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Post by Avatar on Sept 1, 2019 3:49:08 GMT
This will be a rebuild of the consolidated "Into the Chasm of Night" Thread that was lost on 5-31-2005. I urge anyone who wants to read this to download it as a temp file and save it to disk. It is a good read and if I may toot my own horn-an example of as close a technically plausible treatment of B-5 technology as I can devise, within the realm of "real" science. It does contain technical errors, but that is solely due to my lack of a deeper understanding of the social and physical sciences than I currently possess.
A little CHAOS is a GOOD thing.
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Into the Chasm of Night: Chapter 1 Part 1
Into the Belly of the Beast
Malcolm Thomas Caldwell floated along the passageway. He was mumbling Narnish to himself. "Curse the idiot politicians, who picked the Narns over the Centauri. If the idiots of Earthgov had to have the Alliance, why could they not have picked the fanheads over the spoo-for-brains marsupials?" Centauri was easy to learn, and was in common use among the League of Non-aligned Worlds and the Centauri themselves.
The Centauri were feared by the ambitious Drazi, the inept Abbai and the sneaky Vree. Besides the Centauri had gravitational drives. Pawing through the wreckage of Dilgar ships and ransacking dead civilizations, like the Markab, had given Humans very little of practical use, besides food bricks and bio-tech of a rather low quality.
The Centauri, on the other hand, had such nice toys. What did the Narns bring to the Alliance, but Centauri enmity, a few paltry battle lasers, energy mines, and a bunch of nosey types poking into every Human nook and cranny trying for "mutual technology exchanges"?
Caldwell knew how that rigamarole actually worked. It was sort of like one vote / one sapient in the Alliance Charter. The next Alliance President would definitely be a Narn.
It would take Humanity centuries to replace those Humans killed in the Human / Minbari War. Who cared if the Senate was two Senators from every world? Fourteen Humans, two Drazi, six Abbai and four Gaim against ten Narns? If the Vree Corporate came in, then there would be another six Senators to offset the Narns; but the Narns constituted one half of the population of the Alliance. Numbers counted as representatives in the House. So Caldwell practiced Narnish; while he passed clumsy Narns, who clambered their way through his ship. Even in the little things they failed to measure up to the standards he expected.
Most, of the Drazi and Vree aboard, were already swimming in micro-gravity. Humans, fresh from groundhog school, were also rapidly learning as the ship crew worked up. The Narns, supposed space veterans all, were worse than civilians when it came to shipside acclimation. One Narn, not watching where he was going, bumped into Caldwell.
"Watch where you are going!" snarled the spoo-head. Caldwell, noticing the Narn uniform and the rank of Talon Commander, asked quietly "Is that any way for the Ship's Executive Officer to address the Captain?"
The Narn tried to orient to the proper attitude of attention, but apparently lacking the skills, the spoo-for-brains just bounced off the overhead. By now, from the size and color of the head spots, Caldwell had determined that she was a female Narn. Keeping his best not-show-the-teeth-so-I-am-prepared-to-fight-you-smile hidden behind his tight pair of monkey-lips, he righted her, and planted her velcro-soled shoes on the temporary walk strip laid for newbies. He waited for her salute. It was a sloppy one.
"Talon-leader Na'Talith reporting." she said.
Caldwell grunted something, which did not register in his own ears as decipherable, and returned the salute, Human-fashion. "Have all persons reported aboard?" He asked neutrally. Careers had ended on less contentious circumstances than this one. He was not going to give this Narn any excuse to report any negatives to the political office on him. Na'Talith nodded 'yes' in the Human fashion. "Very well." was the next obvious comment for Caldwell to make, so he made it, and watched the the Narn rip rip rip her velcro-soled way down the walkway. Velcro was a lousy substitute for gravity. Her feet would be aching by the time she went to wherever she was going.
As for Malcolm, he was headed for the hanger of this beast of a ship. His last posting had been aboard an Olympus, but that was over three years ago. It had been, like him, a veteran of the Dilgar War. Like him, it had barely survived the Human / Minbari War. That ship had been holed in the rear end by a Sharlin's neutron beam. Wounded by a crazed Warrior Caste Minbari in roughly the same anatomical spot; Malcolm had sat the Human "victory" out in a hospital in Kansas City. He had seen Minbari beams dig trenches across Kansas, and watched the sky-show from his room window abed, as a desperate Earth Force fought the Sharlins at the Battle of the Line. Homo Sapiens should have died on Earth that day. For some straznge reason the Boneheads had trenched Europe, Africa, and Asia on their first flyby; probably saving the Americas for their second firing pass. Well, that had been a Monbari mistake; Opening kamikazi jumppoints all over Sol System; three-fourths of Earth Force's heavy ships had sun-blossomed in pairs, taking the Minbari attack fleet with them.
Malcolm shook off the cobwebs of memory. 'The here and now is important. Let the dead bury the dead. Here and now is the Alliance Ship "Nathan Hale".' For some reason the powers of the universe had given him captaincy over this monster of Human desperation. Personally Caldwell had hoped for an Omega instead of a Patriot; yet, here he was.
As was naval custom and Earth Force doctrine; he presently toured the beast. He had passed through the hanger compartments. Too many Frazis occupied spaces that Furies should have filled. Half the small boat crew were Narns, most of them were pilots in the flight-group. Not good that was. Narns made good ground troops; not as good as the Gaim, but fair enough. As pilots they were worthless. If this were an ideal universe and Caldwell could have his way; he would have Minbari engineers, Human tacticians, Gaim Marines, Vree pilots, Brakiri logisticians, and Narn clergy. That was what Malcolm thought was the strength of each member of the Alliance, as best he understood it. Oh well; the Great Maker did make it a hilarious Universe. Things never worked out the way Malcolm thought it should. Doing a half-Immelmann mid-passageway, Caldwell changed his direction and pushed off a bulkhead. Time to check out the engines on this beast.
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From Strange Eyes
Na'Talith was in her quarters. Sparse even by Narn standards, she began to understand how the Humans had somehow survived the Minbari. Severe aestheticism seemed to be a dominant Human trait. Nothing she was reading on playback was dis-abusing her of her dawning assessment of just how dangerous Humans were, or in her present case, are. The book, she was reading, was written by a Vree named Excolsus. The Narnish translation of Vregan by the selfsame author, who claimed to be a linguist, was awful. No gender agreement, misspellings every other word, and of course a thoroughly incompetent alien comprehension of G"Quan's rules of logic made Excolsus' conclusions suspect to her. Nevertheless, Na'Talith was able to read the garbage and she was assertive enough in her own ability to draw her own conclusions. Excolsus' facts she would not dispute. Na'Talith, by combining the logic of G'Quan and her own not inconsiderable talents, was able to see in her mind, Excolsus' history as it truly was, and not as he wrote it. She read Excolsus' account of the Human arrival at Minbar, after the Minbari had turned upon themselves and descended into the chaos of the ruinious Caste War. She was particularly impressed by the Vree's description of the Human Marines dropping into the maelstrom of that Minbari civil war; especially their arrival at the burning of the holy city of Tuzanor by the crazed Warrior caste. Na'Talith shifted position and read with cross-legged rapture the stories of Sinclair and Franklin; the story of Sheridan and of the other Human heroes as they dug into the chaos of the Minbari Caste system and found a way to stop the extinction of two species, Human and Minbari. Na'Talith closed the book with a solid thump.
"Amazing." she muttered. "Excolsus, you must have been there at Tuzanor." It was quite conceivable, now, to see how the then, low-tech Humans, so clearly outfought the high-tech Minbari Warrior Caste and how foolishly the Minbari divided themselves up and gave the Humans their one slim chance at survival. The Humans cleverly exploited the Schism among the Boneheads. It was the overthrow of the Gray Council by the Warriors, and their revelation of the Religious Caste's part in a genocidal holy war, that the Religious caste had proselytized that created the Schism in the first place. Credit the Humans with the wisdom to cleverly exploit the Schism they found.
Still; Human skill and courage was not quite enough to explain the events of the Minbari War. There was a great unseen hand that had led the Humans to victory over the Dilgar; and to dominance over the League, displacing the accursed Centauri in that leadership role. Na'Talith, like many of the other officers of the Narn Military Command, had an unofficial brief and order to find who or what this unseen hand among the Humans was, so that the Narn could defend against it. This unseen hand, those who aided the Humans, was the reason the Khari had eagerly embraced the Alliance. Na'Talith, herself, was one Narn who believed that the ancient enemy, mentioned in the Book of G'Quan, had been at work among these curious Human creatures.
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Eyewitness to the False Truth
Excolsus was jostled and bumped in the passenger hold of the "Vulture". The stink of the too long unwashed Humans and Narns offended the little Vree's nose. Some useless Narn had missed expectorating into his vomit bag and this had made the stolid Humans sick. There were little globs of Narn breen vomitus mixed with Human "lunch" floating about. Some of the Humans were trying to clean the mess up. Excolsus tried to suppress his own sneezing fits. It was a rotten time to discover that he was allergic to Narn vomitus. At last, he had found a species that were more offensive to him than the Pak Mara. The "Vulture" lurched as its badly designed Human-built thrusters introduced disharmonic vibration into the old lander's frame. Going through a jump gate was tough on the old shuttle. Excolsus managed to to clamber over a huddle of Narns to look out a porthole as they emerged from the Epsilon 17 Gate to normal space.
IT was backlit by starlight and counter-illuminated by reflected planetglow. ITS obsidian blockiness was astonishing in its beauty. It was far larger than any Xill or Xort warcruiser that Excolsus had served aboard. The machine was obviously Human. All angles and edges, the only non-Human part of the thing was the massive prongs of the front weapon. Excolsus remembered from one Narn's description of the thing, that it was five diameters of a Xill long, Two and two third Xill diameters wide and a diameter and a third thick. The Humans claimed that this ship was easily the match of a Centuri "Primus". Excolsus was aware of the Human penchant for claiming the extreme-fiction that was something they called lying. The sad interregnum of William Morgan Clark had produced an extremely paranoid Earth Force that had sworn loyalty, now, to words. How sapient beings could tie themselves to words, was even more mysterious to Excolsus than "lying" or the impetus to build enormous hulks like the one Excolsus peered at through the porthole.
It was one of the ship-killers thet the Humans called the "PATRIOT" class. Excolsus blinked against the faint starlight then looked down at his security badge. He read Earth Force Naval Ship NATHAN HALE. Earth Force Naval Ship had been lined through and in barely legible Narnish script had been scribbled Interstellar Alliance Ship. Such was the vagaries of politics. Excolsus did not smile at this comedy. A baring of the teeth among Narns was an invitation to a fight. Oddly enough the Humans lacked such cues. It made diplomacy and business with the monkeys very hard. Excolsus drifted into reverie. It would be a while before the "Vulture" would dock with the NATHAN HALE.
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Lies in the Religion of Logic
As a Vree, Excolsus had no feelings for or against most aliens. He just thought of them as odd. In the case of Humans the Xeno-biological Guild had discovered them sort of by accident; when the Humans were carving each other up with knives. More out of curiosity than anything else, whenever a Xeno Guild ship passed through Sol it would dispatch a lander or two and sample the Human population, just for amusement. Who could foretell that a slow-moving and relatively uncivilized bunch of semi-savages would in a few hundred planetary orbits become one of the most dangerous and least-understood interstellar civilizations? Excolsus' present work, as a member of the Artisans' Guild, was to bring understanding to the Vree Conglomerate of these Humans. In Human terms that made him a reporter, and under their peculiar rules gave him access to Human activities that any reasonable alien culture would guard with the greatest of secrecy.
Excolsus had ridden in a "Vulture" when the Humans had finally journeyed to Minbar to thank the Minbari for the "Battle of the Line". He had seen with his own eyes the Minbari Caste War. It was that war that cleared the way for the Humans. No other way could the Humans have possibly reached Minbar. That senior Human commanders confessed these facts to Excolsus, which they hid from their own people, amazed the Vree. He had ridden down through Minbar's atmosphere, where half the landers were shot down. He had seen the seventy percent casualties among the Human troops who died in their chutes before they ever reached ground. He witnessed the horrendous fighting between the hairballs and the boneheads where even Minbari women and children fought Human soldiers hand to hand. He had run for his life amidst the wild chaos of the taking of Tuzanor. he had attended the crazy Starfire Wheel ceremony where the Human general Franklin shamed the Minbari Warrior Caste before all of Minbar. He had seen the end of both the Caste War and the Human / MInbari War in the sacrifice of some strange Minbari named Neroon-and the elevation of another Minbari named Delenn. These events, reported to the Guilds by Excolsus, had made him famous among the Vree. Being sane creatures, the Vree kept Excolsus' reports secret among themselves. Excolsus, himself, knew that his work had elevated the status of reporter among the Vree to a position almost as high as that of master-trader or engineer. Few Vree had achieved so much in a profession as he.
Yet for all his experience with the Humans at Tuzanor, Excolsus still found them unreadable and clueless. This lack of "common sense" in them; it was rumored had contributed to the start of the Human / Minbari War in the first place. That gave the Humans both a weakness and an unfair advantage in their struggle against the universe. Excolsus, suddenly awoke from his reverie and dream.
The NATHAN HALE grew from brick shaped toy to huge menacing warship over the course of minutes. Excolsus thought he would see a hodgepodge of crude Human technology overlaid with Narn and Centauri additions on the hulk. Instead he saw a nativist design, as thoroughly Human as the hurriedly built and slapped-together "OMEGA" that had ferried him as deadhead cargo to the Euphrates sector. Yet in the NATHAN HALE, he saw something very strange and new. Somebody had been teaching the Humans a lot about ship design.
The "Vulture" put forth its landing gear, rotated and aligned itself to the port ventral landing stage on the port "wing" of the NATHAN HALE. There was a very solid thump as the lander contacted. Excolsus quickly looked to his watch. Magnetic fields were at work. His watch was ruined. The "Vulture" moved more smoothly now than it had in flight. The lander's stub wings made clearance, as it was towed by unseen forces into the hanger. A hatch meters wide and thick, moved by means unknown over the entry bay opening, and closed it seamlessly behind the "Vulture" as the shuttle moved inside the NATHAN HALE.
Excolsus had to change positions by the porthole to see into the compartmented hanger. He was looking mainly at the maintenance work-bays where he saw, by their uniforms if little else, many Narns and a few Humans bustling around piles of junk that Excolsus tentatively identified as Narn fighters. Frazis? Here? He saw one obsidian-skinned faceted thing with the characteristic Human X-winged fighter architecture. That must be one of the new Furies? Strange to see that lone Human fighter mixed in with the Narns and their junk. Maybe the Humans were serious about sharing the responsibilities in this Alliance?
A short squat Human stood in the Vulture's interior cargo compartment and bawled out "All aship, who's going aship." in Narnish. "We turnaround as soon as we fuel."
Two files of Humans had already lined up to exit port and starboard off the "Vulture" through the drop hatches. Excolsus reminded himself, as he lined up behind a Human female, wearing too much of that artificial musk scent her kind used to hide body odor from Human males (Humans must have a horrible sense of smell!), that the "Vulture" was designed to deliver soldiers by parachute after orbital atmospheric entry.. The Narns were still trying to organize themselves, as he tumbled out the hatch and landed lightly on the deck of the hanger. Micro-gravity has its uses.
Excolsus presented his badge to a Human soldier who checked it against his amiga. The Human shined a small flashlight into Excolsus' eyes. Excolsus blinked as he looked up at the Human. The Human looked at his amiga again, then waved the Vree forward. Excolsus was happy. Just ahead of him was a Human, who had failed muster. That poor wretch was "getting the works"; a Human phrase Excolsus had picked up during the Tuzanor Pacification. He had seen what Humans meant by giving somebody "the works". Vree capital punishment was merciful by comparison.
He hurried along, staying in line. Until he officially fit in around here, Alliance or no Alliance, Narns or no Narns, he was an "alien" on a HUMAN ship, and being non-Human could get you DEAD. The line meandered its slow micro-gravity way to a hatch where a bored Human female and two very large and alert Gaims were waiting. Nervously Excolsus shuffled forward, noticing now the schick schick sound his ship shoes made on the deck . The Human was a free-floater and armed with a thumper. That meant she was a Marine, Excolsus decided. The Gaims were also free-floaters?! They needed no weapons with their cruel natural endowments. Excolsus had fresh news in front of him; the Hive Queens had designed (For the Humans?), Gaim soldiers that could fight in micro-gravity. That could explain why the Hegemony was now a state in the Alliance?
Once again Excolsus endured the procedure for clearance, but this time he had a conversation.
"A reporter?" the Human asked. "You mean the Great Maker cursed some other species with your kind? You clowns never get it right." She said this all in high Vregan sign langauge of course. Excolsus, who was a lowlander, and thus had never bothered much with High Vregan, had to ask what a clown was. After a brief hand-flurried history of Rooty and Zutoo, along with the phrase "Zoot, Zoot!", Excolsus came to the conclusion that the Humans found some employment, even for their idiots. Reporters, clowns, and the job this Human was doing, being the designated idiot positions within the Human workforce.
Excolsus, when asked by the Human about his profession of record, yet again, corrected her and signed carefully in English, "operational historian." It would be better to be defined as something other than "reporter" in this context; to be seen as someone useful in some capacity, he concluded. To his surprise, a bunch of paperwork appeared out of thin air (Or so it seemed.), and he found himself offering his name-glyph to document after document. He had seen no one else in line doing this. He kept asking with his free hand "Why am I doing this?" The Human female signed back, "Don't worry. This is just a formality so you can do your operational historian job." The last document dissappeared into air or so it seemed and the Human female made voice noises into her link. Excolsus should have seen "Captain, we've got a Vree; so you can fill in that officer slot on the required crew roster. He's signed up as our ship's historian. I'll have him tested and combat-posted after his medical." but Excolsus' watch was broken, and that included the voice-to-symbol translator built into it.
By now it dawned on Excolsus that he had committed one of those acts for which smart Vree neutered stupid Vree. He looked wildly for an escape route. The Gaim had moved alongside him. As he looked again at the Human, all he saw was the muzzle of her thumper very close to his face. She signed very politely in High Vregan "You have been 'drafted'. Now go with these nice fellows to sickbay. After the doctor processes you, we'll talk. My name is Lieutenant Paula Chow. You may call me; 'Sir'." She paused "Oh, I forgot-raise your starboard hand and sign after me-'I, Excolsus, do solemnly swear to uphold and defend the..."
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Grilled and Drilled
It didn't take them long to fix Excolsus up properly. His new uniform fit badly. Lousy Narn tailoring. His boots kept shifting. A five-toed Vree foot was not meant to fit those three Narn toed dung-hoppers. Excolsus went through the perfunctory battery of tests with Gaim-inspired enthusiasm. Pass the test or pass as a Gaim meal, some choice that was.
Lieutenant Chow, true to her word, came to see him in his cell / quarters. "Comfortable?" she signed in English.
"Why the language change?" Excolsus asked port-handed in his less than perfect English.
"Nobody has settled on a common language aboard this tub, yet." signed Chow. "Three quarters of our "glorious" Alliance, by population, is non-Human, and so is most of the fleet. But most of the first-line jump-capable stuff is Human-built and Human-crewed. We're trying to integrate everybody; but if you've travelled around a bit in our so-called Alliance, you know that things more subtle than physiology and culture make putting together polyglot crews difficult."
Excolsus nodded the Vree way. He signed "I was aboard a Narn cruiser. They build everything backwards and to absolute minimums. If it doesn't kill Centauri, it isn't used."
Chow agreed "I was given a familiarization tour of a G'QUAN class warship. Aside from their crew-quarters, it was a piece of junk. They had single-loop fusion reactors. Every circuit aboard was load-rated to use at one hundred percent. No operational reserve was planned in any system. No fail safes or idiot proofs were installed. They were operating the ship with at least three mission failure criticals, while I was aboard. The whole ship was an engineering casualty. The crew laughed when I asked about repair procedures, or spare parts. THAT will change." Chow concluded grimly.
Excolsus changed the subject. "You told me you would speak with me about my posting? I thought the doctor told me I was going to be the Ship's Historian."
"You are, pending the Captain's approval." signed Chow. "That's your job, but your posting is your battle-station. This is a WARSHIP, you understand?" She smiled "Excolsus, did you know you were quite good in the single-ship VR simulator?"
The little Vree fidgeted.
Chow read from her amiga, " It seems that when you were younger, the Artisans Guild had a disagreement with the Plastics Guild over the question of 'paper'. You flew a small aircraft as an apprentice in that;"
"War." finished Excolsus dejectedly. How did the Humans find out about that?
"A fighter pilot?" asked Chow.
"No!" signed Excolsus desperately. "I was a transport pilot."
"We'll stuff you into a Fury and get you all trained up." signed Chow happily.
"A Vree fighter pilot. How odd. Considering how well you guys did against the Dilgar, I suspect you will be teaching us, Humans, a lot, my little gray friend." She spoke this aloud so that Excolsus understood none of it. She went over and rubbed the little Vree's head and said to herself "For luck." She signed to him "It looks like I'll get you commissioned and into the flight group, my little gray pet." She patted Excolsus on the head again and sang to herself on the way out of the Vree's quarters "Off we go, into the wild black yonder-"
She passed through the hatch. A Gaim Marine (They all looked alike to Excolsus) poked its faceted-eyed face through, looked unblinklingly at Excolsus, and somehow; in micro-gravity no less, still banged the hatch shut with a solid thump.
Excolsus floated over to the bunk, took off his idiotic Narn issue uniform, and stretched out on the Human-proportioned slab. It was the only compromise to comfort he saw in his quarters, as it would be where he would lay, when the ship was under acceleration, when he was off duty. Excolsus realized with a sudden start that he was a member of the Alliance NAVY!
Well, as bad as things were, the NATHAN HALE was apparently a well-built ship. Excolsus had seen enough to judge that much of her; but little else of her insides, so far . Aside from the hanger, everything appeared cramped and tight-quartered; even for a small Vree like him. Why was there no artificial gravity?
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End of Chapter 1 Part 1
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Into the Chasm of Night: Chapter 1; Part 2
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Where's the Plumbing?
Malcolm Thomas Caldwell was used to pipes and conduits aboard a ship in plain sight. His service had been aboard vessels where maintenance was ongoing. Some sections would be barred off undergoing repairs and upkeep-even during war patrols. It was an axiom of the naval service that spacers learned the laws of entropy by by direct experience. Everything, Human-made, is an engineering casualty. In a before the Minbari War low-bid contractor-built navy that was especially true. The Karmatech junk HYPERIONS were barges with grease monkeys swarming over them from the moment they left the aptly named graving docks to the moment the Minbari used them to zero their neutron cannons. The Rocketdyne Novas had fared better. At least those bricks worked until a slicer separated the engine block from its fuel tanks. The fire blossoming Nova would still be firing its ineffective bolters at a Sharlin, until it finished exploding. Caldwell violently shook himself clear of that memory. 'That was then; this is now.' he reminded himself. He floated along a passageway. He passed among some puzzled Narns who were listening to the instructions of a grizzled old burn-scarred Human bo'sun; who was trying to explain to the spoo-heads the concept of a plug-in / pull-out power grid node. A thick panel of obsidian skinned armor was free of its place in the passageway overhead. The Narns were floating awkwardly at various ridiculous angles to Malcolm's point of view.
The space-suited bo'sun was half-in/half-out of the nano-technological nightmare that was the inner workings of the NATHAN HALE. The bo'sun probably understood the inner workings of this huge power-plant that discharged energy either as reactionless thrust or as various particle beams or wave events better than Malcolm did. Such minor things, as the missile launchers, crew compartments or the fighting compartments, constituted less than one half of one percent of the ship's total mass and function. Fifty five million tons of the ship's mass was directed mainly to movement and dispensing energy in a most unpleasant fashion. It was a mobile brick whose sole purpose was to deny the use of space to enemies of the Alliance. To this end three hundred ship's company and two hundred of her flight group were aboard her. An "OMEGA", by contrast, had twice the complement and no where near the firepower or the complexity of the NATHAN HALE..
"I hate biotechnology>" muttered the bo'sun, as he reached into the ship's guts and pulled out a man-sized piece of hardware. He looked at his amiga and and grunted, "Thank the Great Maker I didn't have to wade in there and find you." The bo'sun pointed to the nearest Narn and said,"You, Spots! Hand me that big box floating next to you." The Narn fumbled in mid-turn and collided with his neighbor. Another Narn, who seemed a little more clued in than the rest, managed by accident, to grab the box and heaved it, free fall style at the bo'sun, who cursed and twisted out of the way. The heaving Narn forgot to brace himself and ping-ponged off the bulkhead. Armor is armor. He knocked himself out. The bo'sun shook his head in disgust and shoved the module into the cavity into its proper slot . The bo'sun pulled himself out of the NATHAN HALE's nanite-infested innards and by himself tried to replace the armor panel to the overhead. The Narns were huddled around their bleeding comrade.
Malcolm in disgust snapped, "Turn to and get that cover seated and secured."
The Narns obeyed. They would obey officers. They at least knew how to seat the armor. Malcolm noticed that the bo'sun checked it carefully over twice before accepting it as secure. Malcolm swam himself over to the nearest Narn, bared his teeth and bounced the Narn off the nearest bulkhead. Now there were two unconscious Narns.
Malcolm turned on them all. "Bo'sun, you seem to have a problem making your work section understand. Demotion one rank. As for you, Narns,-who is senior?"
"I am." said one in Narnish.
"In English." said Malcolm> "As Captain, I decide ship's language. Its English."
"T'Koth doesn't know English." said a Narn, a female.
"Your name?" demanded Caldwell.
"N'Pakh." she said.
"You are now the senior Narn here." said Caldwell simply."One rank promoted. The rest of you gather round and listen carefully."
Malcolm pointed at the bo'sun. "He is a Human non-commissioned OFFICER. I emphasize OFFICER. You obey him as you obey me, for he speaks for me."
"Bo'sun, your name?"
"Engels, Sir!" he answered.
"First name?" Caldwell asked.
"Marx, Sir!" he answered.
"A cruel joke?" asked Malcolm.
"My parents, Sir." said the bo'sun.
"Well, bo'sun, training Narns can be quite physical. Try not to break too many of them. We need them. Teach them well and get your rank back." Malcolm pointed to the two unconscious Narns floating in the passageway. "And clean this mess up."
As an afterthought, before he left, Caldwell addressed N'Pakh, "N'Pakh, you are now an able spacer first. That means you will be bounced hardest for this section's mistakes. Get a helmet and learn quickly or you will have a permanent headache." Caldwell waited for her sloppy salute. He then swam for the bridge.
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Chaos Reigns
Once Malcolm reached C&C, he found the same confusion here that he encountered elsewhere in the nightmare that was his NATHAN HALE. If and when the Naval staff inspected, Caldwell thought his captaincy would be over. It was a delusional Human who rejected facts. Right now a Narn T'LATHI frigate could defeat the NATHAN HALE.
Time to cheer up the troops. He caught sight of Na'Talith floating upside down (Viewpoint again,), at her station trying to hammer a component into place. Narn stubborness overcame Human subtlety and the component seated. The station came alive with holography and Na'Talith somersaulted right axis of orientation and seated herself comfortably. She looked at her bemused captain.
"What?" she asked.
"I'm glad to see some progress." he said.
The Narn exec looked around and spoke quite solemnly, "Captain, though all appears as chaos, I assure, that all is on schedule."
Caldwell grunted at that.
Na'Talith faced her captain, "Seriously, Sir. I will have this ship as fit as any in the Narn fleet."
Caldwell almost bit his tongue on that one, "Number One; this is an Alliance warship. It is not a Bin'Tok. If it was, I would be shoving officers out the airlock for motivational morale reasons." Caldwell swam over to Na'Talith and planted himself opposite her. He braced legs and flexed arms. Narns didn't take criticism well, especially female Narns. Na'Talith was one very touchy Narn.
Caldwell began a formal criticism. "First. We have no flight group. Second. We have no watch schedule. Third. We have no current maintenance casualty status report. Fourth. We cannot MOVE." Caldwell paused to suck in some air.
Na'Talith held up her hand, "Sir? May I address the ship's problems?"
"Yes, Number One." Caldwell granted her permission to speak.
Na'Talith brought the teledyne online, ignoring her amiga for this exercise.
"Captain's briefing." the machine intoned. Na'Talith plugged in the date / time group for the log. "Ship's complement authorized, three hundred three personnel. Flight group authorized two hundred twelve. Present for duty-one hundred ninety-one ship's complement. Eighty-eight flight group. Ship's officers are: Captain, Executive Officer, and Historian present for duty. Ship's Engineer electrocuted when attempting to calibrate ZPF-tap manually."
Caldwell talked over the machine. "That's impossible! The ZPF-tap is idiot proof!"
Na'Talith answered, "He stepped into the focus when it auto-aligned and ZAP. Not enough vapor left of him to collect for last rites."
"Well now we'll have to find another Brakiri to replace that idiot." Caldwell said as the machine droned on. "Damn the Alliance personnel quotas." sighed Caldwell.
"Just don't let him near the engines, Sir." joked the Narn. Her joke fell flat.
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Birds of a Feather
Excolsus was in the midst of a gaggle of Frazis. He had never piloted a deep space single ship in his life. To his surprise he found the Fury very Vree in its layout and functionality. It flew intuitively. The ayeye, which was his copilot, settled its consciousness into the back of head like a telepath, whispering advice constantly. As the dozen Narns broke formation trying to play at being fighter pilots, Excolsus vectored into the midst of them. The Fury out-pitched, out rolled, out-yawed, and out-pivotted and to Excolsus' surprise out-accelerated the Frazis. One by one the Narns were racked up as simulated kills. Soon, Excolsus found himself alone, sharing space with another Fury. Text scrolled in Vregan before his eyes from his fighter TBS.
"Hey; gray guy! This is Chow. How about a little game of Tag?" suggested the other Fury.
It didn't take long for Excolsus to adapt his Vree experience to the new situation. The Human didn't fight in any fashion that Excolsus expected. But then the Human and he were alone. The Vree constantly had to pivot and accelerate to a new escape vector. He found himself lined up in her gun-sights so many times that he thought hr was a vitok; a stupid ground bird hunted by Vree for sport. After he had been "killed" eight times in a row-he got the message. To Paula Chou; HE was an amateur, too.
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Trouble in Paradise
Chow followed Excolsus in to trap on the starboard ventral landing pad. Both Furies contacted at the same instant. Both shuttled to their respective stands. The Narns straggled in somewhat more organized than they had originally launched: so there was a modicum of improvement. Chow was happy. One competent pilot out of a baker's dozen was not bad. Hopefully, when the "GOTOHELL" finally got moving and reached a proper depot, the flight group could get a full complement of Furies. She still wanted to replace the inept Narn pilots and their junk Frazis. Chow waited until her Fury was asleep. She disengaged the ayeye from her mind and suffered through the shutdown sequence. She then pushed herself free of her couch and walked through the body of her fighter. She waited patiently while Excolsus' autopilot read him through a Fury shutdown sequence. The little gray Vree eventually staggered and tumbled and then fell out through the hull of his fighter.
"Pulling G's can be tough; if you aren't used to it." said Chow.
"I am smaller than you are. Human" griped Excolsus. "Acceleration should place me under less strain."
Chow shrugged. "It is a common misconception. You have to take physiognomy in account.For example, Excolsus, your brainpan allows your skull to slosh around more than my skull allows mine."
Excolsus turned a ghastly grayish green white and became violently ill. For the first time in recorded Human history Chow observed a sickish Vree out chuncking. Excolsus had the good sense to expectorate into his barf-bag. The small of sulfur and decayed meat made Chow reach for her bag. Both wound up floating off the deck dry-heaving their guts out. The two of them, in mid-hanger, looked at the Narns looking at them. Chow and Excolsus broke out in Human and Vregan laughter.
Excolsus signed to Chow, "Narn fighter pilots!"
The two of them racked themselves harder with laughter. The puzzled Narns who didn't know Vree sign language milled around in micro-gravity confusion. Maintenance techs grounded tools to see what all the commotion was about. Quite a crowd of them gathered, when Chow signed "Narn fightewr pilots!" The few Human techs present who understood Vregan translated for their colleagues in English. A couple of English speaking Drazi joined in the Human laughter. One Narn who understood explained it to his fellows.
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Three Rings but No Circus
"Marines to Hanger! Riot in progress!" This announcement came over the TWS just as Caldwell stuck his head into the passageway. Gaim were scuttling happily along the passageway, by ones and twos, all of then headed for the hanger. If he didn't want his crew eaten, Malcolm knew he had to get to the Hanger before the Gaim did. The Humans and Drazi might be able to hold their own, but there would be reams of paperwork with dead Narns on the deck. He suited up and was headed from his quarters sternward when Na'Talith fell in beside him pushing and swimming along the passage-ways, as fast as he was moving. Not all Narns were clumsy and some were much quicker learners than the average Human Malcolm reminded himself.
The pair of them were overtaking the Gaim and working their way ahead of the bugs. 'Good for us', thought Caldwell sarcastically. 'We'll be the first to be killed and eaten.' Sometimes being the captain meant you were literally reduced to crap. He looked over at the grimly swimming Na'Talith. 'At least I won't be the only one winding up as Gaimburger.'
Speed was essential, so Malcolm put on a burst of speed as he rounded a corner. From here to the Hanger was two minutes.
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When in Rome
Chow signed to to Excolsus "We've got to put this mutiny down before those those idiot Gaim arrive. The bugs still have this problem distinguishing between 'kill and eat' and 'subdue and carry off to the brig'."
Excolsus was too busy banging Narn and Drazi heads together to see Chow talking at him.. The Humans seemed to be calm enough. They were outnumbered, but they were organized and there was always two or three Humans working on a single Narn. The constellation of unconscious Narns drifting about was numerically increasing. Excolsus cast loose the pair he was pacifying and scuttled over to Chow. He low-blocked the backside of a huge Narn who dwarfed Chow. She twisted and kicked the Narn in the neck. He joined the drifting tumbling unconscious Narns cluttering the immediate environs. A wedge of Humans plowed into the remaining mass of Narns and it looked like a caterwaul of arms and legs and heads. One thing was noticeable to Excolsus. The Humans were wearing helmets and the Narns were not. Amidst the clangs and thuds, Chow started yelling, "No knives! No knives! If the Gaim smell blood it will be a massacre. Some Humans had drifted off with a couple of Drazi and were breaking out the pulse rifles; not for the Narn mutiny but for pacifying the Gaim.
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Do as The Romans Do
Caldwell and Na'Talith finally entered the Hanger. The Gaim were grouped on one side, a sizable mass of unconscious Narns floated on the other side-and between them were a small platoon of mechanics, bomb handlers, fuellers and pilots, Humans, Drazi, and one Vree. The Hanger was a shambles with unsecured tools and parts drifting everywhere.
Na'Talith beat Malcolm Thomas Caldwell to the shout, like a good exec should, "Who started this fight?" she yelled into the quietness.
Chow and Excolsus pointed at each other.
"You two, confined to quarters, now!" Na'Talith said. "The rest of you help the unconsciousa Narns to SICKBAY. You Humans and Drazi can heal on duty. You can restore order to this compartment. You will have the flight group ready for exercises in two watches or it will cost you lives. Do I make myself clear?"
Caldwell now spoke. "The exec has given the orders. If it is unclear, disobedience means decimation." Caldwell looked at the Gaim and choosing three pherenome vials, he carefully read the directions and broke them in the order q-b-l. The Gaim taking their orders by odor returned to their normal duty stations. Sometimes sign and body English weren't enough with the Gaim, then one had to hope that the pherenomes worked. Great Maker help you if you got the sequence wrong.
Na'Talith watched over the cleanup of the Hanger, As she stood there, she contemplated the flight group. This was a problem area for the Nathan Hale. She had thought it could wait for she had other larger problems, or so she thought ; but she finally had to admit it: the flight group needed its own strong leader. It needed a CAG, as Caldwell had told her in the C&C. A CAG was commander of an old Earth aero-plane carrier aero-plane complement. It was an odd name for one who was needed to command the operators and repairers of a spaceship's small-boats. Well; Caldwell had told her the flight group were the assault element in Human naval tactics, so she supposed the CAG could stand for Commander Assault Group. Now which of the two trouble makers should she stick with the job? Excolsus was the Ship Historian and a fair pilot. He had a history of leadership. Chow was the better pilot but she wasn't experienced in leadership.. Besides Chow was Human with all the psychoses which that defect implied. Could Chow pull together the mess that Na'Talith saw? Especially since Chow had exploited the chaos for her own amusement. Na'Talith decided. She would find something to hold over Paula Chow's head, so she could use her as any good Narn officer would.
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Up from the Bottom Rung
Chow sat on her rack practicing dog-fighting with her hands moving and with her eyes closed. She visualized herself against the worst opponent she imagined possible-a Vorlon singleship . She recalled conversations with veterans of Corianna VI who described how whole Aurora squadrons had gone in against a single Vorlon fighter and only one or two Humans had survived. Of course the Vorlons had been driven from the field. Something; their pet Minbari could not do. That was more due to a psychological confrontation. The present day Minbari had no fleet or fighters so that Human boast was meaningless. 'Hopefully,' Chow thought."I'll never face a Vorlon. Drakh gunships, Streib interdictors and Zenner raiders were bad enough. And there were always the damned Centauri. The Centauri were the real bogeymen for Humanity.
Superior in numbers, equal in tactics and with a technology superior enough to the Alliance to inspire fear. The Centauri were what the Dilgar, the Minbari, and the Drakh never were to Humanity an organized coherent military / political system-complete with rational logistics and a competent general staff who knew how to BE an enemy.
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On another Rung
In his quarters, Excolsus was scribbling about his first week aboard the NATHAN HALE. He wasn't surprised. It still made sense for the Vree Corporate to enter the Alliance. Still Excolsus had to wonder over his recent experiences. Where was the Human military that had defeated the Dilgar, subdued and pacified a self-destroying Minbari Federation, overthrowm its own Human tyrant, pommeled the Drakh, stopped a Genocidal War and had up to now thoroughly policed League of Non Aligmned Worlds' Space successfully for the last generation? Was this the Military the Vorlons intended to use in place of the Minbari in their argument with the Shadows? Was this FARCE that Excolsus was in the midst among, a slice of the force which had shamed both the Shadows and the Vorlons at Corianna VI? Where was thew dreaded Human Military that kept the Centauri under their mad Emperor Cartagian at bay? Excolsus had seen it at Tuzanor on Minbar. He had seen it personified in the Being of General Franklin who had used guile, politics, religion and his own simple faith itself to tame the un-tamable Minbari. Excolsus musing to himself was waiting for something like that aboard this ship of fools.
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End of Chapter 1; Part 2
A little CHAOS is a GOOD thing.
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Post by Avatar on Sept 1, 2019 3:51:46 GMT
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Into The Chasm of Night: Chapter 2; Part 1
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Messages From Home
Thomas Caldwell sat cross-legged on the deck in his quarters compartment. The Naval General Staff had sent its latest message of love and Malcolm was reading it unhappy. Being a captain was supposed to be easier than this. NGS' reply to his latest missive had contained hints of courts martial and suggestions of long walks in space without a pressure suit. They had decided that threats of decimation were good for command and staff morale as well as for the rank and file. None of this bothered Malcolm as much as the threat of being reassigned to command a naval depot on Mercury. Accidents and suicides meant an eighty five percent mortality rate for the posting. The survivors when they rotated out were certifiably insane though fit for service. Caldwell thought that he would have better chances with a court martial. Mercury would be a death sentence.
So he had to fix the ship before inspection. Mechanically the problems were simple. Though his crew was understrength he could make do. He had enough trained mechanics to fix what the shipyard had boloed in putting it together if he didn't have to fight immediately. For all their reputation as clowns, Malcolm had faith in his Narns. They had to be good spacers to get anything out of the junk they flew. They stood up to the Centauri with that junk. That was all the proof Caldwell needed about their capability. What the Narn lacked was training and teamwork. Caldwell had enough Humans to supply both to the Narns.
