CHAPTER 14 – DEMONSTRATION OF FORCE
04h51 (Universal Time)
Saturday, March 11, 2322
Bridge of the A.M.S. KOSTROMA
On station at the edge of Ross 128 System
Making sure that all of her bridge crew now wore their spacesuits, with their visors opened for the moment, Tina Forster twisted her neck to look at Governor Janet Robeson, sitting in one of the V.I.P. seats of the bridge and also wearing a spacesuit.
‘’Ready to tango, Governor?’’
‘’Ready, Fleet Captain! Show me your magic!’’
‘’With pleasure, Governor! Patricia, how many Drazt ships are now in position around us and at what distance are they staying?’’
‘’The passive sensors readings from our pre-positioned stealth probes indicate a total of eight cruisers, including the TARASK, plus four frigates. While the TARASK is still holding position at about two light-seconds in front of us, the other Drazt ships are staying at a distance of five to six light-seconds from our fleet, beyond the theoretical detection limit of our radars…but not of our stealth probes. The last ship took position five minutes ago and there is 33 minutes left before their designated attack time.’’
Tina nodded once, satisfied. Spirit had once again performed miracles and had managed to break the code presently used by the Drazt Navy. Mind you, that had been made easier by the fact that, while the Drazt had changed their codes last year, they had only changed the permutations in them and kept the same basic encryption architecture. Tina had thus been able to read the message received by the TARASK a mere few minutes after Dozna Wiss had read it. Also, the stealth probes used by her ship during the battle against Admiral Tharn’s fleet over fifteen months ago had stayed in their hiding spots after the battle and had simply become dormant, until reactivated some twelve hours ago. With the Drazt apparently not realizing that the KOSTROMA was holding position in the same region than the one where Tharn’s fleet had been destroyed, the stealth probes had been in able to blow the cover of the Drazt fleet…again. She now had the totality of the Drazt Navy where she wanted it, except maybe for one ship. However, that missing ship’s respite was not going to be a long one. Opening her fleet communications channel, Tina spoke calmly but firmly in her helmet microphone.
‘’To all ships, from the KOSTROMA. The battle line will advance on my command. Master countdown starting…now!’’
On the Drazt cruiser TARASK, Shipmaster Dozna Wiss was starting to feel fatigue from having been on combat alert for nearly two days now, with only brief periods of rests at intervals. Her bridge crew was equally tired, apart from being under increased stress as the time for the attack approached. Looking at her ship’s chronometer, Dozna decided that it was time for her to decide what she would do and was about to do a collective call to the other Navy ships in the vicinity when her sensors officer yelled a warning.
‘’SHIPMASTER, THE HUMAN FLEET HAS STARTED TO ACCELERATE TOWARDS US! THEY ARE ADVANCING IN AN EXTENDED BATTLE LINE!’’
Dozna felt total frustration on hearing that: she was not going to have the time to discuss with the other shipmasters about whether they should attack the KOSTROMA or not. Worse, if she refused to do battle now and retreated, then she and her whole crew were going to be branded as cowards. She now had no choice but to fight.
‘’PILOT, START ACCELERATING STRAIGHT AT THE KOSTROMA! FULL ACCELERATION! SIGNALS MASTER: ADVISE THE OTHER SHIPS THAT THE HUMAN FLEET IS NOW ON THE MOVE.’’
‘’AYE, SHIPMASTER!’’
Then, a mere few seconds later, her sensors officer shouted again.
‘’THE…THE HUMAN FLEET: IT JUST DISAPPEARED! I DON’T HAVE THEM ANYMORE ON EITHER MY RADARS OR MY INFRARED DETECTORS.’’
‘’WHAT? USE ALL OUR SENSORS: FIND THOSE HUMAN SHIPS!’’
After working for a frantic minute, the poor sensors officer could only look at Dozna Wiss with a haggard expression.
‘’I am sorry, Shipmaster: The Human ships are nowhere in sight.’’
‘’How could that be? They have to be somewhere around.’’ said Dozna before she understood in a flash where the Human ships could have gone. Blood drained from her face as she realized that she and the other navy ships had just been had.
