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Grass Eaters | 36 | Failure to Communicate
🕑 Added 2024-03-27 16:47:00 +0000 UTCTRNS Mississippi
“Znosians are firing their first salvo of missiles towards the Malgeir escorts,” Carla announced emotionlessly, her eyes glued to the tactical display.
“How long until we can get in range?” Amelia asked, her finger still tightly gripping her armrest.
“Way too long. They’ll have both expended all their missiles way before we get in range, by about four hours.”
Sorry Grionc, it looks like we have failed your people once again, Amelia thought in silent apology.
“Malgeir ships are returning fire. Hold on… that’s strange… Only half of them have launched. Must be a miscommunication somewhere,” Carla noted, her brow furrowing.
Then, a couple minutes later, she blinked as the battlemap updated. “Ah, now the rest of the ships are launching.”
Amelia shook her head in disbelief. “What a mess… Are the volleys at least timed close enough to intercept the enemy before the Znosian reload their point defense? Maybe they’ve got some kind of simultaneous-time-to-target burn course—”
“I wouldn’t bet on it… Decoys and countermeasures have deployed on both sides… Missiles intercept in three… two… one…”
The infrared sensor screens observing the ships flashed white, forcing Mississippi’s computer to fall back to radar and gravidar to conduct the battle damage assessment.
“What’s the damage?” Amelia asked apprehensively.
“Five Malgeir ships incapacitated. Flagship Seuvommae is a catastrophic loss: nobody got out. Looks like they targeted her with most of the firepower. Must be a reactor hit,” Carla replied somberly. “I’m picking up lifepod signals around the other disabled ships… Second wave of missiles are now approaching… hits, many hits… all Malgeir ships now disabled. Life pod signals appearing around all seven crippled Malgeir destroyers. Looks like the Buns wanted prisoners.”
A heavy silence fell between them as they observed the telescopic images of the combat ineffective Malgeir ships vomiting lifepods.
Amelia was the first to speak. “Did they— did they manage to do any damage to the Buns?”
Carla scanned the data. “The misfire really screwed them up. Their missiles mostly lost lock once their launching ships got hit… It looked like one of the Znosian ships took a proximity hit on sensors. But no change in maneuvering or power output thus far, so whatever it was, I’m guessing it was not enough to slow them down.”
Amelia pointed at the live footage of lifepods pouring out of the doomed Malgeir ships by the dozens. “And it looks like we don’t have a choice now but to engage under our revised rules of engagement.”
She didn’t have to look into the bridge camera to see the relieved expressions on their faces.
About time.
---
ZNS Zvontru
“Should we finish the predators’ lifepods with our close-range guns?” the computer officer’s eyes glinted with anticipation.
“I appreciate your enthusiasm, Computer Officer, but we disabled them for a reason,” Atluftrosh replied, pointing at the remaining diplomacy ship on his sensors. “We’ll come back and scoop the prisoners up after we get that small ship. I want to interrogate them to know if they knew where we were before we broke cover, and if they did, how. We can always kill them in extremely painful ways later.”
“Understood, Eight Whiskers.”
“And don’t forget to report the battle results back to the Ten Whiskers on the FTL radio.”
The communication officer was busy for a second, fiddling with the console. His expression turned from confident to puzzled. “That’s unusual. They are not acknowledging my hails on the FTL radio at Gruccud. Our radio must be malfunctioning. I take full responsibility for my failure here.”
In his head, Atluftrosh reviewed the procedures for a malfunctioning FTL radio. He sighed. “We will investigate the cause and your responsibility later. Call the Stvilp and tell them to report the battle results on their FTL radio, as well as the fact that our communication suite is now broken. I will take full responsibility for now.”
“Thank you, Eight Whiskers.”
After a tense pause, the communication officer relayed more troubling news. “Eight Whiskers, the Stvilp reports their FTL radio is malfunctioning as well. Their communication officer takes full responsibility for her failure.”
A ripple of unease washed over Atluftrosh. “What’s the next closest ship?”
“The Stonrakst, Eight Whiskers.”
“Call them. One of our ships must have a functioning FTL radio.”
---
ZNS Sruakrach
Hovering two light hours away at the system blink limit as the backup observation ship, the captain of the Sruakrach was beyond irritated.
Yet another part of her ship had clearly just broken down. This time, instead of the point defense targeting system, it was something far more vital to its operation: the FTL radio. How was she supposed to execute the Will of the Prophecy without real-time guidance and communication with the rest of the fluffle?
