by David Weber
It was unfortunate that the Enemy's apprehensions were unjustified.
There were no such forces. This System Which Must Be Defended was isolated from all other prewar population centers except one rather small one a single warp transit away. And not only was that system of no material help, it was actually a drain. For beyond it lay a system in which yet another Enemy force had lain for so long, awaiting its chance. That threat must also be guarded against.
And, perhaps even more importantly, the Enemy must never learn that this star system held not three warp points, but four. The food source which had very briefly attained the status of Enemy on the far side of that fourth, closed warp point, had chosen a most inopportune moment to reveal itself. It was fortunate, indeed, that its technology had been so much cruder than that of the Fleet's current Enemies. Indeed, it had been cruder than the technology of the Old Enemy at the time of the first war. Nothing heavier than a gunboat had been required to crush the food source's feeble resistance in space, although it had proven unusually difficult to subdue on the surface of the world the Fleet had taken from it.
Had the food source made its presence known even half of one of the primary Worlds Which Must Be Defended's years earlier, the Fleet would have regarded its emergence with complete satisfaction. As it was, there'd been insufficient time to prepare a proper grafting from this System Which Must Be Defended. A population with all of the critical elements had been transported to the new planet, but the new world had a harsh and demanding environment, and the Fleet couldn't be certain that the transported population had sufficient depth and redundancy to survive in the face of unforeseen contingencies. Nonetheless, the decision had been made that no further population or resource transfers would be made to the System Which Must Be Concealed. Unthinkable as it once might have been, that single, newly conquered world might well have become more important than all of the prewar Systems Which Must Be Defended combined, and no risk could be run of inadvertently revealing the warp point which led to it to the Enemy's stealthy robotic spies.
If the worst befell the Systems Which Must Be Defended, perhaps that single grafting, in time, might grow into yet another System Which Must Be Defended. If that happened, then the new System Which Must Be Defended must be more cautious than its predecessors had been. It must never return through its warp point of arrival again, and it must prepare itself for the possibility that it would yet again meet the present Enemies at some distant future time.
It was a pity that this System Which Must Be Defended was uncertain whether or not any of its courier drones had reached its sisters with word of the existence of this new and fragile daughter. Perhaps the surviving, isolated splinters of the Fleet might have taken some . . . consolation from the knowledge. And perhaps not. The survival of such a delicate sapling in such a cold and hostile universe was far from certain, as, indeed, the straits to which the fully developed Systems Which Must Be Defended had been reduced demonstrated only too well.
But at least the Enemy had no way of knowing that the System Which Must Be Concealed existed, either-just as he couldn't know that his second fleet also threatened this System Which Must Be Defended. If he had known, he could have mounted a coordinated two-front offensive. Even as it was, the Fleet's resources had to be kept divided, to guard against both threats. And those resources were seriously depleted. In addition to the destruction it had wrought on the warp-point fortresses of the System Which Must Be Defended, the Enemy's last incursion had-as the Enemy probably suspected-wiped out the entire available inventory of monitors. More were under construction, of course. But that took time . . . probably more time than the Fleet had.
Matters weren't entirely unsatisfactory, however. The last incursion had, after all, been repulsed, and the gunboat and small craft losses had been made good since. It was therefore possible to station the bulk of the superdreadnoughts-a hundred and two, out of the available total of a hundred and forty-four-in the other system, where they would join the undepleted array of seventy-two orbital fortresses in a posture of close-in warp point defense. The gunboats and small craft should be able to deal with any future direct attack on the System Which Must Be Defended, using the jammer-aided tactics the enemy had previously seemed to find troublesome.
* * *
Vanessa Murakuma released a quiet sigh as Li Chien-lu completed transit and the damage reports from the first waves began to light up the board. Leroy McKenna heard her, and gave her a crooked a smile of shared satisfaction.
"A lot of damaged units," the chief of staff murmured, "but very few destroyed outright."
