by David Weber
Finally, the quiescent icon of Warp Point Two behind them had erupted with the scarlet of still more gunboats. Their number was unknowable as yet, but there were tides of them, streaming in from what Prescott was now sure must be one of the three remaining home hive systems.
All those converging red icons seemed to swim before his eyes, and he stared into a nightmare from which there would be no awakening.
Well, now we know how it happened. This system and Anderson Three are the conduits from at least two of the home hives. And now we're here, just like Second Fleet was. . . .
Amos Chung cleared his throat softly.
"Sir, it appears that they're using the same tactical disposition they did in Pesthouse."
He indicated the icon of the deep space force that had now turned on them. Then he gestured at an auxiliary plot with its tactical display. Yes, Prescott reflected. It was the same globular juggernaut of battlecruisers, light cruisers, gunboats, and kamikaze small craft.
He stared at them for a handful of endless heartbeats, then inhaled sharply, almost spitefully. He faced his sense of paralysis and drove it back into its kennel as he pulled himself ruthlessly together. This was not Operation Pesthouse all over again. Battle-hardened though Second Fleet had been by the time it reached Pesthouse, its temper couldn't have begun to match that of the blade he wielded. Seventh Fleet stood behind him, its monitor battle-line immeasurably more powerful than Second Fleet's had been, forged and hammered beyond common conception in the crucible of history's bloodiest series of campaigns and calm in the knowledge that the Bugs could be beaten. And he and Zhaarnak had made the decision to bring along the light carriers, not generally regarded as viable battle fleet units but able to augment the combat space patrol of fighters.
They would need them now.
"Raise Lord Telmasa, and the task force commanders," he told the communications officer quietly. "Put them on screens in the flag briefing room." Then he gestured to his staffers to follow him and strode into the adjacent compartment with its array of com screens.
"Evidently," Zhaarnak began without preamble, "First Fang Ynaathar's attack on Harnah did not distract the attention of the enemy forces in Aaahnnderrssson Three after all."
"Evidently not," Prescott agreed. If either of them doubted that the attack had taken place, he did not voice those doubts. Instead, Prescott turned to all of the flag officers watching him from their individual screens. "Ladies and gentlemen, I think it's time for us to activate Case Doppelganger."
* * *
If there was anyone in Seventh Fleet who felt no trace of panic as word of the odds against them spread, then that "anyone" had to be a lunatic. But if anyone in Seventh Fleet was about to let panic paralyze him, there was no sign of it as the fleet's personnel responded to its commander's orders.
Case Doppelganger was the product of endless hours spent gaming out possible responses to the Bugs' globular kamikaze formations in the tactical simulators aboard Irena Riva y Silva and Hia'khan. As the name suggested, it was in many respects an adaptation of the Bugs's own concept-in this case, a tight globe of mutually defending capital ships, packed as closely as their own drive fields and the need to allow for evasive maneuvers would permit.
There was plenty of time to assume the formation as the enemy attack forces swept towards Seventh Fleet across light-hours of vacuum, and Captain Stephen Landrum and the farshathkhanaaks of each separate task force briefed their pilots carefully. Those fighters would sweep outward from the fleet's globe, engaging and weakening the kamikazes and gunboats while the globe ran before them.
It was all about defense in depth to bleed the Bugs as they closed and then meet them with the most murderous close-in defensive fire into history of space combat.
Now all that remained was to see if it worked.
* * *
Clearly the Enemy had been as completely surprised as the Fleet could have hoped. If he hadn't been, he would never have continued onward with a force so much weaker than that waiting to destroy him.
Yet as the Fleet's strike elements swept towards him, it became evident that he had adapted his own doctrine once again. The Fleet had never before seen the spherical formation he'd adopted, yet it quickly recognized the similarity between it and the Fleet's own new attack formation. From its own experience, the fleet was fully aware of the defensive effectiveness of such an arrangement, and the Enemy's decision to turn away from his pursuers would make it even more effective. The strikes were faster than his battle-line, but the need to include cruisers and battlecruisers in their defensive shells limited their speed advantage to barely fifty percent. That meant they could overtake the Enemy only slowly, and while they did so, his small attack craft would hammer at the formations's defenses.
