they penetrate the decoy modules. I too was impressed that you had
a better and simpler solution than our big brained scientists came up with.”

Chuckling, Mauss accepted the praise with a
caveat. “Having missiles fired at your ass tends to focus your mind more
sharply than the intellectual challenge of a chess match. Besides, an engineer
from Gauntlet accidentally gave me the idea. In a hospital visit of our wounded,
she mentioned to me that she wished she’d been off to the side rather than
standing right in front of a bottle. A nearly expired Worm missile entered the Drive
Room compartment, found room to turn, and drilled through her thigh enroute to the
bottle. Obviously, it wasn’t after her. She simply stood close to the magnetic
field it was designed to find.”

“What if a Worm still gets deep inside a ship?
Will the new magnetic shielding conceal the bottles?”

“Not totally, Mam, but we have other internal
decoys to activate and draw them, and we can spin the ship and alter internal
gravity to throw off missile guidance. That will play hell on the Drive Room
crew’s equilibrium, but saving weapons power for the ship is more important
than their vertigo.”

“What about the kamikaze Clanships? I told the
president you would be zig zaging to be more unpredictable. The Krall pilots
fly mostly by eye, based on our analysis of their flight tracks. So our
navigational AIs will randomly shift courses, and you say they can compensate
our targeting systems by feeding the upcoming course changes to the fire
control AI’s for offense and defense?”

“It works in training, Admiral. That’s all I
can say.”

“What does it feel like internally, with all
that shifting and turning?”

“Better take your motion sickness shots early.
However, we are finding T squared gravity compensation can improve inertial
stability considerably more than we expected originally. We didn’t foresee a
need for so many quick maneuvers when we kept the inertial compensation reaction
speed at rates we had always used.”

The Chairfem next stepped dangerously close to
a forbidden line. “No matter our own prohibitions, don’t you wish you could
nuke those orbital platforms and Eight Balls and go in deep for a knockout
punch?”

Mauss wondered if this was a test of her sense
of duty and discipline, or if the Chairfem was exploring the boundaries of how
far Mauss would go if given free reign. The brief hesitation before she
answered proved she had considered her reply. 

“Mam, the Krall have made it clear that
weapons of mass destruction, if used against them on any of our worlds would result
in the total eradication of life on those worlds. We may be attacking a world where
they have already killed all humans, but they are definitely not going to
accept that as prepayment if we used nukes on or near K1. There can be no doubt
they are temperamentally capable of destroying all life on one of our worlds, even
Earth itself. They would not hesitate to kill as many billions of humans as it
took to drive the lesson home.”

“Oh, of course Admiral. We could never take
that risk. I was just thinking of how this strike’s chances of success would be
assured if we could knock out those platforms. Only…, don’t you wonder why they
presented us with that ultimatum? They have never landed a large force where
such mass destruction weapons could find a concentration of warriors. Except,
those forces concentrated on K1.”

“Admiral, they say they intend to make war on
us for generations. We had over seven hundred twenty worlds when the war
started. They took one lightly populated world as a base, and we have withdrawn
from several others that were more private corporate property than real
colonies. As a race, as a civilization, we haven’t
really
been hurt so
far. People living on Hub worlds see the war on Tri-Vid, but have not been personally
a risk. However, if we greatly increase the level of our attack on K1 and can’t
contain them, the Hub worlds or Old Colonies might pay the price.

“K1 is only a forward base in our space. We
still don’t know where the Krall come from, and where their ships, orbital
platforms, and other weapons are built or stored.

“We don’t even know how many of them we face.
Autopsies of dead pregnant female warriors revealed dozens of eggs. They can
probably reproduce much faster than we can. The tattoos of most warriors sent on
raids show us that we mostly face novices each time, with the most experienced
warriors placed in charge of Clanships, and slightly lower rank warriors lead
octets or groups of octets. Where do those newly experienced novice warriors go
after extraction?

“We kill twenty-five percent of their surface raiders
overall, and sometimes thirty to forty percent on more prepared and disciplined
worlds like Poldark. Yet the rank and file warriors all have empty throat
tattoos on the next raids. I think the Krall are holding the experienced
survivors in reserve. They are probably waiting for us to build up our own ground
forces, applying increasing pressure on us to build our armies until they can
mount wider scale large raids. Only then does the prohibition of weapons of
mass destruction make sense, because it is on our own invaded worlds we would
be most tempted to use them. In my opinion, the hundred four million people that
have died so far are only the prelude.”

Hawthorne wasn’t pleased with her remarks. “Admiral
Mauss, I’m somewhat relieved you didn’t go with us to brief the President and
her Cabinet. Aside from you needing this final recon data, I’m afraid your
views might lead the President to mistakenly shift spending from the Navy to
the Army, and also to our newly reconstituted Marines and Air Force.” When she
laughed, Mauss thought she detected a twinge of nervousness.

