Then the fighter strike was through, emerging into clear space and sending reports flooding into the databases of Fleet flag.
"It worked, Admiral!" Ernesto Cruciero exclaimed. "The data are incomplete, of course, but most of the deep space force ships were either destroyed outright or damaged so severely they won't be able to keep formation . . . and wouldn't be much use if they could!"
Murakuma permitted herself a brief smile at the ops officer's enthusiasm.
"Very good, Ernesto. Convey my congratulations to Small Fang Iaashmaahr-and also my desire that she expedite the recovery of her fighters so she can rendezvous with us as quickly as possible." Cruciero and Olivera both looked somewhat crestfallen. "Let's face it, gentlemen. Crippling the deep space force, while certainly desirable, was really something of a sideshow. That's the real threat." Murakuma pointed at the innocuous-looking ruby icon that represented clouds of antimatter-laden gunboats and shuttles. "And we're going to need Iaashmaahr's fighters very badly to deal with it."
There was a basic inelegance to it: the Allies had to defend the asteroids and the Bugs had to neutralize them, and both sides knew it. All of which left little scope for finesse.
Iaashmaahr's carriers remained in cloak for their run to rejoin the rest of the combined fleets, so they had the benefit of one more undetected launch. Those fighters, and the nineteen hundred others from Small Fang Meearnow's Mohrdenhaus (whose usefulness even the Terrans were coming to appreciate), went out to meet the Bug kamikazes in a dogfight whose scale was exceeded only by its desperation.
As always, the fighters cut great gashes through the massed Bug formations. And, as always, they couldn't possibly kill enough of those endless, uncaring hordes. Like water pouring through a collapsing dike, streams of kamikazes closed in on the asteroids.
The battle-line slid in, interposing itself, suffering hideous losses as it burned away hundreds more of the kamikazes. Vanessa Murakuma lay in her command chair crash frame, trying to disassociate her mind from her bruised body as Li Chien-lu shuddered from hits that sent even a monitor's mass reeling. It was all she could do. She'd already given sufficient orders: stand and fight.
Again, many of the attackers broke through-into a latticework of death around the asteroids, whose defensive installations were directed by Taliaferro's command ships. And again, not all the kamikazes could be denied their rendezvous with death. Two of the smaller "Hammer" asteroids were shattered into pieces which wouldn't even stay on trajectories that would bring them into collision with Planet III to burn up in its atmosphere, for their fragments-unlike their intact sisters-were no longer accelerating down their precisely calculated track. But not even the ultimate violence of antimatter annihilation could break up the big planetoids.
At last it was over, and Murakuma and her staff surveyed the readouts of carnage.
"Their remaining kamikazes are falling back to Planet III to regroup," Marina Abernathy concluded.
"We need to do the same thing," Murakuma pointed out, and turned from the intelligence officer to address the ops officer and the farshathkhanaak.
"Ernesto, Anson, I want a schedule for our carriers with undamaged drives to shuttle back to Orpheus 1 and Bug-06 in relays for replacement fighters. We have a long way to go, and the Bugs will be back."
She proved to be right. The Orion drives had kicked the asteroids into fairly flat hyperbolas involving far less transit time than the years simple Hohmann transfer orbits would have taken, and those same drives continued to accelerate them steadily. But on the standards of this era's spacefarers, the pace was a veritable crawl. There was plenty of time for the Bugs to return to the attack, again and again. But they did so with steadily weakening forces, for this system was on its own. They inflicted losses, which the combined fleets grimly took. They disrupted or deflected all but two of the "Hammer" asteroids. They even managed to alter the orbit of Sledgehammer One, sending it careening harmlessly aside.
It wasn't nearly enough.
They were all feeling drained as they stood on Li Chien-lu's flag bridge and watched Home Hive Three A III die.
The Bug attacks had come with greater and greater frequency as doom had drawn closer to the planet-but they'd also grown weaker and weaker. In the end, the Bugs had nothing left to throw at the onrushing asteroids, which had gradually picked up speed as they'd fallen down the sun's gravity well and, eventually, the planet's. By now they were moving at what the pre-reactionless-drive era would have accounted a very high interplanetary velocity.
They watched the view on the big screen, downloaded from recon fighters that were continuing to shadow Sledgehammer Three. Gazing at that rugged spheroid-even more rugged now, after all the hits it had taken-Murakuma contemplated the inappropriateness, verging on banality, of the popular term "dinosaur killer." That asteroid, which had slammed into Old Terra's Yucatan peninsula sixty-five million years ago, was estimated to have been a mere ten kilometers in diameter, rather like the two "Hammer" asteroids that continued to follow the monster in the screen, like lesser sea creatures in the wake of a whale. And it had almost certainly been traveling a lot more slowly. If the thing she was now watching had struck Earth, neither she nor any other life form of Terran origin-not even a microbe-would now exist.
Leroy McKenna was calling out the minutes to impact in a leaden voice. She didn't listen. Instead, she watched Planet III grow and grow in the screen. Presently, the fighters swerved away to stay out of range of the planet-based defenses, and the panorama expanded.
A seemingly small, artificial-looking object appeared, glinting in the planet's reflected light. She'd been told to expect it. By sheer coincidence, Sledgehammer Three was going to sideswipe the planet's space station on its way down. That station was as titanic as all such Bug constructs, but its mass was as nothing compared to the falling planetoid, and the pyrotechnics of its death were disappointing. The asteroid, trailing a scattering of debris that had been the space station, dwindled in the distance against the clouded bluish backdrop. It had probably been deflected a bit, but not enough to matter this close to the planet.
"Minus ten seconds," McKenna intoned, his voice even deeper than usual.
Time crept by. At minus three seconds, an extraordinary thing happened. The swirling cloud-patterns of Planet III abruptly vanished, replaced by concentric rings rushing away from the black dot that had suddenly begun to glow redly with the heat of friction. Sledgehammer Three had entered atmosphere like a three-hundred-kilometer cannonball, generating a shock wave that blew a hole in the air as it went.
Murakuma had only two seconds to absorb that spectacle. Then Sledgehammer Three crossed the terminator into darkness. A protracted second later, a blinding fireball erupted on that nighted surface, impossibly huge given the fact that it was a planet they were looking at. The night vanished as thermal pulse drove a shock wave that overwhelmed the earlier one, pushing outward in all directions from that inferno of an impact-point. Following it across the oceans came hundred-meter walls of water that would, in another hour or so, flood the coastal plains, finally expending their last efforts against the highest mountain ramparts. The earthquakes erupting along every fault line on the planet passed unnoticed. So would the glowing sleet of red-hot rock as the gigatons of debris that had been blasted into space returned in an hour or so; there would be no living eyes to see it, no living organisms to be immolated in the heat.