Fleet Action (wc-3) by William Forstchen (100 books to read in a lifetime txt) 📕

attack, cover blown, repeat cover blown, get the hell out and back to the barn."

He hit the burst signal button and the light; in the cabin momentarily dimmed as nearly all the ship's energy was diverted to powering out the signal across the hundreds of light years of space back to Tarawa.

At least they'd have the information even if they bought it. He realized that in the scheme of things his job was done, he had uncovered the suspected fleet. Within minutes Tarawa would have the information and it'd blow the lid right off the armistice when it came out that the Kilrathi were building the ships in clear violation of the terms. The political ramifications would be explosive, he realized. At the very least Rodham's government would fall. It'd also mean that the war would be back on. He thought again of what he'd just uncovered and the images still locked on the secondary screen chilled him. The carriers were more than twice as big as anything now in the fleet. Even if every ship was still active and on line the new Kilrathi ships had the power to do anything in space.

The Cats undoubtedly knew that their cover had just been blown. The only hope was to fully remobilize before the ships already completed could be moved up into action and meet them on the frontier. If they gained confederation space with our defenses down it was over.

The two missiles hit the second decoy and detonated. The Stealths dropped out of masking and came to full visual, transferring their energy to neutron guns and laser. A shot lanced into the portside stabilizer of Bannockburn and Paladin pulled hard to starboard, lining up a deflection shot on one of his tormentors. He flared off half a dozen more flechette rounds, followed by two dumb fired bolts. The flechette rounds broke open, each deploying a spread of sixty thousand nail-sized shot across a hundred meter wide piece of space. The wave slammed into the Stealth, shredding it to ribbons and the ship silently detonated.

The picket ships were already racing in to join the fray, their speed well up past a thousand clicks a second with maneuvering scoops fully closed.

"Turning in on jump point. Get ready for uncalibrated jump in fifteen seconds!" Paladin shouted.

Another laser burst hit Bannockburn dead astern, overloading the shields, cutting into the Y-axis maneuvering thrusters, and Paladin cursed as he purged the thrusters fuel lines before they detonated.

He spared a quick thought for the message he sent out, hoping that Tarawa was at least still alive to get it, otherwise this whole damn thing was for naught. "How the hell did I ever get into this business?" he shouted even as the jump transit hit.

"We've got it"

Jason looked up at Vance who had not even bothered to knock before bursting into his cabin. The normally unflappable director of intelligence seemed almost giddy with excitement.

"Got what?"

"The signal damn it, the signal. Come on, I'll show you."

Jason followed Vance back down the corridor into the fighter bay. He had a flash memory of the same corridor, running towards the bridge when it was hit by the Kilrathi suicide pilot, killing O'Brian, the first captain of the Tarawa, the corridor decompressing when the hull was shattered

They reached the end of the corridor, the two security guards still requiring that even Vance show ID and undergo a corona laser scan. It struck him as a bit absurd, here they were hiding on a planet's surface, no one could possibly sneak aboard to impersonate Vance, and the man had come down the corridor only a minute before. But he knew that security above all else required no relaxation.

He showed his ID as well and leaned into the corona scanner.

The guards opened the doorway into the bay and saluted, the door slamming shut behind them.

The D-5 team was gathered in a knot around what was Vance's cubicle, and to Jason's surprise he saw bottles of champagne being passed around. He was about to raise an objection to such an open violation of fleet regulations but then realized that fleet regs no longer applied, since officially they were not part of the fleet, and in fact officially did not even exist. Intel people had always struck him as a little strange and he realized that perhaps they needed to blow off steam like this otherwise they would have cracked under the pressure long ago. They were no different than pilots in that respect.

The crowd parted for Vance, patting him on the back.

"Good job, people, now let's finish our party and get back to work, there's a hell of a lot to be done before this mission is finished"

The crowd seemed to immediately sober up and drifted away back to their stations.

"Here's what all the excitement is about. I thought you should know in case anything happened."

"Anything happened?"

"We could take a hit to this bay and our entire team gets wiped out. I want someone off this deck to know what we've just found out I want you to remember the message but you are to immediately, and forever, forget how we found out"

Jason nodded in agreement

Vance pointed to a two dimensional screen. On the right side was what Jason assumed was phonetically translated Kilrathi, on the left long series of white blocks, and occasional words in English which were partial translations of the message.

"When Geoff left he went back amongst other reasons, to have ConFleet send out a false message which stated that our primary matter-antimatter assembly plant on the moon had been destroyed due to an accidental detonation. As a result no new weapons would be delivered for several months. The message of course was a complete fabrication.

An hour ago we picked up this message from Kilrah to their Hari base and cracked part of it."

Jason leaned over to look at the screen.

Most of the message was untranslated but one line highlighted in red leaped out at him . . . "Remove target