by David Weber
Her smile deepened as she recalled the hardcopy that rustled against her rib cage where it lay inside her tunic. Indeed, it was all she could do to avoid chuckling at Fujiko's references to a certain Marine captain-references whose disdain was exceeded only by their frequency. The message's Terran Standard date was December 9, 2369, for Fujiko had sent it from Telik just after the liberation of that tragic world. Now that the Star Union was hooked into the local interstellar communications network at the Telik-Franos warp point, that message had taken less than one full standard day-twenty-three hours and twenty-two minutes, to be precise-to reach her across the real-space light-minutes between the light-year-distant stars. It was more wonderful than Murakuma could have expressed to have her daughter so close, figuratively speaking, at last, but she didn't allow herself to dwell upon it at this particular moment. She had other things to think about, for it was now late December and Sixth Fleet was here in Home Hive Two again, for what they confidently hoped would be the last time, awaiting Third Great Fang Koraaza's Third Fleet and wondering-
"Where is Third Fleet?"
Murakuma sighed at Leroy McKenna's irritable ejaculation. This wasn't the first time she'd heard it, from the chief of staff and others as well, and she set her persona on "soothing" mode.
"Remember the time lag, Leroy. We're thirty-six light-minutes away from Warp Point Two."
"I haven't forgotten, Sir. But we've been here long enough-especially with our recon fighters deployed in the direction of Warp Point Two-to have picked up Lord Khiniak's signal, if he were here to send it."
"Communications between us and Third Fleet have been incredibly roundabout even with the ICN. Yes, the plan called for both fleets to enter this system simultaneously. But . . ." Murakuma stopped herself short of the patronizing lecture on military history Tadeoshi would probably have delivered, with emphasis on the words "Leyte Gulf." McKenna was well aware of the difficulty of coordinating widely separated forces. "If Lord Khiniak had really made transit at precisely the same time we did, it would have restored my faith in miracles! Let's give him a little longer before we start panicking."
"Aye aye, Sir," McKenna clearly wasn't happy, but just as clearly he understood the force of Murakuma's argument.
Murakuma sensed the unhappiness, but it wasn't blatant enough to merit a rebuke. Instead, she leaned close enough to speak privately.
"I know he'll come, Leroy. And so do you."
"How long do we wait, Sir?" McKenna's question might have been regarded as truculent. Murakuma knew it wasn't. The chief of staff was raising a legitimate point.
"I'll decide that. For now, we'll use the time to shake down the fleet and resolve any organizational issues that may exist. When Third Fleet appears, we'll be ready."
"Aye aye, Sir."
In the end, it took less time than Murakuma had feared before the signals of Lord Khiniak's emerging ships began to impinge on Sixth Fleet's electronic consciousness. Ignoring the excitement around her, and carefully concealing her relief, she turned to the flag bridge's system-scale holo sphere, where the green icon of Third Fleet was blinking into life at Warp Point Two, a hundred and twenty degrees counterclockwise from Warp Point One's bearing and 4.2 light-hours from the primary. The incoming data indicated that Koraaza'khiniak was encountering the same kind of limited resistance as she had, and was dealing with it in the same way. No surprise. RD2 findings and logic alike had suggested that the Bugs wouldn't try to contest the warp point. No, they'd pull back within medium-to-close range of the three inhabited planets and exact the highest possible price from any who violated those spaces.
Not that Murakuma and Koraaza had any intention of paying it. That was what Taliaferro was here for with his curiously constituted task group. And it was why the Bugs were about to watch, with whatever degree of surprise they were capable of feeling, as the two invading fleets proceeded toward their rendezvous-away from those planets.
Murakuma's eyes went to the halo of tiny lights that girdled the central sun-icon-a very wide halo, well outside the orbits of the inhabited planets. Twenty-four light-minutes was uncommonly far from a sun to find an asteroid belt; normally, a Jupiter-sized gas giant coalesced just outside the outermost limits of the liquid-water zone, gravitationally aborting planet formation just inside it and leaving a trail of planetoidal rubble to mark what would have been the orbit of an unborn world. But, as astronomers had been learning for centuries, the rules of planetography were made to be broken. The brutally massive Home Hive Two B had somehow formed at a forty light-minute orbital radius, and the result was the stream of glowing dust motes in the sphere towards which Sixth and Third Fleets were bound. When they met, Murakuma would assume overall command of the combined fleets-a truly massive array of killing machinery with the addition of Third Fleet's two hundred and forty starships.
