by David Weber
He'd barely finished reporting to Murakuma across the light-minutes when a multi-megatonne fusion fireball awoke a few score meters behind Hammer Four, its brilliantly defined shock wave surging toward the asteroid but never quite touching it. Then another . . . and another . . . and slowly, ponderously, Hammer Four began to move out of its immemorial orbit, trailing what looked (or would have looked, to anyone who'd braved the sleet of gamma rays) like a trail of small suns connected by a stream of glowing gas.
Operation Cushion Shot had begun.
* * *
It had taken an appreciable amount of time for the realization of what was happening to sink home through layers of unexpectedness-not a fatal delay, perhaps, but certainly a disadvantageous one. But there was no longer any room for doubt. The orbits into which those asteroids had been moved could be projected without difficulty, and all of them intersected at the point that would then be occupied by the third planet. Calculating the kinetic energy such impacts would release was equally simple. And the Fleet knew only too well what would happen to the system's remaining defenders at the instant that planet's population died.
Abandoning the outer system to the Enemy had been an error. That it was an error grounded in flawless logic was no excuse. Neither was the totally unprecedented nature of what the Enemy was doing.
There was, however, a positive aspect to the situation. The asteroids could be deflected from their courses-or, in the case of the smaller ones, actually broken up. It would not be easy, but with antimatter weapons it could be done. And the Enemy must be as aware of that fact as the Fleet was, so his freedom of action was limited by the need to defend those incredible kinetic projectiles as they followed their immutable hyperbolic courses in free fall, at a velocity which, while high on the standards of normal interplanetary bodies, was practically stationary to vehicles using reactionless drives.
There could be no further thought of waiting in defensive posture on and around the planets. Those asteroids must be intercepted as far away as possible. All available gunboats and small craft must be fitted with antimatter loads and launched immediately. And the Deep Space Force must go with them.
* * *
"Well, we expected it, Sir."
"So we did," Vanessa Murakuma replied to Leroy McKenna's observation. The response was purely automatic. Her entire consciousness was focused on the approaching Bug formation-a classic "Bughouse swarm."
Yes, she had expected it. Not even an idiot or a politician could harbor any remaining doubts about the Bugs' capacity to reason from observed data-or, at least, to perform some process that filled the same function as reasoning. They understood what that formation of asteroids meant, and they were committing everything they had left to what they knew was their final stand against apocalypse.
She studied the readouts on the mobile force that trailed behind the tens of thousands of kamikazes: sixty-seven superdreadnoughts, fifty-two battlecruisers and a hundred and thirty-four light cruisers. At least there were no monitors; evidently intelligence was correct in supposing that the Bugs had had insufficient time to complete any new ones since she and Lord Khiniak had made their last, regrettably uncoordinated incursion into this system.
Her eyes went to the holo sphere on whose scale that formation shrank to a single scarlet icon, moving to intercept a cluster of tiny green lights representing the asteroids and the combined fleets' battle-line, together with the fighter screen spread before them by Small Fang Meearnow'raaalpha's eighty light carriers.
Finally, she let her gaze rest on another emerald icon, near the inner fringes of the asteroid belt-one which she hoped and believed appeared on no similar displays aboard the Bug ships whose course it was paralleling.
Anson Olivera approached. The farshathkhanaak had had his eyes on that remote green icon from the first.
"Admiral, we've gotten another call from Fang Koraaza's staff. They want to know if it's time to-"
"Not yet. A little longer, I think." Murakuma had a multitude of figures, actual and projected, at her fingertips. But in the end it came down to a matter of feel, complicated by the need to factor in communications time-lags.
Still, Olivera only had a minute or so longer to fidget before Murakuma straightened up abruptly.
"All right, Anson," she said crisply. "Signal Small Fang Iaashmaahr."
