David Weber & Steve White - Starfire 04 - Shiva Option

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The Shiva Option

by David Weber & Steve White

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.

Also in this series:

Insurrection

Crusade

In Death Ground

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

Edited by David Weber:

More than Honor

Words of Honor

Changer of Worlds

Mutineers’ Moon

The Armageddon Inheritance

Heirs of Empire

Path of the Fury

The Apocalypse Troll

The Excalibur Alternative

Oath of Swords

The War God’s Own

With John Ringo:

March Upcountry

March to the Sea

Baen Books by Steve White

Eagle Against the Stars

Emperor of Dawn

Prince of Sunset

The Disinherited

Legacy

Debt of Ages

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 hagardness 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 incorrect-

ness. 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?”

“Well,” Hafezi ruminated, running his fingers through his beard in a nervous gesture he’d

only recently acquired, “we were operating in cloak. Even if they were aware of our presence

in a general way, maybe they took a long time to locate us precisely.”

“But, Sir,” Murakuma persisted, “it wouldn’t have taken them long to do that if they’d come

out of cloak themselves to hunt aggressively for us. Maybe they were unwilling to do so.”

“Why?” Sommers demanded.

“Well, Admiral, if we’d become aware that there were Bugs in this warp chain, wouldn’t

our first order of business have been to get at least one ship back with the warning? And with

them out of cloak, we might have detected them soon enough to do just that. So it could

make perfectly good sense to them to stay cloaked to keep us from doing that. But,”

Murakuma continued relentlessly into what had become a profound silence, “why did they

suddenly stop worrying about it?”

She made further adjustments, expanding her display to include the warp line of the far

side of Anderson One, leading to Alpha Centauri with its eight other warp points, one of

which connected with . . . Sol.

She said nothing. Nothing was needed. They all sat, no longer a staff but rather a

collection of individuals, each alone with his or her own horrified speculations.

Sommers knew she needed to bring them out of it. But she couldn’t, at first. She, too, was

face-to-face with a nightmare from which there was no awakening.

But because she was in command, and habituated to looking at the big picture, she ran her

mind over the events that had led them, and the rest of the human race, to this point.

It wasn’t that humankind’s expansion into the galaxy had been a peaceful process.

Quite the contrary.

Oh, it had been at first. After Hermes had shown the gateway to the stars—or, more

accurately, blundered through it—colonization of what were now called the Heart Worlds

had proceeded without any difficulties other than those humans had created for themselves.

No dangerously advanced aliens had been encountered, and after the dodged bullet called the

China War, no human with the brain to organize an effective opposition had challenged the

peaceful hegemony of the Terran Federation. Earth and its children had settled comfortably

into the belief that the universe was a fundamentally benign place, holding no real enemies,

only those to whom one had somehow given offense and with whom one should therefore

make amends. That attitude had always been common enough, at least among peoples who’d

enjoyed a vacation from history. (Sommers, whose ancestry was North American, winced

mentally.) And experience had finally seemed to be confirming it.

Then, one fine day in 2205, humanity had met the Orions.

The First Interstellar War had been only the first movement of a symphony of carnage.

One threat after another had materialized out of a galaxy which the conventional wisdom

had never expected to hold so many species at essentially the same technological level in the

same cosmological eyeblink of time. Next had come the three-cornered clash of Terran,

Orion, and Ophiuchi known as the Second Interstellar War. Then all three erstwhile enemies

had found themselves allies in the Third Interstellar War, for the Rigelians had offered none

of them anything but equal opportunity genocide. But then had come a diminuendo of sorts,

as the Terran Federation had dealt unaided with the truly weird Theban jihad for which

humans were at least arguably responsible. That had been around the turn of the twenty-

fourth century. Afterwards, there’d been no armed conflict to speak of for six decades. Even

in this era of extended lifespans, that had been long enough to convince most humans that

peace was the natural state of things.

The majority, as always, had been wrong. The orchestra of history hadn’t come to a

triumphant finale. It had barely paused before launching into the soul-shaking atonalities of

what wasn’t even like music composed by a madman . . . for a madman is, after all, human.

Nothing in history had prepared the human race—even that minority capable of learning

from history—for the horror that had begun when a survey mission had stumbled onto the

Arachnids. Nothing . . . not even the Rigelians, who’d been like a ghastly caricature—or,

perhaps, surrealist painting—of the worst religious and ideological fanatics of Old Terra’s

past. (And presumably still were, on the few planets where they now existed, closely watched

by orbital stations under standing orders to obliterate anything more advanced than a steam

engine or a black powder muzzleloader.) The Bugs were something else altogether. And after

three and a half years of war, no one was any closer to fathoming what that something else was

than they’d been in 2360.