Hawthorne reinforced that thought. “We need to
reward the President’s loyalty to the Navy, the only force she commands that
has taken the battle to the enemy. If we knockout the Krall on K1, we can go
looking for their bases and production worlds in their own space. We’ve long
thought we could make them pull back if we hit
their
home worlds for a
change.”

“I originally thought that myself Mam. However,
the Krall don’t display as much concern for their own warriors as we do for our
livestock. They don’t value the same things we do. I doubt a threat to one of
their worlds would provoke strong protectiveness, even if we find some of them.
Not as that same threat would draw us to defend a human world.”

Hawthorne shook her head. “Let’s hope that
isn’t the case. Forcing the Krall to pull back is our best hope of preventing
the slow destruction of our society. We don’t believe we can ever match them head
to head in ground warfare. They have matched us in every single weapons and
armor improvement. The Army analysts think the Krall deliberately lag a bit
behind us so that our troops appear to have a slight equipment advantage.
However, their physical capability, speed, instincts, and strength, always outweighs
the equipment advantages.

“When that physical advantage isn’t quite enough
due to our new equipment, the very next raid against our equipment uses Krall weapons
or armor suddenly improved enough to restore the near balance. Poldark has seen
their thirty to forty percent kill ratio diminish to about the same twenty-five
percent level as on worlds that have not kept up with Poldark’s push for better
equipment and tactics. Krall raiders are better equipped on Poldark, but not on
other worlds. They tailor the raiders to match the opposition.

“The Joint Chief’s now accept the truth that
the Krall have had many thousands of years of warfare. They can incrementally
improve their ground attacks as much as needed, for as long as we can fulfill
our role of killing off their less skilled novices. However, they don’t appear
as skilled at Space warfare. At least the jury-rigged Worm missiles and
kamikaze attacks suggest there’s a gap we can exploit there.

“Per your own analysis Admiral Mauss, we can
nullify their advanced White Out warning by Jumping from so close that they
can’t predict when or where we will emerge. You have made sure the Worms will
be little threat this time. You determined the dispersed attack we made last
time played to their strengths of individual ship against ship fighting. The
combined fleet defenses this time should keep the Worms away and the group
random movements of the entire fleet will make suicide attacks less successful.
If they try those anyway, the Clanships will often miss their targets and
emerge in the midst of a hornet’s nest of concentrated fire. As you said, you
will avoid the orbital platforms. The only question mark is the ungainly
looking Eight Balls, which you will have to adjust to when they go active.”

With a sour look, Mauss nodded. “Yes Mam, as
you say, the
only question mark
is self-propelled dense matter balls
that we can’t make ourselves and don’t know what they do. In addition, we don’t
really know the firepower capability of the platforms. Our new heavier
fire-and-forget missiles have to get past those platforms and Clanships to
reach targets on the planet, and we will have to retarget many of the missiles
on the balls and platforms as well as the orbiting Clanships. The Clanships and
single ships normally exit White Outs in stealth mode, which we can’t fully match
with our ships, and we can’t get radar reflections from the strange quantum
controlled outer skins of theirs. We don’t know why they didn’t use stealth
last time. Yet, you think
all
we need to worry about are the Eight
Balls.”

There was a threatening tone to the Chairfem’s
reply. “Admiral, are you prepared to conduct this mission?”

“Yes Mam, as much as we can be prepared, and I
am more prepared than anyone you might send in my place. We have to test the
enemy again, but I don’t want unrealistic expectations placed on the outcome.
I’m hopeful we can hurt them, but I’m afraid that the hurt we receive in return
will be as out of proportion as every confrontation we have ever had with the
Krall.

“When Poldark killed nearly forty percent of a
four Clanship raiding force several months ago, they killed over eight hundred
of the two thousand plus raiders. The media and our government trumpeted that as
a great success. You, the Poldark government, and I know that it came at the
expense of three thousand two hundred civilian deaths, and two thousand six
hundred casualties in their armored quick reaction forces. A mere seven to one
loss ratio has somehow become a measure of our success. I pray we measure the
fleet’s success this time differently than that. I will do my best to make it
so.”

“I trust that you will Admiral. I saw your
staff uploading the new data for your AI’s database on the fast courier waiting
for you as I passed the security post. At least I’m confident the media will not
know about your mission in advance this time. When do you Jump for Rhama?”

“I leave as soon as we are done here, Mam. I
will need a day at Rhama to adjust the fleet’s actions for the White Out at K1,
and retarget some of the missiles with contingencies if the orbiting Clanships
and platforms go into stealth mode.”

“Very well, Admiral. Good luck to you. I will
see you for the mission debrief.” They shook hands.

****