They'd gotten into Home Hive Two more cheaply than Murakuma had allowed herself to hope. The RD2s had reported a starship total compatible with Marcus LeBlanc's projections. Naturally, they'd considered the possibility that some of the ships were electronic ghosts conjured by ECM3 buoys, but Murakuma had placed absolutely no reliance on that. She'd spent SBMHAWKs as if the multi-megacredit pods were mere firecrackers, and the avalanche of warheads had blown away the twenty-three fortresses the Bugs had been able to emplace since her previous visit. The CAM2-armed SBMHAWK4s had annihilated the few suicide-riders covering the OWPs and wrought havoc among the patrolling gunboats, and the kamikazes on hand had been able to inflict only the limited damage Murakuma and McKenna were now observing with relief. Quite evidently, the SBMHAWKs had made a clean sweep of the starships.
As the computer analysis of the wreckage began to accumulate, it became clear that they'd more than done so.
"So," Marina Abernathy said, bending over a terminal as the admiral and chief of staff looked over her shoulder, "most of those capital ship readings were bogus."
"You'll never hear me complaining about wasted SBMHAWKs," McKenna growled. "That's what they're for."
"Still," the intelligence officer mused, "you have to wonder: where are the ships the Bugs could have had here?"
"I'm sure Admiral LeBlanc will be intrigued." Murakuma smiled briefly at the thought of Marcus, back in Orpheus 1, a slave to orders. "But I take your point, Marina. They must have other deep-space forces somewhere in the system, so we'll exercise caution. Leroy, we'll wait here until all our units have transited, and I want the heaviest possible fighter CSP out at all times. While Anson is getting that organized and deployed, we'll send our cripples back and reorganize our battlegroups around lost units."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
"And then . . ." Murakuma's smile returned, but this time it was very different. Predatory. "We'll execute Operation Nobunaga."
In a war against an enemy with whom no communication was possible, the security rationale for giving operational plans irrelevant or even nonsensical code names no longer obtained. But military habit died hard. And, she told herself, Tadeoshi would have appreciated this one: Oda Nobunaga, the sixteenth-century Japanese warlord who, time and again, had left his enemies choking on his dust by attacking unexpected objectives.
"I'd love to know," she said, aloud but more to herself than to her staffers, "what the Bugs will think-if that's what they do-when they analyze our course."
* * *
This was . . . unexpected.
The remaining units of the Mobile Force-the ones which hadn't been stationed at the warp point and so had survived the initial bombardment-were continuing in cloak. Rather than squander themselves in an attack against an Enemy whose tonnage and firepower were exceeded only by the caution with which he proceeded, they were conserving their gunboats and small craft to assist the thousands of such craft even now speeding out from the planetary bases to meet the invaders.
All very well, and according to doctrine. Only . . . the Enemy had set course for the system's secondary star!
The Mobile Force would pursue, of course. But it couldn't possibly catch up, given the Enemy's head start and superior speed. The waves of planet-based gunboats would be able to intercept, despite being slowed by the inclusion of shuttles and pinnaces in their formations, but their attacks might not be as well coord
inated as might have been hoped.
* * *
Home Hive Two B blazed in the view-forward, an F-class white sun barely less massive and less hot than Component A, now little more than a zero-magnitude star in the view-aft at almost two hundred and fifty light-minutes astern. Given the geometry of the star system, Component B lay approximately 9.2 light-hours from the warp point to Orpheus 1. At Li Chien-lu's maximum sustainable velocity of just over three percent of light-speed, the direct trip would have taken four and a half days. Allowing for the need to stay well clear of the inner system of Component A-which, unfortunately, lay directly between the warp point and the secondary component-the actual transit time had been well over six days.
It was about the longest trip anyone could have taken within the confines of a single star system, binary or not, and this one had seemed even longer than it was as one wave of planet-based kamikazes after another had smashed into Sixth Fleet.
