Spooker
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Grass Eaters 2 | 57 | Margins I
🕑 Added 2024-09-25 16:47:01 +0000 UTCZNS 1006, Preirsput (2,800 Ls)
POV: Stsinkt, Znosian Dominion Navy (Rank: Ten Whiskers)
The Great Predators struck when the fleet was exactly half refueled. The maximum number of ships in the fleet were deep down in the gravity well of Preirsput-6 with their fuel scoops fully deployed and processing.
Even in the expanse of space, the wave of Kestrel missiles came in like a silent tidal wave. The ships caught in it found their most vulnerable modules targeted, and in the case of the fuel ships with plenty of volatile modules—
“Ten Whiskers, they’ve targeted our fuel fleet!” the computer officer shouted, pointing at the numerous blinking red icons on the battlemap.
“How many?” Stsinkt asked with a sinking feeling.
“All our heavies and the mediums!” he replied, bringing up the full tally on the console.
“So all of them?” she ground out. They hadn’t brought any light fuel ships for this long journey…
“Yes, Ten Whiskers. All of them.”
“Two hundred ships at once?!” Stsinkt exclaimed. “Where is it coming from? Someone must have seen something!”
“Yes, Ten Whiskers. Our long-range radar ships—”
Stsinkt nodded viciously. “Ah, of course our new radar ships saw something. What are they saying? Connect me to Radar Squadron—”
The computer officer shook his head sadly. “No, Ten Whiskers, they’re gone too. All six destroyed. Their last messages said they saw some kind of burn plume incoming from a position about—”
“Put it on the screen,” she ordered.
The main board updated with 24 new predicted targets just a light second away, well within range, above the system plane and bearing away from the gas giant.
“Secured proxy link to the squadron leaders,” Stsinkt ordered. “Launch everything we can into that volume. Mass volley.”
“Yes, Ten Whiskers,” he replied reflexively, busily entering the parameters into his console. He frowned. “Digital Guide says we don’t have a target lock.”
“Of course not,” she snarled impatiently. “It’s the Great Predators and their hiding ships. Put the missiles in terminal self-guidance mode. And start chasing them to raise the probability of resolution.”
It took about five minutes for the entire fleet to get and propagate the order, even though they’d prepared it ahead of time. By that time, the predictive volume had expanded thousands of kilometers in radius.
“Launch!” Stsinkt ordered coldly.
Tens of thousands of missiles burst out of their tubes. For a second, the computers on even the Znosians’ advanced missile destroyers struggled to process and display all the new information at once as their onboard radar sensors activated.
“Missiles away.”
Stsinkt looked at the uncertainty sphere of the target hatefully.
Our turn, abominations.
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TRNS Sonora, Preirsput (2,800 Ls)
POV: Catarina Ibarra, Terran Republic Navy (Rank: Captain)
On the bridge of her brand-new Python-class missile destroyer, Captain Catarina Ibarra stared at the thousands of incoming red dots on her screen for a good second, marveling at the dense cloud they made as their pseudorandom trajectories formed repeating patterns of crimson. They were almost… beautiful.
“Captain?” the voice of her executive officer — Kyrylo — came into her sealed, EVA-worthy helmet through the speakers from next to her. The flammable atmosphere had been pumped out of the ship to prevent a catastrophic hit.
“Well… you don’t see that every day,” she commented dryly. “Looks like they just launched the entire GDP of Mars at us.”
“That appears to be the case, Captain. Seems like a bit of an overreaction to me.”
“I’d be pretty angry at us too,” Catarina remarked, pointing at the side screens analyzing the damage from the over two hundred fuel ships, heavies and mediums, they’d just trashed in orbit of the gas giant.
“Oh, that?” Kyrylo said innocently. “What if their ships just… did that by themselves?”
She smiled at him. “Yeah, and we just happened to lose two squadrons’ worth of Kestrels… Terrible accident.” She took another glance at the status boards. “The squadron… are they ready to go in?”
“They’re approaching their targets now.”
She tilted her head. “Then, you know the drill. Automation Level Four. All measures permissible.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And suggest to the Sonora computers: see if we can turn around and take a few pot shots at the whales still refueling with our spinal rails when they’ve got time,” she added.
“From this far away?” he questioned.
“Yeah, they’ll have what… a couple hours to move? But never hurts to give it a shot, does it?”
“You miss every shot you don’t take, ma’am.”
“And hopefully, they miss every shot they do take.”
