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# CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT:
"We're going back."

As they walked along the curving passageway just inside Li Chien-lu's outer skin, they passed a viewport. Beyond it, the light of Orpheus 1 glinted off ships which, to their practiced eyes, were clearly too small to have any business in this brutal new era's battle fleets.

The sight was enough to set Marcus LeBlanc fuming.

"Goddamn all politicians to hell! But no; as usual, it isn't really them who belong there, it's their cretinous constituents. Not even Bettina Wister could do any harm if the voters weren't such goddamn silly sheep! When I think of all the heavy ships that are tied down when they're needed at the front—!"

Vanessa Murakuma smiled. She was still buoyant with the recorded message that had finally gotten to her through the long and tortuous communication line from deep in the Star Union of Crucis.

"Well, you can't really blame people for worrying about home defense. If the Bugs can find a closed warp point into Alpha Centauri, they can appear anywhere. Even civilians understand that much."

"That's exactly the point—and exactly what even Heart World civilians ought to be able to grasp . . . if certain politicians and their pet so-called admirals weren't so busy feeding them sound bytes instead of accurate analysis! To provide total security for everybody, we'd have to keep forces equal to the combined Bug fleets in every inhabited system in the Alliance at all times!"

"Shhhh! Don't say that so loudly." Before LeBlanc could reach critical mass, Murakuma turned serious. "Just be thankful that all these light carriers were available. You might also," she continued in a subtly different tone, "be thankful that you finally got permission to come this far forward."

"Hmmm . . . There is that." LeBlanc was still forbidden to accompany Sixth Fleet when it set out into Bug space, but he'd managed to wheedle GFGHQ into letting him come as far as Orpheus 1. He pondered that accomplishment with a certain undeniable complacency, and he was in a visibly better mood when they reached the briefing room. Murakuma's staff and task force commanders stood as they entered.

"As you were," Murakuma said crisply. "As some of you already know, we're fortunate to have Admiral LeBlanc here from Zephrain. He's been studying the data from our incursion into Home Hive Two five months ago. Admiral LeBlanc, you have the floor."

"Thank you, Admiral Murakuma," LeBlanc replied formally. (Everyone refrained from cracking a smile over the exchange of formalities.) He activated a holo of the Home Hive Two binary system, with the two star-icons a little over a meter and a half apart.

"Fortunately," he began, "one of the last waves of Bug kamikazes appeared on Sixth Fleet's scanners just before you completed your withdrawal from the system. I say fortunately, because it provided fuller data on the vectors involved. Your own intelligence people's studies of those data have been invaluable."

He inclined his head in the direction of a smiling Marina Abernathy. The pat on the head was intentional. Abernathy had been flagellating herself for the past five months over inaccurate threat estimates.

"Our analysis leaves no room for doubt: that wave—and, unquestionably, others—came from Home Hive Two B. So we may infer that Component B has one or more inhabited planets of its own."

"Besides the three around Component Alpha." Leroy McKenna looked and sounded faintly ill.

"Indeed, Commodore," LeBlanc nodded, still in formal mode. "This system is as heavily developed as any of the other home hives we've observed—probably more so."

Ernesto Cruciero stared at the hologram, his eyes dark.

"I wonder which of these systems their species actually evolved in?" he half-murmured.

"Do you suppose they even remember?" Marina Abernathy asked very softly. Eyes moved towards other eyes, then slipped away uneasily. A silence fell, and hovered there, until LeBlanc cleared his throat to banish it.

"Well, at any rate," he went on a bit more briskly, "this helps explain why Home Hive Two was able to produce gunboats and small craft in such enormous numbers. The good news is that we believe your previous incursion left their starship strength crippled—at least in the heaviest classes, which can't be replaced in five months or anything close to it."

He raised a hand as if to ward off skepticism.

"Yes, I know: we're getting into speculative territory here. And we can't ignore the possibility that they can bring in reinforcements through some warp point we know nothing about. But I've already gone on record with the opinion that another shot at Home Hive Two is worth the risk if an answer to the kamikaze threat can be found."

