Shaitan Wars 2: Wrath of the Shaitans (53 page)

For the first few minutes there was no response, and everyone was starting to relax. Then after three minutes the two Shaitan warships ignited their chemical rocket thrusters and everybody’s heart sank.

“Sir I am observing an anomaly.” Shouted the young lieutenant who was the sensors officer on the bridge. “First the amount of thrust from the Shaitan chemical rockets is far lower than we had observed in our previous encounter. Second the thrust signatures of the two ships are different.”

“How are they different?” Asked Gerald.

“Sir the waveforms of one of the ships is smooth and steady, while that of the other is erratic. It is not something one can make out visually. I tried looking through the telescope, they look the same but the spectrum analyzer tell as different story altogether.” The lieutenant answered.

“Thanks and good job lieutenant. Keep monitoring and let me know if anything changes.” He thanked the sensor officer and connected to the flag bridge.

Fabi spoke up before Gerald could say anything. “I heard the Lieutenant, the Qūzhújiàn is reporting the same issue… one moment… ah the Shiva has also noticed it. So we have an interesting situation. Tango 1 is double lame. It is not just its ion plasma thrusters which were damaged, but also their chemical thrusters. I am hoping that Capt. Dar’s lame mountain goat analogy continues and the lame one slips and breaks something.” Fabi and Gerald had a laugh.

Little did they realize that the words of Fabi would turn out to be prophetic. A few minutes after that conversation, a flash was observed in the thrusters of Tango 1. It was clearly an explosion, and then both its ion plasma thrusters as well as its chemical rockets extinguished. It took Tango 3 many seconds to realize what had happened to its companion ship and shut off its own engines.

By that time it had gone almost a hundred kilometers ahead of Tango 1. Tango 3 started using its retro thrusters immediately to creep its way back next to Tango 1.

“My god. Hamid is either brilliant or the luckiest son of a gun on this side of the solar system. We pushed them, and something broke. Gerald recalculate our optimal vector assuming that Tango 1’s engines stay broken. My flag staff is coordinating with Admiral Maginot to get their optimal vector as well. We need to arrive at the same time.” Fabi shouted out inside his helmet.

Gerald had already left his seat and was standing next to the navigator. He could have seen whatever the tech-head was doing from his screen, but human dynamics and work style requires them to see each other face to face and stand next to each other.

The navigator showed him a few options, and he kept eliminating them one by one, and asked one of them to be modified. He should have gotten used to the speed of tech-heads, but he was still impressed at the speed at which he modified and recalculated the parameters. When Gerald was satisfied, he asked it to be sent to the admiral.

Fabi liked the plans and approved of it, but it was slightly different from the one sent by the Second Fleet. He sent off Gerald’s plan for Admiral Maginot. Multiple fleet operations in the navy of the seas has always been a complex exercise where the egos and politics of admirals and their staff have to be navigated for any plan to be agreed and coordinated on. This was the first time such a situation had arisen in a space battle.

Fortunately for Gerald, Irene Maginot was not your typical admiral with a bloated ego. She excelled in cooperative strategies and she knew a good plan when she saw one. She reverted back fairly fast approving Gerald’s plan. The pincer attack would happen roughly around the same point as originally planned.

All the humans hoped for is that there would be no more unexpected surprise in the next four odd hours that it would take for them to reach that point. For a change saint Murphy did not throw any surprise, and the two human fleets approached the Shaitan warships as planned simultaneously.

Fabi heard his helmet ping. It was Hamid. “Sir, if I was the desperate captain on a suicidal bombing mission of Tango 1, then I would right now look for every option possible to sacrifice myself, cornered and lame as I am, to give Tango 3 a chance to push past the Second Fleet and make a bombing run.

We have to remember that Tango 3 has its chemical rockets intact. It could burst out in acceleration any time it chooses. The most likely time for Tango 3 to do that would be when the Second Fleet is engaged in killing the nukes lobbed at it. My recommendation would be for the Second Fleet to concentrate all their firepower on Tango 3.”

