by David Weber
And against the finely meshed, coordinated offensive fire of a fleet whose datalink was unimpaired, individual ships stood no chance at all.
Zhaarnak turned to his com screen, now split into two segments.
"I believe, Force Leader Shaaldaar, that it is time to bring the fighters back. They can interdict the remaining gunboats while TF 61 deals with the battle-line."
Prescott cleared his throat.
"As Fleet commander, I presume you'll want to assume direct command of TF 61 for the attack."
"By no means. Our original understanding holds. The task force is yours."
Prescott's eyes met Zhaarnak's in the com screen, and when he spoke, it was in the Tongue of Tongues.
"You give me honor, brother, by allowing me the kill. It will not be forgotten."
And then, with the fighters warding its flanks against despairing gunboat attacks, TF 61 advanced grimly.
* * *
It was almost twenty-four standard Terran hours later when, again in split-screen conference, they received the report that the last fugitive Bug ship had been run down and destroyed. But however long the mopping up had required, the actual battle had lasted only two of those hours.
With their command datalink gone, the point defense of individual Bug ships-even monitors-had been unable to abate the missile-storm which had broken over them. In silent desperation, they had been reduced to trying to ram as many Allied ships as possible, but they were slower and less maneuverable than their opponents, even at the best of times . . . which this most certainly was not.
The outcome had never really been in doubt.
Yet the magnitude and completeness of that outcome had still been awe inspiring. If anyone had still been able to doubt Raymond Prescott's abilities after the Kliean Chain campaign, Operation Pesthouse, and the defense of Centauri, no one could now. He had wielded his battle-line as a kendo master wields a katana, and that superbly tempered blade had responded with the readiness he had trained into it over the months of preparation in Zephrain. For the Bugs, the result had been not defeat, but annihilation.
But now their wide-ranging recon fighters had brought word that they were still not alone in the system.
"It stands to reason," Shaaldaar said in his deliberate way. "We are all agreed that this is-or was-one of their important systems. So it must be linked to other Bug systems by various warp points. As soon as they became aware of our presence here, they must have summoned reinforcements from those systems by courier drone. The five standard days it took us to bring their mobile forces to bay and then fight the battle must have given those reinforcements time to arrive."
"Yes," Zhaarnak muttered. Prescott had no difficulty recognizing the emotions raging behind that alien face. It was a characteristic of Orions-and Zhaarnak, more than most-that a successful kill only whetted their appetite for more.
"They have no idea of our strength, or even of exactly where we are. We could go back into cloak, ambush them. . . ."
Zhaarnak let his voice trail off as he met Prescott's eyes. He could read his vilkshatha brother as readily as the human could read him.
"We must face facts," Prescott said into the silence. "We've taken losses ourselves-nine superdreadnoughts, seven battlecruisers, over seven hundred fighters. . . . And our stores of missiles of all kinds have been depleted. More importantly, the recon fighters' reports make it pretty clear that these Bugs are behaving normally. Whatever affected the Bugs in this system evidently doesn't have interstellar range. We had an opportunity, and we were justified in seizing it. But boldness is one thing, and recklessness is another."
Shaaldaar gave a smile that was as disconcertingly humanlike as everything else about his face.
"I believe it was your Human philosopher Clausewitz who observed that a plan which succeeds is bold and that one which fails is reckless."
Prescott smiled back at him.
"That's precisely the distinction. And to take on unshaken monitor battlegroups, even if we did manage to obtain tactical surprise, would be to risk a judgment of recklessness when history got around to considering us."
Zhaarnak's features reflected his inner conflict so well as to remind Prescott that the Orion face, like that of humans but unlike that of Terran cats, had evolved as an instrument of communication. Finally, his ears tilted forward and he gave the fluttering purr that was his race's sigh.
"You are correct. We have accomplished our objectives, and more. We will return to Zephrain in accordance with our original plan."