But this time Sixth Fleet at least knew about the Bugs' new jammer technology-its dangers, and also the ease with which its emissions could be detected and locked up by fire control, once the Allied sensor techs knew what to look for. Operation Nobunaga had incorporated defensive doctrine based on that knowledge. Murakuma had formed her capital ships into concentric protective screens around the fragile carriers, then dispatched her fighters to engage the kamikazes at extreme range. The fighter strikes, rather than press home to point-blank dogfighting range, had launched their missiles at extreme range, which kept them outside the jamming envelope and permitted each squadron to coordinate its fire in precise time-on-target salvos. They'd concentrated on the readily identifiable emissions signatures of the gunboats carrying the jammer packs, and although the gunboats' point defense had degraded the effectiveness of such long range fire, enough of it had still gotten the job done.
Once the jammer gunboats had been savaged, the strikegroups fell back to their carriers to rearm. By then, the range had fallen, and Murakuma had maneuvered to hold it open as long as possible with a view to giving them more time to relaunch and continue their work of destruction. Those maneuvers accounted for much of the extra time which had been required for the voyage.
The fighters had gone back out to meet the attack waves coming in on the fleet, and, with the jammer packs effectively taken out of the equation, they'd been able to close for a conventional dogfight without worrying about the loss of their datanets. They couldn't stop those oncoming waves-King Canute couldn't have done that. But the kamikazes were depleted and disorganized by the time they entered the battle-line's missile envelope.
Murakuma kept telling herself that Sixth Fleet's losses were well within the acceptable parameters for this stage of Operation Nobunaga. It didn't help.
At any rate, she couldn't let herself think about it. She had a decision to make.
She turned away from the viewscreen and studied the holo display of the Home Hive Two B subsystem. They'd been close enough for some time to get sensor readings on the inhabited worlds-yes, worlds, plural. Planets II and III blazed with high energy emissions, bringing the binary system's total to five-easily the most heavily populated and industrialized system in the known galaxy. In particular, Planet BIII, which Sixth Fleet was now approaching, evinced a population as massive as any yet encountered in Bug space. It lay on a bearing of two o'clock from the local sun at a distance of fourteen light-minutes, guarded by the customary enormous space station and a coterie of twenty-four more massive OWPs. Fortuitously, it was also close to the somewhat less massively developed Planet BII, ten light-minutes from the primary at three o'clock.
"In essence," Marina Abernathy was telling the assembled core staff, "the Bug deep-space force has fallen so far behind that it's no longer a factor in the tactical picture. In fact, it's not even bothering to stay in cloak anymore. But two more really scary waves of kamikazes are bearing down on us."
The staff spook indicated the threat estimates on the board. No one felt any need to comment on the totals-they were all growing desensitized to numbers that once would have left them in shock. But Ernesto Cruciero leaned forward and studied the estimated time to intercept.
"It appears," he said carefully, "that we have time to finish rearming our fighters, carry out the strike on the planet, and then get them back aboard, rearm them again, and launch them to meet this threat."
Despite the painful neutrality with which Cruciero had spoken, Anson Olivera glared at him, as the TFN's farshathkhanaaks had a tendency to glare at operations officers.
"That, Commodore," he said with frosty, pointed formality, "is what's known as 'planning for a perfect world.' What if the attack runs into trouble getting past those orbital fortresses? And even if it doesn't, you're asking a lot of our fighter pilots." As usual, his tone made it superfluous to add.
Cruciero's retort was halfway out of his mouth when Murakuma raised a hand, palm outward. Both men subsided and waited while the admiral spent a silent moment alone with the decision she must make.
It didn't take long before she looked up.
"Anson, if we hold the fighters back to defend the fleet and then launch the planet-side strike later, they'll have to face kamikazes piloted by Bugs who're at the top of their forms," she said. "But if we exercise the 'Shiva Option' on that planet first, the kamikazes will be a lot easier to deal with. And either way, the forts and the space station are still going to be there when we go in against the planet. I know it's cutting it close . . . but we're going to do it. Continue loading the fighters with FRAMs."
