In Death Ground Part 39

"Thank you." Prescott thought a moment longer. Recovering one of those drones was out of the question; he couldn't afford to have one of them simply disappear if the Bugs were tracking it. But it was possible they might shed some light on whatever was coming down the Anderson Chain, and that possibility justified a certain amount of risk. "Commander Hale."

"Yes, Admiral?" Crete's senior com officer looked up from her console.

"Can you trigger the com laser on one of those drones and order it to upload to us without terminating its beacon?"

"Without terminating the beacon?" Hale frowned. "I think so, Sir. I'll have to rewrite a couple of lines in the standard interrogation package, though."

"Can you do it before they make their closest approach?"

"No problem, Sir," she said confidently.

"In that case, I want you to trigger the closest drone. Get with Plotting first. Make certain no known enemy positions will be in the transmission paths - from the drone, as well as us - when you do it. It's imperative that the enemy not realize what we've done."

Hannah Avram knew the feeling was irrational. In any real sense, the s.p.a.ce here below (arbitrary term!) Anderson Three's primary sun was no more empty than the plane in which its barren planets and ruddy ember of a companion orbited. But she couldn't shake off the feeling of being adrift in a realm of cold dark nothingness where the soul could lose its way.

The relief force had only just left Anderson Two and its tragedy-haunted planet behind and entered Anderson Three when Tracking picked up a ma.s.sive gunboat formation proceeding from what must be the undiscovered warp point in this system toward the one they'd just transited. Some anxious hours had pa.s.sed, but the gunboats had proceeded singlemindedly on course, and Avram had breathed a sigh of relief as she realized they were just too late to detect her.

After the last gunboat icon vanished off the edge of the plot, Admiral Mukerji had shattered the residual silence on Xingu's flag bridge with a request for an electronic conference. "Sky Marshal, in light of what we've just seen, and what it suggests about the sheer scale of Bug activities along the Anderson Chain, may I suggest we send courier drones ahead to alert Admiral Antonov of our estimated time of arrival? This would enable him to plan his operations with a view to being as close to the Anderson Four/Anderson Five warp point as possible at that time. Surely having our two forces in a position to combine their efforts would maximize the chances of success."

And of your personal survival, Avram had thought. But she'd held her tongue. Mukerji's suggestion, whatever motivations lay behind it, wasn't totally irrational. Still...

"No, Admiral Mukerji. We have no way of knowing Second Fleet's status, so Admiral Antonov might not be able to act on that information."

"Still, Sky Marshal, what harm can it do?"

"Simply this, Admiral: to reach Admiral Antonov, the drones would have to pa.s.s through whatever Bug forces lie ahead of us, and might very well be detected. The enemy's ignorance of our presence is the greatest advantage we possess, and the need to preserve that advantage outweighs the speculative benefits of alerting Second Fleet to our approach. In fact, I'm about to order a course change to take us on a dogleg to the Anderson Four warp point."

"That will add to our flight time, Sky Marshal."

"So it will. But I'm willing to accept that as the price for removing any possibility of random encounters with Bug forces like the gunboat flotilla we just observed."

Her orders had been carried out. Like many - though by no means all - warp points, those connecting Anderson Three to Anderson Two and Four both lay in the same plane as the system's planets. The course change would, indeed, lengthen her pa.s.sage time. But it would also take her force well outside that plane, keeping it beyond the sensor range of any Bugs shuttling between Anderson Three's known warp points as it proceeded towards the Anderson Four warp point. She reminded herself of that and tried not to let impatience gnaw holes in her gut.

"That's it, Sir," Stovall reported. "They've all been accounted for."

"And this time our losses are minimal," de Bertholet added, gesturing at the board. "Admiral, this was the weakest gunboat attack we've faced so far. Could it be... ?"

All the staffers looked at Antonov, and he read the hunger in their eyes. They wanted him to tell them that this latest attack's feebleness represented a ray of hope in the world of unrelieved blackness they'd inhabited for what seemed as far back as memory could reach.

But he couldn't. Unless I'm very much mistaken, this wasn't a real attack at all. They were just probing, trying to gauge how much firepower we've got left without expending too many gunboats to do it. And yet he wouldn't say so aloud, for letting his people have a straw of hope to grasp for couldn't hurt and might possibly help.

So he held his tongue. But gazing at these people, all so much younger than he (Who isn't? he thought with a moment's wryness), he saw that it had been a waste of silence. They knew.

