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

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."

Tolwyn nodded.

"There are eighteen major jump points leading across the frontier and several dozen other jump points running parallel or zigzagging back and forth. Before the armistice neither we nor the Kilrathi had the strength to simply go charging in, saying the hell with our rear and leaping towards the jugular. They now do. We lack the strength of a major counter strike and even if we did have it, it'd be weeks before we could even begin to move it. By then it'll be too late. In addition they can hold a number of their standard fleet carriers in reserve as a reaction force to counter even light escort raiders the way we had been using them in the past. We have to fall back and concentrate what assets we have. If we try a forward defense they might swing around us."

"Why not an offensive, Geoff? Split them off the way we did at Vukar Tag," Grecko asked from the back of the room.

"It won't work this time, sir. Even if we took what we had right now and shot it straight in, their older carriers acting as a reserve would stop us cold, while the new fleet would just continue on into Earth. Second, they'd see it for what it was, an effort to split their offensive. They'd ignore it and still bore straight in. What we have to do is seek a meeting engagement with their main fleet and stop it, that's the only viable option left open to us."

"So what about my home planet?" Polowski asked

Geoff paused for a moment. The cold hard word for it was "abandon" but he could not bring himself to say that, or even really admit it to himself.

"Mike, the Kilrathi have two ways to run this offensive. The first is to break through our forward defenses, then spread out and start ripping the colonial worlds to shreds. Every day that they do that is one more day for us to rearm and they know it. The second way is to come charging straight in, figuring they can mop up the colonies at their leisure after the core planets have been destroyed along with the fleet."

"I'm betting on the second method. It's sound militarily and it's what we would do: kill the home world and inner planets and end the war. The only advantage we can hope for is to stand and defend as close to our main base as possible, thus stretching their line of communication while we can continue to pour into action whatever ships come on line at the last minute. It is the one classic advantage of the defensive the ability to fall back upon your base of supplies, and it's our only hope."

"Easy for you to say," Mike replied. "My entire family's out there on Warsaw, two jumps from the frontier."

"Can you propose any other alternative given what we have?" Geoff asked, his voice filled with a genuine concern. He knew he couldn't simply order men to abandon their homes and families. They'd have to be willing to do it with the hope of final victory and then rescue, no matter how slim the chance.

Mike looked down at his memo pad and then finally shook his head

"You're right, Admiral, its the only way," and there was a soft chorus of agreement.

"I wish we could inform the governors and presidents of the various colonial worlds of our strategic plan, though for security reasons it is obvious we cannot. For that matter, gentlemen, no one outside this room is to have any knowledge of what our strategy is.

"That'll give precious little warning to whichever worlds are in the way of the fleet," Zitek said. "Even if they're coming straight on, they'll still dispatch some cruisers on the way in to scorch