The Bugs were, of course, sentient . . . weren’t they? Because they had to be . . . didn’t

they? Nonsentient lifeforms didn’t build starships, or organize the kind of industrial base that

had overwhelmed all initial resistance by sheer numbers, tonnage, and firepower. And

yet . . . in all those three and a half years there had been no communication of any kind with

them. Instead, mind-numbingly immense fleets had advanced in dead silence, indifferent to

losses, grinding the defenses of one system after another to powder with a nonfeeling

relentlessness even more horrible than Rigelian malevolence. Fantasies of runaway machine-

life had soon been dispelled, however; the Bugs were organic. It would have been better if

they hadn’t been. The Frankenstein robots of popular fiction wouldn’t have needed organic

food. The Bugs did . . . and they regarded conquered sentients as a source of it. As they’d

advanced along the Romulus Chain, whole human populations had vanished. So had Orion

populations, after the Bugs broke into the Kliean Chain. Two races which had thought

themselves inured to war had finally looked true horror full in the face.

Desperate fighting had eventually brought the war to a deadlock. And the Allies had

finally gotten a break: the discovery of a system, Zephrain, which gave warp access to what

was clearly an important system of the Bugs’ unknowably large domain. Admiral Ivan

Antonov—the victor of the Theban War, recalled from retirement as head of the Alliance’s

joint chiefs of staff—had begun to prepare an offensive, to be launched from that system. Not

only would that offensive strike at a critically important Bug system, but it might well also

open a fresh line of advance—a new point of contact which might allow Antonov to create a

war of movement and put an end to the brutal, grinding, head-on war of attrition against an

enemy who didn’t seem to feel its losses.

But then the Bugs had appeared in the skies of Alpha Centauri, humanity’s gateway to the

galaxy, only one warp transit away from the home system itself. It was also the Grand

Alliance’s headquarters, and Antonov had abruptly changed his plans. Taking personal

command of the forces being assembled for the Zephrain offensive, he’d led them through the

previously unsuspected closed warp point that had admitted the Bugs into humanity’s

heartland.

Antonov’s hastily organized Second Fleet had blasted its way into the system on the far

side of that warp point, which he’d dubbed “Anderson One” in honor of his old friend and

mentor Howard Anderson, hero of the first two interstellar wars. Then, judging the risks to be

outweighed by the chance of putting a quick end to the war—and the Bugs—he’d pressed

“Operation Pesthouse” onward towards the warp point into which the Bug defenders had

fled.

But Anderson One had held a third warp point, and Antonov had been too canny an old

campaigner to ignore the dangers that might lurk beyond it. Thus it was that Survey Flotilla

19 had departed through that third warp point, shortly after Second Fleet had fared deeper

into the unknown.

They’d set out just after Antonov’s first couriers had returned from his next conquest.

Censorship had blanketed those couriers’ tidings, but too late to prevent some disturbing

rumors from circulating about what Antonov had found on Anderson Two’s life-bearing

world. Sommers had rejected those rumors out of hand as unthinkable. Yes, everyone knew

the Bugs ate captured sentient beings. But ranches of such beings, raised as food animals that

knew they were food animals . . . ? And there were human worlds that had been under Bug

control for three years now—worlds on which there’d been children and adolescents. . . .

No! Once again, Sommers’ mind dismissed the thought with a spasm of revulsion.

Anyway, there was nightmare enough without it.

Murakuma’s voice resumed, bringing Sommers back to the present.

“The Bugs appeared from behind us, so they have precisely what we were dispatched to

warn against: a way into Anderson One, enabling them to cut off Second Fleet.”

The implications were lost on no one. Every pair of eyes was on the holo display, and every

mind was following the arrangement of prettily colored lights to its logical conclusion.

Was there still a Second Fleet?

Even as Sommers watched, the horror on certain faces deepened visibly as those faces’

owners allowed their eyes to follow the warp chains in the other direction from Anderson

One, to Alpha Centauri . . . and Sol.

In their fight for survival, they’d had no time to contemplate their aloneness, cut off from

the rest of the human race. But now people began to make hesitant eye contact, as they

silently asked each other the question no one dared utter aloud: Are we now really alone?

Maningo’s features began to tremble. Sommers opened her mouth, prepared to forestall

whatever the logistics officer was about to release into the oppressive air of the conference

room.

But Hafezi beat her to it, tossing his head like a tormented horse and speaking angrily—

although who or what his anger was directed against was not immediately apparent.

“No! It’s not possible! We’ve only been gone nine months. And the Bugs jumped us only

about a month and a half ago. There hasn’t been time for . . . well, anyway, remember all the

other worlds we’ve settled! They’re still there, even if . . . if . . .” He couldn’t continue, nor was

there any need for him to complete the thought. Everyone knew what he meant, and no one

wanted to hear it. He rallied himself. “Whatever’s happened, there’s still a Federation for us

to find our way back to. And there’s still our duty!”

