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Grass Eaters 2 | 56 | Invasion VIII
🕑 Added 2024-09-23 16:47:00 +0000 UTCZnosian Siege Fleet, Gruccud (20,000 Ls)
The missiles from Sixth Fleet, controlled by the computers of the TRNS Amazon nearby, attacked in three waves.
The new generation Kestrels arrived first as programmed. Twenty-four missiles, focusing on what the Terran computers thought were twelve of the Znosian fleet’s most important ships, including all six of its missile destroyers with FTL jammers onboard. Though not designed for long-range operations, their targets were following stationary orbits, and Kiara’s bet that they wouldn’t move orbits paid off. In terminal guidance, they went for the missile destroyers’ reactors.
All twelve targets died instantly.
The second wave arrived five seconds later: three hundred of the older generation gray market Pigeons launched by the Sixth Fleet.
The computers of the enemy missile destroyers realized that something was up. The signals indicating signs of operation had disappeared from twelve of their nearby brethren, including all six of their vital FTL jamming ships and four squadron lead ships.
Something was definitely up.
The Znosian ships boosted their sensors and radars towards the most likely vector of enemy approach, the planet around which Sixth Fleet was garrisoned. Some of them hit on vague returns close to them, especially the ones that had their ship defense software updated to best prepare for this new Great Predator enemy. Their fire control sensors locked onto the few incoming munitions they could see… only for those targets to dispense chaff to confuse their radars and flares to confuse their visual sensors. A handful of the ships managed to acquire a target lock, and none had counter-missiles ready to fire in those few seconds.
As a last resort, millions of automated point defense munitions flashed out towards the blossoming signals in an instant, filling the space between them and the incoming volley with deadly projectiles. Their desperate coverage plucked exactly two of the incoming Pigeons from the vast expanse.
Space is big. Really big.
Fortunately for the Znosians, the Pigeons were much less lethal than the first wave of missiles. Only a couple dozen destroyers suffered catastrophic explosions instantly. The missiles were not intelligent, but the Amazon computer controlling them was, and its logic decided that the enemy reactors were mostly buried too deep in enemy armor and hull for the small and obsolete missile designed to kill much smaller Terran ships: they went for the enemy capital ships’ exposed munition magazines, their bridges, their critical modules, or even their weapon batteries.
Unfortunately for the Znosians, the hits wrecked any semblance of order in the fleet. Before the second wave hit, the Znosians on these ships had started to realize they were coming under attack. After the hit, they were stunned off their paws by the explosions; some even into vacuum as their hulls lost integrity. Their computers were inundated with irrelevant data, cries for help, and way too many new pieces of space debris to see anything. This further delayed their reaction time and judgement.
Some of their computers reached out to their nearby ships for assistance and coordination but quickly realized that their radios had mysteriously stopped working. And despite the fact that their FTL jamming ships had gone silent, they still could not reach out to anyone else with their FTL radios.
Strange.
A few realized what was going on, and their computers automatically began calculations for a blink drive activation to escape the coming storm.
When the third wave of missiles, another three hundred Pigeons again, arrived ten seconds later, it was already over for most of the Znosian fleet. With direction from the Amazon, the Pigeons found the few ships that were still combat effective and fixed those problems. They burrowed themselves into the massive holes in the hull dug by their predecessors and aimed at remaining critical modules. There were three hundred missiles, and there were fewer than three hundred targets.
By the time the biological Terrans on the Amazon could read through the battle damage assessment encompassing the billions of new pieces of debris now littering the Gruccud system limit, less than a dozen Znosian missile destroyers were still moving on their own power. Another couple struggled for a few more seconds before their engines failed. Only four ships managed to spin up their blink drives to escape the system, none unscathed.
The Terrans were not bothered that there had been escapees, nor were they in any hurry to rush towards the fifty thousand plus and counting life pods spilling out of the doomed Znosian ships that were still technically contiguous.
Gruccud’s orbits were now clear.
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MNS Copproe, Spivauxu (6,500 Ls)
POV: Speunirtio, Malgeir Federation Navy (Rank: Gamma Leader)
“Two of the Grass Eaters are falling back!” Plecta announced as she checked her console. “Only eight remaining on our tail!”
“Keep tracking them. Find out if they’re going back to guard the gas giant,” Speunirtio ordered.
“Yes, Captain.”
