The Stars at War Read online

  Her long-dead husband's face flickered before her, and she closed her eyes, fighting Tadeoshi aside while options and costs and possibilities cascaded through her brain. Even if she pulled them back now, they might take equally heavy losses later, she told herself. If she backed off on the strike, let the capital ships make transit in strength, the defensive fire would be almost as terrible even if every CLE were blown apart. But the decisive factor, the one she simply could not ignore, was timing, the possibility of getting the fighters in quickly enough, in sufficient strength, to stop the enemy dead and save nine million civilians.

  She opened her eyes once more and watched the fighter icons streaking towards the holocaust and said nothing.

  * * *

  "It's gonna be a rough ride, Skipper," Hathaway said flatly, and Olivera nodded. Whatever their designed purpose, the Bug cruisers' defenses made them missile sponges. They were soaking up enormous volumes of fire . . . and diverting TF 59's fire from the Bug battle-line when its transit-destabilized units were at their most vulnerable.

  "Entering their envelope in fifteen seconds." The tac officers voice was flatter than ever, and Olivera felt his guts tighten.

  * * *

  The fighters slammed into the Bugs' defensive globe, and Vanessa Murakuma's face went white as every light cruiser opened fire simultaneously. The CLEs were the most effective, but the class Ops had codenamed Carbine was almost as bad. They didn't have the AFHAWK, thank God, but they didn't really need the specialized antifighter missile—not when they had enough sprint-mode standard missiles to go around. The Bug cruisers had to be extremely austere designs, she thought almost calmly, without the support systems Terran designers included as a matter of course. If they were regarded as expendable throwaways, that actually made sense . . . and it also meant the tonnage they didn't use for self-protection could be diverted to offensive purposes. The Carbines' missile broadsides were twice as heavy as a TFN light cruiser's, and she watched in horror as they ripped into her fighters.

  * * *

  "Coming up on our final turn, Skip!" Hathaway's voice was jagged with tension, and nausea swirled in Olivera's belly as Malachi went to full power and evasive action and a savage fist crushed him back in his couch. No one had ever figured out how to build a fighter inertial compensator with the efficiency of a starship's or even a larger small craft's. Fighters were the smallest, fastest, most agile deep-space craft ever designed, and the engineers had been forced to accept some fundamental compromises to offset the acceleration effects which would otherwise have turned any human passenger into gruel. In effect, a fighter's inertial sump was shallower than that of anything else in space. It worked . . . but it didn't work as well as those of larger units, and that was what made fighter ops so physically punishing when they went to full power.

  Malachi took them into the teeth of the enemy's fire at .2 c, and Olivera felt another, colder nausea twist his gut as fighters began to die.

  * * *

  I should have called them back. The icy thought burned in Vanessa Murakuma's brain as dozens of Terran fighters exploded. I should have called them back!

  But she hadn't, and her hands locked on her command chair's armrests like talons as her bleeding squadrons continued to close.

  * * *

  "Captain Brigatta's gone!" Hathaway barked, and Olivera nodded.

  "Rampart Strike, this is Rampart Two," he said over the net while the giant's fist crushed him back and antiacceleration drugs fought his body's abuse. "Maintain profile. We're going in."

  * * *

  Half the fighters were already dead when the survivors broke through the cruisers, and more died as they charged across the final light-seconds towards their targets. Clumsy, waddling superdreadnoughts tried to turn aside even as their own weapons lashed at their attackers, but this was what Rampart Strike had come for. It would not be denied, and broken bits of squadrons bucked and bounced through the curdled space in the SDs' wakes. The warp point was a mad confusion of fishtailing fighters and swerving capital ships; Bug jammers overpowered squadron datanets; light cruisers turned to follow them into the madness, point defense firing furiously while the Terran missiles it was ignoring roared in to kill them; and even as Rampart Strike closed, fresh superdreadnoughts continued to make transit into the maelstrom. No computer could have sorted it all out, but that no longer mattered. Rampart Strike 's survivors swerved into the blind spots of their victims, and Olivera knew there would be too few left for a second strike like this. They had to get close—so close not a shot missed, for it was the only pass they were going to get.

