Chapter 12: Weapons and Women

“We spent the time in transit considering tactics. We reached our intended destination, some distance from their cruisers so that we could reconnoiter the area and see if it would change our options. We did two things. We sent intelligence people to the planet and planned our attack on the cruisers and frigates. We considered a few options but considered a surprise long distance missile attack followed by the battleship jumping into range and firing while the missiles were penetrating the shields looked to be the most successful approach with lowest probability of damage as estimated by the AI. The cruisers are of Mob origin and are the size of small battleships. They are hiding close to an asteroid belt that protects them from behind. They are close to each other to facilitate transport and communication between the ships and allows easy passage from one ship to the other by shuttle. They are within weapons range of where they expect the battleship to appear,” said Phoebe.

“We have discovered that it’ll be five weeks before the fleet will arrive to transport the clones,” said Connie, “the third planet from the sun is the clone planet,” she demonstrated on the hologram the location of the planet and then expanded the view to show the facilities on the ground.

“The fighters don’t see any other ships other than shuttles flying around the clone farm,” Phoebe added.

“We have all modeled the situation and attempted to make use of your methods. We have even been through some more of your previous simulations which Patton was happy to supply to us, with situations analogous to what we are facing. We have a bet with Patton that you won’t be able to plan an attack with a lower risk then our lowest risk strategy,” said Janet Malone.

Jason closely looked at the hologram map and asked for the AI to increase the size of the image of the asteroid belt near the cruisers. He looked at the situation pensively for a few moments as they all looked at him. He experienced a mild wave of nausea. His thinking felt different and he couldn’t put his finger on why that was so. He had a fleeting thought that he would easily show these feeble-minded people what he could do, and they were primitives that he could bend to his will. His thought shocked him and he wondered about its origin. He had never thought that way before and he had the greatest respect for the people in front of him.

“You may well be right, as you guys have more experience than I do, but I’ll do my best not to disappoint Patton.” Jason nodded and blinked twice, the Empire equivalent of a wink and a nod.

Malone asked, “What do you think of our plan?”

“You’ve worked out a good plan,” Jason remarked as he asked Patton to play through the proposed plan and looked at the damage estimates along with possible casualties.

“I’m going to think about this for a few minutes and re–consider the options considering some of the simulations that I’ve played. I’ve had the opportunity to attempt a considerable number of unorthodox strategies in situations where I had no other way to succeed. Please bear with me while I suggest and work through options that you may have already considered and thought unworkable or less tenable than the major strategy that you’ve come up with.”

Jason sat and looked at the holograms for a few minutes then spoke.

“Patton, please create a model as I speak.

“What I’d like to do, would be to move to the opposite end of the asteroid belt, so that their sensors are blocked. It’s possible that they may have sensors on that side, but I think it’s unlikely. If they do, we block them. Let’s consider what would happen if we commandeered several moderate size asteroids, fit them with missiles and propelled them towards the cruisers using big missile engines and power plants.” They watched closely as Patton demonstrated what Jason was describing.

“The asteroids are constantly in motion. We pick some that already moving towards the enemy ships. The Mob or priests are aware of the asteroid movement and I’m sure are monitoring asteroids for possible damage to their ships. We move the asteroids so that they head towards them, but their trajectory will clearly miss the ships. Patton isolate yourself from the ship system and please comment on the strategy that I’ve suggested,” asked Jason.

“Colonels, I did include the use of asteroids in simulations amongst the many that I provided to you,” said Patton attempting to emphasize his fairness. He then continued.

“In view of our current position and established missile loads, and reserves of missile motors and current resources, it would take twenty-two hours to prepare the asteroids. I’ve been mapping asteroid movement as you spoke and have selected three possible outstanding candidates that won’t need much power to move and are on close to perfect trajectories. There are sixteen other possible candidates that could be reasonably easily prepared and moved. The subsequent time to suitable missile launch would be 16 hours. The time to replacement of our existing missile stock would be 14 hours. The risk of discovery is approximately 0.001%. The chance of success if success is regarded as critical damage to the cruisers, is seventy-six percent and to the frigates 96 percent. The risk to us of the strategy if it’s incomplete is approximately 14.3%. The risk can range to as low as 0% if the asteroids perform as expected and are not intercepted. The high-risk estimate is based on the early discovery of two asteroids, and their destruction, requiring us to direct the battleship into battle, before all the asteroid missiles have been fired, and therefore sustain some damage. I’ve not detected scanning in this direction and none was detected when the fighters were behind the asteroid belt. Jason, you may not know but some of the fighters navigated the asteroid belt as it’s reasonably widely dispersed.

“Ladies you might as well pay up now, I told you that there was a very high probability that Jason would find a strategy with a low potential for damage to us. He does have a number of other possible strategies that he could have used with equal facility but with slightly less chance of success.” Patton gloated.