As she gazed at the sensor readouts, Hannah Avram thought of Rear Admiral Michael Chin and remembered the bon vivant she'd known. Did he still live at all?

The relief force had, on her orders, stayed on full sensor alert even in these regions far outside the system ecliptic, where no Bugs could reasonably be. Her caution had reaped an unexpected reward, for they now had an answer to one of the questions that had been plaguing them since their departure from Centauri: the fate of the Fleet Train.

The further they'd proceeded, the more they'd settled into the glum conclusion that nothing remained of Chin's command except debris dissipating into the void. But the sensors had brushed against what could only be survivors sheltering out here in the deeps far from any warp point - all too few survivors. Avram didn't even let herself think about the personnel losses that the absence of so many repair ships and transports implied. She couldn't, for she had a decision to make.

She made it. "Commodore Borghesi," she addressed her chief of staff, "inform Ops that I want to detach a couple of battlegroups to rendezvous with those survivors while the rest of us continue on course for Anderson Four. They're to convey my orders to Admiral Chin... or whoever's in command."

"What orders are those, Sky Marshal?"

"I want them to take up a position, at least ten light-hours from any warp point, and wait for us to return to this system with Second Fleet." Avram pointedly omitted any qualifiers. "At that time, we'll contact them by courier drone - keeping our presence concealed will no longer be a factor then - so they can rejoin us as we retire to Centauri."

"Aye, aye, Sir." Borghesi went to summon the staff and Avram took a last look at the meager tally of fugitives. She didn't really want to divide the none-too-abundant forces she was leading to Second Fleet's rescue. But the tatters of Fleet Train needed additional cover if they were to have any chance at all of surviving. And, unless she was very much mistaken, their morale needed any boost it could get.

"From all the information available to us, it is my judgment that the Bug blocking force will enter this system from Anderson Four in the immediate future."

Ivan Antonov looked at the half-circle of his staffers' faces and watched their reactions as his words sank home through layers of fatigue into their dulled awareness.

Stovall shook his head like a punch-drunk boxer. "You mean... ?"

"Da. The time has come to set course for the Anderson Four warp point." Antonov quickly raised a forestalling hand. "Let us be in no doubt as to the gravity of our position. Look here." He turned to the system holo display with the tiny icon of the local blue giant star at its center. In terms of the arbitrary "north" the computer had a.s.signed as a frame of reference, Second Fleet lay about a hundred and forty light-minutes to the south-southeast. The warp point that represented their road home was due east of the star at a distance of slightly over a hundred and ninety light-minutes, placing it somewhat less than three light-hours to their northeast.

"From the vectors of the gunboat strikes we've sustained, Commodore Kozlov and I have been able to infer the approximate configuration of the enemy forces that have been sending them. We believe there are three elements. One has to be about here." He pointed a hand remote and a fuzzy scarlet icon winked to life due south of the star, describing with Second Fleet and the warp point a straight line. "We're less certain about the other two, but they must be in these general areas." A pair of the indeterminate red indicators, oscillating to denote even greater uncertainty, appeared in regions bracketing Second Fleet's present position and the first part of its course to the warp point. "We'll be able to lead the first one a stern chase. The problem will be the other two; they'll try to close in and engage us as we pa.s.s."

"Our speed advantage should enable us to slip out of any envelopment, Sir," de Bertholet stated confidently. "Despite the wear and tear our engines have sustained."

"I hope you're right, Commander. However, it can't hurt to throw off the enemy's calculations concerning our capabilities in that area. For this reason, I want to proceed at slightly less than our best speed. Fast enough to prevent the force to our southwest from overhauling, but slow enough to make the Bugs think our engines are in even worse shape than they are."

Midori Kozlov managed a smile. "The technique is called 'disinformation,' Admiral."

Antonov smiled back. "I know, Commodore. My ancestors - and some of yours - were once noted for it."

Attack Force One watched the enemy turn for the warp point at last. He had managed to work his way between Attack Force Three and Attack Force One, too far distant for either to engage. Attack Force Two was astern of him, and too slow to catch up, and his strategy was now obvious. Badly as he had been hurt, he still hoped to outrun the Fleet and escape through the warp point, and his timing was good - or would have been, if not for Attack Force Four.

