by David Weber
"What is it, Haalnak?" Shaaldaar dropped to feet and mid-limbs and cantered across the deck towards Plotting.
"Those ground installations, Force Leader-they're gunboat bases and they're launching now!"
Shaaldaar's blood ran cold. Of course they were gunboat bases-why hadn't he realized that himself? But if all of them were nests of gunboats, then how many-?
"Tracking reports over a thousand-plus gunboats, Force Leader!" someone else announced, and the blood which had run cold seemed to freeze. A thousand-plus?!
He reached Haalnak's station and slithered to a halt. The rising gunboats were a blood-red spray of icons on the plot, fountaining upward like some cloud of loathsome parasitic spores, reaching for his own gunboats and fighters . . . and the starships beyond them. The number estimate had to be too low, and even if it wasn't, it looked like all of these gunboats were coming from just one hemisphere of the planet. Gormus only knew what the numbers were going to look like when the rest of them launched!
The tide of destruction oriented itself, thrusting for the very heart of his task force, and then-
Shaaldaar stood upright, his eyes wide, as the serried ranks of death spores suddenly disintegrated. The deadly purposefulness of the gunboat tide lost its cohesion. The ones which had already launched began to behave erratically, staggering, seeming to stumble with an abrupt loss of purpose, while no more rose from the untouched surface. He stared at the chaos of what should have been an overwhelming attack, and as he did, he knew what Raymond Prescott had done . . . and why.
* * *
The lifeless ball of slag which had been Planet I receded rapidly in the viewscreen above the conference table in Riva y Silva's flag briefing room as Prescott's staff took their seats. The image held a horrific grandeur as the firestorms of the bombardment blazed in visible seas of flame, wrapped around the smoke and dust enshrouded ruin of a once life-bearing world. It hovered there before them all, and as the admiral took his own seat, more than one of his officers felt a sense of dreadful appropriateness, for his place was directly under the raging hell his warriors had wreaked upon the Bugs.
"Obviously," he began in a crisp yet quiet voice, apparently the only person in the entire briefing room completely unaffected by the apocalyptic vision, "our original plans are going to require modification. Amos?"
"Yes, Sir." The intelligence officer recognized his cue and consulted his terminal for a moment. Not that he really needed to.
"We were luckier than Force Leader Shaaldaar in a lot of ways," he said then. "From the sensor records, it's pretty clear that the defenses were only just starting to come on-line when we hit Planet I, whereas the Force Leader had to fight his way in against much greater opposition. The effectiveness of the Shiva Option seems to have been pretty conclusively confirmed, however, because all effective resistance on and orbiting Planet III came apart the moment our surface strikes went in.
"That's the good news. The bad news is that the data record from Planet III confirms what we'd already suspected from our own experience at Planet I. There were just as many gunboats there as on Planet I, so I see no option but to conclude that there are at least as many more of them based on Planet II. Which, I must also point out, is now fully aware of our presence."
None of this was really news to any of the people in the briefing room, but it still induced a stunned silence.
"But, but, Admiral," Terrence Mukerji stammered into the crackling quiet, "surely the psychic shock that paralyzed Planet I and Planet III will also paralyze Planet II's defenders!"
Prescott permitted himself a small sigh of exasperation but restrained himself from replying directly. Instead he nodded for Chung to continue.
"Unfortunately, Admiral Mukerji," the spook said, "the 'psychic shock' to which you refer is of limited duration-as we've been aware ever since the First Battle of Home Hive Three," he added as pointedly as he dared. "Judging from our experience there, the paralysis will have begun wearing off by the time either of our attack forces could reach Planet II. Their defenses' effectiveness would probably continue to suffer some degradation, but it would be nowhere near as severe as what we experienced at Planet I and Planet III."
Mukerji paled, swallowed hard, and turned back to Prescott.
"Admiral, this is terrible! We'll be overwhelmed! And not just because of the numerical odds, either. Our advantage of surprise is gone, too, since-"
"That goes without saying, Admiral Mukerji," Prescott said quietly. "Which," he added, considerably more pointedly than Chung had dared, "is why our plans have always assumed that they'd be ready for us by the time we got around to Planet II."
