David Weber & Steve White - Starfire 06 - The Stars At War 2

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THE STARS AT WAR II
DAVID WEBER
&
STEVE WHITE
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are
fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
The Shiva Option copyright © 2002 by David Weber & Steve White; an earlier version
of Insurrection copyright © 1990 by David Weber & Steve White; the -revised and
expanded version in this volume is copyright © 2005 by David Weber & Steve White.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any
form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 0-7434-9912-3
Cover art by David Mattingly
Maps by Randy Asplund
First combined printing, July 2005
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
TK
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Production & design by Windhaven Press (www.windhaven.com)
Printed in the United States of America
BAEN BOOKS by DAVID WEBER
Honor Harrington:
On Basilisk Station
The Honor of the Queen
The Short Victorious War
Field of Dishonor
Flag in Exile
Honor Among Enemies
In Enemy Hands
Echoes of Honor
Ashes of Victory
War of Honor
Honorverse:
Crown of Slaves (with Eric Flint)
The Shadow of Saganami
edited by David Weber:
More than Honor
Worlds of Honor
Changer of Worlds
The Service of the Sword
Mutineers' Moon
The Armageddon Inheritance
Heirs of Empire
Empire from the Ashes
Path of the Fury
The Apocalypse Troll
The Excalibur Alternative
Bolo!
Old Soldiers
Oath of Swords
The War God's Own
Wind Rider's Oath
with Steve White:
The Stars At War
The Stars At War II
with John Ringo:
March Upcountry
March to the Sea
March to the Stars
We Few
with Eric Flint:
1633
BAEN BOOKS by STEVE WHITE
Blood of Heroes (forthcoming)
The Prometheus Project
Demon's Gate
Forge of the Titans
Eagle Against the Stars
Emperor of Dawn <http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200201/0671577972.htm?blurb>
Prince of Sunset
The Disinherited
Legacy
Debt of Ages
THE SHIVA OPTION
The authors would like to extend their sincere thanks to Fred Burton, war
gamer and friend, who personally designed the entire Star Union of Crucis
and not only made it live, but also gave us permission
to steal . . . er, borrow it for our story.
Thanks, Fred.
PROLOGUE
Their hands were still tightly clasped when the universe reappeared.
Feridoun had taken Aileen's hand in his just before TFNS Jamaica made warp transit. No one else
on the flag bridge had noticed the thoroughly unmilitary gesture as he reached out to his admiral, for
they'd been fleeing with the hounds of Hell baying at their heels. The rest of Survey Flotilla 19's battered
survivors had already preceded the flagship into the unknown. Then it had been Jamaica's turn, and
Aileen had returned the pressure of his hand and smiled with the knowledge of a personal discovery that
had come—as such things will—at the worst imaginable moment. That pressure, and that smile, had
continued as the appropriately blood-red star had seemed to vanish down a well of infinity astern, and
the two of them had gone through a hole in the continuum as one.
But then reality stabilized, and they were in a new stellar system, God knew how many light-years
away in Einsteinian space, and reports of successful transit began to arrive from the ships ahead of them.
As though with an electric shock of embarrassment, they each released the other's hand, and were once
again simply Rear Admiral Aileen Sommers, Terran Federation Navy, commanding Survey Flotilla 19,
and Captain Feridoun Hafezi, her chief of staff.
Not that the flotilla was much of a command anymore. It had escaped—barely, and with hideous
losses—from the most horrifying enemy humankind had ever faced, or dreamed of facing. But the escape
was only temporary. The Arachnids had witnessed their transit, and so should have little trouble locating
the warp point they'd used. No, she corrected herself: would have little trouble. After the events of the
past three and a half standard Terran years, no human was apt to underestimate Arachnid capabilities.
So she took command of herself and ordered the flotilla onward into the system under cloaking
ECM, getting lost in the immensity of space before the Bugs could follow them through the warp point.
She also sent the Hun-class scout cruisers ahead to begin surveying. They reported almost immediately
that the system wasn't one of those in the Terran Federation's databases, and there was no point in
searching for a native high-tech civilization. This star was a red giant, and like some insane god of ancient
myth it had long since devoured any planetary children it might once have possessed. So Sommers
ordered the Huns to search for warp points other than the one they'd just transited—warp points through
which they could continue their hegira.
She wanted to pause and appease a lack of sleep which had almost exceeded the human organism's
capacity to function. But there was no time. Instead, she called a staff conference.
* * *
At some point, Hafezi had somehow managed to repair the haggardness of battle. Sommers, gazing
across the conference table at him, saw that he'd even restored his beard to its neatly sculpted norm . . .
but she detected a salting of gray hairs among the black. Is it possible, she wondered, that what we've
been through over the last few weeks could've done that already?
Or maybe it's been there all along and I've just never looked closely enough to notice.