The Drazi contingent, Malcolm knew, was competent if stubborn , The snake heads like almost everyone else in space had a longer history and more experience than Humans. Their technology was older and more developed than that of Earth Force, but like many LONAW powers they had been suppressed by the Centauri. They never created a mind-set or infrastructure of a major spacefaring power. They were too balkanized by the Centauri. Their military mind-set and style, like their ships, was small. It didn;'t matter if you had Sunhawks out the rear end. A fleet of VORCHANs and a Centauri Admiral were enough to wreck any dreams of Drazi expansion. Hence the presence of the Drazi Freehold within the Alliance. Caldwell, as he broke open a stick of chewing gum to give his mouth something to do, wasn't sure the Drazi would fit in well as part of the ship's crew. He had tried Drazi as fighter pilots. They seemed to lack something that made for good single combat warriors. They fought better as crews. Unfortunately, Human, therefore defacto Alliance doctrine relied upon single-ship fighters to supply up to half a ship's firepower in a battle. The flight group was expected to savagely press home close range attacks and reduce an enemy capital ships speed and maneuverability. The Drazi believed in gun-ships like the Drakh. Where that got you against the Centauri was dead. The Narns who were much like the Drazi had at least learned the necessity of fighters-even if their fighters and their pilots weren't that good. So putting the Drazi in the NATHAN HALE's ship crew made some kind of cockeyed sense. The Drazi turned out to be good gunners. They were as fast and as accurate as any Humans in that capacity. This freed up the few Humans for for either engineering or for piloting. For this moment Caldwell needed engineers and technicians . Narns went into the pilot pool-so that was why he was stuck with Narns for pilots and Frazis for fighters. Furies for some strange reason rejected Narns as unworthy. No one, at least no one aboard the NATHAN HALE, could explain this one to Malcolm. All these troubles Malcolm had sent forward in his last report to the NGS and now in his hands was their reply-a threat to send him to Mercury.
Caldwell sighed. The trouble always started at the top. He as the captain of a new ship only a month out of the slipway was responsible for this mess. The NGS didn't know or care about his problems. He was expected to solve them even if the NGS was one of the problems itself. He would have to show them how or they would show him a closeup of Mister Sun.
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It's a Human Thing
Na'Talith sat in her C&C command station couch and contemplated her reflection in the teledyne. She had two problems. One was actual, the other was potential. Her Narns and the Humans had a species rivalry going. The whack job Drazi were sitting this one out. Their green/purple conflict was at least two seasons into the future. It didn't help that the Humans looked upon the Narns with derision. After all, look at the Human track record. Dilgar beaten. Minbari subdued. Vorlons and Shadows driven away.(Incredible-how did the Humans do that?). Drakh, not in hiding, scheduled for extermination, Streib headed for zoos and the Zenner running for their lives.
What had the Narn done? Driven the Centauri off their world of Narn? The fan-heads were dangerously formidable and Na'Talith was proud of her peoples' accomplishment, but it paled against the trials and triumphs of the oh so incredibly lucky Humans.
The irony of it was that the Centauri had given the Humans "a leg up" as the Human expression went; mainly as a safeguard against a potential Dilgar uprising, against their Centauri masters. Na'Talith chuckled. The Centauri policy had backfired on them.
Somehow the Centauri had joined with the Shadows in the Vorlon?Shadow dispute. Then, the Centauri had stood aside as the Drakh attacked. In the whole series of wars that the Humans had fought and won, the Centauri were somehow on the other side usually behind the scenes or peripherally involved. The dark meddlesome Centauri hand was in it for profit or power on the wrong side. Each Centauri miscalculation had made the Humans stronger with more worlds , more space, more technology. It was insane of the Centauri, like their current Centauri Emperor.
Na'Talith expected the NATHAN HALE and many other Alliance ships to go into battle against the Centauri soon. The Humans dreaded it.but Na'Talith smiled at the thought. She relished it. She foresaw one end. Centauri Prime's overthrow. What did it matter to the Khari if it was the Humans who caused the downfall of the Centauri Republic? Her own part in bringing the dream to pass was dependent on getting the NATHAN HALE to MOVE.
So fix the Narn/Human problem. She would gather her Narns together. Appoint new Talon Leaders and get them to accept Human discipline. Teach them to set aside brood and pouch. Once the the new ways were set, the training would follow; or knives would follow. She would also start a micro-gravity fighting school off-watch. The times of Narns being slammed into hard objects by Humans had to end. That was as much for survival as for respect. Narns and Humans had to be equals in the crew otherwise the ship would fail and so would her dreams of personal vengeance.
The other problem was always the flight group. Na'Talith understood Caldwell's frenzied reasoning for putting mostly Narns in the pilot slots. Current Human fighters and Narns were not compatable. Frazis as Na'Talith had experienced for herself, against the Centauri were virtually useless. She suspected that Furies were equally superior to the Frazi. Humans, like Paula Chow, rated the recent Centauri Sentri slip-wing fighters at least an equal for the Human Auroras and Thunderbolts. The latest Fury was supposed to be better, but the Centauri pilots were held in great respect by the Humans. The latest variant of the Ruritanian was supposed to be very very good. No one knew if the current Human Fury was its match.
Pilots were the key. Na'Talith knew the best were the Vree. NATHAN HALE wasn't likely to get those. So it had to be Human pilots, if the NATHAN HALE was going to hold its own in battle. That was how the Humans had designed it. Human pilots were available at Sol. But the NATHAN HALE had to go get them and to get them, she had to MOVE. It was a classic circle jerk in logic as common to the Narn Military as any other if there ever was one.
Na'Talith bowed her head and said a small prayer to ease her headache. Frazis would have to do until she could get the NATHAN HALE to a depot.
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Confusion in the Ranks
Paula Chow stood up on the dais in the ready room. Her pilots, mostly Narns, sat in rows of chairs. Most of them had the sense to belt themselves to their seats. Amigas were busy as the pilots downloaded the mission data. This approach saved a lot of briefing time. Humans were used to uploading the crap directly into their ayeyes and concentrating on the piloting and fighting. . Flash briefings via ayeye during the launch-prep were mere seconds in a Fury. With Narns and the Frazis a mission brief took two hours to prepare and thirty minutes to talk through . Puzzled Narns and frustrated Humans wore out pencils and fingers writing laborious notes. Things like consumables and endurance factors , mission load-outs, rules of engagement, patrol vectors, IFF protocols , even such mundane items as com-frequencies , rescue procedures, and launch and recovery circuits had to be spelled out, read out, and read back to ensure that every pilot understood. The whole group was going out and one screwball could foul up the whole flight-ex. The "GOTOHELL" had enough problems without some pilot splashing himself across the armor.
Excolsus looked at his fellow pilots and winked. He had four pages of notes on his kneepad. This briefing was as bad as anything he had suffered through during the Guild Wars. Some no-fly jerk would waggle his arms presenting a mission plan, forget about fuel consumption or something equally important-like maybe the enemy opposition expected. At least the CAG knew how to pilot and what it was to face enemy fire. Still he checked his notes. He might not be one of the famous Human pilots who fought the Minbari Nials at the Battle of the Line, but he had faced enough fire of his own to look for the obvious gaffes and squawk about it. He thought he saw one in the order of launch.
"Why are the Frazis launching first?" he signed.
"The Narns are flying the Frazis. We have fewer Furies and can form up on them . It is the simplest way for us to launch and recover considering our launch group." Chow signed back to him.
"But you have Vultures launching after the Frazis and before us." Excolsus objected, "Sir." he signed.
"Same reason, same result." Chow signed.
"Not satisfied." Excolsus waved in eexasperation.
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Confusion in the Skies
The launch was bungled as Excolsus expected. The Narn formed up on vector as required, but the Vultures lost the Frazis in the blackness of space, took off on their own, miscalculated their burn times, and had to be hunted down and towed back. The Furies spent the wasted time in mock dogfights; while the Frazis dutifully patrolled and returned. The mission debrief was a washout. Everyone present blamed the Vulture pilots for the fiasco until some poor misguided Narn pilot discovered transposed figures that had sent the Frazis off on the wrong vector. Instead of letting the squadron navigator take the blame and commit suicide, Lieutenant Chow took the blame herself. Being Human, she wasn't required to be perfect-so she didn't have to commit suicide. That solidified her with the Narns-all who appreciated what loss-of-face meant. It also went a long way toward solving the flight group problem. The Narns were now honor bound not to embarass their leader further. Mistakes would vanish into thin air as the Narns took it upon themselves to solve their own tactical problems. The Humans would have to get used to the Narn way of doing things.....
The next exercise was Narn briefed . This time it was the Humans and one Vree who were puzzled. Chow launched with the Narns. The sortie went out on vector perfectly. It was nothing complicated , just launch together, fly together , and trap catch-as-catch can. Fuel was managed by the one third rule. One third for fly-out for each Vulture and one third for the return back. Each Vulture had a Frazi shepherding it. The foray into hyperspace was straight through the local jump-gate push-in and do a one-eighty and come back out again. Recovery circuits were ignored. Pilots came in as best they could. This raised hell with the hanger-deck crews who strained themselves making sure the right fighter or lander went to the right bay. Recovery took five times longer than Excolsus thought it should have. At the end, the NATHAN HALE had its first successful sortie. Paula Chow would have the exercises repeated until a rhythm set in. Humans had long learned that each ship had its own way of doing things. NATHAN HALE"s problems had been that her crew had been doing nothing. Now that the crew was doing things the wrong way, they were getting good at it with practice. If there was enough practice eventually something would go right. Once that happened, Excolsus knew the rest would fall into sequence.
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Hunting for the Bonehead Solution
Na'Talith was in the market for an engineer. So far no volunteers drafted or otherwise had responded to her bait. You would think that among Humans, being Chief Engineer aboard a PATRIOT class ship, would tempt somebody to endure the ayeye "teacher". Sure that piece of salvaged Shadow tech either subjected you to complete vegetabalism or left you in screaming pain for the rest of your life or if you were incredibly lucky(one out of every fifty attempts) you just might learn how to manage a Zero Point Focal Tap. It was supposed to be part of the process for producing "techno-mages". Like most Human acquired reverse-engineered tech it still had a few thousand centuries of bugs in it to be worked out. In the meantime they used it like Na'Talith used a katana-she didn't know how to make it, it was just a tool that she could wield. The Humans could grow teachers without understanding how to make them or how the teachers worked.
There was a jinx factor working against her. One of the system rock prospector hounds she had asked as a source for possible volunteers told her "the NATHAN HALE is a cursed ship crewed by incompetents and captained by an idiot!" He told her that among his people"-not since the PROMETHEUS under that imbecile Jankowski-had a ship such a sorry reputation. From the miner, she learned the ship's nickname "GOTOHELL".
Well, if the Humans in this system were too smart to participate in her desperate plan, then she would have to find some alien "volunteer". Where would she find a non-Human who knew anything about matter-antimatter reactors, quantum singularity power plants, much less ZPF taps.....
....Sometimes luck, the obvious gift of the gods, escapes an executive officer but not the overeager Narn Frazi practice patrols that bring in an off-course Human shuttle. Aboard the shuttle, in this case, as a passenger among the usual nondescript supercargo was a Minbari.
The Gaim brought the Minbari to Na'Talith as she exercised in the squirrel cage. Humans had put it in the hanger and insisted everyone whether they needed it or not endure the 20mps/s^2 acceleration field induced for one watch out of every three. It made for a lot of unhappy Narn who rather enjoyed micro-gravity.
So it was an irritated Na'Talith who met an angry Minbari.
Na'Talith put it to the bonehead simply in Narnish. "You are a Minbari in Alliance Space. For simplicity's sake, as far as you are concerned, that is HUMAN space. By treaty, you aren't supposed to be off your worlds. Yet here you are on a Human built warship-a long way from any Minbari settled world."
"This ship has many Humans in its crew. They ,I believe, take a dim view of people who are members of a species that carved trenches on the Human home-world and killed off two thirds of their people." She waited for the Minbari to realize his obvious predicament. While she waited Na'Talith exercised with the peculiar human resistance machines. It took a while. This was a very careful Minbari.
"I take it, You have a purpose for threatening to turn me over to the Humans?" said the Minbari in Warriior Caste dialect.
Na'Talih asked him instead in English,"Do you know the Human trade tongue and what is your name?"
"Soren" was the reply.
Na'Talith smiled, "Economy. That is good in an engineer. When the Minbari were the power to be feared, one of our Ambassadors, G'Kar of the Third Circle, was threatened by one of your Ambassadors, a certain Delenn. We complained, but you serenely ignored us. Now, you say I threaten you. Not at all. I offer you what all Minbari say they crave-the opportunity to serve."
"You want me to serve on this outrage to Valen that you call a ship?" said Soren plainly.
"Yes." said Na'Talith quietly,"I need a chief engineer..."
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Insanity is For the Minds of Little Hobgobblins
The "Teacher" had put a permanent voice in his head. The pain was passing. Soren hated Humans; Human engineering, Human civilization, Human everything. His bout with the "teacher" reinforced that feeling.
But Soren was practical. If Gaims followed you everywhere you adopted that attitude quickly.
Soren at the moment was looking at a piece of technology that should have been Minbari. It was a quantum singularity power-plant. It could have been aboard a Tinashi.
He didn't want to see the Zero Point Focal Tap. From where, did the Humans steal that miracle? A Gaim behind Soren tapped him on the shoulder and pointed. Soren looked at the crude portable computer the Humans called an amiga. The device projected via primitive holography the map route to the main power-plant-the location of the NATHAN HALE's ZPF tap. Soren sighed. Onward with the tour. He followed the stolid Gaim.
It took him a considerable while to get there. Most of the route was through stacked deck after deck toward the propulsor(whatever that was-it was supposedly Human discovered and required learning the hard way-through books and hands on experience). The passage-ways, decks, ladder-ways, the hanger with its work bays and launch tubes all laid out in geometrical squares, just highlighted the Human lack of any esthetic sense and their incompetence when it came to the finer arts in engineering. Soren and his Gaim companions passed solitary Worker Caste Humans struggling around inside the smokey grey viscous liquidly guts of this harsh obsidian-skinned, actinic-lighted horror. Soren could see the curious Human version of a very recognizable power-grid built onto that lattice. He also(at least the voice inside his head knew) knew what that oily smokey grey semi-transparent liquid "jello" was that the Human Worker Castes swam inside to do their work. The Humans Soren had to admit had enormous courage-far more than any vaunted Narns. It offended Soren's sense of propriety to see Humans who should have been trained as Warrior Caste wasted as workers. Even in the simple social niceties the Humans were savages.
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The Indian Chief
The Drazi toiled humming to himself in front of his work bench ignoring the Humans and Narns around him. He had a weapon in pieces in front of him and it attracted all of his attention.
Dulanax was dour even by Drazi standards. He had enlisted in the Freehold Military to kill Centauri, Narns, Dilgar, Abbai, Ipshai, Hyach, Gaim or anything else that needed killing. He assumed that his purpose in this reality was to provide that service. To that end he dedicated himself to learn everything that Drazi-kind knew about large scale energy weapons. When the Choadi had its try at the Freehold, his Sun-hawk had been one of the answers. The answer had been somewhat ineffective, so it was a brief sojourn in a life-pod, until a passing Human freighter plucked him out of space. That had been during the Human/Minbari War-during the bad first half. Dulanax discovered quickly that the Humans were brave, outmatched and outnumbered. He wasn't going home alive.(Drazi who failed were expected-like so many "martial" cultures required-to commit suicide). So he decided to throw his lot in with the Humans. The Humans were his Purple kind of folks and the Minbari certainly needed killing. It would almost be as good as death in battle against the Choadi. Once again luck deserted Dulanax. The Humans somehow survived an almost certain extinction event at the hands of the Minbari and subdued their invincible enemy. Then the Humans had their Purple?Green episode with Clark. Once again they survived. Through it all Dulanax climbed the enlisted rank structure of Earth Force until he achieved a chief petty officer rating.. He had served on local patrol boats, HYPERIONS, OLYMPI, and NOVAS. He served aboard the HERCULES, an OMEGA, last. Now he was aboard this PATRIOT class brick. Each posting had forced him to learn some new Human weapon system. As far as experience went, Dulanax knew he was one of a dozen or so master gunners in the Alliance Navy who had first hand experience of every Human built particle beam, projectile, or missile weapon system. Where Dulanax was superior to his peers was in his knowledge of alien weapon sysrems and technologies. Not many Humans knew that Markab particle beams and Hyach lasers employed the same focusing principles. Of course both of those species were extinct, the Markab gone, the Hyach going-just like the Ikarrans-religious psychotics. Dulanax cared nothing about that. He wanted their guns.
Human archaeologists, Dulanax supposed, would one day rediscover the similarities in Hyach and Markab weapons and publish their research as if it were some new discovery. After all the thumper Dulanax was tinkering with was a Human copy of a Ikarran weapon built into the shooting arm of an Ikarran encounter suit that some Human archaeologist looted from Ikarra itself. Large scale versions of it were the current particle bolters on NOVAS.
Dulanax placed the last focal element in the weapon muzzle. He pulled it from the magnetized work surface. The thumper didn't have too much inertia but it was awkward for Drazi hands to handle. Definitely, it was a Human weapon. The Humans liked to point and shoot with their weapons. Slash and spray was more the Drazi/Narn style. Dulanax shrugged. You could call the Human way of fighting strange. No sane Drazi would try to disarm a booby-trap just because some enemy religious shrine might be destroyed and that was against the rules. Peculiar. Dulanax had seen Humans on Minbar disarm Warrior Caste bombs; just so Religious Caste Minbari shrines could be restored as places of worship. Crazy!
Dulanax set the thumper for practice and drifting lazily from the work bench in the machine shop, cradling the thumper in his arms as he would a new emerged infant, he made his way across the hanger to a small bay set aside as a small arms range simulator. He called up the holographic Hogan's Alley(Why did the Humans call it that?) and worked through the exercise. The targets, mainly fanheads and boneheads, popped out briefly from behind cover and Dulanax shot severely reduced charges at them. The program was a fairly stupid one. The targets were predictable and Dulanax got thirty of them brfore lucky thirty one, a fan-head, shot him in the back. The chirp chirp flashing YOU ARE DEAD signal-and-sign ended the weapon zeroing run. Dulanax port armed the weapon. It still needed a little work on the final focus. His recreation would have to wait, this little Drazi had to stand a watch.
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Somebody Get Me A Monkey Wrench
Soren wandered through the entire ZPF tap assembly. Like much that was Human it eschewed style. Soren had to admit that subtlety was at work here. Minbari had brute-forced their Vorlon-supplied quantum singularity power-plants in order to make them work. It took much dangerous compromise by the Minbari of the principles of engineering as they understood it to get a quantum singularity to power their gravidic engines.
One of the dangerous side effects, Soren mused, as he traced out the circuit feeds to the ZPF Tap, to the Minbari approach to power-grid design, was the potential of feedback damage to the singularity containment array if an outside power source supplied an electromagnetic pulse that spiked an EG conduit precisely when a charge capacitor was discharging into an emitter. Like for example the EM pulse bombs used by the Humans to destroy the Black Star battle group. The EMP bombs shorted out the neutron slicer charge capacitors which discharged into the power-grid instead of into the emitter with catastrophic results. This, as any half-witted acolyte would understand, would and did in the case of the Drala Fi result in a chain reaction explosion all the way back through the circuit to the primary containment of the singularity. Instant evaporation and FLASH.
The Gaim nudged Soren out of his revery. This Human contraption was incredible. It was a much simpler and safer design than Soren had expected. The voice in his head began explaining the choices made in the architecture, Where Soren's mathematical skills failed, the Voice showed very simplified pictures of what the Human-built machine should look like. The Tap the Humans had built, instead of brute-forcing the bridge into the vacuun energy state, had a way instead that tricked the bridge into that realm like a sneak and stole the potential energy differential as a thief in defiance of the laws of physics...
It was elegant, efficient, beautiful and simple as explained by the Voice in Soren's head, in a way that Soren had never seen in the Vorlons' approach to engineering. The problem as the voice pointed out to Soren was that the ZPF was mal-focused. Whatever or whoever had put it together knew nothing about spin aspects or fractional charges of elemental particles. It would be a challenge to Soren, but with his Voice: he, Soren, would teach these Humans a thing or two about real physics and engineering.
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Interludes with Bad Taste
The food brick quivered on Paula Chow's plate. The meal this watch was canary yellow and it tasted like moldy feathers. As usual the cutlery was totally ineffective in cutting the rubbery thing. In micro-gravity the fork bounced off and the knife just glided across the surface. Forget the spoon.
"When the Senate says "Cut the military budget, they sure mean it!" Paula griped. "Yetch!"
Na'Talith who was happily tearing chunks of tasty food brick out with her teeth, while holding the quivering mass with her hands said, "Why complain? Its better than Narn field rations. The offal they served aboard my last ship was unfit for Centauri. You, Humans, are lucky. You didn't have the Centauri feeding you their slop in their labor camps...Oh Sorry..."
Na'Talith had just made her apology in the sparest time it took to save her life. Paula was launched halfway across the Officer's Mess with her pistol out in her right hand and a fighting knife in her left. There was rage in Chow's eyes as Human hands reached out to stop her ballistic assault before she slashed with her blade or pulled the trigger. Asia had been the primary aim-point of most of the Minbari when they made their first flyby strafe run upon the Earth. Chow in the clutches of half a dozen of her fellow Human crew-mates shrugged off her rage in mid-charge across the compartment. The Narns weren't subtle and they lacked social graces . As a former Earth Force officer, Paula had been briefed on the realities of the new Alliance. You had to get along with the Narns. Compromise. Her fellows hustled her back to her seat.
Na'Talith resumed eating-this time in diplomatic silence.
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The Indian Chief Among the Cavalry
Dulanax was in the C&C. Ship's Master Gunner was supposed to be an officer's slot, but all the clowns that the captain had tried in it previously had been failures. So the Human had reached out to him. So here Dulanax was.
So far the Command Group had been no problem for Dulanax. Everybody took and gave orders by taskings and not by rankings. That was refreshingly different from the practice of the Freehold Navy. There, rank was absolute even if not merited. The Humans had learned well their lessons that anything that got you killed, you didn't do, because it got you killed. Dulanax was amused by how many species seemed to have trouble with that concept.
"Are we ready to shoot something yet?" Asked the Captain. "I'm tired of simulations. I want to see if we can hit something."
Dulanax worked his section of the C&C Analog. Touching the air in front of him on the imaginary holographic control interface was a lot harder to do than twisting knobs, pushing buttons and flipping switches. His left foot twitched. It was his trigger foot resting on the trigger pedal that he would depress on a Drazi Sunhawk. On the NATHAN HALE it was the right foot.. He had to remember that unlike Drazi most Humans were right side dominant.
Targettng reticles floated around Dulanax. The White one was for the main spinal weapon-the main gun. the Green ones moving randomly on automatic were for the slicers. The Red reticles were the ones for the Kinetic Mass Drivers-the infamous KMDs. Blue moving triangles would only appear when missiles or ballistic mines were launched.
Dulanax said quietly, "All offensive weapons show ready. Defensive systems, reporting through me, show standby . No targets presented or designated . No recommendations at this time . End report, Sir."
The Captain spoke up into the air in front of him from where he sat belted in his acceleration couch, Mr. Chief Engineer, Report!"
Dulanax saw the small seated image of a Minbari dressed in the uniform of a Windswords Warrior Caste officer appear in front of the Captain. The Minbari image bowed his head slightly in the fashion of a Minbari warrior acknowledging equal to equal respect. He said, "I report to you, that everything is ready."
The Human Captain as Dulanax observed was irritated. He asked, "Can we move?"
The Minbari responded, "We are moving."
"Not ballistically. I mean can we maneuver? Can we leave this confounded parking orbit that we've been sitting for the last two months?" asked Caldwell.
"Yes," said the Minbari who dissappeared at the word "Sir."
Dulanax suppressed a chuckle. Who said the MInbari had no sense of humor?
"Let's go and shoot some rocks." came the order.
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Rocks Don't Shoot Back, Do They?
By League of Non-aligned Worlds standards, the gunnery exercise was acceptable. The slicers sliced asteroids one quarter the size of NATHAN HALE into halves. The polarizer dissociated the color bonds of quarks within the requisite object asteroid equal in size to the ship. It disappeared as a storm of gamma radiation. KMDs pierced five hundred meter nickel/iron lumps without too much difficulty. The streams of relativistic iron filings tore deep gouges in the larger rocks. One test fired missile jerked and jinked its way past the best countermeasures known to Human or Narn Science. The energy mine failed to detonate properly.
"Damn Karmatech! Can't they build anything that works!" snarled Caldwell.
The tiny holographic image of Na'Talith projected from her position in Secondary Battle Control shrugged her shoulders. "It happens to Nagasha Imrul too. The energy mine is like a grenade. You launch it, ballistically, and it proceeds on its vector. It explodes when it explodes. Only G'Quan knows when."
Dulanax's tiny holograph appeared in the air in front of Caldwell at eye level right next to Na'Talith's. Both holograms looked down upon a tired Human in his acceleration couch. Caldwell had loosened his five point harness so he could squirm in his seat under acceleration if he had too. Dulanax ignored the squirming as he said,"The energy mine is an area denial weapon. The Narns use it to break up enemy formations for their favored melee tactics. To put it bluntly, Sirs. Its an anti-Centauri weapon."
"Na'Talith nodded in agreement."
Caldwell looked at his C&C crew and said in disgust." We can slice rocks, dice rocks, vaporize rocks, drill holes in rocks, and hit rocks with missiles. Does that mean we can fight anybody?"
Caldwell looked up at his gunner and his exec, "We've been parked in orbit for TWO MONTHS! The OLIVER CROMWELL worked up to battle-ready in half that time. The Navy calls that joke, the CORNBALL. What do you think the Navy says about us?" He looked at the holographs and the C&C crew in disgust.
"We're the worst ship in the Fleet until we're the best," said Na'Talith defensively. "The TAGROS NAI was such a ship."
Dulanax interupted, " A TALOTHI frigate jumped by three VORCHANs at Ragash V." He surprised Na'Talith with his knowledge. "It limped home to Narn with the bones of many Centauri. I believe your craftsmen carved the bones into flutes?"
"A fine tradition which was started then." agreed Na'Talith. "A tradition we hope to continue."
The two holograms bowed politely to each other.
Caldwell was ashen faced. His officers were demented!
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Replacing a Fuse
Soren was well pleased . The Worker Castes were excellent craftsmen, for all that they were Human. The one, who called herself Adrienne Brown, was more than just some nameless Worker Caste servant. She demonstrated profound knowledge well beyond what some mere Human should possess. She matched Soren insight for insight. The two of them tinkered with the ZPF Tap's focal arrays for the fifteenth time. The Human captain was complaining again that the ship could only fire one weapon at a time; that the ship, that the damned ship, could only move if everything else onboard was shut off. What did the captain expect from a quantum singularity plant? So it took ten watches to charge up the polarizer charge capacitor for a single shot. That Human demanded miracles.
As for A'dren as Soren called her-he thought she would make an excellent acolyte. The Wind-swords had taken non-Minbari into their service in the past. If fools like Death Walker could be of use; then, then a Human should be quite acceptable. He looked over at the young Human female. She was manhandling one of the super-conducting magnetic assemblies twisting it by hand. There could have been a magnetic field with a potential of several thousands of tera-amperes per meter as the Humans measured such things for all Soren could tell, a scant arms length from where she floated, as she wrestled with the stubborn thing. She was as unconcerned as Dukhat had been when the Gray Council had selected him, that great one, to lead all Minbar.
Soren smiled as the little Human twisted the finely worked coil assembly one final turn. She somersaulted precisely out of the path of the lightning.
Soren was well pleased.
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We Should Have Kept Clark
Malcolm Caldwell stared glumly at the engineering overlay on the C&C Analog. Too much of the power-grid diagram was still dark-especially the feeds from the ZPF Tap. The dark feeders were to the thruster pack and to the weapons grid. A jerry-rigged system of temporary feeds glowed from the singularity power-plant to the weapon emitters. That had powered the gunnery exercise. It had taken almost a week using the singularity power-plant to charge the HALE's capacitors so he could run the exercise. Caldwell had waited ten hours for it to charge up a single capacitor just to fire one slicer for five seconds.
It was frustrating. Na'Talith had sworn to him that the bonehead she "recruited" would get the ZPF Tap working. Like so many of the Narn executive officer's promises, it was long on hope and short on delivery. Still, Caldwell came to C&C, routinely, to see if there was any progress. In disappointment, he prepared to shut down the Analog for the fourth time in as many watches......
He was halfway through the procedures, when the grid lit up with the white bar lightning of activation. Caldwell could feel the starved NATHAN HALE come to life. Lights that had been dimmed, as a power conservation measure to save enough electricity to run life support, shone brightly for the first time on the NATHAN HALE's C&C. Caldwell noticed that instead of being darkly lit and gloomy, now the NATHAN HALE's Command and Control was brightly lit and gloomy.
The singularity power-plant that barely provided enough power to run the ship was now unburdened . The Zippy was was on line at too damn long last. Caldwell reversed the Analog shutdown. He wanted to see with his own eyes the progress that that Minbari fool of an engineer was making. Satisfied, Caldwell thought of the difference that this meant for his ship and for himself. No Mercury for the moment. Now, instead of lumbering along along on Hohlman orbits, Caldwell could actually plot vectored-thrust courses. Gravitation still curved everything and ballistics wasn't going away for this flying brick. The NATHAN HALE would be moving according to the laws of motion, but it would be at the twelve G's or so that the crew could stand for combat.
He called Soren on the TWS. The engineer appeared holographically on the Analog. The Wind-sworder was coasting parallel to a conduit. He was inside the smokey gray jello of the NATHAN HALE's nanite guts. Next to the bonehead was a small Human technician . She was working on the pure white bar of light that was the conduit. The Minbari was watching her and pointing to things she should do. Caldwell knew her as Adrienne Brown. "I wonder if the Wind-sworder knows I paired him with a technomage?' thought Caldwell.
Soren noticed the small holographioc image of Caldwell at his end of the link. He bowed slightly, looking something like a dolphin as his body bent at the waist sideways to Caldwell's perspective. The woman had her back to him and she ignored him as she dove into her work. The light bar flared washing out Caldwell's end of the link in a FLASH of light. The flare died and Caldwell was glad to see that the two on the other end of the link were still alive. Caldwell asked, "Are you two all right?'
Soren answered for both of them. "Yes, it was only a small corona discharge. That is the last fault within the grid. We shall be able to begin vortex generator trials within the week." Adrienne behind the Minbari gave one short sharp nod of assent which the Minbari did not see, but which the devious old Earth Force Captain understood very well.
'So' Caldwell thought, 'we will have jump trials within twenty watches, maybe two hundred hours at the outside.' Malcolm could only cross his fingers and hope. After the jump-trials it would take Caldwell a week to get his ship to Sol. Through the Io Jump-gate to the Ceres Yards was a twenty hour run the way the orbitals around Sol should line up when the NATHAN HALE came through the jump-gate. Caldwell reminded himself to double-check the navigator's exit vector-to make sure there wasn't an overshoot that the HALE would have to brake and turn to beat back against.
Once at the Ceres Yards....Caldwell smiled. He could pick up so much. Furies to replace Frazis, maybe some decent Human pilots, gun crews that didn't wear purple or green sashes. The leftovers could fill out the gaps in the ship's company. And most important of all the ship needed a COOK!. That alone was worth the trip to Sol.
As Malcolm finished the shutdown of the Analog for the second time, he envied the senior Earth Force captains who commanded the OMEGAS and the WARLOCKS, They had ships with large complete crews and proven Human technology. Those ships were the spine of the Alliance Navy and the Naval General Staff never let captains like him forget it.
Only schmucks and losers were stuck with oddball ships. Caldwell considered himself lucky. He could have wound up as super-intendant of a spoo ranch HYPERION Midwinter Upgrade complete with a crew of Narns. Just imagine patrolling the hinter-space of the Choadi Consortium with a Karmatech built garbage barge filled with Spooheads? Malcolm was not about to lose the NATHAN HALE.
Whatever demons running the Naval General Staff/Personnel Directorate, who had by mistake presumably slotted Caldwell here, had given him a great gift.. Malcolm was stubborn. He was staying. He had, by luck, drawn a SHARLIN killer. Not a WARLOCK, but judging by the asteroids, this girl could hit hard enough. Could she hit fast enough and with great enough range advantage to succeed in the coming crisis?
Caldwell had a meal scheduled with Soren next watch. A great deal would depend on his lunch with his Chief Engineer.
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A Pair of Squirrels Among the Nuts
Soren picked at his food brick. It was purple this watch meal. He noticed that everyone in the galley and in the Mess wore weapons of one fashion or another. The Humans wore small snub-nosed pulsed particle bolter pistols-what they called PPGs. They uniformly carried their weapons on the hip. The Narns, for their part, carried their own version of a particle projectile weapon. It was a blocky and clumsy four barreled design that doubled as a set of steel "knuckles" for punching when the gun inevitably misfired. The Narn learned to throat punch with their guns because of this. Drazi, being Drazi, carried sheathed knives in their sash belts. Excolsus the Vree appeared unarmed, but Soren knew the Vree, like the Minbari were masters of gravity. The little gray goblin, probably, had a mini-projector upon his person. Soren had his fighting pike well-hidden inside his tunic. That was an honor weapon. Among Humans he would rely upon the most dangerous weapons he owned-hands, eyes, and mind. He saw he was the only one eating the purple food brick. Everyone else was picking at green food bricks. That was curious. Soren normally saw everyone eating "purple" during dinner. The green rancid plasticized glop was supposed to be "breakfast" for these Humans. The Narns gnawed their food bricks trying to bite the ends off. The Drazi sort of hacked away at theirs with their un-sheathed knives. Excolsus took out a piece of saw wire and cut his large green cube of glob into small green cubes of glob. The Humans, for the most part, frantically cut away with fork and knife. Soren noted that they as a body were making less progress than the Narns. There was a poetic metaphor in that somewhere. Soren was almost reduced to laughter by the ridiculous ritualism that each of the aliens brought to the process of eating. The Captain though didn't fit the setting.
Soren watched the Captain carefully. Caldwell did not take up fork and knife. Instead Caldwell grasped the the green brick and with an abrupt twist of his hands managed to snap it into two, then four ,then eight, and so forth until he had it spoon sized. How he managed to keep the pieces from scattering in the micro-gravity amazed Soren. The pieces Caldwell managed to stack in a neat pyramid on his plate. Were the pieces held in place by a static charge? Caldwell calmly picked up his spoon and ate.
Soren watched carefully. Here was a Human of nice ingenuity who could break something of the consistency of rotted rubber without crumbling it.That was important. A Human who was careful and skillful in the small things-was dangerous in the great ones. Those who had made him the War-master of a ship like this, knew what they were doing. Soren, for once, wished that the Minbari had shown such wisdom. Minbar might not know its current grief.
Soren returned to his purple brick and ignored the small talk that surrounded him. Among the Humans it was sports, family and money. The Drazi were arguing the latest version of the question of green versus purple. Excolsus was scribbling away like some demented gray nut-hoarder. The Narns squabbled over whose version of G'Quan was the most correct. The Captain like Soren watched and ate silently.
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Digesting Lessons
Caldwell listened to his officers as they ate. For a crew of three hundred for a ship that needed at least five hundred, he had less than half the staff he needed for the three hundred people he had.
Dulanax, the Drazi, was arguing (When wasn't he?)the merits of lasers versus particle beams.
"Aside from the Minbari, who have neutron slicers and the Centauri who have particle bolters that they misname as ion cannons to fool their enemies, nobody who uses particle beams has had good outcomes with them." Dulanax lectured. "All the feared militaries, develop matter streamers, photonics, or particle/wave event weapons."
Dulanax waved around,"I give you this ship. Its primary weapon uses gluon particle/wave event interactions to tumble and change the flavor of quark particles disabling their bonding groups. Its secondary guns are lasers that use collimated photons to affect gauge Z and W bosons preventing the interchange of mass spin charge etc. among electrons' groupings. This tears the bonds at the molecular level hence the term 'molecular slicers.' As for the close-in guns, the KMDs", Dulanax paused "-a stream of iron filings shot at you near the speed of light is close enough to a Vree antimatter streamer to qualify as a matter streamer." He looked at Na'Talith, who put down her napkin."
Caldwell grimaced at Dulanax's deliberately inaccurate description of the way the physics of NATHAN HALE's weapons worked. The Drazi trusted nobody with his knowledge. He looked at his executive officer as she took up the impromptu lesson. "Granted that the beams of the neutralized charged particle beams are interceptable....."
Many Narn and Drazi heads bobbed in agreement.
" We of the LONAW navies learned firsthand during the Dilgar War just how effective the Interceptor grids on the Human ships are. The Dilgar captured Drazi, Brakiri, and Ipshai ships which they turned upon the Humans in desperation as they, the Dilgar, lost the war. The various commandeered LONAW ships' weapons splashed harmlessly on the Humans, diverged by Interceptors and spread apart by Human E-web. Dilgar particle bolter weapons that make the Human weapons of the same time seem puny by comparison were also intercepted by those same puny Human guns. The same splash effect that stopped LONAW weapons stopped the advanced Dilgar weapons that were themselves an order of magnitude stronger than the best of Narn and Drazi particle beams. Dilgar bolters that exploded Drazi Sunhawks and Brakiri Aviokis with one shot, merely splashed across Human armor."
Na'Talith paused to draw in a breath.
Caldwell took the pause to eat another spoonful of green glob.
"The Dilgar used Centauri patterned weapons, that were proved as useless against the Human E-web." Na'Talith smiled a wicked smile as she let that tidbit sink in." Human particle weapons of that war were pathetic...the Humans did have some very good missile and railgun technology though. Combined with League ships that could provide the particle beam firepower Humans lacked, the Human squadrons destroyed the Dilgar with kinetic weapons at close range with impactors while the Dilgar fired ineffectually at Human missiles and those murderous fighters."
"Still the particle beam cannon as a weapon shouldn't be dismissed, my Drazi friend," Na'Talith looked at Dulanax across the mess table quizzically. "The particle accelerator cannon is still the most powerful and effective long-ranged beam weapon for a "young" technology."
"Narn battle lasers are a form of light mass neutralized charged particle cannon. I believe nobody, present here, disputes the effectiveness of the Narn Military or its weapons?" concluded Na'Talith to the applause of her fellow Narn officers.
Caldwell was about to actually join the conversation. when Soren spoke. Soren was quiet, studious, and courteous. His monologue commanded professional silence and attention.
"Nonsense to this. The primary debate over weapons ignores the true question. What is the purpose? I know nothing of the Dilgar War. I know of the Minbari/Human War...." Soren frowned.
"Our neutron slicers were far more powerful than the Humans' bolter weapons. Our stealth systems defeated their fire control and were a superior defense to their E-web, Interceptors and armor. Our ships were greater in numbers, faster, definitely more technologically advanced. And still are for the most part are-those few that remain."
"Yet it is the Humans who are the guaranteers of peace in Known Space. The League looks to the Alliance for the military might to prevent the otherwise inevitable petty wars among those petty worlds." Soren chuckled.
"It seems that a weapon is no better than the being behind it." Soren finished.
"Terrific, a philosophical Warrior Caste Minbari." growled Paula Chow. " I don't need the Zen behind Hyach lasers. I need to know performance parameters so I can shoot the alien behind it before it shoots me."
Dulanax picked up where he left off. "Let us use the Sunhawk's beam cannons as a benchmark. The weapon can pierce a hundred meters of crystalline iron at a range of about one thirtieth of a light second. It must be in sustained fire mode for at least five seconds to pierce at that distance through the iron. By contrast the NATHAN HALE's slicers can rake cleanly through iron targets as thick as this ship as far away as a fifth of a light second. How the slicers would do against Minbari polycrystalline armor, I do not know. I suspect, if a SHARLIN was hit, the Minbari inside her would know it."
Dulanax said further, "It is common knowledge that SHARLIN slicer beams gouged trenches in the surface of Earth that were three hundred meters across and three hundred meters deep. That illustrates Minbari power. Those were SECONDARY guns. The Minbari did not use the main bow cannons on their ships when they strafed the Earth. I suspect that bow beam had an antimatter component that would have irradiated the Earth. To preserve the Earth for their own use, the Minbari probably wanted to limit the amount of ionizing radiation they would unleash in the Earths' ecosphere."
