Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire (61 page)

The captured Krall clanships would never have the fine control of their event horizons as did the Dismantlers, with their many millions of tiny Trap field emitters spread all around their hulls. Yet, Max Born and his team of physicists had discovered how the Olt’kitapi had managed to “swallow up” their own gamma ray bursts at a White Out.

If they maintained two of the three layer event horizons a few millionths of a second longer, as they rotated out of T-cubed, T-squared, and finally the single rotation out of level one Tachyon Space, they could draw each successive wave of photons inward, rather than releasing them outward into Normal Space.

By doing this, all of the gamma rays generated would be drawn into the event horizon of each staged rotation out of Tachyon Space, allowing precisely for the light travel time and the space-time curvature of gravity to pull the high-energy gamma ray photons into Tachyon Space. T-cubed travel wasn’t difficult to achieve with the proper hardware mods, but preventing gamma rays required exact timing adjustments by the software, which the Olt’kitapi had written for the quantum computers that were specifically designed to operate the clanships. Humans had previously learned from Pholowela how to code to do the third rotation into Tachyon Space for T-cubed travel, and this was a refinement of that knowledge.

The skill to rewrite the Olt’kitapi code was being mastered by human scientists, something that even the Raspani and Torki had to learn how to do from them. It had always seemed too risky to try adjusting something the Raspani and the Torki didn’t fully understand, and they were slow to try risky experiments to learn new tricks. The Olt’kitapi had spent a very long time before developing that capability, proof that they too had been cautious.

The human attitude seemed to be; “Well, if we don’t try, we won’t know. The worst that can happen is it will kill us.” Despite this cavalier attitude, there still were willing test pilots ready to take calculated chances.

Fortunately, with human AI’s available, a technology that had never occurred to the Torki and Raspani, and the Krall had declared it a form of weakness to the Prada, there was no risk of human life for the early trials. Some of the first test craft failed to rotate back to Normal Space, but after recent repeat successes, human pilots were about to fly with the new software. But not this week.

A short time later, ten ships, with a full load-out of anti-ship missiles, one Nova missile, and a number of stealthed mines, the flotilla winked out of Normal Space for the twenty-six hour Jump to Paradise, only five hours after the first report of the attack.

****

The Mark was the only ship that selected a White Out point two hundred miles above the town of Elysium, with the remaining nine ships spread out at longer ranges all around the planet, weapons at the ready, everyone linked into a group Comtap circuit.

“Anyone see anything on active scans?” Mirikami asked.

Several had a report. Carson spoke first. “Their communications satellites are still up, but would we even see a stealthed ship? We see the small camps of prospectors. They actually seem to be working as usual, as if nothing happened.”

“The main transmitter is down, and the attack came at night. They might not know about the attack. The only witness saw a dark triangular shape blocking stars, and that was by naked eye at night. At least it apparently wasn’t stealthed during the attack.”

There was a pause, before Mirikami delivered the bad news. “Almost the entire town is gone. Even the animal feedlots have numerous pits of various sizes in them. I see a deep pit where the com shack was, and a smaller one about where the shuttle may have been parked, which match with the only visual observation of the start of the attack. From all the pits I see, and the small amount of debris, it looks as if almost everything was disintegrated. I don't see anything moving down there, other than a few local birds. It’s peaceful appearing right now.”

“Yea. The peace of the dead,” muttered Sarge.

“I’m descending. I’ll leave Jake in control for even faster navigation control if any of you spot anything threatening.” Then the Mark started down quietly, on Normal Space drive.

As the ship drew within a quarter mile altitude, Mirikami, using zoom on his screens, noted something. “The pits in the ground are perfectly semispherical on the sides, to various depths, from a hundred feet to only a few feet deep. Except where the walls or roofs fell into them and gouged the sides. They aren’t heat glazed as if from a laser, and I haven’t seen any sign of fires, or even blast damage spread over a wide area. The buildings were all made of extruded Smart Plastic, and the roofs, which had slight peaks for better water runoff in this rainy region, look to be intact. I don't see any holes in them, where a projectile or a beam entered from above, to vaporize the structure and contents. It looks like the buildings were gutted from the inside, by a weapon that made no entry holes.”

