"Can we run past them to our jump point?"
"Just barely."
Jason punched into the engine room.
"Shovel on the coal back there. I want full thrust, fuel scoops closed."
"Close the scoops and we'll run her bone dry by the next jump.
"Just do it."
He switched back to Paladin.
"Let's get the hell out of here, and hope they don't have more waiting at the next jump."
"Laddie, from the looks of It I think the whole Empire is gonna be stirring to fry us."
"Let's just hope Kruger figures a way to get us out of here.
CHAPTER TEN
Admiral Geoffrey Tolwyn stood up and walked to the front of the room. He looked down the length of the conference table and felt a cold twinge of pain. So many familiar faces were gone, killed in the bomb attack. It felt strange now to be standing before this group; after all it was Banbridge's job to run Third Fleet. He suddenly felt old and very lonely. He pushed the thought aside.
"Good morning."
He paused, reached into his breast pocket, pulled out an envelope and opened the letter. A paper letter such as the one he was holding was a wonderful gesture out of the past, part of the old traditions that the military still hung on to.
"By order of the JCS, Admiral Geoffrey Tolwyn is appointed commander Third Fleet as of this date, with the primary mission of meeting, engaging, and destroying any hostile invasion into Confederation space which is directed towards the inner system of worlds. You are authorized to employ any means necessary as outlined in Emergency Decree 394 issued this date by the President of the Confederation. Your command will include 3rd Destroyer Group, Commodore Polowski commanding . . ."
He paused and looked back up at the group.
"Anyhow, all of you are listed here," he said quietly, "and if you aren't listed, I'm taking you anyhow," and the room echoed with nervous laughter.
Geoff activated the main holo screen which displayed the new Kilrathi heavy carriers, while a side screen displayed the surmised position of the fleet and its possible route into Confederation space.
A low murmur of voices filled the room as the dozen group and squadron commanders, representing the ships and Marine assault regiments under his command examined the data.
"Our task is to meet and stop this force before it gains the inner worlds of the Confederation."
"Just how many fighters will these ships carry?" Lyford Beverage, commander of the First Cruiser Squadron asked.
"We're working off of only one intelligence sweep, a long range optical examination followed by a translight radar burst, so our data is sketchy. Our evaluation team believes they carry four launch bays, and perhaps six. It's hard to tell, since all the ships were aligned identically at the time we swept them so we don't have a full examination from all angles. Given the mass of the ships, our best guess is two hundred and forty fighters, scout and bomber craft, perhaps three hundred. Close analysis of the scan detected five of the ships emitting infrared signatures for functional reactors. The other seven were cold."
"Good lord, Geoff, if five of those things are coming at us that means we'll be facing upwards of fifteen hundred attack ships," Rear Admiral Allen Zitek growled from the back of the room, his speech computer making him sound almost robotic. Zitek had been badly burned years before leading a squadron against a Kilrathi carrier. It still amazed Geoff what the surgeons could do if a man could be brought in while still alive.
"Don't forget that the Kilrathi had a minimum of nineteen other standard carriers and at least twenty heavy cruisers that carried thirty fighters each. That comes to over three thousand seven hundred additional strike craft."
There was a chilled moment of silence.
"What about logistical support, supplies, and training from the Kilrathi view point?" Duke Grecko asked from the back of the room.
"That's the one hope," Geoff replied. "We now understand the mystery of their transport shortage and their occasional shortages of missiles. They were straining their system beyond the max to keep the war going and at the same time building this new fleet in secret. I've handed this data over to intelligence analysis, and I'm stilling waiting for the full report. My gut feeling on it is that they couldn't fully do both. I think they stripped some of their best squadrons off their front line carriers during the armistice and shipped the personnel out to the new ships, replacing them with new recruits. The burst signal from Tarawa already indicated a thousand fighters transferred off ships that had been put into their inactive reserve. I'm certain we'll see their best shot from the new carriers, which will be fully loaded for combat. The rest of the fleet will be held in a secondary support role or open action on other fronts as diversions."
