Shiva Option s-3

by David Weber

  That far, all went according to well-established doctrine. But what came next was something else altogether.

  * * *

  The Gorm were stereotypically a stolid, imperturbable race. As often happens, stereotype held a grain of truth.

  Gunboat Squadron Leader Mansaduk, for example, had never been affected by the disorienting sense of wrongness that seemed to overtake his Orion comrades-in-arms and Terran allies at the instant of passing through a warp point-at least not to the same extent. Oh, he felt it, of course; no brain, organic or cybernetic, was immune. He just didn't let it upset him. So normally, he approached transit with serene equanimity.

  Not this time, though. He looked left and right beyond the outer corners of his curving viewscreen and watched the wall of gunboats of which his was a part. They were clearly visible to the naked eye, for this was an exceptionally tight formation on the standards of space warfare. It had to be for what it was about to do.

  "Approaching transit," Sensor Operator Chenghat reported in a voice which, like his minisorchi, was a little too tightly controlled, and Mansaduk turned his gaze straight ahead. The warp point was, of course, invisible.

  Well, he told himself, if it happens, it should be the quickest possible form of death.

  Before he'd even finished the thought, the universe seemed to turn itself inside out, and they were in Home Hive Five. The largest simultaneous warp transit the Allies had ever performed-every one of Grand Fleet's gunboats, in fact-was over.

  Stroboscopic flashes to Mansaduk's left and right marked the deaths of gunboats that had interpenetrated. There were a great many of them.

  The Squadron Leader took dispassionate note of the fact that he was still alive. A quick glance at his display showed him that one of his squadron's gunboats wasn't, but there was no time to feel anything. No time to do anything but give the orders which sent his surviving gunboats to their places in the wave rushing toward the Bug kamikazes.

  The gunboats' ordnance loads were configured for killing small craft. The CAM2s had cleared away all of the opposing gunboats of the Bug CSP. All that were left were the assault shuttles and pinnaces, which were enormously more vulnerable missile targets. Fighter missiles would have been highly effective against such vulnerable targets; the all-up, shipboard AFHAWKs a gunboat could carry were even deadlier, and the intolerable glare of nuclear and antimatter warheads ripped at the guts of the kamikaze cloud.

  At first, the kamikazes simply tried to avoid the gunboats which were killing them. Their purpose was to kill transiting starships, and to do that they must survive, not waste themselves in combat against mere gunboats. But they must also somehow remain within attack range of the warp point, and they couldn't do that if they were dead. And so, as the gunboats' kill totals climbed and climbed, the massed kamikazes had no choice but to turn upon them. Exchanging one of their own number for a gunboat was hardly cost-effective, but the Bugs had no choice but to expend some of their number if the rest were to survive to perform their real function.

  A vicious fight snarled around the warp point as the better-armed pinnaces of the kamikaze cloud flung themselves upon the gunboats. Mansaduk watched the suicide shuttle that had been his gunboat's latest target flare into a momentary sun, then took advantage of a brief lull to study the readouts. The kill ratio was very much in the Allies' favor, for a gunboat was a small, nimble target, difficult for a kamikaze to catch. But against the numbers the Bugs had to waste no kill ratio could truly be considered "favorable," and Mansaduk began to feel an anxiety that would have surprised his non-Gorm acquaintances. His eyes strayed towards the view-aft. Isn't it time yet. . . ?

  Then, with no warning, as was the nature of such things, it happened . . . and once again the warp point was marked by the firefly-flashes of simultaneously-transiting vessels materializing in the same volume of space. There were fewer fireflies this time, but bigger ones, because now starships were making transit.

  The first wave consisted of Zarkolyan Kel'puraka-B and Kel'junar-B-class battlecruisers, crewed by beings whose fiery hatred for the Bugs was an elemental force, untempered by any tradition of dispassionate military professionalism. The original Kel'puraka and Kel'junar classes had been extraordinarily well-defended against missiles and kamikazes, with four advanced capital point defense installations each, which made them better adapted to warp point assaults than most battlecruisers. But the "B" refits, while retaining the original designs' defensive power, incorporated a truly radical offensive departure: the elimination of all normal missile launchers in favor of massed batteries of the new "box launcher" systems, effectively converting what had been conventional BCRs into highly unconventional specialized kamikaze killers.

