by David Weber
There was no excuse. He'd just been thinking of the lost Survey Flotilla 19 earlier, and he'd allowed himself to forget that Vanessa's younger daughter had been one of those who'd vanished tracelessly into the darkness with it. He should have remembered. Should never have let himself forget the night Nobiki, despite the reserve of her upbringing, had wept for her sister on his shoulder. Perhaps it was the very pain of that memory which explained his failure to recall it now, but that was only the reason, not an excuse for it. No, there was no excuse-so he made none.
Instead, he started over. "I've missed you," he managed.
"And I you," she whispered. His heart leapt, but the accumulated hurt of many months would not be denied.
"You haven't answered my letters in a while," he got out in a very level voice, and she gestured vaguely.
"I've been . . . occupied."
"Occupied? With what, out there at Justin?"
The instant it was out of his mouth, he realized it had been precisely the wrong thing to say. Her eyes flared with green flame.
"Oh, nothing, of course! Just wait for the Bug offensive that never comes, and-"
"Vanessa, I'm sorry! I didn't mean that!" He shook his head, cursing himself for timing his maladroitnesses so close together. There were only three points of contact between the Alliance and the Bugs: the Romulus Chain, the Kliean Chain, and Alpha Centauri. There would be a fourth once the Zephrain offensive finally began, but until then only those three existed . . . and LeBlanc knew most of the human race prayed nightly to God that it would stay that way.
"Look," he said after a very brief moment, "I know you're running a third of this war! Maybe you're bored, but it's thanks to you that it's been so quiet for so long out there. The very fact that you're covering the Justin System, and that you kicked the butts the Bugs haven't got out of it-"
"Yes. So I can still look down at that planet and all its ghosts, and wonder whether they'd still be alive if I'd done . . . something different."
All at once, LeBlanc understood. He remembered the day her Marine landing force had reported the hideous death toll on Justin. The virtual annihilation-the consumption-of the millions of civilians the TFN-and, especially, its commander, Admiral Vanessa Murakuma-had been responsible for defending. The civilians they hadn't been able to defend, because if they'd stood to fight in their defense, they would have died and left the billions of civilians behind them unprotected.
It wasn't proper procedure for an intelligence officer of the TFN to hold his admiral in his arms while she sobbed her heartbroken grief and guilt, but "proper procedure" hadn't been very important to him just then.
"So you think you've been left in command of a stalemated front as a kind of exile?" he said quietly. "Because people blame you for the losses on Justin?" He took a deep breath. "Listen Vanessa: nobody blames you for that, except possibly yourself. You couldn't have prevented what happened there, and you know it. Hell, I've already told you all this in person! No one could have-and at least most of the people who died went down fighting because of the weapons and the advisors you left them. And, I might point out, if you hadn't retaken the system, the Bugs would still be occupying it. And we all know what that would mean!"
"Yes, yes," she muttered, and turned her back, turning away from both LeBlanc and that to which he was alluding. Ever since Ivan Antonov had entered the Anderson Two System and discovered the planet that had been named Harnah, the human race had lived with the knowledge that there were worse things than genocide.
The first grim lesson in that awareness had come over a communications link to an occupied planet from some forever unknown reporter's camera. The horrifying footage that anonymous witness to atrocity had recorded had been humanity's first hint that their utterly unknown, implacably advancing foes were, like the Orions, carnivores. But that same footage had also revealed that that was the Bugs' only point of similarity to the Orions, for they preferred their prey living . . . and human children were precisely the right size.
That had been horror enough for anyone. By itself, it had been enough to wrack Vanessa with guilt-indeed, to consume the entire human race with guilt and terror alike. Yet even that had paled beside what Second Fleet had discovered upon Harnah, where the local Bug population had fed upon vast herds of the domesticated animals who'd once built their own flourishing civilization . . . and who clung still to the broken fragments of that culture even in the shadow of the hideous predators who battened upon them.