Faced with the incoming dilemma and given full control over the ship’s arsenal of defensive countermeasures, the ship computers didn’t hesitate for a nanosecond.
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ZNS 1006, Preirsput (2,800 Ls)
POV: Stsinkt, Znosian Dominion Navy (Rank: Ten Whiskers)
“Radar confusers,” Stsinkt hissed as over a thousand new targets popped onto their sensor screens, creating confusion amongst the outgoing missiles that had already detected the faint signal of a singular enemy ship.
“Resolving,” her computer officer said, furiously connecting with the other ship computers to work the problem.
A few of the dots disappeared sporadically, but as they did, Stsinkt knew that there was only a limit to what their software sensor filters could do. She merely hoped they’d reduced the targets to a low enough number as the tens of thousands of missiles closed in on randomly chosen targets.
“Is what we have good enough?”
“If we continue to resolve at the same pace… there’s a sixty percent chance of a hit by one of our missiles,” her computer officer read out. “Including their advanced anti-missiles and point defense.”
“Sixty percent?!” she asked. “Only?”
“I take full responsibility for my failure to narrow down the field of possibilities, Ten Whiskers.”
“Never mind that! Tell the fleet to reload as fast as possible. And burn us faster towards them to reduce that probability cone.”
“The entire fleet?”
“Just the ones that can hit them. Get after them!”
“Yes, Ten Whiskers. Initiating full combat burn on all our missile destroyers.”
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TRNS Sonora, Preirsput (2,800 Ls)
POV: Catarina Ibarra, Terran Republic Navy (Rank: Captain)
“I don’t like the look of those odds,” Catarina said, taking a quick peek at the updating consoles at her executive officer’s station.
“Forty percent probability of hit? Yeah, not great—”
“Oh, there’s a zero in there? Now, I really, really don’t like those odds,” she replied.
“Well, you volunteered to play bait, Captain. You have only yourself to blame.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Uh huh.”
“Near-death experiences are how I commune with my God,” she said, holding up her miniature Navy-approved cross necklace.
“Uh huh.”
“I need the hazard pay to feed my gambling addiction.”
“There we go.”
The klaxons all over the ship went off, and the speakers began to blare out the familiar Alarm Red warning:
BwahBwahBwahBwahBwahBwahBwahBwah. Incoming. Incoming. Incoming. BwahBwahBwahBwahBwah—
They strapped themselves into their chairs securely. Some began privately praying, their fate out of their hands.
Of all the missiles flying towards them, only two dozen managed to see through the dazzlers — or guessed the right target. Of those that did, half were distracted by a fresh set of chaffs and decoys the Sonora ejected in an uneven pattern around her spine. The remaining twelve missiles continued on, undeterred.
The ship’s computer, prioritizing the few incoming threats that were not fooled by its tricks, released a barrage of counter-missiles. Unfortunately, the Python only boasted eight of those in a volley. As the machinery behind them reloaded too slowly, the released smaller, more agile counter-missiles boosted at and directly intercepted seven of the incoming threats. The eighth target ate a partial hit hard enough to disable its engines and knock it far off course.
A final four approached, almost within Mark One eyeball range of the Sonora as its engines and even reaction thrusters roared to burn it out of harm’s way.
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt.
The Sonora’s last-ditch CIWS systems activated, six out of its eight hardpoints desperately spraying 20 mm depleted uranium into the vacuum at 6,000 rounds per minute. The barrage shredded three of the incoming and hit the last one’s rear, disabling its flight and maneuvering systems. But it was too late. Thanks to the tyranny of Newton’s First Law, the final spinning missile was close enough for its proximity fuse to activate anyway.
Three thousand kilograms of fragmentation propelled by high explosives threw themselves at roughly where the Sonora was. Almost ninety percent of the fragmentation sprayed directly into her midsection.
Luckily for her crew, that was its most armored module.
The fragmentation penetrated the micrometeorite protection, detonated the electric reactive armor, and sliced through even the composite ceramic tiles. They were mostly caught in the Kevlar netting embedded within the ship hull, creating a six-meter bulge in the walls. A few pieces of deadly debris managed to pierce through, mostly embedding themselves in the opposite wall or clattering into the smooth metallic floor of the hallway, exposing it to cold vacuum. One particularly large projectile managed to penetrate the opposing wall in the hallway, finally caught in the armor on the other side.
Bang.
Red warning notifications popped up on the bridge main screen as the inertial compensators went into overdrive to absorb the sudden shock of the hit.
