Shadow Space Chronicles 1: The Fallen Race (12 page)

It was more than he had hoped for, without a single casualty, and good combat experience.  Although... an attack on the Chxor’s cruisers in a fighter was slightly less dangerous than a live fire training run.  Training missions became routine over time if officers didn't plan out complex engagements, and that caused pilots to grow bored, which led to accidents.

It was the Chxor dreadnoughts that one had to watch.

With that cue, the Chxor dreadnoughts finally began a belated broadside at the retreating fighters.  They did not slow or alter course.  That would have no point, they would not catch the fighters.  In any case, the Chxor wanted the planet, not the fighters.  As the cruiser screen maneuvered to maintain a solid protective layer about the dreadnoughts, the two wounded ships drew to the rear of the formation.  The most heavily damaged fell out of formation, its engines unable to maintain the acceleration.

“
Time to play matador,” he muttered to himself. 
Time for one last gambit,
he thought.  If this plan worked, then he could save the evacuation fleet and possibly damage the Chxor.  If it didn't, then he would lose his ship for certain and the evacuees might not make their escape.  “Execute Bravo Bravo Seven,” Lucius ordered.

The
War Shrike
gave a slight shudder as her seven gravity matrix impellers engaged.  The amount of energy they drank from the vessel’s fusion reactors was tremendous.  The thrust they produced was highly efficient when compared to a mass-based reaction drive.  The size of the
War Shrike
required incredible amounts of power to propel it through space.  A certain amount of energy always went to entropy, and when dealing with the power requirements of a warship, a paltry five percent of the power drain dissipated as electromagnetic noise.  That five percent was enough to make the
War Shrike
light up like a small star, if someone had the sensors to see.

Evidently, the Chxor did.

The Chxor formation altered again.  The new formation put the cruisers into a blocking screen against this new and greater threat.  The dreadnoughts moved to place themselves in better firing positions in the battle line.

Any single one of those massive dreadnoughts out-massed the
War Shrike
three times over.  They also packed an insane amount of firepower, which outweighed anything the
War Shrike
could throw back by an order of magnitude.

The
War Shrike
mounted virtually identical missiles, but even there, Lucius was at a disadvantage, for while the
War Shrike
mounted four tubes to the dreadnought’s two, there were four dreadnoughts, and the enemy dreadnoughts had three times the missile storage than his own.

In short, a lone battleship had no business whatsoever getting in the way of a Chxor dreadnought, much less four of them.

The Chxor didn’t alter course, they didn’t have to.  Their target was the planet and their other target, the object of their hunt, was located in orbit above the planet.  An ideal situation for them.

Lucius could run through the mental calculations the Chxor must be undertaking.  First they would calculate the cost of destroying the battleship, find it minor.  Then the commander would consider any possible defenses that the planet held, and decide that the casualties involved in neutralizing them to be minor as well.  It wasn’t logical that an out of the way planet might possess serious defenses.

Those two casualty lists would be added together, and the final cost tallied up.  To a Chxor, it was only logical that victory was assured, if not now, then later.

Lucius was of another school of thought, one that used logic as a tool for people, not people as a tool for logic.  While to the Chxor it was unthinkable for a ship to continue to fight after defeat was assured, Lucius didn’t think much of assured victories.  He had cheated death and had victory snatched away too many times from guaranteed battle plans.  Lucius didn’t know how this day’s fight would work out, but he did know that he would hurt the Chxor.   The
War Shrike
would move forward to engage the enemy.

Plan Bravo Bravo Seven made almost a head-on course.  The enemy task force would pass the
War Shrike
just within twelve thousand kilometers, at the outermost limit of Lucius’s secondary battery.  His main battery would bear at twenty thousand kilometers, outside the Chxor’s own range.  He had felt the temptation to use his own speed and maneuverability to stay outside of the Chxor’s range.

His course angled to allow the Chxor the option of altering course to lengthen the engagement, which would be brief at the speeds they traveled.  If they altered course, it would draw them away from the planet.  They couldn’t hope to catch Lucius, he had a far higher acceleration than their vessels, almost four times faster.  They could, if they altered their direction now, maintain an engagement for several minutes, which would give them a number of shots at the
War Shrike
, perhaps enough to destroy her.  Lucius wasn’t willing to gamble on their taking that chance.  They were too cautious, too drawn to certainties.

But their commander would be tempted, very tempted.  He might even think of an alternative…

“Captain,” Lieutenant Palmer looked up from his sensor station.  “Two of them Dreadnoughts peeled off, along with their escorting cruisers.  It looks like they’re goin’ on course Charlie Delta Seven.”

The Chxor were doing exactly what made sense to them.  Two Dreadnoughts would be enough to crush the planetary defenses.  Two might be sufficient to destroy the
War Shrike
in a passing engagement.  Therefore, it logically made sense to divide forces to accomplish both tasks.

And it might yet work, if Lucius got too smart for his own good.  The Chxor might have made the right decision.  “If not…” Lucius smiled.  “Laser com message to the
Gebneyr
, Plan Bravo Bravo Seven is a go.”

***

Kleigh watched the screen as the enemy vessel closed.  He did not try to think of what was going through his enemy’s mind.  He saw no reason to make such attempt.  The enemy had acted in ways to defy logic time after time in the past, as he seemed to do now.  Why a commander would take a ship away from a planet, which presumably held some strategic and tactical bonuses, and lead it against overwhelming odds was beyond Kleigh’s mental outlook.  There was no logic to his opponent’s actions, unless he looked for escape and had panicked.  That was a solid assumption, Kleigh decided.  Such illogical beings were driven by emotion, too often.