"But . . . twenty-four hundred gunboats! None of our plans took that into consideration, Sir! They couldn't. It was not only unforeseen but inherently unforseeable."
"What, exactly, are you proposing, Admiral Mukerji?"
"Well," the political admiral began, obviously relishing the unaccustomed sensation of being asked for an opinion on operational matters, "this calls for a radical rethinking of our plans."
"Agreed." Prescott nodded, and a number of faces around the table wore looks of surprise . . . and suspicion. Mukerji's own jaw dropped. "In point of fact, I've already rethought them, in consultation with Commodores Mandagalla and Bichet, before this meeting. In fact, new orders have already gone out to Force Leader Shaaldaar."
Prescott activated the smaller holo sphere at the center of the table. It showed the three life-bearing-or formerly life-bearing-planets in their current alignment, and the green icons of TF 71's two elements moving away from the innermost and outermost planets towards the one between.
"We'll continue on our present, preplanned course for now," Prescott continued as the green icons kept on converging, to Mukerji's visible consternation. "Shortly before we come into tactical range of Planet II, however, both forces will change course to rendezvous here." The broken green string-lights of projected courses abruptly curved away from the target planet to illustrate the admiral's words. "The object, of course, is to draw the ground-based gunboats out, where we can engage them at long range and where they'll be without the support of Planet II's orbital defenses."
Mukerji had passed beyond consternation into a state of outright panic.
"Admiral, I must protest! It's imperative that we change course at once, and return to our warp point of entry. We must-"
"Must, Admiral Mukerji?" Prescott's voice was as quiet as ever, but the staffers were no longer under any uncertainty as to what lay behind that mildness. Several had begun to wish themselves elsewhere.
Even Mukerji had a momentary inkling. But then, banishing it, came the comforting recollection of his exalted political patronage. The thought puffed him up visibly.
"Yes, Admiral! I remind you that I speak for the civilian leadership of the government we serve. And I solemnly assure you that those leaders would view with grave, yes, grave misgivings any further operations in this system at the present time. There could not fail to be adverse career repercussions for everyone here. Everyone, Admiral."
Prescott leaned forward, and his eyes narrowed into slits in a very uncharacteristic way.
"Is that what's uppermost in your mind, Admiral Mukerji? 'Career repercussions'?"
"Of course not, Admiral!" Mukerji said, instantly and just a bit too heartily. "Naturally, my first concern is for the safety of this task force. Thanks to your sagacity, we've destroyed two of the three inhabited planets in exchange for acceptable losses. Surely it's time to . . . 'quit while we're ahead' is, I believe, the expression."
"My first concern, Admiral Mukerji, is the completion of our mission-which is to implement General Directive Eighteen throughout the system."
Sweat began to pop out on Mukerji. His eyes were wild as he sought desperately for the right combination of words to convince Prescott that he must not, could not, send the task force-including Riva y Silva, with Mukerji's own personal body aboard her-against the remaining planet and its fully prepare
d armada of gunboats, every one of them laden with antimatter and crewed by beings to whom the very concept of individual survival was foreign.
"Admiral, I assure you that what you've accomplished so far is all that anyone could expect-all that the government will expect! You've already won a great victory. Why jeopardize it for mere personal vengeance?"
"That will do!" Prescott's voice wasn't extraordinarily loud; it just sounded that way because it came from a man who never shouted at his subordinates. Everyone jumped, and Mukerji recoiled backwards. "I will not leave an untouched Bug-inhabited planet in this system to serve as a base for them to open a new front along the Prescott Chain, simply to spare you the unaccustomed sensation of personal danger!"
"Admiral, when we return to the Federation I will protest this outrageous treatment to higher authority. Very high authority!"
"I have no doubt of that, Admiral Mukerji. But for now, you're under my command, and we're in a war zone. For the remainder of this conference, you will not speak unless I give you leave. If you display any insubordination, I will place you under close arrest. If you endanger this command by cowardice in the face of the enemy, I will have you summarily shot! Do I make myself clear?"
