Destroyer Group, Commodore Polowski commanding . . .'
He paused and looked back up at the group.
'Anyhow, all of you are listed here,' he said quietly, 'and if you aren't listed, I'm taking you anyhow,' and the room echoed with nervous laughter.
Geoff activated the main holo screen which displayed the new Kilrathi heavy carriers, while a side screen displayed the surmised position of the fleet and its possible route into Confederation space.
A low murmur of voices filled the room as the dozen group and squadron commanders, representing the ships and Marine assault regiments under his command examined the data.
'Our task is to meet and stop this force before it gains the inner worlds of the Confederation.'
'Just how many fighters will these ships carry?' Lyford Beverage, commander of the First Cruiser Squadron asked.
'We're working off of only one intelligence sweep, a long range optical examination followed by a translight radar burst, so our data is sketchy. Our evaluation team believes they carry four launch bays, and perhaps six. It's hard to tell, since all the ships were aligned identically at the time we swept them so we don't have a full examination from all angles. Given the mass of the ships, our best guess is two hundred and forty fighters, scout and bomber craft, perhaps three hundred. Close analysis of the scan detected five of the ships emitting infrared signatures for functional reactors. The other seven were cold.'
'Good lord, Geoff, if five of those things are coming at us that means we'll be facing upwards of fifteen hundred attack ships,' Rear Admiral Allen Zitek growled from the back of the room, his speech computer making him sound almost robotic. Zitek had been badly burned years before leading a squadron against a Kilrathi carrier. It still amazed Geoff what the surgeons could do if a man could be brought in while still alive.
'Don't forget that the Kilrathi had a minimum of nineteen other standard carriers and at least twenty heavy cruisers that carried thirty fighters each. That comes to over three thousand seven hundred additional strike craft.'
There was a chilled moment of silence.
'What about logistical support, supplies, and training from the Kilrathi view point?' Duke Grecko asked from the back of the room.
'That's the one hope,' Geoff replied. 'We now understand the mystery of their transport shortage and their occasional shortages of missiles. They were straining their system beyond the max to keep the war going and at the same time building this new fleet in secret. I've handed this data over to intelligence analysis, and I'm stilling waiting for the full report. My gut feeling on it is that they couldn't fully do both. I think they stripped some of their best squadrons off their front line carriers during the armistice and shipped the personnel out to the new ships, replacing them with new recruits. The burst signal from Tarawa already indicated a thousand fighters transferred off ships that had been put into their inactive reserve. I'm certain we'll see their best shot from the new carriers, which will be fully loaded for combat. The rest of the fleet will be held in a secondary support role or open action on other fronts as diversions.'
'That still would leave a minimum of fifteen hundred strike craft on five carriers coming straight at Earth, not to mention what looks like close to a hundred escort ships,' Zitek replied. 'And just how many fighters will we have to meet this?'
'We can have five carriers fully on line within two weeks, with forty one escorts, carrying a total of six hundred and eighty-nine strike craft.'
'Just five?'
'Actually, only two are on line and fully operational at the moment, Geoff said shaking his head.
'With crews working around the clock and cutting a lot of corners, I expect to see three more carriers ready to join the fleet by the time the Kilrathi penetrate into Confederation space. It'll be forty-five days, more like sixty, before our remaining carriers will be on line again.'
'Jamison was brilliant pushing that deactivation through,' Grecko snapped and Geoff could only nod his head in agreement.
The political arena with Jamison standing in the center was now one of absolute chaos. Less than twenty- four hours ago Rodham had announced the existence of the Kilrathi super carriers and the assumption that Earth had been directly targeted for attack. He then called for the Confederation Senate to renounce the armistice and to mobilize for a renewal of the war, closing with his resignation as president. Minutes later the vice president was sworn in and delivered a sharp rousing speech, demanding that the Kilrathi open their border for full inspection of the new fleet or face offensive action. It was all a bluff on Quinson's part, but it at least sounded good. The Confederation had been thrown into a state of panic by the announcement, with every holo reporter scrambling to put their spin on the issue, which ranged from 'we've been stabbed in the back by the Cats,' to 'the evil military was pushing for a war.' The situation was further stirred up by the Kilrathi reply that the bombing of headquarters and the attempt on the Emperor's life were part of a military coup by pro-war officers and that they were totally innocent of any wrong-doing.
At first Geoff had naively assumed that this had closed the deal, that the Senate would vote for war and that the new president's declaration of a full military emergency would be observed.
Jamison had triggered near chaos instead. First she refused to resign, even though Quinson had appointed a new Foreign Minister. Next she accused the military of conspiring to renew the war, a position that the Kilrathi were pumping out through their propaganda agencies.
The result was that the Senate had still not declared war, wavering, some even adopting the Kilrathi line, and demanding that the military unilaterally disarm.
Quinson had stood firm, however, evoking executive right to order the military to mobilize for emergency action. The one restraint, however, was that such an emergency did not give the fleet the right to take offensive action. Tolwyn had actually fallen into a shouting match with the senate military committee over that point, wanting to free his two light escorts that were operational for a spoiling and recon raid into Kilrathi space, but he had been held back.
Sometimes it really bites to be in the military,' Polowski snapped from the back of the room. 'I'd just love to get Jamison onboard my ship as a forward turret gunner's mate when we charge those carriers and let her see what her peace loving friends have done while we slept,' and there was a chorus of approval.
Geoff held up his hand for silence.
'Remember, we are the military. Civilian politics is outside of our control and like it or not that's a tradition we must observe. It's our job to defend the Confederation from the attack we all know is coming, and I'm counting on you to give it everything you have. Some really big damn fools got us into this fix. The hell with them, push them out of your minds. I want you to focus on the billions of innocent people who will be under the Kilrathi antimatter bombs and the survivors who will face their knives if we fail. The existence of the human race now hangs in the balance
He paused for a moment. The words had come out of him, not planned at all. In any other setting he felt they would have sounded worn. But it was the simple truth: the actual existence of his entire species rested in their hands. One wrong move on his part and it might all be over with. All of it gone forever, two thousand years of England gone, a cold silence of death, of extinction.
I can't dwell on this, he realized. It'll drive me insane if I do, so stay focused on the job and nothing else.
He switched the holo screen to a map of the inner core of planets and the jump lines leading out to the frontier.
'The Kilrathi have three main lines of approach, all of which finally come in here,' and he pointed to a blue white star from which radiated a number of jump lines. 'Here at Sirius and the jump point behind Sirius the shortest routes of jump lines come together and then from there straight back to Earth. By the shortest route, jump line alpha, it's ten jump points from Sirius to the frontier, four back to Earth. The next route, beta is twelve jumps to the frontier and delta is thirteen. All the other routes meander back and forth. For the Kilrathi I think they'll be so confident of their strength, and also concerned about not giving us time to rearm, that they'll come straight on in.
'I propose to meet them in front of Sirius.'
'Geoff, that abandons several hundred inhabited colonies further out,' Polowski said quietly, 'my own home of Planet Warsaw being one of them.'
