In Death Ground Part 43

"All right!" It was hardly a professional report, but Prescott felt no inclination to reprimand b.i.+.c.het, for whoever had planned that attack had demonstrated impeccable timing. He and his command were still five light-minutes out, but the Bugs had been moving away from the warp point when the pods erupted in their rear. Over half of them had been destroyed, and even as they died, the first a.s.sault carriers came through the warp point. TFNS Amaretsu, Ajax, Minotaur, and Wizard led the way, followed by the Ophiuchi Zirk-Sefmaara and Zirk-Siraacan and five Terran fleet carriers. Missile-armed fighters spat from their catapults, and then the precious carriers wheeled and fled back towards Anderson Two. The remaining gunboats hesitated, clearly torn between continuing toward Prescott or turning on the fighters in their rear. But their hesitation was brief. They were outnumbered by the newly arrived fighters now, and the carriers' prompt departure deprived them of any stars.h.i.+p targets on the warp point. They swerved back onto their original courses, racing for Prescott's command, and he smiled cruelly.

"Launch the fighters, Jacques. Then reverse course."

"Aye, aye, Sir," b.i.+.c.het said with an answering smile.

The gunboats charged the enemy they had awaited for so long, but that enemy was no longer advancing. Instead, he expelled his own attack craft and then fell back, holding the range open, and the gunboats were doomed. They were slower than the attack craft swarming out from the warp point in pursuit, and they were armed with FRAMs and standard missiles for antis.h.i.+pping attacks, not AFHAWKs.

The attack craft killed the last of them four light-minutes short of their intended victims.

Fifteen days after a.s.suming command of Second Fleet, Raymond Prescott sat still and silent on his flag bridge, eyes burning, as the survivors of Operation Pesthouse limped brokenly back into Centauri. Half of his remaining capital s.h.i.+ps were under tow, abused engines crippled beyond repair, and only eight s.h.i.+ps - eight, out of Second Fleet's entire initial order of battle and Hannah Avram's relief force - were undamaged. He thought of Hannah and his eyes burned hotter, yet he'd done it. With her help - and Ellen MacGregor's - he'd obeyed Ivan Antonov's last order and gotten his people home.

But the price, he thought. Dear G.o.d, the price!

His memory replayed Ellen MacGregor's shocked disbelief when he informed her that he was Second Fleet's senior surviving officer... and that Hannah was dead as well. And her disbelief had turned to horror as his exhausted voice numbly detailed the Navy's losses. Thirty-two superdreadnoughts, eleven a.s.sault carriers, six fleet carriers, three light carriers, five battles.h.i.+ps, thirty battlecruisers, ten light cruisers, eleven hundred fighters, and twenty-eight support s.h.i.+ps had been destroyed outright, and the s.h.i.+ps which could still fight wouldn't have made three battlegroups. In three hundred years, the Terran Federation had never been more decisively defeated - nor lost so many splendid s.h.i.+ps.

And people.

He closed his eyes, clenching himself against the pain. The people. He still didn't have definitive casualty figures, but there were already over two hundred thousand confirmed dead, and all of it - all of it! - for a campaign which ended with the Alliance right where it was when it began. The Pesthouse disaster had crippled the offensive capability of the TFN. G.o.d only knew how that would affect the strategic balance, yet even more frightening than that was the dreadful firepower of those new, monster s.h.i.+ps. GHQ had decided to name them "monitors," for like the original ironclads of Old Terra, they were as slow and clumsy as they were terrifyingly well armored and armed. But slow or not, there was nothing between them and Centauri.

He sat gazing into his plot, drained and exhausted, and fear pulsed deep inside him. They would be coming for Centauri, those monitors. He knew it. And somehow the Alliance would have to stop them without three-quarters of Home Fleet... or Hannah Avram or Ivan Antonov.

Somehow.

Chapter Forty-four.

The Black Hole of Centauri

The Fleet made its way back along the warp chain down which the enemy had been lured. There was no opposition, yet even with damaged units under tow, the enemy was too fast to overhaul, and the blocking force had been trapped and expended for minimal results. Its extermination had further weakened the Fleet, but now the survivors of all the attack forces had gathered, joined by the first of the special ramming units. It was the most powerful force the Fleet had ever a.s.sembled - not simply in this war, but ever - yet its catastrophic gunboat losses imposed delay. It dared not confront enemy attack craft without a powerful gunboat force, and so all of those ma.s.sive stars.h.i.+ps waited while the small craft it needed were rushed to it.

