by David Weber
"Get the fighters rearmed," he heard himself say, "then bring the service ships back inside our point defense umbrella and have Commodore Hardiman deploy his SBMHAWKs. Stan, you and Astrogation work out a course to take us away from the group to port. We need to tempt them into hitting us as two separate strikes rather than one big one."
"Yes, Sir," Guthrey replied.
"Com, record for transmission to Second Fleet."
"Recording, Sir."
" 'Admiral Antonov, this is Rear Admiral Chin. We've engaged and destroyed approximately two hundred enemy gunboats, but we have what appears to be another six hundred on our scanners. I stress that these are how many we've seen; there may well be more out there. The numbers we've observed suggest at least fifty capital ships are headed your way. All I can do is try to get my command out; I cannot provide any security for your rear. I've dispatched messages to Centauri and hope and believe a relief force will be organized ASAP, but I can't guarantee even that much.' " He paused, trying to think of some encouraging thing he could add, but there was nothing. " 'Good luck, Sir,' " he said softly instead, and nodded to the com officer.
"I want that downloaded to every drone in the task force. Hold back Psyche's own drones, but program all the others for a maximum spread pattern in Anderson Five. And be sure you append full log downloads. Admiral Antonov has to know what's coming up his backside."
"Aye, aye, Sir," the com officer said, and Chin turned back to his staff.
"All right, ladies and gentlemen," he said flatly. "Now we have to find a way out of this. Any suggestions?"
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE The Trap Springs
Everyone on TFNS Xingú's flag bridge had learned the inadvisability of bothering Sky Marshal Avram-not that most of them would have been inclined to do so in any circumstances. Even now, with the relief force assembled and ready for departure, she still paced in a veritable fury of impatience, occasionally turning to the view screen and glaring at Alpha Centauri A and the distant orange flare of Alpha Centauri B for reminding her by their presence that she hadn't yet departed the system.
Stop being such a goddamned kvetch, she chided herself. Admiral Chin's warnings of disaster had arrived only two standard days before, and this relief force-seventeen superdreadnoughts, ten battleships, eleven battle-cruisers and twelve heavy cruisers-had been organized slightly sooner than humanly possible. She would have preferred a heavier force-especially some carriers-but this was all that was available out of the Home Fleet elements immediately at hand. She'd commandeered virtually every one of Admiral MacGregor's mobile units-aside from those currently undergoing scheduled overhauls-and waiting for anything more to arrive from Sol would take time they didn't have. And, she thought grimly, we've already picked Sol so barefor Pesthouse and Fourth Fleet that waiting wouldn't add anything worthwhile to my strength, anyway.
No, she couldn't really complain about the pace of the preparations. And she'd had to waste less time than she'd feared shouting down various old ladies of both genders who'd gotten their undies in a bunch at the notion of the Sky Marshal taking personal command. No, she wouldn't have been in such a vile mood, except . . .
As though to rub it in, a com rating looked up. "Sky Marshal, Admiral Mukerji sends his apologies for the delay and reports that all elements of his command are ready for departure."
No good deed goes unpunished, Avram philosophized to herself. If she hadn't blocked Agamemnon Waldeck's attempt to put him in command of Fifth Fleet over Vanessa Murakuma's head, Vice Admiral Terence Mukerji would have been shipped off to the Romulus Chain. As it was, he'd been at Centauri in circumstances under which there was no way she could escape having him as her second in command.
"My compliments to Admiral Mukerji," she said through gritted teeth, "and if he's quite ready, perhaps we can proceed." Her staff took the hint; orders began to go out, and the ships of the relief force began to swing out of their orbits around the Nova Terra/Eden binary planet and set their courses for the Anderson One warp point.
Avram commanded herself to calmness. There was no way to know what had happened to the Fleet Train since Chin had dispatched his drones. Even less could she know what had happened to Second Fleet. But in all this fog of imponderables, she held fast to one datum. Norn had fired off her drones about six standard days ago, and surely she'd sent them to Antonov as well as to Chin. With an ease bred of two days' constant repetition, Avram ran the mental calculations: at their best speed, Bug superdreadnoughts would take a hundred and ninety hours to cross from one warp point to the other in Anderson Four-after transiting from Anderson Three. So Antonov ought to have at least a week's warning. Given that . . . well, if Ivan Nikolayevich couldn't extricate Second Fleet from Anderson Five and be well on the way back towards Centauri, nobody could.
