"Can the chatter!" Togliatti snapped. "And get your targeting solutions locked in, everybody. We're going in now."
Irma complied. For all her griping, she wasn't averse to going after the kind of target they'd been told to seek out just before they'd been launched into this cluster fuck.
The whistle of the F-4's passage through atmosphere grew louder as she crossed the terminator and entered the night side, and it didn't take long to acquire her target visually. The Bug cities weren't a nighttime blaze of light like human ones. Still, Bugs did see in the visible-light wavelengths, and presumably they did like to be able to do things after dark. A galaxy of rather dim stars grew ahead of her.
The city was vast, as Bug cities tended to be. A mountain range upswelling of oddly massive towers and bulging domes that rose like some disturbing alloy of toadstools and stalagmites. Irma had seen imagery of the cities on Home Hive Three-or, at least, of what those cities once had looked like-from the operational debriefs after that attack. These cyclopean ramparts of Hell looked exactly the same, and her mind pictured the chittering, scuttling throngs swarming like maggots in their bowels while the flash and glare of the warheads hammering at the orbital defenses flickered on the outer walls like distant lightning.
The city seemed huge, indestructible and invulnerable. But the FRAM she fired into its heart was a weapon designed for deep-space combat, using the inconceivable energies of matter-antimatter annihilation to produce a blast that was terrifying even when there was no atmosphere to carry the shock wave and thermal pulse. Its designers, surely, had never imagined it being set for a ground burst on a Terra-type planet.
Irma's fighter had shot ahead at Mach 5, streaking over the city and beyond it, before the event-"explosion" was a banality-occurred. Her view-aft simply shut down, and she hauled her nose up, seeking altitude and the refuge of vacuum ahead of the expanding sphere of Hell.
Then she spared a glance to port, and another to starboard. She'd been part of the first wave to hit the surface, but others had followed. It was as if a wall of inconceivable fireballs marched across the planet's nightside, leaving burned-out lifelessness behind it-a landscape lit by firestorms and the glow of lava oozing up through the splits and cracks in the planet's skin.
She turned her eyes from the flaming planet and looked ahead. The fighter was continuing to climb, and the stars appeared.
"How're the others doing against the forts, Skip?" she asked, and there was a pause before Togliatti responded
"They're mopping them up now. The Bugs seem to have stopped resisting effectively."
Force Leader Shaaldaar was confused.
As was always likely to be the case in an operation in which forces separated by interplanetary distances were expected to coordinate, Seventh Fleet's timing had been off. Not by very much-this was a superbly trained force which had rehearsed exhaustively in preparation for the attack-but by enough to be significant. His own task force had been forced to deviate slightly from its planned course by a Bug freighter which had chosen to bumble through exactly the wrong volume of space at precisely the wrong time. Making up the lost time had required him to use rather more drive power than he would have liked, and he suspected that the extra power had allowed a Bug sensor platform to pick him up early. At any rate, he'd been forced to launch his attack slightly later than Prescott's and from slightly further out because the emissions signatures of the OWPs protecting his target had suddenly begun to shift and change as they'd abruptly began rushing to a higher readiness state.
Because of that, Shaaldaar's intelligence people had been given somewhat less opportunity to gather and analyze data on the planetary infrastructure than Amos Chung had been granted. They were still trying to deduce the reason for the extraordinarily high number of ground bases when, suddenly, his sensor crews began reporting antimatter ground bursts on Planet I.
Shaaldaar slapped his mid-palms together in a gesture of perplexity. The decision not to employ the so-called Shiva Option had been made long before Seventh Fleet departed for this attack. More, it had been confirmed by Prescott himself when the two strike forces separated to close stealthily in upon their targets. So why had the Human admiral changed his mind? And if he was going to change it at all, why had he done it so abruptly-and with so little time left-that it had been impossible to advise Shaaldaar of his decision?
There had to be a reason, but what-?
"Force Leader!" Shaaldaar wheeled towards his plotting officer in surprise. He and Sensor Master Haalnak had served together for over three Terran Standard years, and he'd never before heard that degree of consternation and surprise in the sensor master's voice.
"What is it, Haalnak?" Shaaldaar dropped to feet and mid-limbs and cantered across the deck towards Plotting.
"Those ground installations, Force Leader-they're gunboat bases and they're launching now!"
Shaaldaar's blood ran cold. Of course they were gunboat bases-why hadn't he realized that himself? But if all of them were nests of gunboats, then how many-?
"Tracking reports over a thousand-plus gunboats, Force Leader!" someone else announced, and the blood which had run cold seemed to freeze. A thousand-plus?!
He reached Haalnak's station and slithered to a halt. The rising gunboats were a blood-red spray of icons on the plot, fountaining upward like some cloud of loathsome parasitic spores, reaching for his own gunboats and fighters . . . and the starships beyond them. The number estimate had to be too low, and even if it wasn't, it looked like all of these gunboats were coming from just one hemisphere of the planet. Gormus only knew what the numbers were going to look like when the rest of them launched!
The tide of destruction oriented itself, thrusting for the very heart of his task force, and then-
Shaaldaar stood upright, his eyes wide, as the serried ranks of death spores suddenly disintegrated. The deadly purposefulness of the gunboat tide lost its cohesion. The ones which had already launched began to behave erratically, staggering, seeming to stumble with an abrupt loss of purpose, while no more rose from the untouched surface. He stared at the chaos of what should have been an overwhelming attack, and as he did, he knew what Raymond Prescott had done . . . and why.
The lifeless ball of slag which had been Planet I receded rapidly in the viewscreen above the conference table in Riva y Silva's flag briefing room as Prescott's staff took their seats. The image held a horrific grandeur as the firestorms of the bombardment blazed in visible seas of flame, wrapped around the smoke and dust enshrouded ruin of a once life-bearing world. It hovered there before them all, and as the admiral took his own seat, more than one of his officers felt a sense of dreadful appropriateness, for his place was directly under the raging hell his warriors had wreaked upon the Bugs.
"Obviously," he began in a crisp yet quiet voice, apparently the only person in the entire briefing room completely unaffected by the apocalyptic vision, "our original plans are going to require modification. Amos?"
"Yes, Sir." The intelligence officer recognized his cue and consulted his terminal for a moment. Not that he really needed to.
"We were luckier than Force Leader Shaaldaar in a lot of ways," he said then. "From the sensor records, it's pretty clear that the defenses were only just starting to come on-line when we hit Planet I, whereas the Force Leader had to fight his way in against much greater opposition. The effectiveness of the Shiva Option seems to have been pretty conclusively confirmed, however, because all effective resistance on and orbiting Planet III came apart the moment our surface strikes went in.
"That's the good news. The bad news is that the data record from Planet III confirms what we'd already suspected from our own experience at Planet I. There were just as many gunboats there as on Planet I, so I see no option but to conclude that there are at least as many more of them based on Planet II. Which, I must also point out, is now fully aware of our presence."