War World: The Battle of Sauron by John F. Carr & Don Hawthorne

Author:John F. Carr & Don Hawthorne [Carr, John F. & Hawthorne, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780937912041
Amazon: 0937912042
Publisher: Pequod Press
Published: 2007-10-31T06:00:00+00:00

Aboard the ships of Intruder One, on the bridges and at the sensor stations of the Imperial craft, no one was aware of the activities occurring between the Sauron System’s outer planets of Barlowe and Freas. The events were transpiring at the speed of light; they could likewise only be apprehended at that speed. No one could know these events even existed until they could perceive them, and they would not perceive them until they were, literally, on top of them.

By then - if the Sauron technical Rankers were correct in their theories - it would be too late.

What was racing outward from Barlowe and Freas were subatomic particles. Millions of square kilometers of arrays generated the particles in equal portions of negative, positive and neutral charges. The neutral charge particles were wasted, and their part in the process ended there. The positive and negative charges, however, were focused through several miles of electromagnetic acceleration tunnels bored into the crusts of each of the planets.

These accelerator tunnels concentrated the subatomic particles into streams, raised the speed of those streams to 99.99% the speed of light, and fired them toward the surface. The charged particles would have obliterated any physical matter in their way, but they were doomed the moment they left the mouths of their accelerator tunnels. For neither Barlowe nor Freas possessed atmospheres, and the Sauron Technical Rankers knew that charged subatomic particle streams decayed almost instantly in vacuum. One step remained in the process to make the beams survivable, and it occurred one meter below the mouth of the accelerator tubes on the surfaces of Barlowe and Freas.

Screens of gas and high-powered lasers stripped the extra electron from the negative ions and bonded it to a nearby positive ion. The streams that emerged from the accelerator tubes were particles of completely neutral charges, and these propagated very well in vacuum, indeed.

The tubes on Barlowe and Freas were spread out across the facing surfaces of both worlds. They were numerous but capable of very little in the way of fine adjustment in the discretional projection of the particle streams which they generated, or so the Technical Rankers had explained to Diettinger, who finally realized that they were telling him they were almost impossible to aim. The project was, after all, still experimental.

No matter, the Dictator had assured them. What he was looking for was quantity of production, and when he had told them why, they had been delighted to realize he had read their briefings on the project much more thoroughly than High Command had.

Diettinger knew that the Imperial Langston Fields would render the particle beams useless. Langston Fields absorbed energy, radiant as in lasers or thermonuclear explosives, or kinetic as in torpedoes, even ramming ships. Using particle accelerator weapons against a Langston Field was like firing a shotgun into tar. Worse, particle beams imparted damage by the sheer number of the particles they delivered to the target; the mathematics of the Langston Field meant that small elements impacting

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