Dulanax's statement hung heavy around the table. For the more naive among the Humans, who looked at Soren, it was a new revealed truth, about the crass self-serving hypocritical Minbari. The bone-heads were thieves of worlds as well as petty, opportunistic, genocidal, xeno-phobic maniacs. So much for Minbari nobility. The term "bonehead" was a mild perjurative for such a people.
Chow to break the silent tension and change the dangerous subject: asked; "Dulanax, you said that our slicers can reach as far as a fifth of a light second. Does that mean we finally outrange our opposition?"
Dulanax nodded. "Yes with the exception of the Minbari, the Centauri, and maybe the Hyach, you Humans have finally joined the Middleborns in ranging fire. But I remind you all." and here Dulanax stared at Na'Talith and Caldwell "that the Centauri can match what this ship can do as I have described in piercing power with their sustained bolter fire: and that the Minbari could never be hit by Human bolter or beam weapons fire at long range because of their Stealth defense. Also, remember, that until recently, there was no Human warship power-grid that could handle the kind of power used by the weapons I'm describing."
Soren didn't lack courage, Caldwell noticed.
Soren, addressing his comments to Chow said, "Maybe I sound philosophical to you, Pilot Chow." He shrugged, "You want parameters? If this ship fights a SHARLIN. It dies. The Polarizer cannot reach as far as the SHARLIN's bow cannon. The SHARLIN's bow cannon delivers a magnetically sheathed anti-matter particle stream. up to a third of a light second distance. Upon impact with matter it causes an explosion. The only weapons Humans have that have that range are missiles and of course those can be easily stopped...."
"Minbari Stealth will fox the missile seekers . Nials will splash them or the SHARLIN's neutron slicers will kill the inbound vampires before impact. concluded Chow bitterly. "Same for fighters."
Soren said with his own bitter cheerfulness, Isn't it fortunate, that there are no SHARLIN fleets anymore to make this discussion anything but academic..."
Caldwell digested all of this information. Dulanax was a greater treasure than he expected. Chow shot off her mouth too much. Soren would be a bigger problem and Na'Talith was showing a flaw in character that Caldwell hadn't seen before. All these lessons went poorly with his sour meal.
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End of Chapter 2; Part 1
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Into the Chasm of Night: Chapter 2; Part 2
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Practice Makes Perfect
The NATHAN HALE was running warm-ups prior to jump trials. The practice target was a lowly freighter. This one was the Earth Alliance Merchant Vessel DEBBIE REYNOLDS. She was named after some obscure actress its owner/captain admired. The freighter was plodding along the Indus Jump-gate Circuit. Its intended destination was the defunct Ikarran space. Human colonists, complete with livestock, seedling plants, and children were embarked on a brave new venture.
Such things, as whether Terrestrial life could compete in a foreign biosphere or whether the Humans could defeat whatever was left of the stupidity that had killed off the Ikarrans would be tested the hard way. Sane aliens tended to leave defunct planets alone. Nasty things left behind by the previous tenants did nasty things. Never mind the wrong biochemistry, gravity, atmosphere, or star radiation that might have been wonderful for the extinct natives, but is sure to be unhealthy for alien colonists....
That wasn't Caldwell's interest as he looked at the op-order. He was supposed to simulate a response to a Choadi raider attack on the freighter. Funny how naval exercises on the Centauri border were always gamed with Choadi opponents. The nearest Choadi raider was at least a thousand Human Standard light years in the opposite vector to the Centauri border.....this would require an officer's call.
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Shoving a Camel Through the Eye of the Needle
Na'Talith poured over her charts. At least two of the Jump-gates of the Indus Circuit were in the Centauri Republic. One was in the Alioth system, claimed by both the Centauri and the Narns. The other was at Praxal where the Humans and the Centauri were squabbling over a Quantium Forty strike. The Humans discovered the Quantium Forty, and set up the mines. The Centauri, as was their historic practice, when they had abandoned the system turned right around and reclaimed it, after the Humans discovered something useful and made the investment. It was a technically tricky situation. Praxal had been Dilgar garrisoned when the Centauri used Dilgar mercenaries to guard their border systems. The Humans had lone-wolfed an operation into Praxal during the Dilgar War, and cleaned the Dilgar out. The Dilgar had been using Praxal as a base to attack Human freighter convoys on the Indus Circuit. The Centaur did nothing to prevent it. The Humans acted. Again the Centauri did nothing to prevent it. Before the Quantium Forty strike the Humans, after spending blood for Praxal, kept it, to prevent pirates from taking up where the dead Dilgar had left off after the Humans killed them all. The Centauri did nothing about it. Na'Talith grimaced at the missed opportunity. Her own people had come sniffing around during the Dilgar War-smelling a chance to dig into the flank of Centauri Space. The Humans had chased off the Narn expedition with embarassing loss of face for K'Rellam and all of his Circle. Now the diplomats squabbled over the ownership. It was marked on her charts as Centauri. Of course these were Centauri charts.
Praxal was before the Quantium Forty strike, then, full of expatriate Narns, Centauri, and Abbai. They formed a sort of loose System Corporate after the Humans came. That was a form of governance favored by many of the LONAW peoples. The locals didn't mind the Human garrison in the system. The Humans ran patrols, killed off the local pirates, paid lip service to the local Centauri viceroy, and sent an occasional freighter to Centauri Prime with nominal taxes to pay the Centauri "tribute". Within this charade the Humans organized a brisk little trade of their own. Every now and then a VORCHAN would show up-making noises about Centauri Space-but the Humans ignored it. An OMEGA does that for you. Narnish claims were dismissed as propaganda. At that time before the Alliance-no sane captain of a G'Quan wanted to tangle with the old Earth Force Navy.
Now introduce the Quantium Forty mines on Izarius, the moon of Praxal VI and things become dicey. The backwater system becomes important. The Centauri who need Quantium Forty for jump-gates(along with everyone else) decide to act. They send fleets instead of ships. They make threats instead of claims.
Previous engagements occupying the Humans' attention: like; the Minbari , the Shadow/Vorlon crisis, the little current war with the Drakh, ongoing operations against the surviving Shadow Thralls, plus the hassle of putting together the new Alliance government, had kept the Humans from addressing the Praxal question. The Narn Regime had been parallel busy in its distractions with internal feuding within the Khari and its own little war with the Gaim, which the Humans had mediated at last into this Alliance.
Only now was the Centauri question being addressed.
The Narn in Na'Talith was cheerful at the prospect. Still, time among the Earth Force veterans had tempered her reckless enthusiasm. The Alliance, like the NATHAN HALE wasn't quite ready for the fan-heads.
In her current tasking, she charted out the NATHAN HALE's operations to cover some Human freighter, the DEBBIE REYNOLDS. Na'Talith laughed at the name. In Narnish, it sounded like "D'bai ren eldas"-a phrase that loosely translated as "molest yourself" in the Human trade language.
As Na'Talith plotted it, she could see the simulated raider could attack along any any segment of real space in the Indus Circuit.
One thing the Humans stole from the Minbari during their operations on Minbar was the Ansible Network-a system of hyperspace beacon buoys that doubled as a tachyon communications grid independent of the normal jump-gate network. Any Human ship with an ansible could tap into that instant communication grid without having to open a jump-point. One of the curious benefits of the Ansible Network was that a ship's position could be pegged to the nearest buoy's transponder. Three or more gave an exact position in hyperspace far more accurate than the normal gate network. It had been the Minbari secret for their phenomenally accurate jumps. As far as Na'Talith knew, only the Minbari and now the Humans had the technical means to exploit this navigation system. It was an advantage she intended to exploit.
She knew the freighter's gate route; Jump-gate to Jump-gate. She knew the replenishment and fueling points along the route. Where the freighter stopped to take on supplies and cargo was where the "Choadi raider" would hit it. The NATHAN HALE, had in its op-order a "patrol circuit it would follow. Na'Talith could by careful "port calls" and fuel stops could cheat on the exercise and introduce "coincident stops with the freighter. she could crowd them close enough together that the NATHAN HALE would always be within one jump of the DEBBIE REYNOLDS. A rescue under those conditions would be simple. A great deal of the plan depended on the NATHAN HALE's engines.
Human instructors had emphasized to Na'Talith "Be conservative." Na'Talith had had that pounded into her at the Human Naval War College at a city called Trieste. Na'Talith, being Narn didn't learn that lesson very well. If you spent your military career fighting the Centauri who had gravitational drives and advanced particle bolter weapons that could blow your strongest cruisers apart with as few as six hits, while you struggled against them in barely functioning fusion rockets armed with second-rate Narn copies of Centauri weapons,-BEING CONSERVATIVE was the last thing you were.
Besides the Humans bore the lie of their own teaching in that their greatest victories were desperate gambles. So Na'Talith was plotting a big gamble of her own on her charts. She didn't know who the Opposition would be, but she smiled at her guess.... She was confident that her tricks would win this exercise for the NATHAN HALE....
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This is a Heck of a Way to Run a Democracy
"Nobody can make these jumps!" Soren snarled. "They're too close to mass points. The transits through Hyperspace are too obverse to the gradient. You will be caught in the tides and you will be carried off the beacon. Then the tidal forces will rip you apart."
"Us,. Mister Chief Engineer." Said Malcolm Caldwell quietly, "We all are in this together."
"Her plan is insane." said the Chief Engineer. "Even Minbari ships would not dive so deeply into a Hyperspace gravity gradient. Don't forget, we don't have gravidic propulsion. You couldn't comb the currents or tack your way out if a current caught you."
Na'Talith spoke in defense of her plan. "I believe the safety margins are adequate. Narn cruisers do this routinely. Are you saying that the Narns are better Hyperspace navigators than the Minbari?"
"Its not the same and you know it!" retorted Soren. "Size matters. A SHARLIN and a PATRIOT are much bigger than a TALOTHI or a VORCHAN by mass and by volume. Inertia, my dear Narn, is a major factor in the tides of Hyperspace. The currents grab quickly. The engines must counter quickly. The larger the mass, the longer time it takes to counter. Simple."
"Even if the momentum to inertia ratio is the same?" asked Na'Talith.
Caldwell and Soren both stared at the Narn in disbelief.
"It isn't," replied Soren simply. "You mistake potential energy, momentum, and inertia. The ratio is between the potential energy of the ship's rest mass in the gradient, not the momentum. In the case of the NATHAN HALE, to claw our way out on its thruster pack, if we are caught in a hyperspace gravitational cross-tide we would need to accelerate to at least fifty gravities or start sliding down the gradient as you have the course plotted." Soren chuckled.
"One hundred Gs." corrected Caldwell.
Now it was the turn of the Narn and the Minbari to stare at the Human in disbelief.
Soren asked, "You say this ship can accelerate at one hundred gravities(!)?"
Caldwell said, "Yes."
Soren was puzzled, "That makes no sense. Humans cannot function under accelerations that exceed twelve gravities. I don't understand..."
As to a child, the irritated Captain explained, " To grow and train a crew for this ship costs Humanity a billion dollars. To grow this ship from its seedling pod costs Humanity a trillion dollars. In circumstances when it comes down to saving the ship, we pulp the crew. Simple economics, Soren, simple economics."
Na'Talith asked her own question, "Why? That is insane!"
Soren shrugged. Humans since the Minbari War were becoming crazier and crazier.
The argument: over tactics, of movement plans, and Hyperspace routing, continued for two hours among the three of them with neither Soren or Na'Talith agreeing on anything in Na'Talith's cockamamy plan. It was time for Caldwell to vote. "Enough." he said as Soren was about to object to Na'Taliths routing through the Tigara system. "We go with the plan, as is." said Caldwell. "With the proviso that we check with the Chief Engineer before each jump to ensure that the ship can handle the proposed vector." Caldwell was satisfied. He had treated both of his chief officers equitably. Neither was happy and that was a good thing. Caldwell looked at his two alien munchkins. "Questions? Execute the plan then... dismissed."
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Nightmares
Adrienne Brown swam down the passageway in the direction of the thruster pack. Soren confined himself, mainly to to the power-plant of the ship, leaving the reactionless thrusters and the power-grid to her as the Second Engineer. She expected this. There was not much about the Minbari's attitude that escaped her notice. When the NATHAN HALE received a new "Vulture" load of Brakiri technicianss, he treated them with disdain, insulting them, and denigrating their skills. His attitude in assigning her to supervise the "Human" tech portions of the ship was in part based on his opinion that she could "handle" the "cruder" systems. She ignored his bigotry. If the fool couldn't see that the ship as all Human tech, then he had revealed a blind spot in his understanding. That was a weakness an enemy could exploit. Like Soren's vulnerability to his nanite "Presence", it would be a weakness that Adrienne would have to guard against. With rueful admiration, Adrienne thought of just how astute a judge of character that Captain Caldwell had to be to recognize Soren for what he was in the few minutes that he must have had to size Soren up; before the Minbari was exposed to the "Teacher". It had taken her weeks to detect the flaws inside the careful Minbari's veneer.
Down the passageway as she swam, she saw the encounter-suited Dulanax. Dulanax was wearing the hideous mottled obsidian back skinsuits that Fury pilots now wore. The only way Adrienne recognized the Drazi was by the horrible Narn opera that Dulanax liked to bray to himself when he was working. The Drazi was tracing through out power feeds to one of the aft slicer arrays. He had pulled an armor panel off the deck and was peering into the nanite swarms that was the living guts of the ship. He was haloed in the glare of the light given off by the conduit he exposed.. Brown looked for the passageway frame number on the bulkhead to remind herself exactly where she was. One could get so easily lost on this monster, even if you had a general idea where in the NATHAN HALE, you were! So, she was near the base of the aft dorsal starboard emitter? Memories of being lost, intruded into Adrienne's present...
Brown was originally a Martian Human Groundhog-a planet lover. She had originally worked as a magnetic-levitation train mechanic mechanic in the Tharsis Settlements. As a Martian Human she hadn't expected Earth Force to draft her, but draft her they did, to go off to fight the MInbari.
It was surprising that Earth Force would take people like her. She grew up with a hatred for all things Terran. In her soul of souls she had secretly hoped the Minbari would humiliate the Earthers. She was so full of the Anti-Earth Anti-Minbari War attitude. That changed in the Australian Outback, when she was dirt-side undergoing Earth Force basic training. She saw Minbari slicers tear trenches in Woomera Station. To this day the honored dead were being found and buried.
After that, it was off-world, as part of a desperate expedition to find a hidden refuge for a remnant of Humanity, in case the Minbari(who had by some miracle decided NOW was a good time to have a civil war) decided to come back and finish what they had started. She had been five years as a lowly gropo aboard the EXPLORER class ship HUDSON. During the end of that wild and adventuresome five years she had landed with her squad on a dead world. It had been her squads' assignment to provide local security for the team of exo-biologists who were conducting the colonization survey to see if Humans could live on the planet. The HUDSON had already established four such seedling colonies-hidden in the vastness of Space. There Adrienne, the exo-biologists, and her squad-mates had fought and lost to a Soldier-of-Darkness.
She died.
When she awoke, she found herself in the clutches of a strange Human, who called herself Narica. This was both good and bad. Narica was dying herself. She had come across the same Soldier-of-Darkness. Narica never told Adrienne of the details. Nor did Narica tell Adrienne of her, Adrienne's, own miraculous resurrection. Narica just pointed to the twenty-seven crosses, one time, and asked Adrienne for burial among them. Narica had called them heroes in the War Against Darkness-fitting company for her own long sleep. Adrienne remembered Narica's weeks of instruction and the constant pain that to this day inflamed her nerves whenever she used the curse that Narica had given her. It wasn't until after Adrienne had made her torturous way back to Human Space that she discovered that she had fallen into the hands of a Technomage-an outcast of that order who had by the wild laws of CHAOS chosen Adrienne to be her acolyte and successor.
The Order, later, contacted her. Such power, as Adrienne had been given, had to be controlled. The three who hunted her down gave her no choice. So now she was on the NATHAN HALE, known to the Captain by means that she suspected had been supplied by the Order, and known by this clever little Drazi who seemed to possess the oddest bits of knowledge for an ordinary spacer.
She waved at Dulanax. The Drazi waved back. Adrienne admired the Drazi. In the months he had been aboard, he had trained the gun crews of the NATHAN HALE to such standards that they were probably among the best gun crews in the Alliance Navy.
He had accomplished this despite having nothing but rocks and holograms for targets.
Adrienne felt herself to be a little responsible for Dulanax's troubles. The NATHAN HALE was supposed to move when she, the ship, fought. Engineering had been a little slow in the MOVE department. Adrienne and the new batch of Brakiri were changing that condition.
Adrienne had Human incentive, pride in this Human ship to urge her onward. It was the same impetus that drove Captain Caldwell. Adrienne suspected that he was tired of the status whoa!
The NATHAN HALE since leaving dock at Proxima III had been changing orbits going from one stable ballistic vector to another as if she were an OMEGA on patrol. Nothing had been required from the Thruster pack that had remotely tested its limits or endurance. Orders from the Captain given to that Minbari fool, Soren, would change that.
Jump-trials would commence in two watches and NATHAN HALE would finally taste Hyperspace. Other PATRIOTS with their Morton-Thiokol reactionless thrusters had passed this hurdle without incident, but Adrienne had learned in this woman's Navy that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Dulanax was upside down halfway through the deck. He was cursing in Drazi. Adrienne didn't know Drazi. She would have to teach, herself, she supposed. That would mean more pain as she used her gifts. She was used to fire along her spine by now though. She swam toward the encountered-suited Drazi to help. As she did so she sealed up her own environmental shell her skinsuit. One didn't go into the nanite interior of the NATHAN HALE without one.
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Pushing the Camel Through
Caldwell looked around the C&C. He saw staring back at him the collected stares of his people, as dry mouthed as he was. 'We certainly are a nervous bunch of heroes.' he thought.
Caldwell waited for the wormhole to open. He hated this part of the exercise. The current theories of how two fundamentally different physical realities could open an interface to each other without sharing a common set of binding force constants frightened him more than than the blissful ignorance most of the crew shared. He would have to find some appropriate way to thank his "pet" technomage for "sharing".
It opened. Good. The ship would enter the wormhole and the event horizon would seal behind the event horizon. Then Caldwell had to hope that he hadn't made a mistake in gravigation. He had, as he promised himself checked Na'Talith's plotted course and Thank the Maker he had. She was used to Quantium Forty exotic matter generated jump-points. A pure gravitational jump-point such as the NATHAN HALE's vortex generators formed was dangerous in the extreme. The tidal gradient into which the wormhole opened was was STEEP. That Hyperspace entry was nothing like the safe flat space to which exotic matter allowed access. Na'Talith had failed to take that in account. Human Military Vortex Generators used the Hyperspace gravitational gradient,itself, to open the event horizon. That meant entry close to a Hyperspace mass node. It was safe if you figured the mass into the entry parabola. Once you entered hyperspace, you let the mass node sling you along the parabola until you reached your calculated exit point. You opened the exit point and out you popped more or less pointing in the opposite vector to which you entered hyperspace. If you did it right. Na'Talith had the entry point plotted so that the Hale would swan dive into the hypermass gravitational node. Insane physics.
Nobody around him thought it was crazy. Maybe Caldwell was old-fashioned, but a Universe that made quantum mechanical sense was comfortable to him-not this nightmare. The ship was in Hyperspace safe. Holograms appeared on the Analog as departments reported their part of the NATHAN HALE as "nominal".
"Where's our sheep?" he asked.
Excolsus hologram answered by sign language from Signals "Hotel sixteen by thirty-two." Signals was the part of the ship responsible for tracking events external to the ship as well as communications. When external events threatened the ship; the data went to Fire Control where the Weapons Officer would act appropriately it was hoped.
Caldwell read no text message from Fire Control so Dulanax wasn't seeing anything in the data flows that would start the exercise response.
Caldwell waited.
Excolsus sent by text message, "The DEBBIE REYNOLDS transmitted an "All's Well" twenty-two minutes ago." Excolsus continued, "It would be a little early for our "raider" to appear." Caldwell relaxed. Never mind that Excolsus had forgotten the "Sir."
"Does anybody know what the DEBBIE REYNOLDS looks like?" asked a C&C tech.
'One more problem I have to address,' thought Caldwell, 'Nametags.'
Na'Talith from Secondary Control submitted a holograph of the DEBBIE REYNOLDS on the Analog.
"Kind of big to be owned by one man." drawled the tech who had made the mistake of drawing Caldwell's attention to himself.
Looking at the tech, Caldwell asked pointedly,"Who are you?"
"Able Spacer First, Larry Siebert," said the tech proudly'
"Well, you are Able Spacer Second, Larry Siebert, now." decided Caldwell. "To give you familiarity with ship recognition, I'm assigning you to the tracking party. If you learn anything, I may promote you to Petty Officer Second, Larry Siebert. We jump onto the DEBBIE REYNOLDS in six watches for our first scheduled rendezvous. Make that happen and earn your rank." This exchange with Larry Siebert occurred while Caldwell was typing adjustments to the op-order on the fly as he spoke the changes in orders to the Tech.
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Learning the Hard Way
Siebert for the hundredth time, cursed himself. He had a nice cushy job as an C&C repeater for the helmsman. That was gone. 'What did he know about tracking ships?'
'Better learn, Larry.' he thought to himself. 'The captain had a reputation for shoving people into vacuum or so the rumors went.' he knew that the Narn exec was no pushover either.
Well, anyway, he was supposed to report to the Vree, Excolsus. Due to the officer shortage, Excolsus had been "promoted" to navigator. The Vree had compounded his earlier mistakes by showing a talent for gravigation. The Captain, eager to unburden himself of one of the many hats he was wearing, slapped the navigator hat on the ship's historian. That was okay by Larry. The Vree had charge of all the ship's tracking gear, and so far as Larry could tell; it was so automated, it looked like it was a one Vree show. All Larry would have to do was read and write numbers. He had seen Excolsus at work. The little goblin was a pushover-a soft touch.
A couple of hours later Siebert had a different opinion. 'Wrong again, Larry! How could somebody cram so many telescopes on one ship? There were,mass detectors, spectrometers, particles traps, particle counters, strain gauges,, cameras of all types, a weird thing that looked like a twisted tuning fork and radars. The radars were calibrated to handle everything from extremely long wave radiation measured in light months to rigs that measured neutrinos. There was a contraption that the Vree treated with reverence, that Excolsus signed was an ansible(whatever that was). Of course the stuff was scattered all over the ship and had to be checked and calibrated-by you guessed it, Larry-you Larry', Larry thought as he tried to realign the third axis of a rotating Escher five dimensional contraption that measured the curvature of space.
Excolsus was no pushover either. When the Vree showed Larry how to read a parallax of two gravity wave events, Siebert had misplaced a decimal point on the Z axis copy. Excolsus caught the error and was in Larry's face instantly. The Vree couldn't yell. The knife the little goblin held a tiny millimeter from Larry's carotid artery got his attention. The Vree meant business.
So, it was two days of hell for Larry. It seemed like the NATHAN HALE's tracking party as far as Captain Caldwell was concerned was Larry and the goblin. Reports came in from all over the ship to the navigation compartment. Larry stuck there, would either input the data into the computer and or manually plot on a weird map he couldn't understand or read. Excolsus would go off on many mysterious errands then return, quickly teach Larry something new to record, catch Larry's latest mistake, check reports, correct reports(Larry never seemed to get that right for the goblin either) then he would send Larry off to some godforsaken corner of the NATHAN HALE, usually to pull out one man-sized obsidian colored block from the ship's squishy jello insides and replace it with another man-sized obsidian block. Larry hated those trips. You had to pull a block of armor loose and there was never anyone to help you. Then you had to walk into the ship. Better be fast; because most of the time Excolsus didn't give you time to put an air tank on your space suit. You had to close your suit, hold your breath,swim like mad, and do the job before the suit ran out of air. If you failed you died of suffocation and eventually the nanites ate you and you became part of the ship....
....creepy crawlies inside, no sleep for two days and the goblin on his case constantly, Larry was having no fun. In spite of himself, Larry learned basic star charts--stellargraphy. He caught himself anticipating Excolsus corrections. The goblin seemed to have an intuitive understanding of momentum drift. In one casual conversation , when the goblin wasn't pricking Larry with his knife, Excolsus commented by sign language that it took an average tracking party of five trained navigators and a good computer eight hours to plot an update into a blind jump.
"We two did that in fifty minutes" signed Larry agitated.
The Vree signed in answer, "Yes."
Larry knew enough, now, to understand that situation; that was not just Narn crazy-it was CRAZY crazy. He had an acute case of buttock cramps. The Vree must have read his body language somehow.
Excolsus produced a silent Vree smile and signed, "It is crazy, is it not? Captain Caldwell seems intent on matching his Human compatriots of the Minbari War. Absurd, he should expect us to do that."
"You don't understand!" Siebert signed, "Your guessing! I mean, we're guessing-somebody's guessing!" By now Siebert's hands were moving hysterically. "Those Minbari War knuckleheads were opening Kamikaze jump-points into the middle of SHARLIN groups!"
Larry continued waving wildly,"None of our data is good enough to execute a safe Hyperspace transit like that. Those idiots suicided and they didn't care about going BOOM!" Larry said "BOOM" aloud.
"Calm yourself, Human." scolded the Vree with his hands. "Na'Talith is a good navigator. Caldwell is extremely experienced and I know what I am doing..."
Siebert was not reassured.
"As long as that fool of a Minbari engineer lets his people ignore him and do their work, we will be where we need to be to exit." signed Excolsus.He looked at Siebert.
"Our Captain is wise," continued the goblin, "By constantly forcing re-plot of our course under these conditions. he forces us to record our drift history. I look at that and I can correct it by 'feel'. A "smudge" light vector cone if it is small enough is something I can correct intuitively-I can keep the NATHAN HALE out of the steep gradients." The goblin smiled full of self-assurance.
Larry still disbelieving objected.
Excolsus in the middle of his self-confident monologue didn't see it. He waved,"Vree have been navigating by guess for a thousand years. You, Humans, must learn to trust your elders. Sometimes its data-sometimes its experience. This time-both."
Excolsus noticed that Larry had made an impromptu update to the computer. Larry had done it almost out of muscle memory.
"See, you learn." signed Excolsus with encouragement. Excolsus made his own input as a final adjustment. "You attempted a drift correction. Good. Not quite good enough, but it was in the correct trajectile cone. Let experience guide you." He waved in addition, Each Hyperspace parabola is different in arc. You have to see it here." Excolsus pointed at his eye-meaning in the minds's eye."Some have the gift," he signed. "Others-oh well. I will make a navigator out of you, Mister Siebert! Then I can go back to writing HISTORY!"
The Vree waved his hands in laughter leaving Larry floating perplexed above the plotting computer among the rolls of star-charts drifting in the middle of the Ship's Navigation compartment.
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A Tiger's Anticipation
She had only made one mistake in the Hyperspace transit. That was not too bad as Na"Talith considered things. The NATHAN HALE's thrusters had flared white in the transmitted gun-camera video from her escorting fighter craft.. The NATHAN HALE slungshot its way past the unexpected hypermass. No OMEGA or G"QUAN had the thrusters to climb out of the gradient. A SHARLIN's engines, gravidic or not would have been tidally overwhelmed by the distortions in the local currents,. The PATRIOTS had the right kind of engines for the escape maneuver. It had been very close. Na'Talith could guess. Death close. They had escaped by a Human's Chance. Maker be thanked for the shipbuilders of Lockheed/Hyundai. It didn't hurt that Caldwell and Excolsus were fast with the re-computations, either. They had courage and faith in the ship, worthy of a follower of G'Quan.
Na'Talith, with Narn detachment, put aside her near death religious experience for old age storytelling time to her own future young. Excolsus' hologram appeared on the Analog. The small Vree showed Na'Talith the re-plotted exit trajectile light cone for the NATHAN HALE. It would occur in a little over a watch's future time interval. That was nine ship hours early because of the unexpected slingshot. It was perfect for a jump-point ambush. That was a favorite Narn tactic that Na'Talith loved. Find some favorable flat Hyperspace gravitational environment, wait in a sustained hover on thrusters with fighters out and scan for the DEBBIE REYNOLDS to come lumbering along. At the appropriate time open a wormhole, and pop out with fighters deployed. The NATHAN HALE would emerge literally on top of the DEBBIE REYNOLDS in Real-space exactly when her simulated attacker did and jump them both. Surprise was the Narn way. "Scream and Leap" or in this case "Leap and Scream!" Na'Talith smiled to herself. She looked around at her mixed crew of Human and Narn technicians with her in Secondary Control. They were reading their sections of the Analog which was showing in the air in front of them, holographic repeaters of the tacticals in C&C, that served Caldwell as Primary Command. The situation was scattered as gun camera video from fighters and the NATHAN HALE's beam emitters provided segmented coverage of the ship's local battle-space. Only when the TELEDYNE was called up in Primary and Secondary Control would the ship ayeye integrate the disjointed viewpoints into a whole unity. That would happen as the counter-ambush was sprung. Na'Talith quietly sent a message to Dulanax bypassing her Captain. Now if her second guess was correct about the OPFOR, she would cover the NATHAN HALE in glory!
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End Of Chapter 2; Part 2
A little CHAOS is a GOOD thing.
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Post by Avatar on Sept 1, 2019 3:54:04 GMT
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Into the Chasm of Night: Chapter 3; Part 1
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Fan-head Fandango
Lord Jathren was quietly confident. His agents had delivered to him the schedule for the Human transport; DEBBIE REYNOLDS. Other agents had compromised the orders for the Human ships that were supposed to use her as an exercise asset in their training. The HYPERION named the EUREKA was no threat. One of Jathren's VORCHANs would distract that Human fool and lead it astray. The other Human ship, the NATHAN HALE was another matter. It was one of their hunter-killer ships; the ones they classified as destroyers. A PRIMUS or an OCTURION might be hard-pressed to deal with it. Jathren wasn't going to risk one of his capital ships in battle when a simple ruse would do.
The Humans were so foolish. No Centauri would publish ship routing schedules or trust NARNS to keep secrets. Unfortunate weakness. The Universe was a harsh teacher. The many gods knew that if you closed your eyes and trusted to luck, someone would make a fist an d smash your face in.
Jathren summoned his retainers and gave out his orders. A false distress call would be sent from the assigned VORCHAN. The HYPERION must by Human space-faring law respond to it. It would delay the EUREKA for a day. Agents would be instructed to mine the Abbai fuel station at Kathra. It would be a sacrifice to destroy the fuelling station, but the Centauri Republic would rebuild it once Izarium and the Praxal system were in his hands. As a victory it would secure his position in the Centaurum. He laughed aloud at his own audacity. It was a brilliant strategem. Poor foolish Humans!
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Hairball Hoedown
Caldwell looked at his latest gift from NGS, the Naval Intelligence assessment of Centauri message traffic along the Indus Circuit. Didn't anyone ever look at history? Even in fiction, this setup was a cliche.' Send out a phoney distress call? Lure the covering force away, then attack the escorted asset? Caldwell's respect for Centauri tactical prowess declined by several orders of magnitude.
The Centauri weren't complete fools. They had a penchant for arranging "accidents." A mysterious explosion or unknown attackers was their preferred method of action. This close to the border and inside Alliance Space it had to be the method they would use. NGS offered him no advice. Typical.
Caldwell called Soren via Analog,
"Mister Chief Engineer," Caldwell asked as soon as Soren's holograph appeared. "How big a bomb would you need to destroy a ULYSSES class freighter?"
Soren paused before he asked Caldwell a series of counter questions:
"How big is a ULYSSES?"
"Assuming that the bomb is external and not coincident with the the hull of the ship, How far do you expect the bomb to be detonated from the hull?" Soren asked reasonably.
This put Caldwell off for a minute. He said, "I think the Centauri may try to attack the DEBBIE REYNOLDS during this train-ex. I was wondering what size of contact mine they would use?"
Soren for once had an opportunity to use his Wind-sword training, "That is not the Centauri way. It is too simple and direct. They are flamboyant and given to hubris. They'll mine the fuel depot at Kathra which is where they will expect to catch the both of us refueling. If they blow the depot, they destroy a key node in the Alliance supply infrastructure along this segment of the Indus circuit. That alone is worth the risk if they miss either the freighter or us."
Caldwell's face showed pure horror."Thousands of lives, dozens of ships.!"
"What do the Centauri care?" said Soren."An accident is traceable to no one. And of course the Centauri would arrive in force to help the survivors-if any. I suggest the bomb has already been placed. It will probably be of Narn or Gaim manufacture. Why not? Damage the Alliance politically with a public incident if the bomb plot fails. If their plot succeeds, then they cut the Indus Circuit supply line and grab a slice of Alliance Space."
Soren asked Caldwell, "Will the Alliance fight for the planet Kathra?"
"The Alliance won't, but we will." said a decided Caldwell.
"Understood, Captain." said Soren. "Assuming we save the fuel depot from the mining, and see the DEBBIE REYNOLDS off to Ikarra, who would we fight? We still need proof."
"Show me a Centauri Warship within two jump-points of us and I'll get us the proof that I can fling on the floor of the Alliance Senate." snapped Caldwell.
Soren bowed or rather his image did. "That is very Narn of you, Sir. We still want to avoid a war. It would be on Centauri terms if we fought it now."
Caldwell laughed, "It won't be a war. It will be a "Rescue." Humans can play that game too."
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Needle in the Fuel Stack
It was about as Na'Talith expected. She watched on the Teledyne from her post in Secondary Control, It was a brilliant launching and sortie. The Centauri had tried their gambit, using sleeper agents to mine the depot. Somehow Caldwell anticipated it. He had called ahead without her knowledge; the agents responsible for mining the fueling station had been caught too late. They were typical programmed Centauri tools. The two Narns and one Abbai suicided before the Humans could get a telepath to scan them for their secrets. Being Narn, Na'Talith had been had been taught by her own Military, all the Centauri's tricks. Where had Captain Caldwell learned it?
She watched as "Vultures" launched astern of the NATHAN HALE's trail edge "wings" from drop tubes. The two sticks of "Vultures" fired their own incongruous particle thrust engines and headed for the huge glittering jewel of the Abbai fueling station in orbit around Kathra . The "Vultures" quickly receded into small white phase shifting dots lost in the multitudinous lattice of reds greens whites blues and purples of the Abbai Station. The NATHAN HALE hung one thousand five hundred ship lengths away at the nearest safe distance Soren estimated that the tough Human ship dared approach.
Na'Talith followed one "Vulture" in particular. It contained a party of Gaim and the Ship's Second Engineer. Captain Caldwell had insisted that Adrienne Brown lead the search teams. Na'Talith knew nothing about the young Human woman. It was curious that the Captain sent her instead of his Exec to head up the landing party.
The NATHAN HALE pivoted on her axis. Na'Talith watched enraptured a "Vulture's" gun camera broadcast the PATRIOT floodlit in the rainbow lights of the Abbai fuel station. The NATHAN HALE pivoted with eerie grace on her center of mass. Various reactionless thruster emitter assemblies flared bright white as the ship pitched and rolled slightly.
The four prongs of her proboscis discharged lightning for a brief glorious moment then a ray of absolute pure blackness so sharp that it stood out in bold contrast to space itself shot out and a wormhole entry point to Hyperspace opened in front of the PATRIOT. She, the HALE, moved to the event which was a scant hundred ship lengths ahead of her and entered it as majestically as any ship Ns'Talith had ever seen entered, a jump-point. Na'Talith felt the skin along her spine tighten in awe at the beauty of this obsidian Human killer-ship as She pulled the event horizon closed behind her with a flare of white light. The two gravity acceleration died as the NATHAN HALE went into a Hyperspace "hover"-waiting.
Viewpoint was now by Vultures in Real-space and by the NATHAN HALE's Ansible-enhanced gun-cameras in Hyperspace. The PATRIOT hid.
The DEBBIE REYNOLDS, expecting to participate in the train-ex at Kathra jumped in rather conventionally to Na'Talith's jaundiced eye. Instead of the HYPERION simulating the "raider" a flock of Vultures intercepted the proud blue, green, and red Human transport. Na'Talith was surprised at just how large the ULYSSES class freighter was.
From its red three hundred meter spherical head to its twelve blue colored flower petal style Dilgar technology based energy absorber panels: to the six massive green cargo cylinders that surrounded the one thousand meter long hexagonal center cylinder of the ship; to the cluster of seven Beagle/Bryant particle thrust engines in its engine block the DEBBIE REYNOLDS was a thing of primitive beauty and simple brute engineering elegance.
The "Vultures" herded the freighter away from the Abbai station. One of the "Vultures", Na'Talith saw, docked witjh the DEBBIE REYNOLDS. That lander would be carrying Captain Caldwell's handwritten orders to the freighter captain. The orders contained new coordinates in the Kathra system comet halo. The DEBBIE REYNOLDS would be refueled by Alliance Navy fuel barges away from the Abbai Station. A wormhole opened and Na'Talith saw a flight of Furies appear from nowhere. She had failed to notice on the Teledyne while mesmerized by the DEBBIE REYNOLDS that the NATHAN HALE had launched her few Furies into Hyperspace, then opened an exit jump-point for the Furies close to the DEBBIE REYNOLDS. The Furies promptly formed up on the freighter and escorted her as she made her lumbering way to her hiding place among a smudged group of snowballs more than five hundred light hours from the Kathra System primary star. An astonished Centauri observer, who saw the DEBBIE REYNOLDS pass him close by with her attendant escort of Furies, broke radio silence to use the jump-gate transmitter to spurt report to his masters. He got off maybe half a transmission before Fury KMD fire ripped his little transport into a fire blossom. The DEBBIE REYNOLDS opened a jump-point. The Furies entered. She followed. The event closed with a prosaic flash of light. Na'Talith sighed. She was staring at a patch of stars. Na'Talith had learned a great deal in those few minutes. ULYSSES class freighters that were supposed to be jump-gate restricted had some kind of vortex projectors. Also, whatever the NATHAN HALE used to open a jump-point was not like any of the jump-gate or vortex projector technology of which she was familiar, and the NATHAN HALE was capable of opening multiple jump-points!
Another thing. Quantium Forty, being exotic matter, generated a discernable gravity wave before the jump-point formed. It was how ALL the powers of Known Space detected the formation of jump-points and avoided the jump-point ambush. You usually received the gravity spike before the enemy popped out. It allowed you to set up to meet the would be attacker. The Minbari used their famous stealth technology to deny this ability to their enemies. The price was that the first SHARLIN that jumped in had one rough time before its fellows jumped in to take advantage of its jamming and wreck havoc on the enemy. The Humans had Vortex Projectors that didn't give off the gravity spike! Na'Talith stared into the Teledyne now dominated by the rail and rung assembly of brightly colored lights that was the Abbai fueling station. The "Vulture" gun-camera view showed the Abbai station swelling in size as the "Vulture" slowly crawled nearer to docking. The jewel hung alone in orbit as the nightside of the gas giant planet that provided the Stations fuel and its gravitational Real-space provided a dull reddish blue backdrop curtain to one of the most beautifully lit structures Na'Talith had ever seen.
Adrienne Brown and her people had to find that bomb, Na'Talith decided. This Station was too beautiful to be destroyed.
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Trial by Fire
It was molecular-bonded to one of the liquid deuterium tanks.
It was a Gaim bomb. Adrienne was terrified. The Gaim were technologically primitive when it came to metal tech; but were hideously advanced, biologically. The bomb was infected with a green translucent slime plague that was far more effective than any conceivable Centauri anti-tamper devices. The Plague was alive in vacuum! The Gaim who found it lasted long enough to send a radio burst transmission before the slime that covered the bomb, slid off the casing, chased it and ate the poor drone.
Now Adrienne was floating three hundred meters distant in an un-tethered state in the midst of the universe. She could see the slime moving around nervously shifting this way and that like some goalie in a football game*.
She dared not attach a line. The slime was incredibly fast and seemed able to travel along any surface at will by simply flowing.
As for the bomb, it was simple enough. Adrienne used her remote sensors to map the bomb's workings. A Hyach inertial confinement ignition laser provided the fusion trigger for the Helium Three core. The temperatures that that required was mind-boggling. This was pushing metal tech to the limit. Maybe Humans could build bigger bombs, but the technomage in Adrienne didn't see how. The pain of remote viewing was fogging her ability to think. There, she saw it; a radioactive decay isotope trigger. The Gaim kept it simple and extremely effective. Physics very much dictated what worked even for a technomage. Caldwell was correct. She would have to displace the bomb. Could the NATHAN HALE supply her with the means? She had spent hours with the strange Vortex Generators studying the perverse technology to see if Caldwell's mad scheme would work. The NATHAN HALE had four Vortex Generators. She was about to conjure using three of them. If it worked....