He showed and felt no emotion while he ordered two of his five-class dreadnoughts and their escorts to alter course in order to maintain a longer engagement window with the battleship.  If the battleship altered course, it would make little difference.  Such a border world would have little in the way of defenses, two dreadnoughts and their escorts would suffice.

The two dreadnoughts on their intercept course began deceleration.  They slowed their velocity relative to the closing battleship.  They had only four escorting cruisers to absorb the damage that the enemy ship would be dealing out, but, again, that should suffice.  The limited time of the engagement at those closing rates would not allow the battleship to do any particular amount of damage.

The fighters from the earlier attack had withdrawn outside of sensor range.  Perhaps they planned to reload their missiles.  It didn’t matter.  Eighteen fighters would raise the cost of the engagement, but by only a slight amount.  They could not break through the cruiser screen by themselves

Kleigh felt the utter dispassion which, for a Chxor, passed for satisfaction.  Another victory for the Chxor, another world conquered, another enemy defeated.

***

Lucius awoke from a short nap and returned to the bridge.  He had rotated the crew through, giving them plenty of rest.  The level of tension would make sleep difficult, but rest would be needed.  Even now the closer group of dreadnoughts, with their six cruisers, was just over an hour outside of missile range.  At his current course, he would brush past them, at eleven thousand kilometers for a period of a couple minutes, and then be in missile range for another hour, approximately thirty minutes before the second group reached missile range.

Lucius had one serious advantage in that area.  The missiles that the Chxor used were virtually identical to the ones he would be firing at them.  However, they limited themselves to their shipboard sensors.  Lucius had four probes to track the enemy forces.  He had watched them and had firing solutions on the enemy ships since just after he broke the
War Shrike
out of orbit.  His missiles didn’t have the power to travel that distance, but he could see everything the enemy did quite clearly.  The Chxor never used probes.  Their technology base had the capability, but their ships didn’t mount the equipment.  A simple oversight in the design phase made for a crippling tactical disadvantage.  To the Chxor it didn’t make sense to redraw the designs for probes, especially since none of their commanders complained of the lack.

To them, he would be a contact, readily identifiable as a battleship, with an electromagnetic profile to match that of the Desperado-class.  They could find his course and speed by watching where he went.  If he hadn’t lit off his engines, they wouldn’t have seen him until they reached the outer limit of their shipboard sensors targeting range.  Even then they may not have seen him, since he could have kept the ship’s emissions to a minimum until they got very close.

The Chxor, all in a group, could squash him at that close of range, though.  If his shadow drive went down, it made a viable, go-down-fighting plan.

It wasn’t necessary.  In fact, the planet he was paid to protect had told him to get lost.  Approximately sixteen thousand people had chosen to run.  Those twenty-nine ships hid themselves in the sensor shadow of Faraday as they crept out of the system.  Even those slow cargo ships would easily outpace the Chxor, given enough time.

Time that Lucius would win them.

The Chxor, with their built-in handicap, wouldn’t even know the ships had departed.

Lucius began to smile.  He was going to give the Chxor a number of lessons on the importance of long range sensor systems.

***

Kleigh typed in notes to his shipboard log as he waited.  Some of the non-Chxor crew had begun to make mistakes and he made another note that aliens, especially Humans, needed more conditioning to remove some of their illogical habits.  It made no sense to worry about one’s self before or during a battle.  This war for Chxor’s logical supremacy required no less.  The inconsequential individuals must make themselves tools for the greater good.  Those that made illogical errors and blamed them on weaknesses of their bodies showed a failure in dedication.

More discipline was in order.

He noted that the fighters had returned and begun harassment of the wounded cruiser, which fell further behind.  They must not have missile reloads, he noted, because they engaged the lamed cruiser with their pulse cannon.  The ineffective fire accomplished little against the cruiser’s armor.  The enemy’s actions grew more and more irrelevant and illogical.

The enemy battleship grew closer.  Squadron Commander Kleigh’s sensors didn’t yet have enough data to pinpoint a firing solution, but he had the vessel’s course plotted accurately.  The enemy made no move to alter course or speed.  That maintained the brief weapons pass on Kleigh’s force as well as the separated dreadnoughts.  The path would take it directly into the fire of the other two dreadnoughts.  If it didn’t change course, it would actually pass between two of the dreadnoughts and their cruiser escorts.  Logically, the enemy ship should have altered course to avoid such close and lasting range with the two dreadnoughts.  That the ship hadn’t suggested panic and illogical emotional responses.

It didn’t bring satisfaction to Kleigh.  That would have been as illogical as his opponents’ panic.  He foresaw the most probable outcome of this situation and saw only success and victory for the Chxor.  Squadron Commander Kleigh expected significant rewards and his genetic line would receive benefits for its clear and logical thoughts.

Something resembling irritation came to Kleigh then when a series of missile tracks appeared on radar.  The human was defeated, why did it continue to fight?  The battleship, unlike the Chxor, must rely on remote platforms or drones to pinpoint the location of the task force, to allow it a range advantage.

The Chxor realized after a moment of reflection that he had not considered that possible tactic, something which he should have.  If the Human altered course now, he might stay ahead of the task force and avoid any real dangers.

Of course, the Human’s actions, while possibly damaging, could not continue for long.  The battleship would eventually run out of missiles.  At that time, it would have to depart the system or close the range.  So, Kleigh decided, his mistake was not so great as to be necessary to go on record.  That was good, his reward and genetic descendants would be of great service for the Chxor.  And the Human was still doomed.

Kleigh ordered the cruisers to interdict themselves between the missiles and the dreadnoughts.  He then ordered the main batteries to hold their fire, but granted the secondary batteries permission to engage any missiles which bypassed the cruiser screen.