"You're asking me? Magda, I've been out of circulation for a year!" "But you're also the senior commander who's really seen the Rim's weapons in action, so you can give us the best gut reaction on them, Should we worry more about quantity or quality? Because---was Magda grinned crookedly was for our sins, you and I are going to be the Fleet commanders who do the stopping. So who do we stop, Hah? The Rump or the Rim?" Hah dropped into a chair and thought long, hard and furiously.
"I'he Rump doesn't have any of the new technology? Just numbers?" Magda nodded.
"And have we come through with any of those 'wonder weapons" people were muttering about before Second Zephrain? Do we have any surprises of our own?" "A few," Windrider said.
"Then we have to block the Rump with secondary forces and go for the Rim with eve disrything we have," Hah said, suddenly decisive. "No matter how many hulls the Rump has, we can tangle them up in the frontier forts, mines, and local fighter bases.
We can slow them up, at least, but you've never seen an left-brace tthing like Trevayne's new battle-line. We have to stop him, and stop him hard.
If at all possible, we have to cut him up badly enough to move in and take Zephrain away from him.
Even if we lose a dozen systems--comor twice that many!--to the Rump, we've still got a good chance to win this war in the end stf we can keep them away from Zephrain." "And where do we stop them?" Magda asked tonelessly. "Zapata," Hah said crisply. "It's a critical choke point, and we can move stuff in from Bonaparte for the big engagement. Use commerce raiders on the flanks as they advance..
Something in her voice caught Han's attention, and she stared at her friend suspiciously. No! She couldn't mean... to ""Yhat's right, Hah," Magda said ahnost compassionately@u "One of the reasons I was ordered to have this little chat with you was to be certain you did understand the priorities. You got your second star while you were still a POW--THE sae day I got mine.
And that means you're still senior." She held out the luminous pointer.
"Welcome to supreme command of Operation Actium, Admiral Li." OPERATION REUNION Operation Reunion began with an irruption of SBMHAWK carrier pods into the Zvoboda System. One moment the Republican Navy's detection screens were blank: the next a multitude of unmanned pods warped into the teeth of the forts guarding this gateway to the Terran Republic. A few came to grief in the warp point minefields; a few more emerged in overlapping volumes of space and died with the violence the gods of physics reserve for phenomena which violate their laws. But most survived to fling their missiles at the forts, announcing the arrival of the Federation's warriors in fire and death.
Probes of the Zvoboda System had been limited to avoid alarming its defenders, but Ian Trevayne had a fairly good notion of what he would face. The Republic had erected a formidable shell of big Wpe four OWP'S around the Zephrain warp point and another around the warp point to New India, but Lavrenti Kirilenko was convinced there would be few mobile units. The forts were typical of the Republic's designs, each incorporating two squadrons of fighters; that fighter strength, coupled with the forts' own weapons, needed no support to decimate any conventional assault.
Trevayne and Genji Yoshinaka agreed with Kirilenko's assessments; hence the lavish SBMHAWK bombardment that preceded their ships through the warp point. Such a heavy employment of SBM'S would seriously deplete their stores for the next assault, but there was no point planning for the next battle ff they lost this one. Besides, everything 346 seemed to suggest that Zvoboda had been so heavily fortified that the Republic could have spared little for the defense of New India.
Missiles leapt from their carrier pods, but the Republican gunners hadn't been asleep. The Rim's decreased probe traffic hadn't lulled them; rather it had confirmed their suspicions, and they'd gone on round-the-clock alert. Still, no one could be a hundred percent alert at every instant, and ff point defense stopped a lot of missiles; nothing could have stopped them all.
Antimatter warheads flared against shields.
Tremendous fireballs wracked the space around them. Armor glowed, vaporized, flared away.
Atmosphere whuffed outward, water vapor sparkling, as the missiles savaged the forts. Yet for all their savagery, all their violence, they couldn't prevent the Republic from launching the majority of its fighter* But Trevayne had antipated that, and he had no inten-Uon of offering up his strictly limited carrier strength for target practice, even if The Book did call for fighters as the best defense against fighters. Instead, the ships that followed the carrier pods into Zvoboda used a tactic which was new, one so unorthodox it took the defenders totally by surprise, yet so simple they wondered why no one else had ever thought of it.
Simultaneously, da Silva cut her own ropulsion, maintaining just sufficient drive field to interdict missile fire, and rolled on attitude control to place herself stern-to-stern with Nelson--an unheard of position. Then another supermonitorstmonitor pair emerged, and another.
All strikefighter pilots knew to attack battle-line units by maneuvering into the sternward "blind zone" created by the slow and clumsy ship's drive field, where its tracking systems were useless and its weapons could not be brought to bear. But the rebel pilots, racing to implement their fundamental tactical doctrine, were slaughtered by defensive fire from the supermonitors and monitors while searching for blind zones that were, in effect, not there!
They inflicted damage, of course--quite a lot, in fact. But monitors were designed to absorb and survive damage, and supermonitors even more so.
The fighters were cut down before their short-ranged weapons could take decisive effect, and the big ships lumbered towards the fortresses, contemptuous alike of the fighters and mines that sought to hinder them.
The fortress crews knew what their fighters' failure meant. They'd seen the reports on Second Zephrain, and they knew all about the improved force beams Trevayne's ships mounted, but they stood to their weapons, pouring in defensive fire against the oncoming ships. Damage control parties aboard the supermonitors and monitors found their services in high demand, but not critically so, and the capital ships riddled the forts with primary-mode fire and then reduced them to tangled wreckage with "wide-angled" fire even as Sean Remko's battle-cruisers savagely hunted down the few mobile rebel units.
Fourth Fleet reformed into a more conventional order of battle, complete with escort destroyers, and lumbered into a hyperbolic course across the system.
Ian Trevayne sat in his command chair, listening to the reports as his crews worked frenziedly on the damage. It wasn't quite as bad as he'd anticipated, he thought. Bad enough, certainly-- especially in terms of human life--comb no internal damage his repair crews couldn't put right in the seventy-eight hour trip across the system.
It was a case of slapdash repairs, of course, but aside frown the damage to his ships' armor, virtually full combat efficiency had been restored between the first engagement and the moment the New India warp point fortifications hove into range.
Not that he had any intention of exposing those repairs to fresh damage ff he could help it. And he could help it, for the Terran Republic still had no counterweight for the HBM.
The rebel commander knew it, too, and he launched his fighters before the supermonitors came into HBM range. That saved them from destruction in their bays but exposed them to extended-range AFHAWK fire from Trevayne's screen and interception by Carl Stoner's fighters. A few broke through both missiles and defending fighters, displaying the skill and determination which were the haffful- marks of Republican fighter pilots, but they were a spent force. The escort destroyers and capital ships blasted them apart in return for trifling damage, and shortly thereafter the HBM'S began to batter the fortresses.