The first event happened-a bar of blackness pierced the hue of Hyperspace. Those aboard the NATHAN HALE felt a lurch as if something huge malevolent and dangerous had grabbed and tugged on the ship. An exit opened into Real-space. Those who looked at the Teledyne saw the Abbai fueling station framed in the opening.
The second event happened. With no intervening detectable cause a blackness darker than space itself surrounded the bomb-slicing it cleanly from its seat on the Octagonal fuel tank. The Second Vortex Generator was exhausted. Adrienne was in agony, all her nerves were ropes of fire. She desperately wanted to close her eyes to the pain. She dared not. She had to see to aim.
The third event happened. A whiteness brighter than Hell itself opened at the apex of an isosceles triangle. The bomb and Adrienne formed the endpoints of the base. Fierce tidal gravity reached for the bomb and dragged it into the light. Now Adrienne shot her line gun at the station. It hit. and she jerked to a hideous stop. The bomb disappeared into the white light. It closed up. Adrienne felt that mini reality die as the bomb exploded inside of it. Pain.... pain......UNENDURABLE PAIN...She was screaming into silence......
Caldwell watched the telltales on the third Vortex Generator flat-line. There had been a good chance that the NATHAN HALE might have died in an explosion that would have closed local Hyperspace into a hypermass. In Real-space it would have appeared as a newborn mini-quasar. He shuddered in exhausted exhultation. He ordered a "Vulture" out to recover his Second Engineer. He, then, released himself from his acceleration couch in C&C and for once used his ship shoes to schick schick his way to his quarters compartment for desperately needed sleep.
*(Footnote; Adrienne is English by birth. To her football would be soccer to us Americans.)
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Battle Reports
It was another love missive from the NGS. Sent by the NAVSTAR-the Human laid Hyperspace beacon network, (encrypted as navigation timing data), Caldwell waited for the download to decrypt so he could suffer through playback. The Analog flashed the Alliance secure message logo, then it played the hologram.
It surprised Caldwell. He was looking at remote hyperspace sensor buoy footage. Human ships fired these off to map gravity gradients in Hyperspace. The buoys carried cameras as part of their instrument package. He saw a HYPERION pursuing A VORCHAN in Hyperspace. The HYPERION had the Vorchan hemmed in on the parabola and was forcing it deeper into the gravitational gradient by repeated threatening ramming maneuvers. The Human captain skillfully used ballistic mines and occasional particle beam fire to herd the faster more maneuverable Centauri deeper down the slope of the gradient. To escape, the Centauri desperately opened an exit point and strained to climb against the gravity of the hypermass toward which it fell. Caldwell watched the probes perspective until it fell into the hypermass that the Centauri was trying to escape....
Change of point of view, the HYPERION had her Furies out. Calldwell read EUREKA and the Earth Alliance logo as a gun camera on the HYPERION tracked a Fury across a pan and tilt until it was obvious that the Fury(an old Aurora) pursued the VORCHAN through the Centauri's own exit point! That meant that the Human Captain had deliberately aimed for the VORCHAN in a swan-dive. Whoever that crazy Captain was, he was using the Hypermass' gravity and his HYPERION's engines to establish enough delta vee to catch the VORCHAN. The VORCHAN was through. Of course the EUREKA made it or Caldwell wouldn't be seeing this report. Different gun camera this time. It was the port bow particle beam emitter. A single flash bulb burst. A Nixon pulse bomb Caldwell decided caused the light that splashed the Vorchan before it could turn to face its pursuer. So the EUREKA was a MIDWINTER. The VORCHAN went into an uncontrolled tumble. Caldwell saw the Furies rush away from the VORCHAN into the gun-camera frame-of-view as it centered and tracked on the VORCHAN. It must have been a telescopic shot because it was too close to the Centauri for a realistic range. The Furies fleeing, was the clue.. That Human Captain must have been enraged because there was no attempt at rescue as the VORCHAN spat life-pods. Then it blew. The VORCHAN Captain must have been an idiot to burn his engines out like that against a mere HYPERION-even if it was a MIDWINTER....
Caldwell saw the finish, the VORCHAN fire-blossom, and then the EUREKA moving in to gather survivors.
Caldwell waited for the end of the holography of the video record, then he hard-copied the text of the report.
It was dry reading. The dance in Hyperspace had been a navigational duel lasting hours with the VORCHAN originally pursuing the EUREKA. The Centauri had thought it surprised the HYPERION with the fake distress call trick. The VORCHAN hid itself behind the bulk of Cnelsda IV a Mars like world perfect for a gravidic powered ship to mount an ambush in Real-space. When the VORCHAN's repeater probes picked up the EUREKA emerging from Hyperspace, the VORCHAN had popped over the planet's horizon line, opened fire and missed and the chase was on. Into Hyperspace, then the EUREKA seemingly fled. The VORCHAN followed. By all rights the Centauri should have had the advantage there; so why not pursue? A standard HYPERION MIDWINTER with her feeble particle thrust engines was no match in acceleration, compared to a VORCHAN! But then the MIDWINTER HYPERIONS were receiving the Morton-Thiokol B-IV reactionless thruster packs, just like the surviving former Earth Force NOVAs were getting the C-II's, but not the engineering embarassment, gyroscopically-hampered OMEGAs; with their crew spin arms and counter-rotating flywheels. That oversight by the Centauri Secret Service was going to be a Centauri killer. Caldwell looked in the NAVPERS library for the captain of the EUREKA. Janet Heller? He didn't know her.
He flipped to the Appendix that NGS always helpfully supplied to these reports. There was the Naval Intelligence analysis of the battle which called it "absolutely brilliant" and the recommended procedures for spreading dis-information among the known Centauri Secret Service conduits to make the VORCHAN's demise appear accidental. Caldwell didn't think those measures would work. Centauri open source espionage among the news services was very good.
On the other hand the NGS had an interesting tactical ganmbit in mind. Lure the Centauri here in the INDUS CIRCUIT out piecemeal and whittle them down by using the DEBBIE REYNOLDS as bait. Caldwell considered it but the fisherman in him knew that that worm was too old.
It would be better for the DEBBIE REYNOLDS to reach Ikarra and dump off her colonists. A Human Ikarra Colony would anchor the end of the INDUS CIRCUIT and singe the Centauri lion's beard much better that way.
For now Caldwell had to carefully consider the implications of this report that weren't spelled out. His fan-head opposite in the game had tried to destroy an Alliance ship through a ruse-de-guerre. He suspected his Centauri counterpart was reading how THAT turned out. Caldwell smiled at the thought.
Frustration in his opponent was a weapon that he, Caldwell, could exploit in this kind of battle. It was better than a fleet. So far his Centauri opposite had proved himself most helpfully incompetent. Caldwell intended to intensify his opponents frustration. If only Alliance Naval Intelligence had clued him in earlier on the Centauri Kathra gambit instead of lettinng him stumble onto it blindly as a possibility in a chance conversation with Soren during this train-ex. 'Better start calling it a war-ex,' thought Caldwell.
Caldwell counted himself lucky as he destroyed the report by feeding it to the re-cycler. He had Na'Talith, Excolsus, Adrienne Brown, Paula Chow, Dulanax, and even that arrogant fool, Soren to match against the fan-head clowns of the other side. Captain Janet Heller looked to be one of the most formidable tacticians of whom Caldwell knew. Caldwell had learned of the records of great ones like Franklin, Sheridan, Ivanova, Lockley and Haig. Heller appeared to have come out of the same school. Caldwell knew the long odds the Centauri were stacking against him in this poker game. Caldwell was confident he had the better cards.....Especially if he could get Heller?
He composed a message, he wanted to send to NGS. Maybe this time they would grant his request?
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Reciprocation
Failure so complete could only end one way. Fortunately the death required had been paid by that fool Count Anesto. He had saved Centauri honor.
Lord Jathren was down a VORCHAN in the game. His Human opponent was more astute than he anticpated. But being Human, like his breed, he revealed his hand too soon.
Very well, Jathen decided, there was a spy in his entourage. He would have his spy-master scour his retainers for enemy agents. In the meantime he would need new Narn informers. The ones he had, he would, now, have killed. They were probably double agents who had betrayed him into this debacle. Once accomplished in this victory now his Human opponent will lose his agents, would have lost his advantage. Such is typical Human shortsightedness.
For now, Jathen was prepared to play the game of Ohobina. That was a game of patience. He would try to find his opponent, seek out his sources of information and poison them figuratively and literally. Control the sources of information and you control the game.
On the technical side of things, the Humans had some surprises. Their warships were far more dangerous than he expected. Perhaps the Minbari had given up everything they had to their Human conquerors? That was not good for the Centauri in the long march. Humans were technology whores. They exploited whatever they acquired, rapidly. His game would have to be short term. It suited him. When he secured his personal power within the Centaurum, he would worry about the long game. One had to order one's priorities.
Jathren looked at his useless retainers. He would find no help in that quarter. He had other allies who would be of service to him.
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The Game of Hide and Seek; Boredom in Hyperspace
The NATHAN HALE spent a month in hiding with no movement. Station keeping in a Hyperspace hover was tough on a ship. Caldwell was worried about parts shortages, crew fatigue, Hyperspace Cafard, (Have to get a ship's doctor!) and general wear and tear.
The EUREKA showed up to break the monotony. Captain Heller sent over reams of intelligence from the wreckage of the VORCHAN she'd destroyed. Na"talith perused it for Caldwell. She pronounced it useless-explaining that Centauri ships kept nothing operational in the records. Only the Centauri Captain knew operational plans aboard a Centauri ship and he was dead.
Caldwell was bored.
Messages from the NGS came in on schedule. Most of the message traffic was useless and by Caldwell's order of radio silence was strictly one way. Listening to ISN and the LONAW freighter communication traffic produced better local intelligence than what the NGS was sending in their latest series of messages.
Some good news; A Fury patrol commandeered a freighter load of fighter incubators headed for the Taloga Station further up the INDUS CIRCUIT. Chow led that Fury patrol and she was just pirate enough to hijack the shipment!
The irate Brakiri freighter captain watched his profits, the incubators, moved into the hanger of the fiercest ship he had ever seen. A brief Holgraphic exchange with Caldwell left an even more terrified Brakiri. That Avioki fled the HALE's hiding place with word of the coming Alliance War.
Caldwell smirked at his reflection in the C&C Teledyne.
More dis-information to fog the other side's picture of reality.
Reports from the Hanger compartments came presently. The incubators were hooked into the HALE's ayeye and power grid. Buddings from the current flock of Furies had taken root and were growing. The newborn Furies would be ready soon. Caldwell just needed Human pilots. The Narns were still rejected by Furies no matter how hard Paula Chow tried to convince the Furies to accept Spooheads in their bellies.
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Some Words on Paper
Na'Talith floated a few inches above her rack. She had few chances of sleep in the past ship days. Caldwell ran a busy ship in the Human fashion. No rest for anyone. She was reading the latest Situation Estimate from Naval Intelligence. Caldwell had already marked the reports with his own notes. It indicated how secret the documents were that there was one hardcopy and it had an attendant paper trail of custody in triplicate.
Na'Talith read:
[quote:] "Your expected opposition force is estimated to be the Household Forces of the local Centauri Duke. These are not expected to exceed two Centauri capital ship battle groups centered principly on ONE or TWO OCTURIONS and ONE to THREE PRIMI . This indicates a probable VORCHAN force not exceeding TWENTY VORCHANS in number.[/quote]
Na'Talith gulped twice as she saw that in print. That was small change as far as Empires went, when you factored in total fleets, but for some border lord that was a formidable force.
She read Caldwell's note in the margin:
Na'Talith didn't entirely understand Caldwell's scribblings. She looked down at the bottom of the page and saw another of Caldwell's notes:
'What was Caldwell planning?' Na'talith placed the reports in the secure pouch, put that under here and laid herself out on her rack. She snugged herself in with her bunk straps, said "lights off" to the ship and went into a troubled sleep.
------------------------------------------------------------
Interruptions
When he wasn't tied to C&C, Caldwell was a walking Captain. He tended to do administrative work through his Amiga as he toured his Ship. the crew learned to expect to meet him anywhere in the crew spaces of the NATHAN HALE. Malcolm had good luck so far. He had been at his C&C post, only duing battle drills and the ship train-exs. He was passing through the Aft Portside Ventral thruster emitter access passages when his good luck ran out....
....Soren heard the laconic "General Quarters" over the Talk Within Ship. 'What have the Humans bungled now?' he thought, now, as he saunter floated to his battle station. Soren didn't emulate the Humans around him. Let them rush like mad fools. He reached his post. He strapped himself in and waited calmly for that desperate imbecile of a Human captain to call him to save them all. It would be a minor problem.,,,,
....Na'talith reached Secondary Control. She dove for her acceleration couch and barely made it before the acceleration surged. She saw most of her technicians had made it. As she struggled to strap in she noticed that Navigation was showing it was manned by some Human named Larry Siebert. Where was Excolsus? A quick call-up of the locater on the Analog showed nothing of Excolsus, but it showed the Captain buried in the bowels of the thruster pack. Telltales came alive as the Teledyne integrated all the ship's sensors into a single coherent picture for her. The PATRIOT was still in Hyperspace Hover hidden. A pop-up holgraphic window showed a sensor buoy's view of a jump-point opening in near the gas giant planet's moon, Kathra.. A PRIMUS emerged from the event. It headed for the Abbai fuel station. Na'Talith suddenly felt the cold needles of fear as her Mentor described she would fell them the first time she would head into battle. Uncertainty, something Na'Talith heard Human combat veterans in the crew talk among themselves about must be like this. She hiccupped as Narn do to relieve stomach tension and ordered the NATHAN HALE to open an exit point.
The Captain's image appeared on the Teledyne in an Analog pop-up window. He was scrambling up a ladderway straining against the acceleration. That much could be seen from his wrist-link as it moved wildly back and forth as Caldwell grabbed hand-holds on ladder rungs. Caldwell yelled, "Stay put! Monitor, until I get there!" Na'Talith felt the sudden release of tension. Her stomach uncramped and relaxed. Someone else had the burden now. She could concentrate on what she should do. Maybe the Centauri wouldn't attack. Maybe Caldwell could work another miracle. Who knew? She busied herself....
.....Deep in the belly of the beast Caldwell was running up-ship. Sixteen hundred meters! Good grief, the NATHAN HALE was huge!
Why would the Centauri show themselves? What was the objective? This was Alliance Space. Why? Why? He kept running....
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Stupid Aliens
Paula Chow held to the opinion that a big reason Humanity was still around was because Aliens were stupid. She conjectured about this as she walked into her Fury. The Dilgar, the Minbari, the Shadows, the Vorlons-all were agenda-driven idiots, who once shown the errors in their logic went off to bother someone else. Paula started pre-launch checks as she continued her train of thought. Granted that Humanity had been lucky in its choice of enemies, but that luck had involved very hard fighting and extreme suffering with Humans on the receiving end, most of the time. Vainglory was a trait that Paula and most of her generation lacked. Fools died early. The survivors learned humility these days.
To that end Paula offered prayers to THE GREAT MAKER before she sortied out in her Fury. She fully expected each launch to be her last, but was fully determined to do her best to prevent it. This optimistic fatalism was also true of her generation. How else could you go out and face the Universe?
"Bravo One, ready to launch," she said to no one in particular. There was no whoosh, just a bang-thump as the LINAC in the drop tube catapulted her astern of the NATHAN HALE. She trailed astern of the port wing of the PATRIOT. She began paying attention to the insistant whispering voice in the back of her head of the Fury's ayeye autopilot, as Chow vectored out and parallel to the NATHAN HALE's baseline vector. Once positioned, Paula did a quick three hundred sixty degree pitch to check six before she lined up on her planned vector. She turned on the camouflage screen. It was going to be a three hour flight. It was thirty minutes to the Kathra Jump-gate. Once through she was to lose herself in the freighter traffic. That would be a difficult merge. She was supposed to take a quick look around and then return home. Running mission silent, she should be able to do a reconnaissance without being tracked back. Her job was to lay HUMAN EYES on the PRIMUS and get back to NATHAN HALE with some useful Human perspective that no machine probe could supply.
She came out of the gate, oriented galactic north, and headed spin-ward-inclined to the moon Kathra's ecliptic orbit about the gas giant plus twenty degrees. There was a concentration of local traffic waiting to use the gate anchored at the lagrange point gravity anchor: mostly contracted puddle jumpers, and private-owned in-system ships. It was mostly Human-built or expatriate Centauri construction with an occasional Abbai transport mixed in. No Narn stuff. The Spooheads, this far out from Narn, preferred Human equipment. It was cheaper and easier to fix than equivalent Narn gear, and was of better quality. Chow flew her Fury silent. There was no sign of a kilometer sized fanhead cruiser with gravidic engines. The PRIMUS was staying quiet, moving ballistically. Chow was well aware that gravidic engines, even idled, should produce a graviton ripple effect. Her mass detectors showed nothing. The PRIMUS was running cold. Another bad sign-the locals weren't running. Usually when a shark showed up, the minnows scattered. An uneasy feeling was coming over Paula as she pointed herself toward the fuel depot.
It took an hour to coast the Fury to the depot. One look at the PRIMUS moving into a fueling berth and Chow executed a minimum energy escape trajectory back to the gate. Her threat receivers started chirping on the Fury's Analog and her ayeye quietly announced in the back of her mind, "Sentris".
It wasn't a time to be seen. Chow's training was that a Sentri was a point defense interceptor designed to guard its base ship. To that end the Centauri used data linkage from the base ship to the fighter for target detection, tracking, and vectored intercepts. This made sense since a ship's sensors and communication systems were much more powerful and farther ranged than anything that could be installed on a fighter. The Centauri placed only the simplest of detection gear on their fighters.
Earthforce, and now the Alliance Navy used their fighters as long-ranged attack single-ships. Human sensors, though garbage by everyone else's standards, were designed to be as long-ranged as possible for their fighters to carry as well as their ships. The result was that now Chow could see the Sentris. The Sentris, because their base ship controllers were offline, were not getting the long-range tracking data they needed. They were blind to her presence as she fled. Centauri doctrine negated their technological advantage. Stupid aliens again....
------------------------------------------------------------
Incidental Mistake
Excolsus had been trapped hull-side on the top face of the Forward Port Dorsal Slicer emitter when the NATHAN HALE had reacted to the entry of the PRIMUS into Kathra Real-space. He was walking over the surface of the huge truncated pyramid to get a better feel for the Slicer, He had been appalled when Dulanax had described the one hundred fifty meter base by fity meter high structures. The fifty meter by fifty meter perfect square he stood upon reflected his image back at him, when he looked at his feet in octagonal obsidian tile like fractals. It was like walking on an insect's eye, He jerked loose from his magnetic footholds as The PATRIOT seemed to line up for a Hyperspace exit event. Whatever gods in the Universe there were, heard the little Vree's silent prayers. The HALE flipped, lined up thrust herself forward and abruptly halted two hundred ship lengths from where she pitched and yawed and vectored toward an imaginary exit point. The flash of her thruster packs nearly blinded Excolsus as he forgot to engage the flare shielding in his suit visor. It took m,oments to clear the dark spots from his vision. Excolsus hit his suit locator and hoped that no receivers other than the HALE's picked his location bearing and range data. He exhaled with relief, as he saw in his pressure suit visor telescopics, a clumsy "Vulture" fall astern of the PATRIOT and twist on its own axis to make a direct at-him approach vector. He would be picked up. Now all Excolsus had to do was convince the Captain not to have him spaced for breaking communications silence.
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Brainstorming
Excolsus was lucky. The fan-heads heard nothing and Caldwell was a forgiving Human. Now he was in Navigation confronting a new problem with his Captain.
The Vree had a very Human-like posture. He was hunched over, looking at an image of a PRIMUS. His head was resting on his hands. The PRIMUS image was rotating in narrow profile on its long axis. He jabbed at the air in front of him, where it seemed to be an image of an instrument panel. The image started to yaw as well as pitch about its long axis. Excolsus signed, "Wrong, the rear spike antennae is too short. It is longer, more pronounced."
Caldwell, exasperated, signed back, "I know it is wrong. It is an approximate guess. It is not like the Centauri handed over the blueprints."
Excolsus placated his Captain, "I merely point out the inaccuracies to improve our chances against it if we have to fight," he signed.
Caldwell nodded, "The fact that it came here alone, that I don't understand."
"But just in case they do jump in with a battle group to blow this system's infra-structure..." He called up images of a half-dozen Vorchans and scattered them in an open-box formation around the PRIMUS, which he steadied up in a horizontal slightly tilted aspect. "That, I understand. It makes more sense."
Excolsus nodded in agreement. "You have their traveling formation correctly displayed. The Centauri traditionally jump in with their VORCHANS first. These saturate the target area with a volley of particle bolter and ion rocket torpedoes.," He signed. "Those torpedoes" he added in an aside, "glow from the cold plasma shields that the Centauri encased them in to resist Drazi and Narn particle bolter and beam fire." The Vree grinned wickedly. "Too bad for them that the plasma sheath is utterly useless against Human Interceptors, KMD's and Vree anti-matter streamers.
Excolsus continued moving his hands sedately as he warmed up to his subject. It was not often he allowed himself the luxury of teaching. "The PRIMUS comes in behind the fast attack by the VORCHANs and engages the crippled enemy with its long range particle beams-what are erroneously referred to as "combat lasers" by the Narn. These are actually collimated particle beams that consist of neutralized charge cesium ions, They are devastating, especially at long range as the Centauri seem to have solved the beam divergence and the heat problems in their particle emitters."
Caldwell asked with a quick hand flurry, "Why haven't I heard of these "lasers" being used against us?"
Excolsus answered slyly single-handed, "Its a Centauri peculiarity. They like to fight close up to their enemy and strike him with their particle bolters, literally face to face. The "lasers" require them to stand off at distance and "rake" their enemies. The Centauri regard that as a cowardly way of war." The little Vree shrugged. "The Centauri used their "combat lasers" often enough against the Orieni to justify my description of their tactics. Maybe they don't respect Humans enough to feel the need?"
Excolsus moved his hands more quickly now," Both the VORCHANS and the PRIMUS use their ion rocket torpedo launchers to seed space with anti-fighter missile. These are launched on scatter-pack bus missiles and burst asunder when the "torpedo reaches a fighter flight."
This surprised Caldwell.
Excolsus explained, "For the Centauri it is a new weapon. They saw what Auroras were able to accomplish against SHARLINS. They know that their Sentris-restricted to their battle group core ships are inferior to Minbari Nials and by combat evidence to Human Furies. So they deploy these on all their ships in a more sophisticated imitation of the Narn energy mine."
Caldwell audibly snorted, then signed, "Our fighters carry decoys. This is old news to us sons of Earth."
The Vree smiled again. One tired quickly speaking this much with one's hands but he had a student eager to learn and Excolsus was eager to teach.
Excolsus used his amiga to upload into the Navigation analog a simulated Centauri attack on a Brakiri convoy. The Brakiri freighters exploded as VORCHANs smothered them with particle bolter fire. Each VORCHAN in its flyby attack fired eight pairs of bolters continuously. The VORCHANS echeloned port to starboard in a staggered refused file and swept across the Brakiri box port high to starboard low "crossing the Tee" of the Brakiri formation. The effect was akin to that of being run over by a freight train. A flash in the background was obviously a jump-point event.
Four crimsom beams from the locus of the light flash raked across four of the surviving tumbling Brakiri freighters.
A quick pop-up window showed the magnified image of the beam source-a PRIMUS in the act of firing and launching Sentris. Eventually the Sentris entered into the main view. They were gunning Brakiri survival pods, jettisoned from the dead and dying freighters.
Excolsus watched Caldwell's facial expression. Something hard, cold, and pitiless was what Excolsus read. He had seen the same look on his own Xill Captain's face when that ship responded to the disaster beacons.
"This is history?" signed Caldwell.
"Yes, Sir." signed Excolsus. "It was recovered from Brakiri wreckage by a Vree ship of the Artisans' Guild. The XILL responded to a plea for help. There was no one left alive from the incident to tell what happened so the Vree of that XILL reconstructed the incident from what ship's recorders they could find. I am certain it was not pleasant assembling that history." Excolsus did not tell Caldwell that it was he, Excolsus, who had assembled the records. "For a civilized people, the Centauri can be quite savage." he finished.
Silence hung like a fog.
Caldwell waved, "My friend, we Humans KNOW how to deal with that kind of civilized behavior."
Excolsus felt duty bound to remind his Captain of the realities, "{Sir, we should use caution when we invoke justice. War has a truth-lives end and they cannot be called back."
Caldwell looked at the jump-point entering Centauri warships leaving the battle-space, as the simulation ran its course. There were still Sentris shooting at objects as they returned to their base ship. Pilots having fun-target practice on the dying Caldwell supposed. He sighed. The rage he felt hadn't left him, but the little Vree had pulled him up short again. He had to thank Excolsus for that sometime in the uncertain future.
The Centauri were not as tough as the Minbari, technically; nor as numerous in their known fleets, as the Minbari had been. The Centauri were better organized. The fan-heads were logistically more astute. They, unlike the Minbari had a unified political/military infra-structure and a competent military leadership.
That command structure had the wherewithal and the political strategic doctrine to easily defeat any League power singly or the entire LONAW in combination. The old Earth Alliance at the peak of its power might have given the Centauri a stiff fight, but Caldwell knew from Earth Force staff studies he had learned at Command and General Staff College(Fort Leavenworth Kansas-Divon Hall-sliced in two by a SHARLIN beam and never repaired as a visible reminder to-would-be staff officers-the price of failure.) that it was expected that the Centauri, if they wanted, could have crushed the Earth Alliance, the Dilgars, and the Narns all by themselves. Those studies were about a Centauri Republic in DECLINE. The current fan-head regime was in an expansionist mood. As Caldwell reviewed his options and parallel tracked this train of thoughts with the Vree's Centauri tactics refresher, Caldwell was acutely aware why Excolsus argued caution....
....none of this solved the problem of that berthed PRIMUS. He had to find out why the Centauri had staked it out as bait for him.
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The Narn Perspective
Na'Talith was alone in the Officer's Wardroom.
She enjoyed her quiet time. She was sipping an atrocious Human drink called coffee. It gave her a mild buzz-like imbibing alcohol did among Humans. As far as she knew it was perfectly harmless. Its chief drawback was that it tasted terrible-like hot jalla.
She poured over her old notebook computer. She dug it out of her personal gear. Her pouch mates had given it to her when her sponsor secured her place in the Narn Military. She remembered him fondly. He found her the best Mentor that money and influence could buy. She received instruction and favor from him far beyond her contemporaries. Powerful patronage was an advantage that Na'Talith of which took maximum advantage.
So as her Mentor taught her, Na'Talith used her quiet time to prepare for the coming challenge.
The challenge was that PRIMUS.
Na'Talith listed the things she knew about a PRIMUS on a sheet of paper next to her computer notebook as her old Narn Mentor had taught her.
1-acceleration; about fifty gravities.
2-turn and roll; about thirty degrees per second when at maximum acceleration.
3-primary weaponry; four combat lasers as the main spinal weapon, able to hit maneuvering targets up to a fifth of a light second distant, supposedly able to pierce three hundred meters of nickel/iron in a sustained five second burn through.
4-secondary weaponry; sixteen particle bolter twin arrays, able to hit moving targets out to maybe a twentieth of a light second, each particle bolt was supposed to be able to sublimate thirty cubic meters of nickel iron on impact. the rate of particle bolter fire was two bolts per second per mount.
5-tertiary weapon; "ion rocket torpedo", an efficient microwave fusion rocket that homed in on a target using the cheapest of Centauri sensors, rockets and a simple fusion fuel bomb warhead. It was an impact weapon designed to kill by pulse and thermal contact with the target. A typical Centauri "ion torpedo" used an open architecture cold plasma electro-magnetic shell to both provide the confinement mirror for the fusion rocket and to provide the defensive "screen" for the missile against enemy particle weapons that tried to splash it. The missile had a maximum one hundred gravity acceleration The fusion explosion came from the impact of the rocket as it hit its target. The failure of the rocket motor brought about the detonation of the plasma fuel. It was elegant Centauri technology-the drawback was the weapon's short range. The longer the burn, the less fuel there was in the missile to explode at the end of the "ion torpedoe's" run. Narn Energy mines were twenty times as powerful but the Centauri weapon was far more advanced and was a homing missile as opposed to an area denial weapon.
Na'Talith wrote down that the PRIMUS carried twelve Sentris for close in defense against small craft. She didn't think the Sentris were all that much of an asset. The Centauri seemed to include the Sentris as an anti-fighter/anti-missile defense anachronism, a tradition they developed in their wars against the Orieni.
As Na'Talith viewed her notes she ignored the occasional fellow officer who came into the Wardroom for an off-watch snack. She was too busy visualizing the PRIMUS as an adversary.
She realized now, that she first seriously analyzed the Centauri capital ship in quiet solitude just how difficult a PRIMUS, as an opponent was.
The Captain of the T'Nakata, the G'QUAN cruiser aboard which she first served, had been leery of those boastful Narn, who claimed the Centauri would be easy to defeat. She understood the picture of the Centauri he, old T'Polanan, had tried to beat into his officers with word and fist, better now.
The picture of the PRIMUS she had was of a fast, come straight at you vectored attack ship that charged you with beams for long range strafing runs until it had crippled you. Then it would close and kill with its ferocious rapid firing particle bolters shredding your hull with impact detonations until you fire blossomed. It was the hallmark of a surprise attack ship that could open a long range ambush jump-point, spear you you with its beams and then close the distance in Real-space to murder you personally. It belied the myth of the Centauri as cowardly attackers. They were more appropiatley single ship duelists than Na'Talith supposed. There was more of a "scream and leap" Narnishness to the Centauri than most Narns realized, Na'Talith wrote in her notes. The PRIMUS reflected that Centauri predeliction to Na'Talith....
.... Na'Talith groaned and rotated her sore neck muscles, her work-up for the PRIMUS had taken hours. She still had to do one for the PATRIOT. She couldn't present her recommendations to Caldwell until she had accounted for everything in the battle equations and that included in this case the PATRIOT side of the battle ledger .
She made another list;
The Humans packed anywhere from two to eight times as many fighters aboard their capital ships as their alien counterparts. The Fury flight group was truly half the firepower of the NATHAN HALE. She was supposed to carry seventy-two small craft in her Hanger Bays. Not quite forty were available. Still the HALE had twice the PRIMUS fighter load and there were fighters growing in her incubators Na;'Talith scribbled in her notes.
It was a legacy of the Dilgar War this Human fixation on fighters. Human capital ships, with their underpowered beam weapons, needed as many missile launching platforms as they could get close to the Dilgar to volley swarm rthe Dilgars' weak point defenses. Human fighter pilots became famous for their skill in pressing home attacks with suicidal ferocity. They outmaneuvered the Dilgar who flew better fighters, and during the Minbari war proved to be as adept as the Minbari in a fur-ball. It was the Starfury's technical inferioity to the Nial that accounted for the lopsided Minbari kill ratios over the Humans. Skill between Human and Minbari was, as Na'Talith knew from Narn observer reports, equal. Na'Talith added this to her data tables. The PRIMUS if the NATHAN HALE's Furies survived the Sentris, particle bolter twin array fire and "ion torpedoes" would be wrecked at the hands of Human fighter pilots before the HALE closed to engage with her own ship weapons. This was Na'Talith's hope as she plowed through her notes. It reflected what she understood of Human tactics.
In the end though it came down to the Ship. It had to reach the PRIMUS to launch its fighters. The PATRIOT could accelerate up to one thousand meters per second/second squared though the crew could only function at a tenth of that velocity. It could turn and roll at one hundred twenty degrees per second on its vector. Changing vectors was the big problem....
To catch the Centauri PRIMUS in a fighter sandwich the Hale would have to hit the Centauri in the fins at range. The HALE couldn't win a maneuver battle so deep in Kathra's gravity gradient where the Centauri had such a dense graviton soup for their engines to draw upon....
So Na'Talith concluded after four hours of analysis, alone in the Officer's Wardroom, buried in the belly of the Beast.
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End of Chapter 3; Part 1
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Into the Chasm of Night: Chapter 3; Part 2
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History Repeats Itself
In the crew mess the NATHAN HALE's complement watched on a portable Analog, THE BATTLE OF APOLLON. A Hyperspace courier had rushed the record from Earth to the NATHAN HALE. The Captain had seen it and he thought it was important for the crew of the HALE to see it as well.
Dulanax and his Drazi gun crews watched in curiosity. What was so vital, Dulanax wondered, that the Humans had sent a courier ship, instead of broadcasting it encrypted? It must be something extremely sensitive that the Humans didn't want to become general knowledge.
A strange version of the NATHAN HALE-a sister ship called the STAUFFENBERG by her imprimatur on the gun-camera footage opening credits seemed to be the core command ship and the point of view for this record. She was in the heart of a fleet of OMEGAs, WARLOCKs, PATRIOTs, OLYMPI, HYPERIONs, HEROs, G'QUANs, T"LOTHIs, And even a pair of Vree XILLs. In the kaleidoscope of the closing action could be seen the hodgepodge of Drakh, Zenner and the Streib. They died in the dozens as fire-blossoms and bursting ships' hulls.
Dulanax watched carefully the performance of the Alliance fleet. The OLYMPI seemed to be adequate missile barges, staying outside the main beam weapon merge ranges, firing swarms of missiles at targets of opportunity, As such obsolete ships should. The HYPERIONs were still too slow, too weak, and too clumsy at the pivot to fulfill the escort role for which they had been designed. The OMEGAs, despite the clunky centrifuge bodies with which the foolish Clarkists regime engineers had saddled them, and their generally primitive appearance, surprised Dulanax by having some excellent medium range dual purpose pulse/particle beam cannons.
The fighters that flashed through the gun camera images seemed to be of the Thunderbolt model almost exclusively.
There were many of the patented Starfury strafing runs against the more agile alien enemy ships. The Fury pilots tended to hit engines and power-plants Dulanax noticed. The OMEGAs would close the range slowly and majestically then rake their victim with either bow or stern particle beam fire until the enemy of choice exploded.
WARLOCKS tended to sit outside the mass of fighting star-ships in sedate combat box formations. There was nothing close to them by which to gauge speed but instinctively Dulanax suspected that they were maneuvering on tangential vectors to the imaginary battle-sphere of space where the Alliance fleet engaged its enemies. In pop-up windows the Analog would show a magnified view of a WARLOCK pivoting on its vector pointing its two incredibly powerful particle beam cannons and firing its spinal guns into the heart of the battle space. Another pop-up window would show the crimson beams splash through a Drakh command ship or a Zenner cruiser. The WARLOCKs seemed to pick their shots carefully. What they aimed at they hit. The beams always pierced through. There were no rakes, no slicings- just a piercing through of the enemy ship followed by the flash of an explosion. Attendant to the beam strikes, the WARLOCKs kept up a steady long range missile barrage. Dulanax couldn't tell from the battle scenes if the WARLOCK missiles were effective.
The PATRIOTs with the STAUFFENBERG operated like the OMEGAS as an unified squadron. The PATRIOTs cruised on vector in box formation and used their polarizers in unison volley, firing into enemy ship formations at long range on approach vector. As the PATRIOTs reached medium range, they raked through the enemy formations with Slicers. They added their KMD fire to the strafing runs of the halo of Furies that accompanied them as their combat box passed through the disorganized phalanxes of enemy ships.
Drakh gunships were mercilessly pursued by Thunderbolts. Slicers and particle beams raked targets again and again. The green Drakh, purple Steib and yellow Zenner fire that seemed to be everywhere at the beginning of the battle gave way to the steady white and red of Human weapons, and the light blue and dark blue of Narn and Vree weapons. Too many times Dulanax saw the green of a Drakh gunship seem to splash harmlessly against the flank of a Human Warship as it seemed that an opposing beam or bolter of some kind scattered the Drakh beam. On those few occasions when Dulanax saw a Drakh beam hit Hunan ship armor, the beam rarely burned through, indicating to Dulanax the spreading effect of Energy Web at work.
Dulanax was shocked to see a HYPERION staggering under the fire of two Drakh cruisers, four gunships and a Streib INTERDICTOR. It plowed through the barrage and rammed the Streib, smashed through and continued firing at its tormentors, even though it was on fire venting burning atmosphere into vacuum. The pack of Drakh that turned to pursue the HYPERION ran into a three OMEGA triumvirate that raked the Drakh with particle cannon fire. A few dozen Thunderbolts, trailing the three OMEGAS, strafed through the wreckage the OMEGAS left, sparing no Drakh who had hoped to escape in life pods amidst the exploding debris. It was a vignette of Human ruthlessness, thorough and merciless. The Drazi gun-crews with Dulanax gasped in awe at the ballet of death played out before them.
Dulanax was concentrating on the PATRIOTs. They moved in linear vector fashion. That was the nature of the beast. Dulanax admired the spirit of the beings within them. He studied how the creatures within them used their ships during this phase of the fighting when the enemy was broken and scattered. This was no simulation or exercise. Those were real Shadow Thralls shooting at the Humans. Why the Humans were fighting the Creatures of Darkness at Apollon, Dulanax didn't know or care. His professional curiosity was limited to the technical details. He noticed that the Drakh slightly out-ranged the PATRIOTS. The Drakh bosers seemed to have about a third light second range, but in accuracy out-reached the Human weapons by a few tens of thousands of kilometers as Dulanax judged accuracy. Poor Human fire control again meant that weapons that should have outmatched those evil Middleborns in battle were instead inferior.
Dulanax noted that the Drakh point defense was poor even by Drazi standards. Humans at close range seized advantage of this as Dulanax watched the battle in its pursuit phase. There were surprising numbers of missile volleys that struck home past the Drakh countermeasures. Ranges were murderous as the Humans seemed intent on ensuring that not one of the Servants of Darkness escaped. The Humans were killing Drakh at the tens of kilometers ranges. The Humans at this point weren't trying anything fancy. No rolls yaws, pitches, or turns. The PATRIOTs just bored straight in and raked through the unfortunate pursued target that was the object of their current attention.
Dulanax dug through his memory. The Human tactics reminded him of something. The Humans were slashing and hacking with their beam weapons. This was in contrast to their enemies who danced around their adversaries and used their beams to stab at targets. Dulanax had it! The Humans were fighting like Minbari jumping in and loosing a volley of long range fire then moving in mutually supporting battle-groups to carve up the remnants of their enemies. It was odd to see the Humans adopt the Minbari style. The Humans didn't have the fire control or the stealth systems that should have made such an approach possible....
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Inheritor of the Dream
Caldwell watched the report for the second time along with his crew in the Mess. He wasn't surprised at the outcomes. The Drakh made poor choices in technology and they were lousy ship-handlers. He winced in false sympathy as he saw a pair of Zenner STARFISH command ships bracketed in a drone sandwich followed by a strafing pass of a cloud of a score of Furies. The PATRIOT that was the mother ship in the pop-up window that showed this small segment of the battle on the Analog was named the THOMAS PAINE. She rolled and pitched on vector and pointed her polarizer at one of the STARFISH and speared it right through the center, leaving only the tips of its arms to tumble away from the fire-blossom. The other Zenner lost four of its nine arms to Slicer fire from the THOMAS PAINE. Drones fired from the PATRIOT swept out frame locking onto something else as that STARFISH tumbled and exploded. The Furies followed the Human missiles out of frame, then The THOMAS PAINE followed the Furies....
....Caldwell watched other pop-up windows show other magnified engagements of interest in the appalling light show. Pieced together the mosaic of pop-ups made a semi-coherent picture of the battle to Caldwell. He was trained to follow this crap, but constantly changing his perspective was still dis-orienting. He suspected that the Human who commanded the Alliance fleet in this battle was a Minbari War veteran. He saw the Minbari style in too much of the battle. Caldwell was no fan of the Minbari way. It smacked too much of the herd mentality and the idiotic "bayonet charge". Still the OMEGA groups were showing more coherence in their vectored attacks than the imbecile Drakh. The OMEGAs stayed together and tried to fly and fight in formations making blow-through attacks on disorganized mobs of Drakh ships. Caldwell thought the battle was sloppy.