Leroy McKenna followed the admiral's eyes and read her thoughts.
"I wonder what the Bugs will think?" he murmured.
* * *
The staggered arrival of the two Enemy forces, while somewhat unexpected, was of no material advantage to the Fleet given the decision to make no attempt to contest the outer system. Instead, the Deep Space Force was to interpose itself between the invaders and the inner planets.
Except . . . the enemy wasn't advancing toward those planets.
His unexpected behavior had been the source of much perplexity. Eventually, the indecision had been resolved, and the planet-based gunboats and small craft launched, with the first Enemy force to enter the system as their objective. But the delay had enabled the later-arriving force to approach rendezvous close enough to lend the support of its small attack craft. An unacceptable number of craft had been expended for no significant result.
Now, however, the directing intelligences of this System Which Must Be Defended had regained their accustomed equilibrium. There would be no more ill-coordinated attacks. All available gunboats and small craft would be consolidated into a single, massive strike which must surely overload the Enemy's defenses.
* * *
"And so, Great Fang Koraaza," Murakuma concluded the prearranged spiel, "pursuant to orders from the Grand Allied Joint Chiefs of Staff, I assume overall command of Third and Sixth Fleets."
"Acknowledged, Ahhdmiraaaal Muhrakhuuuuma," Koraaza'khiniak replied with equal gravity.
As a practical matter Murakuma had been exercising command throughout the battle they'd just concluded. But now her flagship Li Chien-lu and Koraaza's Kinaahsa'defarnoo had finally approached close enough to permit the little ceremony to proceed without irritating time-lags.
The disparity in sustainable speeds between the Bugs' gunboats and shuttles had-not for the first time-been a priceless gift to the Allies. And while the oncoming clouds of kamikazes had employed jammer packs lavishly, the Alliance's fighter pilots had by now worked out the tactics for dealing with them. They'd picked off every jammer they could identify from long range with third generation fighter missiles, then closed in to knife-range, slashing through those seemingly inexhaustible formations with hetlasers and gun packs, then coming around to slash again.
Eventually the Bugs had grasped that limiting their kamikaze mass's speed to that of the slower shuttles simply enabled the Allied starships to avoid being overtaken. So they'd sent the gunboats streaking ahead at their maximum velocity, leaving the shuttles to follow as best they could. But that had enabled the Allied battle-line to concentrate its tremendous wealth of defensive fire on the unsupported gunboats, burning vast numbers of them out of the plenum before they could complete their ramming runs. Still more were blown apart by the fighters that snapped at their heels.
As always, some of those multitudes had gotten through-more than enough, for Vanessa Murakuma's money. But her gaze held steady as she studied the totals of ships damaged or, in a few cases, destroyed outright. It had to be considered an acceptable loss ratio, given how few gunboats of the attack wave had made it back to their planetary bases.
T
he shuttles had fled back there, too. Lagging behind the gunboats, they-or, rather, whoever or whatever did their thinking for them-had seen the futility of pressing on with an independent attack on ships they'd have had difficulty overtaking in any case. So, along with a second, as yet uncommitted wave of gunboats, they'd retired to the planets which they knew to be the Allies' objectives, evidently concluding that they need only wait for the Allied combined fleets to enter their effective attack envelope, as they must do sooner or later in order to reach those objectives.
It was, Murakuma reflected, a perfectly logical conclusion on their part. It just happened to be wrong.
"So, Ahhhdmiraal," Koraaza's voice from the com screen brought her back to the present, "matters are now in the doubtless capable hands of your Small Claw Tahlivver."
Murakuma chuckled inwardly. Koraaza, without the spelling to mislead him, came closer to pronouncing Paul Taliaferro's surname accurately than most humans who didn't come from the region on Old Terra's North American continent known as Virginia.
"Indeed, Lord Khiniak-as soon as we can locate enough asteroids that meet his somewhat exacting requirements," she agreeed, and Koraaza favored her with a tooth-hidden smile.