"And we believe we have such an answer," Murakuma said, leaning forward in her chair, "in the form of the Mohrdenhau-class light carriers which have become available." She inclined her head in the direction of Eighty-Seventh Small Fang Meearnow'raalphaa, who'd previously commanded TF 63, Sixth Fleet's heavy carrier task force. Now he'd turned that command over to Thirteenth Small Fang Iaashmaahr'freaalkit-ahn, one of the highest ranking female officers in the entire KON, and taken over the newly formed TF 64: eighty Mohrdenhau-class CVLs, escorted by sixty cruisers of various sizes.

A prewar class, the Mohrdenhaus were rather low-tech, and hence apt to be underappreciated by the cutting-edge-happy TFN. It was also a quintessential Orion design: an uncompromisingly pure carrier with twenty-four fighter bays crammed into a hull no larger than a heavy cruiser's, which left very little room for anything else . . . including the ability to absorb punishment. Its life expectancy was measured in minutes after it came within weapons range of enemy capital ships. But it was never intended to be there. Instead, the Khanate had used it as a frontier picket . . . which was why its designers had somehow made room for a cloaking ECM suite. More recently, it had been used to secure the Allied fleets' lines of communication. Now, with those lines secure enough and the Bugs sufficiently on the defensive (apparently) to justify a little less caution . . .

And the Khan released them, not having to appease the kind of popular hysteria that scum like Agamemnon Waldeck and Wister promote so they can exploit it, Murakuma thought with a subversive bitterness she hadn't allowed Marcus to see. Then she shook off the mood and chided herself sternly. Of course we ought to have a whole flotilla of the big Terran carriers that're sitting around in the nodal systems, neutralized by our own politicians as surely as the Bugs could hope for. And of course we shouldn't have to rely on fragile Tabby designs that're out of date where everything but their ECM and their crews' guts are concerned, instead. But instead of crying into your beer about it, you ought to be giving thanks to whatever gods you worship that you've got those eighty fragile ships and their nineteen hundred-plus fighters.

"So," she said aloud, "even though we all know the Mohrdenhaus are far too light for a warp point assault, they can provide anti-kamikaze cover once we're in Home Hive Two—where, based on Admiral LeBlanc's findings, we have some new ideas on how to proceed. Those ideas will be detailed in the staff briefings."

She paused for a moment, and then spoke in a voice whose quietness left no question about her assumption of undivided responsibility for the decision.

"We're going back in."

* * *

The buoys with which the Fleet had seeded the space surrounding the warp point were set continuously on deception mode. Naturally, the enemy would be awake to the possibility that this was the source of the readings being picked up by his robotic probes. But he would be hesitant to rely on that possibility, assuming—as was only natural—that the Fleet would have summoned all available forces to the defense of such a manifestly crucial system.

It was unfortunate that the Enemy's apprehensions were unjustified.

There were no such forces. This System Which Must Be Defended was isolated from all other prewar population centers except one rather small one a single warp transit away. And not only was that system of no material help, it was actually a drain. For beyond it lay a system in which yet another Enemy force had lain for so long, awaiting its chance. That threat must also be guarded against.

And, perhaps even more importantly, the Enemy must never learn that this star system held not three warp points, but four. The food source which had very briefly attained the status of Enemy on the far side of that fourth, closed warp point, had chosen a most inopportune moment to reveal itself. It was fortunate, indeed, that its technology had been so much cruder than that of the Fleet's current Enemies. Indeed, it had been cruder than the technology of the Old Enemy at the time of the first war. Nothing heavier than a gunboat had been required to crush the food source's feeble resistance in space, although it had proven unusually difficult to subdue on the surface of the world the Fleet had taken from it.

Had the food source made its presence known even half of one of the primary Worlds Which Must Be Defended's years earlier, the Fleet would have regarded its emergence with complete satisfaction. As it was, there'd been insufficient time to prepare a proper grafting from this System Which Must Be Defended. A population with all of the critical elements had been transported to the new planet, but the new world had a harsh and demanding environment, and the Fleet couldn't be certain that the transported population had sufficient depth and redundancy to survive in the face of unforeseen contingencies. Nonetheless, the decision had been made that no further population or resource transfers would be made to the System Which Must Be Concealed. Unthinkable as it once might have been, that single, newly conquered world might well have become more important than all of the prewar Systems Which Must Be Defended combined, and no risk could be run of inadvertently revealing the warp point which led to it to the Enemy's stealthy robotic spies.