WARLOCKs worked the perimeter of the battle-space with malevolent Human intelligence. Now that Caldwell was seeing them for the second time he could better judge their performance. Caldwell whistled under his breath at the astute pilotage and gunnery displayed by the WARLOCK crews. Their spinal particle beam cannons, derived from the idiotic Clarkists' G.O.D. satellites, seemed to be slower firing but much longer-ranged than a PATRIOT's polarizer. The WARLOCKs were, as Caldwell knew, little more than a pair of the particle beam cannons and a rocket; with ancillary systems thrown into the armored housing holding it all together to make it interesting. For Humanity's first attempt to build Its version of a SHARLIN; it wasn't too bad. By the SHARLIN's standards, though, the WARLOCK was a flop. The WARLOCK seemed to take forever to get a shot off. The particle beams pierced everything readily enough through the unfortunate targets that were hit, but it was obvious that it took the WARLOCK longer to line the target up than to charge its guns. The SHARLIN just jumped in and shot everything to pieces. It took a lot of hard work to get anything out of the WARLOCK by comparison. The PATRIOTs, it appeared, with their polarizers were quicker killers.
Caldwell saw another pop-up of the THOMAS PAINE. It was chasing a Drakh mother ship From the point of view perspective of the main ship gun camera, it was a view of the STAUFFENBERG's proboscis. A pure white beam of light lanced from the prongs of the STAUFFENBERG for the first time in the battle(the second time that Caldwell had seen this shot). The beam flashed past the PAINE, narrowly missing that Human ship. Caldwell saw in the PAINE pop-up the PATRIOT's armor react to the near miss with lightning patterns across its obsidian surface. The beam splashed the Drakh mother ship. The Drakh burst as if it had been a balloon popped by a pin, The beam traveled through the expanding debris field.
Excolsus drifted over to join Caldwell. He was rapidly becoming Caldwell's favorite officer. He signed and pointed at the Analog, "that was a hypermass gamma ray discharge." he signed.
Caldwell twisted in mid-between the deck and overhead to face the Vree. He signed, "A what?"
"That white beam of light." signed Excolsus. "Its a gamma ray spike burst from a temporary hypermass formed by and forced to discharge through a magnetic monopole field." waved Excolsus.
That was the correct physical principle behind the polarizer. Caldwell wasn't going to confirm Excolsus hypothesis.
Excolsus signed further to Caldwell, "I didn't pay much attention to it during the gunnery trials, but you, Humans, tried for a Vorlon Lightning gun!"
Caldwell signed in negation, "Not quite. We could never develop a beam so powerful with our current level of technology. We tried actually to create a version of the Minbari SHARLIN bow cannon. Our engineers couldn't duplicate the Minbari gravitational focusing systems or a gravity streamer for the anti-matter particle beam our scientists theorized it used, so we settled for flipping the spin orientation of quarks. We did that, by creating an electro-magnetically confined hypermass inside a magnetic monopole lensing system. The gamma burst we collimated by magnetic field polarization, hence the term "polarizer"....."
Excolsus signed his surrender, "I am not Dulanax. I don't need to know the what of the thing. But how powerful is it?"
Caldwell shrugged before he signed in answer to the Vree's question, "It is about three quarters the power and three quarters the range of A SHARLIN's bow cannon. It is our best weapon next to the particle cannons on the WARLOCKs. The main advantage of it, is that we don't have the heat dissipation problem with it that our other beam weapons have, and we can fire it more continuously than a WARLOCK or G.O.D. satellite particle beam weapon."
Excolsus pointed out a flaw in Caldwell's monologue, "That beam came from the STAUFFENBERG which was twice as far from the Drakh carrier as the THOMAS PAINE and you know the PAINE was just coming into its main gun range."
That puzzled Caldwell. He hadn't noticed the shot all that much in the hundreds he saw in the recording. He opened his own amiga and plugging into the Analog he extracted those files that contained the STAUFFENBERG's proboscis shot. He also pulled ancillary appendix files that were embedded in the main recording of the sequence. These were parallel zipped files that were oblique point-of-view gun-camera footage. During battle, Human ships launched swarms of cheap ballistic sensor buoys that provided off-ship parallax baseline interferometry for aiming direct fire beam weapons at long range. These buoys would maintain a camera and signal lock on their launching ship to maintain a position fix. These were the files Caldwell was unzipping. he started playing the unzipped files to look at the STAUFFENBERG from the viewpoint of her sensor buoys as she fought.
His first look at the STAUFFENBERG left Caldwell cold. She was a PATRIOT in shape,but the blue-white mottled armored hull, was totally unlike the obsidian smokey hull of a normal PATRIOT. It seemed to ripple and change patterns. A Streib beam licked it. The Energy Web of the STAUFFENBERG, as it reacted to the strike, seemed normal enough as it diverged and spread the anti-proton stream of the Streib beam weapon. A cursory look at the STAUFFENBERG's KMD's and drone launch cells in operation against the Streib INTERDICTOR cruiser showed those weapons were normal enough as the STAUFFENBERG tore the Streib apart.
It was strange to see that mottled blue white hull on the STAUFFENBERG. Caldwell next played the STAUFFENBERG's bow beam shot using the interferometer buoy viewpoints. He used the pop-up window feature of his amiga to isolate the shot effects on the Drakh mothership and to call up the recorded range data. Excolsus was correct. The STAUFFENBERG hit the Drakh at twice the expected accurate range. The beam seemed to be the same as a PATRIOT's but the fire control was better. Was it possible that the STAUFFENBERG was the beneficiary of VORLON technology?
Caldwell didn't know how that would go over in the Alliance.
The fact that the Shadows, while Clark misruled the Earth Alliance, had supplied Humans with regenerative armor technology and molecular slicers was supposed to be top secret. No sane Human wanted the Minbari to find out about that. That would guarantee a second Human Minbari War-a Human extinction event for sure. There were even more profound reasons to avoid the possibility of Vorlon tech in Human ships from being discovered. The LONAW had seen several of their member worlds destroyed by Vorlon planet killers. It would be bad, indeed, for Humans, if both secrets got out. Vorlon tech in Human ships was supposed to be impossible. Yet, if what Caldwell saw was correct, here was a PATRIOT with Vorlon-like bio-armor and fire control systems.
Things certainly were getting stranger and stranger on the other side of Alliance space.
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Soldiers of Darkness
Lord Jathren, noble scion of the Centauri, was looking at gun camera footage of his own. His Ducal Audience Chamber was nowhere as grandiose as the one maintained by his House at the Imperial Court; but if he lacked the luxury, he still had access to the best in Centauri video technology. The viewpoint of the record was mainly Drakh, and it was mostly depressing.. One of the Shadow Thralls was in the forefront of the holo-projector. The Drakh was feeding the cynical Jathren lies and excuses. Jathren knew from his own practices, how courtiers flattered. This poor Drakh simpleton was an amateur. He let the creature prattle on while he looked at the propaganda and tried to sift truth from lies.
Drakh editing, showed them standing bravely against an enemy who outnumbered them. Supposedly by this record they were valiant in defense. Jathren had never served in the Centauri Military. He was too important for such trivia. He looked askance at his retainer "expert" who was watching this "presentation". He would talk to him after he dismissed this Drakh. Amidst the backdrop of exploding Drakh, Zenner, and Streib ships; the flattering and the lies traded back and forth. Jathren eventually wore the Drakh out and it requested permission to leave his presence. He dismissed it with a wave of his hand.
Jathren called his expert to him.
"Well?" he asked.
"No surprise." said Count Morado, "The Thralls lack the skill of their departed masters. You can see it from the way they fight. Their gun-ships are designed for swarm attack. They should hold their gun-ships close to their cruisers. Use their cruisers to open firing jump-points out of which they can exit together with their gun-ships and fire at point blank range at single Human ships. Instead they fight the way the Humans want them to fight when they engage with beam-fire at long range. Their beams lack the piercing power to breach the Human defenses at those ranges. The Humans simply cripple them with fighters and their own long range beam-fire, then close to short range and kill the immobilized cripples with missile and matter streamer fire. The Drakh and their allies cannot survive long against that kind of close range Human firepower. Since they are going to die anyway, they might as well make it a Murado and fight knife-to-knife and swarm the Humans. Despite that worm's lies I saw they outnumbered the Humans by at least three to one in ships in this "heroic Drakh defense". Why let the Humans stand away and whittle them down with particle cannons designed to bombard planets? The Human WARLOCK has the SLOWEST CYCLING heavy particle beam I have ever seen."
"What about the Human fighters?" asked Jathen.
"Bah, its the Human base ships we must kill if we fight them." said Morado. "That we can and must do. We have no choice. The VORCHAN is our chosen instrument. It carries enough particle bolters to overwhelm the largest Human ship's defenses if we jump in close enough in sufficient numbers. The Humans lack Minbari stealth and are vulnerable to our close-ranged attacks in spite of their interceptor technology. Look, Milord, in my opinion, from this Drakh presentation it is obvious that the Humans are technically on a par with the best of the Non-aligned Worlds. They like to fight at long range, as their weapons are slow-cycling though powerful by any standard to which I can compare them. We should respect the Humans. But I am not afraid of them." Morado concluded.
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More Briefings
In the HALE's Hanger:............Where things Human Made talk to each other......
Malcolm Caldwell sat/floated cross-legged mid compartment through the latest Officer's Call yawning. The NATHAN HALE would be on the move to another stable gravitational cleft in Hyperspace when this farce was over. He glanced briefly at the gravitational tidal chart that he had plotted the course upon two hours before. The HALE was scheduled to crawl at ten meters per second/second squared from one end of the Kathra hyperspace ridge to the other end. It would take just under twenty minutes. Mostly these moves were designed to dodge Centauri Hyperspace probes. Human stealth technology, to the Centauri, was a joke. Still you could hide from Centauri sensors. Distance and random movement was a good hiding tactic....
Dulanax was lecturing the officer cadre on Centauri weapons again. Ho hum.
"Don't underestimate the Centauri," he said in Narnish.' "They are Conservative in strategy but audacious in their tactics. This shows in their weapons."
" I shall start with their "ion rocket torpedo" missile weapons." said Dulanax.
"This is a physical rocket built around an advanced ion engine." prattled on the Drazi Master Gunner. "Its shell is an electro-magnetically confined plasma which acts as the rocket motor confinement mirror casing for the rocket body. Onboard sensors are Centauri miniaturized passive versions of radar and lidar receivers which use the launching ship's coded active target painting to home in onto the target. The "ion torpedoes" are cheap as the Centauri expect these missiles to be splashed. By Centauri standards the rockets are "primitive". The plasma sheath has the twin advantages of acting like a crude E-Web and as a lightweight armor against enemy particle bolters and beams." Dulanasx added, "The Centauri find these missiles to be effective against "barbarians"-like US." He shuffled around some hand written notes he had magnetically paper-weighted to the lecturn he floated behind.
They use three primary weapons in the direct-fire role. Their "combat lasers" are neutralized charged collimated cesium ion particle beams. These beams are comparable in range to the Hyach laser with twice its peak power. The weapon is a piercing one using a sublimating mechanism. It's standard effective range is about a quarter light second as the Centauri use it. The Centauri combat lasers of a PRIMUS can pierce a G'Quan's armor in about three to five seconds sustained hull strike. Some of the Narns(not Na'Talith) gasped in shock. Dulanax ignored them. "I don't know how the PRIMUS' beams would fare against an OMEGA, but the weapon is impressive."
"The second Centauri direct fire weapon is what they call their ion twin array bolters. It is a particle bolter of standard design, though they use gravitational systems where we of lesser technology use electro-magnetics.It allows them to use a gravidic "waveguide" to shape each bolt. That is how the Centauri manage to add an explosive concussive feature to the bolter before impact. When the travelling waveguide splashes on the target just ahead of the bolt it explode. Funny, how you Humans use the same principle, electro-magnetically though, to cause divergence of intercepted particle beams and bolters with your own particle Interceptors." Here, Dulanax cackled in irritating Drazi laughter. Caldwell was busy trying to tune Dulanax out. Dulanax noticed this and raised the volume of his voice, " The "twin ion array" fires with a maximum rate of five bolts per barrel per second though the Centauri scale the rate of fire back to perhaps half the rate. Maybe a heat problem with the bolters in sustained fire?" Dulanax mused. "But in all events, it is a hit/miss weapon. Not relevant, when they get close to you. I have seen the Centauri particle bolters pierce Brakiri AVIOKI cruisers fore to aft. The Centauri VORCHAN relies heavily upon this weapon for its ambush attacks-what the Centauri call "the Murado fight"."
Some Humans snickered.
Dulanax glared at the fools. "VORCHANs attack in packs and jump in on top of you...The Centauri expect their VORCHANS to be slaughtered, but enough of the pack will survive to kill their target. At a hundred kilometers range having a VORCHAN pump forty or more particle bolters per second into you is not funny-especially when it is one of six."
That didn't stop the snickering.
"This brings us to the Centauri matter cannon" Dulanax continued. "I suppose the nearest Human equivalent is the KMD? But whereas, I don't know how you Humans; so suddenly managed to tap your reactionless thruster technology to build a matter streamer that can shoot iron sand from rest mass to over ninety percent the speed of light down such a stubby accelerator barrel, I do know how the Centauri use gravidics to fire a stream of Hafnium isomorphic isotope bullets at their enemies at a fifty percent of light speed! I can compare it for you, by analogy ,to what an unprotected person experiences when he is hit by a stream of explosive shells from an automatic cannon. You still use such weapons in your army do you not? Dulanax asked.
Several Humans and Narns nodded yes.
"Scale that up to Centauri star-ship speeds and magnitudes. Imagine you are receiving that kind of fire faster than you string words together, and imagine each Hafnium shell that hits you at half the speed of light exploding against you on impact with one to three hundred tera-joules of energy..... at a rate of fire equal to that of an ion bolter at fifty times an ion bolters range. It is not so much a piercing weapon like the ion bolter, as it is a a long-ranged kinetic shock weapon that the Centauri use to blow apart armor.....and ships....."
The laughter died. Nobody had much mirth left as Dulanax finished. "I warn you. The Centauri match their aggressive tactics to their weapons and their racial demeanor. The fan-heads like to fight close, bloody, and violent. It works for them." He added as a parting thought as the Officer's Call ended. "Remember the Centauri outnumber us of the Alliance by a considerable margin."
With that last cheerful thought the meeting broke up.
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Do Not Try the Patience of Wizards
Soren hated some of the duties of the Chief Engineer position. For some strange reason, on Human ships, he, as a warrior, was required to check on the working conditions of his men. It made no sense. Worker Castes should do their menial tasks and not bother him with their problems.
Adrienne Brown, who accompanied him, during the engineer spaces inspections, rebuked him, "A good officer takes care of her men." she said, "'sotto vocce', Sir!" She put down on the deck, removed the lid, and stepped into the bucket she had towed behind her on a line as she swam alongside Soren through the passageways. Soren, stopped in amazement, to see what he thought had been a pail full of heavy lubricant, begin to flow up and around his Second Engineer until it enveloped her in a shimmering oily black Adrienne Brown shaped covering. Two red glowing spots where her eyes should have been stared at him. Their shape said, ""I'm ready to check the interior spaces of this section if you would be so kind as to remove the armor panel, Sir!"
Soren, turned to, removing the overhead access. He had gambled with Adrienne, to see who would dive into the nanite guts and check the power-grid here. As usual he won. As she helped him secure the armor panel so it wouldn't bang around, Soren asked her in irritation, "Who taught you this rubbish about taking care of your servants? They should take care of themselves!"
Adrienne stopped in mid-plunge into the translucent smokey jelly of the NATHAN HALE's guts and retorted as she somersaulted in mid-passageway just below the overhead access, "My Sister!" She was centimeters from Soren's face, her "red demon eyes" staring into Sorens.
"Was she Warrior Caste?" Soren asked taken aback.
"No, she was a plumber," The black skinned small demon told him. "until the Earth Force called her."
"Where is she now?" asked Soren.
"Dead." replied the Second Engineer.
"I supposed she died fighting," said Soren, trying in his Minbari way, to honor the memory of a fellow Warrior, who had crossed Caste when duty called and perished in the service of others."
"No, she died at her post, as part of a damage control party, repairing the NOVA she served aboard during the BATTLE OF MITHRAS II." she said, "She abhorred violence, but when drafted she went. Earth Force put her in a place where she wouldn't have to kill, but where she could serve. Your people killed her."
Soren looked at the little demon and listened quietly.
"When I was able, I joined Earth Force and trained to kill your people ,but unfortunately you, Minbari, quit before I got the chance to use that training. Now I am here talking to you, taking your orders, and trying to remember that YOU are an Alliance officer and not someone to tear apart with my hands...."
Soren blinked in amazement at this insubordination.
"....just because you are a member of a xenocidal maniacal species with a bone growing out of your head." The little red-glowing-eyed demon bowed politely in the Minbari fashion showing the proper military obeisance and respect.
"I am not insane." said Soren simply.
"Sir, you are a Minbari, a member of a species incapable of self-control:therefore insane."
She abruptly dove into the open overhead and swam out of sight into the smokey glare of the power-grid to check what had injured the rating who had reported the engineering casualty that had burned him.
'It was something that a chief would have corrected on the spot', Adrienne thought as she moved along the conduit. 'The fleet was so shorthanded of non-commissioned officers due to the war that it would take a generation to replace the institutional memory that the service had lost in its chiefs and sergeants. Damn the Minbari.' She found the mis-seated module and kicked it firmly into place and scanned the local jelly to see if the radiation pulse had metastisized any of the local nanites into a malignant form. It had. She scan mapped it into her amiga. A clean-up crew would do the follow-up. She would have to lead that crew in the "surgery" to cut out the malignancy. There was no competent chief to assign the task.
She finished and swam out of the access, her head down to the deck of the passageway. Back-lit by the smokey pearl light from the open access, she wondered how she looked to Soren, as she somersaulted to the deck. Her black Technomage skin-suit contacted the deck and her feet stuck solidly. It was something else she was learning about her Naurica "gifts" that she had received. She had too many opportunities to practice the ART given to her by Caldwell when he had made her Second Engineer. By conscious thought, like now, she could stick to any surface hand and foot to which she wished to anchor herself. One day she would THANK her Captain for the opportunities to learn such useful skills and for the PAIN that went with the opportunities
Soren looked at the black oily skinned demon as she worked her amiga and scrolled through a long holographic list of the malignant regions she had mapped because of that fool Worker Caste who had caused the gamma ray burst that burned him and left Soren another man short...
"I sure wish we could have talked to the Engineers of the PATRIOTs that fought at Apollon." the demon muttered.
Soren asked, "Why?"
Adrienne leveled her glowing red eyes, as she saw herself reflected in the armor , "Because they learned through actual battle damage and engineering casualty histories, how to handle nanite mutations and cancers," she said simply. "We would be conducting repairs based on their operational experiences; instead of our guesses."
Soren met her statement with silence.
"Another reason, you, incompetent Minbari, lost the war," she said quietly, "is ignorance of operational research. Great Maker, savages like your people-with rayguns and spaceships. It was Humanity's misfortune to meet you, before we were ready." She patted the armor of the NATHAN HALE affectionately. "A couple of centuries and if you had attacked us like you did, you would have been stopped in mid-rampage and we could have talked sense to you."
Soren snorted at this.
Adrienne walked over to her bucket, stepped into it, and waited patiently until her skin-suit flowed back into the bucket. It lapped longingly around her feet as she stepped out. It was as embarassingly affectionate as a pet dog. She looked at it with some distress as she put the lid back.
She looked at Soren as she straightened up, "By rights, Sir, if Humanity had had any luck You would be in a zoo. My sister, would be alive, visiting family in Budapest, throwing peanuts at you."
Soren didn't know what a zoo was.
Whatever she was saying in Wind-swords dialectal Warrior Caste, it wasn't translating well. Soren shrugged Minbari fashion. Human cultural concepts like Human engineering terms; translated poorly into Minbari. Soren was wise enough not to press Adrienne too closely for explanations. He had seen Adrienne Brown break up a fight among five Narns. He, as an experienced Minbari Warrior, wasn't sure that HE could win a fight amongst five Narns. Caution was one thing Soren had learned from the Humans.
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End of Chapter 3: Part 2
A little CHAOS is a GOOD thing.
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Post by Avatar on Sept 1, 2019 3:55:40 GMT
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Into the Chasm of Night: Chapter 4; Part 1
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The Coming Storm
The fighter pilots walked out of their simulator pods in disgust. Captain Caldwell was waiting on them as they returned to the ready room.
Paula Chow walked/floated up to him and asked point-blank, "Why are we piloting breeching pods?" She pointed at the angry upset Narn pilots of her flight group. The Narns complained loudly (in Narnish) that they were fighter pilots, not barge jockeys....
Caldwell laughed in Chow's face and said in German, which the Narns couldn't understand, "They are barge jockeys."
Chow looked at Caldwell in sudden realization, "the breeching pod drills!"
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Happy Birthday
The NATHAN HALE exited from its wormhole less than fifty kilometers from the Kathra Fuel Station. Dulanax's gun-crews, who had rehearsed the fire-plan a hundred times, fired. Dulanax watched from Fire Control on its Analog the gun cameras show him the Slicers at work. Fins and wings separated from the main body of the PRIMUS. Dulanax smiled as he saw the telescopics pop-up on the Analog showing the four breeching pods full of Gaim which had jumped in with the NATHAN HALE rush forward and latch onto the main hull of the carved up PRIMUS....
....Caldwell in C&C watched the same show on the Fire Control Analog repeater. Confound it, the range was too short for the Teledyne. On the Teledyne, itself, he saw the Centauri ambush party head for the Hyperspace decoy where the NATHAN HALE had been. The Human DEEPSTAR Navigation Network had about a dozen expensive new nodes planted in the Kathra Hyperspace gravitational ridge. Ordinarily there would have only been one of the scarce expensive beacons. NGS Naval Intelligence had come through, however. That gave Malcolm two cards to play in the otherwise stacked Centauri deck. He could jump danger-close to the moon's center of mass, and he could track through the DEEPSTAR network the local gravitational traffic. Caldwell smiled at the Centauri stupidity. He watched the progress simultaneously of the Centauri transport that had used the Kathra gate to enter Hyperspace and it cleverly using the local gravitational tides to mask its approach to home in on the NATHAN HALE look-alike that it sought. The fan-head Kamikaze crew came closer and closer. FLASH. Caldwell didn't care if the holographically disguised asteroid bomb got them or their own explosive killed them. The PRIMUS would have used that explosion signal to disgorge troops to take the Fuel Depot intact. Except Dulanax had just carved the PRIMUS up like a turkey in a display of gunnery as fine as any Caldwell had ever seen. Now if the breeching pods could just make it...
'....Eighty Gaim against a thousand Centauri was like throwing mud in the face of a Minbari. The Centauri were deadly soldiers. If anyone could take Gaim on, one for one, it would be the Centauri fan-head Royal Guardsmen.' Na'Talith worried these thoughts around in her mind as she bumped around in the "Vulture". It was part of the follow-on wave to the breeching pods. Humans were involved in this second wave as well as Narns. Sneak Attack was the order of the day. Na'Talith laughed to herself. Anyone who thought that HUMANS engaged in fair fights these days was a fool. Not since the Human/Minbari War....
....War is all hell and since war was the Remedy the Fan-heads had chosen, Malcolm Caldwell was going to give them the full dosage of the prescription. The Gaim, if they followed the plan, should have released the nerve gas. Caldwell wanted prisoners, but he needed the technology more....
Na'Talith followed her troopers through the wreckage. That damned Drazi had added KMD fire to the Slicers. THAT wasn't part of the plan. The idiot drilled the PRIMUS full of holes. Atmosphere was venting. Centauri auto repair systems were plugging leaks, but the hulk had ferocious winds whistling throughout its spaces. How much atmospheric reserve did the PRIMUS have? If she tore her pressure suit?
Centauri had donned their own vacuum suits. Theirs were; as expected, better armored and more advanced than the Narn model. The Centauri suits had a black-light camouflage feature. This made the fierce fighting worse.
Narns were clumsy in micro-gravity. The few Humans in Na'Talith's party were doing most of the fighting. The few Gaim, Na"Talith came across, were busy being sick and vomiting up pieces of Centauri that didn't agree with them. Na'talith worried. The trigger-happy Humans shot at anything that moved, that was non-Human. She told her Narns in Narnish battle dialect, "Stick close behind the Humans and clear of their lines of fire." The smart Narns did and survived.
A stupid fan-head charged out of black-light ambush at Na'Talith. He almost shot one of her pouch-brothers before Na'Talith slashed him with her katana. Cursed micro-gravity. The blow lacked the strength behind it that normal gravity should have lent it. The Centauri fired his weapon again, wildly. One solid blast of Thumper fire from a Human Gropo, and the Centauri was globbed all over Na'Talith and everything else in the compartment. Na'Talith hated Thumpers. The crazy Humans with their mania for overkill always brought cannons to a knife fight.
Na'Talith had thought Caldwell subtle for a Human, but this assault could have been done better. Narns knew how to do it better. Na'Talith, for example, herself, would have bribed a Centauri to put the nerve gas bombs on the PRIMUS, instead of sending the Gaim to storm aboard with it. Slicing the fan-head ship was unnecessary. Use Infiltration and subtlety. The Humans were lucky, that the Narns had joined the Alliance to teach them how to fight....
....Caldwell unbuckled himself as soon as the NATHAN HALE went rest relative to the Abbai Station. He could see the parts of the PRIMUS still jumbled together in its berth. He couldn't tell on the Analog what was going on over aboard the PRIMUS. Lucky indeed had Humanity been in the Minbari War. While Minbari gravidic technology was beyond Human comprehension for the moment,(And the Minbari weren't talking.), enough was understood to build WARLOCKs with gravidic engines. That taught Humans enough to know where to hit a gravidic ship. In this case of gravidic drives; Centauri ships were still more advanced than Human ships, but less advanced than the Minbari. That was the basis for the plan Caldwell had sugggested to Naval Intelligence when the PRIMUS had so conveniently offered itself. The PRIMUS engines and gravidic systems could be reversed engineered more easily than the Minbari wreckage in Human hands. Caldwell gambled that it was worth this risk. The Centauri could still blow that bird....
Caldwell lost himself in thought as he swam around the C&C; reassuring nervous jittery crew.
There was a problem in the Alliance. Certainly the Drazi, Narn, and the Vree joined the Humans as they saw the ineffectiveness of the League at containing Centauri ambitions. From the aliens' point of view; it was a good move. Neither the Drazi, nor the Narn had the technology to face the Peacocks
The Vree lacked the numbers. The Gaim were in the Alliance because Humans gave the Queens access to space.(Possibly a mistake?) Caldwell mused as he helped the helmsman make a slight pivot adjustment on the HALE's orbit to keep it rest relative bows on to the Abbai Station. He gave the helmsman a reassuring shoulder slap as he serruptitiously checked the Analog for the hundredth time. This close, if the station fuel tanks lit off with that PRIMUS going to glory, even the incredible NATHAN HALE's armor wouldn't save them. Caldwell thought the Gaim might be just a little too strange for Humans to comprehend. Who could fathom the motives of Hive Minds? So Malcolm free associated while he waited for the word of success.
Caldwell jerked himself back to the present. Na'Talith appeared on the Analog in miniature. She had her helmet off and her spacesuit was covered in gore, The nerve gas part of the plan hadn't worked as well as Caldwell hoped.
She reported, "Our insane Drazi, Master Gunner, Dulanax, has too much enthusiasm. He fired KMDs into this wreck. What systems that remain are shredded, holed, and riddled. I wish our engineers luck in making sense of the ruins."
"The Centauri survived the nerve gas. The main body of them retreated to the PRIMUS' power-plant. We're heading there now. The fan-heads haven't arranged too many surprises. We gave them no time. They could still blow this ship." she said laconically.
At the last Caldwell ordered, "Activate the web and back us off a couple of hundred kilometers."
The Na'Talith hologram said, "The fuel tanks, Sir. Shouldn't you put the planet between you and the Station? The blast wave will damage you even at that distance."
Caldwell said calmly, "This ship can handle SHARLIN fire. A wave front from that station if it explodes at the new standoff distance is survivable." he lied. Caldwell had to remember morale. The crew fighting over in that PRIMUS had to see the NATHAN HALE hadn't abandoned them, and hidden herself like some coward behind the planet....
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Pawing Through the Rubble
Excolsus was drifting along comfortably pushing off bits of wreckage. He had seen shot-to-pieces decompressed ships before. Antimatter streamer fire and KMD fire was surprisingly similar in effect. If he lived through this action, he'd asked Dulanax, if the Humans had gotten hold of Vree weaponry. If they had, it was probably been through the damned Narns. Unable to decipher the technology, they, the Narns would sell it to someone who could. Then, they would steal the results from their customers. Thats how the Narns had gotten hold of their Battle Lasers. After the Centauri had abandoned Narn as unprofitable, the Narn had taken Centauri Combat Lasers to the Abbai who had designed an inferior copy of their own. The Abbai had of course developed their "combat lasers" from the weapons tech supplied to them by their neighbors, the Hyach. The Narns went to the Abbai with open hands claiming they wished to trade with the fish-heads, the "surplus Centauri criminal technology", for food and medical supplies the Narns "needed". The Narns then stole the technology through espionage and claimed as their own, the Abbai work on the Centauri weapons.
At least the Narns didn't scavenge their technology off the dead, like the HUMANS. The stories of Humans pawing over the ruins of IKARRA and MARKAB were famous throughout Known Space. It was even said that the Humans of their IPX Corporation were mounting a Deathwatch over HYACH NYM, hoping to add Hyach technology to their own other grave robberies. They would present the loot to Human Kind-and add another layer of knowledge, hundreds of years more advanced than they should have discovered by now or would have achieved on their own merits if left to themselves.
A Human sergeant waved Excolsus over to a twisted lump of ceramics and metals. "Here's something." he said using Vree flash cards, unnecessarily.
"Energy node diffuser, gravidic." signed Excolsus using Amsil, the Human language for their deaf. The scrap would probably give the Humans an artificial gravity cage in a dozen years. This PRIMUS would be salvaged for such trinketry. Excolsus pushed ever onward.
Like every other Alliance soldier aboard this PRIMUS, he was aiming for the power-plant. Rigging a quantum hypermass power-plant to evaporate was notoriously difficult. The longer the delay in killing all the unaccounted and unnumbered Centauri, the greater the chance that some fop of a Peacock-brain aboard this PRIMUS' crew might it figure it out. Excolsus, being Vree of course, knew how to blow a ship like this, but the stupid Centauri, in their arrogance, didn't even provide scuttling charges! Such vainglory! Onward ever onward....
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Praising Oneself
There was nothing for Dulanax to do in Fire Control now. His job, in this operation, had taken five seconds. Shoot an immobile, powered-down hull. To be fair, Dulanax was surprised at how easily the PRIMUS succumbed. The Centauri ship had feeble armor. The Drazi was astonished at how easily KMDs ripped through the hull. He'd expected something like maybe a tougher version of the Narn G'Quan. Human targeting systems by Drazi standards were crude. If the Centauri jammers had been turned on, Dulanax expected that most of his aimed fire would have missed. That was the main reason he had added KMD fire to try and knock out what he suspected were the locations of the jammers on the PRIMUS. By over-estimating his enemy, Dulanax probably had incurred his Captain's displeasure. On a Drazi ship, that meant a walk in space with no clothes. It was still a beautiful job of gunnery, the best that he had ever done. The PRIMUS was a tumbled wreck and the Abbai Station was barely nicked here and there. Dulanax chuckled. He bet there were a lot of fish-head Abbai on the Station who had evacuated their bodily orifices when the slicers went to work. Dulanax turned to his Fire Control party and exhorted them, "Keep local tracking active. Nothing must escape from that PRIMUS. No pods. No buoys. Nothing from that ship!"
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Archaeology
Soren was amazed at the scrap the eager Narns and Humans brought him. Most of it was recognizable. Spaceship technology tended to follow a familiar format, no matter what the species of the designer. In many respects the Human equivalent was superior in quality to the Centauri components he examined-especially from the standpoint of engineering safety margins and redundamcy.
Soren was familiar now with Human engineering. For such primitives they practiced very sound engineering principles. Other aliens as they advanced through the technology tree gained overconfidence and shaved the safety margins. Economics did that. Build it cheaper. In that respect the Centauri were no different than the others.
A Human floated into the workshop with a Centauri pistol. Soren examined it, threw it ballistically into a catch net and said to the Human, "Basic weapon, fires a pulsed particle bolt of superheated helium three ions using a maser grounding beam. A Human slug spitter is as effective."
The Human smiled ,shrugged and said, "Orders are to bring you everything."
Soren waved him off and cataloged the PPG as artifact TA1195. Let some Human blow himself to shreds, taking it apart. Soren turned his attention to a Gravity wave modulator that was in the pile of junk through which he sorted. A Minbari child could design one better than it was....
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From the Throne of Chicanery
Adrienne Brown grimaced in pain. She was the leader among the cleanup crews arranging order out of Dulanax' chaos aboard the PRIMUS. The mostly Brakiri engineers took the wreckage of the power-plant and tried to fit enough of it back together to make something work. They were not having much success. Adrienne would change that shortly, but not just yet. First she had to incant.
Caldwell demanded his briefings, this way; so that, there was no record. Soren, for his obvious reasons, refused to brief the Captain. It was beneath the Minbari to address his Captain. Besides Caldwell didn't trust the Minbari. (What Human would?). Adrienne waited until Caldwell was properly self-tranced (It had taken her weeks to teach him how to mesmerize himself-so strong was he resistant to hypnosis.)
She, then reported, "The boarding party secured the PRIMUS seven hours ago. Of our two hundred committed, forty-seven are KIA, no wounded. It breaks down as seventeen Gaim, ten Humans, and twenty Narns. Half of the dead Narns, strayed into friendly fire. As planned, those Centauri not killed by the gas bombs, or in the breeching operations, fled to the ship's power-plant. They were trying to detonate it when we irradiated them. The reactors powering the hypermass confinement mirrors spiked and shorted out the remains of their grid. Most of the idiots were killed in the resultant lightning storm. I guess the Centauri have never heard of "grounding".
Caldwell who appeared as a commanding presence in Adrienne's "mind's eye" said in laughter, "You should watch an old historical drama called STAR TREK."
Adrienne didn't understand her Captain's reference. She blinked, lost concentration for a moment then sent images of the wreckage of the PRIMUS engineering compartment as she saw it through her own eyes. She blinked. There was too much dust floating in the air. Some of it had to be bits of charred Centauri. She was allergic to dander. "Sir." she continued, "the PRIMUS is yielding up some surprises. Dulanax talked to me and he thinks he Centauri use an active gravidic energy screen to diverge incoming particle beam fire. It sounds like a gravitational version of E-Web. He thinks it either works well and the Centauri thinned their ship armor as a consequence, or the screen supplements a system of jammers. Either way he concludes that the PRIMUS is designed to survive grazing shots. A direct hit by even our secondaries will pierce it. As you have seen, a beam rake against an unshielded PRIMUS wrecks it totally." She gazed carefully through her eyes, looking specifically at the evidence of KMD damage in the compartment she floated in. She wanted Captain Caldwell to see the damage as she saw it so he would understand the problems she had in salvaging the wreck.
She said, "You can see that KMD fire has made salvage difficult." She shifted her report to the stuff that Caldwell had as his chief interest. She was expert at reading Caldwell's body language. It was important to give him the information he needed.
He, seeing through her eyes, said, "Ah, let me see that control display."
She swam over to the engineering panel toward which the Caldwell image pointed.
After gazing at it through her eyes, Caldwell said, "Very advanced defensive systems-they divert and mis-direct incoming fire rather than absorbing it." He continued "Like any advanced technology user they defeat incoming fire with countermeasures more than with armor."
Adrienne agreed, "They are very well equipped with jammers. Their equipment is not as good as the Minbari Stealth systems-but whose is? ....They have far more countermeasures aboard this PRIMUS than I have seen on any other ship I have ever examined. I believe that they used massive numbers of jammers to make up for their immature shield technology."
Caldwell pounced on that, "How did you come to that conclusion?"
Adrienne spent four exhausting hours showing her captain bits and pieces of shattered Centauri ship-explaining to the one Human she knew aboard NATHAN HALE, who was equipped by training and experience to quickly understand her technomage illustrated explanations of Centauri wonders....
....Dulanax muttered to himself as he uploaded files from the latest records from the salvage parties into his amiga. It was frustrating to wait for each "Vulture" load of booty from the PRIMUS, but there it was. No signals traffic was permitted that might let some enemy discover the salvage work in progress.
He put his amiga down with a magnetic click on his desk in his work area inside Fire Control, and opened the latest files. The holography was nowhere near as good as Excolsus' Vree model personal computer, but Dulanax had used Human gear for more than twenty years and he found that his amiga did what he wanted. He studied the files, using the indexes to organize data in parallel streams, the Drazi way. Humans seemed to prefer linear progressive data streams like the Minbari, but Dulanax found such analytical approaches confusing and wasteful to him of time.
"The Centauri are no giants." said a voice behind Dulanax.
The startled Drazi twirled in mid-compartment halfway in mid-reflex to launchinng a throwing knife, when he saw Caldwell serenely hovering in mid-compartment, looking at his amiga's holographs.
"Does that indicate that the Centauri combat laser beam emitters are limited to about a thousand terajoules?" asked the Captain.
Dulanax dumbly nodded. The Captain had a strange two thousand meter stare in his eyes as if he was looking at more than his surroundings....
"The heat sinks they use for their particle lasers are buit into their fuel bunkers. Funny that they don't use laser cooling..." Dulanax mused. "We can handle that easily with our energy web and with the KMDs set in Interceptor mode."
Caldwell said quietly, "I wonder if they can pulse the weapons-like a Q spoiling laser?"
Dulanax quickly looked at the holographed engineering trace print of the particle beam emitter again and noticed with a shock that the Centauri weapon could be pulsed.
Dulanax did some quick calculations and said with some shock, "In piercing mode, it can detonate a particle bolt inside armor with perhaps as much as fifty percent more energy than in beam mode!" He loooked more closely at the cooling systems and muttered, "Seven seconds...before they scored internals on us...." His face blanched in fear."That's five times the piercing and explosive power of their "twin ion bolter cannons"-incredible!"
"Range?" Caldwell snapped.
Dulanax whipped out a Drazi abacus and finger-danced calculations based on what he saw of the beam generation and focal elements of the Centauri weapon blueprinted on holography in front of him. "Maybe a thirtieth of a second at the outside range limit for those numbers."
Caldwell nodded slowly. "Good enough to defeat any LONAW power." He nodded at the holograph and told Dulanax, "We are lucky that the Centauri didn't have SHARLINS as an incentive to make things worse."
Dulanax said in some awe, "They are bad enough. The actual performance figures I'm getting from this PRIMUS shows me that our intelligence estimates are badly skewed. The PRIMUS' offensively and defensively is about half the effectiveness of such a SHARLIN! So I would say we have underestimated the Centauri badly....They may have underestimated themselves...."
"Not bloody likely." said Caldwell.
Adrienne Brown, just finishing her monologue to her Captain, and seeing through his eyes, the work Dulanax did as she briefed Caldwell on the PRIMUS gravidic shields, agreed with Dulanax about the Centauri. She said so and saw Caldwell imperceivable to anyone except to someone like her, nod in agreement.
She saw in her Captain's body language his most underlying fear. There was the Centauri jump-point ambush. The fan-heads could surprise NATHAN HALE as she parked rest relative to the fuel depot. The salvage was taking too long, she could read in his face. General Quarters was wearing down the crew, she saw in his eyes. It was weird to see through Malcolm's eyes, see him and Dulanax in her mind's eye, and see the compartment where the Drazi and Human worked together, and by so seeing, know their thoughts more surely than through the use of any telepathy. She saw Caldwell decide that NATHAN HALE had to risk it-had to salvage everything before the PRIMUS was hauled off and nuked to scatter the evidence. She saw his worries. Get the crew back, hide the ship. Play for time....
But most important of all, Adrienne saw her Captain wondering what his Centauri counterpart was plotting next....
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End of Chapter 4; Part 1
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Into the Chasm of Night : Chapter 4; Part 2
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Treason or Honor?