“We concede, Patton,” said Phoebe laughing. “ No doubt, Jason, once you’ve a few minutes more to think about it you can reduce the risk even further using those strategies that Patton said that you still have available?”

“Jason, you also might not know that during the time you were incommunicado, the marine information technology specialists, along with the communications group have been through Ship’s systems and have removed a considerable number of further impediments to her adequate function. They have also blocked the information getting back to the saboteurs by diverting the program that they were using to collect information. We can get onto any intrusions into the ship software system in microseconds. They know we are on to them. Our people have also commenced work on the medical AI software and have found a number of programs that have interfered with processes much as you explained they would be likely to do.

“The poison has now been identified as a male gene toxin that has a slow onset of action so that the person isn’t aware of change. It only affects the Y chromosome. The technology isn’t from this galaxy. Its operation is beyond our capacity to counter.” Maj. Constance Ross noted.

“We have also been working on preparing the case against the patriarch. The lawyers are busy analyzing all the information that’s available on the ship and are documenting everything including each and every programming intrusion and every software aberration.

“Shall I plot a jump to a suitable point behind the asteroid belt?” Stan asked after Jason connected to him.

Jason looked at his team. “Shall we proceed onward, ladies?” They nodded at him and he said facetiously, “XO engage warp drive. Move to warp five, as convenient.”

“Warp drive engaged Sir, we’ll move quickly to warp five as you command,” Stan replied using his Star Trek imitation voice.

“Jason, you are clearly a very bad influence on this ship! What the hell is that garbage that both of you are sprouting?” Phoebe asked grinning.

Jason and Stan both laughed. So much for Stan not having a sense of humor thought Jason.

Fifteen minutes later they heard Stan’s voice again.

“We are in place; the engineers are preparing missile platforms and preparing to modify missile engines for pushing. I’ve shown them the hologram of the discussion and the proposed plan. They have suggested as follows: each asteroid will have its own control system to prevent interception of communications, however they can be controlled from the ship. Initial control will be from the ship until the risk of interception exceeds the benefit, at which time, control will shift to the asteroid.”

Stan looked at Jason through the hologram.

“You’ve indeed turned out to be a remarkable young man and I hope that you will continue to develop and fulfill your expectations, whatever they may be. I suspect you don’t know what those expectations are, either!” Stan said and chuckled.

“Hear, hear,” replied Janet. “Jason, that was indeed a remarkable plan considering you made it on the fly and so quickly! It has turned out to be so viable with such a low risk!”

“The engineers want to talk to you; I’ll patch them through, if I may,” requested Stan.

They turned to the hologram to greet Jacobo Lengling the chief engineer, and his deputy John Vesa.

“Can I suggest that we also consider adding a substantial explosive charge to each asteroid? Let’s fire the missiles, and point and accelerate the asteroids at the ships, jettison the engines and power supplies, so that we can save them and reuse them later, then allow the asteroids to continue onwards to an optimal close point to the cruiser’s and then explode,” said Jacobo Lengling.” Jason, if you’ve any further screwy ideas let’s know as soon as you can.”

“That’s an excellent idea. It’ll force them into evasive action at that point and if we are lucky do some more damage,” said Jason.

“Shall we adjourn for lunch as I’m famished and I’m sure that you’re ready to eat by now?” said Jason rubbing his stomach. They laughed and walked to his canteen. They then adjourned to the conference room next to the bridge to continue to discuss their plan.

“I have another idea,” said Jason as he established a connection to Engineering. “I was thinking about this over lunch and my suggestion is another technology that I recall discussing with Patton, and you guys ages ago, and lately with Stan.

“Jacobo, I have a series of questions. How many of the mines, if any, have you guys built and tested? Can they be disguised to look like asteroids? What I’m thinking of doing, is adding to the same idea, but sending mines into the area that we deploy before the asteroids arrive and get as close to the ships as possible. They can explode just as the missiles get into range. I’d program them to hit the engines, but also block escape pathways. Mines were very much part of our warfare.”

“We played with some designs after we spoke to you. None are built, but we can prepare some quickly if you wish?” Jacobo answered.

Jason went on to explain the history of mines to the others and how he considered that a mine could be a resurrected concept particularly if it could be also propelled into appropriate positions as part of an elaborate trap. He suggested they could be thought of as if they were slow small missiles. The small size and slow speed wouldn’t trigger automated ship defenses, nor alert sensor operators.

“The enemy would be at a low level of alert and we could then move mines disguised as small slow-moving asteroids reasonably close to the cruisers. They would need to move at a speed that would make them nonthreatening but be in positions where they could rapidly be close to both of the cruisers as they moved. They would continue to move too slowly to alert the sensor systems until it was too late.

