Shiva Option

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 pi

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 pi

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.