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In the Day Audience Room of Lord Jathren's Palace...Oh the Rough Life Along the Frontier!
Count Morado was a hired expert. He gave advice; while Lord Jathren gave the orders. Jathren had cost the Centauri a VORCHAN and a PRIMUS. Morado's operatives in the Praxal system had finally supplied smuggled video-extremely poor quality video-of the Human ship mounting an ambush of the DAWN ORCHID. The Human ship was a black chunk of darkness hard to see against the star-field. Morado replayed the sequence.
It came out of its jump-point, unnervingly close to the vantage point of the agent who recorded it. He must have been aboard the Abbai Station. Morado could see parts of it as the Human ship slewed and rolled to come rest relative in the inertial frame to the station. It launched breaching pods. It fired raking beams of some kind at the PRIMUS. It was remarkable gunnery at this close range. The gravidic field coils and the crew quarters were cut cleanly loose, leaving the main power grid and weapons arrays intact. Short shimmering bursts, streams of sparkling matter came from the Human ship and Morado saw the impact strikes of the spurts as they hit the DAWN ORCHID. Its gravity screen was down! The fools on that ship had de-powered.
Morado hissed through his teeth. Bunglers. Marquis Draltus deserved his fate. Docking, then leaving yourself defenseless without even posting Sentri fighters for a guard? What was Draltus thinking?
The breaching pods of the peculiar design left the Human ship. Only four made the assault? Morado was frantically note taking as he replayed the assault over and over. These particular Humans were more dangerous than he expected....
....As Morado feared, Lord Jathren didn't understand.
"So you now have a close look at this Human ship?" Jathen asked.
"Yes, Milord, but...." Morado was interrupted.
"You think I wasted another ship?" Jathren said abruptly.
"No, Milord," said Morado carefully. "I think Marquis Draltus wasted his ship."
"Bah, Draltus was going to get himself and his ship killed anyway. He was an idiot. Better to get something out of that fool before he endangered all of us." said Jathren.
Morado was a total loss for words. A PRIMUS, packed with Centauri secrets, filled with two thousand Centauri souls, was just a Jurago game-piece to this man? What kind of fool was he serving? Morado assessed his options faster than Jathren's next words came tumbling out.
"What did we get for that poor fool, Draltus' sacrifice?" Jathren, asked between bites on a Kodo-bird drumstick. He was dribbling grease while eating on his throne. "Good information I hope...."
Morado added gauchery as well as stupidity to the list of his lord's crimes. Morado nodded to his lord and employer, "It is my first close look at a Human ship supplied by my own agents. It is also the first reliable look we have had supplied by CENTAURI agents since the Dilgar war. The Humans have improved, Milord."
Morado continued, "that worthless propaganda supplied us by the Drakh showed us little close detail aside from exploding Drakh ships...." Morado couldn't help himself. He had to get that criticism said at the expense of the Shadow Thralls.
Fortunately no Drakh were present. They remembered insults. "The record, supplied by our agents, shows me enough detail to map out the Human ship's weapon emplacements, give me an idea of the thing's speed, and some guesses as to its power-plant and defense...."
"Well?" asked Lord Jathren. "Do you have anything besides generalities?"
"This Human ship can open a jump-point ambush within its weapons' striking distance of any known fixed target. Its weapons are of the raking variety-continuous beam emitter type." said Count Morado.
"Including the sparkling streaming things? asked Jathren.
"Yes." Morado said. " Those, milord, are matter streamers of a type never before seen on a Human ship...."
"You are mis-informed, my hired expert," said Lord Jathren, jocully. "Those are a progression of the crude Interceptors the Humans designed when we gave them bolters! Sooner or later, they they were going to turn their particle bolters into streamers." Jathren proudly puffed himself up. He had one-upped his "hired expert".
Morado, within the the privacy of his own thoughts, disagreed. In Morado's private opinion, the Vree had obviously supplied the Humans with the technology. The Humans had incorporated it with reverse engineering into their armament package with logical forethought. It wasn't some crude adaptation of Centauri technology or just another gun they stuck on a ship somewhere.
"So how does this Human ship strike you, Morado?" asked Jathren.
"It is a long-ranged gunship, milord." Morado said. "I don't believe its primary purpose is close assault, though that is what we see in this recording.... I did not see it employ its spinal mount and that worries me...." Morado muttered a bit, cleared his throat and said, "This Human ship in layout and performance reminds me of something my military proctor once told me....a TINASHI? He told me he once boarded a Minbari frigate that visited Korgath about half a century ago. The way it was laid out was like this Human ship....close in matter projectors for anti-fighter work, midrange raking weapons for work against enemy ships trying to flank attack, and the traditional Minbari bow cannon for the long-range shooting against enemy ships after jumping into a battle." Morado chuckled at happy memories, "Old Sthrathon, he told me that the Minbari chose that layout, because it allowed them to use their slow-firing weapons to greater advantage against their faster, more-maneuverable opponents of their past."
"What faster opponents?" asked Jathren.
Morado shrugged, Centauri fashion. "Orieni? I don't know." The Humans imitate. They are adaptable.
Jathren snarled, "You said this before, 'expert'. You weren't so frightened of the hair-balls then....the Humans have shown nothing to me in the way of technology that impresses me. Why they don't even have gravity control! I regard the puny Humans as no more dangerous than Narns."
Morado kept a straight face, 'No more dangerous than Narns?' He looked at a still image of the Human ship. Centauri had machines that handled routine intelligence chores like estimating energy output from weapons based on recorded visual effects against known target physical properties. The results of this analysis for this recording were displayed in basic scientific notation that Morado could decipher, though Jathren could not. The values indicated that the Human ship's secondary beam projector weapons were twice as powerful as Narn battle lasers. If the matter streamers were as Vreelike as Morado feared-then maybe the streamers were as powerful as ion bolter cannon. He had no idea at all what the Human spinal weapon was like. Judging by the battle records the Drakh had supplied the thing had demolished Drakh cruisers with one hit!
A Centauri ship needed barrage fire to produce that kind of result. It was a matter of philosophy Morado supposed. Centauri found that with jammer technology blinding fire control, you jumped in close and hosed out a wall of saturation fire in the general location of your target. You got enough hits to wreck his jammers and then you finished him with accurate bolter fire. It put a premium on volume of fire and close ranged violence, lessons the Centauri first learned from the Xon and which they used against every other sapient thing they'd fought since.
Morado supposed the Humans, being cowards, had learned a different lesson. Certainly their slavish imitation of the Minbari was based on a desire to avoid close combat. Fortunately up to now, the Humans' pathetic sensor technology made their weaponry ineffective. This Human ship's weapons, while impressive, would only be impressive in missing spectacularly, or so Morado hoped.
'So the Humans were no more dangerous than Narns? Wonder if that Human ship commander had an engineer who could decipher Centauri jammers? There was an old Orieni expression,"What can be hit, can be killed." It kept rolling around in Morado's head as he watched his idiot lord munching on the Kodo drumstick, dripping grease all over himself.
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Bears Looking for Food
Aboard the NATHAN HALE: within the starboard machine shop spaces....
"Junk!" Soren snarled. What they haven't copied or stolen is junk!"
"I assume you are criticizing Human technology again?" said Adrienne Brown sweetly.
"no, You, fur-heads, do well enough." snapped Soren a bit miffishly. "It is this Centauri refuse. Take a look at the garbage. Narn knock-offs perform better. Soren asked dismissively in rhetorical fashion,"Why haven't you, Humans, done better with the Centauri technology they gave you, originally?
Brown, feeling the urge to lecture this pointy-headed Minbari coming on, wanted to keep her reply short but failed. "Pride and a fear of dependency, I suppose," she began. "The Centauri never gave us technology in bulk. They just gave us bits and pieces. They always kept the vital knowledge for themselves to make a profit off of us by being the sole source of supply for the missing knowledge. That is why, for example, we, Humans, had to learn to make vortex generators without Quantium Forty."
In shock, Soren said, "Jump-gates without exotic matter?"
"Sure," Adrienne said, "Reactionless thrusters instead of gravity thing-of-a-made-jigs; particle beam cannons, instead of ion bolters. Whatever the Centauri supplied in in bits and pieces, we, Humans, filled in the gaps. To this day, the Narn have better fire control than we do. We make up for it with the sheer power of our weapons. That is why we need the stuff off the Primus. Can you imagine what even a second rate fire control system can do, if we can defeat Centauri jammer technology?"
"Why not incorporate the Centauri jammers into your own technology?" Soren asked.
Adrienne risked the truth as she knew it, in her answer to Soren, "I suspect that Centauri jammers; like Minbari stealth, is dependent on gravity control. Human systems are electro-magnetic. Theoretically we should be able to do everything that, you Minbari, or the fan-heads, can do, once, we earn how to build an inertia cage. With that problem defeated, we could use the side effects of the technology to blind gravidic sensors and level the playing field-so to speak. You can't target us, we can't target you. However with our electro-magnetic based technology we retain our active defenses which can survive longer than yours do. When you get hit, Boom! When we get hit, we limp home."
Soren smiled, "Yet with your vaunted electro-magnetic technology you still want gravity control!” he sneered.'
Adrienne showed teeth, "We'll manage. Gravity control would be a boom for commerce, though."
Soren's laugh was harsh, "Minbari think little of trade. We give what our talent allows and only take what we require."
"Another reason you lost the war, communist."Adrienne Brown replied
Soren looked at her quizzically, "What is a communist?"
"A Human form of Bonehead-now extinct." Adrienne said.
"I didn't know you, Humans, had an inter-species war on the Earth?" said Soren.
"We destroyed them after we killed the last of the Neanderthals." Adrienne added.
Soren was a confused Minbari. The Humans destroyed two competitive species on Earth, who were as sapient as they? Maybe the Humans were more ruthless than he assumed....
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Jackal Time
NATHAN HALE, Fire Control....
Dulanax was impressed. Centauri fire control systems were superb. Maybe the Minbari systems were better, but their gear was as far superior to the best Drazi and Brakiri stuff as to be almost magical. Some of his Narn associates seemed less impressed than he. Dulanax supposed that familiarity breeds contempt.
He turned to Na'Talith, "Is any of this useful for us in the short term, Sir?"
"You know Human fire control systems far better than I, Master Gunner. You should know that these components are useless to the Humans. They use photo-optics, reflected light waves, and crude gravity wave detectors based on strain gauges. With crap like that, how can they integrate spatio-metric distortion field detectors? How can they even use a Centauri gravity wave oscillator?" Na'Talith spoke plainly.
Dulanax shook his head in disagreement."Radar works. I couldn't have sliced the PRIMUS to bits without it. Telescopes work. The Infra-red telescope showed me what not to shoot. Denigrate the Human technology, but it gets the job done.
"At close range against defenseless ships...."snarled Na'Talith, upset that this Drazi contradicted her in front of the rest of the Narns in Fire Control.
Precisely why the Captain modified your fire-plan and jumped in so close." said Dulanax. He did not add that it was on his own recommendation to Na'Talith, originally.
Na'Talith looked at the Drazi gunner, she looked at him hard. "You really admire the Humans , don't you?"
Dulanax nodded once, sharply, in the Drazi way and said nothing.
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Treason and Honor
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Jathren's Palace; in the West Wing Study....
Morado and the Drakh drank together. There was no better way to get to know your enemy than to share a glass of Braviri. Humans didn't drink Braviri. Drakh did. Certainly Morado now knew from his agents.....HE knew that the Drakh had Centauri Prime totally under their control. Morado even knew HOW. But; here, though, the illusion of Centauri independence-of it being an alliance was maintained. Still, if he was to survive this, the game must be played to its bitterest end. He asked the Thrall, a question. Like most Drakh, it refused to give its name, believing that names were a source of power. It didn't matter. Morado didn't need tricks or enemy superstition to exploit weakness. Morado was Centauri. He was going to save his people. It was the only way that he, Morado would survive fools, like Jathren.
"What happened out there, that the Humans moved against you?" was the bold life threatening question he asked the Drakh.
Universal truths, like slurred speech, when one was drunk exist. Still, Morado had to repeat the question twice to get the Drakh to answer.
"They drove away the Masters." Said the befuddled Drakh.
'What kind of answer was that? The Humans drove away the Masters? The Shadows?' Morado refrained from laughter. The Shadows played games with everyone including the Vorlons. Technology and evolution wise; any one of the Younger Races were flies experimented upon by those First Ones . Just as an afterthought, Morado suddenly suspected, 'The Drakh are a CREATED RACE to fill a minor niche in the Shadows' overall plans?' Morado, thunderstruck by this thought, was too logical in outlook to ignore the almost religious connection this would give the Drakh to their "Masters"-their very real and living "gods". To Morado, a modern Centauri, it was blasphemy to regard the Shadows as such. As any sensible Centauri, he believed in The Great Maker, and his senses. Morado had seen a Battlecrab. Creatures that made those things were devils in the flesh, not "gods".
By now the Drakh was having trouble holding its deformed horned head up. A thought percolated through Morado's mind as he watched its drooping skull. Nothing came to cognition for Morado. Later he would recognize it, but for now he would stick to the game.
"So the Humans are your enemy because they drove away your, Masters?" asked the curious Centauri Count, again.
"Yessss." hissed the drunken Drakh, who began a long rambling discourse"....the Humans torment us....the Masters preferred them....the Masters gave them gifts....how to protect with the living skin....how to travel without the exotic matter....how to move without the use of expelled mass for thrust...."
In the mix of drunken Drakh lies and half truths, Morado pieced together a picture of an Earth Alliance as thoroughly dominated by the Shadows under Clark as his own Centauri Republic was now riddled by the Drakh. The Drakh rambled onward.
"....the Humans took from the Masters and then they turned on them....the Humans joined the Lords of Order and fought against the Masters....but we, Drakh, er the loyal ones, stayed true....when the Masters left, we stole back from the Humans, the living skin and the other gifts....the Humans are too stupid to use the gifts....we stole them back, the gifts....we stole them back for we are the loyal ones....we are the true...." The Drakh passed out.
Morado cursed softly. The Drakh probably lied about Human thruster technology and vortex generation, or maybe it didn't know how smart the Humans were when it came to reverse engineering and original thought. The living skin was troubling. Rumors about Human ships sporting an armor that regenerated appeared about the same time as the Shadows probably dominated the Humans, themselves. That was during the Clark Regime.
After the humans killed Clark, Morado knew their ships had changed appearance yet again. Whether the Drakh stole the living skin armor back, was not relevant. That Human ship had something like it and whatever it was, it was working for them. All in all, this very confused and drunken Drakh had given Morado a picture of the Alliance that made his mind up for the Centauri Count. If the Humans could survive Dilgar, Minbari, and Shadows, then he, Morado,would cast his lot and his people's future with them. Besides; if the Republic entered the Alliance, it would become the Centauri Alliance. Forty billion Centauri would outvote everybody else in that crazy Human system of one sapient equals one vote. Morado smiled. It was an elegant way too restore the glories of the Republic. It had the added bonus that if he planned it right; the Humans would do most of the dying to pull it off. He patted the passed out Drakh on the head as he slumped in his chair. Morado whispered softly, "You, my sad friend, are going to join the Dilgar, the Minbari, and who knows what else the Humans have tossed onto the pile of The Great Maker's failed experiments....
With his decision made, Morado, set about planning his treason.
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End of Chapter 4: Part 2
A little CHAOS is a GOOD thing.
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Post by Avatar on Sept 1, 2019 4:46:38 GMT
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Into the Chasm of Night: Chapter 5; Part 1
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The Chess Board Heats Up
'It is going to be dangerous.' he thought.
Caldwell looked at the latest encrypted download from the Naval General Staff. The idiots were crazy. He didn't have to read the text blocks of the message to know this fact. Every recent message from the NGS had been crazier and crazier.
The Alliance was fighting the Choadi. There was fighting ongoing near Z'Hadum for some stupid reason. The Drakh had poisoned Earth. The Drakh raiders that did it were being pursued by a Crusader fleet organized by "Johnny Nukem" Sheridan.
Caldwell knew the galactic cartography and the macro-politics well enough. His little one ship front against the Centauri was going to get a lot hotter in this chaos.
Most of the two billions of surviving Humanity were out of the fight. Correct strategy or not on the Drakhs' part, the idea of Humanity joining the Ipshai and the Hyach on the probably extinct, but still breathing list, was appalling. Even the Shadows during the worst days of the Clark regime hadn't been this close to exterminating Humanity.
Caldwell knew that the colonies weren't strong enough or bio-diversified deeply enough to sustain Humans. Maybe after another couple of centuries terraforming the colonies, Humans could afford to lose the Earth, but for now.......
Well, at least Sheridan had the correct strategic priorities. A: Find a cure. B: Kill the Drakh. Malcolm grunted. NATHAN HALE was in the wrong place for A or B, so Malcolm waited for the stupid ayeye to decrypt the latest wisdom from the NGS. Whatever it was, HE and HIS wouldn't rank high enough in Sheridan's priorities to be a letter of the alphabet. He read the decrypted hardcopy briefly and laughed. He laughed so loudly that it carried outside his quarters and brought anxious Gaim to see if he had gone crazy-like sometimes a sick queen might. Maybe Caldwell had? Puzzled Gaim posted themselves bodyguard close to protect their "sick queen". A Narn coming on the scene called for a medic. This prompted more laughter from Malcolm. "Got to get a ship's doctor!' he thought to himself. His laughter continued.
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Mixed Feelings and Messages
Hours, later, as Na'Talith read the same NGS traffic, she didn't find it at all funny. The Narns of the NGS must have gone happy in the liver. It made sense to clean out the Choadi. They were pirates. The Regime could spare enough ships from the reserve to wipe the nuisances out. Going after the cure for the Humans? For a moment, Na'Talith toyed with the idea of letting the bad smelling monkeys go extinct, but then, like the Khari, she decided against it. The Humans were the IF factor, that assured the Narn victory over the fan-heads. So for the moment, the heroic Narns would carry the Alliance. Na'Talith had confidence that some Narn scientist would cure the plague. Her people were good at bio-warfare. So the Humans would be out of it for a few seasons. Now if the Centauri could be directly linked to the Drakh! She rubbed her hands with glee....
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A Vree Viewpoint
Excolsus had the advantage of the Vree.His information was usually better than anyone elses'.The records of the Drakh's attack upon Earth played out before him. The Shadow planet-killer failed. Drakh bungling combined with Human courage mixed with some interesting technology produced the result.
Excolsus briefly examined the ferocious results of Human applied captured Minbari technology. Their new VICTORY class destroyer looked like more than a fair match for a SHARLIN or a WARLOCK. The fact that the particle beams of a WARLOCK and the lightning gun on the VICTORY could pierce even Shadow bio-armor; much less hit Shadow technology artifacts; spoke mountains' worth of data about the latest in Human fire control as well as their weapons' POWER.
The Humans proved themselves already capable of building the energy weapons. Hitting with precision had been their problem. So gravity control was now in the Human trick bag.
The Human engineer Adrienne Brown, Excolsus concluded, was correct in her facts; in claiming the soonness of things Human as Soren had told him in the recounting an episode where he and she had almost come to blows over some minor ship repair. Soren spoke of it to Excolsus, in passing, as an example of Human boastfulness, which he, Soren, flippantly dismissed "A generation is all Humanity needs to take its place in the galaxy! Bah!" so Soren had imitated derisively the words of Adrienne Brown. Excolsus shook his head as he replayed the section where the one VICTORY smashed itself to glory to kill the Shadow Planet-Killer......What Minbari had ever defeated one of those?
Too bad the Drakh struck with their plague. Excolsus wasn't optimistic about the Humans' chances . From what Vree agents reported, the whole Earther biosphere was infected. Not just the Humans on the world were infected but everything living. The Drakh poisoned the very Earth to render it unusable. Just what would the Humans do now? What did this mean for him and the NATHAN HALE?
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We Don't Have Time To Die Right Now; We're Too Busy Killing You....
"We're not going anywhere." said Malcolm Caldwell.
He addressed his officers in the Mess at another one of the interminable officer calls.
"We're not going anywhere-especially not after the Drakh." he repeated. “We can't do anything to fight the plague. Other forces and means are dealing with that, Pray to the Maker, that they succeed. We aren't going to Z'Hadum, either. Same reason."
The grumbling and the anger on the faces of his officers and chiefs didn't off-put Malcolm.
"The Narns," he smiled, "will be visiting the Choadi soon. Maybe they will enjoy the target practice."
Realistically Caldwell reckoned that the Narn Regime's old navy would be decimated by the wily pirates. Earth Force in its heyday developed a healthy and cautious respect for the Choadi. Earth's plans for the pirates had involved lengthy planetary blockades and low scale attrition warfare to wreck the Choadi economically. Nobody in the LONAW or among the other major powers in prior better days wanted to pay the cost of such a war. Now, Caldwell thought, the Alliance is using the Choadi as make-work to keep the devious Narn out of trouble while the rest of the Alliance exterminated the Drakh.
"which brings me to what we of the NATHAN HALE will be doing in this new crisis." Caldwell said. "In a nutshell we'll be doing picket duty along this frontier."
He looked among his puzzled officers and chiefs, "That means, we recruit local resources, build up a militia, harass the fan-heads.....give them a bellyache so bad that they'll clutch their stomachs and bend over, so that we can kick their posteriors....any Drakh we find in range of course we kill; but we keep this frontier in Alliance hands. Our mission is to keep the fan-heads too busy to exploit our troubles by exacerbating theirs."
'So I log another morale boosting speech', thought Captain Caldwell, as he sort of pulled himself into a seated position at the head of the Captain's Mess.
As Caldwell seated himself, Na'Talith let out a bellicose Narn cheer. The rest of the Narns present joined her in a ragged chorus. War, any kind of war, with the Centauri, was music to Narn ears. The Narns were nuts.
'Get out the carving knives and the flute playing lessons.' thought Adrienne Brown as she scanned the assembled cadre.
Caldwell, now firmly seat-belted in his chair, looked among the Humans. They weren't happy. Most of the older chiefs were scarce old enough to remember the Dilgar War as young babes. Many of them were children too young to serve when they cowered under Minbari SHARLIN slicer beams that trenched the Earth. None of them, and certainly none of the commissioned officers knew the desperate truth confronting Earth now, but that news would come out quickly and then the carefully husbanded morale of the NATHAN HALE would be gone. Have to do something about that.
From his chair, Caldwell interrupted the cheering Narns. He snarled with a decisive sneer that out-Narned even Na'Talith, "As for how we give the Peacocks that bellyache?"
"Well the Centauri have secrets, and I want them. That is what WE can contribute to the Crusade Against the Drakh."
Adrienne, playing the role of the cynical staff officer, asked her captain from her end of the table; "What can one ship do?"
Caldwell, who permitted this kind of free criticism at these officers' calls, entered into the spirit of the conversation. He wondered where his "tame" technomage was going with her criticism?
"We play Leonidas at the pass and hold the gap." he countered mildly.
His assistant engineer countered, "Leonidas was killed with his entire command."
'What was Adrienne doing?' thought Caldwell. He said, "True, but Leonidas fought Persians-Humans. This time we fight Centauri and we all know what that means....." Caldwell leaned back with a broad smile on his face. He finally figured out what Adrienne was doing.
Laughter broke out among the assembled company. Even Soren, the taciturn Minbari laughed. True the grim facts didn't change, but at least the Human penchant for graveyard humor awoke and that had carried doomed Humanity through to success, previously.
It worked for Earth Force fleets, during the Dilgar War, when making fun of the Dilgar as "cat-faced missile bait" had lightened the shadowed moods of the out-gunned OLYMPUS crews of that generation. Jokes about goblins, spoo-heads, gators, bowling balls, bowling pins, boneheads, (Though to the present day, the Minbari made certain that no Human lived to enjoy telling a "bonehead" joke within a Minbari's hearing.), and other derogatory jokes about Humanity's various alien opponents seemed to be a common feature of Human military humor. It seemed to belittle an otherwise superior enemy and make him Human-sized for a hard-pressed Humanity to cut down in the darkness of war.
So now for morale purposes, the jokes would be about "peacocks” and "fan-heads". Caldwell knew in his heart, that those "peacocks" and "fan-heads" would be as un-funny as the Minbari. Still, when you are in the pot, being cooked, you might as well crack a few cannibal jokes.
Thus this officers call broke up into species groups, each sharing among its own coterie in its native speech some jokes about the "incompetent Centauri"
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A Knight Moves.
One of those "incompetent Centauri" loaded the last of his data storage crystals into his single-ship. It was a very old transport equipped with obsolete particle thrust engines. It had a lackluster registration so far down the primary ship registry list, that no one would notice its departure. One thing not listed in any data base was its ability to use a jump-gate. All of these advantages came with drawbacks.
Once through a jump-gate, the little transport would show up on every Centauri sensor grid within range of a beacon entry or exit point. That would bring warships to check its registration. The little transport had to make it through two jump-gates before its passenger would be "safe". To get there the Centauri transport pilot had a scheme. He un-docked his transport from its station berth and headed for a nearby VORCHAN.
This particular VORCHAN was one of the Drakh bio-robot controlled ships in the Centauri fleet. It had a raid route assigned to it; to hit one of the Human expatriate colonies. This Centauri knew from his agents that the VORCHAN would jump in, blow the colony's orbital infrastructure to pieces and run before the Alliance responded. Since the raid was doomed to succeed, this Centauri judged it to be the safest way to cross into Alliance Space without alerting his own people. Just dock to the Drakh controlled ship and ride it parasite fashion, like the Earther Remora did with the terrestrial shark. As for his own personal disappearance?....well this Centauri had made those arrangements too.
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Pawns With Minds of Their Own
The best laid plans of Lord Jathren, the Drakh, and the Humans; all seemed to run afoul of the great Human prophet Murphy. Or so thought Lord Jathren.He was running through the halls of his pal;ace to hear firsthand the news about Morado! Evidently some stupid Narn assassin had killed the Count. The Narn had blown himself up in a typical Narnish blood-feud sort of thing. Odd about that? Count Morado was so careful about leaving living enemies lying around to bother him. Well everyone misses a detail every now and then. Lord Jathren shrugged in mid-run. he would just have to rely on Marquis Ishdai. Ishdai was not as clever or experienced as Morado, but Ishdai was from a nobler house and his advancement to Lord Jathren's principle advisor would help Jathren with Ishdai's father in the Centaurum. You must always think of politics.
Jathren reached his Audience Chamber to see the Marquis and that fool of a Drakh together. Both were talking to each other. For the first time Jathren felt the the cold hands of conspiracy cutting off his air. Morado's death was now more than a nuisance. It was danger.
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Pawn Traps Rook
The transport un-docked from the VORCHAN just in time. Count Morado saw the jump-point open close to the VORCHAN and the counter-ambush staged by the Humans. It was magnificent!
The VORCHAN had targeted the colony's transfer point wheel station and was setting up its strafing run when the first flight of Furies ripped into it. Morado saw the Furies form a necklace formation with the intent of draping their necklace around the VORCHAN as they passed by it. Sparkling streamers of fire danced across the VORCHAN's hull as it center-pointed itself inside the moving circle of Furies. The streamers tore off chunks and fires erupted from venting gases where the streamers scored piercing hull hits. The VORCHAN's fins were hole riddled, the gravidic engines died, the VORCHAN tumbled. Morado easing his little transport away watched aghast as a giant Human ship came out of the ambush point following the Furies. Morado cut his engines and tried to imitate a drifting piece of debris. Human sensors were crude. He might get away with it.
On his transport's scanners, he saw the giant Human ship lay alongside the crippled VORCHAN. Such courage! Breaching pods launched from the wings of the Human Monster. It was hard to see against the blackness of space as the little black specks attached themselves to the scarlet hued Centauri ship.
Now that Count Morado had a little free time he could see the damage more clearly on the VORCHAN. He saw weapon strike damage coincident with ion pulse cannon mounts and missile launchers. the humans taught their single-ship fighter pilots to cripple enemy ship weapon emplacements well.
Morado watched the Humans. Patience was not supposed to be a Centauri virtue, but Morado had learned it as a survival skill serving that idiot, Jathren. With that other fool, Marquis Ishdai, now, looking out for Centauri interests for Lord Jathren along this border, Morado knew it was safer to be Centauri on the Human side of the border. Something about the Drakh dominated Centauri Republic made it unhealthy to be Centauri on the other side these days.
Time to send the distress call, he, Morado, decided.
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Time to Castle?
Rescuing the Peloam Colony had been a rushed job.
The NGS sent the order with the date/time group/with no explanations-just instructions.
Caldwell after mulling it over, selected his tactics and crossed his fingers. The Cuisinart was the oldest fighter trick in the book. The Centauri sent one VORCHAN just as the NGS said ANI warned.(Odd Malcolm still thought of it as Earth Force Naval Intelligence-the old EFNI...).
The raider had been easily counter-ambushed as suggested by the ANI tacticians. The raider was also being ramsacked as was also suggested by those old EFNI hands. For Malcolm Caldwell this good fortune smelled like a Centauri trap, so he urged his people to quicken their work, "Lets hustle along and get out of here!"
He was pacing C&C when Na'Talith called from Secondary Combat Control to report Signals was receiving a distress call.
Caldwell thought to himself, 'Delay?' He asked via Analog TWS to Na'Talith, "What distress call?"
Her small holographic image in front of Malcolm's face bowed in a Narnish sort of salute and said,"Small unidentified transport near our VORCHAN friend."
'It was a trap!' Malcolm decided. He snapped, "Send a lander! Bring it aboard, only after its searched, and I MEAN SEARCHED!"
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Welcome Wagon.
The Alliance troops had been none too gentle. It was Morado's first experience with the Gaim and like many before him, he found it unpleasant. A pair of human technicians , Murphy( A son of the great Human Prophet?) and a M'kumba by name; tore his little transport apart searching for a bomb. They found nothing, not even the smuggled data that Morado had secreted aboard. The Human ship towing him, a "Vulture" shuttle, hauled his transport to the left wing of the Human ship.
Morado oriented himself to the Human juggernaut, by calling the pronged end it's front and the blocky end its rear. What he called the rapidly approaching left wing was his arbitrary decision based on his current eye-line horizon viewpoint. The reality as he was soon to discover, his transport was landing on the starboard dorsal landing pad.
The landing was as eventful as docking with a Centauri Capital ship. The procedures were different; but the result was the same. His transport was safely lodged in the ship's Hanger. The difference here was that there were armed Humans and Narns waiting to meet him. As his Gaim nannies gently pushed Morado out the transport hatch, he tumbled out onto the hanger deck to sprawl ungracefully.
Morado, looking up from his sprawl, said with as much dignity as he could muster;"Take me to your Leader." in broken Narn.
The senior Narn present, a female, looking down at the Count, grabbed him by his collar and jerked him into a vertical frame of reference (Standing, though in micro-gravity the Centauri had nothing to which he could anchor his feet to the deck.) and said, "First, we debrief you, Peacock, then we'll invite you to dinner......."
........Morado discovered several things during his "debriefing". First, the Narns hadn't learned anything new in the art of conversation. Second, he, Morado, did not enjoy pain. Third, the Gaim had disgusting table manners. At least the one that ate his finger did. Finally, Humans took a great deal of convincing. He'd finally talked himself into a meeting with the Human leader of this ship.
Morado was hard slammed and manacled into a chair behind a plain onyx desk in a plain onyx room in the bowels of this plain onyx ship. Morado looked around the claustrophobic cramped compartment.There was a "typical" massive counter-sprung pressure door; common to a primitive space-faring culture with paranoia issues, he observed.
The whole ship reflected this, Morado ruminated. Small cramped spaces, all the living spaces in this huge ship were small cramped spaces. Everything was given over to the machine. The myth of a Human ship being "the flying brick" was no myth. No wonder Human ships were so tough; they were all mass and very little void.
A Human swam gracefully into the compartment. He somersaulted into his chair and absent mindedly buckled himself in. Morado looked at his own loose seat belts, looked up and smiled. he said in Centauri, "I'm sorry, but it seems my guards forgot something......"
The Human looked back and said nothing.
Morado tried again, "I've tried very hard to tell your people that I need to talk to their leader."
The Human sat there.
"Very well," said Marado cheerfully, "if this is pointless, then do me the courtesy of putting me out of your misery. I would hate to think, I'm wasting your time!"
Caldwell finally spoke, "What were you doing with an Albatross class transport?"
"Ah…. it talks!" beamed Morado, "It was all I could scrounge up on short notice. I'm sorry I couldn't show up in an OCTURION, but you know how it is? Vacation arrangements never are what you desire, but what you can afford."
Caldwell eased back in his chair and said; "Okay, so you stole a Human transport to escape from whatever...."
"Drakh." said Morado.
'The Human's interested in what I have to say at last,' Morado saw. That being reached across the desk and grabbed Morado by his prisoner jumpsuit and said, "Explain."
End of Chapter 5: Part 1
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Into the Chasm of Night: Chapter 5; Part 2
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Flip a Coin....
It was the roughest six weeks that Morado ever remembered. Morado tugged unhappily at his Narn style military uniform. The Narns were lousy tailors. Try as hard as they might, the Centauri could never teach the Narn how to sew.
Morado was still trying to adjust to his role as ship advisor, "tactician", whatever that meant. Having Narns address him as "Talon Leader" was also peculiar. The Humans nearest equivalent status was "commander". All of these terms, the Count had to look up in the ship's computer library. None of the terms actually seemed to fit him, as he was essentially doing for Captain Caldwell, now, what he once did for that imbecile, Lord Jathren.
Morado was also having language troubles. Nobody on the "Brick", except the Captain spoke, Mountain dialect Centauri. Morado was refreshing his rusty Narnish, but everyone of the "Brick's" crew spoke some gibberish called English. Morado had never heard of beings called, English. When he asked a Narn, in Narnish, who the English were, the Narn roared at him in laughter. So Count Morado was feeling isolated and encircled. For the thousandth time, Morado wondered if throwing his lot in with these people was a good idea.
For now he, Morado, earned his air by advising. Caldwell was certainly different as a patron. Several times the NATHAN HALE left it's Hyperspace hide, on Morado's speculations. Each time a Centauri ship died. The NATHAN HALE took heavy damage on two of those occasions and the "Brick" fled to her space of safety where locals, Abbai, Brakiri, Narns , and even Centauri outcasts, like himself, gathered together, and repaired the beast. Morado marveled at the loyalty and common purpose that the Humans seemed to engender among a group of what should have been mutually hostile alien enemies....
....Morado sitting in his quarters eating his stale Human supplied rations had learned early to his sorrow that there was no alcohol allowed aboard an Alliance ship to wash down his food-brick-a silly Human rule. What did the Humans think they were, Minbari? He was nursing a spiced drink, the Narns called Kaffa. Supposedly it was something the Humans invented. Humans inventing anything was a big joke among the Narns. Morado thought it a fair joke.
Until the Minbari War, Morado mused between bites, the pecking order was well understood in the realm of Known Space; Minbari, Centauri, Narns, Vree, and THEN Humans. Officially now within the Centauri Republic's government; the estimate was, the Centauri, Narns, Humans, and Vree. Among the professionals, though, the consensus ranked the Humans ahead of the Narns in total strength, and technically; just about equal with the run of the mill Vregan science. This put the Humans on a par with the Republic's best technology. Weeks aboard the NATHAN HALE caused Morado to think the Humans might just be more advanced than his own people in materials sciences, and certainly on a par in weaponry. 'To put it bluntly', Morado supposed, 'if the numerical odds were equal between an Alliance fleet of Human ships and a Centauri fleet, it would come down to the crews.' In such a fight, the Centauri would win through superior experience in space combat and of course, their training. Morado laughed at this......
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Watch It Tumble
Malcolm was a very happy Alliance Captain humming to himself in the middle of his quiet C&C. Repairs progressed nicely. He watched repair Furies and Abbai workbeetles swarm over the NATHAN HALE finishing the last details on the ventral slicer mounts. That last PRIMUS had managed VORCHAN support and fought a Centauri fight. Fortune favored the HALE as her first polarizer shot crippled the PRIMUS, taking it's combat lasers out of the fight. That made the struggle, then, a race between the NATHAN HALE's Furies, and the VORCHANs. In the process the HALE had been VORCHAN bait. Half of her weapons had been shot out with numerous ion bolter hull hits.
Centauri jammers still spoofed Human missiles. Watching the HAWKS spool off had been disheartening, and Malcolm smiled now in battle remembrance, at how Dulanax's hologram had jumped up and down in three gee rage on his Analog from Fire Control, as the little hyperactive Drazi raged at slicers, that failed to hit targets well within range and easily seen by telescopics and optical trackers.....
Still it had been one PATRIOT against a PRIMUS and four VORCHANS. At the cost of a dozen Furies and a badly damaged HALE, Caldwell and Company sent off an entire Centauri attack group. That was one down and nine hundred and eighty two to go.
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The Only Good Centauri is.....
Na'Talith was reviewing her notes. This was a complex operation, this OPERATION IDANA, that her crazy captain was hatching. All of this, on the word of a Centauri traitor?
Na"Talith had her own opinions. She didn't trust that treacherous Centauri. One just didn't trust traitors, even if they came over to your side. She looked at the ceiling of her "Ship's Office" which was what the First Officers off duty work center had painted in English on its thick smokey oily obsidian colored pressure hatch. She said aloud to no one, "Morado should take a long walk in space without clothing." ‘How could the Captain trust him?’ she thought.
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Comes Up Tails.
Jathren was in a foaming-at-the-mouth rage in that there was actually foam coming out of his mouth.. Marquis Ishdai was nowhere to be found and that Drakh, whatever his name was, was missing as well. Four VORCHANs and a PRIMUS! Sent out and lost on their advice. Gone. Six thousand Centauri killed for no purpose. For literally the first time, Jathren considered ordinary Centauri lives . It wasn't that he was concerned about the rank and file lives lost. They were there to be used. But now he had to answer for the losses to the Centaurum. Ships and Centauri may be plentiful, but to lose two PRIMII, seven VORCHANs, have a subject colony, Dagab II, revolt for no apparent reason, have your chief House lackey assassinated, lose track of one measely fur-head cruiser and annoy a primary Centauri ally, that damned Drakh. THAT would take a little explaining on Centauri Prime.
With things going this wrong, Jathren followed the usual prudent Household measures. He had his cooks, and food taster; killed and replaced, started preparing all of his libations himself, and tripled the size and individual pay of his personal bodyguard.
Jathren was also spending a lot more of his personal time, away from his mistresses, anticipating his rivals' maneuvers-his HUMAN rival's maneuvers.
He knew the source of his problem.
If only he could bag that pesky Human ship, then all of his plans for Kathra would ripen to the point for the plucking. He just needed more ships to flood the possible jump-routes. A hundred or so ships for a hundred days should flush the Human out. A quick kill of that Vermin; then he would lead the fleet to Dagab II, put down the rebellion and then on to Praxal......
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Charting Your Future In the Stars....
At Captain Caldwell's insistance, Morado spent much of his time with the new Brakiri Navigator, Lemarchus. The HALE's new Navigator, puttering around in Ship Navigation was a good mapmaker, a skill for which the Brakiri Traders were famous. Lemarchus' hand-drawn charts of the Indus Circuit were superb, as good as any the Centauri Cartography Service with its thousands of mapmakers produced.
It helped that the NATHAN HALE had outstanding cartographic gear. Here again the Humans showed surprising sophistication having holographic transcription gear better than anything Morado had seen outside the Emperor's Observatory on Centauri Prime. Centauri astronomers spent their lives learning the craft of scribing macro-gravigational charts from optical observations. Here aboard the "Brick", Lemarchus had a couple of Brakiri acolytes who did nothing but translate his, Lemarchus' first draft drawings into complete charts.
Morado was further surprised to discover that Caldwell was no stranger to the gravigational cartography, himself. A couple of times when Lemarchus prepared the route charts for the operations around Dagab II, Caldwell corrected Lemarchus' "approved" charts that the Navigator accepted from his acolytes. Malcolm cited something he called "inertia field drift".
The corrections matched gravimetric readings that Morado took with his own instruments. These were tools that he asked the artisan/engineer, Adrienne Brown, to make for him using the machining tools and stock materials that the NATHAN HALE carried as part of her standard fittings in her "machine shop spaces".
