Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [17]
Diamond ships that shone like crystal chandeliers were just as functional as the metal of their enemies. Although the mothership was vast, the other ships tended to be smaller than their opponent’s counterparts. They swirled and flurried around their mothership, in carefully orchestrated patterns that nevertheless seemed chaotic to an outside observer.
The logistics of battle, the logic of force and counterforce, meant that the evolution of the two races’ weapons technology had converged over the course of their long war.
Allowing for the differences in biology and technology, the fleets were of roughly the same size – about a hundred capital ships and around ten times as many support vessels.
In most circumstances, tacticians agreed that a couple of capital ships were enough to subdue a planet.
The fleets had been segregated, but only symbolically. At their closest point, they were about two thousand five hundred miles apart, well within firing range. The moon wasn’t even a physical barrier and the fleets could have conducted a war without moving. Guided missiles were quite capable of flying around Pazithi, gravitational lenses could bend energy rays around the moon’s thick atmosphere. Or, if that proved too subtle, just about any ship over the average size from either fleet contained ordnance that could crack apart the moon, and the larger ships could have used gravitron beams to direct the radioactive rubble at key strategic points in the enemy fleet.
Both sides would now know the strengths and weaknesses of their enemy. During the course of the war, both sides had collected more than enough data to be able to model probable outcomes. Like chess computers, or grandmasters, the battle computers would be able to think a million moves ahead. Like a chain of dominoes falling, there was an inevitability to events. Very early on, within ten or twenty seconds, both sides would know whether they were destined to win or lose the day.
In the early stages of the war, prisoners had been taken, enemy vessels captured for scientific analysis or simply to strip down for raw materials. Virtually all that the two sides knew of each other came from this source. Databases, mind probes, sealed orders, analysis of scientific achievement, communications ciphers. All of it had been recovered by the victors from the battlefield. The winner would gain an advantage in all future struggles. It had quickly become a standard tactic, when all was lost, to set all remaining weapons, every reactor and every battery to self-destruct. All that power unleashed at once in a massive explosion that prevented even the smallest item of your technology from falling into the clutches of the enemy. Naturally, if timed correctly, the blast often destroyed most of the other fleet, too. Over the course of the war it had become a fine art calculating the optimum moment to commit mass suicide –
letting the enemy getting close, but not so close that they’d get suspicious and escape into hyperspace. Now, virtually any combat ship that self-destructed could take a mass the size of a small planetoid with it, and in a few notable cases the ‘self’‐destruction of a warfleet had resulted in the devastation of planetary systems.
All of which meant, in practical terms, that when the two races encountered each other a few shots would be fired and then one fleet would realise it had lost, self-destruct, and take the other with it. Few battles lasted for more than a minute nowadays, and generally less than one percent of the combatants on either side survived.
The fleets over Pazithi began scanning each other, picking out anything even potentially hostile, assessing every threat from the exact configuration of armament and manning levels on the largest ships to broad sweeps for nanoweapons.
Within seconds, battlelines and plans had been drawn, targeting solution after