But Attack Force Four was almost here. Attack Force One had kept it fully advised with periodic courier drones, and now it sent off another flight. The Fleet's fresh strength would arrive knowing precisely where to look for the enemy... and sweep in from the warp point, meeting him head-on. And so Attack Force One let its doomed foes run. It and Attack Force Three closed in from either flank, angling inward while Attack Force Two sealed the rear of the net, and the long, weary pursuit was almost over.

The last three and a half days had been the worst of Raymond Prescott's life, worse even than the desperate days in Telmasa. For eighty-six hours, his ships, a full third of Ivan Antonov's total combat strength, had sat silent and still, watching Bug courier drones come and go but doing nothing while their consorts fought for their lives. The battle was far too distant for his sensors to pick up the starships, gunboats, and fighters fighting it, but nuclear and antimatter explosions were glaringly evident, even at extended ranges, and there'd been too many of them.

But at least they mean there's still somebody left... and they're headed this way at last.

He nodded at the last thought. The Admiral was beginning his run. He was still thirty hours out, but he was coming in, and Prescott felt his inner tension winding still tighter.

And he knew something Antonov didn't. Chin's drones had reported not only the ma.s.sive strength of the gunboat strikes which had ravaged the Fleet Train but their timing.

The Bugs didn't use light-speed communication relays between warp points. Presumably, that - like the cloaked pickets they seemed to leave everywhere - was a security measure, intended to deny any enemy a "bread crumb" trail to their inhabited systems. The fact that they hadn't attempted to destroy the comsat chain Jackson Teller had left in Erebor might also suggest that the notion simply hadn't occurred to them, which might be the best news of this entire disastrous affair. If they didn't realize Second Fleet had established a comsat chain in its rear, they were almost certain to have significantly overestimated the time Centauri would require to respond. If that were so, any relief fleet was likely to arrive long before they expected it. But the important point just now was that the Bugs relied solely on courier drones as their only means of coordinating at interstellar distances, and Chin's drones had told Prescott how long the Bugs had taken to come within sensor range of the Fleet Train. And that data gave him a good idea, given the top speed of courier drones and gunboats, just how far the Bugs' warp point into Anderson Three had been from Chin - and thus from the warp point to Anderson Four. Which meant that, unlike Ivan Antonov, he knew the Bugs would be arriving within the next fourteen hours... and that Ivan Antonov had timed the climactic maneuver of his career perfectly. Now it was up to TF 21 to be certain it worked.

Ivan Antonov stared fixedly at the plot. It wasn't that he hoped to see anything there that he didn't already know. It was just that it was expected of him: Ivan the Terrible, displaying total, inhuman concentration and impa.s.sivity.

So instead of looking for hidden meanings in the display the computer constantly updated - a silicon-based idiot savant compulsively pawing its abacus - he let himself covertly contemplate the young people with whom he shared Flag Bridge, and the rest of Colorado, and the rest of the fleet.

So young.... Those youthful faces truly were from another time, another world, yet if any of them were to live, their survival depended upon him. They trusted him to get it right, and for just an instant, as their trust crushed down upon him like an extra layer of fatigue, he felt the weight of every endless year of his unnaturally extended life and knew he was too old.

He shook free of the thought. Surely all the experience one acc.u.mulated in a century and a half must count for something! Anyway, if the antigerone treatments really were a colossal counter-evolutionary mistake, humanity would simply be replaced by something that wouldn't make such errors, for it wouldn't deserve to survive....

"Now don't go Russian-nihilistic on me, EYE-van." Antonov's lips curved in a smile no one else noticed as he heard the voice echoing across the gulf of seven decades. No, Howard, I won't, he thought. I can't afford to just now. I brought these people into this, and it's my duty to get as many of them as possible out of it.

And, it ought to be possible to get a fair number out... if only the timing was right.

Dear G.o.d, bozhemoi, please let my timing have been right.

Attack Force Four had reached its final warp point. A fresh shower of courier drones went ahead, announcing its arrival, and its warships prepared for transit. Its losses against the enemy's support echelon left it thirty percent understrength in gunboats, but it still had over four hundred. The ships without gunboat groups would be left behind - someone had to watch the warp point - and the others would join the attack on the enemy's fleet.

"Ships transiting the warp point!"

The announcement from Plotting wasn't loud, yet it cracked like a whip in Flag Bridge's silent tension. Prescott handed his coffee cup to a steward and spun his command chair to face his plot, and his mouth tightened as the deadly stream of Bug warships flowed into existence.