* * *
The enemy's support echelon had proved a much tougher opponent than anticipated. The first gunboat strike was annihilated for very little return, and the second suffered just as badly for even scantier results, for the enemy's freighters had carried large stores of missile pods. The support echelon had deployed hundreds of them to cover its flanks, and the gunboats had not even seen them . . . until their CAMs launched.
The third strike had done much better. The enemy had exhausted his pods against the second, and the third destroyed at least six of his warships and a third of his freighters, but once again it took heavy losses. Indeed, losses were so severe that the gunboats which had been detached to seal the warp point through which any enemy effort to dispatch relief forces to his trapped fleet must enter the system had been diverted against the stubborn support ships.
The diversion, while irritating, created no problems. In effect, the fleet simply exchanged its gunboats for the blocking force's, which, after striking the enemy's support ships, would continue on to overtake it before it left the system. The exchange had delayed blockage of the warp point by some hundred hours, but the new gunboats had ample time to reach their position, for the enemy could not even begin responding until warning drones reached him.
Unfortunately, the support echelon proved a still dangerous foe when the fourth strike went in. Barely twenty percent of its support ships survived the attack, and reports on warship losses-while less definite-indicated its escorts had been hit equally hard. But before they died, they killed almost half their attackers. The Fleet would be going into battle with its gunboats badly understrength. Even more irritatingly, it had been impossible to send in a fifth strike without prohibitively delaying either the warp point blocking force or the Fleet, and the surviving enemy ships had managed to slip away into the depths of the system.
In the long run, it mattered little. Badly damaged, low on ammunition, and trapped between the blocking force and the fleet contingents about to annihilate their main fleet, those ships had nowhere to run. Eventually they would be hunted down, and the Fleet refused to allow them to further divert it from its primary mission.
* * *
Ivan Antonov's plot flashed with fury as another fighter strike crashed into the enemy. The Bugs' futile attempt to evade him had ended in a cataclysm of violence, and his face was hard as he watched the death toll rise.
It was fortunate he'd decided to bring the battle-line into action, for the Bug gunboats' AFHAWKs had inflicted brutal losses on the fighter jocks of the first strike. Unfortunately for the Bugs, losses hadn't been brutal enough. Once their AFHAWKs were exhausted, the gunboats had been easy meat, and while the escort fighters were exacting their revenge, the battle-line had closed to SBM range of the main enemy force. Second Fleet had taken ugly losses of its own, but the second, FRAM-armed strike had been waiting on the catapults when the first was launched. Antonov had sent it in along with the missiles, and the need to stop both fighters and missiles had fatally overloaded the Bugs' point defense. Not that it had been quick or simple, for Antonov had declined to close to energy or even standard missile range. He'd lost his monopoly on command datalink, but he had more heavy launchers tha
n the enemy this time, and despite his initial strike's losses, he also had an enormous fighter strength. He'd used both to batter the enemy for almost thirty hours at long range before he finally committed to close action, and his eyes glowed coldly as the fighters blew through the final gunboats and swept over what was left of the Bug starships.
"I think it's almost over, Sir," de Bertholet said quietly. "We only lost about twenty fighters this time."
"Da. All that remains is the cleanup," Antonov agreed. He rose from his command chair and stretched hugely. "You did well, Commander." His eyes swept the rest of his flag bridge crew. "You all did. Commodore Stovall, please pass my thanks to the entire Fleet."
"Of course, Sir." Stovall hid a smile. Ivan the Terrible truly had mellowed, he thought.
"Good." Antonov walked closer to the main plot and gazed into it, rubbing his jaw in thought as de Bertholet stepped up beside him. "Still nothing from the recon fighters?"
"Not a word, Sir." The ops officer tugged on an earlobe, then shrugged. "Shall I move them further out?"