Mukerji swallowed and nodded jerkily. Prescott's flinty eyes impaled him for perhaps five more seconds, and then the admiral drew a deep breath, released it slowly, and addressed the rest of his stunned staff in a normal voice.
"Commodore Bichet will now outline the tactical dispositions we'll adopt when we rendezvous with Force Leader Shaaldaar. It's going to involve reorganizing and rearming our fighters, and deploying most of our SBMHAWK4s under shipboard control. . . ."
* * *
The Bug gunboats seemed noticeably sluggish and uncertain as they moved outward from Planet II-probably residual aftereffects of what they'd undergone when Planets I and III died. But that hangover was beginning to wear off by the time they overtook TF 71 and began to close in.
All seventeen hundred and eight of the task force's remaining fighters met them head-on.
Once, in the days of reaction drives, it had been confidently asserted that there could be no such thing as a "dogfight" in space. At most, antagonists might exchange fire briefly as they flashed past each other at enormous relative velocities, or else they might match orbits and settle into a slugging match that would end the instant one side scored a thermonuclear hit. Reactionless drives, with their inertial compensators, had changed all that. And now the yellow sun of Home Hive One shone on the vastest dogfight in history.
The reactionless drive wasn't magic, however. The fighters couldn't instantaneously reverse direction, or any such fantasy. And the Bugs weren't interested in killing fighters-they only wanted to break through and get their real targets, the capital ships. Inevitably, quite a few of them did. . . .
* * *
"Let me send out my gunboats." Shaaldaar's face in the com screen wore a pleading look. "The crews have volunteered to go."
I don't doubt that for a second, Raymond Prescott thought. This task force is their immediate lomus at present. But deeply though he understood, he shook his head.
"I appreciate their willingness, but we need to conserve them. We'll stick with the original plan."
Shaaldaar looked for just a moment as if he were going to argue, but then he gave a curt human-style nod and turned away from his pickup. Prescott drew a deep breath, then turned away from his own com station to watch the sanitary violence in his plot while the quiet, clipped voices of communications and plotting officers and ratings rustled in the background of a cathedral-like hush.
He knew what Shaaldaar had been thinking, but he and Jacques Bichet had planned carefully for this moment, and as the icons of the incoming gunboats swept closer and closer to the far slower starships they sought to kill, that plan unfolded.
The gunboats were a ragged mass as their survivors broke past the intercepting strikefighters. Hundreds of them had already been blown out of space, and their squadron datanets were so riven and broken that it was impossible really to tell whether or not they were still suffering the lingering aftereffects of the Shiva Option. But they were Bugs. Neither disorganization nor slaughter could turn them from their mission, and they continued to close in a pulsating swarm of what were effectively manned missiles.
But as they closed, they suffered successive decimations.
First came the SBMs. The strategic bombardment missiles were the longest-ranged shipboard weapons in space, and these were fired from SBMHAWK pods, which were themselves deployed the better part of ten light-seconds out from the fleet to give them even more standoff range. The pods seemed to disintegrate as their cargoes of death streaked off towards the oncoming Bugs, and Seventh Fleet's plots glittered with the icons of outgoing missiles.
SBMs were less accurate at extreme range than capital missiles were, and they were relatively easy targets for point defense to intercept. But they also had half again as much reach, and there were hundreds of them as they slammed into the gunboats at a range far in excess of any weapon with which the Bugs might have replied. Huge fireballs blazed at the heart of the formation as warheads designed to kill starships expended themselves upon mere gunboats, and clouds of plasma and vaporized alloy, mixed with scattered atoms of what had once been organic matter trailed behind the stream of kamikazes.
And then it was the capital missiles' turn.
Shorter-ranged than the SBMs, the capital missiles carried warheads that were just as powerful, and they used the internal volume freed up by their smaller drive systems to pack in sophisticated onboard ECM, which made them extremely difficult targets for the missile defenses. A far higher percentage of them got through, and the furnace consuming the Bugs roared hotter.