"I, too, am not altogether unacquainted with the foibles of engineers. But we have an entire asteroid belt to choose from. Shall we proceed?"
* * *
The case for abandoning the outer system to the Enemy had been an unexceptionable one. If the speed differential between gunboats and shuttles made it impossible to coordinate a single overwhelming attack as planned, the obvious solution was to draw all available resources of both sorts back around the Worlds Which Must Be Defended, where the Enemy must come to them and would surely be swamped by sheer numbers. Viewed in that light, there was no need for undue concern over the fact that the Enemy's carriers for their small attack craft had vanished into cloak in the outer system.
However, the Enemy's subsequent behavior had continued to refuse to conform to expectations. It was extremely difficult for the Fleet's scout craft to penetrate the dense shells of small attack craft the Enemy was maintaining about his starships. And, lacking a foothold in the asteroid belt itself, the Fleet possessed no sensor stations in position to substitute for that lack of reconnaissance with direct observation.
Still, the essential facts seemed clear enough, judging from the handful of fragmentary reports from the few gunboats which had gotten through and lived long enough to send back any data at all. In contrast to the usual pattern of events, the Enemy was preparing for a protracted campaign by constructing bases on three of the largest asteroids and six smaller ones. The defensive installations being emplaced on those asteroids were certainly consistent with the hypothesis.
* * *
"Coming up on Sledgehammer Three, Commodore."
Paul Taliaferro, sitting in the position from which he'd unceremoniously displaced the copilot, grunted something unintelligible. The pilot expected no better in the way of a response, accustomed as she'd become to the commodore's preoccupied taciturnity, so she went on piloting.
Taliaferro wasn't quite the surly misanthrope his reputation suggested. Indeed, he occasionally wished he possessed more of the social graces whose lack-in the opinion of many, including and especially his former wife-helped account for his failure to rise above the rank of commodore. He just didn't have the time for them . . . nor, to be honest, the motivation. When manipulating and reshaping the inanimate physical universe through engineering, there was generally one best way to do a thing, and that was that. It was so straightforward! None of the irritating ambiguities and irrationalities with which humans insisted on complicating their lives. Often they actually seemed to resent having the path of maximum efficiency pointed out to them as succinctly as possible. He wondered why.
It was different, though, with Admiral Murakuma. She understood!Or at least she listened with appropriate attentiveness, and with none of the unreasonable resentments that he'd always found so hard to understand. True, she sometimes smiled in a way that left him vaguely puzzled on the rare occasions when he noticed it. But she'd presented him with such an interesting problem. Even better, she'd provided him with the authority and the tools he needed to do his job, and then left him alone to do it. Bliss!
Now the asteroid they'd dubbed Sledgehammer Three was visible in the shuttle's lights, waxing to fill the viewport whose presence was the reason Taliaferro had appropriated the copilot's seat. He studied the asteroid with care, for this was his last stop on his last inspection tour of it and its two mates, and of the lesser asteroids designated Hammer One through Six.
Sledgehammer Three was a rugged sphere almost four hundred kilometers in diameter. As far back as the twentieth century, it had been recognized that above a certain minimum mass an astronomical body's own gravity would prevent it from retaining a grossly irregular shape. Only four of Sol's asteroids were above that minimum. Here in Home Hive Two's fifth orbital position, though, it was pretty clear that the unborn planet would have been a true whopper if it had succeeded in clumping together. In spite of a vastly greater radius, this asteroid belt was as dense as Sol's, and held far more giant members. The three Sledgehammers had been easy to find, the six smaller rocks for the mere Hammers effortless.
Then had come the toil of constructing the installations which Taliaferro now observed. Over a hundred robotic point-defense emplacements dotted Sledgehammer Three's wild and barren surface. Also, buried deep under the crevasses and craters, were the command datalink facilities that would enable Taliaferro's eleven Guerriere-C-class command ships to coordinate the three Sledgehammers' defensive fire. The six Hammers mounted proportionately lighter defensive works.
All of that, however, was secondary, meant only to keep these asteroids in existence long enough to fulfill their destiny. Only one engineering work on Sledgehammer Three really mattered-the one that couldn't be given a trial run.