‘’By the ancestors! They must have jumped straight to Kadosh! And our whole navy is now here, eleven hours away from Kadosh. Forster played us for a bunch of fools! PILOT, REVERSE COURSE! HEAD AT FULL ACCELERATION TOWARDS KADOSH! SIGNALS MASTER, WARN THE FLEET!’’
04:58 (Universal Time)
Quadrant space traffic control center
Kar Lev-Dom orbital station and space terminal
Medium equatorial orbit of Kadosh (Ross 128b)
One of the six Drazt space traffic controllers on duty in the control center, itself part of the huge Kar Lev-Dom orbital station and space terminal, did a double take when her radar display sphere suddenly showed five new echoes seemingly coming from nowhere.
‘’Woah! Where are those five ships coming from?’’
Designating electronically those five dots, Dara Swit got only a blank information box from the high-capacity computer which analyzed the data collected by the sensors of the station.
‘’Unknown contacts!? Is this a joke? SUPERVISOR ROKAN, I HAVE FIVE SHIPS THAT JUST APPEARED NEAR THE STATION, OUT OF NOWHERE.’’
Dara’s shift supervisor, Nila Rokan, came at once to her station and looked at the radar display sphere for a few seconds.
‘’I don’t understand! I didn’t get any warning about a Navy exercise in our area. Besides, how could these ships appear so close to our station without being detected before?’’
‘’I don’t know, Supervisor. These appear to be big ships: they should have been detected much earlier.’’
A strange-sounding voice speaking in the Drazt language suddenly resonated in Dara’s earphones, at the same time as a text message started scribbling down on one of her flat screens and those of the other five space traffic controllers.
‘’Kar Lev-Dom space station, this is the Human Spacers League ship KOSTROMA. Advise immediately all the ships presently docked to your station to keep their present position and not fly away. All Drazt ships presently approaching your station are to turn away and adopt waiting orbits at a lower altitude. Any ship approaching us will be destroyed without further warning.’’
Despite being as stunned as Dara, Nila Rokan managed to overcome her confusion and reply to the mysterious call.
‘’To the ship that just called, this is the Kar Lev-Dom space traffic control center. If this is a joke, it is not funny. What is your proper identification?’’
‘’This is the A.M.S. KOSTROMA, flagship of the Human Spacers League First Battle Squadron. In case you still have not heard about that yet, your race is now at war with the Human race. We have no intentions to kill innocent civilians, but any ship approaching us will be destroyed immediately. Please advise all your ship traffic to stay put for the time being.’’
‘’Us, at war?’’ said Nila to herself, totally confused. Thanks to the Drazt government’s tight censorship policies, no civilian agency or organization had been told about the conflict with the Humans or even about the space battle in which most of the Drazt Navy’s cruisers had been massacred many rotations before. Of the Human race, Nila and her staff only knew that it was some barbaric, war-prone race inhabiting a nearby star system. She was still trying to make sense of all this when all the radar display spheres of the control center suddenly went blank, at the same time as a sharp noise reverberated around the station.
‘’Damn, what is happening now?’’ asked Dara Swit to herself. One technician answered her question with a alarmed shout.
‘’SOMEBODY JUST SHOT UP OUR SENSORS MAST! WE ARE NOW BLIND!’’
‘’OUR RADIO AND LASER TRANSMISSIONS ANTENNA MAST HAS ALSO BEEN DESTROYED, APPARENTLY BY DISINTEGRATOR BEAMS. WE ARE NOW BLIND, DEAF AND MUTE!’’ shouted another technician. That was when Nila understood that all this was no joke.
‘’ALRIGHT, ALL OF YOU: STAY CALM AND CONTINUE MANNING YOUR STATIONS. REG, MAKE AN ANNOUNCEMENT VIA INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS LINKS AND OVERHEAD SPEAKERS: ALL SHIP DOCKINGS AND UNDOCKINGS ARE SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. NO SHIP IS TO ATTEMPT TO LEAVE THE STATION. WE HAVE ENEMY ALIEN SHIPS NEARBY.’’