"No." Antonov shook his head. The recon fighters watching Second Fleet's flanks were already at fifteen light-minutes. If he pushed them much further out, he'd have to spread them so thin they might miss a cloaked enemy, and fifteen light-minutes would give an hour and a half of warning before even a gunboat launched from cloak could reach attack range. Against uncloaked attackers, the warning time jumped to almost ten hours.
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his uniform tunic and thought. He'd lost few ships in the engagement, but several were damaged, and the engineers' reports on drive reliability were even worse now. This particular bunch of Bugs had declined to show him the next outbound warp point and, deep inside, he was just as glad. He needed to regroup, bring up reinforcements, get his rear properly surveyed, and, above all, service his drives before he advanced again.
"We will remain here for seventy-two hours once the enemy has been mopped up, Commander de Bertholet," he said finally. "That will give us time for shipboard resource repairs and to reorganize our strikegroups."
"Yes, Sir."
"We will, of course, be somewhat more vulnerable while we do so," Antonov continued thoughtfully. "So once the strikegroups have reorganized, I think we will push the recon shell a bit further out. Inform Admiral Taathaanahk that I want a third of his regular fighters fitted with external sensor packs to expand the shell to twenty light-minutes."
"Yes, Sir."
"Good, Commander," Antonov murmured. "Good."
* * *
The dispersed attack groups slowed their advance. The enemy had destroyed the decoy force, but now he sat motionless. His high tactical speed always made him difficult to engage on the Fleet's terms, and the attack groups were grateful for his lack of activity. The longer he sat, the better, for the fourth and final attack group drew closer with every hour. Any one of the four could engage the enemy's total force on terms of near equality; with his retreat sealed and vast numbers of gunboats coming up from adjacent systems, his inferiority would be crushing.
And best of all, he did not even know he was in danger.
* * *
"I think you'd better look at this report from Captain Trailman, Sir," Jacques Bichet said.
Raymond Prescott raised a hand at Lieutenant Commander Ruiz, his logistics officer, interrupting their discussion of TF 21's increasingly strained resources, and turned to Bichet with a slight frown. Vincent Trailman, TF 21's farshathkhanaak, outranked Bichet, but the two of them had been friends since the Academy. It was unlike the ops officer to refer to him by anything other than his given name, and the ops officers voice was strained. "See what, Jacques?"
"One of Vincent's fighters just picked it up," Bichet said grimly. "It's a courier drone beacon." Prescott's eyebrows rose, and Bichet voice went lower. "That's not all, Sir. According to the ID string, it's from Norn-and it's Code Omega."
"Code Omega?" Prescott snapped upright in his chair, and Bichet jerked a choppy nod.
The stocky admiral stared at his ops officer in horrified disbelief. Norn had been left safely behind in Anderson Four-damaged, yes, but in no danger. Unless . . .
"Where is this drone?" he demanded, and Bichet consulted his memo pad display.
"According to CIC, it's just under twenty light-minutes out-that's from the fighter shell; it's forty light-minutes from Crete-at one-niner-one, zero-three-three, Sir. That puts it right on the very limit for a drone beacon's omnidirectional broadcast range, and signal strength comes and goes. Plotting and Com agree that could mean its on a circular search. We lose strength as it heads away from us and pick it up when it closes again."
"A circular search." Something icy crawled down Prescott's spine. He could think of only one explanation for an Omega drone from Norn. But that was impossible . . . wasn't it?
"All right," he made himself say. "Pass the information to the Flag and inform Admiral Antonov I'm detaching Pyotr Veliky and Ramilles to recover the drone. Then get hold of Captain Yukon and Captain Shariz. I want them cloaked-this could be some sort of decoy ploy, and I don't want them sucked into anything. After you talk to them, tell Vincent I want a fighter sweep in the direction of the drone. If there's anything out there, that may draw its attention away from Veliky and Ramilles. If they don't, I want them close enough to support the battle-cruisers."
"Aye, aye, Sir." Bichet hurried off to give the necessary orders, and Raymond Prescott leaned back in his chair and worried.
