Road to nowhere, Arc 4 of "Gone with the Sun"
Chapter 47 Learning Experiences
Falling leaf
Fighter pilots are by temperament a bit flaky. Old-style bomber pilots have to consider the lives of their buddies as well as their own, and most cruiser pilots are similarly a little more reserved. Not Nairobi's pilot, who used to fly antique acrobatic biplanes for a hobby, and fancied himself in one of the new frigates, much to his Captain's annoyance.
"I am a leaf on the wind; watch how I soar."
"Can it, Flight Lieutenant, there's no wind in space, and that ended badly for the pilot."
"Come on, boss, don't you know how liberating it is to have all the safeties and the VI off? I tell you it takes artistry to look like you're damaged when you're not. At least in something this size."
"Fine, but be an artist a little more slowly, this ship is still new and I don't want the paint scratched. Also, I don't think the forward pickets are in place yet."
In fact they very much were. Peacemaker, Pegasus and Overlord had crept in toward the feeble light of Pax, a K0 yellow dwarf, while the Normandy shadowed the cruiser Nairobi, making like a rock on a rock, discharging its drive core directly into a 60km diameter asteroid, as though it had just arrived after a long and painful FTL hop.
Phase two had started; the cruiser's migration in-system to Noveria's L2 Lagrangian point. Very slow, very unstealthy, painful-looking… and boring. The pilot was playing Debussy's Clouds in the cockpit – a good choice. Let it be; he'll get a surprise soon.
Each frigate had different tasks. Pegasus and Overlord took up station at Noveria's L4 and L5 Lagrangian points, each a sixth of the way around the system. Passive scans had revealed nothing at all, which itself was a great big something in this system.
TBS crackled to life on Peacemaker, sitting with stealth off at the L1 point between Pax and just above Noveria, over the horizon from Port Hanshan.
"Nothing at L5." (Shepard, on Overlord, not in the co-pilot's seat but strapped into the gunnery officer's seat behind the Thanix cannon, before the threat map.)
"Likewise, nothing at L4." (Liara, in the co-pilot's seat on Pegasus). So. It would fall to Peacemaker to run the first active scan.
"Right. Nyrek! Ready for subsonic speed in-atmosphere. Let's drop our pants."
"Yes, sir." Nyrek wore a bloodthirsty turian grin as he pressed one of his console's actual Big Red Buttons, except this one was white:
PING
Coo-eee!
The Nairobi's pilot killed the ambient auditory simulators and looked at his Captain with a wild surmise: "Ye cats! Sir, they could have heard that on the Citadel!"
"Don't forget, frigates are the eyes and ears of the fleet, pilot. They've had a scanner upgrade, the Argus advanced scanner array."
"Argus? The gun?"
"No. It's beyond me why they named a gun Argus, but for a scanner it's rational. If you look it up you'll find Argus the all-seeing on the extranet. A Normandy-style scanner uses neutrino chirps. As a side effect they do an extremely sharp lobed electromagnetic pulse. It lights up heavy metal deposits, and Eezo, like a Christmas tree. Those fins are, besides airfoils, detector plates."
The pilot considered this while tracking Peacemaker's descent to the troposphere.
"So why the hell are we bothering with stealth if the first thing we do when we get to the planet is ding a great big dong?"
"We haven't rung the gong, pilot. Just one ship has. And, you will note, stealth is off, its thermal sink is down, and it's now discharging its drive core. All perfectly Little Red Riding Hood, except the crew's at battle stations and the nukes are online. I'm beginning to see some Shepard magic here."
Pong
"Spirits! Two Reaper ships! Are you getting this, guys?"
TBS came alive.
"Yeah. One capital ship, on its back below a light dusting of snow." (Shepard)
A 'light dusting' in this context was a few metres. Capital Reapers were two kilometres long. Nyrek activated the on-board HIRES and lidar imagers, began a visual scan.
"They're Reaper corpses, I suspect. Live reapers would have been up and after us or more likely our 'sick' cruiser." (The Nairobi's captain).
"Capital Reaper's five hundred klicks from Port Hanshan. I'm guessing it had just turned up when the crucible fired and the Pax relay overloaded." (Shepard)
"Concur. But the other one, our VI paints it as a destroyer, is outside Firebase White."
"It's sprawled but upright, yes, so was on the ground already when the red flash came. There's something unidentifiable almost on top of Port Hanshan." (Lawson)
"We've got visual on that now. It's a tube, rather bigger than the destroyer… oh, this stinks."
"Garrus?" (Lawson)
"Guys, I think it's a collector ship."
Sharp intake of breath from Liara. "Actually that makes sense. They'd have been after the bio and AI tech."
Shepard, though, had focused on the obvious military issue. "There's no reason a collector ship would have suffered any worse than us from the Red Flash. By now they might have done some repairs. No reaction to the ping so far, Garrus?"
"None… wait… Peacemaker just got pinged. "
Rumble
The Collectors had waited till his ship showed its hand, before scanning it. It wouldn't make that mistake again. It mustn't be given the opportunity to communicate.
"Do I take a shot?" Peacemaker, as the point machine, had besides its usual armament a couple of human mini-nukes on very temporary mounts underwing. The airflow disruption not only made his ship hard to handle in-atmosphere; in space manoeuvres it wallowed like a hippo too. Garrus badly wanted to get rid of them. Shepard didn't.