Sixth Fleet fell back toward the warp point, covered by its weary fighter pilots as the strikegroups fought a series of bickering actions at extreme range against the fresh Bug gunboats.
* * *
The last Enemy units were gone, escaped from this system that they had rendered uninhabitable.
The Fleet had failed to protect the Worlds Which Must Be Defended, or to arrive in time to prevent the destruction of the Fleet component which had been assigned originally to that task. The repercussions of the destruction of the Worlds Which Must Be Defended would have grave consequences for the war effort, and the loss of so many ships in such futile combat was . . . annoying.
Yet the affair hadn't been a total loss. The gunboats had been ordered to track the withdrawing Enemy starships to their warp point of exit, regardless of casualties-and they'd succeeded.
A handful of them had even survived long enough to report that warp point's location.
* * *
TFNS Dnepr transited before KONS Celmithyr'theaarnouw. So Raymond Prescott had a few moments to appreciate the sight of Zephrain A's yellow glow, and the distant orange spark of Zephrain B, before turning to his com screen and speaking formally.
"Fang Zhaarnak, I relieve you."
"I stand relieved, Fang Pressssscott."
The little ceremony had been agreed to in advance. Now they were back in the Zephrain system, which was part of the Terran Federation, duly ceded by the Khan, and where the massive Terran orbital fortresses made the TFN the predominant service in terms of both tonnage and personnel. So Prescott was now in command of Sixth Fleet, and they exchanged closed-lipped grins at the formality.
Those grins faded for a moment as they looked into one another's eyes and recalled those who would not be returning to Zephrain. The count was in now: 22,605 personnel of all races. There were also 5,017 wounded aboard the remaining ships.
But then the grins were back.
"Did your staff intelligence officer ever complete that estimate of the system's total population, Raaymmonnd?"
"Yes. Commander Chung did an extensive analysis of the sensor returns from Planets I and II. Based on the Bug population density the energy outputs imply, he estimates a total of-"
* * *
"-at least twenty billion Bugs!" Lieutenant Commander Togliatti looked around the ready room, where VF-94's surviving pilots sprawled, exhausted. "The spooks figure that there were eight to ten billion of them on the planet we waxed, and another twelve to fourteen billion on the other one."
They stared at him, punch-drunk. They'd gone sleepless for days, sustained by drugs, and completed their recovery aboard Wyvern just before warp transit. They no longer had any response in them.
But then Irma Sanchez gave him a look of disappointment.
"Twenty billion? Come on, Skipper! Is that all we killed?"
CHAPTER FOUR: "Surely that can't be right!"
Zephrain was a distant binary system. The orange K8v secondary component, with its small retinue of what were by courtesy referred to as planets, followed an orbit of over fifty percent eccentricity. Even at periastron, it barely swung within three light-hours of Component A. Currently, it was headed out to the Stygian regions where it spent most of its year and was barely visible from Xanadu, the second of that privileged coterie of inner planets that basked in Zephrain A's warm yellow G5v light. Gazing out the window of his office, Raymond Prescott could almost imagine himself on Old Terra.
Not quite, of course
. It was always "not quite." The tree whose branches almost brushed against the window was a featherleaf, product of a well-developed local ecosystem which showed little sign of yielding to Terran imports. And practiced senses told him that the gravity was a shade on the low side-0.93 G, to be exact. Still, Zephrain A II was a singularly hospitable world for the humans who'd dubbed it Xanadu.
It was equally comfortable for Orions-and they had discovered it first. Reactionaries like Zhaarnak's father, and even relatively enlightened old-timers like Kthaara'zarthan, had never recovered from the Khan's precedent-shattering act of ceding the system to the Terran Federation.
The move had made sense, though. Indeed, it had become unavoidable the moment the teeming Bug system was found on the far side of one of Zephrain's four warp points. On the far side of another of those warp points lay Rehfrak, a sector capital of the Orions, with billions of the Khan's subjects, squarely in the path of any Bug counterattack an offensive might provoke. Only the Terran Federation, with its prodigious industrial capacity, could fortify Zephrain so heavily as to make any offensive use of the system thinkable.
