Koban 6: Conflict and Empire (19 page)

She used her Comtap link to send Mirikami the mental images from her sensors screens.

“Hmm. Athena, I think this must be an entirely Ragnar conducted operation, there are no purely Thandol naval units there. The apes apparently can get their crap together much faster than the Thandol can. Those Stranglers with their Debilitaters are only useful near ground level, and like you, I think those fat bodied ships are troop carriers. They didn’t come for a smash and run raid of destruction as we were expecting, they plan to put boots on the ground and hold on. How many types of supply ships did you say?”

“It looks like my AI thinks five hundred twelve are cargo ships. There are ships of many mixed designs, which are the right size and shape to haul cargo. About half of them have a similar design and paint scheme, and the rest are very mixed styles, with different colored paint jobs. They apparently have Ravagers and Shredders as escorts.”

“OK. That clinches it as being an invasion, not a punitive raid. I’ll need to mobilize more than just crews for staffing the missile bays on our ships. We’ll need to put our own boots on the ground to help the small PDF contingent that Tanner’s has. Contact President Flacco, tell him what we know, and reassure him that Kobani forces are on the way, but they may need to hold out on the ground for several days before our troops can arrive.”

“Yes, Sir. What do I tell him about the help the PU navy promised us? Are they sending their heavy cruisers? And Nabarone’s troops?”

“Nabarone told me Foxworthy sent four hundred of her cruisers to Dawson, the Rim colony ten light years from you. But she isn’t authorized to send them into combat yet.

“I’ll send an emissary to Earth overnight, but the PU also expected to have months to get ready for this, and they can’t respond as quickly as we can. Not without Comtaps anyway. I’ll send some communications people for President Strickland and her VP, Bledso, to have available for instant discussions with us. I’ll get in contact with Nabarone, since he was in the process of pulling Kobani spec ops away from the last of the Krall fighting, and intended to load them on troop carriers to move them to Dawson. That was if the expected Thandol attack became an actual landing. It’s become a Ragnar landing instead.”

He sounded apologetic next, “It doesn’t look like those troops will get the month of leave time he promised to give them. I’ll let him tell Foxworthy the bad news. Her troop carriers are supposed to move his forces, and she won’t send them to Tanner’s, not in the face of the size enemy fleet she’ll face, unless our fleet arrives first, and Strickland says she should get involved in the fight.”

“Sir, I don’t want to sit here idle, not even for a few hours for the first reinforcements to arrive. We want to avenge the people we lost. We can do some damage right now. The probable troop ships, and that mixture of supply ships, all seem like vulnerable targets. I think we can ding their long-term plans better right now than after they land those ships, or think to move them to lower orbits where they can be better protected by the bulk of the Ravagers.”

“I agree, Athena. They’re your squadrons to command, use them wisely. Keep us informed, and watch your backsides.”

****

Grudfad was elated. “Commander Thond, the human ships fled when they saw how greatly they were outnumbered. They had no hidden ships nearby, which means the speed of organizing this fleet was your masterstroke, catching them completely unaware. They weren’t even fully stealthed from us.”

In truth, Thond too was pleased, but he wasn’t dismissing human resistance yet. “Their ships were heavily outnumbered the last time, yet they stayed to fight us, and did so effectively. Unless it takes an unusual amount of power to employ their nearly perfect stealth systems, I don't understand why they used the less effective level, which we can detect. We wouldn’t have been able to surround what we couldn’t see. That troubles me.”

He explained why. “It’s obvious they were not entirely unprepared for an attack against this planet. Have you seen the sensor report of the radar and laser network that was activated only after our attack started? All of their largest cities have a variety of sensor types tracking our ships as they pass over, and that tracking appears to be coordinated between them. They lock onto multiple ships in the lowest orbits, proving that our stealth isn’t fooling them. Powerful high frequency pulse radars follow a tracked ship for accurate positioning, and that lock-on continues between cities as the ship passes out of range of the first sensors, without any loss of pulse intensity, showing their tracking network never lost the target.