The Mark set down silently, the only noise coming from the whoosh of the four portals, as they rushed up into their recesses. Five hundred Kobani, armored and stealthed, merely kicked up some dust as they deployed, leaping out and spreading towards the destroyed town, with a few tracks leading to the two pits on the paved tarmac, and some others going towards the animal pens.

Only platoon leaders were authorized to make reports, unless hostile opposition was encountered. It stayed mostly silent, except for platoon leader comments.

“The sections of roofs and walls, those that are still partly intact, have circular cuts removed from them, which have a similar radius to the pits in the ground.”

“There are some dead animals, cleaved in half, or some along their length, which fell into the pits here in the pens.”

“I found a hand and a foot. Both lying on the ground, under a half collapsed building portico.”

“Hold it.” It was Mirikami. “Who found the human remains?”

“It was Jorl, Captain.” Jorl Breaker flashed his suit’s icon for everyone to see on his or her visors.

On the map overlay they all had for the town’s layout, as recorded during the previous month’s supply delivery, Jorl was standing right at one of the four entrances to a residence hall, where a rain and sun awning had stood, over a set of double doors.

“Everyone else continue searching for survivors. I’ll join you Jorl. Remember, each of us needs to continue to send images and reports back to Haven and the other ships.” If they were attacked, there would be a more complete record for those that followed.

“Alyson, you and Jakob have the ship.” He leaped over the railing, and dropped easily the eighteen feet to the next deck, the 1.15 g’s of Paradise of no concern. He leaped down the stairs, barely pausing to touch the landings as he descended faster than he could have fallen, using the side rails to pull himself down faster than gravity or the ship’s lift system would have allowed.

In minutes, he was at Jorl’s side, looking at the remains. There was a right-angled metal frame, with a cleanly sliced bit of glass still attached, lying next to the front part of a bare right foot and a slice of the shin and part of its bone. There wasn’t much blood from that small amount of tissue. The heel and entire rear of the shin bone and calf muscle was missing, not to mention the remainder of the body.

Jorl, without a word, lifted the fallen rear edge of the canopy, which had been attached to the vanished building. Under it, there was a left hand on the walkway, fingers curled, and an inch of the wrist. Both appendages were cut as if a razor had done that, with no tearing or ripping of soft tissue, or any burns showing at the edges of the wounds.

Leaving the body parts where they were, Mirikami picked up the piece of metal and glass. He held it upright close to the ground, a couple of feet from where the building entrance had been. Thought a moment, moved it slightly and angled it a bit.

He nodded, and pointed at the foot and hand. “The poor bastard almost made it out of the building. This piece is from the bottom corner of the right side door when it swung open, and I think his right foot was next to the open door as he flung it open, when whatever killed him, and vaporized his body and the rest of the door, suddenly struck. I suppose his left hand was extended, along with his right foot, in an all-out dash to get clear.”

“I took a picture of the finger tips and thumb for Jakob, to see if there might be a left hand print on file back on Haven. All of the first colonists passed through Haven for citizenship ceremonies, and we might have more than DNA and retinal scans for this one. Most of them accepted the clone mods for the slightly higher gravity here, and we may have a full body scan of the man.” The large hand, rough nails, and big hairy knuckled toes certainly suggested a male, or a less than a delicate flower of a female colonist.

They were still looking down into the closest hundred-foot pit, of varying depth pits that covered the building’s former “footprint” on the surface, when Jacob linked.

“Sir, the hand belonged to a Neil Falstaff, from New Australia, who had received cone mods on Haven. It is probable that the foot will match, but there is no footprint recorded for him. He was single, with no family with him on Paradise.”