The escorts came first: thirty-six light cruisers, Cataphracts and Carbines in a tighter transit than any Terran admiral would countenance. They made no effort to scout - after all, a dozen battlecruisers had been watching the warp point for over twenty days - but flowed out into a spherical screen, and then the first of those stupendous warships followed them. One, two, five - eighteen made transit, and behind them came twenty-four superdreadnoughts, and after them the battlecruisers. One hundred and three starships burst through the flaw in s.p.a.ce and formed up, and Raymond Prescott realized he was actually holding his breath as he waited.

Then they began to move, and a fierce exultation flared within him. Six of the new leviathans and half the superdreadnoughts remained behind, but the others - all the others, even the battlecruisers which had picketed the warp point for so long - headed in-system, and they were already launching their gunboats.

"All right, Anthea, Jacques," he said flatly. "Pa.s.s the standby signal. Those big b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are the priority targets, then the SDs."

"Twelve of the new... mobile fortresses. At least a dozen superdreadnoughts. The battlecruiser and light cruiser totals should be available soon." Midori Kozlov's voice was an inflectionless drone as she studied the sensor readouts like a soothsayer peering into the depths of a crystal ball and read off the tally of the Bug forces sweeping forward to intercept them.

"How many have been left to cover warp point?" Antonov's tightly controlled voice might have fooled anyone who didn't know him well enough to notice the loss of definite articles.

"Unknown, Sir. We're still too far out."

"No matter. It is time." The admiral swung his bearlike bulk to face de Bertholet. "Commander, deploy the fighters."

All the fighters Second Fleet still possessed had been at alert for hours, their pilots holding exhaustion at bay with drugs and adrenaline. Now they launched as one and took up flanking positions against gunboat attacks.

At the maximum speed it could manage and still keep formation, Second Fleet arrowed directly towards the ma.s.sed ranks of death coming to meet it.

"All right, people," Prescott murmured, eyes locked to his plot. TF 21 had crept in even closer, moving at glacially slow speed. They were barely half a light-minute from the warp point, directly behind the ships facing the rest of Second Fleet, and any Orion would have envied his fang-baring smile. "This is what we came for. Let's make it count. Are you ready, Jacques?"

"Ready, Sir." The ops officer half-crouched over his console, like a runner in the blocks, and his hands rested lightly, ever so lightly, upon it.

"Execute!" Raymond Prescott snapped.

The ships on the warp point watched the enemy running headlong into the waiting tentacles of the rest of Attack Force Four. Given his speed, some of his units might actually win through the waiting inferno, but the detachment waited to sweep up the broken pieces as they came to it. The attack force's gunboats were two-thirds of the way to the enemy, and- ***

Four hundred and three SBMs exploded from empty s.p.a.ce as TF 21 flushed its external racks. Another hundred belched from the Dunkerques' internal launchers, and their targets had had no inkling those ships were there. Thirty seconds pa.s.sed before light speed sensors even detected TF 21's launch, and there was no time to react, no time to take evasive action or bring active defenses on-line. Raymond Prescott's birds were in terminal acquisition, screaming in on their targets at.8 c, and then the universe blew apart.

All five hundred of those missiles were directed at just six targets, for TF 21 had no idea how much damage those unfamiliar monsters could absorb. But however mighty their shields, however thick their armor, they were no match for that devastating strike. The vortex blazing on the warp point momentarily rivaled the blue giant furnace at the system's heart, and when it cleared, the ships which had been at its core no longer existed.

The Bugs reeled under the totally unexpected blow, and even as they fought to adjust to it, fresh salvos roared in from the Dunkerques and ten Borzoi-C-cla.s.s fleet carriers launched three hundred and sixty h.o.a.rded fighters. Those strike groups had been made fully up to strength before they were attached to TF 21, even at the expense of the exhausted, over-strained squadrons which had fought to protect Second Fleet's main body for ten heartbreaking days. Their pilots had sat in their ready rooms, ready for instant launch if TF 21 had been detected yet knowing - for they were veterans all - what their fellow pilots had endured while they sat inviolate in cloak. Now it was their turn, and the key to Second Fleet's survival lay in their hands.