Since the escape from the last system, their behavior towards each other had been scrupulously
correct. Not, she thought wryly, that they'd had much opportunity for incorrectness. And not that they'd
actually avoided each other—their duties would've made that difficult. No, they'd just worn formality as
armor against their own feelings. Feelings they couldn't openly express under the present circumstances,
even if they'd known how.
One crisis at a time, Sommers told herself firmly. And preferably not the personal one first. She
concentrated on listening to Feridoun's—no, her chief of staff's—report.
Concentrating was hard, though. She already knew most of the facts he was reciting, and they were
too painful to bear thinking about.
First, her loss figures. Out of SF 19's original strength of seven battlecruisers, one fleet carrier, two
light carriers (both from the space fleet of Terra's Ophiuchi allies), nine light cruisers, and two freighters,
she'd lost two battlecruisers, three light cruisers, and a freighter—every one of which she felt like a stab
wound. And it was worse than it sounded, for practically all the survivors—including and especially
Jamaica—were damaged in varying degrees. And besides . . .
Hafezi voiced her own gloomy thoughts as he summed up.
"Both the battlecruisers we've lost were Dunkerque-A-class, out of the four we originally had. The
impact on our firepower—"
"Yes, yes," Sommers interrupted. The Dunkerque-A's were rated as BCRs: ships that combined a
very respectable battery of capital missile launchers with a battlecruiser's speed and nimbleness at the
expense of sacrificing almost everything else. They were formidable missile platforms, especially when
knitted into datalinked firing groups by Jamaica and her other two Thetis-A-class command
battlecruisers. All three of those had survived. But . . . her lips quirked into what could almost be
mistaken for a smile. "Still just as many chiefs, but not as many Indians," she said aloud.
Hafezi looked puzzled for a moment—the joke belonged to her cultural background, not his. But
then he caught the sense, and he responded with a smile as humorless as hers. It was a mistake, for their
eyes met in a more direct contact than they'd known since the battle. Hafezi's shied away, and he hurried
on.
"Furthermore, the carriers suffered heavy losses in their fighter squadrons." The figures appeared on
the conference room's display screen. "And all our depletable munitions are in short supply after the loss
of Voyager."
"That last loss worries me more than all the others. And not just—or even principally—because of
the missiles she was carrying," Commander Arbella Maningo, the logistics officer, put in. In the earlier
stages of their flight, she'd wavered on the ragged edge of panic. But she'd steadied as the situation had
grown more desperate, as people sometimes did, and the freighter Voyager had been her special
concern.
Sommers was inclined to agree with the logistics officer's observation. Still, she wished Maningo
hadn't brought it up, for there was nothing they could do about it, and just thinking about it gave her the
beginnings of a migraine.
With no other alternative but annihilation, Survey Flotilla 19 was fleeing outward into the unknown in
the forlorn hope of eventually finding itself back in known space. The notion wasn't completely
unrealistic—the warp connections sometimes formed clusters of interconnected nexi, and the Terran
Federation and its allies encompassed a lot of warp points. But its chances of success were directly
related to the length of time they could sustain the search. Under such circumstances, the loss of fifty
percent of the flotilla's logistics support was a catastrophe so overwhelming that discussing it was
pointless. Sommers had refrained from placing everyone on short rations; in the odd blend of shell shock
and euphoria that had followed their escape, the morale impact of such a move would have been
imponderable but almost certainly not good. She wouldn't be able to put it off much longer, though. . . .
"What happened?" Maningo was continuing, as much to herself as to the conference at large.
"Where did they come from?" Sommers felt no inclination to slap the logistics officer down; she wasn't
reverting to her former jitters, just voicing the question that had been in everyone's mind since the
Arachnid ships had appeared behind them in the expanse of nothingness that was a starless warp nexus.
"That's clear enough," the electronic image of Captain Milos Kabilovic growled. Kabilovic, CO of
the fleet carrier Borsoi, wasn't a member of the staff, but he was virtually present as commander of SF
19's "gunslingers"—the term for the explorers' Battle Fleet escorts that continued to be used even though
the distinction between Battle Fleet and Survey Command had faded more than a little since the war
began.
"It was a closed warp point," he went on, "either in that warp nexus or, more likely, one of those on
the other side. The Bugs—" it had been years since anyone had called the Arachnids anything but that
"—closed in on us as soon as they became aware of our presence."
At first, nobody showed any inclination to dispute the carrier commander's analysis. The anomalies in
space and time known as warp points—usually, but not always, associated with stellar gravity
wells—had been known to humans for over three centuries, ever since the day in 2053 when the
exploration ship Hermes, en route to Neptune, had abruptly found itself in the system of Alpha Centauri,
instead. They'd been known even longer to humanity's sometime enemies and current allies the Orions,
the only known race to have theorized the phenomenon's existence rather than accidentally stumbling
over it. Knowledge of the so-called closed warp points, invisible even to those who'd learned how to
detect ordinary warp points by their associated grav surge, was of more recent vintage. But it was
nonetheless common knowledge in this room, one of the fundamental background hazards of survey
work, against which precautions were routinely taken. And SF 19's precautions had gone beyond
routine. . . .