"That still would leave a minimum of fifteen hundred strike craft on five carriers coming straight at Earth, not to mention what looks like close to a hundred escort ships," Zitek replied. "And just how many fighters will we have to meet this?"
"We can have five carriers fully on line within two weeks, with forty one escorts, carrying a total of six hundred and eighty-nine strike craft."
"Just five?"
"Actually, only two are on line and fully operational at the moment, Geoff said shaking his head.
"With crews working around the clock and cutting a lot of corners, I expect to see three more carriers ready to join the fleet by the time the Kilrathi penetrate into Confederation space. It'll be forty-five days, more like sixty, before our remaining carriers will be on line again."
"Jamison was brilliant pushing that deactivation through," Grecko snapped and Geoff could only nod his head in agreement.
The political arena with Jamison standing in the center was now one of absolute chaos. Less than twenty-four hours ago Rodham had announced the existence of the Kilrathi super carriers and the assumption that Earth had been directly targeted for attack. He then called for the Confederation Senate to renounce the armistice and to mobilize for a renewal of the war, closing with his resignation as president. Minutes later the vice president was sworn in and delivered a sharp rousing speech, demanding that the Kilrathi open their border for full inspection of the new fleet or face offensive action. It was all a bluff on Quinson's part, but it at least sounded good. The Confederation had been thrown into a state of panic by the announcement, with every holo reporter scrambling to put their spin on the issue, which ranged from "we've been stabbed in the back by the Cats," to "the evil military was pushing for a war." The situation was further stirred up by the Kilrathi reply that the bombing of headquarters and the attempt on the Emperor's life were part of a military coup by pro-war officers and that they were totally innocent of any wrong-doing.
At first Geoff had naively assumed that this had closed the deal, that the Senate would vote for war and that the new president's declaration of a full military emergency would be observed.
Jamison had triggered near chaos instead. First she refused to resign, even though Quinson had appointed a new Foreign Minister. Next she accused the military of conspiring to renew the war, a position that the Kilrathi were pumping out through their propaganda agencies.
The result was that the Senate had still not declared war, wavering, some even adopting the Kilrathi line, and demanding that the military unilaterally disarm.
Quinson had stood firm, however, evoking executive right to order the military to mobilize for emergency action. The one restraint, however, was that such an emergency did not give the fleet the right to take offensive action. Tolwyn had actually fallen into a shouting match with the senate military committee over that point, wanting to free his two light escorts that were operational for a spoiling and recon raid into Kilrathi space, but he had been held back.
Sometimes it really bites to be in the military," Polowski snapped from the back of the room. "I'd just love to get Jamison onboard my ship as a forward turret gunner's mate when we charge those carriers and let her see what her peace loving friends have done while we slept
," and there was a chorus of approval.
Geoff held up his hand for silence.
"Remember, we are the military. Civilian politics is outside of our control and like it or not that's a tradition we must observe. It's our job to defend the Confederation from the attack we all know is coming, and I'm counting on you to give it everything you have. Some really big damn fools got us into this fix. The hell with them, push them out of your minds. I want you to focus on the billions of innocent people who will be under the Kilrathi antimatter bombs and the survivors who will face their knives if we fail. The existence of the human race now hangs in the balance
He paused for a moment. The words had come out of him, not planned at all. In any other setting he felt they would have sounded worn. But it was the simple truth: the actual existence of his entire species rested in their hands. One wrong move on his part and it might all be over with. All of it gone forever, two thousand years of England gone, a cold silence of death, of extinction.
I can't dwell on this, he realized. It'll drive me insane if I do, so stay focused on the job and nothing else.
He switched the holo screen to a map of the inner core of planets and the jump lines leading out to the frontier.