If the worst befell the Systems Which Must Be Defended, perhaps that single grafting, in time, might grow into yet another System Which Must Be Defended. If that happened, then the new System Which Must Be Defended must be more cautious than its predecessors had been. It must never return through its warp point of arrival again, and it must prepare itself for the possibility that it would yet again meet the present Enemies at some distant future time.

It was a pity that this System Which Must Be Defended was uncertain whether or not any of its courier drones had reached its sisters with word of the existence of this new and fragile daughter. Perhaps the surviving, isolated splinters of the Fleet might have taken some . . . consolation from the knowledge. And perhaps not. The survival of such a delicate sapling in such a cold and hostile universe was far from certain, as, indeed, the straits to which the fully developed Systems Which Must Be Defended had been reduced demonstrated only too well.

But at least the Enemy had no way of knowing that the System Which Must Be Concealed existed, either—just as he couldn't know that his second fleet also threatened this System Which Must Be Defended. If he had known, he could have mounted a coordinated two-front offensive. Even as it was, the Fleet's resources had to be kept divided, to guard against both threats. And those resources were seriously depleted. In addition to the destruction it had wrought on the warp-point fortresses of the System Which Must Be Defended, the Enemy's last incursion had—as the Enemy probably suspected—wiped out the entire available inventory of monitors. More were under construction, of course. But that took time . . . probably more time than the Fleet had.

Matters weren't entirely unsatisfactory, however. The last incursion had, after all, been repulsed, and the gunboat and small craft losses had been made good since. It was therefore possible to station the bulk of the superdreadnoughts—a hundred and two, out of the available total of a hundred and forty-four—in the other system, where they would join the undepleted array of seventy-two orbital fortresses in a posture of close-in warp point defense. The gunboats and small craft should be able to deal with any future direct attack on the System Which Must Be Defended, using the jammer-aided tactics the enemy had previously seemed to find troublesome.

* * *

Vanessa Murakuma released a quiet sigh as Li Chien-lu completed transit and the damage reports from the first waves began to light up the board. Leroy McKenna heard her, and gave her a crooked smile of shared satisfaction.

"A lot of damaged units," the chief of staff murmured, "but very few destroyed outright."

They'd gotten into Home Hive Two more cheaply than Murakuma had allowed herself to hope. The RD2s had reported a starship total compatible with Marcus LeBlanc's projections. Naturally, they'd considered the possibility that some of the ships were electronic ghosts conjured by ECM3 buoys, but Murakuma had placed absolutely no reliance on that. She'd spent SBMHAWKs as if the multi-megacredit pods were mere firecrackers, and the avalanche of warheads had blown away the twenty-three fortresses the Bugs had been able to emplace since her previous visit. The CAM2-armed SBMHAWK4s had annihilated the few suicide-riders covering the OWPs and wrought havoc among the patrolling gunboats, and the kamikazes on hand had been able to inflict only the limited damage Murakuma and McKenna were now observing with relief. Quite evidently, the SBMHAWKs had made a clean sweep of the starships.

As the computer analysis of the wreckage began to accumulate, it became clear that they'd more than done so.

"So," Marina Abernathy said, bending over a terminal as the admiral and chief of staff looked over her shoulder, "most of those capital ship readings were bogus."

"You'll never hear me complaining about wasted SBMHAWKs," McKenna growled. "That's what they're for."

"Still," the intelligence officer mused, "you have to wonder: where are the ships the Bugs could have had here?"

"I'm sure Admiral LeBlanc will be intrigued." Murakuma smiled briefly at the thought of Marcus, back in Orpheus 1, a slave to orders. "But I take your point, Marina. They must have other deep-space forces somewhere in the system, so we'll exercise caution. Leroy, we'll wait here until all our units have transited, and I want the heaviest possible fighter CSP out at all times. While Anson is getting that organized and deployed, we'll send our cripples back and reorganize our battlegroups around lost units."

"Aye, aye, Sir."

"And then . . ." Murakuma's smile returned, but this time it was very different. Predatory. "We'll execute Operation Nobunaga."