"But we were operating continuously in cloak!" Hafezi protested. "And we didn't even emplace any
courier drone nav buoys at the warp points we passed through, just in case the Bugs had any cloaked
pickets in those systems. How could they have found us?"
"None of that's foolproof. They could have detected us on any one of our warp transits, if they
already had pickets in those systems." Kabilovic addressed the individual who had the most intimate
knowledge of sensor systems. "Isn't that true, Lieutenant Murakuma?"
Fujiko Murakuma nodded slowly as everyone awaited her opinion, respectful of her expertise
despite her junior rank. She was the flotilla's specialist in the new second-generation recon drones which
had revolutionized survey work by marrying the technology of advanced sensors to that of the
SBMHAWK missiles that allowed a bombardment of an unseen enemy at the other end of a warp line.
Probing through unknown warp points in advance of the ships that launched them, the RD2 had removed
some of the "shot-in-the-dark" quality from warp point exploration . . . and, with it, maybe some of the
mystique, which was why certain old-timers affected to despise it. A generation which had grown up with
the likelihood of Bugs on the far side of any unsurveyed warp point had little patience for such
romanticism, on the other hand. It belonged to the days when survey ships had fared heedlessly into an
illimitable frontier, seeking worlds to study and colonize rather than to incinerate.
Fujiko Murakuma belonged to the generation which had come to grips with the harsher, infinitely
more terrifying present reality, and Sommers studied her. The fact that she put her individual name before
her surname wasn't unusual; many Japanese-derived cultures had by now adopted that Western practice.
Indeed, her name was more Japanese than her appearance, for she was tall and slender, her hair held a
reddish glint in its midnight depths, and her eyes, despite a perceptible epicanthic fold, were hazel-green.
But any ambivalence in her background was unimportant. What mattered was her professional
competence, and as to that there was no uncertainty at all.
"That's true, Sir," she replied to Kabilovic. "I'm firmly convinced that the Bug force that attacked us
entered one of the star systems through which we'd already passed—or, to be precise, one of the warp
nexi, with or without a star system—rather than the one in which they attacked us. We weren't aware of
their entry because of our lack of coverage of those nexi, even with nav buoys."
It could have been interpreted as a veiled criticism of Sommers' decision not to emplace such buoys,
since their absence meant it was impossible for any courier drone to find its way home with word of the
flotilla's fate. But emplacing them would also have been a tell-tale trail of bread crumbs for any Arachnid
picket or survey force which had chanced upon them, and the lieutenant's odd eyes met the admiral's
squarely. Looking into them, Sommers detected nothing behind the words except a junior officer gutsy
enough to say what she thought even at the risk of misinterpretation. What she did detect was a desire on
Murakuma's part to say more, to go beyond the expert opinion Kabilovic had solicited.
"Do you care to theorize any further, Lieutenant?" she inquired, clearing the way for Murakuma to
speak up in the presence of her superiors.
"Well, Sir . . . May I?" Murakuma indicated the holographic display projector at the center of the
conference table. Sommers nodded, and the lieutenant manipulated controls. A series of colored balls
connected by sticks, rather like a very simplified representation of a molecule, appeared in midair: warp
nexi and the warp lines that connected them. There were nine of the immaterial spheres, and everyone
present recognized the display as SF 19's route. It had, of course, no relation whatsoever to those
various stars' relative positions and distances in real-space. Nobody except astronomers thought in such
terms when the warp points allowed interstellar transits without crossing the intervening light-years.
"We began here," Murakuma began, using a light-pencil to indicate the ball representing the
Anderson One system. Then she flashed the immaterial pointer four balls further along the string. "And
here's where they attacked us. When they appeared, they didn't give the impression of a force that had
just piled into the system and was still in the process of getting itself organized. That's why I believe they
entered a closed warp point in one of the intervening warp nexi." She created the broken strings that
denoted warp lines leading to closed warp points, indicating hypothetical routes into the three nexi they'd
transited before the Bugs had overtaken them.
"Precisely," Kabilovic said with a satisfied nod, but Murakuma wasn't finished.
"But the question then becomes," she went on, "why did they wait so long to attack us?"
摘要:

THESTARSATWARIIDAVIDWEBER&STEVEWHITEThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.TheShivaOptioncopyright©2002byDavidWeber&SteveWhite;anearlierversionofInsurrectioncopyright©1990byDavidWeber&SteveWhite;the-r...

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