Hundreds of feet scuffed as Ellen MacGregor's senior officers rose, and she crossed the auditorium stage with a brisk, determined stride and her jaw set in a confident jut. Her staff followed, and she deliberately refrained from looking over her shoulder at them. She'd made the public demeanor she expected of them clear in terms no one could possibly have misunderstood.

She reached the lectern between the long conference table and the edge of the stage and turned with parade ground precision to take her place behind it. Her staffers seated themselves at the table behind her, joining her second in command and his staff, and she took a moment to turn and smile tightly at Raymond Prescott. He looked less harrowed and exhausted than he had. That still left a lot of room for improvement, but however exhausted he might be, at least he'd evinced none of the bleak despair or outright panic which hovered over Centauri's inhabited planets like an evil fog. He's got a h.e.l.l of a lot better right to feel those things than certain other people, too, she told herself. Like that son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h Mukerji.

She allowed herself a fleeting, sharklike grin at the thought of the political admiral. All of Operation Pesthouse's surviving flag officers - except one - had distinguished themselves during Second Fleet's grim retreat. Mukerji hadn't. In fact, an iron-voiced Prescott had been forced to relieve him when he'd revealed the soft, panicky center most of his peers had always suspected was there. Agamemnon Waldeck had, predictably, objected in the strongest terms and even gone so far as to propose Mukerji for command of TF 43, the orbital forts covering the Anderson One warp point. MacGregor, however, had been unimpressed by the Naval Oversight Committee chairman's arguments and, backed to the hilt by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had confirmed Prescott's decision and sent Mukerji packing with an alacrity she knew would have delighted Hannah Avram. It had certainly delighted Mukerji (in the short term, at least), for it had gotten him out of Alpha Centauri and away from the Bug juggernaut he confidently expected to hammer the system flat. It was probable that he would get over his panic once he was certain his own hide was safe, but while it was remotely possible that Waldeck's patronage might be able to find him some form of employment one day, MacGregor's scathingly brutal a.s.sessment of his state when she approved his relief should keep him from ever again commanding in action.

But her grin faded as she turned back to face the well-filled auditorium, and she scolded herself for dwelling on Mukerji. He'd proven how amply he deserved to be slapped down, yet she knew the savagery with which she'd done that slapping owed even more to her own reaction to the loss of Ivan Antonov and Hannah Avram than to her longstanding contempt for him.

Well, what if it did? she asked herself coldly. The son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h had it coming, and if kicking his a.s.s is the only thing I do to compensate for my own sheer, howling terror I'm at least in better shape than certain of my esteemed political masters! Or, for that matter, she added grimly, than most of my military subordinates.

"Be seated, ladies and gentlemen," she invited, and feet scuffed once more as her officers - primarily Terran and Ophiuchi, but with a few Tabbies and even a handful of Gorm scattered among them - did whatever their respective species described with the verb "sit."

She let her eyes sweep their tense, silent ranks and felt their anxiety like a barely contained forest fire, probing at the firebreaks she'd labored to erect around it. Ellen MacGregor knew about war, for she'd gone straight from the Academy into the closing stages of the Theban War, yet in all her years of service, she'd never sensed anything quite like this. There was a brittleness to her subordinates, a stunned desperation overlaid by lingering disbelief. That was especially true of the Terrans out there, for it was their fleet which had been so savagely mauled, but that same brittle, disbelieving fear - resignation, almost - clung to the nonhumans as well. Hannah Avram had been perhaps the most respected human officer of her generation. Her loss would have been a blow under any circ.u.mstances; coupled with Ivan Antonov's death, it had hit the Alliance squarely between the eyes with staggering power. For sixty years, the navies of the Grand Alliance - all of them, not just the TFN - had regarded Antonov as the galaxy's greatest living naval commander, the admiral who stood alone as the only true heir to Howard Anderson and Varnik'sheerino. He'd been more than simply the military commander of the Grand Alliance. He'd been its icon, its living war banner. Now that banner had fallen, and with its destruction, the Bugs had destroyed the cert.i.tude of the officers who'd followed it into battle.

