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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Ghosts of Kliean
"I am sorry to disturb you, Sir, but I think you should see this report."
Third Great Fang of the Khan Koraaza'khiniak, Lord Khiniak, sat up on his bed pad as Claw of the Khan Thaariahn'reethnau entered the cramped sleeping cabin. The small, spartan compartment was located immediately off Kinaasha'defarnoo's CIC, and the great fang had discovered that it was entirely too conveniently placed. The monitor's designers had intended it for the emergency use of a flag officer during sustained maneuvering and combat, not as someplace for a fleet commander to spend every night. He supposed some might argue that his decision to essentially move himself permanently into the cabin for the immediate future might be less than fully reassuring to some of his perso
Despite that, he had no intention of changing his routine. From the moment Lord Talphon's official permission to proceed with his long-pla
And they did. Lord Khiniak doubted that anyone outside Third Fleet, with the exceptions of Raymond Prescott and Zhaarnak'telmasa, had anything like a true grasp of what his command had become over the seven dreary standard years of waiting in this accursed star system. It was the ambition of any officer of the Zheeerlikou'valkha
Unfortunately, despite the permission he'd been given to mount his longed-for attack, he wasn't free to proceed with operations the way he truly wished to. Given a more perfect universe, he would have restricted himself to a single recon drone probe of the closed warp point. Just enough to secure the data he required to program his SBMHAWKs before he launched his entire fleet at the Bugs' throats. In the long run, any risks involved in that approach would almost certainly have been offset by the fact that it would have allowed him to retain the element of surprise.
But there were other factors to consider-the same factors, in many ways, which had driven Zhaarnak'telmasa to fall back from Kliean before the Bugs' initial onslaught. Although Lord Khiniak and his crews regarded themselves as an offensive weapon, they could never forget that their true function for seven endless Human years-almost fourteen of their own-had been to stand as a barrier between any additional Bug attacks and the heavily populated star systems which lay beyond Kliean and Telmasa. Certainly, the Strategy Board hadn't forgotten, and Fang Kthaara's permission to proceed hadn't arrived completely free of strings.
Koraaza'khiniak suspected that Kthaara had been forced to attach those strings largely for political considerations, but to his own sensitive nostrils some of them carried the definite scent of Fleet Speaker Noraku's caution, as well. In fairness, few beings in the explored universe were less politically motivated than Noraku, and while Koraaza often found the Gorm representative's deliberate, phlegmatic approach to problems even more maddening than he found most Humans, the Third Fleet commander was forced to concede that this particular set of strings wasn't entirely senseless.
Given the fact that the Bugs clearly had been forced more and more heavily onto the defensive, it was impossible even for him to argue that an attack from Shanak was essential. Valuable and extremely useful, yes; essential, no. Koraaza believed fervently that his proposed offensive would help shorten the war, but he wasn't blind to the fact that his thirst to engage the enemy was as much the product of his people's code of honor as of cold, strategic analysis. The one didn't invalidate the conclusions of the other, yet the Zheeerlikou'valkha
If that was true, then it only made sense-however much he resented it-to be certain before any offensive was launched that it was in a position to succeed without risking the destruction of Third Fleet's protective barrier. Which explained both the substantial reinforcements GFGHQ had somehow managed to pry loose from the rear area pickets and also the very specific orders from Centauri which had required him to conduct a thorough reco
Bug-06, his probes had quickly revealed, was a largely useless binary system with a K-4 class primary and a dim ember of a red dwarf secondary component. The two-star system boasted a total of ten planets, one of them inhabited, and a single massive asteroid belt, but it was obvious that it could have been only a staging point for the massive forces which had streamed forward to murder Kliean and to threaten Alowan and Hairnow with matching destruction seven years earlier. The relatively small (by Bug standards, at least) population of the K-4 star's i
The drone probe data had to be taken with a grain of salt, as a Human might have put it, given the Bugs demonstrated ability to use deception mode ECM effectively. Even allowing for that, however, it was clear to Koraaza that his earlier suspicion that the Bugs realized perfectly well that the Alliance had determined the warp point's location had been accurate. At least seventy massive Type Six OWPs hovered within missile and beam range of the warp point through which any attack must come, supported by forty-plus heavy and light cruisers, at least ten thousand patterns of mines, and thousands of laser buoys, all liberally seeded with jammer and deception-mode ECM buoys. Which didn't even include any of the hundred-plus superdreadnoughts, their supporting battlecruisers and cruisers, and the hordes of gunboats and suicide small craft which undoubtedly stood ready to assist them in repelling any attack.
In light of the way in which Operation Retribution and Operation Ivan had obviously stretched the Bugs' available strength to and beyond the breaking point, even Koraaza had been surprised by the numbers of starships detailed to defend what clearly was at best a secondary system. On the other hand, the presence of so many mobile units might well serve as further support of his theory that one of the "home hive" systems stood in relatively close proximity to Shanak. If there were only one or two stars between Shanak and one of the Bugs' core population concentrations, then this "secondary" star system would be of crucial importance despite its unprepossessing appearances. Not only that, but the Bugs had discovered by now, if they hadn't already known, what happened when the "Shiva Option" was applied in a heavily populated system. They must realize as well as the Alliance that they simply could not allow a bombarding fleet into range of a major population center without effectively writing off every military unit in the same star system. Which meant the pressure to defend such perimeter systems as Bug-06 must be even greater than ever.