That was regrettable. Yet the small attack craft could venture into their own attack range only at the expense of casualties, and as they were ground away, so would be the Enemy's ability to wear down and fend off the next attack formation.
* * *
Stephen Landrum watched his strikegroups go in again and again and again. They were good, those pilots, possibly the most experienced and best trained in the history of interstellar combat, with the sort of kill ratios that fighter pilots throughout history could only have dreamed of.
But good as they were, there were only so many of them, and the Bugs had devised a formation which denied them at least half their usual advantages in combat. If the strikefighters wanted to attack the gunboats and the kamikazes who represented the true threat to their starships, they must first run the gauntlet of the massed anti-fighter missile batteries of the Bugs' starships.
And they did.
They did it over and over again. The glare of nuclear and antimatter warheads, the invisible death of x-ray lasers, the sudden mid-word interruption of deep-space death . . . By now, they were only too familiar to Landrum and every other fighter commander in Seventh Fleet. And if they were familiar to the COs, how much more common were they to the fighter jocks who lived and died through them? Yet not one strikegroup balked, not a single squadron hesitated.
The first of the Bug attack globes was clearly visible in the visual display now. Not the ships themselves. No one could have picked them out even yet. But Seventh Fleet's personnel didn't need to see the ships.
They could see the explosions that marked the deaths of humans, Orions, and Ophiuchi, as well as Bugs. The explosions that wrapped themselves around the outer perimeter of the globe and turned it into a solid sphere of brimstone come straight from Hell as it rumbled dreadfully onward in Seventh Fleet's wake.
* * *
After a while, Raymond Prescott had found, one passed beyond fatigue into a state of heightened awareness.
It was something he'd experienced before, of course. He was, after all, one of the two most experienced combat commanders in human history. It had shaken his perception of the universe when he realized that he and Vanessa Murakuma now had actually seen more-and more intense-combat even than Ivan Antonov. Of course, fighting Bugs either gave one experience quickly or killed one . . . when it didn't do both of those things at once.
Yet for all the dreadful history of combat and slaughter which lay behind him, he'd never experienced anything to surpass this.
He'd lost track of how long it had been since he'd left the flag bridge. He ate meals brought to him there, and disposed of their end products in facilities a few steps away. But sleep was something dimly remembered, a fading memory of some prior life, recalled only when it appeared in the form of an irresistible temptation he nonetheless had to resist.
But why resist it? an inner voice he didn't want to hear asked. What's the difference? Death is death, regardless of whether or not you're awake when it comes. And it's coming.
He shook himself as if to physically throw off the incubus of despair.
The fighters had done their magnificent best, but some of the gunboats and shuttles had broken through. A screen of battlecruisers and light crui
sers had interposed themselves-and the bodies of their crews-between them and Seventh Fleet's main body. Almost seventy of those ships had died. But the Bugs had come on with something beyond their normal indifference to losses-something that Prescott, had he been talking about any other race, might have called desperation. At least two hundred gunboats and a hundred kamikaze assault shuttles had broken through and plunged into the battle-line's final defensive envelope with fighters still on their tails.
There were no reliable figures on how many of them had completed their attack runs-nor did Prescott need them. The figures that mattered were those of the ships they had taken with them into death: eight monitors, twelve superdreadnoughts, and eleven light carriers. And, of course, the people. Prescott was still coming to terms with the fact that he would never hear Force Leader Shaaldaar's rock-steady basso again. Vice Admiral Janos Kolchak had died with his flagship, as well. Twelfth Small Fang Yithaar'tolmaa's Howmarsi'hirtalkin had survived, but the small fang's own remains were somewhere in the twisted mass of wreckage that comprised most of his flagship.