And the way they did it only makes it worse, MacGregor conceded. They sucked us in - all of us, not just Antonov - and then jumped us with those G.o.dawful monitors. Maybe if we'd really listened to LeBlanc it wouldn't have hit us so hard, but we didn't. Despite the gunboats, despite the a.s.sault Fleet, despite the plasma gun, we never truly believed - not deep down inside - that the Bugs could out-innovate us. We were so sure they'd have to play perpetual technological catch-up that it never occurred to us they might actually produce something that gave them the advantage in hardware, and we were just as confident of our ability to outthink and outfight them. They were simply a huge, unthinking, elemental force, not an opponent capable of a.n.a.lysis and strategic innovation. She snorted mentally. Yeah. Sure they were!

She shook off the thought as she realized her audience had settled into its chairs (or whatever). Ten days had pa.s.sed since Raymond Prescott led his crippled fleet back to Centauri, and MacGregor sometimes thought she, Kthaara'zarthan, Oscar Pederson, and Prescott were the only four people in the galaxy who realized how priceless those days had been. In addition to her role as Fourth Fleet's CO, she'd found herself tapped as the Federation's acting representative to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but that responsibility, at least, had been one she could entrust to other hands. She knew enough about Tabbies to recognize how terribly his vilkshatha brother's death had hit Lord Talphon, but he'd let neither grief nor his hunger for vilknarma divert him from his duties as the Joint Chiefs' new chairman. He and his nonhuman colleagues had worked beyond exhaustion to squeeze out every possible reinforcement for Centauri, but they'd remained tactfully distant from the purely human side of the situation. Especially the political one.

MacGregor deeply appreciated their efforts to bolster Fourth Fleet, and she understood why they'd stepped aside from the political aspects of the crisis. She only wished she could do the same, but that was out of the question. She and Pederson had worn themselves hoa.r.s.e trying to quell the panic of such notable war leaders as Bettina Wister (who'd left the very morning after Prescott's return - with indecent haste - for an emergency a.s.sembly session on Old Terra... thank G.o.d!) without success, yet their own officers were almost worse. They might not run around in circles waving their hands and squealing like that political wh.o.r.e Wister, but their numb lack of anything resembling aggressiveness made MacGregor feel as if she were swimming in tapioca. Perhaps it was only her imagination, but things certainly looked better to her than they had ten days ago! Fourth Fleet had acquired sixteen more superdreadnoughts and nine more battles.h.i.+ps, counting new arrivals and the combat capable survivors of Second Fleet and Hannah Avram's relief force. Some of those survivors were still being worked on by the repair s.h.i.+ps, but all were fit for service under emergency conditions, and if her minefields weren't yet as heavy as she wanted, they were five times heavier than they had been. All of that should be evident to every person in this auditorium from Jeremiah Dillinger's daily status reports. Yet try as she might, the bulk of her officers seemed unable to drag themselves out of their slough of despond, and she was getting more than a bit tired of it.

Well, she thought, if this news doesn't get them off their b.u.t.ts, our morale's in even worse shape than I thought! She inhaled deeply, propped her forearms on the lectern, and leaned across it to address the a.s.sembly in clear, crisp tones.

"Thirtieth Least Fang Harniaar and his task force will arrive in Centauri at approximately 0730 local tomorrow," she told them, and a stir, more sensed than seen, rustled through the auditorium. It wasn't strong enough to call relief, but MacGregor decided to regard it as headed in that direction.

"His arrival will increase our battle-line strength by twenty-seven percent, double our battlecruiser strength, and increase our mobile units' combined fighter strength by eighty-four percent," she went on briskly. "In fact, our order of battle will be stronger in every unit category, except superdreadnoughts, than Second Fleet was for Pesthouse. And with the additional support of Centauri Sky Watch plus the advantage of a defensive position directly atop a warp point, our effective combat power will be at least six times as great!"

She smiled fiercely, but there were no answering smiles from her audience, and she felt her own congeal. That frozen, singing tension remained. It was as if her officers couldn't quite make themselves believe in their own advantages, as if some inner part of them could see anything she said only as an effort to jolly them along. She felt their misgivings mocking her... but she felt something else, as well, and a dangerous light flickered in her dark brown eyes. She closed her mouth, firm lips tightening in an ominous line, and glared at the silent rows of officers for a long, smoldering moment. And then, deliberately, she stepped around the lectern. She walked to the very edge of the stage and put her hands behind her, gripping them fiercely together as she glared out at Fourth Fleet's command structure, and her voice was harsh.