They all sat up a little straighter, and even Maningo’s incipient quivering solidified into

determination. Thank you, Feridoun, Sommers thought, and in that fierce hawklike face she

thought to glimpse the Iranian mythic hero whose name he bore.

She didn’t dare allow her gaze to linger on that face.

“Commodore Hafezi is correct,” she rapped, reasserting control of the meeting. “We can’t

allow ourselves to dwell on speculative possibilities. All that can accomplish is to cripple our

will. Our sole concern must be the accomplishment of our mission and the return to safety of

the people entrusted to our command. To that end, we must locate another warp point as

soon as possible.” She felt no useful purpose would be served by mentioning the possibility

that this might be one of the occasional “dead end” systems with only one warp point.

Instead, she decided to attend to what she’d been putting off. “In the meantime, it’s necessary

for us to restrict our consumption of nonrenewable supplies, especially in light of the loss of

Voyager. Therefore, effective immediately, we’ll—”

The whoop of the general quarters klaxon shattered the air.

The voice of Jamaica’s captain came from Sommers’ chair arm communicator, speaking to

no one, for she was already off at a dead run for Flag Bridge. She needed no explanation of

what that whooping meant.

Well, she thought as she ran, at least I won’t have to worry about breaking the news to people

that we’re going on short rations.

She stood beside Hafezi and watched doom approach in the holo sphere.

“I’d hoped they wouldn’t find us so soon,” she said quietly. Not so long ago, she wouldn’t

have made a remark like that to her chief of staff. Now . . .

He didn’t reply. His eyes, like hers, remained fixed on the display of the Bug pursuers,

approaching on what wasn’t quite a stern chase they could run directly away from and which

would therefore intersect their course with the inevitability of death.

The wavefront of that oncoming force was composed of what humans termed gunboats—

larger than fighters. In fact, they were larger even than the auxiliary small craft carried by

starships, but they generated an intermediate form of reactionless drive field which conferred

speed and maneuverability far greater than that of any conventional starship. Indeed, their

speed approached that of the fighters the Bugs, for whatever reasons, couldn’t or at least

didn’t use . . . and, unlike fighters, they could make unassisted warp transit. They were a Bug

invention, and had come as a shocking surprise to the Allies, who hadn’t thought the Bugs

could invent. At least they had some countervailing disadvantages; they were energy hogs,

and in consequence had emissions signatures that made them as readily detectable—and

targetable—as full-sized starships.

Not that the Bug force would have been all that hard to detect in any case, for its second

wave consisted of battlecruisers, advancing uncloaked in justifiable contempt of their quarry.

Lots of battlecruisers . . . all the survivors from their fight in the last system, in fact. Some

were simply gunboat tenders, but the majority were fighting vessels comparable to her own

Dunkerque-A-class BCRs—the classes the Alliance’s intelligence had dubbed Antelope, Antler,

and Appian. Enough of them to smother SF 19’s defenses with missiles.

“Commodore Hafezi,” she said crisply. (Even at this time, there was no need to deny him

the traditional courtesy “promotion” accorded to anyone aboard a ship other than its skipper

whose normal rank-title was “captain.” Indeed, Sommers was beginning to understand what

she’d always read, that tradition became particularly important at times like this.) “We need

to be able to launch the fighters at the precise moment when interception becomes

unavoidable. Notify Captain Kabilovic.” Milos, after all, wasn’t aboard this ship.

Tradition . . . again. “And order the Huns to stay well clear and continue their present survey

pattern.”

Hafezi’s nod showed his understanding. The scout cruisers might, after all, find another

warp point. And their combat value was almost negligible.

“Aye, aye, Admiral,” he replied with a crispness matching hers. Then, as though by

common consent, their eyes met in a way they hadn’t been allowed to meet of late. And, a

tremulous instant later, so did their hands.

What does it matter, now that we’re all dead? She turned, with a look of what might have

been called defiance, to face any of the flag bridge crew who might have seen them.

Some had. They were staring openly. But not with amazement. They were grinning.

The amazement was all Sommers’.

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TheShivaOptionbyDavidWeber&SteveWhiteCopyright©2002TheauthorswouldliketoextendtheirsincerethankstoFredBurton,wargamerandfriend,whopersonallydesignedtheentireStarUnionofCrucisandnotonlymadeitlive,butalsogaveuspermissiontosteal...er,borrowitforourstory.Thanks,Fred.Alsointhisseries:InsurrectionCrusadeI...

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David Weber & Steve White - Starfire 04 - Shiva Option

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