The signal flashed across the light-minutes to Iaashmaahr'freaalkit-ahn, commanding her own Task Force 63 and also Third Fleet's TF 33-thirty-four assault carriers and forty-eight fleet carriers, which had gone into cloak and maneuvered among the asteroids until they were in position to cover the Bugs' anticipated course. The signal was received, and thirty-four hundred primary-pack-armed fighters launched undetected.
They couldn't remain undetected quite long enough to reach their targets, of course. The ships of the Bugs' deep space force managed to launch their gunboats into the path of the fighter strike, and other gunboats hastily detached from the "Bughouse swarm" joined them. But that desperately erected barrier could barely even slow Orion and Terran and Gorm pilots who smelled blood. One Bug starship after another died in a stroboscopic cluster of fireballs, and the com frequencies rang with cries of triumph in three languages, from three different sets of vocal apparatus.
Then the fighter strike was through, emerging into clear space and sending reports flooding into the databases of Fleet flag.
"It worked, Admiral!" Ernesto Cruciero exclaimed. "The data are incomplete, of course, but most of the deep space force ships were either destroyed outright or damaged so severely they won't be able to keep formation . . . and wouldn't be much use if they could!"
Murakuma permitted herself a brief smile at the ops officer's enthusiasm.
"Very good, Ernesto. Convey my congratulations to Small Fang Iaashmaahr-and also my desire that she expedite the recovery of her fighters so she can rendezvous with us as quickly as possible." Cruciero and Olivera both looked somewhat crestfallen. "Let's face it, gentlemen. Crippling the deep space force, while certainly desirable, was really something of a sideshow. That's the real threat." Murakuma pointed at the innocuous-looking ruby icon that represented clouds of antimatter-laden gunboats and shuttles. "And we're going to need Iaashmaahr's fighters very badly to deal with it."
* * *
There was a basic inelegance to it: the Allies had to defend the asteroids and the Bugs had to neutralize them, and both sides knew it. All of which left little scope for finesse.
Iaashmaahr's carriers remained in cloak for their run to rejoin the rest of the combined fleets, so they had the benefit of one more undetected launch. Those fighters, and the nineteen hundred others from Small Fang Meearnow's Mohrdenhaus (whose usefulness even the Terrans were coming to appreciate), went out to meet the Bug kamikazes in a dogfight whose scale was exceeded only by its desperation.
As always, the fighters cut great gashes through the massed Bug formations. And, as always, they couldn't possibly kill enough of those endless, uncaring hordes. Like water pouring through a collapsing dike, streams of kamikazes closed in on the asteroids.
The battle-line slid in, interposing itself, suffering hideous losses as it burned away hundreds more of the kamikazes. Vanessa Murakuma lay in her command chair crash frame, trying to disassociate her mind from her bruised body as Li Chien-lu shuddered from hits that sent even a monitor's mass reeling. It was all she could do. She'd already given sufficient orders: stand and fight.
Again, many of the attackers broke through-into a latticework of death around the asteroids, whose defensive installations were directed by Taliaferro's command ships. And again, not all the kamikazes could be denied their rendezvous with death. Two of the smaller "Hammer" asteroids were shattered into pieces which wouldn't even stay on trajectories that would bring them into collision with Planet III to burn up in its atmosphere, for their fragments-unlike their intact sisters-were no longer accelerating down their precisely calculated track. But not even the ultimate violence of antimatter annihilation
could break up the big planetoids.
At last it was over, and Murakuma and her staff surveyed the readouts of carnage.
"Their remaining kamikazes are falling back to Planet III to regroup," Marina Abernathy concluded.
"We need to do the same thing," Murakuma pointed out, and turned from the intelligence officer to address the ops officer and the farshathkhanaak.
"Ernesto, Anson, I want a schedule for our carriers with undamaged drives to shuttle back to Orpheus 1 and Bug-06 in relays for replacement fighters. We have a long way to go, and the Bugs will be back."