And yet, Prescott kept forcing himself to remember, the battle-line had mostly survived. The Bug deep space force originally assigned to this system had evidently underestimated the extent of that survival, for it had pressed on without waiting for support from the massive Bug formations coming in from Anderson Three. That miscalculation had almost certainly saved Seventh Fleet-for now, at least. That and its own battle-forged toughness. It had met the incoming Bug starships with a hurricane of missiles, wrapping them in a shroud of purifying antimatter flame that swept them from the continuum. But the Allied battle-line had paid with fourteen more of its own monitors to do it, and the number of other ships destroyed or damaged was in the usual proportion.
And now the monstrous array of fresh capital ships from Anderson Three was closing inexorably in, its BCRs racing ahead of the slower monitors and superdreadnoughts in their haste to begin finishing off the crippled prey. And Zhaarnak was comming him.
He turned to the com screen, and the vilkshatha brothers looked at each other. Each of them saw the memory of Alowan and Telmasa in the other's eyes and knew how precious the shared years which had passed since that unexpected reprieve had been to both of them. Yet there seemed little to say. There was no need for them to put what they felt into words . . . and there was certainly no point in saying that the next fight would be Seventh Fleet's last, for they both knew it.
So instead, Zhaarnak turned to practicalities with a briskness that anyone familiar with his race would have recognized as a mask for despair.
"We must reorganize our battle-line, Raaymmonnd."
"Yes." Prescott looked again at the loss totals, then looked away. "Our task force organization has pretty much vanished. We'll abandon our worst damaged ships and scuttle them, so they won't slow up our withdrawal. I've already got Anna and Jacques at work forming new battlegroups around whatever command ships are still alive."
"Can we manage such a fundamental restructuring in the midst of battle?"
"We can." Prescott's tone held no doubt, only certainty. Only a force as superbly trained and battle-tried as Seventh Fleet could even have considered plugging units from different Alliance members into the same datagroups on the fly. Prescott knew that, and the pride was like ashes in his mouth.
"I want those BCRs to encounter the kind of coordinated missile fire they're not expecting," he said. "Maybe it'll give them pause."
"We will also need to reorganize our strikegroups to cover the withdrawal."
"Truth. Raathaarn and Stephen are working on it, but it's going to involve even more organizational improvisation. We'll base all of the surviving fighters on Terran carriers because they're the best equipped to meet multispecies life-support requirements."
And because the surviving Terran carriers alone have ample hangar space for every one of the fighters we still have left, he left unsaid.
"Very well. I will have Small Fang Jarnaaa coordinate with Claw Laaandrummm."
There was little left to say. Zhaarnak said it anyway.
"It has been a good hunt, brother."
Prescott gazed into the screen at the brother he would almost certainly never see in the flesh again. This electronic image would have to do, and in a way he knew Zhaarnak would have understood, it was Andrew to whom he spoke, as well.
"Truth, brother. A good hunt. Our claws struck deep indeed."
* * *
TFN safety regulations imposed strict limits on the number of sorties a given fighter pilot could fly in a given time. In Seventh Fleet's present pass, those regulations-like so much else-had long since gone by the boards.
Several times, Irma Sanchez had almost yielded to the enormous army of exhaustion, sleeplessness, stress, and grief for her gallant, too-young pilots. Meswami had been the latest to go-she'd let herself feel it later. Pink-cheeked Rolf Nordlund was now, by default, the XO of a "squadron" reconstituted out of ingredients from three species. And Irma was still skipper, senior to Cub of the Khan Mnyeearnaow'mirnak, Lieutenant (j.g.) Eilonwwa and the two human pilots who'd been foisted on her.
That, she reflected, was probably what had kept her from simply letting go: the problem of running this motley crew that still went by the call-sign "Victor Foxtrot Niner-Four." That, and the small blue-eyed face that occasionally floated up to the surface of her mind amid all the fatigue and horror-for what kind of universe would Lydochka inhabit after all this was over?
