* * *
The gunboats recognized what the enemy intended, but they were willing to accept his sacrificial gambit, even at the price of their own destruction, for those had to be his last combat-capable units. With them gone, there would be nothing to prevent the other attack forces' new, fast battle-cruisers from overhauling and smashing his wounded ships on their long road home.
* * *
"ETA twenty minutes," Bichet announced. Prescott nodded acknowledgment without looking away from the plot. At least it won't take long against this many of them, he thought. I wonder—
"Sir! Admiral Prescott!" The sudden shout jerked his attention to his com officer, and his eyebrows flew up as he saw the wild exultation transfiguring Commander Hale's face. "Sky Marshal Avram!" she blurted. "Sky Marshal Avram is on the priority channel!"
* * *
Hannah Avram's heart twisted as her cloaked starships streaked past the first staggering, broken wrecks. She could feel the agonized exhaustion with which those ships clawed towards home. Second Fleet hadn't been defeated; it had been shattered, yet its survivors fought on, and she remembered Second Lorelei. This was the second time she'd seen the wreckage of a Terran Fleet, and heartbreak warred with pride as she watched that wreckage which had refused to die.
"I have Admiral Prescott, Sir," her com officer said.
"Prescott?"
"Yes, Sir." The com officer sounded stunned, as if he couldn't believe his own words. "Admiral Antonov is dead, Sir."
It hit Hannah like a fist, and even through her shock, she knew it would hit every other Terran officer—and all of their allies—with equal ferocity. But for now she was grateful for her shock. It kept the news from being real while she grappled with what she had to do, and she turned to her com screen as Raymond Prescott's exhausted, harrowed face appeared upon it.
"I'm coming in cloaked from your zero-zero-six, zero-zero-niner," she said flatly. "I have seventeen superdreadnoughts, ten battleships, eleven battle-cruisers, and twelve heavy cruisers, but no carriers. Keep coming; I estimate contact in twenty-three minutes. Stay alive, Raymond. Keep them bunched and concentrating on you until I can hit them by surprise, but stay alive!"
* * *
Raymond Prescott turned away from his com screen.
"Jacques, new orders for Kinkaid! All of her fighters stay with us."
"Yes, Sir!"
Icons shifted wildly as the fighters which had already passed Crete broke back towards her. The gunboats were only sixteen minutes out; he had to survive for five minutes, and without those other fighters, he wouldn't.
Minutes limped into eternity. His own sensors hadn't picked up the Sky Marshal yet, but he knew she was there . . . and the Bugs didn't. He watched the gunboats sweeping closer. Ten minutes out. Eight. Six. Kinkaid's fighters smashed into them head-on, and the plot was ugly with the fireballs of dying gunboats and allied pilots. His Dunkerques began punching SBMs and capital missiles into the Bugs, and the furnace roared hotter. Four minutes. Two. Crete's missile batteries began to fire, and then the madness was upon him.
TF 21 and its supporting, scratch-built battlegroups writhed under a tsunami of gunboats. Ships twisted and danced in wild evasion maneuvers, and the visual displays were a kaleidoscope of explosions. The battleship Timoléon was the first to die, then the superdreadnoughts Ellesmere and Namcha Barwa. Crete's sisters Titicaca and Lake Michigan followed, then the battle-cruiser Arizona and her squadron mate Moltke. But even as they were pounded to pieces, they fired back in an orgy of mutual destruction and hate. It went on and on, seconds stretching into hours and minutes into eternities, and Crete staggered again and again. Her shields were down, her armor shattered, her breached hull belching air, but somehow she lived and killed and killed and killed . . .
And then, suddenly, Hannah Avram was there. Her undamaged, unshaken ships slammed into the Bugs like the hammer of God, and they flushed their XO racks as they came. The gunboats had been so intent on their prey they never even saw her coming, and the fresh hurricane of fire took them totally by surprise.