They streaked in, drives howling, vision graying, and behind them came the rest of TF 21. The Borneo-cla.s.s superdreadnoughts had no capital launchers, but they had heterodyne lasers and standard missile launchers, and they were fast. Raymond Prescott brought them in at 30,000 KPS while the Dunkerques lay back, pouring in SBMs and capital missiles, and the totally surprised Bug starships fought around in desperate turns to meet them.

It took the fighters three minutes to reach them - three minutes of frantic maneuvers while the Dunkerques hammered them with another six hundred missiles. Point defense stopped many of the follow-up birds, but the battlecruisers got two more ma.s.sive salvoes in virtually unopposed first, and three Bug superdreadnoughts were destroyed and two more damaged before the fighters even arrived.

AFHAWKs roared to meet the strike, but the Bugs had sent their escorts forward with the rest of their attack force. TF 21 lost thirty-seven fighters; the other three hundred and twenty-three, armed with full loads of FRAMs, carried through. There were ten superdreadnoughts and twelve battlecruisers on the warp point when they began their runs; when they finished them, there were three air-streaming, shattered, half-molten wrecks, staggering half-blind towards TF 21 as if in some instinct to hurl themselves bodily upon their enemies.

But they never had the chance, for TF 21's enraged fighter jocks came screaming back. They had no external ordnance, only their internal lasers, but that was sufficient.

The warp point lay half a light-hour behind Attack Force Four; by the time it realized its detached units were under attack, every one of them had been dead for over twenty minutes.

The attack force had no idea how many enemy ships were astern of it. Its sensors showed a horde of attack craft sweeping back from the warp point, disappearing as they rejoined their motherships to rearm, but no enemy starship had emerged from cloak. There couldn't be many vessels back there - surely the other attack forces would have known if any significant portion of the enemy fleet had eluded them! - and yet there must be a powerful force. The blazing speed of the detachment's destruction, even of the mighty new units, was proof of that, and Attack Force Four dared not be caught between an enemy of unknown strength and the survivors streaming towards it. It must know what it faced, and there was only one way to learn that.

The gunboats which had almost reached Second Fleet arced suddenly away, for they had the speed - and numbers - to reach the warp point once more and spread out, find the enemy, determine the nature of the threat.

Com lasers and courier drones spilled from the attack force to alert the other forces, but it would take yet another half hour for that information to reach the closest addressee. By the time it did, the diverted gunboat strike would be a sixth of the way back to the warp point.

The starships hesitated a moment longer, and then Attack Force Four turned to follow its gunboats. It was still closer to the warp point than the known enemy forces, but given its slower speed, the prey it had come to kill might actually be able to beat it there. Yet it had no choice. The enemy had smashed the barricade which was supposed to hold him pent; if it was not replaced, then all of his ships might yet escape.

Everyone on Colorado's flag bridge had seen photos of distant nebulas where hot young stars blazed through the glowing clouds of cosmic dust from which they'd had their birth. Now they gazed at the main screen where the spectacle at the warp point was displayed: explosions so intense they must surely gnaw at the fabric of s.p.a.ce itself but veiled by a surrounding haze of superheated gas, a nebula of man's creation. And there was utter, awed silence in the presence of a cataclysm that seemed beyond the powers of any save the Maker of Stars to wreak.

But then, after a time lag that the distance differential reduced to almost nothing, the four hundred incoming gunboats swerved away in hundred-and-eighty-degree turns and began to recede into the blackness. And all at once the silence shattered into a million fragments as all the pent-up tension released itself. Such were the cheers and the weeping that they hardly waxed any further when, minutes later, the enemy starships also turned back.

"Prescott did it, Sir!" Stovall turned exultantly to Antonov... and what he saw stopped him. Boulder-impervious to the storm of emotion around him, the admiral was staring at the tank in which the red icons of the enemy, having completed their turning maneuver, were racing for the warp point ahead of Second Fleet's green ones. He consulted his wrist calculator with scowling concentration, then faced Stovall.

"It appears, Commodore," he said quietly, "that our speed advantage won't quite suffice to overtake and pa.s.s the blocking force before it gets back to the warp point - at least not by any significant margin. Note also -" he indicated another portion of the tank, astern of the green icons "- that the Bug forces pursuing us have launched what must be their entire remaining gunboat complement."

"They won't catch us, Sir," Stovall stated emphatically.

"No, they won't... unless we slow down as a result of damage sustained when we catch up with the blocking force just short of the warp point. This leads me to two conclusions, Commodore Stovall, neither of them pleasant."