  The entire design concept was a calculated risk; the box launchers were slow and awkward to reload, for they lacked the sophisticated ammunition-handling equipment that made up so much of the mass and volume of conventional launchers. Because of that, the box launchers had to be loaded one round at a time, from outside the ship, with its drive field down. But the advantage of the "box launcher" was that multiple missiles could be simultaneously loaded into each box . . . and fired in one, massive salvo. And the very absence of the reloading equipment of other launchers meant that three times as many box launchers could be mounted in the same internal volume. Which meant that a single battlegroup of five Kel'puraka-Bsand one Kel'junar-B command ship could belch forth four hundred and thirty-five anti-fighter AFHAWKs in a single coordinated salvo.

  They did, and as they fired, each battlegroup became the center of a spreading cloud of fiery death. Their missiles raced outward, like the blast wave of some stupendous explosion, and its crest was a solid, curving wall of kamikazes vanishing into the plasma-cloud death of their own massive loads of antimatter.

  The Zarkolyans blasted enormous swathes through the ranks of suicide shuttles before the Bugs understood what they were dealing with. Then the kamikazes, as though in response to a single will, turned on the new attackers. Six of the battlecruisers who'd survived transit died, but most of the pressure was removed from the gunboats, which proceeded to torment and distract the kamikazes. Those gunboats had expended their own AFHAWKs, but they retained their internal weapons, and they took vicious advantage of the kamikazes' distraction. And while they did, the surviving battlecruisers withdrew through the warp point to reload their box launchers in the safety of Anderson Three.

  As they withdrew, the main body of Grand Fleet began to transit-one at a time, led by more Zarkolyans. This time they were Shyl'narid-A, Shyl'tembra, and Shyl'prandar-class superdreadnoughts, the larger cousins of the Kel'purakas which had preceded them. They embraced precisely the same design philosophy, but with five times as many launchers each, and the defenders of Home Hive Five had never seen anything like them. The kamikazes turned once more, swinging back from the gunboats to leap upon these bigger, clumsier, more vulnerable targets . . . and the superdreadnoughts belched death into their faces like the blasts of some war god's titanic shotgun.

  Mansaduk's squadron was down to only two gunboats by the time they broke through into the clear and saw those advancing behemoths. A quick glance at his HUD showed the surviving kamikazes regrouping for an attack on the new threat-the one they'd been intended to face. He had no need to look at his crew. Unlike his inanimate instruments, their minisorchi was woven with his; he knew what they felt.

  "No, Chenghat," he said, his eyes still on his HUD. "Not just yet. We have work to do here before we can follow the battlecruisers back. We must give the superdreadnoughts our support. They won't have the option of retiring to rearm."

  * * *

  The Fleet tallied the losses of the warp point defenders with profound dissatisfaction.

  Ultimately, there'd never been any realistic hope of preventing the Enemy from gaining entry to the System Which Must Be Defended, of course. The introduction of those extremely irritating warp-capable missiles had seen to that. Still, the Fleet had hoped to exact a far higher price
of the invaders as they made their assault transits. Unfortunately, this Fleet component hadn't known of the new battlecruiser and superdreadnoughts classes. Sensor data shared with all of the Systems Which Must Be Defended by the System Which Must Be Defended which had been charged with the war against the Old Enemy suggested that the new classes came from the Old Enemy's fleet components, but no report had indicated that they would be capable of such massive salvos of AFHAWKs, and their appearance in simultaneous transits-coupled with the Enemy gunboats' earlier transits-had wiped out far more of the combat space patrol and kamikazes than projections had allowed for.