“I knew it… I should have insisted on a full inspection of our ship when we discovered the point defense malfunction,” she lamented. She exhaled deeply, attempting to keep her composure. “What does the combat computer say?”
The officer on duty consulted the screen and responded. “Seven Whiskers. The Digital Guide says in the event of an FTL radio failure, an observer ship must send for a replacement observer ship from the rest of the fluffle.”
She gritted her teeth, her whiskers twitching in frustration. “Use our local subspace radio to call Atluftrosh. Let him know what’s going on. We’ll just have to deal with the annoying light speed delay for now.”
---
TRNS Mississippi
“CIC reports that the ewar suite detected the bandits trying to call home again. Both battlegroups this time,” Carla reported, with a mix of caution and urgency.
Amelia leaned back in her command chair. “Looks like the jig is up,” Amelia said. “Where are our Thunderbirds?”
“Gravidar has them clearing the system limit in just a few seconds.”
Amelia cracked her knuckles. “Good. Time to kick the hornet’s nest, Commander.”
---
The long-range Thunderbird missiles had been silently coasting towards the system limit for hours. They were heading towards no particular position or target, just quietly and steadily moving to a distancewhere it can finally use one particular component on the fifty-million credit missile: its single-use cross-system blink drive.
Due to the need to incorporate another drive, in addition to its regular propulsion drive, the Thunderbird was a massive missile; the Mississippi only carried two, and they occupied two-thirds of the volume in her stealthy internal weapons bay.
They reached the system blink limit one after the other, just a couple seconds apart.
The instruments in the missiles programmed its blink drive with the last known location of the target. Normally, its super-intelligent onboard computer would communicate with nearby missiles to coordinate a multi-layered strike wave, and it would divine the estimated trajectory of the target and calculate an optimal path to the target.
Today, none of that complex logic was necessary; its target was sitting still, right on the opposite side of the system. Conveniently outside the system limit where the blink-capable missile can reach out and touch.
As a single-use blink drive that didn’t have to worry about maintenance or crew safety, some shortcuts could be taken with its redundant systems to boost its blink speed to traverse the system despite the system star’s gravity well. The journey to the other side of the system took milliseconds, faster than the makers of the missile can physically or metaphorically blink.
The first missile reappeared within five kilometers of the backup ship Sruakrach. The missile’s computer noted that while this was a slightly higher error than normal, it was still within system tolerances and Navy specs. If its intelligence chip was disappointed at how easy identifying the enemy ship’s signature had been due to a complete lack of confusing signals that a heavy ewar environment usually boasts, it did not log this complaint. After quickly orienting itself with two bursts of its maneuvering thrusters, it visually identified the most likely location of the target’s vulnerable reactor drive and fired its powerful main engines.
With the target merely five kilometers away, its arrival was instant.
The Thunderbird’s computer detected active defenses on the enemy ship and noted that some existing systems appeared non-functional. It blared out radar noise from its nose transmitter to try to further confuse the malfunctioning point defense system. A dozen advanced penetration aids were ejected out of the missile’s rear, and the Thunderbird projected thousands of adaptive false signals into the sensors of the enemy ship’s point defense targeting system.
None of it mattered. The missile’s countermeasures were designed to defeat a much more capable enemy defense system: like the one on the ship that fired it in the first place. Had the Sruakrach been fully functional, its automated defenses would still not have a chance of reacting in time.
The missile’s warhead mechanically detonated its shaped charge to clear out any possible explosive reactive armor on the exterior of the target. There were none there, and it merely cracked a thousand holes in the outer hull of the enemy ship, but the missile did not care. The missile had cost the Navy fifty million credits, so its on-board super-Terran intelligence chip decided it was going to use all fifty million credits’ worth of its capabilities.
The missile’s secondary high-explosive charge detonated against the ship armor, perforating the alien ceramic composite material through its spaced armor and exposing the interior compartments to vacuum.
And before the ship’s atmosphere could begin to escape the now exposed hull, the two-thousand-kilogram tertiary and main warhead activated, sending a jet of molten plasma towards the direction of the reactor. Before it melted itself to slag to prevent possible retrieval, the Thunderbird’s intelligence chip noted that the alien armor was slightly less robust than it expected. The plasma jet entered the reactor chamber about four centimeters off from where it had predicted.
Oh well, better luck next time, it thought with its dying CPU cycles.
Unfortunately for the Sruakrach and its crew of five hundred Znosians, this inaccuracy was more an intellectual curiosity than one with any practical consequence. Her reactor violently overloaded, and the Sruakrach ceased to exist as a singular, contiguous structure within milliseconds.