A snarl of Orion brought her back to the present. She'd never learned the Tongue of Tongues. Eilonwwa understood it, however, and could speak Standard English with his own race's extended consonants. Irma wondered what she'd do if the Ophiuchi bought it.
This time, though, she didn't need Eilonwwa's services as a translator, for she had a pretty good idea what Mnyeearnaow was talking about.
"I see them, Lieutenant," she cut in as Eilonwwa began to interpret. It was yet another formation of kamikaze shuttles, stooping like raptors on Seventh Fleet's dwindling battle-line. She rapped out a series of commands. At least Mnyeearnaow could understand Standard English, and he kept formation as well as anyone in this ad hoc squadron as they altered course and went to the attack.
Their external ordnance was long gone, and hadn't been all that copious to start with, given their need to carry extended life-support packs for this endless patrolling. But their F-4s' internal hetlasers jabbed and thrust, turning antimatter-laden assault shuttles into expanding miniature suns. But the kamikazes went into evasive action, and fresh formations of gunboats appeared to complicate the tactical picture.
A scream of static and a brief fireball, and Irma winced. Johnson, she thought. Or was her name Jackson? God, I can't even remember, I've known them so few hours.
But then the last kamikaze was free of them, and only Mnyeearnaow was in a position to intercept it. The Orion swooped in . . and didn't fire.
Irma heard the snarling, mewling voice in her headset and cursed her inability to understand. "Eilonwwa-?"
"He sayss hiss firrring mechanisssm hass mallllfunctionned, Ssir," the Ophiuchi fluted.
"Mnyeearnnaow," Irma snapped, "pull up! That's a direct order."
But the Orion's fighter continued to close with the shuttle that now had nothing between it and the battle-line.
"Goddamn it, don't pretend you can't understand me!" Something caught Irma's eye. The computer had deduced the kamikaze's target: TFNS Irena Riva y Silva.
Fleet Flag she thought automatically. Maybe Mnyeearnaow's seen it too.
"Mnyeearnaow," she yelled, "talk to me!"
The Orion voice finally sounded in her headset-but only in a howling, quavering war cry that sent primal ice sliding along her spine. And then fighter and shuttle met at a combined velocity that was an appreciable fraction of light's. Irma's outside view automatically darkened; the flash wasn't why she had to squeeze her eyes tightly shut and blink them rapidly a few times.
Then they were past the gunboats
and into the clear. Irma let herself take a deep breath among the clean stars for a moment while receiving the survivors' acknowledgments, then braced herself for the gunboats to resume the engagement.
Only . . . they didn't.
Bewildered, Irma wondered if she'd heard something. But no, the sudden break in the battle-pattern had triggered a sense deeper than hearing. Yet to her or any veteran it was practically audible.
Nordlund must have "heard" it, too.
"Uh, Skipper-?"
"Yeah, Rolf . . . er, XO. Resume our patrol pattern. I don't know where they've gone, but I'm not arguing."
* * *
"No, Ahhdmiraaaal Maaaacomb," First Fang Ynaathar said flatly, "we will not probe the warp point first."
"But, First Fang-" TF 81's commander began, and Ynaathar forced himself not to snarl. It wasn't easy, and only the fact that he'd fought shoulder to shoulder with Macomb and knew the Human was no chofak but as true a farshatok as the First Fang had ever known made it possible.
"There can be no other decision," Ynaathar cut off the TFN commander of Eighth Fleet's battle-line. "You know as well as I that Fang Presssssscottt and Fang Zhaarnaak commenced their attack precisely on schedule. And if the Bahgs have chosen not to defend Harnah, then it can only have been to employ their warships-and their gunboats and kamikazes-somewhere else. We cannot allow them to combine against Seventh Fleet and crush it in isolation!"