* * *
Antonov sat facing his three task force commanders on the split-image screen. Prescott had summarized the message of Norn's drone, but that was only for the benefit of van der Gelder and Taathaanahk, for its contents had already been downloaded to Colorado. So Antonov had already gone beyond what the others were going through now, and could step in quickly to fill the numb silence with his decisive bass.
"Thank you, Admiral Prescott. Now, we must consider the implications of this. Clearly, our information is somewhat out of date, inasmuch as the drone was launched approximately one hundred and eighty hours ago. A lot can happen in almost seven standard days. But we know this much: Norn and Hyacinth were destroyed here in Anderson Five, so some Bug forces must already be here, doubtless in cloak, in addition to the force-clearly a very powerful one-moving in from somewhere behind us." From Anderson Three, he silently corrected himself. Through some warp point we never found because our survey was too little and too late. He dismissed the thought; the pizdi might have entered some other system through a closed warp point. And self-reproach was hardly the most useful mental exercise just now. "The fact that they've committed this force suggests that there is also a major force waiting ahead of us, intended to be the other jaw of a trap."
"I quite aaaagree, Sssssir," Taathaanahk said with a calmness drawn from that naraham-inadequately translated as "detachment"-that was one of the four pillars of his culture's Taainohk philosophy. "I thhhhhhink we mussstttt asssssume they knnnnow their owwwn capabilities-annnd they cccccertainly knnnnow ours, fffor thisss cammmpaign hasss given themmm ample opportunity to assssessss our strength. They woulddd hhhardly hhhave sssprung thisss trappp unlessss their forrrces were sssuch asss ttto allow a rrrreasonable expectation of sssuccessss." The Ophiuchi admiral paused as though to invite disagreement. None came. "I therefore sssuggest thattt our firssst priority ssshould be to exxxtricate Sssecond Fleet wiiithout delay."
"I concur," van der Gelder said, blinking the haunted look from her eyes. "We should head back now, hard and fast. With our tactical speed advantage, we can leave whatever's waiting ahead of us eating our dust and blast our way out before the blocking force has had time to settle into a defensive posture behind us."
"Unfortunately, Admiral van der Gelder," Antonov rumbled, "we can take as a given that the blocking force is coming from at least as far back as Anderson Three. Unless we get out of this system without any sort of observation by the Bug units that destroyed Norn and Hyacinth-which is sheer wishful th
inking-the Bugs will send courier drones through the warp point ahead of us. With that warning, the blocking force will form up and await us on the far side of whichever warp point is most convenient. And without Fleet Train's SBMHAWK stores, we're in no position to mount a warp point assault." He left unspoken the probable fate of the Fleet Train, and watched their reactions. Prescott seemed unfazed-he'd had even longer than Antonov to adjust to the new facts. But he could recognize the signs in van der Gelder, and the subtler ones in Taathaanahk, as the implications began to sink home.
"However," he went on before the silence could stretch too thin, "I agree that we should retire into Anderson Four as promptly as possible, if we can do so without heavy losses. Once there, we'll have the warp point in our rear, as it were; we can hold it against whatever forces are here in Anderson Five while letting the blocking force cross Anderson Four and come to us."
"Alssso, Sssir," Taathaanahk observed, "we'll be able to ussse our fffighters and AFFFFHAWKs to interdict any courrrier drrrones sssent thhhrough the warrrp pppoint, thusss preventing their ffforcesss from mmmounting a cooooordinated attack."
"Yes!" Van der Gelder leaned forward with new animation. "That would give us the opportunity to defeat them in detail. Especially considering the probability-which I consider high-that Home Fleet has dispatched a relief force."
"They woulddd hhhave had to orrrganize one vvery quickly," Taathaanahk said dubiously.
"If I know the Sky Marshal," van der Gelder rejoined, "she scraped together everything at Centauri that could fly and energize a beam and sent it off-or, more likely, led it off-without waiting for reinforcements from Sol. She knows when time is of the essence! So the relief force may not be as big or as well-balanced by ship types as we might like. But if it can hit the Bug blocking force from the rear in Anderson Four while it's heavily engaged with us . . ."