As he watched, he saw that it was very complete indeed. He saw it even before Bichet turned from his and Chung's analysis of the incoming data.
"Admiral, those forts don't even have their shields up!" the ops officer exulted.
"So I see, Jacques."
Even as Prescott spoke, carefully keeping his matching exultation out of his voice, the fighters began to launch, and the fortresses began to die. Those warheads held only specks of antimatter, but they were striking naked metal, and their targets vanished in fireballs like short-lived suns. The intolerably brilliant flashes of fury in the visual display gouged at his optic nerve, even at this range and even through the display's filters, but he didn't look away. There was a hideous beauty to those lightning bolts of destruction, and something deep within him treasured the knowledge that thousands of Arachnids were dying at their hearts, like spiders trapped in so many candle flames.
Then the battle-line entered missile range of the space station, and Prescott made himself look away from the dying fortresses as he faced his second worry. How well would that station coordinate its fire with the as yet unknown defensive installations of the planet below? He had a bad moment as the computer traced a luminous dotted line around the schematic of the station, indicating that its shields had just come on-line. But as his capital ships' missiles went in, there was no point defense from the planet . . . nor even from the station. And, as detailed sensor readings began to come in and scroll up the plot's sidebar, he could see that the shields weren't state-of-the-art ones, either.
Chung didn't state the obvious, Prescott noted with approval-he was getting better. Instead, he merely offered a diffident observation.
"They must not have thought it was worthwhile to refit this station, Sir, since this is obviously one of their core systems-and therefore, by definition, not on the front lines."
"No doubt, Commander. Also . . ."
Prescott closed his mouth and didn't allow Chung's look of frank curiosity to tempt him into completing his thoughts aloud. The losses they've suffered, between Operation Pesthouse and the Black Hole of Centauri, may have forced them to concentrate on starship construction, to the exclusion of upgrading their orbital installations. No, this wasn't the time to float that concept.
Nor was it the time to be thinking of anything at all except the reports that poured in as the missiles reached the space station. With no point defense to thin out that onrushing wave front of death, the shields' level of sophistication hardly mattered. They flashed through a pyrotechnic display of energy absorption that a living eye-had it remained living and unblinded in such an environment-could barely have registered. Then they went down, and devastating explosions began to rock that titanic orbital construct with brimstone sledgehammers as antimatter met matter.
Each of TF 61's ships had flushed its external ordnance racks, and the tidal wave of massive capital ship missiles slammed lances of searing flame deep into the now unprotected alloy. But the station was titanic-so huge that its mass seemed to belie its obvious artificiality, for surely nothing so colossal could be an artifact. So huge that it could absorb a great deal of damage-even the kind of damage dealt out by antimatter warheads. A major portion of it lasted long enough to get its point defense on-line, and Prescott needed no specialist's analysis to see that his missile fire had suddenly become markedly less effective as fewer warheads evaded the active defenses long enough to strike their targets.
Well, there was a solution for that. A little unprecedented, but . . .
He turned to the intraship communicator in his command chair's armrest and spoke to Dnepr's commanding officer. Certain things still lay in the province of the flag captain, especially where the leadership of the battle-line was concerned.
"Captain Turanoglu, you will proceed at maximum speed to beam-weapon range of the space station and . . . engage the enemy more closely."
Prescott couldn't be sure Turanoglu recognized the quote, which lay outside his cultural background. But the banditlike Turkish face showed no lack of understanding.
"Aye, aye, Sir!" he barked, and he'd barely cut the circuit before Dnepr, with the rest of TF 61's capital ships behind her, surged forward.
Mandagalla, Bichet, Chung, and everyone else near enough to have overheard the exchange stared at Prescott. He could understand why. Missiles, unlike directed-energy weapons, were equally destructive regardless of the range from which they were launched. And at missile range, the Allies' generally superior fire control and point defense had always given them the advantage. No Terran admiral had ever closed to within energy-weapon range of the Bugs if he could help it, and Prescott braced himself for a call from Zhaarnak.
None came. His vilkshatha brother was being as good as the word he'd given on Xanadu before they'd departed: TF 61 was Prescott's, and as fleet commander Zhaarnak would support to the hilt whatever decisions the human made. So the task force's capital ships swept onward in formation with Dnepr-including Celmithyr'theaarnouw, for Zhaarnak's body, as well as his honor, stood behind his promises.
They drew still closer, the space station swelled to gargantuan dimensions upon the visual display . . . and the stares of his staffers turned into looks of comprehension. The key words in Prescott's orders to Turanoglu had been maximum speed. It stood to reason that the Bugs, taken by surprise by the missile-storm and struggling to bring their systems on-line, would have given priority to their point defense. So, Prescott had reasoned, their anti-ship energy weapons might well still be silent. And so it proved, as his battle-line closed to point-blank range, pouring unanswered fire into the disintegrating mass of the flame-wracked station. The holocaust blazing against the serene blue and white backdrop of the planet TF 61 had come to kill doubled and redoubled as force beams, hetlasers, and the unstoppable focused stilettos of primary beams ripped and tore.
Yet even that unimaginable torrent of energy and the dreadful waves of antimatter warheads seemed insufficient to the task. The space station bucked and quivered as the carnage streaming from the capital ship gnats stinging and biting at it hammered home, yet still it survived. And as Prescott watched the plot's sidebars, he realized that his ships' sensors were detecting the first Ehrlicher emissions as somewhere inside that glaring ball of fury Bug warriors fought to bring their own surviving force beams and primaries into action.
"Admiral," Mandagalla reported in an awed voice, "our projected course will bring us within ninety kilometers of the station."
Prescott's mouth opened, then closed. That can't be right, had been his initial reaction. It simply didn't sound right. In space warfare, ranges weren't measured in kilometers!
But even at minimal magnification, the space station now filled much of the big viewscreen with its death agony. It was a spectacle none of them would ever forget. The Brobdingnagian structure burned, crumpled, collapsed in on itself, shed streamers of debris. Rippling waves of stroboscopic explosions ran across its shattered surface as a new volley of missiles, in uninterceptable sprint mode now that the range had dropped so low, struck home.