“Hull breach! Hull breach in the midsection on the port side!” Catarina’s executive officer warned in the intercom. After a second, his voice came through again with a much calmer, “Non-critical perforation breach in the central hallway. Hull armor is self-sealing. Damage control teams one and two on the way, ETA twenty seconds.”
Catarina released her white-knuckled grip on the command chair. “Any casualties?”
“None yet. Our spacers in that sector were in internal armored cabins and we had no one in that hallway.”
She let out a sigh of relief, her hot breath momentarily clouding her visor before its nano-coating dissipated it. “Good. Any news from—”
The alarms rang again.
“Launches from the Grand Bun Fleet! Many new launches! Resolving.”
Catarina took a sharp breath as she checked her console again. Another swarm. If the enemy had taxpayers and voters, they might be complaining about how many little Buns this expenditure of munitions could have clothed and fed… “Full combat burn away from the bandits right before they get into the minimum abort range. We’ll have been here long enough by the time those missiles get anywhere close. Inform the other captains to hurry up with… whatever is taking them so long.”
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ZNS 1006, Preirsput (2,800 Ls)
POV: Stsinkt, Znosian Dominion Navy (Rank: Ten Whiskers)
Stsinkt sucked in through her buck teeth as she read the shocking new figures for the enemy vessel on her sensor screen. Each of its four Alcubierre fusion hybrid engines lit up like an open torch in the dark. The State Security briefing had given them only a slight underestimate for the enemy’s predicted maximum combat acceleration, but seeing it for herself was an entirely different matter.
“Ten Whiskers, they’ve abandoned all their efforts at hiding and are fully burning for the system limit.”
“Yes, I can see that too. Any chance that our missiles will still be able to hit them from this range?” she asked hopefully.
“None at their acceleration profile and current distance, but Digital Guide analysis shows that sensors have detected some unaccounted-for debris in the area that doesn’t exactly match our missiles. We have likely gotten a hit on one of their ships with the last volley… but it obviously didn’t stick.”
“Another thing for the incompetents at the Ship Design Bureau to analyze and take responsibility for,” Stsinkt nodded and then said savagely, “At least we now know that they can bleed.”
After a few seconds, she turned back to the console, her instincts burning, “Wait a second. The initial scans said there were two dozen targets in their area and… unless we got some real bad information from State Security and the Great Predators have discovered ways of violating the rules of physics that forbid multiple contiguous objects occupying the same volume, that one ship couldn’t have carried enough missiles to destroy over two hundred of our fuel ships by itself. Wait… is that… possible for them?”
“Ten Whiskers, if we attribute the impossible to the enemy all the time, we might as well go home and await extinction.”
“Should we?”
“That would be against our directives.” Her computer officer went back to his console. “We’re scanning the volume again. Nothing so far. It is possible that decoys were involved. We have seen them make extensive use of them before.”
“Weird,” Stsinkt said cautiously. “That still doesn’t explain the number of missiles they fired at us. Expand the search volume. There must be more of them out here somewhere.”
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TRNS Sonora, Preirsput (2,800 Ls)
POV: Catarina Ibarra, Terran Republic Navy (Rank: Captain)
The other twenty-three missile destroyers of the Republic Navy Squadron 9 and 10, their missile bays empty — they had left theirs with the Sonora as she baited out the enemy — fired their spinal dual rail guns at the orbiting refueling spacecraft from beneath the refueling ships deep in the gas giant’s atmosphere.
For the specifications of the Python-class missile destroyers, the Navy had insisted on low observability even in the firing of its guns, and the thousands of stealth-coated depleted uranium projectiles sprayed up at the refueling ships above them in volleys. The ambient radiation from the reflective atmosphere of Preirsput-6 barely covered their railguns’ thermal blooms.
“One volley away… two away… three away… four away…” Kyrylo reported. “Five away…”
“Still no signs of movement from the targets?” Catarina asked.
“None, they’re all still refueling. Six away… seven away… Squadron 9 dry on guns… eight away… And they’re all dry now. Both squadrons Oscar Mike.”
Then, as they ran empty on all munitions, and minutes before the hits would register, they burned their thrusters away from the ships in the enemy fleet marked for death.
Catarina zoomed out on the galactic map. “Any chance we can intercept this doom fleet again before Sol?”
“No point, Captain. Not if we go through with the Maikop Option.”
“Well, at least we’ve made that a viable option now… Let’s get out of here.” She looked hatefully at the many remaining ships of the Znosian Grand Fleet. “We’ll see you assholes back in Sol.”