In a war against an enemy with whom no communication was possible, the security rationale for giving operational plans irrelevant or even nonsensical code names no longer obtained. But military habit died hard. And, she told herself, Tadeoshi would have appreciated this one: Oda Nobunaga, the sixteenth-century Japanese warlord who, time and again, had left his enemies choking on his dust by attacking unexpected objectives.

"I'd love to know," she said, aloud but more to herself than to her staffers, "what the Bugs will think—if that's what they do—when they analyze our course."

* * *

This was . . . unexpected.

The remaining units of the Mobile Force—the ones which hadn't been stationed at the warp point and so had survived the initial bombardment—were continuing in cloak. Rather than squander themselves in an attack against an Enemy whose tonnage and firepower were exceeded only by the caution with which he proceeded, they were conserving their gunboats and small craft to assist the thousands of such craft even now speeding out from the planetary bases to meet the invaders.

All very well, and according to doctrine. Only . . . the Enemy had set course for the system's secondary star!

The Mobile Force would pursue, of course. But it couldn't possibly catch up, given the Enemy's head start and superior speed. The waves of planet-based gunboats would be able to intercept, despite being slowed by the inclusion of shuttles and pinnaces in their formations, but their attacks might not be as well coordinated as might have been hoped.

* * *

Home Hive Two B blazed in the view-forward, an F-class white sun barely less massive and less hot than Component A, now little more than a zero-magnitude star in the view-aft at almost two hundred and fifty light-minutes astern. Given the geometry of the star system, Component B lay approximately 9.2 light-hours from the warp point to Orpheus 1. At Li Chien-lu's maximum sustainable velocity of just over three percent of light-speed, the direct trip would have taken four and a half days. Allowing for the need to stay well clear of the inner system of Component A—which, unfortunately, lay directly between the warp point and the secondary component—the actual transit time had been well over six days.

It was about the longest trip anyone could have taken within the confines of a single star system, binary or not, and this one had seemed even longer than it was as one wave of planet-based kamikazes after another had smashed into Sixth Fleet.

But this time Sixth Fleet at least knew about the Bugs' new jammer technology—its dangers, and also the ease with which its emissions could be detected and locked up by fire control, once the Allied sensor techs knew what to look for. Operation Nobunaga had incorporated defensive doctrine based on that knowledge. Murakuma had formed her capital ships into concentric protective screens around the fragile carriers, then dispatched her fighters to engage the kamikazes at extreme range. The fighter strikes, rather than press home to point-blank dogfighting range, had launched their missiles at extreme range, which kept them outside the jamming envelope and permitted each squadron to coordinate its fire in precise time-on-target salvos. They'd concentrated on the readily identifiable emissions signatures of the gunboats carrying the jammer packs, and although the gunboats' point defense had degraded the effectiveness of such long range fire, enough of it had still gotten the job done.

Once the jammer gunboats had been savaged, the strikegroups fell back to their carriers to rearm. By then, the range had fallen, and Murakuma had maneuvered to hold it open as long as possible with a view to giving them more time to relaunch and continue their work of destruction. Those maneuvers accounted for much of the extra time which had been required for the voyage.

The fighters had gone back out to meet the attack waves coming in on the fleet, and, with the jammer packs effectively taken out of the equation, they'd been able to close for a conventional dogfight without worrying about the loss of their datanets. They couldn't stop those oncoming waves—King Canute couldn't have done that. But the kamikazes were depleted and disorganized by the time they entered the battle-line's missile envelope.

Murakuma kept telling herself that Sixth Fleet's losses were well within the acceptable parameters for this stage of Operation Nobunaga. It didn't help.

At any rate, she couldn't let herself think about it. She had a decision to make.

She turned away from the viewscreen and studied the holo display of the Home Hive Two B subsystem. They'd been close enough for some time to get sensor readings on the inhabited worlds—yes, worlds, plural. Planets II and III blazed with high energy emissions, bringing the binary system's total to five—easily the most heavily populated and industrialized system in the known galaxy. In particular, Planet BIII, which Sixth Fleet was now approaching, evinced a population as massive as any yet encountered in Bug space. It lay on a bearing of two o'clock from the local sun at a distance of fourteen light-minutes, guarded by the customary enormous space station and a coterie of twenty-four more massive OWPs. Fortuitously, it was also close to the somewhat less massively developed Planet BII, ten light-minutes from the primary at three o'clock.