‘’Uh, understood, Supervisor.’’ replied the technician in a less than assured voice.
In one of the embarkation waiting lounges of the orbital station, Zar Dov, with her little daughter Riza asleep in her arms, was able to hear like the other waiting passengers the announcement via loudspeaker that resonated around the lounge. She was on this station with Riza because her husband Lem had discretely urged her before his sudden departure on a secret mission to temporarily leave Kadosh and to go to one of the space resorts dotting the first moon of the planet. She had been waiting to board a passenger ship due to leave for the moon when this announcement had come. While everybody around her was now acting either confused or incredulous, Zar understood at once what was happening and lowered her head to hide her instant grief. Lem’s secret mission was now too evident to her: he had gone out to fight the Humans, opponents that Lem himself had described to her as being vastly superior in military terms to the Drazt Navy. Despite the fact that the whole subject of the clashes with the Humans was classified, Lem had told quite a bit to Zar about it, especially after one Human had visited them some time ago at their apartment in Drakan City. If the Human fleet was now near Kadosh, then that could mean only one thing: Lem was now dead, with the Navy’s fleet destroyed.
Zar was still quietly crying in her chair when someone shouted above the din of the crowd occupying the lounge.
‘’LOOK AT THAT HUGE SHIP! IT IS COMING TOWARDS US!’’
Wiping the tears blinding her, Zar raised her head to look through one of the large panoramic windows of the lounge which gave a view of the void of space around the station. An apparently big ship was indeed approaching the station, but not really on a collision course. Instead, it passed close under the station, letting the waiting passengers in the lounge appreciate how gigantic it was. Having been shown in the past pictures of that ship by Lem, Zar recognized it at once, sucking in her breath and then whispering its name with dread.
‘’The KOSTROMA…’’
05:13 (Universal Time)
Bridge of the A.M.S. KOSTROMA
At the vertical of Drakan City
Low equatorial orbit over Kadosh (Ross 128b)
‘’We now have the Supreme Conductor’s palace centered in our main optical telescope, Captain. There is one Drazt patrol frigate parked on the main landing pad of the palace complex and we can also see a number of vehicles around it. It seems that some kinds of supplies or equipment are being loaded aboard that frigate.’’
Tina Forster, sitting in her command chair, looked at Janet Robeson, a sardonic smile on her face.
‘’I knew it! The rats are leaving the ship, and this even before it has started sinking. You care to bet with me where the Supreme Conductor is planning to find refuge from us, Governor?’’
‘’Oh, LHS 288c would sound like a good bet to me, Tina. After all, it is the only other habitable star system that they know about for certain.’’
‘’Bingo! Well, let’s send the good Bar Kosh and his gang of sycophants on their way…to Hell. Renée, you may open fire now.’’
‘’Aye, Captain!’’ replied Renée d’Argenteuil, sitting at a weapons fire control station. ‘’Heavy rail gun batteries loaded with kinetic shells, firing now!’’
With three of its four 150-meter-long electromagnetic rail guns pointed down at the surface of the planet, the KOSTROMA started firing salvoes of 300 kilo armor-piercing shells every five seconds. The shells, very dense projectiles with a core made of tungsten carbide, left the muzzle of their guns at a velocity of over 6,000 meters per second, creating long trails of flames as they entered the atmosphere of Kadosh and flew through it at hypersonic speeds. To anyone watching them from the ground, they looked like bright meteorites coming down from the sky. However, being hypersonic, the thunder-like noise they created on their passage could only be heard on the ground once they had impacted. In this case, the shells impacted the roofs and grounds of the palace complex occupied by the Supreme Conductor and its close aides, burrowing deep into the ground while liberating a frightening amount of kinetic energy that translated into thermal energy and powerful shock waves. The patrol frigate KOBOL, sitting on the palace’s main landing pad, was one of the first targets in the complex to be hit and was utterly destroyed by the monstrous impact of one kinetic shell. Supreme Conductor Bar Kosh died shortly after the destruction of the KOBOL, killed while riding an elevator connecting his underground command bunker to his palace. The same shell that killed him also went down all the way to the command bunker, the flash from the liberated kinetic energy burning at once the oxygen inside the bunker and killing its occupants. A total of 45 kinetic rail gun shells hit the palace complex in less than one and a half minutes, turning the two kilometer-square palace grounds into a field of deep craters and terrorizing the citizens of Drakan City. However, nobody but the occupants and guards of the palace complex were killed by that bombardment. In this case, Tina Forster had followed one of her favorite dictums: that it was preferable to cut the head of the serpent rather than try to cut its tail.