And that, too, Vanessa Murakuma's heroic stand had stopped short of the millions upon millions of human beings who lived in and beyond the Romulous Chain.
"Yes," she repeated dully, gazing westward at the Cerulean Ocean. "I know all that-at least with my forebrain. But even if the Navy doesn't blame me, maybe they think I'm . . . burned out." She laughed harshly. "Sometimes I wonder if I am."
"Being bored isn't the same as being burned out."
"Maybe not. But still, I've made up my mind; I'm going to request a transfer, to take part in the Zephrain offensive."
"What? But Vanessa, that's already locked in. Raymond Prescott and Zhaarnak'telmasa are-"
"Oh, I'm not expecting to command it. I know I won't get another shot at command of a fleet. I just want to do something, in some capacity. You may be right that being burned out is one thing and being bored is another, but the fact remains that, at a minimum, I am bored."
"You're not going to get any sympathy from most combat veterans. They like being bored!" The corners of Murakuma's mouth quirked upward, and a ghost of the old jade twinkle arose in her eyes. LeBlanc pressed his advantage. "And as for being burned out . . . do you really think they'd leave a burned-out admiral in command of forces that've been built up to the level yours have?"
Her head began to nod, as though acting on its own, but then her innate self-honesty stopped the gesture. Whatever else she might think, she had to admit that Fifth Fleet had been reinforced to a size that amply justified the presence of a full admiral as CO. And she'd been able to use the time to shake that massive force down into a smoothly functioning whole, its parts commanded by flag officers she understood and trusted.
"Yes, you're right of course. And you haven't told me anything I didn't already know. So . . ." She turned to face him, smiling, and the old Vanessa Murakuma was back. "So why do I feel so much better?"
"Sometimes you can know something and still need to hear it from someone else. Especially from someone who . . ." He didn't continue, nor was there any need for him to.
The raw ocean breeze had driven everyone else inside, leaving them alone on the terrace. As he took her hands in his, the weather finally fulfilled its promise with a gust of wind and a spatter of rain, and waves began to hiss and crash against the base of the cliff.
"I suppose we'd better get inside," Murakuma suggested.
"Yeah." LeBlanc nodded. "Uh, I've been assigned temporary quarters here. They're not far."
Moving as one, they turned away from the balustrade and, for a while, left the storm behind.
CHAPTER TWO: Forging the Sword
The VIP Navy shuttle drifted slowly through space. Although it was far larger than the cutters which normally played deep space taxi for the TFN's flag officers, it remained less than a minnow beside the looming bulk of the ship it had come here to see.
The trip wasn't really necessary, of course. Every one of the high-ranked officers aboard the shuttle, human, Orion, Ophiuchi, and Gorm alike, had seen the titanic hull time and again in holographic displays and on briefing room screens. By now, any one of them could have recited the design philosophy behind the vessel and even the major specifics of its armament. And yet, despite that, the trip had been necessary. These officers worked every day of their lives with electronically processed data, but there were still times when they had to see with their own eyes, touch with their own hands, to truly believe what the reports and briefings told them.
And this, Oscar Pederson told himself, is one of those times
.
The shuttle was luxuriously equipped, as befitted the craft assigned to Pederson in his role as CO of Alpha Centauri Skywatch, but the quality of its fittings wasn't the reason it was here today. No, like the four other shuttles keeping formation upon it, it had been chosen for its passenger capacity. Even with all five of them, it was going to take at least six trips to transport all of the rubbernecking admirals (or their other-species equivalents) who wanted to see the gleaming alloy reality.
Horatio Spruance, the first monitor ever commissioned by the Terran Federation Navy, was a mountain beyond the transparent viewport. Pederson was no stranger to huge artificial constructions. The vast majority of the major space stations serving the Federation's inhabited planets were even larger. Of course, all but a tiny fraction of each of those space stations was devoted to commerce, freight, repairs, passenger transfers . . . anything and everything other than the deadly weapons of war. Still, the massive OWP from which he commanded the Centauri System's fixed defenses certainly was armed, and it was actually larger than Spruance. But there was a major difference even there, for that orbital weapons platform was designed to stay exactly where it was. It was, as its very name suggested, a fixed weapons platform, a fortress, armed and armored to fight to the death at need in defense of a specific planet or warp point.