Mirikami pulled at his lip. “I suppose his clone mods, and perhaps an apartment close to the exit let him almost get out of the building in time. I don't think, coming in the middle of the night as it did, that anyone had much chance of an escape. I think these multiple pits hit in rapid succession, and for a multistory building like this one, they came at varying levels throughout the structure. That’s why there’s so little left. Most of it was converted to vapor in a sphere.”

“What makes you say that, Sir? I’ve not heard of a weapon like that.”

“You have, but not in this sort of application. I used my visor to measure this pit, its depth where I can see it, and its width. It’s almost a complete hemisphere. Divide the width in half and what do you come up with?”

Jorl looked, obviously using his visor ranging and measuring system. “Uh…, it’s roughly two hundred forty feet across, which is a hundred twenty foot radius.”

He thought a moment, knowing Mirikami said that its radius was significant. “Oh. It’s about the same as the radius of the fifth force that applies to the Denial chip effective range.

“Very good, but that isn’t the only device we know of that has that unusual short range.”

“Right, the Olt’kitapi Katusha’s, and the…” the realization hit him. “The Raspani Q-rupters! Which the Krall placed in warheads of their Worm missiles, to disintegrate their way through ship hulls and bulkheads.”

“Exactly. The hundred twenty-two feet and a few inches of that quantum weapon matches the radius of the damage done here. Someone knows how to make that breaking of quantum electromagnetic bonds operate with a spherical effect, and not just in a beam like a Q-rupter uses. The hundreds of them used here don’t seem to have used a boring effect to reach the interior of the target areas. No entry holes. I could be wrong, but they simply seem to have appeared inside the buildings. The matter in a two-hundred forty-four foot diameter sphere was suddenly converted to atomized gases, which would then burst away from their points of origin. If tightly confined, I suppose the gas pressure would be very forceful.”

“Then we might not find any survivors, and if the weapon disintegrates itself, there won’t be any sign of that either.”

“I don’t want to give up on survivors yet. They might not all have been indoors, and others may have been faster than poor Neil. We’ll send ships to the four outposts, but if they were not attacked, their remote locations may have left them literally in the dark.”

“Captain, we may have spotted an escape path for someone out here by the animal pens.” Mirikami’s visor told him it was Bill Saber, one of his platoon leaders.

“What do you have?” Even as he asked, his Comtap showed him the image of a square iron storm grate, with one side caught on the lip and not flush with the walkway.

“I see it. Lift it and check inside. It may be large enough to crawl though.”

He saw Bill’s hand move the cover aside easily, and the point of view dropped suddenly and he was seeing an infrared visor view of the inside of a four-foot high round culvert pipe. A warmer spot in the distance suggested the outlet. Bill stood up, and the above ground view went through some trees and towards what their map of the area indicated was a small stream.

“OK, Bill. Take your people and look for anyone that may have used that route to escape. If you need a shuttle, let Alyson know, and we’ll send it out to help you search a wider area.”

“Will do, Sir.”

Mirikami resumed looking into the irregular pits around this former residence hall, and walked past two others. He noticed the surveillance camera bubble covers at the corners of the surviving roofs.

“Jacob, my visor is zoomed in on a camera cover. There was one at each corner of many of the buildings. Do you have a record of what their capability was?”

There was barely a second of delay. “The records on Haven indicate they would have fed to the colony AI, which was housed in the Administrating Building, near where Gale Murchison’s quarters were. We can see that this building was thoroughly demolished, and the core memory of their AI was in there. It is not likely that any portion of that memory will be available to recover, Sir.”

“Jacob, I was asking about the cameras themselves. Do they have any internal storage, in the event their link to the AI was severed?”

“I apologize for misunderstanding, Sir. The cameras may have some storage, depending on the models installed, and they could have had directional adjustment under user control. If you remove the covers and show me the make and model numbers, I can tell you.”

Mirikami had Jorl send his people down into the pits to clamber over the fallen roofs, which were conveniently at the top of all of the leftover debris. Every camera model happened to have internal storage, for almost an hour of data, and each was mounted on powered gimbals for directional control.