It was the Bugs' turn to die, caught between two fires. But they, too, struck back. The superdreadnoughts Luzon and Palawan, the SDEs Mercedari, Tasmania, and Paricutan, and the battleships San Genera and Terrible had raced all the way from Centauri to Anderson Four in just fourteen days only to die, but they accomplished their mission. The Bug gunboats burned like a prairie fire, and in their ashes lay the survival of what remained of Second Fleet.
Yet there was one last, agonizing price for the Terran Federation Navy to pay. Even as Hannah Avram's ops officer announced success and she turned to her com link to Crete, one last flurry of gunboats evaded every weapon targeted upon them in their death runs. They salvoed their external ordnance and followed it in, tearing deep into TFNS Xingú's armored hull, and Raymond Prescott's com screen went blank with terrible, sudden finality.
* * *
The gunboats' destruction was final. The Fleet had no idea how many enemy starships had come to their fellows' rescue, nor of how they could have avoided the blocking gunboat force which should have stopped them, but there was no point in sending battle-cruisers and CLs against such heavy units without battle-line support. Courier drones were sent ahead, alerting the forces still between the enemy and home, but although the waiting gunboats might harass them, they were too weak to stop them.
The trap had failed . . . but not completely. The enemy had been decisively crippled, and all four attack forces would pursue as rapidly as possible. The Fleet would arrive on his heels, and this time it would send no mere survey force into the system from whence he had come.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Road With No End
"No question about it, Sir," Feridoun Hafezi reported with as much briskness as any of them could manage these days. "They've entered the system in force this time—fourteen battle-cruisers."
Rear Admiral Sommers nodded and looked around the haggard faces of Survey Flotilla 19's staff—the faces of people who had, in all probability, just been condemned to death. Irritatingly, at this moment when she had far better uses for it, her mind flew back in space and time to their fourth warp transit from Anderson One, and she couldn't repress a wholly inappropriate smile.
"Well, Feridoun, remember when we'd just transited into that starless warp nexus and you hoped that maybe we could go someplace where things would be more interesting?"
The chief of staff grimaced. "Yes . . . I did, didn't I? Now I finally understand why combat veterans never seem to mind being bored!"
It had been just after that, with their warp point survey of that stretch of space still in progress, when they'd become aware of the Bug forces closing in behind them. Where they could have come from along this barren warp chain, and what their presence implied about the fate of Second Fleet, were questions Sommers hadn't had the luxury of contemplating. Instead, she'd had to make an impossible decision. Trying to fight her way home through enemy forces of unknown size hadn't even been an option; SF 19 was no battle fleet. Forging on into the unknown on the one-in-a-million chance of finding a warp chain that doubled back to Allied space had seemed an equally preposterous alternative. But it had been the only alternative she'd had, and she had ordered the Huns to redouble their efforts to find a second warp point.
They'd succeeded . . . just as one of the probing Bug gunboats stumbled onto the cloaked Terran ships. It sounded the alarm before it died, and they'd been unable to prevent the packs of pursuing gunboats from observing them as they fled towards the newly discovered warp point They'd emerged into the domain of a red giant that had long since incinerated any planets it might have possessed. Without even pausing for breath, Sommers had ordered her Huns to spread out in a desperate quest for warp points while the gunslingers turned at bay against the pursuers they'd known would be through the warp point close behind them.
Her fighters had sent the initial wave of gunboats reeling back through the warp point. Then the real pursuit burst
on them in mass simultaneous transits of gunboats and cruisers, followed by waves of battle-cruisers. Sommers' combatants had battered them back through the warp point again, winning priceless time for the scout cruisers' frantic search for a warp point.
TFNS Inca, which had found the way out of the last system, had repeated her feat while there was still time. Sommers had ordered the flotilla toward the newly discovered warp point, but fresh Bug gunboats had poured into the system just as the fighter screen she'd left behind had come to the end of its life support and begun to withdraw. A desperate dogfight had swirled across the red giant's sky, and the damaged battle cruiser Kalinin, her crew evacuated, had been left behind to an attention-distracting self-immolation. But the flotilla had, in the end, managed to transit undetected, leaving behind the cooling plasma that had been the gunboats which might have pinpointed the escape-hatch warp point. And Sommers had been able to breathe again, in the feeble light of the type M red main-sequence star into whose system they'd materialized.