Horatio Spruance wasn't. This menacing mountain of missile launchers and beam projectors was designed for mobility. It wasn't designed to defend, but rather to project power. It floated there, looming like a titan over the construction ships and the suited yard workers clustered about it like microbes as they worked around the clock to put the finishing touches upon it. And a titan was precisely what it was . . . or perhaps that hopelessly overused cliche 'juggernaut' truly applied in this case. Slow and cumbersome compared to any other warship ever built, even a superdreadnought, it was also twice as large and powerful as that same superdreadnought.
And she's also a more conservative design than I really would have liked, Pederson admitted to himself. Balancing long-range and short-range weaponry has saved the Navy's ass more than once. And there's definitely something to be said for having something to shoot at an enemy who manages to get to any range of your ship, instead of limiting yourself to one ideal "design" engagement range. But it may just be that this time the Bugs had a better idea what they were about than we do. A six-ship battlegroup of ships this size could throw down one hell of a weight of fire if they were all pure missile designs.
Of course, he could hardly complain that no one had asked his opinion, because BuShips had done just that. In fact, they'd solicited design suggestions from every Fortress Command system CO in the entire Federation, as well as the Battle Fleet flag officers who would actually take those designs into combat. And, to be perfectly fair, they'd incorporated quite a few of the Fortress Command suggestions. And, again, to be perfectly fair, even without a pure missile design, a battlegroup of Horatio Spruances would still be able to pump out an awesome quantity of missile fire.
It's just that, good as they are, they could have been so much better . . . if we'd only had time, he told himself.
He sighed quietly as the shuttle drifted around one flank of the behemoth he and his fellows had come to see. Lord Khiniak stood just to Pederson's left, and the Terran admiral smothered a smile as he heard a soft, rustling purr from the Tabby fleet commander. It wasn't easy to strangle that smile, either, because Pederson had become enough of a "Tabby expert" to recognize the Orion equivalent of his own sigh, and he knew exactly what had produced it.
Lord Khiniak, too, regretted the desperate haste with which the Spruance design-and that of her Orion counterparts-had been finalized. But not, of course, for quite the same reasons. It wasn't the missiles which could have been crammed into the design that he missed; it was the fighter bays.
Vanessa Murakuma had also heard Lord Khiniak's sigh, and she was actually forced to turn away to hide her own expression as she recognized Pederson's struggle not to smile. It would never do to give in to the most unprofessional giggle threatening her own self-control, but she knew precisely what the Fortress Command admiral was thinking. She hadn't personally discussed design concepts with Third Fleet's commander, but she didn't really need to, for Lord Khiniak was a regular contributor to the Heearnow Salkiarno Naushaanii.
Although her tone deafness had always prevented her from understanding spoken Orion, she was completely fluent in the written forms of both High and Middle Orion-a fluency she'd acquired in no small part to follow the Khanate's military journals in their original forms. As a result, she knew that Lord Khiniak was a highly respected (despite a certain iconoclastic streak) commentator in the Heearnow Salkiarno Naushaanii's pages. Yet even though the functional equivalent of the Federation Naval Institute Journal could wax just as contentious on matters of strategy and force projection concepts as its Terran counterpart, the Heearnow's articles and editorials were far less fractious on an operational or tactical level, for the Orion Navy had no doubts at all about the proper tactical mix for its fleet units.