  "Visual range!" he barked over the net. "Visual range launch!"

  "Holy Mary, Mother of God, blessed art thou among women . . ." Carlton Hathaway whispered as an enemy superdreadnought loomed on his targeting screen. The range was less than a hundred thousand kilometers, and it flashed downward like lightning with the fighter's overtake velocity as Malachi lined up. The tac officer's hand rested on the control panel built into the armrest of his flight couch, and the ball of one gloved thumb reached for the big, red button.

  " . . . pray for us sinners at—"

  The SD appeared suddenly on his visual display, and his thumb jabbed.

  "Birds away!" he screamed, and threw up into his helmet as Jane Malachi redlined her drive in a vicious hairpin turn. Four antimatter-armed close attack missiles blasted from the fighter, roaring down on the SD, and eight more missiles followed them in from the only other two survivors of Olivera's original squadron.

  All twelve scored direct hits. There was no wreckage.

  * * *

  Vanessa Murakuma's bleak, frozen eyes watched the fragments of Jackson Teller's fighters fall back to their carriers. They'd killed sixteen SDs, and Plotting estimated that they'd inflicted heavy damage on six more, but they'd paid for it with almost seventy percent of their number, and it was her fault.

  She stared into her own soul, loathing what she saw, then made herself accept it and set it aside. There would be time to face her dead later.

  She drew a deep breath and looked back into her plot. They'd put the next best thing to thirty superdreadnoughts out of action, but that many more were already in-system, and more were making transit as she watched. It was unbelievable. Whatever she did, however many she killed, however brutally she smashed them, they just kept coming, and with her fighter strength decisively blunted, she couldn't stop them. Perhaps she couldn't have stopped them anyway. Perhaps her hope of doing that had never been anything more than a hope, no more than a desperate need to believe she could do it. But whatever it had once been, it was only one more failure now.

  She inhaled again, nostrils flaring, then looked up at Ling Tian and Leroy Mackenna.

  "Go to Charlie Seven," she said, and her own calm, even voice as she ordered her task force to begin its long retreat astonished her.

  "Yes, Sir," Mackenna said softly, and she looked at Teller's ashen face on the com screen.

  "Consolidate your squadrons, Jackson. I'll give you as much time to reorganize as I can."

  "Yes, Sir." There wasn't a trace of condemnation in his voice, and she wanted to scream at him. But she stopped herself. Somehow she stopped herself.

  "Once you've consolidated, detach any carrier without at least two squadrons on board," she said flatly. "Send them back to Justin and Harrison to evacuate every civilian you can pack aboard. You're authorized to redline your environmental systems."

  "Yes, Sir," Teller said once more, and Murakuma nodded. She leaned back in her command chair, watching the ravaged light dots flashing back towards their carriers, and her mouth twisted.

  At least she'd just made sure they'd have lots of spare life support for the civilians, she thought bitterly.

  CHAPTER TEN

  "We can't wait!"

  One inescapable consequence of the physics of the reactionless drive was that the instant a drive field went down, any velocity it had imparted went with it. The energy shedding process as
the immense forces concentrated in the surface of the field's "bubble" dissipated was spectacular but harmless, and the ability to decelerate virtually instantaneously from .1 c to whatever a starship's relative motion had been at the moment the drive was engaged could be invaluable. There were, however, circumstances under which the velocity loss required some inventiveness.

  And this, Andrew Prescott thought sardonically, watching Daikyu's master display with what he hoped was an air of calm confidence, is one of them.

  The battle-cruiser slid stealthily through the system's outer reaches, creeping along (for her) at barely 15,000 KPS under cover of her ECM while passive sensors probed the vacuum like a cat's quivering whiskers. Her course carried her directly towards the Justin-Sarasota warp point, but that invisible dot lay two billion kilometers ahead, and she had no intention of approaching it any more closely than she must. While a coward would never have let himself be "volunteered" for his present mission, Andrew Prescott was no fool. He was confident he could spot and evade any enemies which weren't cloaked, but even though his scanners hadn't found any, the presence of cloaked Bug pickets was a certainty, and logic suggested there were more of them than there were of him.