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ZNS 1006, Preirsput (2,800 Ls)
POV: Stsinkt, Znosian Dominion Navy (Rank: Ten Whiskers)
“Losses are one heavy cargo, two medium cargo, one recovery ship, eighty-four fire support ships, and a hundred thirty orbital transports,” the computer officer reported from his station, voice steady. “Digital Guide says that is a normal distribution of ships that were refueling. It seems they were merely going after targets of opportunity.”
Not hearing a response, he looked up towards Stsinkt. “Ten Whiskers?”
“Another two hundred ships,” she read slowly.
“Yes, Ten Whiskers. Our medical ships are evacuating the ejected pods. We have medium to high confidence that the shots came from below them, within the gas giant’s atmosphere. Many of the wrecked ship captains and squadron leaders have taken full responsibility for… negligence, mostly, but—”
She shook her head. “No, this one is on me. I did this. I will take full responsibility for this.”
“Ten Whiskers—”
She cut him off. “It’s on me. I wasn’t prepared— prepared for them to devastate us with diversionary tactics so sophisticated, it’s an entire generation beyond ‘hey look, what’s that predator doing behind you?’ that even bred-illiterate hatchlings can see through!” Stsinkt shouted out the last part, throwing her datapad to the floor and thumping her foot in rage.
He bowed his head in shock and fear at her outburst for a minute, waiting until she finally cooled down and slumped back into her command chair. “What do I tell the other captains, Ten Whiskers?”
She sighed heavily, closing her eyes. “Resume refueling as quickly as possible. What do our margins for attacking the Great Predator Nest look like now?”
“They didn’t take out any of our missile destroyers and not that many of our orbital transports, Ten Whiskers, so our margins remain the same: about quadruple. But without our fuel ships, we’ll definitely have to refuel once again before we reach the predator home system.”
She nodded slowly. “Have the combat computer develop a better plan for refueling under threat in the future. Over four hundred ships. Hundreds of thousands of Servants of the Prophecy… gone in minutes. This loss rate is— it’s an unconscionable waste, even if our primary mission is still a foregone conclusion.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll— we’ll find a better way.”
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Meta
Fun fact on a Terran Thrapple bottle cap (collected 2124):
Up to 10% of Znosian hatchlings are considered “bred-illiterate”.
Upon scanning the online code, the explanation:
Znosians considered “bred-illiterate” have brains that are not developed with the necessary facilities for reading to save on breeding time. Their roles in Dominion society are generally restricted to manual labor, with non-reading systems developed to train them for their simple jobs, but a rare few “bred-illiterates” have historically been known to overcome the limitations of their birth to achieve greater things. It has even been rumored that one such individual achieved a rank of five whiskers in the Znosian Navy.
These defects in the hatchling pools have since been corrected by Znosian State Security to fully eliminate that possibility.
Comments
Nicolae
I don't think "Maikop Option" has been explained in any way so far.
Nicolae
OR an AI instructed to end the war as soon as possible, with no limitations on how it is done. Also, "chopping one's head off in order to get rid of lice" is more extreme than my idea. What I said would be closer to "removing all hair from the body".
Valdis Trautmanis
Could this be the "Maikop Option" select Terran officers have mentioned a number of times or have I missed something along the way? Doesn't ring any other bells except being the name of a city in Russia...
Valdis Trautmanis
Are you implying that advanced Terran AI, with or without involvement of the "Secret Service", effectively forced the Buns' hand into launching this invasion in order to end the war quickly and unite the Terrans? That would be kind of Dr. Strangelove-level of crazy, or chopping one's head off in order to get rid of lice
Valdis Trautmanis
Darn it! Those Buns still managed to scratch the paint on one of our brand new Pythons! Still, this was truly a riveting chapter 👍 Railgun salvo riveting even! But we can't win this with Dakka alone, time for some cyber warfare or something along those lines...
Nicolae
For all we know, it gave the idea of the attack on Terra as a way to end the war early. And get all of humanity invested/open to the rest of space.
jrharper42
One could only imagine what a super-Terran intelligence could do inside Znosian networks 🤔
Nicolae
I can't wait for malware and viruses to be used like PoisonIvy, Stuxnet, Conficker Virus, MyDoom, I LOVE YOU. The only issue is that they will likely not work on repeated attempts too far apart.
AnAbsoluteVillain
‘hey look, what’s that predator doing behind you?’ ding dong dashing the neighborhood. Beting the next game is red rover red rover send the nuclear payload over.