"Not directly, Garrus, not with the fun stuff, not while it's close to Port Hanshan."
"Suppose it doesn't come up? Won't we have to go inside with a ground team?"
"Mikhailovich would already have two battalions en route, Shepard." (Nairobi)
"Not yet. Wait. It's always better to let the customers come to the shop." (Shepard)
"Spirits. I'm getting tau neutrino signatures. It's powering up."
"We'll try and ablate its armor in-atmosphere then hit again before it leaves the magnetosphere. If it comes up after you, tell the VI to cut loose with the first underwing missile so the nuke goes off at some distance, say three kilometres from the docks, timed so it's just off the ground if you possibly can. Get at least eighty klicks distant if you do a magnetosphere burst!"
"… okay. Done. The rate the neutrino emissions are building, it'll lift in forty seconds. Firing in ten… five. Four. Three. Two. One. MARK."
And a ridiculous chemical rocket left from under wing, for a point four kilometres downwind of Port Hanshan. The shock would proceed directly up a valley to the Collectors. Shepard had warned him to keep it a low airburst, stay low initially, and apply clamps against an electromagnetic pulse.
Fireball
Nyrek had seen composite 3D holos of modern Turian warheads going off. Those were fission-fusion layered devices, rather unwieldy, of around fifty kilotonnes TNT-equivalent – rather more than a dreadnought slug, but nowhere near a Reaper strike.
On the other hand, the atmosphere shocks especially in dusty or sandy battlefields, and the radiation, and the pressure overburden, had made them an invaluable addition to the turian arsenal during the Krogan rebellions. They could kill unprotected krogan infantry by the billion.
This was not an infantry target but a huge armored and shielded tube.
The ground was frozen snow, not sandy desert.
It didn't matter.
Yet Vakarian had inspected the warhead being mated to the rocket's fuselage. It amounted to a cone less than a metre across. The implosion element or "pit" was an ellipsoid, not a sphere, and fitted in the tip of the cone. It was only a small portion of the whole device. The human techs and armed guards would permit no-one to see the remainder of the device, but Liara said it was almost certainly a lithium deuteride pill.
"Spirits!"
Somehow the first fission caused implosion and fusion of that second pill even though it wasn't surrounded by the explosion. With that clue, the principle of how it was done had already been worked out by Liara and Javik, but the devil was in the details, and no details could be seen.
What Garrus could see through the rear vid was a blinding fireball.
The last time he'd seen such a thing was recorded exiting Pragia in the shuttle, eight kilometres away and going like stink. That had been just a straight-up black-market thorium-derived U-233 fission device, of quarian origin, for civil engineering (moving mountains, creating industrial disposal pits, etc.). Such things were so easily scanned for that terrorists discounted their use, and the power was low (about 20kT, tops).
This was twenty kilometres off. It had to be in the multi-megatonne range. The only thing the hierarchy had ever designed like that for surface use was a multiple-warhead thing that had to be carried by ship and was universally reckoned a waste of U-235.
"Step on it, Nyrek!"
Mach Stem
What did for the armor, indirectly, was the reflected shock waves. These combined into a vertical shock front which did not suffer appreciably from inverse-square power diminution.
The Reapers and their minions were familiar with the rule that EMP from Compton recoil electrons was proportional to the square root of the gamma ray flux pushing those electrons – which meant the EMP scaled as the square root of kilotonne rating. Human nukes– these were multi-megatonne devices– yielded a huge increase in electromagnetic pulse; EMP exceeded experience by two orders of magnitude.
The collector ship Overmind barely had time to register that the tiny aircraft approaching did not have an air-breathing engine before it exploded – a kilometre outside the point-defense range. It had left it almost too late but just managed to clamp its higher functions before the EMP hit.
Well, it wouldn't make that mistake again.
But it was too late to prevent the tube caroming off a mountainside opposite the Port Hanshan docks. The kinetic barriers were briefly overwhelmed following several shorts of the ring main, and in that time the mountain strike fractured armor on one side which should have been able to shrug off a dreadnought hit. If it hadn't been for g-compensating mass effect fields, collector crew would have been pasted instead of human colonists.
As it was, the ships Collector-Captain suffered three broken appendages. If it had been capable of feeling anger and humiliation, it might have done something silly.
Instead, it did something logical. However unexpectedly powerful, this was still a chain-reaction weapon and therefore a known quantity. It got out of atmosphere fast. Now these things wouldn't be able to hurt it with atmospheric shock waves.
The Collector ship, still sparking down one side, climbed through the mesopause to orbit where it expected to spend minimal time doing running repairs. The fleeing frigate had flipped and returned, then fired another. Wasting time it could have used to flee, although it was going noticeably faster now. Not very sapient. All it would inflict in space was prompt radiation, subject to the inverse-square law. It instructed its point-defence subsystems to engage the missile at extreme range; around ten kilometres. It should be dead by five kilometres out. Plenty of time after that to engage the wounded cruiser which this speck was attempting to protect.
But the missile detonated at twelve kilometres.
The Overmind never stopped to consider the effect of Noveria's magnetosphere. No Collector or Reaper had ever had occasion to think about what such a large nuclear explosion in a strong planetary magnetic field might do.
As it turned out, it wouldn't make that mistake again, either.
Next chapter: #48, "Overkill"
Monday, July 27, 2015