A project on that scale had required a workforce of millions, and millions more to service the workforce. They'd come from every corner of the Federation. In the streets of Xanadu's instant prefab "cities" could be seen every variety of human being that Old Terra had spawned, and quite a few it hadn't. That was unusual in today's Federation. The Heart Worlds' once-polyglot populations had long since blended into "planetary ethnicities," while the young Fringe Worlds had been settled by people seeking to preserve various traditional ethnicities from disappearance by giving each its own planet.
Nevertheless, this motley crew had sunk tendrils of root into the soil of Xanadu with surprising rapidity. The population had already outgrown government by a Navy administrator, and a provisional government had been organized under the duly appointed Federal governor preparatory to seeking full Federation membership. Watching the constitutional convention, Prescott had occasionally found himself wondering if someone had formed a club for disbarred lawyers. And yet, oddly enough, some genuine political creativity had come out of it. Architectural creativity, too; looking to the future, they'd approved plans for a stately Government House on a hill above the river-named the Alph, naturally-that Prescott could see in the distance, beyond the spacefield. Of course, actual construction was being deferred until things became a little less unsettled here . . . meaning, no Bugs a single warp transit away.
Which, Prescott reminded himself briskly, is why we're here. He turned away from the window. Zhaarnak was waiting with the patience that was one facet of his seemingly contradictory character.
"Have they arrived yet?" the human asked.
"Yes. In fact, they are waiting in the outer office."
Prescott nodded, sat down at his desk, and touched a button.
"Send Small Claw Uaaria and Captain Chung in."
Uaaria'salath-ahn, Zhaarnak's staff intelligence officer, was the senior of the two spooks. By the generally recognized rank equivalencies, a "small claw of the khan" was somewhere between a captain and a commodore. So she led the way into the room, and Prescott reflected on how unusual it was to see an Orion female wearing the jeweled harness that was their navy's uniform. Not so very long ago, it would have been unheard of, and that, too, was a change which owed more than a little to the Terran example. The patriarchal Khanate had been headed in that direction even before it discovered just how capable human females could be as warriors in the first two interstellar wars. Since then-and especially since ISW 3-the move towards full female integration into the military had gone on with what (for the extremely tradition-bound Orions) was enormous rapidity.
On the other hand, female Orions still had to "prove" their worthiness for their ranks by being even better at the same job than the vast majority of males could have been. In some ways, Uaaria's position was a bit easier than most, for Prescott knew that her father was an old friend and war comrade of Zhaarnak's. He also knew his vilkshatha brother well enough to realize that he retained enough of his race's old sexism to find his intelligence officer extremely pleasant to look upon, although he would no more consider taking liberties with her than he would have considered it with one of his own daughters. But in one respect, at least, Uaaria was a perfect exemplar of what it took for a female to succeed in the Khanate's military: she was very good at her job. In fact, she was very, very good. Despite her youth, Prescott considered her to be one of the half dozen finest intelligence officers, human or Orion, he'd ever met, and he knew Zhaarnak relied upon her analyses implicitly.
As did Prescott himself.
"Sit down," he invited.
"Thank you for seeing us on such short notice Fang Pressssscottt, Small Fang," Uaaria murmured, lowering herself into one of the chairs in front of Prescott's desk as naturally as if she hadn't been raised to sit on piles of floor cushions.
"No problem. When the two of you requested this meeting, we were eager to hear the results of your analysis of what we observed during the offensive."
"Particularly," Zhaarnak added, "your interpretation of the unprecedented confusion that overtook the Bahgs after our first major surface strike on Planet I."
"We still cannot be certain as to the cause," Uaaria replied cautiously. "Our working hypothesis is still the same one Fang Presssssscottt advanced at the time: that all the Bahgs in a given system are in some kind of telepathic rapport, and that destroying that many of them at once had an effect on the rest similar to . . . to . . ."