Here was another example of underestimating the Humans. These beings had people who could hear a vague description of a gravitational wave distortion detector, whip blueprints out of thin air so to speak, and create one out of crude metals and plastics. Simply amazing!
Morado was using a set of these detectors on HALE's dorsal telescopic array to map the zenith vectors that Caldwell planned for his jump into Dagab II. He was watching the raw data on an Analog repeater as he sketched out the approach routes.
Dulanax, sharing the compartment with him, was zeroing the ship's dorsal slicers using his own set of slaved Analog repeaters and the same array of telescopes and pre-registered firing arc conic referrants. The Drazi, cursing in Drazi, which the Count didn't understand, seemed to be addressing his new fool of an assistant, the Human, Larry Siebert. Morado regarded that Human as a pest.
Larry kept asking the Centauri questions about the "extended range gravitational anomaly detector". Apparently the fool thought that it was a strain gauge like the Humans used to detect the opening of a worm hole.
Morado let the imbecile prattle on.
Right now he was measuring ranges to the comets of the Dagab II system's Freya Belt. He was obtaining range errors of +/- ten percent of expected distance. Far superior Centauri detector grids, could get that down to to one half of one percent error, at the multi-light year ranges, Morado was range gating.
Within the effectiveness of Centauri weapons, such a grid; well inside a light second, such Centauri detection gear, was accurate enough to give ranges and mass vectors on moving targets close enough to hit.
That was how Centauri ship's ion cannons could hit enemy ships despite enemy jammer and spoofing technology.
In theory, if the Humans could rig their fire control to use Morado's crude instruments, real time (Impossible since his instruments needed an artificial gravity pantograph repeater to plot real time vectors, and the Humans simply didn't have the technology to build one smaller than the size of the HALE herself.), then the Humans could improve their firing accuracy by fifty percent. That was five times better than the Humans could do with their current fire control systems aboard the "Brick" against a Centauri ship with its jammers working. That at a third of a light second would render the Humans about a third more lethal than they were, currently.
'Thank the Maker for the Laws of Physics', thought Morado. 'The Humans are dangerous enough as is!'
As it was, now, the HALE had a solid fifth of a light second range advantage with her spinal polarizer over a PRIMUS' or an OCTURAN's combat lasers, and her slicers outranged a VORCHAN's ion bolters by thousands of kilometers. It was enough of an advantage that the HALE, being ambushed by the Centauri, could kill a PRIMUS by getting her Furies out and beat off the standard Centauri tactic of the long vectored VORCHAN assault with ease.
You had to jump out on top of the HALE with TWO of the PRIMUS/VORCHAN attack groups to kill it. That was what Morado considered his most important lesson learned, from this last battle, as he bent forward to record by hand on his star chart the numbers he needed to finish his part of the Dagab II attack plan jump-point vector map.
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Looking Beyond the Trivial
Soren and Caldwell thudded their way across the NATHAN HALE's dorsal surface. In moments like this, seeing the massive flat-topped pyramidal slicer arrays at the corners of the HALE's thorax "block" against the faint glow of the Milky Way was eerie. If you thudded your way a few hundred meters port or starboard off in either direction, Malcolm knew, you would see either the port or starboard trapezoidal wings of this ship as black oily shiny obsidian blot-outs of an otherwise sharp star-field that began at the perfect knife edge right angle where the ventral surface and either the port-side or starboard-side facing of the thorax block met.
Caldwell had heard the WARLOCK compared to a pike or a barracuda in its profile, just as he heard of the late unlamented SHARLIN compared to angelfish or Vorlon ships compared to onion plants. Everyone knew what a battlecrab and the thistle shaped Shadow Spitfire was. There was plenty of argument on what things with which to compare Drakh ships, but everyone agreed that the Centauri were various manta rays, while the Drazi were lightning bugs.
The betting among the aliens was that future Human ships would join the fish club. Caldwell, with the introduction of the HERO and the PATRIOT classes wasn't so sure. Both classes looked like the results of Shadow insectile influence in Human ship architecture. The HERO for example looked like a Blocky angular bee, while the PATRIOT could vaguely pass for a mis-proportioned hornet. That was not good news if you were a member of the kill-the-Humans club. Vorlon tech had proved inherently stubborn for Humanity to reverse engineer. Shadow tech on the other hand was designed to be user friendly and Humans weren't squeamish about sacrificing lives to "tame" it.
Malcolm spoke to Soren as they finally thudded their way to the dorsal telescopic array.
"Well what do you think of Morado's gravity wave detector?" Malcolm radioed to his dour Minbari engineer. He pointed to the scarlet and yellow box bolted over the capture lens of one of the telescopes in the hemispherical pop-out sensor turret-that was now in the OUT position.
"A child's toy easily fooled." scoffed Soren. “You need an artificial gravity wave generator that mimics its readings in real time, so that you can graph it with a strain gauge reader. You, Humans, have neither the gravity wave generator to amplify the signal, nor can you build a strain gauge small enough to use even this crude device." the Minbari static radioed back.
"It may be a child's toy to you, Soren," Malcolm fumed; "But not to the Centauri. You, Minbari, have stuff like this that can help the Alliance." he argued as a Human to a stubborn Minbari for the millionth time.
Soren looked at Malcolm as if he were an ignorant child, but mindful of the thumper that Malcolm had holstered on his sinister side, and a Human's proclivity to anger in general, kept his voice neutrally toned as he replied in Religious Caste-not using the despised Human English, "Seriously, Sir, why should any Minbari give you the metal, with which you, Humans, can make our chains stronger? Is it not enough that I repair what you have? Must you demand that I improve it, for you, as well? How childish in thought; is that, when you claim it is we, Minbari, who are childish?" Having given his speech, Soren turned and thudded away, daring the Human to shoot him in the back, before the silent witnesses of millions of stars.
Caldwell's left hand actually descended to rest on the butt handle of his thumper. He was not conscious of it. Instead he changed radio channels inside his helmet with his chin and radioed the ship as the Minbari, pearl white in his skintight pressure suit continued marching away, a perfect silhouetted target against the blackness of the ship and the stars. Caldwell said, "Pass the word. The Captain requires the presence of Commander Morado, Lieutenant Commander Adrienne Brown, and Petty Officer Second Larry Siebert in his quarters within the hour. Broadcast and expedite."
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Beat to Quarters
It took a search party to find Adrienne in the bowels of the HALE's thruster pack. She was going to be late by a quarter hour reporting to the Captain's quarters.
She emerged from the hideous nanite infested smokey grey semi-liquid/semi-solid mush that made up over ninety percent of the HALE by volume. Once the armored access panel was reseated, she shucked her new encounter suit.(Another "new thing" fresh from the weapon shops of Earth that they sent out to the fleet just before the infection.).
She hated the thing and the stupid badly-designed bucket you had to pour it into when you peeled it off. It wasn't like her own skin-suit, well-trained at all. At least her skin suit "heeled” and went into its better designed "bucket" when she commanded it. The Fury pilots, who had their own new suits with which to deal, called these Human suits "the creepy crawlies". Narns refused to wear the damned things. For the poor Human given one, once the suit latched onto you, it followed you around like a puppy dog. Having it flow all over you and enfold you, was exactly like donning a suit of dog slobber, not dry, comfortable and warm like her own Technomagic skin-suit. Getting the dog slobber suit to go into its bucket was worse. The tool provided to scoop it, poke, and prod it into the bucket was worthless. Worst of all was that it dog-whined at you when you wore it.
For a paranoid schizoid species, like Adrienne knew hers to be, putting on any encounter suit was like putting on a bullseye. Adrienne wondered how many Humans knew of the First Ones and the Kirishiac War; which had first seen the widespread use of this technology in the presence of the Younger Races. That little fracas was very much on her mind as she swam furiously towards Caldwell's quarters. Her whining whimpering encounter suit escaped from its line trailed bucket and flowed sedately after her along the passageway deck, overhead and companionways. Adrienne looked backward once wide-eyed and swam faster; trying to put more distance between it and her. Now it was barking at her.
The Kirishiac had gone the encounter suit route and started calling themselves "gods" among the younger races. The First Ones swatted the Kirishiac for it. 'The First Ones could swat Humanity for the same reason.' thought Adrienne as she grabbed the lip of the hatchway, swung her way through, hauled the massive hatch shut behind her and dogged it shut as she popped into Caldwell's “stateroom". The Hatch thumped clanged with the doom of a tomb door closing, but Adrienne smiled. She had beaten her encounter suit in the race. It was puddled outside barking petulantly. Fortunately the hatch was thick, soundproofed and Adrienne didn't have to hear it. Of course, Adrienne clonged herself in the head with the bucket in her desperate haste to enter the compartment to evade her suit. Adrienne rubbed the goose egg she could feel rising above her left eyebrow. Such a wound didn't concern her. She had "internal abilities" that would deal with that little problem almost instantly. It was just another small problem, she ignored, to which wouldn't have to attend in her crazy life.....
Four very worried people crowded around Caldwell's onyx desk where he had unrolled Morado's latest offering. 'What wasn't onyx or obsidian aboard this ship?' Caldwell thought to himself for the first time in astonishment. He opened the meetiing; "Once we in-jump into Dagab II, can we take Count Morado's clever contraption to track the movements of the Centauri ships so that our HAWKs can endgame them?
Morado, at the opposite end of the table, was sipping kaffa from a squeeze bulb. It would never replace hot jalla. he said between sucks on the bulb, "Not possible. Your missiles need gravitational motivators to generate gravity waves for a target seeker head to modulate and amplify as part of a detector system. There are several types of Centauri motivators and also several type of gravity wave modulators that I could describe, but any of them are beyond your current understanding to implement.
Caldwell, who knew what Humanity had discovered (Stolen off dead extinct aliens was probably more accurate.), knew that the Centauri hadn't the vaguest notion was Humanly possible, was astonished at Morado's statement and like with his recent conversation with Soren was a little more than irritated. It showed.
Morado switching from English to Mountain dialect Centauri gently explained, "You must understand, Captain, I mean no disrespect for Human prowess. Gravity control is one of those technologies that is so esoteric, that if you don't have the basic scientific understanding of the force, even if they drop a gravity motivator upon your lap, whatever gods favor you, it is of no use. You could not make it work unless you knew the WHY."
"What?" said Caldwell.
Adrienne Brown interjected, "WARLOCK."
"What?" the captain repeated himself.
"The WARLOCK uses a gravity polarizer to generate its inertia cage. I did peripheral work on its inertia cage during the startup when it was folded into the DESTROYER X program. I left it after it became clear that the Shadows were...."
"Enough!" barked Caldwell. Adrienne was about to say things that he, Caldwell, knew about her life, but that alien ears should not hear-especially about her work on Shadow Technology as a Technomage for Humanity when she had returned to a Clarkist Earth, come back from the dead.....
Adrienne looked at him, swallowed bile, and gazed at a confused Siebert and Morado. She continued, "I left the project when the engineers had a three meter per second acceleration field limit in the artificial gravity. That achievement was mostly Human-derived work from the remnants of Dilgar technology.”
Caldwell nodded. "That explains the outrageous linear acceleration of her particle thrust engines. The WARLOCK has her apparent inertia converted into artificial gravity?" he lied.
Adrienne agreed, head nodding. Both Malcolm and she switched to German which neither the Centauri or the weapon's tech understood. "Unfortunately, the reactionless thruster pack we use for the HALE negates the operation of any gravity polarizer we can build, now." she finished before Caldwell could ask the question.
"So our thruster pack can not supply the basis for any kind of gravity wave modulator/tracker or target locator system for our missiles using Morado's gear?” Caldwell asked now in English..
"No." replied Siebert, Morado, and Brown together in chorus.
"So much for the HAWK part of the plan," said Malcolm as he looked over Morado's handiwork.
Morado shrugged Centauri fashion and spoke,"Based on my limited experience aboard this ship, I would forget about using gravidics. Perhaps your WARLOCKs may be the path you take to that end in the future, but in this warship you are limited to electro-magnetics. Perhaps if you can find some quantum tunneling phenomena? Otherwise, it is the speed of light that limits you? And as long as your enemies use artificial gravity to bend light?"
"Our ordnance misses." finished Caldwell. "Ansible and teledyne are FTL communication; as technology based on E/M phenomena...but they are useless."
Morado puzzled asked, "Why?"
Adrienne took her turn to explain, "Both, Commander, are based on hyperspace boundary effects. They don't work in realspace. We can talk into and out of a hyperspace event horizon using this effect-even in a ship crawling across normal Real-space, but there is no equivalent phenomena slower-than-light that we can use. We have translation gear that interprets the phenomena into our Real-space terms that we can use in our frame of referant-hence our terms for such gear-ANALOG."
Morado hearing for the first time this confusing explanation of Human communications gear, didn't understand, "How did you Humans come by these things? Perhaps you could still use these to...."
Siebert finally spoke up again revealing how much Dulanax had taught him recently as a weaponeer, "Sir, are you nuts! Shooting energy into a wormhole?! Fly through, launch missiles, sure that's stable matter, but only a fool would try to send energy through an event horizon. Don't you know what happens?" Larry was agitated now. He fidgeted nervously while the others talked.
Morado, a calming influence among the hot-tempered Centauri, finding Humans to be about the same temperament, applied his courtier placatory skills. Once he calmed Siebert down, he looked at the engineer of the group for further explanation, since she seemed to know the science best and could put it into plain Narn that he could understand; which she proceeded to do.
She said, "There is a mirror boundary effect we exploit. What you project into Hyperspace comes vectored straight back at you, amplified of course by the higher energy potential of that hyperspace and proportional to the energy that you used to open the wormhole."
She added "It is applied to any form of the binding forces. We discovered the Ansible as an E/M Hyperspace edge effect while researching the phenomena during the Minbari War; when we captured Minbari FTL gravitational communications gear. We couldn't modulate it with gravity, but there was always magnetism!"
Caldwell added to the puzzled Morado's confusion, "We found it at the same time we learned how to open worm holes without exotic matter. We thought that if we could get away from Quantium Forty we could avoid the feedback energy problem. Didn't work."
Caldwell looking at the Centauri tried again. "If Hyperspace is a puddle and you push the water at the edge of that puddle it forms a wave that travels across the edge of that puddle. The wave crest never enters into the puddle itself, but every bacterium in the puddle feels the passage of the wave trough." Still no comprehension on the face of the Centauri. Caldwell gave up.
Adrienne picked that odd moment to laugh. "Apparently the rest of you don't comprehend." Adrienne said, looking at Caldwell in a knowing way, gazing on the completely befuddled Morado, she smiled, "That is comforting to me. We, Humans, have something we can call our own, like you Centauri with your precognition, or the Brakiri with their Speaking to the Dead.”
"Or the Drazi with their bad breath?" interjected Morado with a joke.
"-we Humans can visualize in our mind's eye the actual workings of Hyperspace." Adrienne finished. She looked at the puzzled Larry Siebert. "Well; at least most of Us." Caldwell was suddenly busy perusing the unrolled map of OPERATION IDANA.
Morado turned his attention down to the tabletop and to his "baby". "Let us put that aside shall we, yes?" Caldwell had set magnets to hold the plan firmly in place so that it would not re-roll.
"With with the set of gravitational wave distortion detectors I've given us. It is no gravidic detector grid that shows you where the enemy is instantly when he moves using his gravidic engines, but it is better than what you have and it cannot be easily foiled." Morado looked around. "Now; as to how we will use this against that fool Jathren...."
The four of them bent over the plan.
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End of Chapter 5: Part 2
A little CHAOS is a GOOD thing.
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Post by Avatar on Sept 1, 2019 4:47:58 GMT
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Into the Chasm of Night : Chapter 6; Part 1
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Map-reading for the Dumb
Lord Jathren and Ishdai looked at the holographic map. Dagab II was a nondescript single star with fourteen planets.
The one Ishdai zoomed in on in close up was Idana. "There it is." he said in disgust. "It is the Centauri holding and the gravitational anchor for the nodal terminus jump-gate of our spin-ward circuit. If we lose it; then the Humans have a direct jump route to the Centauri Core Worlds; including, Centauri Prime. They split the Republic into two halves and hold the center against both halves, if they take the gate with its beacon. Without that Hyperspace beacon our ships would have to long jump around the periphery of the Republic to navigate instead of jumping across."
The Marquis brought up a macro-scale holographic map of Centauri space to show this to Jathren. "This is the reason, more important than the Quantium Forty in the outer cometary belt, why Idana is important.
Jathren's childlike fool mind asked the obvious question, "Why didn't we build other gates and other beacons to obviate this weak link in our jump-gate network?
Marquis Ishdai shrugged Centauri fashion. "Nobody, besides us, knows how to map the overlay of a Hyperspace beacon network, aside from the Minbari and maybe the Markab, and relate it to Real-space, point for point. We just completed our survey within this generation to understand how the beacons interlock into critical nodal points.”
“As to why we didn't build more beacons? It doesn't do any good. The nodal beacons belong to the jump-gates built by the First Ones. Nobody, I suspect, not even the Minbari, among the younger races knows the secret of building such a nodal beacon......”
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Map-reading for the Not So Dumb
It wasn't the best pre-battle conference that Caldwell had ever attended. The officers’ command group from the Alliance HERO class destroyer, but not their captain, ferried over to the HALE aboard a rather decrepid looking "Vulture" that externally looked almost as worn out as the one he used on planetary excursions.
The leader of the HERO party, Joshua Kelley, their ship's Navigator, as they all gathered in the Officer's Mess for this HALE command group, dog and pony show, listened politely and answered questions as to what the SPRUANCE could bring to the party.
Looking at the OPERATION IDANA maps he asked, "So we lure the big cheese on the other side to over-commit his forces to a "flush and shoot". When he deploys his "net" to catch you, we over-jump his pickets and land in the center of his "trap" here at Dagab II. We blow whatever he has in system and knock out the beacon, taking out that node for that whole section of the Tigris Circuit. With the beacon gone, he can't jump in his outer pickets to kill us by weight of numbers. Once we have Idana, then we bring in our own Hyperspace Gate repair parties and Beacons and tie them into the Euphrates Network via the Indus Circuit, split the Fan-heads in two, and defeat them in detail. Cute!"
Kelley looked levelly at Caldwell and asked him point blank: "Just who do you KNOW, Captain, Sir, that can knock out a First Ones' beacon in Hyperspace without blowing the Gate and the local Hyperspace gravity gradient to hell and gone, much less cause the system star to Nova? And how did you find out that Dagab II had such a beacon?"
Malcolm looked at the Navigator with catlike innocence and said nothing.
Kelley and the rest of his party looked once more at the OPERATION IDANA map as a "tame" Centauri, named Morado, outlined the steps in the plan.
Kelley guessed that it was that fan-head, Morado, who drew up this "Himmelsfahrt Kommando exercise". He would have to warn his Captain......
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Let's Dance
Dulanax was used to missing more often than hitting at long range with the NATHAN HALE's guns. The two ship element that over-jumped danger close THROUGH the planet's, Idana's, locus mass, emerged within a few thousands of kilometers of the Centauri orbital base; with the planet behind the Alliance ships, so that the Centauri garrison commander in his higher geosynchronous orbit had to choose to fire at the planet as well as them. The few seconds that the fan-heads wasted in trying to decide, Dulanax assumed, that the HALE would try to get a little closer to the Centauri base before it opened fire. The HALE certainly had the delta vee for it.
As he saw it from the HALE's Fire Control Center, the HERO class ship opened up with its spinal lasers, long before Dulanax judged the two Human ships would be in position to fire, while that destroyer was still emerging from its jumppoint. The HERO's lasers hit and raked the Centauri station, slicing from out to in on the station as it followed its orbital ballistic. The NATHAN HALE fired its polarizer at a slightly shorter range five seconds later, once Dulanax confirmed the Centauri station's jammers were dead. The beam hit station center of mass and vaporized the already rent, gas venting, fire engulfed victim of the HERO's remarkable gunnery.
Dulanax was too professional to be a gawker. The HERO bleeding velocity was already falling toward a pair of low orbiting VORCHANs in a hard braking maneuver, changing its vector to an intercept conic. Its, the HERO's Furies, were already out. These spread out in an offensive defensive screen slightly ahead of their mother ship.
The HERO's spinal lasers speared the nearer VORCHAN of the pair, splashed the VORCHAN for a second, then drilled through. Dulanax cursed in admiration as he saw the shot, in close up, on the teledyne. The beams missed the VORCHAN's antimatter reactor by a mere forty meters! Hulled and holed, that VORCHAN, on fire, began to tumble from the venting.
The farther VORCHAN belched ion bolter fire and anti-fighter mines. It lauuched a flock of the fuzzy blue Centauri plasma missiles in an escorting halo around itself. Dulanax recognized this as escape fire.
The VORCHAN captain was trying to open a jump-point and escape while still gravitationally anchored in orbit with cold gravidic engines. That was incredibly dangerous for the VORCHAN and anyone stupid enough to be near it. Furies from the HERO disregarded this fact and surged forward at maximum acceleration from their defensive screening positions to a high low port to starboard ventral strafing run on the VORCHAN. The Centauri's fire went local point defense as he tried to turn himself to meet the Furies head-on and not give them a shot at his vulnerable engines.
The HERO was re-cyclying its spinal lasers, so it made do with its ventral slicer. It was, again, an extreme range shot, very long for a Human ship; or so Dulanax thought. The Centauri must have gotten his engines working at last, for he was now transverse to the HERO, going better than orbital ballistic speed and very close to the planet. With the jump-point forming, a fairly big planet providing soon partial terminator horizon cover, and the VORCHAN's jammers now going full bore, that Centauri Captain must have thought, that if he could survive the Furies, then his escape was assured. The eight Furies made it through the plasma missile barrage, avoided miraculously the VORCHAN's ion bolter fusillade, and missed the VORCHAN with their KMD fire in return. The missiles the Furies launched in their attack were, as usual spoofed by Centauri jammers. The missiles went bombing into the planet.
The desperate Centauri VORCHAN captain didn't care. The Idanese colonists had to take their chances like he did in this battle, didn't they?
The VORCHAN was mere moments from the jump-point, when the HERO's slicer hit.The VORCHAN split into two parts-one third and two thirds-from the dorsal fin to the starboard wing being the smaller surviving portion. The other part exploded, as it tumbled off vector into the collapsing jump-point. There were no pods.
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Hiccup
A small ship, as oily black hulled as the NATHAN HALE, herself, fell away from the dorsal landing pad on the PATRIOT's port wing. The little ship pitched and yawed on a heading as if anticipating something. A jump-point opened in front of the HALE. The little ship darted forward impossibly fast into the event horizon, which just as suddenly as it had appeared in front of the HALE, now closed.
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The Charlestown While....
Dulanax watched this event in amazement, while NATHAN HALE thumped with the launch of HAWKS and Furies. A faint distant blob on Morado's gravity wave distortion detector modified telescopes showed up optically at last. That mass had been manually plotted hours before; hiding outsystem in the comet halo, when the HALE had sneaked a disguised Hyperspace probe through the Dagab II; Idana Jump-gate as routine ship debris. Such debris would often accompany normal merchant ship traffic and as expected the careless fan-heads missed it., The target, now, was an optically fuzzy blob. It was a large-vectored object, coincident with the predicted route to be expected of a gravitationally powered capital ship moving very fast from a zenith ambush position sited to catch an Alliance ship emerging from Hyperspace jump at what should have been its safest close approach vector from Alliance Space into the Dagab II uncharted gravity gradiant. 'Tough luck, fan-heads.' thought Dulanax, 'The Humans have some damned good Brakiri gravigators in their Alliance!' He tentatively I.D.ed the approaching blob as a PRIMUS. He labeled it Tango Four. He looked at it again, suddenly suspicious.
Dulanax got that Drazi ache in his ribs; that was the intuitive harbinger of very bad news. So, that blob was probably an OCTURION, he concluded. It wouldn't be charging the NATHAN HALE like it was, unless that OCTURION had VORCHAN support, lots of VORCHAN support. The VORCHANS were probably too close to the OCTURION to separate out from the optical image merge on Human telescopes at such an extreme range.
On the teledyne, Dulanax saw the HERO gingerly tiptoeing through the orbital Centauri mine-fields surrounding Idana, as the last line of Centauri defense. It was releasing its own ordnance-Narn designed blockade mines. 'If we lose here,' Dulanax thought, 'It will at least cost the fan-heads considerable headaches to clear out our presents.' From a moral standpoint; it was better than de-orbiting H Bombs and slaughtering colonists. From a political viewpoint; from within the volatile Alliance, it made this attack more justifiable in the eyes of neutrals. The problem, now tactically, was that this part of OPERATION IDANA, designed to isolate the planet and prevent anyone on it from launching to the jump-gate in a run for help, was taking too long. That HERO was taking its own sweet time to finish sowing mines, instead of hurrying up to join the NATHAN HALE to meet the new threat running in system on them like a herd of eleopharchi.
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Hiccup
The little black ship came rest relative to something that was both existent and nonexistent. It was, the ship's occupant could sense through her artificial senses, as nonexistent as the thing, she had come to kill, the aliveness of the being, was glorious, that holiness that the thing had once been before it became this something else. In the polyvalent hues of colored hyperspace, it was hard to see the thing's structure as if a standing gravitational wave could have structure visible to the living corporeal eye!
It would take some Clarkean science indeed to do what was necessary, the little black ship's occupant mused, as it prayed for its soul to a nameless god and for the soul of the thing it would try to kill.
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We Slap Our Knees in Time....
As Dulanax expected, the VORCHANs appeared as little blobs surrounding the bigger blob. They were still too small and poorly illuminated at this distance to register as distinct objects. Dulanax mentally counted the little blobs as they emerged from the central fuzzy mass. Seven. Eight.....Ten....Twelve.... Too many for the HALE to fight! Dulanax's abdomen throbbed in fear as he saw the classic Centauri long vector attack formation take shape in the incoming data.
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Hiccup
Sooner or later, the little black ship's pilot had to leave the safety of its confines. This was not a murder you could commit at a distance. The hell of it was that the pilot knew the truth, the thing to be murdered, it wanted to die. Its agony and its sin was that deep; that it called across the space/time asking for someone to release it from its gravitational rack of torment.
What original sin it committed to condemn it to this pinion of pain was beyond the pilot's comprehension, understanding, and probable caring. What insect could know the feelings; the torments, triumphs, or dispairs of a demi-god condemned to suffer through to universal heat death for something it did, either too trivial or profound, for the comprehension of the ephemerals?
The black ship pilot approached the thing/not thing with the mundane tools one would expect of a creature of this age. It wore a primitive semi-sapient encounter suit guaranteed to keep it alive in the normal vacuum and conditions of Real-space for a couple of days. For tools to maneuver in the realm of hyperspace the pilot carried a personal gravidic maneuvering unit-sort of like a gravitational surfboard analogy to that actual tool that ancient Earthers used to ride on oceanic waves that came to shore. The pilot used its "board" to "ride the tube" of a Hyperspace gravitational wave until the pilot's forward progress came to rest in the null space around the thing-the creature crying out for the pilot to kill it.
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As We Waltz to March time....
Lord Jathren's OCTURION yawed rolled and aligned itself sloppily on the new vector of its VORCHAN escort. The DRAGON's ORCHID surged towards Idana effortlessly. Centauri inertia cages were good but you still felt that faint tug of acceleration when the ship changed direction. Jathren paid it no heed as he exulted in the tactical situation laid out before him as a feast. The foolish Humans had shown themselves-not where he, Jathren had expected or that fool, Ishdai had predicted, but out in the OPEN just the same. The idiots were stuck in Idana's gravity field. Their primitive ships would take minutes to climb out of that deep "pit" of potential energy. During those minutes; He, Jathren would have the Acceleration energy potential advantage, what ancient Centauri sailors in the Age of the Wind Propelled Warship called the weather or the wind gauge.
During those minutes while the Humans were pinned by gravity in place, Lord Jathren's ships would decelerate and dance around the slow Humans and victory would be his!
What did He, Jathren, need with fools like the Marquis Ishdai or that nameless Drakh?
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Hiccup
Murder is such a simple thing. Sometimes it involves a power such as a Spell of Destruction or sometimes it involves nothing more than a gentle push. The pilot pushed at the thing in pain. The dead center equilibrium of its rack of pain tipped. 'Not too much' the pilot thought, 'You must give the thing/not thing time enough to "enjoy" its death-to control the way of its passing or all of this will be for nothing.' The pilot felt the outward push of gravitational tide from the thing, an outgoing ripple of gravity. In that wave, the pilot felt a "Thank You."
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By the Numbers, Two, Three, Four....
On the NATHAN HALE's bridge it was frantic haste. The thump of HAWK and Fury launches had long ceased. On the Analog, Caldwell saw the clumsy deployment of the Centauri trap before his narrowed eyes.
Morado, at Caldwell's left elbow, as once the Centauri had stood beside Jathren, tugged at his Narn uniform collar and griped, "Why do you crazy Humans use animal skins in your uniforms?"
Caldwell gave the Centauri a half-smile but didn't waste breath to reply. Instead, he was busily using hand signals and short phrases of mostly unintelligible (To Morado) Human battle language to his bridge crew. As Caldwell commanded and directed, the NATHAN HALE pointed her bow toward the center of the oncoming Centauri mob of ships; the HALE following closely behind the cloud of her HAWKs that she was shepherding into the attack. HALE's Furies, contrary to the traditional historical Earth Force practice, followed behind their base ship. No Cuisinart maneuver today, with its consequent danger of fighter attack vector over-commit, here. If the NATHAN HALE was going to make it, the fighters would have to be used well. Caldwell looked at his "pet" Centauri. "What will Jathren's VORCHANs do?" he asked, a question of his advisor, at this rather late-in-the-battle game.
"If Marquis Ishdai gives the battle orders, we are doomed." said Morado. "He isn't that big of a FOOL. The Vorchans he will order to mass fires at their maximum range, off our approach axis and concentrate on one of our flank aspects as we traverse their formation. They will, then, swing into a pursuit vector and fire on our engines if they can. They will repeat these tactics until they have stripped one side of our ship of weapons; then, they will mass fires in a continuous barrage on our weaponless flank until we are killed. Rest assured that Ishdai if he gives the orders will keep the Vorchans together and mass their fires on US. He will save the OCTURION and keep it only in fire support range, until it is time for the finishing blow."
For added emphasis; Morado restated, "He, Ishdai, will most definitely hold the OCTURION out of the close fight and use its combat lasers and matter cannons at long range to strip us of weapons so that the VORCHANs can maul us closely."
"Then we head straight for the OCTURION" stated Caldwell.
Morado's face paled, an d he felt his tentacles suddenly clutch his belly in fear.
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Hiccup
The pilot made it back to the little black ship. There was no point trying to make it to either the Dagab II Jumpgate or trying to signal an allied ship to open a wormhole for the little black ship to escape into normal space.
Firstly; there was no beacon nearby presently active, anymore, to act as a navigational fix between Hyperspace and Real-space. The Human NAVSTAR V beacons that would serve the future purpose were dormant during this battle, sleeping, until the pilot awakened the nodes.
Secondly; any attempt to open a wormhole right now might have distinctly unpleasant consequences-especially gravitational ones for Dagab II, the star itself.
Thirdly; the pilot wasn't going to abandon the thing/not thing she had just murdered. There were moral obligations.....
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And We Line Dance, Two Stepping all the Way....
Caldwell yelled at no one in particular, "Did that Jump-gate just die?" as he read energy telltales off the large Dagab II system strategic battle-space holographic map. "Doggone the teledyne is great to have!' thought Caldwell as the green indicator of an active artificial energy source winked yellow and then turned a nice, to Malcolm's interpretation anyway, cheerful red.
With this good news, Caldwell barked at Na'Talith, "Go to maximum crew-safe acceleration. We can't maneuver with the fan-heads, but if we get to micro-gravity we sure can out accelerate them. Fight them on our terms....."
Na'Talith countered, "We'll have to release the HAWKs to reach flat-space quickest."
"Compromise the vector." Caldwell said, "We can't release control. The missiles will be spoofed too far out. We need the HAWKs to tie up the escort VORCHANs' guns long enough for our Furies to close.”
On the Analog, the HERO was finally climbing out of Idana's gravity well. She was paralleling the HALE's vector. Caldwell ruefully admired that ship's captain. Whoever he was, he was providing the PATRIOT with blindside flank cover from the threatened VORCHANs flanking end-run on HALE's current approach vector to the OCTURION and he was minimizing the risk to his own HERO destroyer.
The VORCHANs, ahead of the OCTURION, were almost within reach. The HERO's Furies left her and surged. Unusual! Caldwell saw them close rapidly on the nearest VORCHAN and skin-dance. It was a Minbari tactic learned through bitter experience, the bitter receiving Human end of its results. The multi-vectored conic of close approach strafing runs along multiple axis was the way Minbari single-ship fighter pilots made the best use of the Nials' poor turning ability. In the hands of Humans, flying Furies, with greater roll, yaw and pitch ability in the present battle, it was a much better Human tactic. The VORCHAN ruptured in flames as it vomited gas and chunks of itself. Lucky power-plant hit! Crap Centauri ship armor couldn't stop KMD fire. Noiseless BOOM! One down, eleven VORCHANs to go. Caldwell judged the HERO's fighters to have over-committed on their attack vector. It was too tangential to the sphere of space occupied by the Centauri. They, the HERO's Furies, would have to decelerate, re-vector, and beat a reverse course back to get into the battle.
The HERO, herself, was was drifting away from its covering position, but still running a parallel conic vector to the HALE. Caldwell was puzzled. 'What was that HERO's captain doing?' he asked himself.
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Hiccup
The pilot of the little black ship had no teledyne to watch the light show occurring in Real-space around the Hyperspace wherein the pilot was. What the pilot had was something darker and much older and more hateful-at least to the Lords of Order-and possibly the Human side of the ongoing fight the Pilot observed in her little hand-held sphere. The pilot smiled a little as the smaller Human ship changed vector. The Captain of the PATRIOT was going to be schooled in tactics by his junior in rank and prestige and that tickled the little black ship pilot's sense of humor. Oh yes, the pilot, though a murderer many times over, had a sense of humor.
One had to find laughter anywhere one could, the pilot thought, as the battle rushed toward its climax. The pilot turned senses outward to check on the dying progress of its friend-the thing/not thing, the pilot had so obligingly, for all the "right" and "moral" reasons, murdered. The pilot thought of the murder as a debt of honor that the pilot owed to the thing for the wrongful punishment it had been forced to suffer for whatever slight that its punishers had judged it to have committed against Creation.
'It will be over, soon.' the pilot thought. With ancient martial knowledge, older than the Centauri species currently making the terrible mistakes in battle, the pilot saw what the outcome would be ere those Humans who would execute the slaughter could devise it.
The pilot, thus watched two deaths in progress......
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Doing the Turkey Trot.....
Caldwell watched the HERO yaw slightly. He asked to confirm his suspicion, "Is that ship changing vector, again?"
"Yes, and the VORCHANS nearest it are breaking away from the OCTURION to give chase." Na Talith confirmed from her station." She spoke into the air at Dulanax's Analog holograph, managing her part of the HALE's fight, "Dulanax? The OCTURION have you targeted it?"
Caldwell didn't hear the answer, for things elsewhere were happening rapidly. He was getting that old single-ship fighter pilot sensory overload. He saw the HERO pitch end for end, and fire its spinal lasers. The swarms of remote interferometer probes that human ships used to aid in targeting triangulation for weapons fire; those devices were the probes that now gave multiple gun-camera views of the action on the Analog. That showed five different closeups of the HERO and its target split screened-one image for each sensor remote covering this individual action. Twin beams of white hot light shot out from the HERO in profound closeup into the darkness. Multiple gasps broke out from the Narns and one very shocked Centauri on the NATHAN HALE's bridge. The Humans were too busy to care. The beams splashed a VORCHAN, the intended target, and it exploded.
Morado sighed, "So Hyach technology, too, falls before you? Your engineers learned quickly that alien technology you steal. What did you use on the Hyach to force their secrets from them?" the Centauri asked bitterly.
Before anyone could answer Morado's purely rhetorical question, the HERO fired once again at her pursuers. Another VORCHAN's hull was drilled through and it exploded.
Dulanax interrupted this incredible display of Human gunnery to announce, "Fire solution on the OCTURION." For in the midst of gawking at the HERO's gunnery lesson, Na'Talith had executed Caldwell's wish to come in on the VORCHAN denuded aspect of the Centauri attack group's vector.
'After all why waste the opening caused by the unexpected bait that the HERO dangled in front of the foolish fan-heads by that idiot HERO captain's unplanned course change?' so thought the Narn, Na'Talith.
The HERO fired again. Another VORCHAN hit. Dulanax's hologram reported laconically, "Polarizer firing.....Hit." His hologram image insert that popped in as a window on the master Analog view partially obscured the OCTURION target. It was an extreme range polarizer shot.If it was a hit, Caldwell judged it to be a grazing one. The OCTURION seemed to stagger in mid career. It looked like it wanted to tumble, but it ponderously righted itself and kept coming.
"Eight seconds to our most prudent firing range." Dulanax reported.
Na'Talith added matter of factly, "He will be in optimum combat laser and matter cannon range in forty seconds."
"When can we fire again?" asked Caldwell.
"Thirty seconds." said Ka'Danash, a Narn tech assigned to watching the telltales and status repeater on the HALE"S polarizer. He was part of the bridge crew; in deference to the Human mania for information redundancy in battle.
"Better hit this time, you accursed Drazi." snarled Na'Talith.
"Or we're doomed?" laughed Dulanax ending the question.
The offside vector VORCHANs finally came onto a proper attack bearing to strafe the HALE. They were late as Caldwell saw in executing their maneuver. The HERO was still angling out on its conic and the VORCHANs chasing her were out of this specific fight. The fan-head gun-ships were over-committed like any bunch of ineptly used fighters.T o that extent the HERO had split the Centauri formation in two and left a flank wide open for the HALE to exploit. Caldwell didn't know if the HERO's captain designed this; or if it was an accident of battle maneuvering. Malcolm didn't care. The opening was there and HALE was precisely positioned to exploit.
At this time, he was trying to thread the HALE into the gap of the OCTURION's exposed ventral starboard flank before those brain-dead Centauri in the enemy fleet plugged it.
In passing; the PATRIOT's captain noticed that the OCTURION's remaining VORCHANs were forming a circle and coming straight at him! A Cuisinart? Those idiots were trying for a Cuisinart against as PATRIOT? Caldwell called to Dulanax, "Master gunner, you're going to have some VORCHAN's strafing us in a flyby shortly. I suggest KMDs in interceptor mode and auto-gunner on the Slicers."
Dulanax's hologram swallowed hard once. Six or more VORCHAN in a close strafe was about the limit he thought that any warship could take. More than five hundred ion bolters fired in a couple seconds? He saluted and said stoically, "Aye Aye Captain."
Caldwell was puzzled that the HERO hadn't fired her magnificent lasers again. The VORCHANs were halfway across the gap between the HALE and the OCTURION. It was definitely a Cuisinart the fan-heads were attempting.
Tele-operated HAWKs were end-gaming, just as the VORCHANs' ion bolter fire started clanging on the HALE's armor. Some of the HAWKs got through! Slicers from the HALE flailed at the VORCHANs as they flashed past, putting the HALE in the middle of their "necklace of death". KMDs intercepted most of the VORCHANs' bolter fire, but a quick glance by anyone on the bridge at the master damage control plot showed the HALE's accumulating wounds.Caldwell knew there were too many VORCHANs even with the HERO's bleed off of half of them for his ship to handle. He knew it going into this charge. BANG! That last hit was internal. Caldwell had that WE'RE DEAD feeling clutching at his windpipe. Everything on the Analog reinforced that feeling in Caldwell's gut.
Dulanax dully reported, "KMD loads down to forty percent."
Nothing, but good news....Caldwell braced himself.
Dulanax reported, "Polarizer firing....missed."
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End of Chapter 6; Part 1
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Into the Chasm of Night: Chapter 6; Part 2
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Fanhead Fandance
Lord Jathren was displeased. He saw two of his VORCHANs exploded by that accursed Human junk-ship's smaller companion's beam weapons. He knew intuitively that he had made mistakes as a reproachful Marquis Ishdai had been all too ready to tell him.
Sending off half his VORCHANs to chase that smaller Human ship was a mistake.