Ten days had passed before the Bugs found their way into the new system and sent clouds of gunboats probing into it while their battle-cruisers sat watchfully on the warp point. Sommers' ships, in cloaked battlegroups built around the Huns, had commenced a nerve-racking game of cat and mouse as the search for yet another new warp point went on.
Then, three days after the Bugs' arrival, four of their gunboats blundered into Sommers' carriers and freighters. Hastily launched fighters had blasted them out of space and then rendezvoused with their carriers beyond scanner range. SF 19, reprieved once more, had resumed its cloaked maneuverings. But the Bugs, with their enemies' presence in the system positively confirmed, had intensified their search. And now, three days later, they'd been reinforced, bringing their total in-system strength to thirty-two battle-cruisers and God knew how many gunboats. . . .
"Yes," Sommers said, dragging her mind back to the staff meeting, "I believe the situation has ceased to be desperate and become serious." A couple of people smiled. "We now need to decide what changes, if any, to make in our survey procedure." She indicated the display screen. It was no holotank, but two dimensions were all that was required to display the orbital plane of this system's cold, worthless planets. It showed the warp point through which they'd entered and on which the Bug battle-cruisers now squatted sullenly, a hundred and twenty light-minutes out from the red star on a bearing about thirty degrees "east" of the display's arbitrary north. Other icons showed the elements into which SF 19 had been divided, probing in regions closer to the system primary. "The floor is now open to suggestions. Yes, Feridoun?"
The chief of staff cleared his throat. "Admiral, in my considered judgment, the arrival of more Bug battle-cruisers lends added force to the argument I've made before."
In private, Sommers mentally interjected. Now it seemed he'd decided to go public. "Why is that?" she asked aloud.
"Operating in the inner system, so close to our entry warp point, maximizes our vulnerability to detection by the battle-cruisers there. The presence of additional battle-cruisers makes the risk we're running an even more unacceptable one."
Sommers decided not to make an issue of Hafezi's arguably improper use of the word unacceptable. "You're aware of the basis for my orders."
"Yes, Sir: you're firmly convinced that the warp point we're looking for is a Type Seven, all known examples of which occur within ninety light-minutes of their system primaries." Hafezi drew a deep breath. "Admiral, I have utmost respect for the extensive survey experience on which you base this . . . hunch. But I must point out that only nine percent of all open warp points are Type Sevens. And all the other ninety-one percent are located at greater distances from their primaries—usually at considerably greater distances. I therefore recommend that we discontinue our inner-system survey and turn our attention to the outer system, where the probability of finding a warp point is eleven times greater and where we can perform survey operations beyond the enemy battle-cruisers' sensor range."
Sommers restrained an angry retort—she had opened the floor to suggestions, and Hafezi hadn't quite strayed over the line into insubordination. "There's something in what you say, Commodore. But I would remind you that the Bugs, presumably following the same line of logic as yourself, have sent their gunboats to the system's outer limits and begun a gradual inward sweep. And while gunboat sensors aren't as powerful as those of battle-cruisers, there are a lot more of them." She held the chief of staff's eyes. "At any rate, that is all secondary. The central point is that the region we're in now is the place to find a Type Seven. And that, in my 'considered judgment,' is precisely what we're looking for."
Hafezi's eyes didn't waver. "I respectfully disagree, Sir."
They continued to lock eyes while the rest of the staffers tried to be inconspicuous and Sommers wondered why the chief of staff was so determined to make this a contest of wills. Could it be, came the unwelcome question, because I'm a woman?
Feridoun came from a tradition of educated cosmopolitanism; serving under a Westerner wouldn't gall him. But a woman . . . ?
It wasn't even that she was a Western woman. There was a strain in Islam which had always equated Western woman with whore, but he'd no more have any truck with that than Sommers would with the trashier elements of the West's past. Indeed, an Islamic woman might actually have been worse, summoning up from his mental background certain assumptions about the proper roles of the sexes that not even his austere and intellectualized form of Islam had ever entirely exorcized.