“Is there anything else non-essential we can dump from the ship?” he asked hopefully. “The faster we go—”
“No, Captain. Those four missiles we have loaded on our external pylons are our last.”
“Damn, I was hoping— ah, well, at least they are Terran missiles,” he said confidently. “Let’s draw these pursuers as far away from Caerio-7 as we can before we double back.”
“We’d be betting on the missiles each getting a kill,” Plecta commented.
“Four of them at the gas giant, right?” Speunirtio reasoned. “One each, and if we hurry, maybe we can scoop enough for one jump.”
Plecta frowned. “What if the remaining chase us after?”
“We’ll worry about that after.”
It took another six hours of continuous chase with the remaining eight Znosian missile destroyers before Speunirtio was satisfied that they were far enough away from Caerio-7.
“Good, now turn us back. Take a safe angle away from the chasers.”
Plecta glanced at her consoles with alarm. “Captain, we’ll be approaching Caerio-7 at almost three percent the speed of light relative. How are we supposed to aim our missiles or slow down?”
“We’ll have to rely on an aerobrake to shed relative velocity,” Speunirtio said quietly.
“An aerobrake?!” Plecta exclaimed. “At three percent the speed of light? Assuming we don’t burn up in the hydrogen atmosphere, would such a maneuver even be possible?”
The HannibAI computer lit up with a caution.
No. I have completed my calculations. You’ll hit the atmosphere more like slamming into a solid wall than a fluid medium—
“Look, their computers are good, but they can’t possibly know everything, right?” Speunirtio asked.
Plecta shook her ears. “I don’t know, Captain. It hasn’t been wrong yet.”
“Fine. What if we shed some speed on our approach?”
“Then the guys behind us will catch up and hit us while we’re refueling, and that’s even if the missiles on our rack work and take out the four of them guarding the planet.”
“The missiles will work,” Speunirtio declared confidently. “They all have so far.”
“We still need to slow down— somehow.”
“What if we take the chasers further?”
Plecta shook her ears. “Captain, I think the Grass Eaters have it figured out. That’s why those two ships initially peeled off to join the two orbiting Caerio-7. They know what we’re trying.”
Speunirtio sighed. “If it doesn’t work, at least we’ll take out some of them on the high-speed pass.”
Plecta scrutinized his face for a moment, and she understood what he meant. At least their end would be quick, and they’d take out four of the enemy at the cost of their own ship. And they were a mere scout ship.
Not a bad trade on any day.
She nodded. “Yes, Captain. We’ll do everything we can.”
Five hours later, the Copproe finally doubled back enough for the radars to see all four enemy ships positioned to intercept them around Caerio-7.
“They’re ready to launch, Captain,” Plecta declared as she got the notice from the gunnery section that the missiles had been armed.
“Not yet. I want us to get as close as we can. The no-escape zone.”
“Yes, Captain. According to the specifications they gave us on the missiles, we’ll reach it in about—”
She was cut off by a loud grinding noise in the hull. The Copproe shook at an unnatural frequency beneath their paws.
Speunirtio saw the urgent notification on his console. “Which idiot gave them permission to fire?!” he demanded furiously as he watched four yellow dots representing his precious Terran missiles race away from the Copproe towards the four enemy targets.
Plecta hurriedly consulted her own. “Missile control crew is saying it was a misfire. They claim they never hit the launch button—”
“Four misfires?!” Speunirtio gaped at her. While the Copproe didn’t have the best record in the Sixth Fleet, having all four missile batteries launch without command was unprecedented. A record-breaking mistake with a deeper root cause.
“The crew is still insisting they didn’t give the launch commands,” Plecta relayed.
As Speunirtio gaped at his battlemap, the sensor board flashed twice. The dozen or so targets they could see were suddenly replaced by a massive influx of new information, listing what appeared to be every independently maneuvering entity in the system larger than the size of his paw… and some smaller.
“New FTL transmission incoming, Captain,” Plecta announced, bringing a new image on screen.
While he had been briefed about the nature of their allies, the alien face on their main screen unsettled Speunirtio for a short moment. He brought his instincts under control quickly, and he cleared his throat before speaking into his microphone. “Terran Admiral Amelia Waters. It is good to see your people.”
“Likewise, Captain. Now, adjust your heading and burn course before you go straight into Caerio-7. Your planned aerobrake maneuver is not going to work. You’ll hit the atmosphere more like slamming into a solid brick wall than—”
“—than a fluid medium,” he completed for her, breaking into a wide grin.
