Attack Run

ADVENTURER: T-MINUS 11 HOURS
  Ty figured that before the Aatarr joined the two Aatrixx in orbit around Jupiter, he needed to deal with them first. They were in a low orbit around the planet. The period and altitude of their orbit over the planet would put them within a few thousand miles of the apex of the convoy’s trajectory around it. Their sensor returns showed the two ships were just a couple hundred miles apart in the same orbit and that neither was taking any defensive maneuvering.
  He knew from the outset of the attack that timing would be crucial. Using Junior to command the jumps would leave the Alliance ships in the dark about where the Adventurer was until the light from their location got to the ships. But that was just a few minutes. In that time, he had to jump in system, which was easy enough and then accelerate directly at either of the Aatrixx to maximum subliminal speed, a little more than twenty percent of light.
  Ty began to program the attack run into the flight control and fire control systems. Lastly, he entered the jump parameters into Junior. After reviewing the information, he sounded General Quarters again. It was time. The attack run would take all of twenty-six seconds to execute. He commanded the jump.
  T-Minus twenty-six seconds… The Adventurer jumped and began her run at the Aatrixx from nearly a million miles away. They were eight light seconds from Aatrix. Ty remembered as the ship began to accelerate all the previous times he’d done this in a simulator against the software doppelgänger of the ship he was now approaching. He wondered how close reality would be to what he’d practiced. He could tell from the sound of the generator that it was, for the first time in a long time, being called upon to put out close to its full combat rated output.
  At T-Minus Twenty-Three seconds, the Adventurer had accelerated to ten percent of light speed.
  At T-Minus Nineteen-seconds, light from the jump reached the Aatrix.
  At T-Minus Seventeen-seconds, the Adventurer had accelerated to maximum speed of twenty percent light speed. The Aatrixx threat warning system detected the Adventurer accelerating towards the ship and began to sound alarms of an imminent attack.
  At this point, the computers were flying the ship and doing the fighting. The reaction times were simply too short for a human to have any hope of firing the weapons and driving the ship safely. The seconds ticked down. Ty watched the targeted Aatrixx in a window that he’d set up on the main display panel. In reality, they would never be close enough to see it with their naked eyes. Nothing would happen down to two seconds prior to crossing. The Aatrix’s only hope of surviving the attack was to hit the Adventurer and destroy it with a laser shot. The Adventurer would jump away before any missile or rail gun slug got even close to it. To that end, he’d shut the aft shields off to give the forward shields as much power as they could muster. Everything would occur and they’d either survive or not, in what happened in a tenth of a second before they jumped past the ship at one second before crossing.
  At T-Minus Twelve-seconds, the duty officer on the Aatrixx stabbed the button releasing the defense systems to actually fire at the oncoming ship.
  At T-Minus Ten-seconds, the Adventurer’s laser began firing at the Aatrixx sensor towers in an effort to blind the ship.
  By T-Minus Nine-seconds, the gun turrets and the laser batteries had extended and swiveled into position to face the ship. The fire control systems for the rail guns determined there was no workable solution and so didn’t fire the guns. The lasers on the other hand targeted the onrushing ship and began firing at it. While it was seconds away, the distance between the ships was still measured in tens of thousands of miles. Most shots missed, those that that hit were absorbed by the shields.
  At the same time, the Adventurer’s rail guns began firing a mix of solid and fragmentation slugs at the ship. Those rounds travelled in their own trajectories towards the ship.
  At T-Minus Five-seconds, the Adventurer rail guns stopped firing. The rounds, if fired, would have sailed passed the ship.
  At T-Minus Four-seconds, the laser targeting systems began to detect the onrushing railgun rounds and recognizing them as the greater threat, aimed at the rounds to try and kill them. Several of the rounds were vaporized by the intense beams, but even the vapor continued on towards the ship at twenty percent of light speed.
  At T-Minus One point two-seconds, just two thousand miles from the Aatrix, the Adventurer jumped using Junior to control the jump. The Adventurer jumped across Jupiter’s system of moons and rings and braked hard to drop down to a full stop. She took another nine-seconds to decelerate. The trajectory arced the ship behind the planet so that it was between them and the two ships.
