Divine Wind

The Japanese phrase that translates to “divine wind” refers to a powerful storm, forceful enough to sink the largest ship.  Near the end of World War II, facing imminent defeat, the tiny island nation undertook a desperate strategy.  They began sending airplanes, packed with explosives, to fly into Allied naval vessels.  The world learned a new term.  Kamikaze.

The journey from Saturn to Jupiter gave us time to plan our next attack.  We hashed through every reasonable scenario we could come up with, and ran the data through our simulators.  We got the same result each time.  We lost. 

Our fleet of fifteen ships lacked the firepower of the Raptor, the Federation ship we will face when we attack Europa.  There is no way a collection of commercial ships and obsolete military vessels could defeat a state of the art warbird. Not a sane way, at any rate.  We did not find a potentially winning scenario until we embraced suicide.

Our only advantage is our numbers.  And the finite amount of weaponry any ship, including the Raptor, can carry.  We came up with a two pronged attack.  The first goal was to get our enemy to consume its missiles, shells, and bullets.  By firing them at our relatively defenseless fleet. 

The other goal?  To fly one of our ships into the Raptor.  We don’t possess any military grade missiles.  Our kinetic weapons are toys compared to what we will face.  But our smallest ship has 90,000 kilograms of mass and will be moving at 25,000 miles per hour.  The cargo bay of each ship carries a load of mining explosives fashioned into a bomb.  If one gets close enough, the shrapnel from an exploding ship will punch many holes in the Raptor’s hull.  A direct collision will be fatal.

We know the crew of any ship that engages the Raptor will face almost certain death.  We had to decide the order of attack.  Plan A was to ask for volunteers.  That didn’t work.  Every ship volunteered to go first.

Plan B was a lottery.  Fifteen numbers, inside a computer program.  The captain of each ship pushed a button and received their number.  I was both relieved and disappointed when the Avenging Angel got 14.  That put us at the end of the attack.  By the time I die in this battle, if it comes to that, we will already have lost.

I am happy that Michael, in charge of the Starscraper, had drawn 12.  He is an important part of the team.  I depend on his guidance.  I am despondent that Eve, captaining one of the old military ships, drew two.  I know what that means.  But there is no going back, no plan C.  Everyone cried and hugged their shipmates.  The reality of our plan sunk in.   

War in outer space is nothing like its planet-bound counterpart.  A ship is either in orbit around a celestial body, or it is traveling in a relatively straight line in free space.  Without the friction that land or air provides, space ships must consume energy and propellant to slow down or turn.  No matter how big, all ships have a finite amount of each.  More weapons mean more mass, requiring more fuel and propellant.  And a larger, heavier ship.  Everything has harsh limits out here.

There are no battle lines in space.  Just ships moving very fast.  Two combatants flying directly at each other will have a short window to fire their weapons before they fly past. It might take hours or days for them to turn around to make another pass.

If two ships are moving in the same direction, at the same speed, they will be stationary with respect to each other.  That allows for a more traditional exchange of weapons fire.  We were determined to avoid that.

Those things factored into our attack.  With an additional twist.  Our plan to attack Europa was a feint.  A diversion to convince the Federation to move the Raptor there.  Our real plan was to hijack the Federation jump ship orbiting Callisto, the New Apollo. 

The Apollo is a generation ship.  Its journey will take longer than the lives of its crew.  Long enough for the crew to raise children, and for them to raise theirs, before the destination is reached.  We aren’t going to Europa.  We are going to the stars.

We are close enough to Europa to pick up the Raptor on our sensors.  We know they can see us.  Eight of our ships veer off, heading for Callisto.  The other seven continued toward Europa and the Raptor.  They would see this and guess our intentions. 

The Raptor was circling Europa.  From there it would have provided a formidable defense against an attack on the colony.  When they realized our target was the jump ship, they accelerated out of orbit to face our attack group.  Overcoming the gravitational pull of both Europa and Jupiter is a strain, even for the Raptor’s powerful fission engine.  The Raptor will be the superior vessel in the upcoming battle.  But the advantage of speed is ours.

If we had military weaponry, we would have formed a circle facing the enemy.  That would allow all of our ships to fire on the Raptor at the same time.  Instead, the attack group formed a line.  The lead ship was between the Raptor and the trailing vessels.  This was the best defensive position our poorly armed warriors could adopt.

 

The Sidewinder is in the lead.  Their radar sees the Raptor dispatch a missile.  They launch their decoys.  Each ship carries at least 5 decoys, the larger ships had more.  Each decoy is maneuverable and remotely controlled by the crew.  The decoys are much smaller than a ship, but they are fitted with triangular attachments, called corner reflectors, designed to concentrate and reflect radar waves back to the sender. That makes the decoy appear larger. 