Forgetting that the Humans out-ranged him was a bigger mistake
Failing to reposition his escorts to block his suddenly exposed flank in time to block that Human junk-ship was a very bad mistake.
That forced him to commit his VORCHANs to an attack beyond his range to support with matter cannon fire.
At least Ishdai agreed to his VORCHAN attack. Better to lose two or three VORCHANs in an attack that crippled the Human before the main close engagement, his advisor argued.
Still the Humans were doomed despite his mistakes. Lord Jathren remembered from his limited instruction concerning space warfare, that all battle was ultimately decided at short range.
Ishdai was pacing, frightened and worried.
"How soon before the lasers and matter cannons fire?" Jathren prodded his advisor.
"About forty seconds." said the hand wringing Ishdai.
Just then a tremendous charge of energy passed the OCTURION. Dozens of Centauri died at their posts as electrical systems discharged into their bodies. The OCTURION's control systems had numerous safeties and fail-safes. The Centauris' engineers and naval architects weren't stupid, but even those systems weren't designed to cope with a grazing hit by such a weapon . Disciplined Centauri dumped the dead bodies out of the way and assumed the vacated posts. They reset systems and made quick repairs. The OCTURION continued to close.
Jathren lounging in his command throne said unnecessarily, "They missed."
"Jammers full output, NOW!" said Marquis Ishdai urgently. He explained to his patron, as Lord Jathren was about to either countermand or question his order, "Our gravidic dispersal fields and armor won't protect us against that kind of beam; a beam weapon of that power! They could just sweep that beam across us and destroy us!"
"Bah", said Lord Jathren, "We have very good armor and electrical screens of our own....."
"Which seems to be not as good as the Humans seem to have." said the Marquis, seeing by the battle imager repeater, hundreds of pulses of ion bolter fire from a half dozen VORCHANs fired into the large Human ship at the center of their circle of fire. Most of the ion bolters seem to burst apart in mid vector as if hit by something-the infamous Human Interceptors? Some bolters seemed to splash apart just short of the Human ship's armor. That would be the incredible Energy Web the Humans used as part of their active defense technology. Only one bolter in twenty, Ishdai judged, actually hit the Human ship's armor. The black oily smokey stuff seemed to lightning streak when a hit was scored. Maybe a scorch mark would last a brief second, then, the armor visibly rippled and healed itself! Ishdai felt the tentacles of fear clutch his abdomen and wrap solidly around his thorax. The Human ship turned pivoting in the imager and pointed its pronged maw directly at HIM. "Jammers at maximum over-boost!" he shrieked in pure terror.
Lord Jathren looked at his cowardly advisor in disgust. He said calmly, "Evade."
Trained Centauri moved the the DRAGON's ORCHID off vector in a random direction. This caused the Human ship to miss. 'Good" thought Jathren. He ordered, "Resume closing on that piece of Human garbage."
Ishdai muttered. Lord Jathren asked him "What did you say?"
"Get to the transports, milord, for you have killed this ship." said Ishdai dully.
"Coming into primary weapons' range." interrupted a Centauri officer.
"Good. Let us see the Humans handle this ship's firepower! Fire our mains at him!” said Jathren triumphantly.
The DRAGON's ORCHID fired its battle lasers and matter cannons. Lord Jathren watched, satisfied, as weapons fire splashed around the ugly Human ship. There was no color to that hideous black blocky thing. No grace, No style.
Strange that the streams of coherent particles beams-the battle lasers, or the pellets from matter cannon fire seemed to be splotching across the enemy's hull, but it wasn't doing anything.....The cursed enemy didn't explode!
"What is the matter with you fools? Increase fire rate!" shouted Lord Jathren.
Centauri soldiers and technicians around Jathren looked at him bewildered.
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Hiccup
Looking at the Chaos in the handheld sphere the little black ship's pilot smiled. 'Soon, very soon, the two deaths would conjoin. Two evils would be set to rights. The pilot laughed. Perhaps the Ancient Masters would find humor in this dichotomy of Order and Chaos. The servants of neither.......
Ah, the thing/not thing was folding in on itself, closing itself off from this reality. Only the pilot would witness the thing's final passing. Such deaths should be private affairs, witnessed only by the murdered and the murderer....
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Round Peg, Square Dance?
Soren had his damage control parties well in hand. The NATHAN HALE had poor single-ship fighter pilots, mediocre gunners; but the Minbari engineer was certain that his engineering division could have functioned well aboard any SHARLIN. During the dull moments he was prepared to anticipate the possible effects of Centauri weapon's fire. On his Vregan supplied Amiga he kept abreast of the pertinent details of the external battle.
Minbari saw better in blue-light than most species so the blue tinted smears that assaulted the eyes of most non-Minbari when looking at Soren's Amiga were crystal sharp and clear to him.
Soren had ceased to be an active Warrior Caste, when his people surrendered to the Humans those many years ago, but he had forgotten nothing of his training. To Soren as he saw the battle merge between the NATHAN HALE and the OCTURION, he knew that the Centauri was using his VORCHANs poorly. He, Soren, would have sent the Vorchans, en masse, as flankers and used the OCTURION as the fulcrum of the battle to set the angle of incidence on the closing vectors. Instead the Centauri allowed the Humans to trisect the converging planes of fire. The OCTURION should have placed itself at the apex of two converging conics of fire and smothered the two Alliance ships in a crossfire of battle laser, matter cannon, and ion bolter fire. Instead the Centauri split their VORCHANS to chase the Humans in two directions. The OCTURION sending its remaining VORCHANs in an encircling flyby allowed the HALE to bring EVERY weapon to bear on something while the VORCHANs failed to concentrate fire. Soren could scarce conceal his contempt for the Centauri in this fight. In effect they were even bigger idiots than the fool Humans aboard the HALE.
Soren shrugged. Sometimes tactics had to be simple, direct, and brutal. Soren watched with detached interest as the OCTURION's battle lasers and matter cannons splashed fire across the HALE's armor. The two giants were in the final stage of their charge at each other. It was a detached calm Minbari who wondered if the HALE would continue to show sloppy error prone gunnery or if the OCTURION would make the mistake.
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Hiccup
The thing/not thing was about done in its dying. The little black ship pilot sighed. A part of the pilot's attention was devoted to the two onrushing monsters closing to point blank range to finish the death-dance.
The pilot spoke aloud for the first time since the act of murder, "Decoys? That is how you survive point-blank combat laser, matter cannon, and ion bolter fire?"
It was an insane thing, to launch crude ballistic mines that contained Quantium Forty encapsulated micro-fusion warheads. The explosion was actually an implosion that created a momentary pseudo-mass that mimicked a genuine gravitational infinity. Clever. The pilot hadn't known of this little Human trick; it was a nasty surprise indeed! Centauri gravidic aimed weapons would shoot at the pseudo-mass and achieve nothing as the weapons fire was sucked down into the gravity sheer of the pseudo-mass' gravitational field as the weapon's fire came within the "apparent event radius" of the "very Real-space" gravity gradiant. Truly, it was a capability difficult for a non First One to discover, to build, and as far as the pilot knew, a totally peripheral and a too temporary effect at that to be a useful property of Q 40-its quaint ability to tap the Hyperspace energy sink to create short-lived micro-hypermasses-something unknowable to the Younger Races who lacked the necessary understandiing of exitic matter to see it-until NOW. Who, but the Humans, was insane enough to squander research on scarce Quantium Forty as a temporary possible Hyperspace zero point energy focal tap to create such Hypermasses or use it for such strange purposes?
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Dosey Doe or Dosey Don't?
"We're almost out of chaff mines." reported Na'Talith.
Caldwell nodded. So far; the mines had stopped most incoming fire, (Perhaps ninety percent, a part of his mind intuitively guessed?) of the murderous OCTURION's close ranged fire. The rare hit was awful enough. The whole massive fifty-five million tons of NATHAN HALE lurched violently around Malcolm each time something struck. He saw a lot of kinetic shock damage as things solidly Human built broke loose in his C&C and fell in the vector direction of HALE's acceleration. He witnessed on the HALE's remote interferometer probes' broadcasted gun-camera Analog imagery, that as the HALE came closer to the Centauri ship, the OCTURION scored more hits per volley each that it fired. Though a lot of it splashed across the armor or exploded short (Interceptors); some of it pierced the HALE’s armor. The HALE was on fire with visible plumes of boiling and burning gas escaping through hull rips. This was the worst ninety seconds through which Malcolm had ever lived. Judging by what was coming, the next ninety seconds promised to be even more dreadful-much worse.
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Bang That Drum Slowly.....
The third polarizer shot didn't miss. Dulanax smiled as the fan-head battlewagon ruptured. No one aboard that Centauri ship would be having fun, right now. Continuous combat laser, matter cannon, and ion bolter fire had damaged NATHAN HALE horribly.Three quarters the Ventral slicers were gone. The port-side KMDs were shot out. Likewise the empty cells of the port and ventral missile launchers were wrecked. Huge dotted line rupture marks scarred the armor where the PATRIOT had been hulled and holed. Yet the great ship still moved and fought as Dulanax saw on the Analog. Venting and fires notwithstanding, the NATHAN HALE was alive. She was spinning on her long axis now; keeping her remaining KMDs and slicers at work against the ragged concentration of VORCHANs trying to work their way back into a second firing pass. They were about a light second distant dorsal forward of the NATHAN HALE trying to form up for a charge.
Dulanax saw on his Analog repeater that the Furies; which to this point had followed behind the HALE dutifully; were locked now in a fur-ball with the OCTURION's fighters. The number of fighters an OCTURION carried was about equal to what was the HALE's present complement, but there the equality ended. Ruritanians and Sentries were simply no match for the Thunderbolt Fury. Still; those fan-head fighters tied up the HALE's Furies and left the ship naked to those milling VORCHANs forming up for their death-or-glory attack. The fatalistic Drazi in Dulanax thought he knew what was coming. To come so close! If he hadn't missed that second shot! The polarizer was out due to forward power-grid damage. Where was that HERO? Dulanax had lost track of it. 'Damn these worthless Human sensors!' he thought.
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Hiccup
It was dead. The little black ship pilot set aside time to pray to the nameless god at this moment of its, the thing's/not thing's passing.
The pilot now had only one death to concentrate upon. The Centauri monster was mortally wounded, but there were still the other Centauri jackals that would harass the Humans. The death dance wasn't finished, but the final acts were already foredoomed. It was only the playing out of the rondel on the hand-held crystal that delayed the pilot from the final act the pilot would play in Dagab II drama.
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The Tennessee Two Step or Dancing in Air;
Marquis Ishdai patted his bleeding lips. Lord Jathren had struck him. Weakling. A man would have knocked him down and killed him, but what could you expect in these degenerate days of the Republic? Ishdai looked quickly at the status displays. There wasn't much left of the DRAGON's ORCHID. The Humans had fired their spinal weapon again and hit the edge of the left wing. Almost a third of the OCTURION had vaporized before the shot passed. A surer hit would have destroyed them utterly.
As it was, they were dead in space, helpless. Looking at the Human ship as it moved off, Ishdai saw it trailing debris, with holes and rents all over its hull and on fire. It was still reasonably brick intact. It fired something like matter streamers, and it was using its other beam weapons at charging VORCHANs. Incoming fire on the Human ship was still met by those accursed Interceptors, that damned Energy Web, and that amazing double damned armor. By ship’s identification friend or foe reporting; Centauri or alien identification; only seven VORCHANs were left.
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Hiccup
Not yet, the little black ship pilot decided, not yet......
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Amidst alarms, blood, and gore on his smashed bridge, Captain Malcolm Caldwell looked at the broken body of Na'Talith. Damage control parties were struggling under fifty four meter per second^2 acceleration fields to put out fires and stop the howling venting tornado storm of air. Venting into space this deep inside his ship? The HALE was that badly hurt? Amidst the gale of wind and the whooping of alarms, the cries of the wounded or the dying, the too few able-bodied tended to the too many casualties; both mechanical and organic. Each pronouncement of death by the Narn medic(What was her name?) stung Malcolm bitterly with reproach. Another someone died, because he wasn't GOOD enough. The hell of it was that even at this late date in his command, Malcolm still didn't know most of them by name.
The Narn medic finally scrambled through the wreckage that pinned Na'Talith. She pronounced her still alive. Two Narns and a Human cleared away the wreckage and half dragged, half carried the hundreds of kilos of bloody-mangled but still breathing Narn executive officer off to Sickbay.
Morado, as gore covered, as his patron, but still at Caldwell's left elbow said, "We must get to the Furies, yes?"
Caldwell wearily nodded. "Otherwise, those VORCHANs will form up an attack wedge like they should have done in the beginning and run us down and shoot us in a mass volley. Like they should have done in the beginning." he repeated. Caldwell coughed up blood as if to punctuate his statement. "At least we can still hit them with our Slicers," rasped Caldwell burbling blood.
Morado saw his pale patron. ' I will not lose him,' thought Morado, 'We have come through too much together.' It was a surprising thought for the Count.
Morado put on his court jester personality, "True, Sir, we can kill them with our slicers, here: but I would like to live through this battle, Captain, so lets not give them the satisfaction of taking us with them." declared he; as he motioned what was left of the bridge crew to turn the HALE and take it toward the fighters. The PATRIOT yawed with fierce lateral acceleration. Everything weighed eight times what it should have instead of the twelve that Morado expected. Apparently the thruster pack had taken heavy damage.
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Hiccup
'Patience,' the little black ship pilot thought; 'Patience.'
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Fanhead Fool's Dance.....
Lord Jathren, looking at the battle imager, cheered, "Look! The coward Human flees before us!"
Ishdai who had another viewpoint, asked "Why? We are no threat. He shows his good flank to our VORCHANs, but he is not opening the......Oh." Marquis Ishdai, bloody lipped, bowed to his patron and left Lord Jathren's presence. Other Centauri were busy doing whatever they could for the DRAGON's ORCHID. Ishdai reached the OCTURION's hanger and commandeered a Centauri transport. It took minutes. He was impatient as he launched ostensibly to survey exterior damage to the DRAGON's ORCHID. He wanted off that hulk. Any second now something Human could burst the battered OCTURION asunder; and he wanted away from that ship.
Count Ishdai was a practical Centauri. Once you lost the battle, the safest place in a battle-zone was away from the shooting. He kept an eye out for stray ordnance and like the careful Centauri that he was; scampered the transport out of the local tracking range of wandering Human missiles or drifting Centauri mines.
On the Centauri transport's weak detection gear, he tracked the Human ship as she caught up with her fighters. The kaleidoscope of explosions in the fighter furball died as the massive "Brick" moved into the swirling swarm of single-ship fighters. It was as if its presence had been like a fireman who had put out a fire. Ishdai looked for friendly Centauri telltales in that area, but there were none. Only aliens.
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Hiccup
The little black ship pilot's hand-held globe showed the Centauri deaths as the fleeing Centauri Marquis saw them through his eyes. It was almost time to call. Almost.......
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Texas Triangle
Larry Siebert, using his recently acquired knowledge as a ship's gunner, saw the tracking problem played out in Fire Control in REALTIME. There was flock of VORCHANs at point A, the NATHAN HALE at point B, the fighter fur-ball at point C. Three points these were on a collapsing triangle, with planet Idana midway between B and C. Could the NATHAN HALE reach the fighters first, turn and face her pursuers and kill them before they killed her.
Weight increased. The Drazi, Dulanax, muttered "We give them our backs......" as he attended to the Slicers.
Siebert rarely prayed. Frankly; he didn't know to whom to pray. Now he sweated prayers to any and every deity he, of whom he heard or could, imagine. He urged more speed as his heart hammered under more weight.
Time slowed down. The few working Slicers left; swept aft futilely against the pursuing VORCHANs. The first Furies streaked close aboard and flashed past the NATHAN HALE. Siebert suddenly recognized that Captain Caldwell was using the planet as an anchor-executing a gravitational slingshot under boost, thereby putting the planet between HALE and her pursuers, split the VORCHAN pursuit into two halves since the VORCHANs would have to cover two escape vector conics- not one. BRILLIANT!
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Hiccup
The little black ship's pilot saw it in the hand-held sphere. The one who leads the Humans, changes, saw the pilot, but the endgame remains to be played.....Still not yet time to call....Almost though.......
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The Peacock Polka?
Desperation ploy? Morado could think of nothing else to tip the odds in this close battle. The odds otherwise were against him in numbers and in decreasing range.
Keep firing arcs in mind! "Point starboard KMDs and dorsal slicers at them." he said slowly and calmly in his difficultly learned English. He looked at Lemarchus who was tending the blood frothing Captain Caldwell and trying to handle helm control at the same time. Lemarchus would have to do this job, for which he wasn't trained, if this crazy plan was to succeed. Morado had all he could do to track the battle, compute vectors in his head, and assign damage control, since that fool of a Minbari engineer couldn't be trusted to prioritize the repairs needed.
Caldwell was conscious and he whispered intent and suggestions, but as far as Morado was concerned, his patron was incapacitated the minute that flying debris had punched a rib into Caldwell's lung. Morado's duty was to win this battle and save his patron while doing it.
Morado called to Dulanax in Fire Control, "Master Gunner, Do you see what the Captain intends?
The Drazi Analog hologram said, "Yes. We zip past the planet. The fools chasing us must split apart in two parties or we will use the planet to mask ourselves and flank them."
Morado said to Dulanax, "The VORCHANs will appear over the planet on opposite terminator approach vectors. They will pop-up on the planet horizon as we close skim the planet. The VORCHANs will be only there in our favorable range solution for two seconds, Master Gunner. Hit them quickly or we are dead."
"I guarantee three. If there are four to a grouping, we shall see." said Dulanax, who then vanished......
........"System failure." Morado cursed. Hoping it was the Bridge Analog and not ship Fire Control. Morado reassigned damage control parties to work "this casualty". Seconds later; as the ship swung behind Idana, or so Morado supposed it did by his in-his-head calculations and his pocket watch, he felt the wounded HALE change tempo. It was outgoing fire. Only on audio he heard Dulanax report, "Starhoard KMDs supplies gone, Slicers recharging."
"What results?" asked Morado, less than calmly, "Our Analog's out. We're blind here!"
"Don't panic." said Dulanax, again on audio only. "Two VORCHANs splashed; one damaged, on fire, venting, tumbling, gone ballistic; one fleeing with our fighters in pursuit. That group appeared over the Idana terminator to spin-ward our position."
The puzzled Morado digested that audio report, seeing in his mind's eye the way the surprised VORCHANs probably died, caught between the low orbit anvil of the HALE and the high orbit hammer of her Furies.
"What of the other three?" The Count had to know. If the HALE's fighters hounded off after that fleeing surviving VORCHAN, then HALE would be facing the last three Centauri with empty weapons."
Dulanax laconically reported, "Did I forget those? Sorry. The HERO caught them, anti-spin-ward in her own shadow-side low orbit ambush. Great Maker, that captain is clever." Dulanax laughed. "He stood his ship on its thrusters and hovered just within the planet's atmosphere right on the shadow terminator line. He speared the first two on his lasers, and before the third saw him, of the three VORCHANs, he cleaved it with his dorsal slicer. I'm watching that VORCHAN fall into the planet, both halves....."
Lemarchus, from the bridge Helm control looked up from where he tended Capatain Caldwell. The Brakiri's shocked visage spoke volumes. But the anguish of horror on Malcolm Caldwell's face froze Count Morado's blood. The Human said between spits of blood, "The impacts will kill thousands!"
He waved Morado to come over to where he lay and whispered to both the Brakiri, Lemarchus, and Morado, "I can't command like this...."
Morado, taking his patron's left hand in his, in a formal ceremony every Centauri, worthy of the blood, learned when he took his first oath of fealty; said simply, "I take this service to lead your people in your name." Caldwell, who had no idea what Morado was doing, but guessing that it was some sort of Centauri change of command ritual, nodded once in affirmation before finally letting go and having the blackness take him.
The Centauri Count stood up with as much dignity as he could under the various odd acceleration forces that tugged at HALE, looked at the bloody, dirty and in many cases gashed faces of the HALE's bridge crew and gave his first order in his halting broken English, "Go orbital ballistic."
The Narn technician Ka"Danash, the one now manning a dead Bridge telltale repeater for the HALE's polarizer, asked Morado, "Shall I organize a stretcher party for our Captain, Acting Captain, Sir?" He said this in Narn.
Morado nodded.
Ka'Danash and two Gaim busied themselves removing the unconscious Caldwell. They gently and reverently carried him on the same long, lonely trek that Na'Talith and so many others, too many others had traveled.
Morado, as he saw the stretcher party go, felt a little cold and alone. B'Gantus, the Narn medic who had pronounced upon Na'Talith, swam up to him and saluted. It was doubly odd. For she was a graceful Narn in micro-gravity and she saluted a Centauri "Captain" on the smashed ruin of a Human ship's C&C. She reported, "He has a rib pushed into his lung. For a Human that's very bad, but I think he will live, if we can get the rib out, mended and his wound sewn up, quickly.....He has really waited too long for us to move him."
Morado said, "He was in the middle of a battle. A patron doesn't abandon his people or his House...."
The Narn, not comprehending, saluted in expected dismissal. Morado returned this odd Human gesture of respect. His patron would recover. Good. To the Work, then.
Morado made his way across the debris strewn C&C, carefully. Some of it was free and drifting. First priority for him was visually obvious. He stood unsteadily by the left side of the Captain's chair and said into the audio pickup on the Ship's internal communications , the TWS, choosing Narn in which to issue the orders, "This is Morado, speaking for the Captain. All crew, still able, shall attend to our casualties, mechanical and to our wounded comrades. We shall recover our fighters as soon as we can."
Morado paused. There was the detail of cleaning up this battle. That was the victors' responsibility. "As soon as we are able, we shall launch search and rescue. We will offer quarter to those enemy survivors who wish to surrender."
Morado then switched to individual communication. "Mister Soren?" he asked.
"Soren, here, Morado. Is Caldwell dead?" asked the Minbari.
"No." replied the Centauri, not without the edge of anger to his voice.
"Pity." was the Chief Engineer's response.
Morado asked rather sharply, "Do you know what is expected of you?"
"Yes." was Soren's brief reply.
Morado to ensure that the Minbari understood said, "I am not as forgiving of your mistakes as the Captain, Mister Soren."
"Of course, the Captain is Human, You are Centauri. We, Minbari, understand these things." said Soren matter of factly.
Morado cut Soren off. ‘That Minbari might yet take a naked walk in space.’ He motioned the Brakiri to join him at the Captain's Chair. He said, "Lemarchus, you did well for us at the last. You weren't trained to pilot, yes?"
"If you need a Number Two to run this beast until the wounded and the Captain return to duty, then I accept." Lemarchus said with a broad smile.
"That is what I like about you, Brakiri," Morado smiled in return, "So modest! If you accept it, then, I will leave to you the great pleasure of cleaning up this mess." Morado waved at the wreckage. Lemarchus bowed in the fashion of the Brakiri and calling over several confused Narns who were trying to move a smashed wedged console, organized them and set about bringing Brakiri order to the Human Chaos.
Morado at last looked at the torn, bloody Captain's Chair. It wasn't a throne like you would find on a Centauri ship. It was plain, built to hold a Human firmly in place while acceleration and inertia crushed him under what would be many times his apparent rest mass. There were simple controls for the Analog in the right armrest and a set of simpler communication controls for the Ansible and teledyne in the left. The Humans expected their Captains to use their wits and the Ship's crew, not controls to handle a ship. Simplicity.
Morado sighed, yet once more, and climbed into the Captain's Chair. He opened up Intra-ship on the TWS to speak, "Attention throughout the ship! This is Morado, speaking for the Captain! We are victorious! Now, we will fix this ship, yes? Then, we will go and see if that fool of a Centauri, my old patron, Lord Jathren is still alive, aboard what we left to him of his OCTURION. If he is, he and I will have a long talk together."
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Burp
The little black ship's pilot smiled. Putting the hand-held sphere into a catch-pocket, the pilot adjusted her cloak, attended to her ship and set it on its pre-planned course. She headed it for the agreed rendezvous Hyperspace egress point. Adrienne Brown sent forth her call to activate the NAVSTAR V's to set the locus firrmly . The NATHAN HALE would home in on the locus, She would be be, there, with an open jump-point, waiting......
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End of Chapter 6; Part 2
A little CHAOS is a GOOD thing.
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Post by Avatar on Sept 1, 2019 4:54:00 GMT
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Into the Chasm of Night: Chapter 7; Part 1
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Picking Up the Pieces
The DRAGON'S ORCHID, or what was left of it was mostly repaired. Lord Jathren prided himself on his retainers and servants. They served an old House and they were an efficient, reliable, and loyal OCTURION crew, even if they saw a dozen VORCHAN loads of their fellows killed and a third of their own evaporated into vapor. The long range communications gear was smashed and all the ship's boats were gone, stolen by the few weaklings in his, Jathren's picked crew, but one expected that. The last boat had been stolen by that traitor, Marquis Ishdai.
The OCTURION was too far adrift from Idana for the escape pods, Jathren observed to himself.. Besides the radioactive mess in that world's atmosphere made a welcome for any survivors of the space battle most problematic. It wasn't a healthy choice. In that respect, the Narn blockade mines were a blessing. Lord Jathren could imagine what a rescue party from Idana had in mind for HIM, if they could reach him.
In any event, when an underling reported a ship approaching, Lord Jathren was excited. Finally a rescue ship from Centauri Prime! He raced to the OCTURION's battle control to open communication, not even deigning to stop at a porthole to peer at his rescuers' ship.
He emerged into battle control and stopping briefly to adjust his uniform (One must make the best possible public presentation of oneself.), sat down on his throne. Once he had calmed down and assumed the correct attitude of nonchalance; he waved at a lackey to open two way visual communication with the rescuer via way of the battle imager. A holographic image appeared and Lord Jathren almost swallowed his tongue.
Two Centauri appeared amidst a black obsidian background totally devoid of any curves or colors, save those functional to light, and an all too hateful, and to Jathren, from recent painful association with cause, all too alien script.
One of the Centauri was Marquis Ishdai. He wore chains. Bedraggled: filthy in a ragged, bloody, torn, Centauri spacesuit, he stood next to the other Centauri.
Count Morado, was resplendent in the uniform of his House, with all his honors and titles on display, including combat medallions for ships he killed in battle. Jathren dully realized that those silver medallions were for rebellious CENTAURI ships killed. A seven point star on the medallion with a dagger striking its center was the symbol for CENTAURI TRAITOR.
Morado wore thirteen of the medallions.
Morado punched Ishdai in the ribs and said in Mountain dialect Centauri, "Tell him."
Marquis Ishdai stared dully ahead and said, "Patron, prepare to surrender your vessel and your person." Morado punched Ishdai, again, in the ribs, "Your retainers and servants will be honorably treated. You, yourself, are guaranteed life, but you must answer for your actions."
Jathren answered, "And who is there to question my conduct? You two fools? Bah! Morado's officially dead and you Ishdai are a traitor and deserter! Neither of you have the right under the Rules of the Centaurum!"
A Narn, a heavily damaged and bandaged Narn, limped into the holograph, She said; "My name is Na'Talith, of the Fourth Circle. By Centauri appellation, you would call me, COUNTESS. I have the right under Narn Custom and Law, to bring you before the Khari."
A Human entered the hologram. He wore the dress uniform of an Alliance command grade officer, complete with the kill sash. There were seventeen scarlet chevrons at the bottom of an impressive parade that marched from left shoulder to right waist. It featured many colors; yellows, greens, oranges, a single blue, and a couple of browns.
Jathren swallowed hard. Brown was the color of a Narn ship kill. He didn't know what the other colors meant, but he could guess at the "scarlets".
The Human said in stilted and somewhat archaic Centauri mountain dialect, "Captain Thomas Malcolm Caldwell of the Alliance Ship, NATHAN HALE. These Centauri under your law, I am informed, can bring you before the Centaurum to answer for your crimes."
Jathren continued to bandy words. ""Only if they are of Houses in good standing. Morado is officially DEAD and Ishdai is a COWARD. Their word means nothing.” He emphasized, "And you, HUMAN? Your word is less than NOTHING!"
Jathren was about to break communications contact, after this rhetorical triumph, when a dull thud jarred the DRAGON's ORCHID. The Human said, " That's a boarding party, Lord Jathren. They're GAIM-Alliance Marines. I suggest you quit, peacefully. Otherwise; it will be very bloody and messy….for you." The Human made a neck slashing motion and the Holograph winked out to a white dot, and then faded.
Lord Jathren sank down from his defiant stance he had assumed when the Human appeared in holovision. He sat shriveled in on himself, on his throne. Dull booms echoed throughout the ruined ship that up to the moment had been his domain. Jathren looked around him. Senior House and Family lackeys moved away, putting distance between themselves and him.
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A New Broom
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On the Western Continent: Planet Idana; Alliance Base
Standing outside the doorway of her fused earth igloo hut, that she used for an office, Na'Talith looked skyward, as another "Vulture", on landing approach, lined up, and came in across the mounded fused dirt fenced base boundary to chirrup on the fused earth runway. The howl of scram-jets and the wind-blast of its passage almost knocked her off her feet. It was an idiot, who put the base headquarters shack and administration complex of igloo huts at the primary spin-ward approach end of the landing strip......
Prisoner transfers were always tricky. The OCTURION wreck had held two thousand survivors, many of them wounded. The HALE and the HERO class destroyer, RAYMOND SPRUANCE, between them, had six hundred surviving souls. Many, actually most, of them were wounded themselves. Na' Talith, under those constraints, had supervised the transfers of prisoners to the Alliance base camp holding facility on Idana's Western Continent.
The Idanese Centauri had seen the space battle and had drawn their own conclusions. Fortunately and surprisingly, they sided with the Alliance. The Idanese Centauri weren't crazy about the Narns they saw, but as long as the Alliance showed its Human face, Morado did all the talking and Na'Talith worked in the background; things progressed calmly.
It helped the Alliance’s Cause that immediate post battle appeals by the Idanese Centauri to Centauri Prime for help in coping with the VORCHAN tragedy had been met with drop dead silence-especially as there wasn't a blessed thing the Alliance could or would do to stop a Centauri relief effort.(Though that relief might take a while to get to Dagab II.) Na'talith smiled. A dead jump-gate would have forced the long-about route for such an effort.
On the other hand, Earth, despite the Drakh plague, and Human over-commitments everywhere, still scraped up enough off-world resources among the Human colonies to route a couple of small hospital ships and a food-barge convoy to Idana. Those ships came farther and followed a more tortuous route than any help that could come from the Centauri Core worlds. The battered Idanese saw this miniscule Human help supplied with such enormous and costly effort and were GRATEFUL.
The Idanese were further astonished when the Alliance forces in their midst allowed the Idanese colonists to freely appoint their own representative, A Centauri Speaker to represent them.
That Speaker, standing outside her office/quarters igloo with her, was arguing with Na'Talith about Lord Jathren.
Ishdai waved at the sky and asked her, "Why don't the Humans build better shuttles? They have the propulsion science to dispense with particle thrust engines. Surely the noise and the pollution....."
Na'Talith said in reply, "I don't know, why don't you ask their Senate, next time you see them?"
"Speaking of Senate.... Lord Jathren! He must be made to pay for his crimes!" said Marquis Ishdai.
Na'Talith, who had already been this route with Ishdai a hundred times before, on this very long Idanan day, said, "I'd rather talk about the shortcomings of the Humans and their technology, Speaker. But once again, speaking for the Alliance, we agree that Jathren should pay for his crimes; but the accidental physical outcome of battle in war is not a crime...."
"True, but if that Idiot hadn't attacked Praxal and tried to seize Kathra Station, you wouldn't be here at Dagab II. There wouldn't have been a battle around Idana and the Western Continent wouldn't be poisoned." Marquis Ishdai swept his hand toward the fused earth fence that was the boundary of the Alliance Base.
The Earthers had erected a version of their energy web to handle the lingering effects of ionizing radiation, but outside the web which was embedded in the fence, the ground and air was tainted with the fallout from the twin impacts of that VORCHAN from three months prior.
Adrienne Brown had told Na'Talith it would be decades of terraforming before the Western Continent was reclaimed as "safe".
'In any event; the odds now were that it and the rest of Idana would be under the Alliance banner,' Na'Talith thought as she patiently listened to the Speaker, the Marquis Ishdai present the Idanese Centauri's plea for Jathren's hide, preferably roasted, for the one hundred and first time.
Healthy Centauri prisoners worked inside the camp, building more of the base and planting.crops. Na'Talith admitted that the Humans were practical. They didn't use forced labor. The Centauri war prisoners were paid in Alliance currency (Human dollars, Narn work chits would have been an affront.), and were allowed to purchase from the same Base canteens that Alliance personnel used.
Paroled Centauri prisoners were released into the planetary Idanese Centauri population. So far no sabotage or active resistance had been formed by them or any of the Idanese locals.
Na'Talith wasn't sure how far Human generosity should extend to these Centauri. Captain Caldwell told the locals, through Marquis Ishdai, that his ships, the HALE and the SPRUANCE, would stay only long enough to complete repairs to themselves, re-establish an orbital trans-shipment station for the one they had destroyed, and repair the Dagab II Jumpgate that had somehow for some unexplained (to the Centauri) ceased to operate in the midst of the battle. Once completed, with these tasks, if the Idanese requested, Caldwell promised to remove his ships.
Marquis Ishdai told Na' Talith that he didn't think that was a good idea as long as Jathren was still alive, as part of his long conversations with her. In fact, Ishdai used it as yet another reason for Lord Jathren to stop breathing.
He said so, "Before anything else is decided about Idana; we must kill Lord Jathren! Its simple prudence!"
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End of Chapter 7; Part 1
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Into the Chasm of Night: Chapter 7; Part 2
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Healing
Malcolm Caldwell walked the Tour of the Ship as he had done so long ago, when he first took command of the NATHAN HALE. Had it been a year?
With him was Adrienne Brown. She no longer walked about the ship in the Narn uniform of a Second Talon Leader as she had when she played Second Engineer to the Minbari, Soren. He had been demoted to Idana Alliance Planetary Base; Director of Maintenance.
Now she shuffled alongside in her ship boots, wearing her accustomed cloak and Technomage's skin-suit. Following obediently behind her, was her Human-made encounter-suit, trained finally at last in inkblot obedience to heel, when she commanded it.
Also with Caldwell, to inspect the HALE's repairs, was the Captain of the RAYMOND SPRUANCE, Janet Heller. As Caldwell remembered, she had commanded the HYPERION, EUREKA. Apparently from the way she told it, her crew and she had quick-transferred over to the brand spanking new SPRUANCE at an Alliance station in the Hyach Nym system. What the Hyach were doing; outfitting an Earth-built ship, she didn't explain, nor did Caldwell ask. He was just grateful NGS had finally answered one of his calls for help............
As Adrienne and Janet talked about the state of the HALE's repairs, Caldwell reflected upon that help.
Janet Heller had fought a better BATTLE OF DAGOB II than he had. Caldwell was professional enough to admit it. The SPRUANCE had killed seven of the twelve VORCHANs and opened the flank of the OCTURION up to attack for the NATHAN HALE in the doing. SPRUANCE had saved his ship twice: once in the charge against the OCTURION; and, then, in the final orbital clash between ships, that killed the last of the VORCHANs.
He interrupted Adrienne, who was in mid-explanation to Captain Heller of the re-growing of the HALE's starboard port forward Slicer emitter array.
He asked Janet, "Did your ship come through okay?”
The rather austere Australian accented English, Janet Heller used, was soft and quiet. You had to strain to hear it and you had to listen carefully, "We took damage in the hanger and our starboard wing. We also took a very bad hit in the thruster pack that I thought would drop us into Idana when we sliced that last VORCHAN at the end. Still, we came through much better than we should have, given the odds."
She schicked-schicked along in her ship shoes, which Malcolm noticed were about two sizes too big for her feet. 'That would account for her constant downward stare at the deck,' Malcolm thought. 'She didn't want to trip in micro-gravity.'
That reassured him. He wasn't in the presence of a super-woman in Janet Heller. Adrienne on the other hand.
"I would have liked it better; if we had sent an automated freighter to mine Idana in close orbit and if we had waited in Hyperspace ambush to close jump them when they came to sweep the mines..." continued Captain Heller.
Caldwell missed some of Captain Heller's comments in his reverie, but he saw again, intuitively, why Heller was the better battle Captain. She saw her enemies more clearly than he, and staked out the battle-space to exploit them. There was something of the hunter in this lanky Australian Captain.
Malcolm mentally shrugged it off. He was senior Captain and he had done his second best. They had won.
He wasn't going to let professional jealousy or envy of superior talent sour this Victory.
He asked her another question, "What do you think of my ship, the NATHAN HALE?"
Janet Heller answered as softly and as truthfully as before, "It is a great ship manned by a valiant crew. It is a shame that events rushed us all before we were ready." She, looking past the present into the dangerous Drakh-dominated Centauri-filled future, it was as Captain Heller added, "Ah well, perhaps, here, we bought ourselves the needed time?"
She left that question hanging in the swirling air of the soft lighted passageway they moved through. Taking the lead she ripped her shoes free of the deck and pushed off swimming toward the galley Mess. It was but a short swim away. Caldwell followed Heller's example. Adrienne brought up the rear, probably to give her Captain a helpful shove, in case he couldn't keep up with SPRUANCE ACTUAL. Caldwell gave Adrienne one quick look and vowed not to embarrass her or himself, by needing that shove.
Count Morado met the party at the gang hatchway into the Mess. With him was Dulanax, Lemarchus, and Excolsus, the Vree who had spent so much time with Paula Chow and the Furies, recently, that he had become a stranger to the HALE's command group.
Caldwell noticed that the silent Vree sported more than a dozen kill chevrons on his sash. All of them were scarlet-some of them were for ships. That said something about this Fury pilot....
All of them planted themselves on the deck and cued up in line to collect their standard issue Alliance Naval Personnel Meal: Ship Ration; Food Brick Number Six. It smelled like and tasted like smoked eel, but had the consistency and cutability of jello. Caldwell hated it. "I should have had the meat-loaf." he decided aloud.
Heller joked back; "It is Friday, so we have fish."
Amidst the chuckles that greeted this feeble joke, as they set to eating, Malcolm took in his sight, the people who looked after ships and crews, who dealt with the problems of Dagab II and Idana, specifically: who; when he was flat on his back for the three months since the battle, had run this show. They had only bothered him about scuttling the DRAGON's ORCHID (vetoed because even a totally wrecked OCTURION was an incalculable intelligence prize to the Alliance.), and sending a request for disaster relief. (Approved: for if it were granted; the political benefits to the Alliance were immense, or so he hoped.)
Between mouthfuls, Count Morado looked at Captain Caldwell. He used his napkin to wipe some nonexistent morsel from his dry lips and asked, "What do we do with Lord Jathren?" Morado added, "The Speaker for the Idanese, Marquis Ishdai says the colonists want him dead. Since their word is not ours; it would only be fair and prudent to turn Jathren over to them, Yes?"
Adrienne Brown shook her head emphatically no. "Killing him is breaking our WORD." she said.
"You promised him." Morado said; pointing at the group and speaking like a Centauri, "Me? I lied."
Caldwell put his left hand up, palm facing outward. Captain Heller joined his gesture exactly using her dexter hand, "No. Jathren lives as we promised. We gave our WORD." both captains said together in unison.
"Two to one! That is democracy for you!" Morado said in mock disgust. "We will live to regret this!"
Malcolm reached across the table and took the Centauri's hands in his own. He said, "I've gone through...." Then he looked at all assembled at the table and everyone else in the galley Mess and Caldwell modified his speech. He nodded at all present "WE'VE gone through Hell. Whether Jathren lives or dies isn't important in the grand scheme, not in the current scheme of things I suspect. If he creates trouble in the future, at least;then, you can tell us that you warned us, my friend. But we must keep our WORD. Otherwise, we are no better than he is."
"Or the Vorlons, or the Shadows, or their pale imitators, the Drakh." signed Excolsus.
'Leave it to the Vree, to speak the last word' thought Adrienne Brown.
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End of Chapter 7; Part 2
This concludes the novellette; "Into the Chasm of Night", the story of the NATHAN HALE, a PATRIOT class cruiser, the tale of its actions and its crew on the border of Centauri space.
***** *******, COPYRIGHT 2004-.
A little CHAOS is a GOOD thing.
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