But none of that mattered, for Sommers was in command, and she had to stay there if they were to have any hope, however forlorn, of survival. Attempts to command by committee—or COs who waffled when decision time came—were a prescription for disaster Aileen Sommers had no intention of following. And, she thought grimly, given that a Type Seven is our only real chance to get out of this system alive, I'm not about to debate logic-versus-instinct with anyone.
"Your objection is noted, Commodore, and you may have it on record in any form you wish. Nevertheless, we will continue to conduct our survey as per my orders. Is that clear?" Sommers' final question was not just for Hafezi, for her eyes swept over the entire staff.
Only one other pair of eyes wavered under that regard. Commander Arabella Maningo, the logistics officer, looked left and right as though searching for something that wasn't there. When she spoke, her voice was at first quiet to the point of inaudibility and level to the point of expressionlessness, only gradually taking on a high quaver. "What does any of this matter? Even if we do find a warp point and get through it, we'll just be one more system further away from home. And then we'll have to find another warp point, and then another, on and on forever, and eventually our ships will wear out and our life-systems will degrade—"
"That will do!" The bullwhip crack in Sommers' voice brought Maningo's head jerking up, eyes blinking, and the fog of incipient hysteria in the compartment seemed to dissipate. "I know that pressing on into the unknown is a bleak option. But it happens to be the only option we've got! And it's not hopeless. Remember, the Federation and its allies comprise one hell of a lot of warp nexi. It's not at all out of the question that we'll happen onto one of them. And we're equipped for long-term independent operations. Our maintenance resources won't give out any time soon . . . assuming that you manage to do your job."
Maningo's eyes flashed and her jaw clenched. Good, Sommers thought. Better anger than the lugubrious despair that would overtake them if they let the nightmare vision of suffocating in their own wastes, lost in an infinity of cold dark emptiness, take up residence in their heads. She found herself half-wishing that the Bugs would find them—this waiting was killing them as dead as combat could, and taking longer about it.
She shook the thought away and met all their eyes again. "We will continue to pursue whatever avenue holds out any hope of survival. That is our minimal obligation to our personnel. Giving up is not an option we are permitted!" She made sure none of those e
yes met hers, either in defiance or with a mute plea to let them all lie down and die, before she adjourned the meeting.
* * *
The Bugs found them midway into the second watch of the following day.
Sommers and Hafezi were both on the flag bridge, maintaining a mutual politeness which was brittle in its frigidity, when the sensors erupted in electronic panic. A dozen gunboats, sweeping out of the blackness into close sensor range of Jamaica's own battlegroup. They were also within missile range of the group's two battle-cruisers.
"Get them!" Sommers snapped as the gunboats turned tightly to escape with their news. But missiles were already arrowing forth from Jamaica and Roma as per standing orders. Nine were blasted apart, yet three got beyond the missiles' reach. Sommers and Hafezi looked at each other wordlessly, all differences forgotten. By unspoken consent, they turned to the system display in which the four tiny battlegroups and the skulking cluster of carriers and freighters swam. Of course there'd be no change in Bug dispositions yet. But as soon as those surviving gunboats' messages could speed across the light-minutes . . .
She stared for a moment at the icon that represented her own little battlegroup—in addition to the battle-cruisers she had the Hun-class scout cruiser Uzbek and the CLE Marblehead—and then turned to Hafezi. "Feridoun, I want the battlegroup to proceed on this course." She used her remote, and a string-light grew in the holotank.
"Away from the others, Sir?"
"That's right. We're the only ones whose location the Bugs know. I want to draw them away from the rest of the flotilla."
"We'd stand a better chance of defending ourselves if we joined forces, Sir. Especially with the carriers—"
"Negative. Even combined, we wouldn't stand a chance against the Bug forces in this system. No, the other groups' best defense is invisibility. Which means, among other things, that the carriers are not to launch their fighters, in support of us or for any other reason. It would maximize the Bugs' chances of detecting them, and their lack of a command ship to datalink their point defense makes them peculiarly vulnerable." She gave the chief of staff a hard look. "Carry out your orders, Commodore."