Chapter One Hundred and Three - Mystify, Mislead, and Surprise the Enemy
A perusal of historical records showed that there was a massive and clear bias in favour of surprise.
Even just momentary knowledge that an attack was coming could tip the balance in a conflict away from the aggressor. But surprise? That was undeniably one of the most powerful elements in a conflict.
Unfortunately, the very nature of a violent conflict often meant that surprise didn’t usually last all that long.
How many ‘first strikes’ would the ERF get?
Well, if their plans worked to perfection, they’d actually get a few of them.
“Are you ready?” Day sent over their shared net. It was her, Candle, Twilight, and in the centre of their current plan, Lullaby.
The four of them were sitting on a blanket on a hill, the sun shining down warmly upon them, birdsong in the air, and a few snacks laid on them to pick at. A lone willow hung heavy above them, trailing leaves masking the sunlight.
In reality, the four of them were flying in a relatively tight formation. Candle’s larger body was being used to hide Lullaby, whose hull was in turn masking Day, and Day was masking Twilight. Any clear image from the military FTL ship would only show one of them on a lazy approach.
That was, if the Accord FTL ship bothered to look.
Their four hulls weren’t the only things flying towards the enemy, and they hadn’t noticed the rest yet either.
“I’m ready,” Lullaby said. A hand slipped out from her pile of blankets and ensconced with a scone. There were some little noises from the pile as she nibbled. “Just tell me when,” she said.
Day nodded. She was laying with her back against Lullaby, or her blankets, at any rate. She was, without contest, the best of Day’s sisters to sleep on.
“Alright. First phase, launch,” Day said.
Across a tiny portion of the vast emptiness of space, where three massive vessels sat fat and lazy, were some three dozen small drones. They were about the size of a classic minivan, bulky and angular, covered in colour-eating paint and a few unfolding manoeuvring thrusters.
They were basically invisible.
That was, until the split second where Day’s Go signal reached them.
All thirty-six launchers spun around, their fronts exploding outwards. Then the torpedoes within them launched.
Each drone was a copied and refined version of the drones Twilight had once designed. They housed two torpedoes each, and twelve human-style chemical-warhead long range missiles.
The torpedoes raced ahead, twenty-four for each of the FTL ships.
Day liked to imagine that onboard those ships there was a communications officer, or maybe some poor alien manning the scanning and radar station whose job just got a lot, lot more interesting.
The torpedoes were somewhat stealthy, as stealthy as a thruster with a bomb on the end could be.
The missiles were the opposite, and they launched seconds later.
Thirty-six drones launching twelve missiles each, split amongst three targets. An easy 144 missiles per FTL ship.
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They wouldn’t actually deal too much damage. Sure, they were packed full of explosives, but a couple of kilos of high explosives could only do so much against ships that were multiple kilometres long.
The screaming of the missile’s targeting systems and ECM and counter-ECM, however, would be one hell of a surprise.
“Torps on the way. Missiles too,” Twilight said.
She dipped a cookie in a mug of hot chocolate.
The cookie broke apart and she raised half of it, glaring. “Who programmed that in?” she asked.
Candles snorted.
The torpedoes were slower than the missiles, but not by very much. The missiles just had better acceleration owing to their much smaller mass. The timing would be a bit off, of course. It wasn’t like they could position each drone exactly equidistant to the other and the FTL ship they were targeting.
Still, the missiles would strike in about four minutes, with about a minute between first impact and the last. The torpedoes would come in after, but only half of them.
Every other torpedo was a directional EMP. Those would be going off in staggered waves, to constantly mess with the ship’s scanning equipment.
The other half of the torpedoes were Casaba-howitzers. Nuclear bombs which would go off, launching half-ton balls of plasma at the FTL ships at an appreciable percentage of C.
Day kept an eye on the clock. The seconds ticked by.
“Lullaby,” she said.
Two arms poked out of the blanket pile, then Lullaby’s head, hair all tangled and messy as she yawned big. “Okay,” she said.
Candle’s hull spun and moved along one axis, suddenly revealing Lullaby.
The MAC-destroyer was entirely built around a single weapon, one that had never fired in aggression.
Until now.
Lullaby roared, the hull bucking backwards even as her thrusters kicked to full to counteract the force of her main gun firing.
A ton of tungsten was projected forwards at speeds that were quite simply ludicrous. Multiple megatons of electrical energy spent in a picosecond to project the bullet outwards, completely draining an entire bank of massive capacitors which had been constantly charging for days.
The round beat the missiles to the enemy.
It punched into the side of one of the civilian FTL ships with ten times more raw energy than the asteroid that had wiped the dinosaurs.
The bullet didn’t stop to impart all that energy on the ship. It punched a hole Day could drive through from bow to stern and kept going.
And then it met the second ship several thousand kilometres later. That strike would be a glancing blow, they knew, but it didn’t matter overly much. The round rammed into the port side of the ship and a half-kilometre exit-wound was punched out of its starboard side.
“Hit,” Lullaby said. She nestled back into her blankets. “Wake me up when we’re in knife-fighting range.”
“I will. Good job,” Day said at about the same time as the first missile struck.
***