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 . . . !