At the Drazt Navy headquarters, some five kilometers from the palace complex, Division Master Korb Ren hurried to the command offices of Vice-Admiral Gren, only to be stopped by the two guards posted in front of her door.
‘’Halt! If you are looking for the vice-admiral, then she is not in her office, Division Master.’’ said one of the two navy guards. Ren gave the guard an incensed look.
‘’What do you mean, not in her office? An enemy fleet is busy bombarding the city right now! Where is she?’’
‘’I believe that she is at the Supreme Conductor’s palace, Division Master.’’
That answer made Ren slap one foot on the floor, furious. To the hidden indignation of many other officers at Navy Headquarters, Vice-Admiral Lona Gren had not taken direct command of the fleet sent to attack the five Human ships at the limit of the system, instead sending a bunch of messages to the individual ships of the fleet. She had not even named an actual, on-the-spot fleet commander to properly coordinate the attack, thinking that choosing a specific attack time for all the ships would be enough. Ren doubted very much that Vice-Admiral Gren had gone to the palace simply to brief the Supreme Conductor: she could have done so faster and more efficiently by simply using a video link with the palace, something that would have also allowed her to stay where she was needed right now: at her post. Thus, Gren had just proved to be a coward, on top of being an incompetent commander. However, her latest act of cowardice had not saved her, judging from the spectacular lights and sound show coming from the palace grounds. Unfortunately, that did not solve Korb Ren’s problem, which was to find someone in command to take charge of this mess and decide how to deal with the Human fleet.
Ren, utterly frustrated and swearing to himself, had turned around and was heading towards the underground command bunker of the headquarters to go speak with the duty commander there, when all the lights inside the building went out at once. With only the weak illumination of the night sky coming through the windows, Ren suddenly found himself in near total darkness. Stopping and taking a few seconds to let his eyes adjust to the low light level, Ren then noticed something through a window that made him swear again: the whole of Drakan City was now totally dark in the pre-dawn morning! Going to the nearest bank of elevators, he tried to call a cabin, but without results: the elevators seems to be as dead as the lights.
‘’How is this possible? Our auxiliary power systems should have kicked in automatically by now.’’
A very loud thunderclap-like sound suddenly made him jerk and turn around towards a nearby window, in time to see an explosion of sparks on top of the nearest defensive turret of the astroport. Twelve of those remotely-controlled and operated turrets, armed with medium disintegrator cannons, had been hastily built around the astroport after the past battle that had cost 42 cruisers to the Navy. Before, only a perimeter fence and a few guarded gates had defended the astroport, the legacy of centuries of peace on Kadosh. Ren could only watch helplessly as turret after turret, each of them already without power and plunged into darkness, were destroyed by what had to be powerful laser beams tuned to the invisible spectrum. In the distance, Ren could also see that the radar antennas of the astroport were being destroyed as well. Strangely enough, none of the occupied buildings or hangars of the astroport got hit by laser fire, nor did they seem to have been targeted at all. Still, the whole astroport ended up being turned into a pitch-black expanse after only a couple of minutes of enemy fire. As for the ships that would normally have been at the astroport, they were all out in space, supposedly trying to stop the Human fleet from attacking Kadosh. Korba Ren, having seen enough, started to run towards the nearest staircase well while swearing at the helplessness of his navy.
10:37 (Universal Time)
Bridge of the Drazt patrol cruiser TARASK
Speeding towards Kadosh
‘’Still no response from Navy Headquarters, Shipmaster. The planetary space traffic control system is also silent.’’
