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.

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

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?"

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

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