  During the encounter, all Ty or anyone else on board could do was stand and watch the displays and infer from the readings how the attack went. When the Adventurer slowed into orbit around Jupiter, Ty turned to Anderson, “Well we’re still alive. There’s some success there.”
  “Yeah, but did we hit the Aatrix?”
  “Let’s see what the sensors picked up after we jumped.”
  Ty tapped on the display’s control panel. A new window appeared in the display. He sent the output of the sensor to the display. He found the Aatrixx and zoomed in on it. He set the playback to slow motion. A counter in the upper right corner of the screen, counted the time in hundredth’s of a second. For several seconds, nothing appeared to happen.
  “What you’re seeing are images that were captured from a five light-second distance after we made the escape jump. The effects of our laser attack won’t manifest until we hit two hundred on the timer counter here,” said Ty. He tapped the counter in the window, “The rail gun rounds won’t arrive until the counter gets to five hundred.”
  “Ok”
  When the counter hit two hundred seven, the shield surrounding the Aatrixx began to pulse a blinding violet white flash every five hundredth’s count. After ten flashes, other secondary flashes could be seen at several places on the ship’s hull. Ty tapped a button to freeze the playback.
  “Are those the shield generators failing?”
  Ty nodded, “That’s the beauty of a pico-second burst. All the power of our one hundred megajoule beam is compressed into a thousandth of a second. That increases the energy level of the shot some, and it creates a very intense shock to the system.”
  “How does that make a difference?”
  “You like taffy right?”
  “Yeah, who doesn’t,” she winked at him. Ty just smiled.
  “Well, what happens if you apply a force over time on the taffy?”
  “It stretches.”
  “What happens if you apply the same level of force, but you jerk the taffy instead?”
  “It snaps and breaks.”
  “That’s what happens here. If the beam energy is spread over a full second, which is how we rate the power, then the system can absorb that energy input. But if the same amount of energy is applied in a very short time, the molecules of the ship’s hull or in this case the shield waves can’t absorb the energy fast enough. In the case of a solid material, that sets up shock waves which shatter molecular bonds. In the case of shield waves, it induces fluctuations in the wave form of the shield which the shield anodes can’t absorb fast enough and so shockwaves in the shield anode occur, with the same result.”
  “So without the shield anodes, the shield collapses?”
  “Yes, and you get this, those secondary explosions are the shield anodes failing. We’ve still got about ten more pulses before the laser stopped firing. From here on, the hull is going to take the hits from the laser pulses.”
  True to his word, the shields no longer pulsed, instead a point on the hull near the aft sensor tower lit up in bright flashes of light. With each flash, increasingly larger chunks of the hull began exploding away from the ship. At four seconds in, the flashes stopped and the boulder and rock sized chunks of the ship’s hull could be seen floating away from the ship.
  “When we get to six seconds, the rail gun rounds start hitting, if we aimed right that is. Mind you these are coming in at twenty percent of light. There is a horrific amount of kinetic energy in those slugs. If even one hits, it’s going to be spectacular. We’re talking twenty-one quadrillion joules of energy.”
  At six seconds there were three blinding flashes away from the ship followed almost instantaneously after by the hull of the Aatrixx flashing a brilliant white. When the flash faded away, the Aatrixx was rotating along its long axis. It soon became apparent that the ship had been broken into three large pieces.
  “Damn,” said Anderson. She was almost slack jaw in awe of what was being displayed. “What happened there?”
  “I’d say that’s a kill. But to be precise, three slugs were hit by the lasers firing in point-defense mode. Our slugs were vaporized, but the matter of the slugs was still moving towards the ship, just in a plasma or gaseous form instead of solid. It still had most of the kinetic energy, it was just diffused over an area as the gas expanded in the vacuum. What you saw was the radiation and heat of the gas and plasma striking the ship, but that was enough to break it apart.”
  “Powerful case for using kinetic weapons, don’t you think?”
  Ty shook his head disagreeing with her. “No, they were just incredibly stupid. That other Aatrixx will start jinking now which will make this kind of an attack a lot more difficult if not impossible. Our next attack will be different,” he said with a smile.
  “Besides, the next attack is designed to draw them away from Jupiter.”
  “When do you start?”
  “In forty minutes, as soon as we loop around the planet. This’ll be a conventional attack, so we need to get everyone suited up.”