She proved to be right. The Orion drives had kicked the asteroids into fairly flat hyperbolas involving far less transit time than the years simple Hohmann transfer orbits would have taken, and those same drives continued to accelerate them steadily. But on the standards of this era's spacefarers, the pace was a veritable crawl. There was plenty of time for the Bugs to return to the attack, again and again. But they did so with steadily weakening forces, for this system was on its own. They inflicted losses, which the combined fleets grimly took. They disrupted or deflected all but two of the "Hammer" asteroids. They even managed to alter the orbit of Sledgehammer One, sending it careening harmlessly aside.
It wasn't nearly enough.
* * *
They were all feeling drained as they stood on Li Chien-lu's flag bridge and watched Home Hive Three A III die.
The Bug attacks had come with greater and greater frequency as doom had drawn closer to the planet-but they'd also grown weaker and weaker. In the end, the Bugs had nothing left to throw at the onrushing asteroids, which had gradually picked up speed as they'd fallen down the sun's gravity well and, eventually, the planet's. By now they were moving at what the pre-reactionless-drive era would have accounted a very high interplanetary velocity.
They watched the view on the big screen, downloaded from recon fighters that were continuing to shadow Sledgehammer Three. Gazing at that rugged spheroid-even more rugged now, after all the hits it had taken-Murakuma contemplated the inappropriateness, verging on banality, of the popular term "dinosaur killer." That asteroid, which had slammed into Old Terra's Yucatan peninsula sixty-five million years ago, was estimated to have been a mere ten kilometers in diameter, rather like the two "Hammer" asteroids that continued to follow the monster in the screen, like lesser sea creatures in the wake of a whale. And it had almost certainly been traveling a lot more slowly. If the thing she was now watching had struck Earth, neither she nor any other life form of Terran origin-not even a microbe-would now exist.
Leroy McKenna was calling out the minutes to impact in a leaden voice. She didn't listen. Instead, she watched Planet III grow and grow in the screen. Presently, the fighters swerved away to stay out of range of the planet-based defenses, and the panorama expanded.
A seemingly small, artificial-looking object appeared, glinting in the planet's reflected light. She'd been told to expect it. By sheer coincidence, Sledgehammer Three was going to sideswipe the planet's space station on its way down. That station was as titanic as all such Bug constructs, but its mass was as nothing compared to the falling planetoid, and the pyrotechnics of its death were disappointing. The asteroid, trailing a scattering of debris that had been the space station, dwindled in the distance against the clouded bluish backdrop. It had probably been deflected a bit, but not enough to matter this close to the planet.
"Minus ten seconds," McKenna intoned, his voice even deeper than usual.
Time crept by. At minus three seconds, an extraordinary thing happened. The swirling cloud-patterns of Planet III abruptly vanished, replaced by concentric rings rushing away from the black dot that had suddenly begun to glow redly with the heat of friction. Sledgehammer Three had entered atmosphere like a three-hundred-kilometer cannonball, generating a shock wave that blew a hole in the air as it went.
Murakuma had only two seconds to absorb that spectacle. Then Sledgehammer Three crossed the terminator into darkness. A protracted second later, a blinding fireball erupted on that nighted surface, impossibly huge given the fact that it was a planet they were looking at. The night vanished as thermal pulse drove a shock wave that overwhelmed the earlier one, pushing outward in all directions from that inferno of an impact-point. Following it across the oceans came hundred-meter walls of water that would, in another hour or so, flood the coastal plains, finally expending their last efforts against the highest mountain ramparts. The earthquakes erupting along every fault line on the planet passed unnoticed. So would the glowing sleet of red-hot rock as the gigatons of debris that had been blasted into space returned in an hour or so; there would be no living eyes to see it, no living organisms to be immolated in the heat.
The impacts of the two surviving "Hammer" asteroids were barely worthy of comment. Sledgehammer Two, when it arrived, was sheer redundancy.