Amelia nodded. “We’ll take care of the… eight gnats chasing you. Just slow down, come back, get refueled, and get out of here. At a sane relative velocity this time please. You are a warship, not a meteor.”
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ZNS 1006, Preirsput (22,000 Ls)
POV: Stsinkt, Znosian Dominion Navy (Rank: Ten Whiskers)
The thousands of ships in the Grand Prophetic Fleet simultaneously blinked into the Preirsput system, maintaining careful separation between the ships, some by light seconds to minutes, to avoid all falling into the disruption fields of the Great Predators in blink space. This made coordination after blinks slightly more complicated, slightly less organized, but it was a necessary precaution to avoid the crippling of the entire fleet by a single FTL trap from the Great Predators.
The system itself was well-surveyed by the Znosian Navy. After all, they had occupied it for months at a time when they managed to push through the mostly unpopulated system to get to the Malgeir core world of Datsot. They knew it had two harvestable gas giants: Preirsput-5 and Preirsput-6. The abundance of hydrogen and helium in their atmospheres was necessary for the synthesis of spacecraft blink fuel on common fuel scoops mounted on every blink-worthy ship. The main sequence star of Preirsput itself would also be a potential refuel target, but only for specially designed exploration ships that could survive the extreme temperature and gravity conditions of yellow stars while still remaining capable of the volatile procedure of fuel extraction and processing.
The current positions of the gas giants were also of relevance to the Znosian Navy. Preirsput-5 was roughly on the path between one side of the system to the other, and Preirsput-6 was not. The suspicious Znosian combat computers almost instantaneously (and correctly) deduced that the most efficient transfer burn to Preirsput-5 might be mined by the predators. Instead, they headed for the out-of-the-way Preirsput-6 gas giant.
As she read the latest relay dispatch from Grantor, Stsinkt tried not to throw up her breakfast rations. The Great Predators had savaged the fleet of three hundred missile destroyers she left to keep the Lesser ones entrapped in Gruccud. While the lives of their spacers were forfeited to the Prophecy the day they left the hatchling pools, such an inefficient waste was unbecoming of a well-trained Znosian naval officer, not to mention one who was as careful as she was known for being.
Her next message to the relay ship was to take full responsibility.
She’d hoped that they would at least keep the system open in case the secondary fleet under Sprabr needed to be brought in for support. Now, with Sprabr forbidding the use of jamming gaps and the enemy cutting off her route out, she felt truly alone. The only way out was forward.
“Computer Officer, any signs of the enemy squadrons?” she asked.
“No, Ten Whiskers. Our radar ships… they’re scanning at full power.”
“They’re in here somewhere,” Stsinkt muttered. “I know it. They have to be.”
Unfortunately knowing that you are going to be attacked by invisible beasts is not quite the same as being able to prevent it.
“That’s… what the Digital Guide also predicts,” her computer officer agreed. “Shouldn’t— shouldn’t this many radars be able to see the predator ships?”
“Sure, and with the new software, we can get radar resolutions down to the size of my paw,” she replied absentmindedly.
“So why aren’t they showing up?” he asked, peering at his console in frustrating. “Didn’t the State Security brief say they can shrink their radar cross section to the size of a head, much larger than our minimum resolution?”
She turned to look at him. “There are trillions of fast-moving objects the size of my paw in this system. The other sensors can’t search through and corroborate them all, not even if our computers all work in parallel. We don’t know what we’re looking for. And… they could always be hiding behind something.”
The computer officer looked down at his console in disgust. “The incompetents at the Ship Design Bureau better be taking responsibility for this.”
“Oh, don’t worry, Six Whiskers, there’s plenty they have to take full responsibility for by the end of this campaign,” she replied darkly.
“What do we do?”
“If anything, they’re going to hit us when we refuel,” she decided.
“Should we delay our refueling operation until we hunt them down, Ten Whiskers?”
“No, no. We’ll never find them unless they choose to fight. And maybe even when they do.”
“We just have to hope they don’t know which of our ships we’re on?” he asked with a worried expression.
Stsinkt nodded. “Yes, and we have to hope that they don’t get very lucky. For the sake of the coordination of the fleet in the coming battles. But… if they do, our lives were forfeited to the Prophecy the day we left the hatchling pools.”