The arguments in favor of that tactical mix were impeccably logical and occasionally downright brilliant, yet in the end, all that rationality was the handmaid of cultural imperatives so deep-seated that they might as well be instinctual. That was as true for Terrans as for Tabbies, of course, but the Orion honor code of Farshalah'kiah-"the Warrior's Way"-required the individual warrior to risk his pelt in personal combat and had come over the centuries to enshrine an unhesitating commitment to the attack. Even when forced to assume the strategic defense, an Orion automatically looked for a way to seize the tactical offense. Cover your six was a Terran idiom that did not translate well into the Tongue of Tongues. When humans had first met them, the Tabbies had fought in swarms of dinky ships, although even then there'd been no technological barrier to constructing a smaller number of more capable and better protected ones-like the ships with which the unpleasantly hairless, severely outnumbered aliens from Terra had defeated them. In the end, they'd been forced to accept a similar design theory, even if they'd done so kicking and screaming the entire way. If they'd wanted a fleet which stood a chance in combat, they'd had no option but to match the combat capability of their opponents, because the disparity in effectiveness had meant that there'd simply been no other choice.
Until, that was, the Rigelians had introduced the single-seat strikefighter and restored individualism to space war. It might be going a bit far to argue, as some TFN officers occasionally did, that the Tabbies were actually grateful to the Rigelians (who, after all, had cherished their own genocidal notions where Orions and humans alike were concerned). Yet there was no denying that the KON had never been truly happy until the fighter gave its warriors back their souls. Ever since ISW 3, all their capital ships had featured integral fighter squadrons, despite the inefficiency involved in designing launch bays and all of their associated support hardware into ships that weren't purpose-built carriers. Show them a ship even bigger than the superdreadnoughts they'd never really liked anyway, and their reaction was totally predictable: By Valkha, imagine how many fighters something that size could carry! And they were disposed to see the bright side of whatever tactical models rationalized that predisposition.
Pederson, on the other hand, had never belonged to the TFN's strikefighter enthusiasts. His idea of a proper warp point assault ship leaned much more heavily towards missile launchers and beam weapons protected by the heaviest possible shields and armor, and he couldn't quite conceal his skepticism over the Tabby ideal, although the crusty old fire-eater was obviously doing his manful best.
"A most impressive vessel," Lord Khiniak said now, and despite her tone deafness, Murakuma thought she detected a certain sly amusement in the angle of the fang's ears and the tilt of his head as he glanced sidelong at Pederson. It was hard to be sure without the body language cues, especially since her earbug was tied into the translating software of the shipyard building Spruance, and this particular package had
a particularly irritating, nasal atonality. "Of course, it will not be possible to realize the full potential of a military hull of this size until the carrier version reaches production. As a fighter platform capable of surviving long enough in a warp point assault to carry its fighters through and then launch them, it will make it possible for us to-"
"Yes," Pederson interrupted just a tad briskly. "We've all seen the specifications for your Shernaku class, Great Fang. Ninety-six fighters . . . very impressive. But it will be a while before it can be put into production." At least the Fortress Command admiral was too tactful to add, In Terran yards, although Murakuma suspected it had been a near thing. "And to be honest, there are some modifications I'd like to see in the Spruance design, myself. But we don't really have the latitude to experiment with the initial classes. You must admit that given the pressure to get our own monitors into production as quickly as possible, more conservative designs must have priority. In fact, you have admitted it, with the other two classes you've shown us. Those are balanced designs, and-"
"We don't need to go into that at the moment," Ellen MacGregor cut in.
As Sky Marshal she was completely familiar with the design features of all of the Allied monitor designs. Like Pederson, she would really have preferred a somewhat greater degree of specialization in the Terran designs, but the Fortress Command admiral was quite correct about the time pressure. BuShips had decided-with her own not entirely enthusiastic support-that it was more important to go with tried and proven hardware and weapons mixes which could be put into production in the shortest possible time rather than to waste months the Grand Alliance might well not have in trying to come up with the perfect design before they even laid the first ship down. In fact, the Spruance design had been frozen within three months of Pesthouse's disastrous conclusion, with construction commencing exactly fifty-nine days after the design was sealed.