The ships and the decoys deploy chaff, thin strips of aluminum foil that reflect radar waves in random directions.  And they carry devices that read the frequency the Raptor’s radar is using, amplify it, and rebroadcast it back at them.  The goal is to make it hard for the Raptor to distinguish a ship from a decoy.

The decoys have small engines and can only fly under power for a limited time.  But they are light and will already be travelling the same speed as the ship when launched.  Some fly ahead, others fall behind.  The decoys and the Sidewinder form a line.  The radar signals will merge together and appear to be one object to the Raptor.

As soon as the last one launched and fell into line, the decoys and the Sidewinder diverged to form a six sided pattern, roughly a circle, facing the oncoming enemy.  Far enough apart that one missile could not destroy more than one of the targets.  If the ruse worked, the Raptor would not be sure which of the six signals belonged to the Sidewinder.  We wanted to create as many targets for their missiles as we could.

Next in line behind the Sidewinder was the Falcon Hunter, Eve’s ship.  Trailing by a few thousand miles, Eve saw the lead ship as a dot on her radar display.  From the rear, without the effect of the corner reflectors, the decoys were invisible.  Until the first missile reached a decoy and the screen lit up with an explosion.

Eve’s crew watched as the missiles hit each target.  There was a gasp when the Sidewinder exploded.  Five people died in a fiery instant.  They knew they were next in line.  They prepared themselves as best they could for what awaited them.

In the Avenging Angel, along with the other ships heading to Callisto, we listened to the radio chatter from the attack group.  People who had put their lives in my hands had just perished.  Eve and her crew will be dead in minutes.  Ultimately, I am responsible for of all of this.  I weep, knowing I will never see Eve smile again, never hear her voice or her laughter.  But underneath the sadness is cold fury.  No matter the cost, we each have a job to do.  We have engaged an enemy powerful enough to destroy us.  We are past the point of no return.

We listen as the Falcon Hunter dies.  Then the RoadRunner, then the Cooperstown.  Four ships methodically blown to bits.  Something had gone wrong with the RoadRunner’s decoys.  The Raptor only launched one missile at them, and it found its mark.  With the other ships, the enemy expended many missiles on decoys. 

When the New Hope enters missile range, two of its decoys explode.  Then, silence.  The Raptor had fired all of its missiles.  The decoys spent their fuel and fell away.  They would not be needed now.  The Raptor’s remaining weapons, cannons and guns, are only effective at close range.  That near, we would no longer be able to fool their radar.  The New Hope’s jets fire in a precise pattern to introduce slight, random shifts in the ship’s position, while keeping it on a collision course with the Raptor.   That forces the enemy to constantly re-aim their weapons.  For every shell or bullet that hits the New Hope, two or three miss and fly harmlessly into deep space.

The guns are relentless. The New Hope explodes twenty miles ahead of the Raptor.  Giving the enemy just enough time to dodge the thousands of pieces of debris hurtling toward it.  The battle has been one sided up to this point.  Our attack force is down to the last two ships.  But we are getting closer. 

DeltaMiner, the next ship in line, reports that the Raptor is changing direction.  More than likely, they want to conserve ammunition and return to Callisto to defend the launch site.  The rest of our ships are almost there.  This is where the advantage shifts.  In a game of hide and seek, the much larger Raptor has little chance of eluding us.  Our ships are moving faster, and since they are smaller, they can change direction more rapidly than the enemy craft. 

The DeltaMiner fires its maneuvering jets and continues on an intercept trajectory.  The ships are no longer travelling in a straight line toward each other.  Instead, both are on a curving trajectory.  The Raptor is arcing its way around toward Callisto.  The DeltaMiner constantly adjusts its path, focusing on the point in space where they will intercept the Raptor.  The enemy’s cannons and guns resume firing.

But physics plays against them now.  When two ships are flying directly at each other, in a straight line, aiming a cannon or a gun is a simple matter.  When both ships are on a curved path, the weapon must be aimed at some point ahead of the target.  The DeltaMiner continued with its evasive maneuvers.  The Raptor’s guns missed more often than they hit.  When the DeltaMiner exploded, it was just a few miles from the Raptor. 

The Ramses, the last ship in the attack group, reports that the Raptor was unable to evade the debris from the DeltaMiner.  They detected multiple impacts on the hull of the enemy ship.  A few minutes later, as the Ramses bears down, they receive incoming fire from only one gun.  The Raptor has been badly wounded. 

By now the Avenging Angel and the other ships are in orbit around Callisto.  We watch the Ramses video feed in anxious silence.  The camera shakes when the ship absorbs gunfire.  The dark hull of the Raptor becomes visible and gets larger.  The video feed goes white as it terminates.  A final radio message from the Ramses computer indicates the bomb was detonated.

Our sensors pick up a burst of energy from the direction of the attack.  The signature contains x-rays and gamma rays, at levels much higher than ordinary background radiation.  We know what that means.  The Raptor was powered by a large nuclear reactor.  It has been destroyed.  The battle is over.