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 And of course we shouldn't have to rely on fragile Tabby designs that're out of date where everything but their ECM and their crews' guts are concerned, instead.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 a smile of shared satisfaction.