"Get me Commander Lin," Taliaferro muttered. The pilot had barely complied before he leaned forward and snapped into the grille. "What's the word on that flaw in the pusher plate?"
"We're not certain there is one, Sir," Lin Yu-hsiang replied from his temporary command post on the surface of Sledgehammer Three. "When it comes to constructing Orion drives, we don't exactly have much experience-and having to stop what we're doing to answer questions about it doesn't exactly help!"
The pilot blanched, expecting thunderbolts. But Taliaferro actually chuckled-partly in recognition of a kindred spirit, and partly at what had become a standing joke in TG 64.1. When the name for what the task group was constructing had reached the Tabbies, they'd thought they were being honored. No one had had the heart to tell them that the name dated back to a time centuries before humanity had dreamed their race existed.
Nuclear pulse propulsion-"Project Orion"-had been a product of the twentieth century, one of many notions for liberating the infant Space Age from the dismal mathematics of chemical rocketry. Conceptually, it set some kind of record for brute-force crudity: detonate a series of nuclear explosions behind you and let them kick you forward! Naturally, it required a massive shock-absorbing plate for your vehicle's rear end. Worse, however, it had faced insurmountable political obstacles in a world understandably jittery about allowing anyone to send up spaceships packed full of what were in effect hundreds of small nuclear weapons. But for a time it had seemed to offer the best hope for reaching the outer planets and-especially after the Bussard ramscoop had come to grief on the hard facts about the interstellar medium in Sol's vicinity-the stars.
Then had come the unanticipated breakthrough into reactionless drives, and the Orion concept had gone the way of Jules Verne's giant cannon. At the same time, the idea of "dinosaur killers"-asteroids used as kinetic-energy weapons against planets-had joined reaction drives in the dustbin. It just wasn't practical to enclose an entire asteroid in a drive field. And tractoring such an object would have no effect except to rip the tractor-beam projectors out of ships
that instantaneously took on velocities measured in percentages of c.
No, it couldn't be done with reactionless drives . . . but Vanessa Murakuma had wanted it done anyway. When she'd put the problem to Taliaferro, he'd automatically snorted that it was preposterous. Then he'd gone off and thought about it, to the near-exclusion of eating and sleeping. And when he'd put his solution before her, she'd backed him to the hilt, selling the idea to a skeptical Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Taliaferro's moment of amusement passed.
"I tell you what, Commander," he said. "You've got precisely as long to decide whether there's a problem-and, if there is, to fix it-as there is between now and Sledgehammer Three's scheduled ignition."
"But . . but, Commodore-"
"But me no buts, Commander. I've just finished checking out all the other asteroids, and they all report that they're ready for ignition. The first of them, Hammer Four, is due to light off in-" Taliaferro glanced at his wrist chrono "-thirteen minutes and a little less than twenty seconds. After that, there's no turning back. I'm damned if I'll stop the clock now to wait for you to get your act together!"
"Commodore, I protest!"
"Protest all you want to, Yu-hsiang-later. But right now, if I were you I'd get busy on that pusher plate. Sledgehammer Three is going to get kicked out of its orbit on schedule, and if you're still there at the time . . . well, it ought to be an interesting trip to Planet III, especially with fusion bombs going off under your ass!"
Taliaferro cut the connection while Lin was in mid-splutter, and turned to the pilot.
"All right, get us back to Alfred. And raise Fleet flag."
While he waited, Taliaferro studied a two-dimensional schematic of the Home Hive Two A System out to and including the asteroid belt. Sheer habit, for he'd long since memorized it. Still, he gazed at the little lights of the nine asteroids which TF 64.1 had transformed into weapons. They were strung out over forty-odd degrees of the belt's circumference, a curving scimitar of death. That was where they'd been found, and it had been out of the question to move them together, for the same reason their drives couldn't be tested: an Orion drive in operation was something the Bugs could hardly fail to notice. So they would start moving in staggered order starting with Hammer Four, each asteroid lighting off its drive as the others came up level with it on the hyperbolic orbit that would send them careening across the inner system, terminating at one of the three scarlet planet-icons on the display. Sledgehammer Three, the tip of the scimitar, would be last, so Lin actually had a fair amount of time left. Just as well, Taliaferro thought. I wouldn't really leave him there. Probably.