“Jason,” said Jacobo earnestly, “I’ve been working on cloaking technology for the missiles which could work for mines and do believe that this is achievable and is a very low risk strategy particularly as the mines will be well in advance of the larger asteroids. The size of the mines won’t alert the sensor operators and the cloaking would work well enough to allow them into a short enough range that they could do serious damage. Because of the cloaking constraints we couldn’t get more than three into the appropriate range in the first instance, but if they trigger at or around the time that the missiles fired they could provide a substantial diversion that will delay identification of the incoming missiles by overloading the sensors.

“Not only that, I do believe, if we then sent in more mines there would be a short window when they wouldn’t be detected. I’ll soon have a reserve of close on four hundred of these mines but I estimate that approximately forty or fifty would be more than enough for the purposes that we are considering. The replicators spit out one every ten minutes and we have ten of our small replicators making them. They all do have shield penetration capacity. They’ll need some more work after replication. I’ve also been able to implement the double charge concept, where they explode against the hull and send, using the power of the explosion, a trans-dimensional shaped charge inward that would explode within the cavity of the ship. We have seen that the optimal position for these explosions is where we can damage the bridge, communications, weapons control and engineering. This often leads, as we’ve seen with the Frigates, to a very repairable asset. It won’t take us long to complete these mines, particularly as we’ll cannibalize existing components from missiles of different sizes. The cloaking works and all we really need to spend a bit of time doing, is to either disguise the mines as asteroids, or simply bore out some of the smaller asteroids and use them. We’ll test out both concepts. Colonel Malone, I wonder if I can borrow some of your Marine engineers with their AIs to help?” Jacobo Lengling asked. “We need to do some experimenting to get the variants we use, right.”

She nodded and said she would get onto it, and briefly communicated with her engineers before Jason resumed speaking.

“Let’s aim at disabling the ships in the most effective way if we can. If we disable them with the mines we stop our missiles,” said Jason. “Perhaps we can also be sending some of the cyberwarfare satellites to listen in on the ships?”

“Jason there will be too much activity if we do that along with the mines and all the rest we are trying to do. The more we do the more likely they’re to get on to us. Two or three objects floating around isn’t something that people react to, but more than that and someone will start target shooting,” said Phoebe. Jason nodded his head.

“Janet I’d suggest that we consider boarding the ships if we possibly can, however I do think that we need to be aware that they may have the potential for fighters. They are very large cruisers. To me it looks like these are fighter ports,” Jason said as he Janet and Phoebe pored over the hologram of the ships enlarging it in front of them. They stood close to him looking at the ships. “I seem to recall that Connie may have mentioned that they had fighters.”

“Jason there’s no doubt that those are ports for the fighters. Historically ships of that size could field up to thirty fighters or twenty missile bombers. We have ten of those missile bombers aboard, though our fighters can carry one anti-ship missile. The missile bombers can carry six anti-ship missiles. We could hide fighters and missile ships along with our boarding shuttles just out of sensor range behind these two large asteroids. We can begin moving them out soon and it’ll then take them three minutes to get to the ship. It would be good to arrange for mines to explode in or around the following likely fighter assembly points here and here” Col. Phoebe Harris suggested as she pointed at two areas reasonably close to the ship where she said that squadrons of fighters were likely to assemble before proceeding to attack.

“Jacobo, do you remember us discussing mines with explosive ordinance which fires all in one direction?” Jason asked, “How long would it take to prepare some of those?”

“I can make nearly twenty of those and have the components to build another twenty, Jason, within the time we have available. I’ll give that job to your Marines, Colonel Malone. I’ll set them to trigger either by command from the ship or to identify a specified number of fighters in reasonable proximity, say three fighters. They can be arranged in series and are quite maneuverable. I did research the concept of the Claymore mine that you told me about, Jason. The engineers thought rather than ball bearings, they would put in individually targeting missiles, at twenty per mine. We use them for close-in defense, so we have many of them made, already. We’ll ensure they have enough explosive for a fighter. Will this be satisfactory?” asked Jacobo confidently.

Jason thought that Jacobo was a great asset and a superb engineer. He was very creative and seemed to have a superb talent for new munitions.

“Proceed and launch as able,” ordered Jason after glancing at Harris and Malone who were looking at him incredulously.

“For someone from a backward planet you’ve added some remarkable concepts. Your strategic concepts must come from a highly warlike people. We have been highly disciplined as a culture, but I suspect that after so many years of workable and effective solutions that we have advanced more slowly over time. We also were of the mistaken belief that we had eliminated the Mob as a threat. We have had so much weaponry and even now we have such a huge population and so much industrial capacity that people and ships are expendable. Your concept of almost surgical warfare is interesting. We have been very good at targeting communication and control, but the solutions you propose are very different and quite refreshing,” remarked Phoebe. “I’ll go and brief my pilots in a couple of hours and spent some time with them looking at the specific tactical elements. Janet can come along with me as we’ll need to talk about loading Marines to take over the cruisers and frigates. I’ll be very interested to see how these mines work and if it’s a viable concept. If it is we’ll have ships to board, and more ships for our developing fleet.”