“They clearly have experienced attacks from orbit before on this world. There must be some sort of weapons system that can make use that data. I suspect it will be used to guide surface to orbit missiles, because plasma cannon bolts suffer from attenuation in the atmosphere, as do lasers if there are clouds. For missiles fired from the surface, we will have plenty of time to see them coming, and they can’t reach extremely high velocities until they leave the densest air. We’ll have time to knock them down.”

His suspicion about the purpose of the tracking network was confirmed, but it functioned in a more coordinated fashion than he’d expected, in a manner never used by any of their previous foes in the Empire. There were over a hundred large atmospheric aircraft sighted, climbing from multiple scattered airfields, which based on their wide and fixed wing designs, were assessed by Thond’s combat center to be craft that couldn’t climb high enough to directly attack ships in orbit. They couldn’t leave atmosphere, or carry powerful enough lasers or plasma cannons to be a serious threat to a low orbiting Ravager.

Suddenly, six hundred seventy-five extremely high-powered ground based laser batteries went online, from seventy-five fusion-powered units surrounding each of the nine major metropolitan complexes. They focused two or three dozen beams on individual Ravagers, through breaks in cloud cover all around the planet.

Simultaneously, the highflying aircraft each launched multiple midsized anti-ship missiles, which had been unseen from orbit, concealed as they were under the wings, and from bays suddenly opened in their fuselage. They were already above the densest atmosphere when launched, and accelerated rapidly. The missiles, emitting no radar signals of their own, as would equivalent sized Ragnar designs, displayed an uncanny ability to accelerate and track directly towards the same ships being attacked by the powerful lasers.

The seekers on the missiles were using the reflected laser illumination for some of their guidance. The beams constantly adjusted their aim as the targeted Ravagers maneuvered, rotating along their long axis to spread out the heat from beams scorching their hulls. The missiles also altered course, and achieved hyper-velocities as the atmosphere rapidly thinned.

The lesson was a stern one. Twenty-seven Ravagers were destroyed in a shocking few seconds of frantic, and ultimately futile evasion. If they quit rotating to improve steerage to avoid the rapidly closing missiles, at least ten to fifteen lasers, of the twenty or more seeking each of them, managed to find a cloud-clear path to combine and burn through some part of their hull. This allowed the ravening beams to damage interior structures, electronics, weapons ports, and the far more fragile crews, of course. Then, one or more missiles caught up to them anyway, as they resumed rotations, or turned the wrong direction, and even AI controlled laser and plasma cannon defenses couldn’t counter the combination of threats.

The Krall had taught humans that a multilayered planetary defense was essential. The Ravagers, firing energy weapons and missiles from low orbit, hadn’t penetrated atmosphere yet, to discover just how effective air turbulence tracking and unjammable low powered laser scanning could be, in guiding longer-flying atmospheric pursuit missiles to enemy ships.

The slower troop transports and supply ships might be the first to discover that two hundred of the nearly thousand objects orbiting Tanner’s world, particularly those in two and three hundred mile polar orbits, were not there for communications, navigation, or for weather monitoring. Those previously mothballed rail guns were waiting for unsuspecting, ships to draw close. Most Ragnar ships, including Ravagers, weren’t as sturdy or had as many redundant systems as did a Krall clanship. Nor could any Empire pilot execute the wild and violent maneuvers the Krall typically employed to avoid or escape defenses. The Kobani were the supreme masters of this tactic now, outfighting those Krall warriors in space or in atmospheric dogfights.

“Falgrat, falgrat, falgrat!” The string of obscenities from Thond was shocking. More for the number of them and for what prompted them than the frequent swear words the crusty, if not vulgar leader was noted for in his language.

“Force Lieutenant Grudfad, order all bombardment Ravagers to double their orbital height. Those falgrat sucking human droppings allowed us to initiate our bombardment, defending only with widely scattered medium powered lasers and plasma bolts initially, to lull us into becoming complacent. This pretense of weakness encouraged my captains to descend, to give the city defenders less reaction time to destroy our air to ground missiles. It was a deliberate tactic to draw us in closer.”

