Shaitan Wars 2: Wrath of the Shaitans (25 page)

When the two approaching enemy fleets were just under half an hour away from each other, and at about a 9,000 Km distance, the Third Fleet stopped its engines. The Third Fleet was now free floating on its own momentum towards the fleet from Beta Shaitan.

The ships of the Third Fleet then started a programmed task in unison. They started releasing into space the first piece of their Maskirovka. It was a package which had no electromagnetic emissions (yet). Its skin was made out of carbon composites, not metal so it did not reflect radar signals well.

The packages continued travelling along with the free floating ships of the Third Fleet at the same velocity and in the same direction as the ship of the Third Fleet, having inherited the momentum and the speed from the ships out of which they had been released.

To an observer at a few hundred kilometers away, if they knew where to point the telescope, it would be visible in extreme magnification under the very dim sunlight at this distance far beyond the orbit of Pluto, as a lump of rock few meters wide. At the same distance, if they shone a very high radar ping, they might just be able to detect it. At any distance beyond a few hundred kilometers though, it would be nary impossible to detect those packages.

As this task was going on, Admiral Kalinin’s signal was broadcast. It was deliberately broadcast Omni directionally and at a very high signal strength. This would ensure that both the Shaitan fleet got to hear the broadcast, and hopefully understand the message.

The message simply said – “We understand your message and start our compliance now. We will let your ships pass through. If however our ships are attacked by your passing ships, then we will retaliate.”

The message was short and simple. Even with the inaccuracies of a computer generated translation, Fabi was certain that the Shaitans will understand the message. It was now generally considered that the Shaitans had understood the first message humans had sent in the Shaitan language. It was thought that due to the comprehension of that first message in their own language, did they subsequently communicate their threat in the Shaitan language.

Now that the second part of their little Maskirovka had been delivered, it was to be seen if they would buy it. There was however no time to wait and see the Shaitan reaction, the third act of the Maskirovka had to be played out immediately.

The ships of the Third Fleet had been traveling in a tangential direction to the sun heading towards the fleet from Beta Shaitan. Now they had turned 90° and changed their heading directly towards the sun and opened up their engines full throttle.

Their momentum in space meant that the ships of the Third Fleet continued traveling in the tangential direction, towards the incoming fleet from Beta Shaitan at the same speed as before. Additionally now with their engines pointed at a 90° angle, it added velocity in the direction of the sun. So the Third Fleet started moving away in curved line from the fleet of Beta Shaitan.

The Third Fleet was no longer heading directly towards the Beta Shaitan fleet and its three ships. When the two fleets passed each other, the Third Fleet would have moved about a 100 km to the sunward side of the fleet from Beta Shaitan.

It would be apparent within a few minutes to the approaching fleet from Beta Shaitan, who must be tracking, that the Third Fleet was moving out of the way. Hopefully that, along with the message they had just broadcast would convince the Shaitans about Human compliance to their demands. Everybody in the fleet kept their fingers crossed and waited.

Since the two fleets were approaching each other at almost 5 Km per second, the best window of opportunity for firing missiles at each other was when directly approaching each other. The missiles would then have been closing in on the approaching ships, it would not have fuel problems reaching its target. The high approach velocity would also make it that much more difficult for point defense systems to shoot the missiles down.

Once the fleets passed each other, the missiles would have to chase down the other fleet. First it will have to lose all the velocity imparted by the firing ship, then gain the velocity of the target ship. It would certainly run out of fuel before that, and even if it didn’t it would approach the target at such a low speed that it would be a sitting duck for the point defense system.

With that window in mind the computers had been programmed accordingly. When the human computers sensed the distance between the Third Fleet and the fleet from Beta Shaitan had narrowed to 50 Km. It gave the signal, and all hell broke loose.

Unlike the previous generation ships, the fundamental limitation on firepower of a large ship like the Nautilus was not the amount of missiles it could carry. It were the missile tubes. Space battles were decided and over within seconds, or tens of seconds at the most. There was no point in carrying 200 missiles, if the captain could not launch them in a few second when he wanted to.

There was no way that much volume of missiles could be launched within a few seconds even if the Nautilus had 20 missile tubes, not that there was that much clear space in the ship to accommodate even 10 such tubes. So the designers of Nautilus went back to brass tacks and started asking some fundamental questions.

Why the hell does a missile, which has navigation, sensors, electronics and computers better than many spaceships just two decades ago need a launch tube to guide it? Why does a missile which has rocketry more sophisticated than the Friendship class ships still used by USC, need to be launched from a dumb hollow piece of tube?

The designers really didn’t have an answer. They realized that they had been blindly following the thinking inherited from atmosphere based missiles, launched from primitive planes and helicopters well over a century ago.

To make matters worse, when a missile was launched from a tube, it would always start in the direction in which the tube was affixed, which usually would be in the direction the ship faced. What if the ship wanted to launch behind while running away, or launch to the sides while flanking the enemy?

So the designers decided to ditch the launch tube. The Nautilus had no missile launch tube! Instead the missiles of Nautilus had a special but ridiculously simple release mechanism. They were literally ejected out of the belly of the ship en masse like the bombers of World War II hundred and fifty years ago! It was really a bit more sophisticated than that, but the basic principle was the same.

The designers did not have to make much modification to the missile itself. It was after all designed to turn and guide itself to its target. As long as it was released in open space, it could basically fly itself in any direction.

They added a special casing to each missile made out of carbon composites meant for protection of the missiles in storage, handling and to survive the ejection mechanism. The casing had a nice touch in that it could simply be released in space, and both its visual and radar profile will make it look like a small sized carboniferous asteroid rock.