"In essence," Marina Abernathy was telling the assembled core staff, "the Bug deep-space force has fallen so far behind that it's no longer a factor in the tactical picture. In fact, it's not even bothering to stay in cloak anymore. But two more really scary waves of kamikazes are bearing down on us."

The staff spook indicated the threat estimates on the board. No one felt any need to comment on the totals—they were all growing desensitized to numbers that once would have left them in shock. But Ernesto Cruciero leaned forward and studied the estimated time to intercept.

"It appears," he said carefully, "that we have time to finish rearming our fighters, carry out the strike on the planet, and then get them back aboard, rearm them again, and launch them to meet this threat."

Despite the painful neutrality with which Cruciero had spoken, Anson Olivera glared at him, as the TFN's farshathkhanaaks had a tendency to glare at operations officers.

"That, Commodore," he said with frosty, pointed formality, "is what's known as 'planning for a perfect world.' What if the attack runs into trouble getting past those orbital fortresses? And even if it doesn't, you're asking a lot of our fighter pilots." As usual, his tone made it superfluous to add.

Cruciero's retort was halfway out of his mouth when Murakuma raised a hand, palm outward. Both men subsided and waited while the admiral spent a silent moment alone with the decision she must make.

It didn't take long before she looked up.

"Anson, if we hold the fighters back to defend the fleet and then launch the planet-side strike later, they'll have to face kamikazes piloted by Bugs who're at the top of their forms," she said. "But if we exercise the 'Shiva Option' on that planet first, the kamikazes will be a lot easier to deal with. And either way, the forts and the space station are still going to be there when we go in against the planet. I know it's cutting it close . . . but we're going to do it. Continue loading the fighters with FRAMs."

* * *

Despite the reservations it was their farshathkhanaak's responsibility to feel, Anson Olivera's pilots knew precisely what they were about. More than that, they understood their Admiral's logic. That didn't mean they liked their orders; it only meant that they knew they would have liked any other set of orders even worse, under the circumstances.

The FRAM-loaded F-4s spat from their launch bay catapults, bellies heavy with the destruction they bore, and grim-faced pilots of three different species looked down upon the blue-and-white loveliness of the living planet they'd come so far to kill. Somehow, seeing how gorgeous that living, breathing sphere was made the reality of the Bugs even more obscene. Their very presence should have obscured the heavens, covered itself and all its hideous reality from the eye of God in a shielding, evil-fraught gloom. But it hadn't, and the assassins of that planet's distant beauty settled themselves in their cockpits as they prepared to bring the sun itself to its surface . . . and bury it in eternal night.

The massed fighters, the total strength of every strikegroup in Sixth Fleet, settled into formation. Flight plans and attack patterns were checked a final time and locked into the computers. The hundred or so CAM2-armed SBMHAWK4s Vanessa Murakuma had reserved for this moment deployed with them and locked their targeting systems on the orbital fortresses. There weren't enough of them to destroy the fortresses, but their warheads would suffice to batter the forts and . . . distract them as the fighters streamed past.

Anson Olivera watched his plot, watched his pilots as they finished forming up and dressed their ranks with the precision of veterans who knew the value of careful preparation from painful personal experience. He tried not to look over his shoulder at the master plot, which showed the ominous scarlet icons of the incoming kamikaze strikes sweeping towards Sixth Fleet from behind. Like his pilots, he understood the logic of their orders, but this was going to be close.

He suppressed the need to snap orders at them to hurry up. They were already moving as rapidly as they could. If he tried to make them move faster, it would only engender confusion which would actually slow the entire process, and he knew it. Which didn't make it any easier to keep his mouth shut.

But then, finally—almost abruptly, it seemed, after the nerve-gnawing tension of his wait—they were ready. He made himself pause just a moment longer, running his eyes over the status lights and sidebars in one last check, then nodded and keyed his mike.

"All flights, this is the Flag," he said clearly. "Execute Nobunaga Three."

The last dawn came for the billions of beings on the world below.

* * *

One question, at least, was settled. This horrible disorientation, like all telepathy-related phenomena, might halt at the edge of the interstellar abyss, but it had no difficulty propagating across the gulf between the components of a distant binary system.