Still the gunboats came on, and as they closed through the extended-range defenses they were met by standard missiles in sprint mode. Point defense was completely useless against sprint-mode fire, for there was insufficient flight time for missile defenses to track the incoming birds. The same velocity which made them impossible to intercept limited their own tracking time and degraded both their accuracy and their range, but they struck like unstoppable hammers from Hell, and they were backed in turn by anti-ship energy weapons, and finally by point defense laser clusters.
It was the densest, most multilayered pattern of defensive fire anyone in the task force had ever seen, and the front of the Bug formation was a solid wall of flame, a wall that glared and leapt and died, like a torch guttering in a hurricane.
To most of those who observed it, it was self-evident that nothing could come through it.
Raymond Prescott knew better. In a universe ruled by chaos theory, there was no such thing as an impermeable defense. Yet even he allowed himself to hope, as he watched the "hostile" icons that had resembled a blood-red blizzard in his plot melt away like snow flakes in a hot oven.
Not all of them melted, though-not even in that fiery furnace. Twenty-four hundred gunboats had made up that inconceivable swarm at the beginning. Less than a hundred got in close enough to launch FRAMs. Of those, only thirty-eight managed to get off a second salvo. Of those, precisely nine completed their ramming runs.
Which was quite bad enough.
Prescott kept his face immobile as the reports came in, even though every "Code Omega" was a barbed blade in his gut. Then, at last, Anthea Mandagalla reported that the data were all in, and the computer displayed them with cybernetic emotionlessness. TF 71 had lost eight hundred and sixty-two fighters, seven battlecruisers, four fleet carriers, two assault carriers, five superdreadnoughts, and-despite the tremendous wealth of defensive fire from the Hannah Avram-class escorts-one monitor. Five more capital ships had suffered varying degrees of damage.
"It could have been worse, Sir," Mandagalla ventured.
"I know," Prescott replied absently. And he did. Indeed, what he was thinking didn't bear uttering aloud: Thank God Andy got us in through a door they didn't know to watch. If they'd detected us coming
in, and met us with a single concerted wave of over seven thousand gunboats . . .
He ordered himself not to shiver in front of his staffers. Instead, he turned to face them and spoke briskly.
"Anna, we'll detach two of our Borsoi-B fleet carriers and a squadron of battlecruisers to escort the damaged units back to the warp point. In the meantime, the rest of the fleet will proceed to Planet II."
"Aye, aye, Sir." Neither Mandagalla nor anyone else had expected Prescott to depart without finishing off the last inhabited planet, now denuded of its gunboats. Still . . . "Admiral, there are still the orbital defenses to deal with. And we've expended most of our SBMHAWKs on the fighters."
"I know," Prescott replied again. "But we still have about two hundred left, and we've got plenty of SRHAWKs. We can send out mixed salvos to confuse the Bugs' point defense."
"What about kamikaze shuttles, Sir? Those fortresses, and the space station, probably have quite a few of them, and our strikegroups have taken heavy losses."
Prescott turned to his spook.
"Amos?"
"It's our assessment, based on the size and configuration of those forts, that they only have so many shuttles." Chung spoke without hesitation, but also without much happiness. "I've already made my conclusions available to Jacques and Commodore Landrum."
Prescott cocked his head at Landrum, and the farshathkhanaak answered his unspoken question.
"I believe our remaining fighters can handle them, Sir." He sounded barely less unhappy than Chung had, but Prescott ignored it.
"Very well, then. Let's get down to cases. . . ."
* * *
It was frustrating.
It was clear now what the Enemy survey flotilla had found that was so important: the closed warp point that had admitted the Enemy undetected into this system-a System Which Must Be Defended. Any doubt the Fleet might have entertained on that head had been dispelled once the gunboats' scanners had obtained solid data on the Enemy starships. Several of those starships' emissions signatures were perfect matches against the reports from the system the Enemy had fought his way through. There was no question that this was the same fleet, although the Enemy had somehow managed to conceal the existence of his own monitors from the picket force he'd smashed on his way here.