The Insurrection

Neither Matucek nor many of his people lived to see it, but the follow-on wave of carriers found a hole wide enough to offer escape from the full fury of the distance-attenuated force beams.

They charged through it--only to reel in shock as every surviving fortress cut loose with the same incredible number of primaries and taught the Republican Navy the power of the "variable focus" improved force beam refined from the theoretical data at ZephraJn [[DS. Stressed field lenses allowed the same projector to operate in primary mode, projecting a beam which was tiny in aperture and brief in duration compared to a regular force beam. And while, like all primaries, it lacked the wide area effect of the force beam, it was a weapon to which electromagnetic shields, metal armor, and human flesh all offered equal resistance that is to say, none at all.

The vicious beams stabbed through the carriers, crippling electromagnetic catapults and, all too often, the readied fighters, as well, and the first carrier wave staggered aside, toothless, their riddled fighter bays useless.

But even the improved force beam required a cooling period between primary-mode shots, and the rebel commander turned the full fury of his fleet upon the remaining fortresses. The Book called for intact forts to be bypassed, for the follow-up waves to flood through the holes opened by SBMHAWK'S and the assault waves to draw out of range of the surviving energy weapons, but that was impossible here. Admiral Anton Kellerman threw the surviving ships of the first wave into the teeth of the big forts, and the primaries' slow rate of fire proved decisive. They died hard, but they died.

.. and took half a dozen more superdreadnoughts (and six assault carriers which had no business--by The Book--in such an engagement) with them into death.

Trevayne watched grimly as the relayed sca

It might have been different if he'd dared to marshal Fourth Fleet behind Sk.vwatch. The firepower of his mobile units, coupled with that of the forts, would have smashed the rebel attack into dust--but someone had had to cover the Gateway in case he and Yoshinaka had guessed wrong.

He studiel lis display narrowly, wishing for the thousandth time that even one of his supermonitors was operational, but only the immobile, half-finished Nelson was even partly so. Another thirty standard days might have changed that, but he had to fight with what he had, and, as he watched Anton Kefflerman gather his shaken units back into some sort of formation amid the drifting rubble of Skeavwatch, he wondered grimly if it was enough. He'd been confident when he told Sanders he could hold Zephrain, but ONI had underestimated the rebel attack strength by at least a Factor of three.

But Skywatch had done bloody well, and that had to be a very shaken rebel commander. Virtually all of his super-dreadnoughts'had been crippled or destroyed outright, and his carriers had suffered heavily. He had to be wondering what fresh disaster awaited him from Zephrain's Pandora's Box, and ff he could just be convinced that what awaited him was even worse than it actually was.

He watched a small rebel force line out for Gehe

He encouraged the enemy's adherence to The Book by holding back his own fleet--including the monitors of BG 32, commanded now by Sonja Desai and very different from anv other monitors in space. There were a few monitors in the rebel fleet. They must have been the rear guard, protected from the first crushing embrace of action because their long building time made them so hard to replace. But his primary interest lay with the surviving carriers as Ortega shivered, moving into a slightly wider orbit in company with BG 32. Ortega and Desafs monitors were datalinked to the immobile Nelson; they couldn't leave Xanadu without dropping the partially-operational supermonitor out of the net, and he needed Nelson. He needed her badly, and he had to suck those carriers into range of her weapons before they launched.

Anton Kefflerman watched the plot aboard his CVA flagship Unicorn and wondered just what Trevayne was playing at. He'd once served under the Rim commander, and the one thing Trevayne had never seemed was hesitant. Yet he wasn't moving forward to engage. True, he was badly outnumbered- comby at least three-to-one in fighters, Kellerman judged but still...

It was possible he wanted to engage close to Xanadu for a very simple reason: he could have based hundreds of strikefighters on the planet. Yet those stupendous, half-completed hulls drifting in orbit above the Fleet base seemed to argue that he couldn't have built too many fighters. Could it be they'd caught him with his pants down? Was it possible that, despite the long delay, he wasn't ready for them?

Kellerman hoped so. His own people were badly shaken. Few of them had ever imagined an opening phase such as they'd just endured; none had ever actually witnessed its like. He settled deeper into his command chair, watching his plot, wondering, and the gleaming diamonds of his battlegroups crept across it toward the waiting wall of. Trevayne's warships.

The fleets were still beyond the range at which combat could even be thought of when the rebels received their next surprise.

As a lieutenant, Ian Trevayne had commanded the corvette Yang'tze. That starship had been only a little larger than any one of the launchers which now awoke on Ortega, Nelson, and Sonja Desai's monitors. Ortega and Nelson each mounted five of them; Zoroffand her sisters mounted only three each, and they'd sacrificed ninety percent of their normal armament to squeeze them in.

Those missiles wer to ess physical objects than energy states as they lunged at the rebel ships. Given the relatively i

Even at their speed, the HBM'S' range was such that Kellerman's sca

If the target was a small ship, the small ship died. A capital ship might absorb more than one hit but not even the most heavily shielded and armored ship could survive more than a very few.

Admiral Kellerman was not a man to panic, and he did not panic now. At such ranges, a high degree of accuracy was impossible, and nine of the first salvo were clean misses. His point defense ignored them, concentrating on the other thirteen, and his seasoned crews stopped ten of them short of his ships' shields. But three got throogh, and the assault carrier Hector vanished in a brilliant flare of light. He winced inwardly at the prodigious power of the new weapons and ordered his fighters launched to clear the suddenly threatened "safety" of their bays. And then Anton Kellerman got his final surprise.