  Still, total gunboat losses had been barely eighteen hundred, less than seven percent of the Fleet's total gunboat strength in this system, and thousands upon thousands of planet-based kamikazes remained to replace those lost on the warp point. The Fleet's Deep Space Force's starships were outnumbered by more than three-to-one by the Enemy units now in the System Which Must Be Defended, and the balance of firepower was even worse than those numbers suggested, for over half of the Deep Space Force's total starships were mere light cruisers. But even now, those ships could call upon the support of the planet-based kamikazes and almost twenty-four thousand more gunboats, and some of those gunboats carried the new, second-generation jammer packs. Clearly, the Enemy's total combined attack craft strength was less than half that-indeed, current estimates suggested it was less than ten thousand-and they were supported by little more than a thousand gunboats after their losses during the initial assault.

  The odds against the Fleet were thus formidable, yet not truly impossible. The Fleet's greatest weakness lay in the disparity in the speeds of its component units and the tactical constraints that disparity imposed, but its numerical advantage in gunboats, properly applied, offered an opportunity to offset that weakness. Coupled with the new jammer technology, the Fleet estimated that it actually had one chance in three of inflicting sufficient damage to induce the casualty-conscious Enemy to break off short of the Worlds Which Must Be Defended.

  This time.

  * * *

  Kthaara'zarthan and Vanessa Murakuma stood side by side on Li Chien-lu's flag bridge, watching Grand Fleet take form in the plot.

  It was, inevitably, a somewhat diminished array. As usual, the destabilizing effects of warp transit had degraded the accuracy of the defensive fire that had met the kamikazes. Ten monitors and a dozen superdreadnoughts of the leading waves had either been destroyed or sent limping back to Anderson Three. But they'd absorbed all the damage the Bugs had been able to inflict. The carriers, coming afterwards, had entered unmolested and were now deploying a fighter cover of unprecedented strength. Behind that shield, the remainder of Grand Fleet was streaming in and coalescing into its prearranged formation with practiced ease.

  As well it should, Murakuma thought. This operation was unprecedented in numbers and tonnage, but in nothing else. It was the kind of offensive which nearly a decade's experience had rendered almost-not quite-routine. From any prewar viewpoint, Grand Fleet's experience level would have been as awe inspiring as its size.

  "Do you suppose the Bugs will have any technological surprises waiting for us?" she asked Kthaara.

  "Surprises, by definition, are unpredictable," the Orion said philosophically. "The possibility cannot be denied. We have learned to our cost that the Bahgs are capable of inventiveness, and in their present straits they must be innovating under the lash of desperation-if, indeed, they are capable of feeling such a thing as desperation. Nevertheless, our precautions should suffice against any plausible threat."

  Gazing at the solid phalanxes of green lights forming up on the plot, Murakuma couldn't disagree. For all of Kthaara's eagerness to end the war in one grand, sweeping act of vengeance, the canny Orion refused to neglect the Allies' hard-learned tactical doctrines. The massive battle-line would advance in-system behind a cruiser screen, its flanks covered by clouds of fighters. That advance, toward the teeming planets whose destruction would cripple any further resistance, would force engagement upon what must be a badly outnumbered deep space fleet. True, the DSF would surely be preceded by a lot of planet-based kamikazes. But, again, the Allies were used to that, she reflected, then looked up as Leroy McKenna walked across to her and Kthaara.

  "Lord Talphon, Admiral, the last units have transited successfully."

  "Excellent." Kthaara straightened up. "Please let me know the instant all commands have reported readiness to proceed. It is time to finish this."

  Lieutenant Commander Irma Sanchez had thought she was prepared for the oncoming wavefront of death.

  VF-94 had launched from TFNS Hephaestus, the assault carrier on which the squadron was now embarked, and taken its place in Grand Fleet's fighter cover. To minimize pilot fatigue, that cover was maintained by squadrons in rotation, and this was VF-94's shift. It was almost over, and Irma was allowing a certain blue-eyed face to peek into her consciousness. She'd managed to get leave a couple of months earlier, but hadn't been able to stay for-was it possible?-Lydia's twelfth birthday. That was a few standard days from now. . . .