The missiles could be given targets before launch or if you had the proper codes, remotely as well. The missiles could be programmed to recognize IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) signals and then simply left on proximity trigger mode. In one stroke your missile could be turned into intelligent mines.

And how do you eject 200 missile, each weighing over a ton reasonably far out of the ship within a few seconds so that it could light up its drive immediately? The B2 bomber on Earth could depend on gravity, but the Nautilus couldn’t.

So the eject mechanism used another even older, 250 year old technology – the pneumatic hammer. Well, not exactly a hammer, but the same principle as a hand held pneumatic rivet gun. The missiles were stored around a cylinder that encompassed the spine of the ship.

There were six openings on the aft and six on the fore all along the circumference of the ship. These openings were thin and long for a missile to exit length wise from the ship. Underneath each of the opening was a simple pneumatic mechanism powered by compressed air which was fed missiles from a storage which looked very similar to that of the rivet storage in a rivet gun.

These pneumatic ejectors could eject ton of missile as fast as 30 meters per second, so that it was capable of lighting up its engine in less than half a second after exiting the ship. The ejectors could also eject out as gently as a few centimeters per second, when you wanted to lay them like mines. Each ejectors could eject at the rate of one missile per second. The entire 200 missiles could be emptied by the 12 ejectors working simultaneously within 17 seconds.

The Nautilus and its sister ships of the Third Fleet however were not ejecting any missiles at the moment. They had already ejected and laid out the missiles. Each ship had deployed 90 missiles out of its 200 in store. That was a total of 360 missiles.

All the missile however had not been laid directly in the path of the oncoming Beta Shaitan fleet. The Third Fleet had continued laying missiles as it had moved laterally, spacing them out evenly. The missiles had not been released gently either. They had been release at the maximum velocity, so that the ones that had been released over half an hour ago, were now over 50 Km away from where they had been released.

Some were on above of the path, some below the path, and some on the other side to the one the Third Fleet had moved. The computer had programmed the pattern of release for maximum disbursement. The best part was the missiles were moving away silently without any rocket burn on its own momentum.

When the computers onboard the Third Fleet gave the signals however, things changed drastically. The explosive adhesive that held the casing of the missiles got an electrical jolt, that triggered them and the casing gently blew apart.

The sensors and navigation computers came to life and took a few milliseconds to get their orientation. Then it calculated its optimal trajectory for another few milliseconds, and gave commands to its attitude thrusters to orient themselves in the correct direction. Then the main thrusters of the missiles roared to life and started its mad suicidal dash towards its targets.

Whether the Shaitan captains were taken by surprise or not, the humans didn’t know, but the response from the Shaitan warships was immediate, almost as soon as the light from the missiles’ exhaust reached them. At the minimum, the Shaitans had programmed their computers for contingency reaction.

This was the first time humans were observing the capabilities of what they thought was a Shaitan warship, and the capabilities suggested that the name was justified. Each of the three vessels launched 16 missiles simultaneously from 16 missile tubes placed all along the circumference of the warship.

Eight of those missile from each ship totaling 24 headed towards the Third Fleet, while the rest 24 headed towards the human missiles. Simultaneously two laser beams from each ship targeted the ships of the Third Fleet. These were the same intensity death ray laser beams used by the troop carrier over Titan. The only difference was that each Shaitan warship carried two of those instead of one.

Last but not the least was the surprise new weapon these Shaitan warships carried, which had not been used by the earlier troop carrier. It was a weapon which the humans would only be able to figure out properly long after the war. Fortunately for the Third Fleet, it operated on the basic principles of a rail gun and was mistaken as such.

The Third Fleet was already running away from the Beta Shaitan fleet, and had just over a 100 Km of separation. The ion plasma engines of the human ships were already at full throttle. The human ships were at a slight advantage over the Shaitan warships in the sense that the human missiles were at 50 Km distance from the Shaitan ships when the fight began, whereas the Shaitan missiles started 100 km away.

More importantly, the human ships were moving away from the missiles when the battle started, while the Shaitan ships’ momentum was taking them closer to the human missiles. The Third Fleet will have longer to try and kill the Shaitan missiles, while the Beta Shaitan fleet would have a lot less time to do the same to the human missiles.

The death ray lasers were effectively countered by the AWPS system which had saved the day for the human ships in the last battle over Titan. The system had been improved, now that they knew the exact output of the Shaitan killer lasers. The human ships didn’t have to tumble to distribute the heat. It would not have been possible to tumble without cutting off acceleration, which would have been a disaster, as it would have let the Shaitan missiles catch up.

Just like the previous encounter with the Shaitans, the geeks had put one piece of speculative defense on the Nautilus class of ships. Due to the earlier precedent, the navy had not laughed at the geeks this time, and it was a good thing too. For it was this speculative piece of engineering that saved the lives of the Third Fleet.

Computed Acceleration Deceleration for Ballistic Evasion (CADBE) was possible only after the development of the practical quantum computer. The Nautilus class vessels carried multiple cores of quantum computers which ran many of the new technologies on the ship, from the variable geometry Fusion reactors to the CADBE system.

The concept was simple, understood by anyone instinctively, the trick was in the execution. Any child playing dodge ball knows to watch the hands of the thrower. Once the ball has left the hands of the thrower, it is ballistic, its trajectory can no longer be changed by the thrower.

The child calculates instinctively the trajectory of the ball and determines if the ball is going to hit him if he continues running at the speed and direction he is running. If the answer is yes, then all the child has to do is to alter his speed or direction, and the ball will miss him.

The CADBE system worked on the same principles but tremendously fast. It needed to, after all the incoming rail gun projectile was expected to approach at tens of kilometers per second. The rail gun projectile was just a piece of mass, which did not emit any light or electromagnetic waves, so it was very difficult to track in flight.