Murakuma finally turned to face the strangely silent flag bridge and the people who'd just witnessed the greatest single act of destruction ever unleashed by sentient beings. She spoke like a machine.
"Commodore McKenna, convey my personal congratulations to Commodore Taliaferro on the success of Operation Cushion Shot. And please raise Fang Koraaza. Given the total depletion of this system's kamikaze assets and the psychic effect the remaining defenders must now be experiencing, I believe we can proceed to reduce the other inhabited planets by . . conventional means."
* * *
Lord Khiniak and his staffers came aboard Li Chien-lu, to full military honors, as the combined fleets orbited around the lifeless hulk of Planet IV. There was now the leisure to indulge such niceties.
As she led the Orions into the flag lounge, Murakuma's eyes strayed to the calendar display on the bulkhead, with its Terran Standard equivalency: January 23, 2370. It was so easy to lose track.
A little over a standard year since they'd entered this system. Operation Cushion Shot hadn't been quick. Neither had it been cheap. Even the Orions looked very sober as they contemplated the losses they'd taken in the battles that had swirled around that phalanx of asteroids. Nearly thirty-two percent of the combined fleets' starship strength. Two hundred and four ships-seven monitors, forty-five superdreadnoughts, twenty battleships, nine assault carriers, eighteen fleet carriers, nineteen light carriers, thirteen heavy cruisers, twenty-two light cruisers and sixteen destroyers-had died that those inconceivable projectiles might reach their destination. So had forty-two percent of all fighters engaged. It was a loss total that would have been beyond prewar comprehension.
But . . .
"So, Ahhdmiraaaal Muhrakhuuuuma," Koraaza interrupted her brown study. "Is it confirmed?"
"Yes, Lord Khiniak. We had plenty of time to scout the outer system during the preparation of the asteroids, and found nothing. Commodore Abernathy is prepared to state categorically that every Bug in this system is dead. I propose we dispatch a courier drone so informing the Joint Chiefs of Staff."
Koraaza gave a long, rustling purr of a sigh. "So. One home hive is left."
"Don't forget the Bugs' base at Rabahl," Murakuma cautioned, recalling Fujiko's messages.
"I have not. But according to the latest message traffic, our allies of the Star Union are preparing the final assault on that system. It will no doubt be a major operation, yet they clearly consider it a matter of no immediate urgency."
"True." Fujiko had intimated as much. "They've invested Rabahl thoroughly. It isn't going anywhere, and the Crucians want to completely assimilate the new technologies they've gotten from us before going in."
"So," said Koraaza once again. "We can safely leave our allies to deal with the Bahg defilers of their own worlds. For us, there remains but one great task. Both our fleets, and those of Fangs Zhaarnak and Presssssscottt will come together and meet at last." The slitted pupils in his amber eyes narrowed, and all at once the cosmopolite Murakuma had thought she'd known was no longer there behind those eyes. "It will be a gathering of warriors beyond anything in legend. I imagine that even Lord Talpho
n will be there, for he owes a vilknarma, a blood-balance for the death of his vilkshatha brother. Surely the Khan will relent and allow him to be personally present at the killing of the last Bahgs in the universe."
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Full Circle
Marcus LeBlanc caught sight of a familiar figure across the great room through the rays of Alpha Centauri Alpha-light that slanted through the tall windows.
"Kevin!"
"Admiral! How are you-?" Kevin Sanders began, then remembered himself and started to come to attention.
"To hell with that!" LeBlanc strode up and shook hands with his one-time protégé, whom he hadn't seen in a year and a half. "I didn't know whether you'd be coming here with First Fang Ynaathar or not. It's good it to see you."
"Likewise, Sir. You're looking very well, if I may say so." Which was true, even though there was a little more salt and less pepper in LeBlanc's beard than there had been. Zephrain clearly agreed with him. That, and being close to Admiral Murakuma, Sanders added to himself with an inner chuckle. "Oh, and congratulations on your richly deserved promotion, Sir."