  He looked around the bridge once more, and his mouth quirked at the duty watch's tense body language. The last three weeks had been nerve-wracking for his subordinates, but those same weeks had held another, even deeper strain for him. The others were concerned primarily only with surviving; he was responsible for the success of his mission, as well.

  His half-smile vanished at the thought, for if his ship had evaded all enemies, her consort Longsword hadn't. He couldn't be certain, but he suspected Captain Daulton had gotten too close to the warp point—either to probe it or in an effort to get a courier drone to Sarasota—five days ago. Whatever his intention, Longsword had been detected, ambushed and destroyed with all hands. Daikyu had been just close enough to catch the omnidirectional Code Omega which confirmed her destruction, and Andrew Prescott was determined the Bugs would not get his ship, as well. Daikyu had a job to do, and to do it, she must survive.

  But she also had to know what was going on and—trickier still—whether or not what she knew was important enough to report. Just securing the data was hard enough, as his present elaborate maneuvers illustrated, but it was easier than deciding when that data was vital enough to risk passing it on. He'd made up his mind at the outset not to make any reports that weren't vital, and Longsword's destruction reconfirmed his determination, for there was no way the Bugs could miss a transiting courier drone. Even assuming they didn't manage to backtrack it to Daikyu, its mere existence would tell them Longsword hadn't been the only spy left to watch them, and their efforts to find Daikyu would redouble if they knew positively that she was there to be found. Worse, it might cause them to rethink whatever deployment had inspired him to send the drone in the first place, and unless he was in a position to see any changes they made—and report them to Sarasota—those changes could turn his original message into a trap.

  The same considerations applied to recon drones. An RD was a low-signature object, with every built-in stealth feature the TFN could devise, but even the stealthiest drone's drive field could be spotted under the wrong circumstances, especially at close quarters, and he needed to get his RD right on top of the warp point. Redemption couldn't be risked on questionable data; he had to reduce the uncertainty factor to the absolute minimum. The problem was to somehow get the damned thing to point-blank range without using its drive, and he and Fred Kasuga, his exec, had wracked their brains to find a way. The actual suggestion had been Kasuga's, but like everything else, the final responsibility for its success—or failure—was Andrew Foote Prescott's.

  He grimaced at the familiar thought, then sighed. There were times he wished he'd told Murakuma to hand the stinking job to some other captain, but someone had to do it, and he'd accepted it because it had to be done. And, he admitted privately, because deep down inside he was convinced he could do it better than anyone else.

  Well, Mister Wonderful, if you're so hot it's about time you prove it, he thought, and glanced at his astrogator.

  "On profile?" he asked quietly.

  "Yes, Sir. Coming up on release point in—" Lieutenant Commander Belliard glanced at the countdown ticking away in a corner of his display "—eight minutes."

  "Good." Prescott looked at his tac officer. "Status on the bird, Jill?"

  "Just completed the final diagnostic, Skipper." Lieutenant Commander Cesiaño popped a chip out of her console, loaded it into a message board, and handed it to him, and he glanced over it. Every system checked—as he'd expected from Cesiaño—and he handed it back with a nod.

  "Outstanding. Now if everything works, we may even get away with it."

  The tac officer grinned, and he smiled back at her as he felt the rest of the bridge crew respond to his wry tone. Funny how even really bright people can be amused by stupid jokes, he thought, and settled into his command chair to watch the final minutes limp into eternity.