There were far more of the small attack craft than had been expected, as they were augmented by almost two thousand operating from a swarm of ships smaller than any normally seen in the Enemy's battle fleets—no larger than the Fleet's warp point defense cruisers, in fact. The Enemy had committed practically all of them to a single massive strike that had ignored the fire from the orbital works and, at a single blow, virtually depopulated the third planet of the secondary sun. The ensuing psychic shockwave had hit the onrushing waves of gunboats and small craft well before they reached their objectives, stunning them into a state of ineffectual disorganization. The small attack craft, returning from the smoldering sphere of radioactive desolation that had been a World Which Must Be Defended, had slaughtered them.

Now the Enemy was proceeding toward the nearby second planet. It must be left to its own devices. Once, that would have been unthinkable for any World Which Must Be Defended. But now there was no alternative. The waves of gunboats and small craft still following the enemy could accomplish nothing. They must be recalled, for they were in no condition to fight a battle now, and when the Enemy killed the second planet, the effect of the psychic shock would only be intensified.

Yet writing off the secondary sun's second planet carried with it an additional complication. The new wave of confusion wouldn't affect only the gunboats and small craft in proximity to the Enemy. It would wash over the entire system and its defenders, even before the effects of the first one had even begun to wear off. The Fleet couldn't be certain what would happen when two such shockwaves hit in such close temporal proximity. There was simply no experience on which to base any estimate, just as there'd been no warning that such an effect could be produced at all until the Enemy had proven it could. It was entirely possible that the second shockwave would not only extend but intensify the effects of the first.

And if that happened, and if the effects persisted while the Enemy returned to the primary sun . . .

There could be no further indecision. A force which had not been exposed to those psychic impacts was needed, and needed badly. And there was only one such force available.

* * *

"The recon fighter's report is confirmed, Sir," Ernesto Cruciero reported. "Heavy Bug forces have entered this system from Warp Point Three."

He indicated the Warp Point icon in the holo display of the Home Hive Two A subsystem. They'd known of it only by inference from the array of fortresses around it. Naturally, they had no idea where it led.

Now Vanessa Murakuma glared at that icon. It lay four light-hours out from the local sun on a bearing of seven o'clock—about ninety degrees clockwise from the course Sixth Fleet was following towards that sun. Then she looked at Cruciero's threat estimate. No monitors, at least, she reflected. But over a hundred superdreadnoughts . . . !

Sixth Fleet had made its way back from the now-lifeless planets of Home Hive Two B unopposed, for the Bugs were clearly avoiding battle. The staff had spent the voyage arguing the pros and cons of staying and finishing the job by sterilizing Component A's three Bug-infested worlds, whose defenders were still showing unmistakable signs of residual grogginess. The pros went without saying. But, Abernathy had insisted, the Bugs still possessed thousands of kamikazes. And, while Sixth Fleet had lost mercifully few capital ships outright, the strikegroups and the battlecruiser screen had taken losses that left Murakuma unhappy about the thought of facing those kamikazes.

Still, her heart had been tugging her toward the "pro" side.

Now, though . . .

"I fully understand the impulse to stay and burn this system clean of the last Bug," she told the staff. "In fact, that's my own inclination. But this changes things. We'd be able to make it across the inner system to Warp Point One without being intercepted by this new force, wouldn't we, Ernesto?"

Cruciero nodded.

"I doubt if they'd even try, once it became apparent we weren't going for the inhabited planets," he said, and his tone was ambivalent. Like Murakuma, he'd been wavering.

"We should be able to exit the system without any opposition except maybe occasional stray kamikaze formations we can brush aside," Abernathy agreed. There'd never been any question about where she stood. Ever since Sixth Fleet's earlier disagreeable surprise in the system, the spook had been inclined to err on the side of caution.

"Very well." Murakuma straightened up. "We're calling it a day. Leroy, please inform the task force commanders."

"Aye, aye, Sir."

Murakuma turned away and studied the holo sphere again as the staffers hurried about their duties. No one could dispute that she'd made the prudent decision, and none of the staffers had even shown disagreement in the body language she'd come to know so well.

So, she wondered, why do I feel this doubt—almost a sense of regret?

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