"All right, ladies and gentlemen," she half-snapped and half-snarled. "Let's get this out in the open, shall we?" Her hard, contemptuous tone sent another stir through the audience - one of uneasy surprise this time - and she smiled a thin, unpleasant smile. "Oh, come now! Surely someone out there would like to address the point so obviously on everyone's mind!"

No one spoke, and she rocked on her toes, bouncing up and down in short, sharp arcs that reminded the humans in her audience of the flick-flick-flicking tail of an irate tigress.

"No? Then I'll address it," she told their silence flatly. "We - and by 'we' I mean, specifically, the Terran Federation Navy - got our a.s.s kicked. To date, counting all known losses, the Bugs have destroyed almost three hundred and forty TFN s.h.i.+ps. In case some of you haven't run the figures, that's twenty-eight percent of our prewar hulls and over fifty percent of our prewar tonnage. Oh, and let's not forget the sixty-four capital s.h.i.+ps out of action for major repairs or the 'combat capable' units of our own fleet which still have unrepaired battle damage. Then there's Pesthouse itself. In addition to most of Home Fleet, we've lost Admiral van der Gelder, Admiral Taathaanahk, Sky Marshal Avram, and Admiral Antonov. Worse, we lost all those s.h.i.+ps and all those people because we f.u.c.ked up. We walked right into it - all of us. We and our allies saw what we wanted to see, what the Bugs wanted us to see, and we screwed up by the numbers, didn't we? Be honest, ladies and gentlemen," she invited scathingly. "We've just been guests of honor for the biggest cl.u.s.ter-f.u.c.k in our mutual histories, and all of us, and especially every Terran officer in this auditorium, are scared to death, aren't we?" She glared at the a.s.sembled officers, chin jutting aggressively, shoulders squared, eyes snapping, and still no one spoke.

"Well, we've got reason to be scared," she went on in a marginally gentler voice. "We've been hammered, we've lost our best commanders and our most experienced units, and we're it - the entire mobile defense force - for Centauri and Sol. And just to make things worse, the Bugs have acquired command datalink and introduced an entirely new s.h.i.+p type bigger and nastier and lots, lots tougher than anything we've got. Does that just about sum it up?"

Again, no one replied from the auditorium seats, but this time a voice spoke up behind her.

"Yes, Sir," Raymond Prescott said with poison-dry wryness. "I guess that does sum it up, just about."

MacGregor turned her head, and he smiled crookedly at her. It was a battered and tired smile, but far from a beaten one, and she smiled back.

"I'm glad to hear that, Admiral Prescott," she told him. "I was beginning to think we might have a serious problem here." Prescott's smile became a grin, and a few people in the audience actually chuckled. The laughter sounded surprised, as if its authors couldn't quite believe they'd produced it, but it was real, and MacGregor swung back to face the seats.

"All right, people," she said, and her voice had replaced its brief humor with adamantine determination, "let's cut to the chase. The Bugs are coming. When they get here, they're going to throw a simultaneous a.s.sault transit into our faces at a time of their own choosing. They're going to cover that a.s.sault with hundreds, probably thousands, of gunboats, and they're going to back it up with superdreadnoughts and these new 'monitors' of theirs, and the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds will have command datalink. Taking everything into account, this will probably be the most powerful warp point a.s.sault in history. And do you know what's going to happen when they launch it?"

Not a voice spoke, and she swiveled her head, sweeping her eyes across them all in slow, remorseless arc, as she let the silence stretch out. Then she snapped it.

"What's going to happen, ladies and gentlemen, is that we're going to reduce their fancy new s.h.i.+ps, and their gunboats, and their a.s.sault fleet - and them - to plasma. We've got the s.h.i.+ps, and the forts, and the fighters, and the weapons we need, all backed up by the greatest industrial capacity in the known galaxy, and we are d.a.m.ned well going to turn the Centauri System into a Bug-eating black hole. People, I don't give a good G.o.dd.a.m.n what they have. All I care about is what we have, and we are going to mine that warp point until I can frigging well walk across it! We're going to cover it with energy platforms, and missile pods, and forts, and capital s.h.i.+ps, and combat s.p.a.ce patrols, and we are f.u.c.king well going to kill any Bug that sticks its ugly snout through it! And if any of you think we're not going to do those things - or if even one of you gives me any less than a one thousand percent effort - being eaten by Bugs will be the least of your worries! "Is that perfectly clear?"

The silence was different now - a ringing stillness, crackling about her, and she nodded.

