Shiva Option

"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 to

"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 ca

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 ca

"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.