“Good thinking captain, let me run this past Admiral Maginot.” Fabi said and switched channel. There was almost no lag time now. The conversation was real time. The two admirals agreed that Tango 3 was far more dangerous than the crippled Tango 1.

The Third Fleet was narrowing the distance to the Tangoes who were no longer accelerating. The Third Fleet had switched off its emergency chemical thrusters the moment Tango 1’s engine malfunctioned and they stopped accelerating. The ion plasma thrusters were good enough to catch up with the Tangoes now.

Once the Third Fleet reached the optimum distance, it cut off its thrusters and started coasting without power, no longer gaining on the Tangoes, but maintaining the current distance. It was to make it easier on the missiles they were about to launch. After salvaging the 110 nukes from the doomed USS Endurance, the Third Fleet had a total of 440 nukes distributed evenly amongst the three ships.

The ships of the Third Fleet pumped out all of the 440 nukes using their 12 pneumatic ejectors at an amazing rate in less 15 seconds, and waited for a signal from the Second Fleet. They would synchronize their firing with the Second Fleet. The Third Fleet was at a relative rest to the Tangoes, while the Second Fleet was rushing in towards the Tangoes almost head on. Thus the Second Fleet would fire from much further away compared to the Third Fleet.

As the Second Fleet approached its optimal firing distance, they signaled the Third Fleet and its eight vessels started firing their missiles simultaneously. Each vessel could pump out four missiles at a time from its four tubes. The missiles were programmed to sync up with the ones that were fired later, so that they all arrived at their destination at approximately the same time.

Forty missiles from each ship, totaling 320 missiles were fired exclusively at Tango 3 by the Second Fleet. The Third Fleet had programmed 300 of its missiles to target Tango 1 and 140 missiles to additionally target Tango 3. It was an overkill even for the remarkably point defense capable Shaitan warships, and the Shaitan captains realized it soon.

Tango 3 had started breaking out of formation the moment the first salvoes were fired. It was heading out of the plane of the solar system northwards, in order to skirt the Second Fleet. Tango 1 had made no attempt to defend itself, and rather used all its missiles to kill nukes headed towards Tango 3, to try to give it as much of a chance to get away as possible.

Tango 3 had stuck with Tango 1 for this encounter to get as much protection from the firepower of Tango 1 as possible, now that the defensive salvoes of Tango 1 had started being fired, it was trying to make a break and slip away. However after the first 30 seconds the captains of Tango 1 and 3 must have realized that their situation was hopeless, so they turned vindictive.

The laser point defense of the Shaitan warships continued functioning, but they were mostly ineffective against the AWPS system, what really worked to kill the human missiles were the Shaitan antimissiles. Since the Shaitan ships used a tube based system to launch their missiles similar to the Resolute class ships, it was an either or choice between launching offensive nukes and defensive antimissiles.

The Shaitan warships seem to have made a choice. They would take down as many human ships with them as possible. They stopped firing antimissiles to defend themselves and started firing nukes exclusively. Their plasma rail guns may not have been that effective at the distance the battle was raging, but now they fired those guns exclusively at the human ships, not trying to shoot down the incoming human nukes.

The first signs of the Shaitans having turned Kamikaze was felt with the bridge of almost every ship in the Second Fleet blaring out skin temperature and hull damage alarms. The plasma rail guns were not light speed weapons. The lightweight plasma cartridge could be accelerated by the heavy gun incredibly fast, but it was still a small fraction of a percentage point of light speed.

The Nautilus class ships were equipped with the CADBE system, which had proved a life saver. It was able to avoid plasma rail gun, unless the ship ventured too near to the Shaitan warships, such that the emergency thruster could not pull the ship out of the line of fire fast enough.

However the Resolute class ships of the Second Fleet had no such protection. At this distance of just over five hundred kilometer, it was as good as a light speed weapon. It took just 2 or 3 seconds to hit its target, and there was no way the Resolute class ships could evade it. Thankfully the plasma cartridge could only hold its full lethality for less than a second, after which it started decaying exponentially.

The plasma hitting the human ships had lost most of its lethality. They were still hot and lethal enough to cause hull damage on the Resolute class ships, which had a thinner hull. Four of the ships of the Second Fleet suffered hull breach, one of them suffered multiple breaches in multiple sections and was in serious trouble.