"Good," she said mildly. "In that case, let's get down to the nuts and bolts of just how we're going to do that, shall we?"

Raymond Prescott tipped his chair clear back, stretched and yawned hugely, and propped his heels on the briefing room table to survey his staff wearily.

"Does that just about cover it, Anthea?" he asked, and Captain Mandagalla scrolled back through the notes on her own terminal.

"Just about, Sir," she agreed after a moment. "Admiral LeBlanc's agreed to your request to a.s.sign Captain Chung as your staff spook - I understand there was quite a bit of compet.i.tion for his services; Admiral Trevayne even wanted him on Old Terra - and he'll be reporting tomorrow morning. And you've got that com conference with Admiral MacGregor, Admiral Chamhandar, and Fang Harniaar tomorrow, as well. I think we've got most everything nailed down in preparation, but Jacques and I don't have the latest readiness updates yet."

"Um." Prescott rubbed his eyes with his organic hand and wished he could scrub away his fatigue. But it was better than the retreat from Anderson Five had been. He told himself that at least six times a day, and one of these days he was actually going to begin believing it.

He smiled - or grimaced, at least - at the thought, and then again, more naturally, at the memory of now MacGregor had kick-started her officers. He was probably the only other officer in Fourth Fleet who could truly understand how she must feel, given that he was also the only other officer who'd suddenly found himself in the shoes of both Ivan Antonov and Hannah Avram, and he hadn't envied her a bit as she struggled with her subordinates' shattered morale. Her decision to transfer her flag from Amaretsu to the hastily repaired Xingu had been a statement of her determination to carry on for Hannah, and Prescott had done his dead level best to support her by projecting the confidence she needed from him, but they'd both been fighting a losing battle... until she decided to kick a.s.s. Ivan Antonov couldn't have done it better himself, he thought, and if there truly is an afterlife, he and Hannah must be laughing their a.s.ses off watching MacGregor. I hope they are, anyway. They deserve it.

He drew a deep breath, unaware of how his smile had softened, then shook himself.

"All right, then!" he said briskly. "You and Jacques can fine-tune the readiness numbers for me before the conference, Anthea, but leave it until tomorrow. For right now, I think we can all use some sack time."

The last gunboats arrived under their own power. There were barely two thousand of them, yet the Fleet dared delay no longer. The system beyond the warp point boasted ma.s.sive industrial capacity. It could undoubtedly build attack craft very quickly and in large numbers. Further delay was thus likely to work in the enemy's favor, despite the new s.h.i.+p types.

"- so as I see it, we've actually got two objectives here, Lord Kolaas," Admiral MacGregor said to Least Fang Harniaar. "First, of course, we have to hold Centauri and protect The Gateway. But just as important, it seems to me, is the need to knock the Bugs back on their heels in a way that every citizen of the Grand Alliance can understand."

She paused, watching the Orion commander of Task Force 42 on her split com screen in Xingu's flag briefing room. The least fang had surrendered twelve superdreadnoughts to Prescott in return for the same number of Terran and Ophiuchi carriers and a.s.sault carriers, for it had gone without saying that he would command Fourth Fleet's strikefighters. Now he combed his whiskers with his claws, slowly and thoughtfully, then nodded in a human gesture of agreement.

"You are, of course, correct Ahhhdmiraal MaaacGregggorr," he yowled in the Tongue of Tongues. "Your people have been understandably anxious" - MacGregor's tips twitched wryly at the Tabby's choice of words - " since the failure of Operation Pesthouse, but my own have been equally stunned by Second Fleet's losses and their implications for the future conduct of the war."

He paused, and Raymond Prescott and Vice Admiral Ira Chamhandar nodded in grim understanding from their own quadrants of MacGregor's screen. From the outset, the Grand Alliance had tasked the TFN as its primary offensive striking force. The Terran fleet, bigger and more powerful than any of its allies and supported by the most potent industrial machine in the galaxy, had been the only logical choice for the role. But whatever happened when the Bugs attacked Centauri, the TFN would be launching no new offensives any time soon. Simply replacing its lost hulls - and training the personnel to man them - would require at least a full year, and replacement alone wouldn't be enough. The Bugs' now possessed both command datalink and those new, mammoth monitors, and for all MacGregor's brave words, no one really knew if a monitor-led a.s.sault could be stopped. Even if it could, any sustained offensive would require the Grand Alliance to build vessels of matching weight and power, and that was going to add a minimum of eighteen more months to the wait.