"To hitting them over the head with a hammer," Chung offered.
"Something of the sort," Uaaria allowed. "But whatever the precise mechanism of the phenomenon, its effects were clearly system-wide."
"A pity they are not universal," Zhaarnak muttered.
"That wouldn't do us much good, considering that the disorientation is only temporary and no one's ever figured out how to coordinate attacks in different systems," Prescott observed. One human head nodded and two sets of Orion ears flicked in agreement. Simultaneity was a meaningless concept in interstellar space. "But even so," the admiral continued, turning back to Uaaria, "this seems to offer an advantage we can exploit when attacking heavily populated Bug systems."
"Indeed, Fang. In order to throw such a system's defenders off balance, the inhabited planets should be bombarded as early and as heavily as possible."
"Hmmm. . . ." Prescott considered that for a moment. The ethical issues such a policy would have raised in a war with any other race never even entered his mind-these were Bugs. But that didn't mean there weren't practical problems.
"An ideal combination of circumstances let us land the punch we did," he mused aloud. "Possibly an unrepeatable combination. Still, it's something to bear in mind. For now, though, please continue with your other conclusions."
"A few conclusions and a great deal of speculation," Uaaria demurred. "I will let my colleague here state our first conclusion, as it was he who arrived at it."
"Before we left Alpha Centauri last May," Amos Chung began, "I got Admiral LeBlanc to copy me the data by which his Lieutenant Sanders had inferred the existence of five Bug 'home hives.' Based on the observations and sensor information we recorded during the engagement, I'm prepared to state that the system we attacked was Home Hive Three."
Prescott and Zhaarnak exchanged glances. Chung's announcement had the same kind of resonance as Sanders' briefing at Alpha Centauri: it imposed at least the beginnings of form on the threat they faced.
"We are not," Chung went on, "in a position as yet to place Home Hive Three in any larger context, as we have no idea where it lies in relation to any other Bug system-"
"Naturally," Zhaarnak said, and it was Prescott's turn to nod agreement. Not a single scrap of Bug navigational data had been captured in the entire war. Or, more accurately, tonnes of it might have been captured, but no one had any way to know.
"-but I've run a cost analysis of the defenses we enco
untered there. You may find the results informative."
"A 'cost analysis'?" Even someone far less familiar with the Tongue of Tongues than Prescott could have read the incredulity in Zhaarnak's voice. "How was this possible?"
"The energy-emission readings allowed us to estimate the system's total economic output. And by analogizing to our own defensive installations, we can estimate how much of such output is required to maintain them. Admittedly, this is a case of estimate piled atop estimate. But if our figures are at all valid-and we believe they are-the defenses were strangely light for the system they were protecting."
Both admirals sat up straight.
"Light?" Prescott echoed. He recalled that mastodonic space station. "Surely that can't be right!"
Chung read the admiral's thoughts.
"Yes, Sir, I know. That space station at Planet I was huge, and they had another one like it at Planet II. And I don't like to think about the firepower those orbital fortresses could have put out if we hadn't caught them flat footed." The spook visibly braced himself against an anticipated blast of high-ranking skepticism. "Nevertheless, if our assumptions are correct, the maintenance costs of those defenses amounted to only about forty-eight percent of the gross system product."
"That sounds like quite a lot," Prescott observed mildly, understating the case by several orders of magnitude. He tried to imagine the reaction of certain human politicians to a proposal to spend that much on orbital defenses. The perfect crime, an inner imp whispered. Give 'em all heart failure and then laugh like Hell. . . .
"On the face of it, Sir, perhaps. But the corresponding percentages for Sol, Alpha Centauri, Valkha'zeeranda, and Gormus are much higher. The figures are available for your perusal."
"Well, of course," Zhaarnak interjected. "After all, those systems are-"
The Orion stopped abruptly as understanding dawned, some fraction of a second after it had dawned on Prescott, and Chung nodded, recognizing that they'd grasped the point.