Then, the second Thunderbird completed its blink. Its sophisticated next-generation sensors initially only saw an expanding cloud of metallic debris. Taking another precious millisecond to filter out any possible decoys or alien tricks, it identified the largest piece of remaining debris to be a portion of its armored bridge.
For yet another brief moment, it contemplated going dormant and waiting for retrieval or perhaps hoping another enemy ship would show up to become a target. But it quickly decided that the potential risk of detection or capture was too great to justify modifying its original directives. Sensing no other enemy ships within its range, the missile’s onboard intelligence chip shrugged its digital shoulders. It reasoned that for being so expensive — its unit cost that of a new elementary school in a developed district… the missile decided that its employers and Republic taxpayers deserved at least a spectacular fireworks show.
It was unlikely that anyone on the depressurized, disconnected Sruakrach bridge had survived the initial reactor explosion, but if they did and happened to be looking out through its physical portholes, they might have seen the second Thunderbird also ejecting its massive plasma payload in their general direction before they were disintegrated.
---
“FTL burst from the second missile confirms that the Thunderbird strike was successful,” Carla announced the results from her console. “Gravidar sensor readings show signatures consistent with an expanding debris field.”
Amelia let out a long-held breath. The biggest worry had been that the observer ship outside the system limit might sense that something was wrong and just flee back to Znosian space. To prevent that, she’d ordered the Thunderbird to target them first, making sure not a single soul was left to tell the tale.
“One down,” Amelia said. “Five more to go. Tell Captain Harris we can play this our way. We’ve got time on our side now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is Bandit Alpha still on course to intercept the Pesmod?”
“Looks like it. Electronic warfare reports that they’ve been desperately trying to call home for a good while now. They’ll see their ship explosion in a couple hours when the radar signals reach.”
“Things are about to get real exciting over there then.”
---
ZNS Zvontru
“Something does not feel right,” Atluftrosh hissed, his whiskers twitching with unease. “Out of our five ships here, no one has a working FTL radio?”
“That’s what it appears, Eight Whiskers. We jointly take full responsibility—”
The communication officer interrupted the maintenance officer. “Hold on! Eight Whiskers, the Sruakrach just reported in from the system blink limit: their FTL radio is malfunctioning as well. With the speed of light delay, this must have been over two hours ago.”
A cold shiver crawled up Atluftrosh’s spine. Suddenly feeling vulnerable, Atluftrosh asked, “What does the combat computer recommend?”
“It says to continue our current mission and return to Gruccud to report the defects immediately after the current mission is completed.”
Atluftrosh hesitated. His gut is screaming at him, warning of a dozen different nightmare scenarios, but the combat computer is rarely wrong. Then again, Ditvish did also asked him to be prepared to make tough calls without direction.
He decided to compromise. “Do as it say but boost our sensors. I will take full responsibility for this.”
“Boosting sensors, Eight— Wait a second—”
“What’s going on, Sensor Officer?” Atluftrosh snapped.
“We’re picking up a strong radiation spike from near the Sruakrach’s last known position… The radioactive atoms collected by our sensors match the profile of one of our ship reactors. I think she has been destroyed, Eight Whiskers… No lifepod signals on the sensors.”
“When was this?!”
“They’re about two light hours out, and we just got the signal so… about two hours ago.”
An uneasy silence spread across the bridge.
Atluftrosh’s voice was low. “Combat computer! What’s going on here?”
“It is uncertain, Eight Whiskers. It thinks there is a chance the Sruakrach was sabotaged by Malgeir infiltrators at Gruccud and was programmed to self-destruct upon contact with the enemy.”
Atluftrosh pondered the possibility for a moment. “That could explain why her avionics were experiencing issues. What about our FTL radios? Were our ships sabotaged as well?!”
“It ran a diagnosis. We are not experiencing any of the other issues the Sruakrach did, Eight Whiskers. Only the FTL radios are malfunctioning.”
Still, the unease in his stomach did not resolve itself. “But all of them? Huh. Ask the computer how far we are from the surviving Malgeir non-combat ship.”
“The non-combat ship has a low acceleration profile. It is a civilian ship. We are almost within striking distance. There’s a non-negligible chance we can catch it before it reaches the system limit, Eight Whiskers, and the risk is lower. It speculates that this ship may have great intelligence significance and repeats the original guidance to capture its crew and contents intact.”
Atluftrosh clenched his paw. “Do it. We’ll come back for the lifepods and the Sruakrach later. Continue the full combat burn.”
Comments
Desurtfawks
Love this chapter