"Given those implications," Harniaar went on levelly, "you are quite correct, Ahhhdmiraal. I do not know if it is possible to damage the enemy's morale, but it is imperative to restore our own with a resounding success here. And, of course, it would be most desirable to inflict sufficient losses upon the enemy to induce him to abandon further immediate offensives."

"Precisely," MacGregor said, "and that's why-"

The shrill, atonal scream of Xingu's General Quarters alarm cut off whatever she'd been about to say.

Two thousand gunboats and a hundred and fifty light cruisers erupted into Centauri s.p.a.ce. Fourth Fleet's RD2s had kept a cautious eye on the Bugs in Anderson One, but it appeared the Bugs had realized that. They might not know precisely how it was being accomplished, but they'd allowed for the possibility, and their stars.h.i.+ps sprang almost instantly from normal standby procedures to all out attack. There was virtually no warning before the gunboats roared off their external racks and the a.s.sault fleet's light cruisers lunged for the warp point. Only the fact that the Bugs had been forced to hold their forces beyond SBMHAWK range of the warp point bought Fourth Fleet any time at all, but the first gunboat still burst into Centauri less than fifty seconds after the recon drones which warned of its coming.

Yet Ira Chamhandar's command fort had already sounded the alarm, and the combat s.p.a.ce patrol on the warp point was alerted. MacGregor's stars.h.i.+ps, twenty-five light seconds, from the warp point, received the warning fifteen seconds later than Chamhandar, and they were still charging to battle stations when the first Bugs appeared, but the warning was sufficient for the ready duty carriers and Orion battle-line units to launch. Three hundred and twenty fighters streaked towards the warp point, flas.h.i.+ng in to join the two hundred forty-strong CSP, and then the mines began to detonate.

Twenty-one light cruisers interpenetrated on transit. That was a somewhat higher percentage than usual, yet it would have been acceptable... normally.

But these were not normal conditions, for the Fleet had never encountered such mine densities before, and the new datalink systems' ability to coordinate point defense conferred no advantage. This was a closed warp point. The enemy could place mines directly atop it, and he had. There was no clear zone, no s.p.a.ce in which transit-addled electronics could recover. The deadly mines streaked in to blow s.h.i.+p after s.h.i.+p out of s.p.a.ce; the fortresses which had been at immediate readiness added their fury to the holocaust; attack craft streaked in, salvoing missiles at the gunboats; and a bright, terrible sphere of flame blazed about the warp point.

"My G.o.d, Sir!" Commander Aburish sounded as if he couldn't believe his own readouts. "It looks like - It is, by G.o.d!" He wheeled to MacGregor with a savage smile. "According to Plotting, Admiral, we've just scored a one hundred percent kill on their cruisers!"

"Outstanding!" MacGregor bared her own teeth, then shook herself. "Gunboats?"

"Harder to say, Sir. Several hundred, at least, but they're much harder mine targets. The CSP caught them with their point defense degraded and nailed a lot of them, and our own strike is on its way in, but-" He shrugged, and MacGregor nodded, then flicked her eyes to Raymond Prescott's portion of her com screen.

"The battle-line will advance to support the forts, Admiral Prescott," she said formally.

The area about the warp point became a wild, swirling melee as fishtailing fighters and gunboats spun and snapped at one another. The standing combat s.p.a.ce patrol had exhausted its missiles, but the human and Ophiuchi pilots closed grimly with their internal lasers. The gunboats had suffered terrible losses in the initial strikes, and despite their speed and relatively tiny size a small percentage had been picked off by mines, as well. But half of them had carried AFHAWKs, and all of them had their own internal weapons. Fighters began to die in the vicious, fiery spits of deep-s.p.a.ce death, and then the first Bug superdreadnought rumbled through the warp point.

An incandescent halo racked the huge s.h.i.+p's s.h.i.+elds as the minefield attacked, but the a.s.sault fleet's light cruisers had not died entirely in vain, for they'd drawn in many of the mines directly atop the closed warp point, thinning the field's density. What remained was sufficient to wound the Bug leviathan cruelly, but not to kill it outright, and even as it wallowed in its agony, a second and third superdreadnought followed it into Centauri s.p.a.ce. More mines streaked to attack them, as well, but with steadily diminis.h.i.+ng power, and Ira Chamhandar's eyes were hard.