  "Stand by for release," Cesiaño said finally, and Prescott tipped his chair back and steepled his hands across his flat belly. All he could really do at a moment like this was try even harder to radiate confidence, and—

  "Drone away!" Cesiaño said, and Prescott's eyes narrowed. The RD's low-signature materials made it all but invisible even to Daikyu's sensors, and it radiated no active emissions at all. Even its drive was down—indeed, Cesiaño's missile crews had physically disabled it, just in case—and it stopped dead as it penetrated Daikyu's drive field. But a readied tractor jerked it instantly back into motion. It couldn't accelerate without a drive of its own, but the tractor tugged it bodily along, imparting the momentum of Daikyu's velocity. It couldn't maneuver or change course, but it also offered no betraying energy source to warn anyone it was coming, and its present heading would take it directly past the Sarasota warp point in almost exactly thirty-six hours at a range of less than fifteen light-seconds. And in the meantime . . .

  "Execute breakaway," he said.

  "Aye, aye, Sir," Belliard responded. "Executing now."

  Cesiaño cut the tractor, and Daikyu looped up and away from the drone. The range opened gradually, and Prescott inhaled in satisfaction as it vanished from even Daikyu's ken four minutes later. It was unlikely in the extreme that anyone would see it coming, but that left the trickiest parts still to accomplish. First, Daikyu had to up her speed (and consequent chance of detection) enough to circle round the warp point to catch the drone at the appointed rendezvous on the far side, and then—

  And then, Andrew Prescott told himself, I have to decide if the result of the exercise is worth breaking silence to inform Sarasota. He grimaced again and looked at the chronometer. Three days. The time, he knew, was not going to pass quickly.

  * * *

  "They're coming over us! They're coming over us!"

  An explosion roared over the link, and the voice in Acting Major Frieda Jaëger's earbug went from a tenor shout to a soprano scream. The link brought the terrible concussion right into her command vehicle with her, slamming her head aside in involuntary reflex as her mind pictured the carnage with masochistic clarity, and her hands fisted. Somehow the transmitter at the other end had survived the explosion, and she heard the scream collapse into a horrible, high-pitched, endless sound of agony before her com officer could cut the circuit.

  Jaëger drew a deep breath and shook herself. Lieutenant Furness wasn't the first to die since the Bugs came to Justin. He won't be the last, either, her mind said grimly, but he'd blown hell out of the Bug point before they called in the heavy stuff on him.

  She dropped her eyes to the map display. So far, the Bugs didn't seem to have sorted the recon satellites out of all the other orbital junk, but Colonel—No, Brigadier Mondesi, she corrected herself—wasn't taking chances. A sneaky opponent might opt for planting scanners around the satellites to track their whisker laser transmissions to whatever was receiving
them, so Mondesi had them reporting to widely dispersed (and unmanned) remote ground stations, and aside from short-range tactical traffic, all transmissions were compressed into burst transmissions and then bounced off anything but one of the recon or surviving comsats. Transmission quality might suffer, but there was almost always some handy piece of space junk, manmade or natural, to get the message through, and the tight beams were virtually undetectable.

  Which was good, because hiding things like Jaëger's Asp command vehicle from an enemy who controlled the high orbitals was hard enough without radiating "Oh kill me now!" emission signatures. In fact, she would have preferred to command her "battalion" of Marines, Peaceforcers, and civilians from her battle armor and a hole in the ground that gave the Bugs nothing at all to spot. Unfortunately, she had too many civilians and Peaceforcers and too few armored Raiders to make that practical. Worse, her force was spread so thin and so widely dispersed that she needed all the command and control capability she could get, and in that respect an Asp was vastly superior to anything even a Raider "zoot" could provide.

  For what it was worth.

  She glared at the display as the Asp's computers turned Furness's position from green to crimson. The Bugs' operational doctrine sucked, and they didn't appear to have any equivalent of the Corps' zoots, but the bastards were incredibly fast and strong even without it. The intelligence pukes' best guess was that they came from a high-grav world, though none of the planets Argive had reported had been massive enough to account for it. That was an unsettling thought. Jaëger had seen the population estimates Intelligence had formed based on Commodore Braun's report, and if that many Bugs lived in a star system that didn't even contain their home world—

  Jaëger snarled at her own wandering thoughts. Fatigue. I've got to find a way to get at least some shut-eye, or my brain's going to go straight to mush. But how the hell am I supposed to do that when the bastards keep coming this way?