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?
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Ghosts of Kliean
"I am sorry to disturb you, Sir, but I think you should see this report."
Third Great Fang of the Khan Koraaza'khiniak, Lord Khiniak, sat up on his bed pad as Claw of the Khan Thaariahn'reethnau entered the cramped sleeping cabin. The small, spartan compartment was located immediately off Kinaasha'defarnoo's CIC, and the great fang had discovered that it was entirely too conveniently placed. The monitor's designers had intended it for the emergency use of a flag officer during sustained maneuvering and combat, not as someplace for a fleet commander to spend every night. He supposed some might argue that his decision to essentially move himself permanently into the cabin for the immediate future might be less than fully reassuring to some of his personnel, and he was certain that the proximity to CIC, Flag Bridge, and Plotting wasn't doing a good things for his own regular and undisturbed sleep patterns.
Despite that, he had no intention of changing his routine. From the moment Lord Talphon's official permission to proceed with his long-planned offensive had arrived in Shanak, he'd been an impatient zeget on a fraying leash, and he didn't particularly care that his behavior meant his officers and crews had to be fully aware of that fact. In fact, he wanted them to be aware. Wanted them to share his own focused, almost feverish sense of exalted anticipation.
And they did. Lord Khiniak doubted that anyone outside Third Fleet, with the exceptions of Raymond Prescott and Zhaarnak'telmasa, had anything like a true grasp of what his command had become over the seven dreary standard years of waiting in this accursed star system. It was the ambition of any officer of the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee to train his warriors as farshatok-that term the Humans translated, accurately but incompletely, as the "fingers of a fist." Of course, Human fists were blunt, clawless instruments, but the sense came through. But Third Fleet had gone beyond that. His personnel were not simply farshatok, not simply a band of warriors who fought with perfect unity, teamwork, and ferocity, but vilka'farshatok, warriors of a single clan-of one blood, whatever their birth or clan affiliation. Even the Gormish units of his command had been touched by Third Fleet's eagerness to avenge Kliean, and so Lord Khiniak had no fear they would misinterpret his eagerness as anxiety or uncertainty.
Unfortunately, despite the permission he'd been given to mount his longed-for attack, he wasn't free to proceed with operations the way he truly wished to. Given a more perfect universe, he would have restricted himself to a single recon drone probe of the closed warp point. Just enough to secure the data he required to program his SBMHAWKs before he launched his entire fleet at the Bugs' throats. In the long run, any risks involved in that approach would almost certainly have been offset by the fact that it would have allowed him to retain the element of surprise.
But there were other factors to consider-the same factors, in many ways, which had driven Zhaarnak'telmasa to fall back from Kliean before the Bugs' initial onslaught. Although Lord Khiniak and his crews regarded themselves as an offensive weapon, they could never forget that their true function for seven endless Human years-almost fourteen of their own-had been to stand as a barrier between any additional Bug attacks and the heavily populated star systems which lay beyond Kliean and Telmasa. Certainly, the Strategy Board hadn't forgotten, and Fang Kthaara's permission to proceed hadn't arrived completely free of strings.
Koraaza'khiniak suspected that Kthaara had been forced to attach those strings largely for political considerations, but to his own sensitive nostrils some of them carried the definite scent of Fleet Speaker Noraku's caution, as well. In fairness, few beings in the explored universe were less politically motivated than Noraku, and while Koraaza often found the Gorm representative's deliberate, phlegmatic approach to problems even more maddening than he found most Humans, the Third Fleet commander was forced to concede that this particular set of strings wasn't entirely senseless.
Given the fact that the Bugs clearly had been forced more and more heavily onto the defensive, it was impossible even for him to argue that an attack from Shanak was essential. Valuable and extremely useful, yes; essential, no. Koraaza believed fervently that his proposed offensive would help shorten the war, but he wasn't blind to the fact that his thirst to engage the enemy was as much the product of his people's code of honor as of cold, strategic analysis. The one didn't invalidate the conclusions of the other, yet the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee had learned the hard way (which-he conceded in the privacy of his own thoughts-was the way in which they seemed to learn all of their lessons) that the pragmatism of their Gorm allies and their one-time Human foes was just as important as honor when it came to planning military operations. And, pragmatically speaking, it was far more important to the Alliance that Third Fleet prevent any possibility of a last-ditch Bug offensive out of Shanak than it was for that same fleet to launch an offensive of its own.
If that was true, then it only made sense-however much he resented it-to be certain before any offensive was launched that it was in a position to succeed without risking the destruction of Third Fleet's protective barrier. Which explained both the substantial reinforcements GFGHQ had somehow managed to pry loose from the rear area pickets and also the very specific orders from Centauri which had required him to conduct a thorough reconnaissance of the warp point defenses-if any-awaiting him on the far side of the warp point in the system which the Alliance's astrographers had designated Bug-06.