"The Kilrathi have three main lines of approach, all of which finally come in here," and he pointed to a blue white star from which radiated a number of jump lines. "Here at Sirius and the jump point behind Sirius the shortest routes of jump lines come together and then from there straight back to Earth. By the shortest route, jump line alpha, it's ten jump points from Sirius to the frontier, four back to Earth. The next route, beta is twelve jumps to the frontier and delta is thirteen. All the other routes meander back and forth. For the Kilrathi I think they'll be so confident of their strength, and also concerned about not giving us time to rearm, that they'll come straight on in.
"I propose to meet them in front of Sirius."
"Geoff, that abandons several hundred inhabited colonies further out," Polowski said quietly, "my own home of Planet Warsaw being one of them."
Tolwyn nodded.
"There are eighteen major jump points leading across the frontier and several dozen other jump points running parallel or zigzagging back and forth. Before the armistice neither we nor the Kilrathi had the strength to simply go charging in, saying the hell with our rear and leaping towards the jugular. They now do. We lack the strength of a major counter strike and even if we did have it, it'd be weeks before we could even begin to move it. By then it'll be too late. In addition they can hold a number of their standard fleet carriers in reserve as a reaction force to counter even light escort raiders the way we had been using them in the past. We have to fall back and concentrate what assets we have. If we try a forward defense they might swing around us."
"Why not an offensive, Geoff? Split them off the way we did at Vukar Tag," Grecko asked from the back of the room.
"It won't work this time, sir. Even if we took what we had right now and shot it straight in, their older carriers acting as a reserve would stop us cold, while the new fleet would just continue on into Earth. Second, they'd see it for what it was, an effort to split their offensive. They'd ignore it and still bore straight in. What we have to do is seek a meeting engagement with their main fleet and stop it, that's the only viable option left open to us."
"So what about my home planet?" Polowski asked
Geoff paused for a moment. The cold hard word for it was "abandon" but he could not bring himself to say that, or even really admit it to himself.
"Mike, the Kilrathi have two ways to run this offensive. The first is to break through our forward defenses, then spread out and start ripping the colonial worlds to shreds. Every day that they do that is one more day for us to rearm and they know it. The second way is to come charging straight in, figuring they can mop up the colonies at their leisure after the core planets have been destroyed along with the fleet."
"I'm betting on the second method. It's sound militarily and it's what we would do: kill the home world and inner planets and end the war. The only advantage we can hope for is to stand and defend as close to our main base as possible, thus stretching their line of communication while we can continue to pour into action whatever ships come on line at the last minute. It is the one classic advantage of the defensive the ability to fall back upon your base of supplies, and it's our only hope."
"Easy for you to say," Mike replied. "My entire family's out there on Warsaw, two jumps from the frontier."
"Can you propose any other alternative given what we have?" Geoff asked, his voice filled with a genuine concern. He knew he couldn't simply order men to abandon their homes and families. They'd have to be willing to do it with the hope of final victory and then rescue, no matter how slim the chance.
Mike looked down at his memo pad and then finally shook his head
"You're right, Admiral, its the only way," and there was a soft chorus of agreement.
"I wish we could inform the governors and presidents of the various colonial worlds of our strategic plan, though for security reasons it is obvious we cannot. For that matter, gentlemen, no one outside this room is to have any knowledge of what our strategy is.
"That'll give precious little warning to whichever worlds are in the way of the fleet," Zitek said. "Even if they're coming straight on, they'll still dispatch some cruisers on the way in to scorch the planets directly in their path. They'll have to, they can t afford to leave potential bases in their rear. Nearly every one of those outer worlds has at least one base on them, the major systems garrisoned with troops and orbital bases. They could stand against raiders, but not against what they'll be throwing in."
Geoff nodded grimly. It meant that millions in the outer worlds might die. He could only hope that those who could get out of the way would, heading to remote areas of their world to wait out the attack. At least most of the worlds were sparsely populated, with a lot of room to hide. In the early days of the war the outer regions, except for the Landreich on the flank of the Confederation, had been devastated, and billions had died. The region had yet to recover. It wasn't until Sirius was reached inside the area never touched by the war, that the major inhabited regions were located.