It had worked, and aside from the twenty-seven ships destroyed with nearly all aboard lost, it had cost Thond another eleven front-line Ravagers with significant hull damage, ships that would now only be able to support the invasion from a safer, less effective distance, and staying away from atmospheric drag. The losses were only two percent of the Ravager force he brought, but it followed another six percent in losses of their total Ravager class of ships, from the previous two confrontations at Zanzibar and Meglor. Those warships were the pride and backbone of Ragnar space combat capability.

The Federation, humans in particular, had inflicted those high losses of the most effective Ragnar warships in less than a single orbit of time. That was a higher number of ships lost than they had experienced over an expanse of five generations, enforcing punitive actions against subservient species, as ordered by the Emperor’s High Command.

Adapting to this enemy, Thond altered his original invasion plan on the fly. “Lieutenant, post the eleven damaged Ravagers up with the civilian supply ships to aid the Shredders in defending them, and release the fifty Ravager defenders they already had to form escorts for the troop ships. Send down the Pounders, one hundred ships in each of four units, to form assault groups, with the Stranglers divided between them. I’m changing their mission from capturing the two main spaceports at the largest cities. Those big cities have proven to be harder targets than expected, and we could suffer losses of Pounders trying to take those spaceports directly.

“I want to land our troops in four of the least defended areas near four smaller cities, landing within striking distance of them, and send them ahead to conduct a lightning advance with only the Pillagers. I see no sign they have armored units of their own to oppose our Pillagers. I’ve identified the four cities.” He sent coordinates to his Lieutenant, for relay to the four Ground Force commanders, whom he’d just designated to lead the new surface assaults.

He explained his reasoning. “Each mid-sized city I’ve selected has a smaller spaceport that we can use, and I believe we can overrun them faster from the ground. I want the external Hoths that were detached from the Spears to escort the infantry when they advance, with Ravagers providing fire support from orbit. Once the four groups are down, I want the ranking commander of each hundred-ship Pounder unit to operate independently, and secure those landing facilities as undamaged as possible. I want the Armored Force units to race their Pillagers towards their assigned targets at all possible speed, accompanied by Stranglers, leaving no time for the enemy to mount an effective ground defense.”

“Sire, as a career Space Force officer I’ve not received training on large scale ground assaults. What happens to the foot Ragoons that can’t keep up with the armored vehicles?”  

Thond thumped his chest lightly in approval. “Valid question, Lieutenant. The foot Ragoons, even with powered body armor, won’t have fast transport unless they can take some away from the enemy. We couldn’t bring everything we wanted with us, so they’ll move into those smaller outlying towns to crush the civilian population and find what they need for transportation. They’ll be foot padders until they can capture suitable local transports, and then follow behind the lead Armored Force units. They need to do this quickly, because Pillagers that are unsupported by troops are more vulnerable to attack from the rear, sides, and from above, by a suitably equipped enemy.”

He amended his cautious sounding words. “I don't expect there to be an effective ground resistance here at first. Not one they can develop as quickly as we organized this invasion. There is no sign of space capable fighters as of yet, so our Hoths will own the skies.”

Grudfad grasped the strategy change. “When you have control of those smaller spaceports, and have destroyed their defensive laser batteries, the eight Spears can land and deploy the remainder of our Hoths. They can support our troops when you attack the larger cities.”

“Exactly. We have already encountered much stronger space defenses for these cities than ever encountered from worlds in the Empire, at least within our own security zone. I can’t speak for what the Finth or Thack Delos have faced in their sectors. Our recent experience in the Empire may not be representative of what we’ll face here. The Empire has been stable, with little expansion for generations, and it no longer has aggressive species that can conduct battles like this. Except for tightly controlled security forces like ours, of course.” He said the last with a bitter note in his voice.