Koban 6: Conflict and Empire (48 page)

“Then it’s kinda hard for the Thandol to find one then, isn’t it?”

Tet shrugged. “I think there are several thousand reported in PU astronomical records, from my younger days in the academy, becoming a Spacer. As new solar systems form, they evolve from chaotic disks, with collisions and near misses until the orbits settle down for the giant planets. Smaller planets can be completely thrown out by interactions with the giant planets. In fact…,” he paused a couple of seconds as he pulled a reference from a Comtap storage library.

“They’re called a rogue planet, nomad planet, free floating planet, and interstellar and starless planets. I think most of those we know about are a tiny fraction of the billions expected to reside in the galaxy. Most of those in Human Space seem to have been found via gravitational lensing, when the planet happened to pass in front of some distant star when a telescope was pointed that way.”

“Then how do we ever find this one? Wait for gravitational lensing?” It sounded like a challenge to do the impossible.

His attempted rescue of Maggi was properly rewarded, in her traditional manner. “We Jump there and look for a nearby mass, you twit. I hadn’t considered a lone planet as a possibility. Let’s get a move on. Rogue 2,” as she decided to name it, “is located in security sector two. I’ll bet there are Rogue 1 and Rogue 3 counterparts in the other two security zones.”

****

Delthab Trindal, of the Farlol nobility line, was the current High Commander and cousin to the Emperor. He was angrily addressing other assembled nobles, members of his High Command staff. “How did the Wendal Weather Bureau or the Imperial Stellar Observatory fail to predict the heating and expansion of the upper atmosphere this morning?

“If we had a stellar flare, why wasn’t there the usual radiation alert before the ejected coronal material reached us almost a cycle later? Those take a half cycle or more to travel this far. There should have been enough warning to send all of our orbital tugs aloft, to start moving unpowered structures out of danger. Why have we not experienced this effect in the past?”

There was a complete lack of response, because Trindal was speaking to nobles that had military training, but had no more knowledge concerning atmospheric dynamics than did Trindal.

“Get your assistants off all four foot pads, and lifting them quickly as they run, to find my answers. I’ll have to take what I know to the Emperor, and explain to him what is happening, well before the first streak of fire crosses the skies tomorrow morning, and he sees them for himself.”

The hours and alibis flowed steadily, without any firm answers. The experts said there had been no coronal mass ejection from the home star, and even if there had been, it might have damaged the ozone layer, and perhaps heated the highest layer, the thermosphere, but that was where low orbit objects routinely operated, and was essentially considered part of orbital space. What appeared to have happened was that part of the lower, and denser mesosphere, had briefly risen into the thermosphere as high as the Crusher remnants were orbiting.

With the three broad flat sides of those corner sections meeting the suddenly denser air, their orbits started to significantly decay. Once they lost ten miles of altitude, they were continuously traveling through slightly denser atmosphere every orbit. Even though called atmosphere, it was essentially a vacuum to any unprotected Thandol. Regardless, the panicked first reaction was to try to use the quickly available tugs to raise the orbits of all three objects. That rash decision divided the effort, so that none of the sections could be boosted high enough quickly enough. Their descents were merely slowed, and by the time more tugs were launched from the surface, and brought in from other planets and remote facilities in the system, none of the debris sections could be saved. It wasn’t certain if even one piece could have been saved from reentry from the very start.

Instead of answers being found, blame was being spread widely. Some tentacles pointed at a low-level governmental department, which was recovering the valuable scrap, using low orbits for speed and economy. It was claimed the low level provided fast and efficient movement of scrap from orbit to the ground. That governmental division in turn blamed Planetary Space Traffic Control, who had wanted the next higher orbits reserved for revenue producing satellites and space docks. The rationale was that the low orbit objects would be completely dismantled long before their orbits would encounter significant drag.

The Emperor was still furious that his personal ship, the Emperor’s Pride, was destroyed in the first place. Now these pieces, associated with his title and Imperial pride, were about to smash to the ground, reminding citizens of why they were called Crushers in the first place. They were expected to generate considerable destruction, and cause an unpredictable death toll, because evacuations were proceeding in a hectic and disorderly fashion, with more tentacles directing blame between various Imperial departments.

The combination of effects added to his previous sense of humiliation, and reminded his detractors that his personal ship was destroyed by a new enemy, one that he had created, practically over his head at the Empire’s heart. It made him suspicious of how this could happen again. It seemed like a convenient way to increase damage to his previous favorability with his alliance of imperial supporters. Typical coups seldom involved serious damage to the capitol world, or touched the population that kept the wheels turning, few of which would be of the Emperor’s herd. Only the most violent coups, in the early history of the empire had been like that.

Nevertheless, such an unlikely disaster smacked of a wide conspiracy to the Emperor. Why hadn’t his family nobles appointed to the High Command prevented this, or at least discover how it had happened? They hadn’t even offered a scapegoat to present to the public, as a sacrificial recipient of the blame. He needed a distraction from this fiasco to present to his supporters. Just not the one he received.

You tended not to notice a scratch on your tentacle, when your gonads got crushed.

****

“Holy crap!” Thad was awed. “We could make a bigger dent in their navy if we’d brought more Scouts, or just carried more reloads. These will be sitting ducks.”

He was referring to the collect of two orbiting Crushers, and a total of nearly six thousand Smashers, Stranglers, and a smaller class of pyramid design ships, parked on airless plains of the rogue planet. All of the Thandol large ship designs went beyond what was needed to simply accommodate the larger bodies of their crews. It apparently scaled with their large egos and self-esteem.

One ship class was underrepresented, with only five examples of Stompers, which could carry ceremonial ground troops. They were often used to put the conquerors on display, for a beaten species to see exactly to whom they owed subservience.