He could only hope they had dug their shelters deep enough to survive bombardment.
"So the colonies are a write off?" Duke asked quietly, obviously wanting to make the fact absolutely clear.
"Local guard units will be given the discretion to stay, but I want everything here for the major showdown," and he pointed at Sirius, hanging in the middle of the holo. "Sirius is where the decision will be made."
"What about the Landreich and Kruger?" Polowski asked.
"I'll ask them for help and for the release of the escorts we signed over to them, but I doubt old Kruger will be amused that once again we're pulling a withdrawal due to strategic necessity."
He could well imagine the explosion that would be created when the burst signal reached Kruger on that one.
"Gentlemen, I want the fleet fully loaded and ready to move within four days."
The men looked at him incredulously.
"Geoff, it'll be eight, more like ten days before we get all our personnel back in aboard ship," Zitek replied. "Even our active carriers had half their crews on leave. Some of them are at the far end of the Confederation."
"You'll find a clause in Emergency decree 394A that allows for the drafting of emergency replacements off civilian ships, and retired personnel if need be for the duration of the emergency. Use it, shanghai your crews if necessary, but I want full ship's complements inside of ninety-six hours. Now let's get to work." The admirals and Marine officers filed out of the room. Geoff looked back down at his memo pad, ready to feed in a long series of orders. Looking up he saw that Duke had stayed behind.
"Something's wrong, isn't it?" Geoff said, sensing that there was bad news coming.
Duke nodded.
"I just got a signal in the clear from Kruger."
> "Go on."
"He told us and I quote 'you created this mess, you solve it. Go to hell.'"
Geoff chuckled sadly.
"Doesn't the damn fool realize," Grecko snapped, "that if the Confederation goes down, the Cats will turn on him next?"
"If he comes to help us, he'll get hit from the rear. It's the old classic problem of frontier militia being called up to serve with the regulars — do you leave your homes open to attack by marching off somewhere else?"
Geoff paused, realizing that there was something else to the message.
"You're holding something back, Duke, what is it?"
"He also reported, in the clear, that Tarawa has failed to return and is assumed lost."
Geoff remained standing, staring straight at Duke.
"Damn this war to hell."
Eyes wide with excitement and with the thrill of the hunt, the Emperor turned to face his grandson.
"Magnificent, simply magnificent," he growled, turning back to look out the forward view port of the cruiser that now served as the Imperial ship. Less than a kilometer away, the Kilrathi Fifth Fleet of the Claw passed by in review. The light frigates, corvettes and three destroyer groups had already passed. The last of the heavy cruisers was just passing to port and now the first of the new carriers, Hagku'ka, came into view.
Every fighter had been launched and moved in formation ahead of the carrier, three and a half eighties of fighters arrayed in eight V formations. The bow of the carrier came into view, the heavy durasteel forward edge studded with quad mounted mass driver guns and anti-torpedo launch tubes. Three launch decks, one on either side and one topside opened into the vast interior of the ship, which was mostly comprised of the huge hangar bays, workshops, and armament storage areas needed for the fighters.
Internal bulkheads had been double layered, compartmentalizing the ship so that even if the forward end was shattered all the way back amidships, the aft half could continue to fight. Three belts of armor sealed off the outside of the ship from the interior so that if a torpedo did penetrate the phase shielding and outer layer of armor, its detonation would not burst into the vulnerable inner decks and fuel storage areas. Sealed internal access shafts even allowed for the transfer of fighters from one bay to another for launching if a bay opening were shut down. Just aft of amidship three more launch bays were mounted pointing aft, in the same configuration as the forward half of the ship. The six Yatug class engines were actually buried inside the ship, wrapped in heavy armor, their exhaust vents tunneling through thirty meters of ship before reaching open space. If a spread of missiles were closing from astern, the engines could be throttled off and the exhaust vents slammed shut, the missiles impacting impotently against heavy durasteel. The shields could then be retracted, or if need be blown clear and the engines unharmed, fired back up.
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