  "Sssssskipperrrrr-"

  The voice in her helmet was that of the recently promoted Lieutenant Eilonwwa. Irma was still amazed by her good fortune at having kept him. The multispecies fighter squadrons Seventh Fleet had cobbled together amid the retaking of Anderson Three had been emergency expedients only, as Commander Nicot had told her at the time, and by now none were left . . . except VF-94. Commander Conroy, Hephaestus' CSG, subscribed to the if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-itphilosophy.

  Eilonwwa was currently on the squadron's outermost flank, and he'd picked up the downloaded readings from the recon fighters first. But now Irma's fighter was displaying them for her. She managed to acknowledge Eilonwwa's transmission as she gaped at the readings. That can't be right! Can it?

  "Heads up!" Commander Conroy's voice was crisp yet completely calm, almost conversational, on the command circuit, but Irma knew he, too, had read the tale of those tens of thousands of kamikazes roaring down on Grand Fleet in formations whose density was without precedent in space warfare-even in this war. He fired off a series of orders, and Hephaestus' component joined the wave of fighters that curved inward to support the cruiser screen and, it was hoped, envelop its attackers.

  The forward squadrons began to salvo their FM3s, and Irma wondered if they were even bothering to pick targets. There was no real need, after all. Anything fired into that mass of small craft was almost bound to hit something, and the missiles' short-ranged seekers would probably do as good a job of finding something to kill as the overloaded tactical computer of whatever fighter launched them.

  Fireballs began to glare all along the cliff face of that moving mountain of suicidal death. It was incredible. They were actually so close together that an exploding kamikaze's antimatter load could take out two-even three-additional small craft by simple proximity. It was worse than shooting fish in a barrel; it was like dynamiting them in a fish bowl!

  And yet, if you could accept the sacrificial logic of massed kamikaze attacks in the first place, then that hideous hurricane of exploding small craft made perfectly good sense. Yes, the fighters could kill anything they could see, but the Bug formation was so dense, so compact, that the strikegroups could see only a tiny fraction of them at a time, and while they were killing the ones they could see, the others were sweeping closer and closer to the Fleet at over twelve percent of light-speed.

  That was why the protective fighters had to envelop them, had to capture them in a net of coordinated crossfires and finely sequenced squadron-level pounces.

  But there were too many attackers to envelop, and no time to work around the perimeter. There was time only for each squadron to salvo its missiles head-on . . . and then follow them straight into that maw of destruction. It was sheer, howling chaos, with absolutely no possibility of centralized direction. Strikegroups came apart, shredding into individual squadrons-sometimes individual fighters-as they fought for
their own lives and the life of the battle-line.

  But they were used to that, had been ever since the Bugs introduced their gunboat-mounted jammer packs. Nor did it matter much; there were plenty of kamikazes for everyone to kill. Enough, and more than enough.

  "All right, people," Irma said as she finished her formal orders and VF-94's spot in line flashed closer at a combined closing speed of over .25 c. "Try to keep some kind of formation and watch each others' backs. But mostly . . . kill the bastards!"

  And then they were in among the vastest dogfight in history, and there was plenty of killing for everyone.

  Even for veterans of the war against the Bugs, there was something horrible about the way the seemingly illimitable ranks and columns and phalanxes of gunboats and small craft advanced. There was absolutely no tactical finesse. This was an elemental force that existed for the sole purpose of reaching the screen, and passing through it to the capital ships and carriers.

  They know-in whatever weird way they "know" things-that this is their last stand, Irma thought in some sheltered recess of her mind, even as she blew two kamikazes out of the plenum, so close together and in such rapid succession that the fireballs merged. And we know this is the last real battle we'll have to fight. That's why there's a kind of madness about this carnage . . . from both sides.

  Then the tatters of the Bugs' first waves came into contact with the screen, and it became clear that there was going to be something else about this battle that was unique.

  * * *

  "Report! I want answers!" Leroy McKenna's strain broke through his usually rock-steady surface as he snapped at the staff intelligence officer. Murakuma decided that this wasn't the time to reprove him. Instead, she concentrated on trying to match the studied imperturbablility that Kthaara'zarthan radiated as he stood beside her.