‘’No, no, no, no, no: this can’t be!’’ whispered to herself Dozna Wiss, her stomach gripped with foreboding and worry. To be totally helpless to stop what was happening now to her home world truly maddened and sickened her. The shaking voice of her sensors officer then added to her despair.
‘’Shipmaster, our telescopes show the planet to be completely dark. There are no city lights visible from space. Our orbital space stations around Kadosh are also dark. We can’t detect any radar, radio or other electronic emissions coming from the planet.’’
‘’NOOOO!’’ cried out Dozna, losing control of herself at that awful news. She then hid her face in her hands and started to cry. Her home planet was now apparently dead, destroyed at the hands of an enemy that possessed anti-matter weapons and she and her crew had utterly failed in their duty to protect it. After long seconds of crying, her despair gradually changed to anger and hatred towards the enemy who could do such a monstrous genocidal act. Wiping off her tears, she then looked around at her bridge crew: her officers and operators were all clearly as despondent as she was and were now sort of apathetic at their work stations. Dozna swallowed hard, then spoke up in a strong voice.
‘’FELLOW DRAZT, WE MAY HAVE FAILED IN OUR DUTY TO PROTECT OUR HOME PLANET, BUT WE NOW HAVE ANOTHER DUTY TO PERFORM: TO AVENGE IT. WE ARE GOING TO FIND THOSE HUMAN SHIPS AND WE WILL DESTROY THEM, BY RAMMING IF NEED BE.’’
Her announcement was met by a vengeful roar from her crew. Her bridge personnel then became alive at their work stations, scanning space around the star system in search of the monsters who had destroyed Kadosh.
Some twenty minutes later, as Dozna had just finished a conference call with the other shipmasters of their fleet, her signals officer suddenly looked at her with a shocked expression.
‘’Shipmaster, we are receiving a call…from the KOSTROMA.’’
‘’WHAT? THEY HAVE THE GALL TO CALL US AND MOCK US AFTER THIS? CONNECT ME WITH THOSE BASTARDS!’’
‘’Yes, Shipmaster!’’
Dozna soon had the image of Tina Forster visible on her command chair’s viewing screen. The calm and relaxed attitude of Tina only made Dozna angrier.
‘’YOU MONSTER! HOW DARE YOU CALL ME AFTER WHAT YOU DID?’’
Tina kept her calm despite Dozna’s aggressive tone and looked at her with a somber air.
‘’What you think happened is what will effectively happen to Kadosh if your race tries another treacherous attack against us like the one your Supreme Conductor ordered your fleet to conduct, Dozna.’’
‘’Uh? What do you mean, ‘what I think happened’? Kadosh is dead!’’
‘’Ah, yes, that!’’ said Tina before turning her head briefly to give an order to one of her crewmembers. ‘’Renée, lights on, please!’’
Seconds later, exclamations ran around the bridge of the TARASK when the lights of cities around Kadosh and of orbital stations became visible again. Dozna could only look at Tina in incomprehension.
‘’But, what…’’
‘’What happened is that, during our limited attack against Kadosh, which only took out your Supreme Conductor and your radar and radio transmitters, we infiltrated a powerful computer virus inside your various computerized systems controlling your power generation and distribution networks, and this across the whole planet and aboard your orbital installations. I just ordered that computer virus to temporarily switch power back on. However, if your government still refuses to accept the terms of our ultimatum, then the power will shut down again and I will order my ships to implement a gradual fire plan which will selectively target your various military and industrial installations, until you become reasonable. I was sincere when I said that I have no wish to kill Drazt civilians or even Navy personnel, but our patience is wearing very thin. As for your government, it will have to take a decision about our ultimatum without your precious Supreme Conductor: that tyrant and his band of sycophants are now dead, buried in the rubble of his palace.’’
Dozna, nearly crippled emotionally, was unable to reply to that for seconds. When she was able to speak again, it was to see that Tina had simply waited patiently for her to regain her composure and was now speaking again.
‘’Dozna, we truly wish for peace between our two races and we still hope that you will become our friends rather than our enemies. The Drazt will however have to shed this paranoia of theirs about the Human race. Many things have profoundly changed in the Solar System in the last few years and our race has now established some firm holds