* * *
Despite the reservations it was their farshathkhanaak's responsibility to feel, Anson Olivera's pilots knew precisely what they were about. More than that, they understood their Admiral's logic. That didn't mean they liked their orders; it only meant that they knew they would have liked any other set of orders even worse, under the circumstances.
The FRAM-loaded F-4s spat from their launch bay catapults, bellies heavy with the destruction they bore, and grim-faced pilots of three different species looked down upon the blue-and-white loveliness of the living planet they'd come so far to kill. Somehow, seeing how gorgeous that living, breathing sphere was made the reality of the Bugs even more obscene. Their very presence should have obscured the heavens, covered itself and all its hideous reality from the eye of God in a shielding, evil-fraught gloom. But it hadn't, and the assassins of that planet's distant beauty settled themselves in their cockpits as they prepared to bring the sun itself to its surface . . . and bury it in eternal night.
The massed fighters, the total strength of every strikegroup in Sixth Fleet, settled into formation. Flight plans and attack patterns were checked a final time and locked into the computers. The hundred or so CAM2-armed SBMHAWK4s Vanessa Murakuma had reserved for this moment deployed with them and locked their targeting systems on the orbital fortresses. There weren't enough of them to destroy the fortresses, but their warheads would suffice to batter the forts and . . . distract them as the fighters streamed past.
Anson Olivera watched his plot, watched his pilots as they finished forming up and dressed their ranks with the precision of veterans who knew the value of careful preparation from painful personal experience. He tried not to look over his shoulder at the master plot, which showed the ominous scarlet icons of the incoming kamikaze strikes sweeping towards Sixth Fleet from behind. Like his pilots, he understood the logic of their orders, but this was going to be close.
He suppressed the need to snap orders at them to hurry up. They were already moving as rapidly as they could. If he tried to make them move faster, it would only engender confusion which would actually slow the entire process, and he knew it. Which didn't make it any easier to keep his mouth shut.
But then, finally-almost abruptly, it seemed, after the nerve-gnawing tension of his wait-they were ready. He made himself pause just a moment longer, running his eyes over the status lights and sidebars in one last check, then nodded and keyed his mike.
"All flights, t
his is the Flag," he said clearly. "Execute Nobunaga Three."
The last dawn came for the billions of beings on the world below.
* * *
One question, at least, was settled. This horrible disorientation, like all telepathy-related phenomena, might halt at the edge of the interstellar abyss, but it had no difficulty propagating across the gulf between the components of a distant binary system.
There were far more of the small attack craft than had been expected, as they were augmented by almost two thousand operating from a swarm of ships smaller than any normally seen in the Enemy's battle fleets-no larger than the Fleet's warp point defense cruisers, in fact. The Enemy had committed practically all of them to a single massive strike that had ignored the fire from the orbital works and, at a single blow, virtually depopulated the third planet of the secondary sun. The ensuing psychic shockwave had hit the onrushing waves of gunboats and small craft well before they reached their objectives, stunning them into a state of ineffectual disorganization. The small attack craft, returning from the smoldering sphere of radioactive desolation that had been a World Which Must Be Defended, had slaughtered them.
Now the Enemy was proceeding toward the nearby second planet. It must be left to its own devices. Once, that would have been unthinkable for any World Which Must Be Defended. But now there was no alternative. The waves of gunboats and small craft still following the enemy could accomplish nothing. They must be recalled, for they were in no condition to fight a battle now, and when the Enemy killed the second planet, the effect of the psychic shock would only be intensified.
Yet writing off the secondary sun's second planet carried with it an additional complication. The new wave of confusion wouldn't affect only the gunboats and small craft in proximity to the Enemy. It would wash over the entire system and its defenders, even before the effects of the first one had even begun to wear off. The Fleet couldn't be certain what would happen when two such shockwaves hit in such close temporal proximity. There was simply no experience on which to base any estimate, just as there'd been no warning that such an effect could be produced at all until the Enemy had proven it could. It was entirely possible that the second shockwave would not only extend but intensify the effects of the first.