The coordinates that Pradwal had relayed, were obtained from other servant’s accumulated information, had been too approximate for exact navigation. They were likely rounded off versions the nobles used for conversational brevity, overheard from casual conversations. This put the Scouts only within a few billion miles of a Mars scale rocky world, detected by it being the only nearby mass.

Its former atmosphere, apparently thin to begin with, was now frozen out as mounds of carbon dioxide deposits at what would have once been the original poles. There was a layer of water ice under the CO2, which appeared to be eroding away along the sides. The ancient poles were evidence now of how long this planet had been sunless. The axial drift of its rotation had long ago shifted the two masses of the polar icecaps to what was now the world’s equator. The frozen ball must have been drifting for billions of years, without the warmth of a star to sublimate or melt and redeposit the once polar deposits at the new axial poles. The water ice also stayed where it was, under the protective layer of CO2, but had found users for its treasure, which accounted for the eroded appearance of the sides of the ancient ice caps. It was being mined as a useful resource.

The Thandol had constructed four huge domes, two close to and on either equatorial side of the two ice bulges. Aside from the Thandol admiration of the number four, the dome placement was evidence of either their longevity here, or anticipated longevity. As they used the water ice, and perhaps some of the CO2, they didn’t want to disturb the dynamic balance of the planet’s rotation, so they kept the mass distribution along the current equatorial region, as they shifted material away from the two icecap bulges. Even so, it would take a very long time to redistribute enough mass to cause the present axis of rotation to shift again, perhaps causing crustal instability and quakes as that happened.

The domes were colored differently, one being white, another a golden color, one yellow, and one was tan. These were frequent colors seen on buildings on Wendal, with the golden shade found on the outside of many structures in the Emperor’s compound. White appeared where there seemed to be a bit less opulent luxury, yellow less still, and tan evidently was reserved for nobility of the lowest status, but still higher than the browns, grays, greens and deep blues of the commoner’s residences.

The five small Scouts were about to put the long-term planning of the Thandol to the test. They were unlikely to alter the axis of rotation, but the base wasn’t going to be nearly as habitable or secret when they were finished.

“Sarge,” Maggi prodded. “Your professed long-range accuracy may not be of much use here.”

“Why’s that? I see a lot of targets, starting with two large ass Crushers we can’t miss at our present range.”

“No contest, hitting those fat sitting ducks. But I was thinking of our crater target practice. Notice how relatively smooth this ball is? It was tossed out of its home system before many leftover rocks had time to smack into it, or the atmosphere froze out and covered them. Almost no craters to use as a bullseye.”

She suggested an alternative test of accuracy. “I’d think some of the most widespread damage we might cause could be blasting gravrods down into the icecaps at an angle, to send shock waves out the opposite side under those domes. Remember what happened on our large target asteroid? On the side opposite from my hit? I wonder if we can do more damage to the domes from underneath, if we slam shots in from the other side of the planet and lift and rupture them from below. We’d have to estimate the right angle for a shot like that.”

Dillon poured cold water on the idea, using logic. “Not possible. This isn’t an asteroid, it’s the size of Mars, a bit larger actually, at a diameter of four-thousand six hundred miles, per my AI’s measurement. That asteroid you shot at was a low density accumulated rubble pile, with a diameter of just under six hundred miles, which may have once had a small dense core. You can’t get the same force transmitted all the way through this planetary mass, with its larger dense core, and higher gravity holding its surface down.”

“Say’s the biologist, with a sideline in genetics,” she retorted, pointing out his lack of planetary expertize.

“From the biologist, with a sideline in diplomacy and languages,” was his rebuttal.

Mirikami, confined in a small ship with his lovely, petite, highly volatile wife, made a tactical, practical, and safe decision. “The domes are not our primary targets anyway. Dead Thandol in domes won’t keep these ships from attacking Tanner’s if they’re all still here and intact when we leave.

“I don't mean we won’t hit the domes at all,” he added, “but the Crushers are the only ships in orbit here, being too massive to land on any planet, and they’re easily hit out here on their own. The Thandol captains landed their heavier Smashers and Stranglers on the smooth plains closest to the domes. The other smaller craft, with lower ranking captains, landed at the outskirts around the domes.”

His next comments initially suggested to his people that he’d drifted slightly off topic.

“I did a search of the old Olt’kitapi data about the Empire, and there once were similar sized warships to those smaller ones we see here, which the Thandol called Guardians. These are closer in size to a PU navy light cruiser, but given the Thandol love of big things that fly, these may function as the PU destroyers did, before the Krall micro-Jump methods made screening a space fleet with them impossible. They might be used to form a screen for the larger fleet elements, the same way the Ragnar tried to use their Shredders. If so, then Guardian is a reasonable name for them until we learn differently, but we know they won’t be able to defend a Thandol fleet from us any better than Shredders worked for the Ragnar. We don’t stand-off and fight from a distance, so I don’t think these Guardians are vital targets for us. We don’t have enough gravrods for ammunition anyway, so focus on the larger craft.”

Then he returned to their primary goal. To change the Thandol’s assault plan, initiated by the Emperor’s petulance, to attack Tanner’s World in the belief that it was a Federation planet. The Thandol were apparently unaware of the recent Ragnar experience there, which might only have extended their planning period anyway, and would certainly increase the forces the Emperor would commit to their own attack.

“We had no idea what we’d find here, and in hindsight, we didn’t bring enough Scouts, or magazines of gravrods, to target every single ship spread around the four domes, sitting completely undefended out on those smooth flat ice plains. In fact, we don’t yet have enough Scouts built, nor gravity guns for them, to do a thorough job here. We need to do as much damage as we can with the gravrods we have, but we have to use one other tool we brought with us, and do more than tickle a planet’s atmosphere.”