"Release the pods to local fire control," he told his ops officer coldly. Fresh orders flashed out from his command fort, and the energy-armed Type Three and Four OWPs closest to the warp point acknowledged their instructions. Their fire control activated the shoals of SBMHAWKs slaved to it, firing them in individual, carefully controlled salvos, vomiting sprint-mode capital missiles against the air-bleeding wrecks which had survived the mines' fury, and s.p.a.ce itself shuddered as antimatter warheads tore at their targets.

The gunboats realized what was happening, and half of the survivors swerved for the fortresses. But the OWPs' energy weapons flamed in response, and the stupendous "escort" fortresses - two-hundred-thousand-tonne bases designed and armed solely to kill missiles and fighters... or gunboats - smashed them by the score even as Allied fighters raced up their wakes. s.p.a.ce was littered with the hideous debris of what once had been gunboats, yet some broke through to hurl themselves bodily upon the forts with full FRAM loads. s.h.i.+elds flashed, armor vaporized, and men and women died as the blast ripped deep into the fortresses' compartments.

"They're getting through to the forts, Sir," Anthea Mandagalla said tautly.

"How bad is it?" Prescott demanded, never taking his eyes from his own plot. His heavy missile s.h.i.+ps were almost in range to begin punching SBMs and capital missiles into the holocaust on the warp point, and a sort of deep, visceral horror gnawed at his guts as he watched still more superdreadnoughts transit unflinchingly into the maelstrom. Nothing should just keep coming that way, yet they did, and for all its fury, the warp point crucible was less terrible than it had been. The mines were being worn away - not swept, but absorbed - and the fortresses had expended most of their missile pods... or died.

"It could be worse, but it's not good," Jacques b.i.+.c.het answered for the chief of staff. "CIC estimates hard kills on forty superdreadnoughts, but they've taken out six forts completely, and a dozen more are badly damaged."

"Admiral Chamhandar's released the Alpha Group energy platforms, Sir!" Commander Hale called out, and then b.i.+.c.het nodded decisively.

"SBM range, Sir!" he announced sharply.

"Fire as you bear," Raymond Prescott said harshly.

The warp point was a sphere of fiery death, far worse than the Fleet's projections. But the Fleet had allowed for the possibility that its estimates might err. It had sent sixty superdreadnoughts through the invisible hole in s.p.a.ce, and courier drones told the tale of destruction which had awaited them. But another fifty superdreadnoughts waited in reserve, backed by the new, larger s.h.i.+ps, and those who had led the way had weakened the mines and begun the destruction of the enemy's fortresses.

The attack would continue.

"That's fifty superdreadnoughts confirmed destroyed, Sir," Fahd Aburish said, and Ellen MacGregor nodded silent acknowledgment. Fifty, she thought almost calmly. That's six more than our entire superdreadnought strength, and the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are still coming through!

Xingu staggered as a Bug SBM exploded against her s.h.i.+elds. The fleet flags.h.i.+p was a part of Prescott's TF 41, and the Bugs had almost two dozen intact superdreadnoughts - most the missile-heavy Archers or the new Arbalest-cla.s.s command s.h.i.+ps - in Centauri. Those s.h.i.+ps were all damaged to greater or lesser extent, but they were also missile armed, and the survivors had command datalink. Their salvos were as heavy as the ones thundering down upon them, and they were concentrating their fire on Fourth Fleet's battle-line.

Stupid of them, MacGregor thought. They've got to clear the forts out of their way before they can even think about moving in system, and tonne-for-tonne, an OWP is a h.e.l.l of a lot more heavily armed than a superdreadnought or a battles.h.i.+p!

"Admiral Chamhandar's released the Alpha Group platforms, Sir," Aburish said, and MacGregor smiled an ugly smile.

The invading Bug stars.h.i.+ps had absorbed the fury of most of the mines within a half light-second of the warp point, winning at least a limited s.p.a.ce in which their consorts could deploy and fight. But the mines had been only a part of Ellen MacGregor and Ira Chamhandar's fixed defenses. Now Chamhandar's command fortress transmitted yet another activation code, and two hundred-plus laser buoys flamed as one. A solid phalanx of X-ray lasers sleeted through the Bugs, ignoring s.h.i.+elds to rip deep into armor and alloy, and a baying cheer echoed from Xingu's CIC as every single enemy s.h.i.+p on the warp point blew apart.