All of the ships of both the fleet suffered instrument damage on the sensors and equipment mounted on the skin. Thankfully the human fleets had started accelerating away from the Shaitan warships the moment they had offloaded their payload of missiles, so the damage from the plasma rail guns decreased and tapered to almost zero after a minute.

But in that minute it had wreaked havoc for which the human ships had no defense, and for which some of the ships would pay dearly, for now what was approaching them would suffer no reduction in lethality – 400 megaton nuclear missiles. Now that the Shaitan warships had been freed of the burden of defensive missiles, the awesome fire power and sheer volume of missiles it was capable of pumping was on display.

The modified program of three human antimissiles bunching together to kill a Shaitan nuke, in order to foil its countermeasures had been downloaded by the Second Fleet and were being employed successfully, but they had a fundamental problem. The Resolute class ships did not carry nearly enough antimissiles to be able to get rid of all of the nukes thrown at them.

The Shaitan warships had thrown equal number of missiles at all of the human ships. The three Nautilus class ships had more than enough antimissiles to repulse the attack on them without breaking a sweat, but they could not come to the aid of the Second Fleet immediately.

Gerald’s plan had anticipated the problem. Upon firing their missiles, both the human fleets had turned almost 90° down the plane of the solar system to put as much distance as possible in that direction between them and the Shaitan warships, while leaving their forward momentum on the plane of the solar system intact. This would enable the Second and the Third Fleet to keep approaching each other in the X-Y plane, while still running away in the z-axis from the Shaitan warships.

The unfortunate consequence of this trajectory was that the Second Fleet which was approaching the Shaitan warships headlong would move away from them in a curve as its forward momentum continued to carry it forward towards the Shaitan warships even as it dived below the plane. This meant that the Second Fleet would get a lot closer to the enemy before the distance started increasing.

There was nothing that could be done about this basic law of physics, and at the time it was thought that the superior acceleration of the Second Fleet owing to its chemical rocket thrusters would be able to mitigate the consequences. But no one had contemplated that the Shaitan captains would turn suicidal and forego defensive missiles.

No one had anticipated the sheer number of nukes the Shaitan warships would fire. As a result the Second Fleet was going to be on its own for almost 5 minutes before the Third Fleet was near enough to give them support on point defense. Seven of the ships of the Second Fleet soldiered on grimly, killing Shaitan nukes thrown at them with their antimissiles as long as they lasted.

The eighth and the badly damaged ship of the fleet had two of its tubes out of operation. One severely damaged, while the other was open to space and the weapons crew loading the missiles dead. As a result it was not being able to keep up with the nukes that were closing in. The fate of this ship was sealed.

The only consolation the crew of this vessel would get, would be that they would watch the destruction of their nemesis before they died. The destruction of the two Shaitan warships was spectacular. Never had humans exploded 760 nukes in one place at the same time before. It was visible to plain sight from over a thousand kilometers that the human ships were at the moment.

It looked like computer generated fireworks on a screen. All the explosions had the same color and flashed for a few moments before becoming dark. There was no afterglow to indicate that the largest concentration of human bombing ever had just taken place in that volume of space.

By the time the Third Fleet was able to come to the assistance of the Second Fleet, all of the ships of the Second Fleet had run out of antimissiles. As the angles of approach of the two fleets converged and the distance reduced, the Third Fleet’s antimissiles grew more accurate and were able to shoot down more of the missiles aimed at the Second Fleet.

Unfortunately, help did not come soon enough for two of the remaining seven ships of the Second Fleet. By the time all the Shaitan nukes had been killed, there were only 5 ships left in the Second Fleet now slowly moving away from the Third Fleet having crossed over. There was no cheers of victory in any of the bridge.

Fabi sat on his chair in the flag bridge, strapped to the wall. He could feel his hands shaking from the adrenalin that was wearing down now, as he moved to unstrap himself. He heard the ping in his helmet and saw it was Admiral Cloutier, most probably wanting to congratulate him on the victory.