bulkhead above her and attempted to achieve the transcendental state in the fashion her great-grandfather had labored to teach her. But Erica had been a child who, like most of her generation, gave first heed to the culture-leveling call of an increasingly blended humanity. By comparison, her paradada ’s ways and stories were anachronistic remnants from a time and world that seemed far more distant than Mother Earth.
But there was a greater challenge to Krishmahnta’s current serenity than her inexpert efforts at meditation. Lying on her bunk, she was repeatedly haunted by the terrible and growing conviction that—if she stepped wrong now—the combined fleets of the Further Bellerophon Arm, and the many millions of civilians sheltered behind them, might be forfeit.
The losses she had taken in defending Raiden against this renewed attack were minimal:heavy damage to a few of the older, slower monitors was the worst of it. Several of her workhorse picket ships—DD’s recently sprung from mothballs—had been unfortunate enough to attract the attention of a few stray force beams and HET-lasers during the recon sortie made by the older Baldy SDs: unable to stand up to that kind of ordnance, the small, gutted hulls had been evacuated and scuttled.
But where was the Great Alien Attack that these preliminaries had surely heralded, and which had been the hallmark of the Baldy campaign thus far? A shift in their first, suicidal tactics had been foreseeable, even inevitable—but this mincing, distant fencing match was a complete and utter reversal of their fleet doctrine. Unless…
And thus reblossomed the thought that had repeatedly kept Krishmahnta from sinking into the mauve of a delta-wave mental state: What if this was not a doctrine change, but a trap? With an attack looming large at the Jason warp point here in Raiden, she felt a correspondingly greater temptation to send a courier to Admiral Miharu Yoshikuni in Beaumont and retrieve the capital ships with which she had bolstered that task force’s rattled defenses. It was clear—from the unprecedented appearance of the stickhives, the Baldies’ meticulous reconnaissance, and their attempts to exhaust her crews—that A Great Attack was coming into Raiden from Jason. Logically, Krishmahnta should meet that force with greater force—as much force as she could muster, in order to smash the invaders back from Raiden yet again.
But the ease with which she came to that conclusion, and the almost primal impulse to respond by taking more forces from Beaumont, was precisely what made Krishmahnta reject that option. As a seasoned flag officer, she had learned—sometimes the hard way—that any action that felt inevitable or compulsory often felt that way because it was a well-laid trap. The Baldies were trying to make her increasingly nervous about her ability to hold Raiden so that she would draw reserves from—and weaken—Yoshikuni’s fleet in Beaumont. The Baldies would then smash and roll up Yoshikuni’s diminished forces and cut straight through to Suwa. And so they would catch Krishmahnta’s swollen fleet in a bottle, plugged at one end by the forces in Jason and sealed at the other by the enemy armada in Suwa.
Of course, the opposite temptation was to fall back on Suwa now and signal Yoshikuni to do the same. But then they’d find themselves in the position of trying to defend two warp points in one system—and as it was, their combined fleets barely had enough strength to permanently secure any one warp point.
So the invaders had to be met in both systems. The strategy was simply one of attrition: to inflict as much damage upon them as possible as they emerged from the single warp point in each system—rather like intercepting the ships of an old-fashioned water fleet as they passed, one by one, through a narrow strait. And when the time came to fall back, Krishmahnta and Miharu Yoshikuni would have to fall back together. First to Suwa, and then,
But there was a greater challenge to Krishmahnta’s current serenity than her inexpert efforts at meditation. Lying on her bunk, she was repeatedly haunted by the terrible and growing conviction that—if she stepped wrong now—the combined fleets of the Further Bellerophon Arm, and the many millions of civilians sheltered behind them, might be forfeit.
The losses she had taken in defending Raiden against this renewed attack were minimal:heavy damage to a few of the older, slower monitors was the worst of it. Several of her workhorse picket ships—DD’s recently sprung from mothballs—had been unfortunate enough to attract the attention of a few stray force beams and HET-lasers during the recon sortie made by the older Baldy SDs: unable to stand up to that kind of ordnance, the small, gutted hulls had been evacuated and scuttled.
But where was the Great Alien Attack that these preliminaries had surely heralded, and which had been the hallmark of the Baldy campaign thus far? A shift in their first, suicidal tactics had been foreseeable, even inevitable—but this mincing, distant fencing match was a complete and utter reversal of their fleet doctrine. Unless…
And thus reblossomed the thought that had repeatedly kept Krishmahnta from sinking into the mauve of a delta-wave mental state: What if this was not a doctrine change, but a trap? With an attack looming large at the Jason warp point here in Raiden, she felt a correspondingly greater temptation to send a courier to Admiral Miharu Yoshikuni in Beaumont and retrieve the capital ships with which she had bolstered that task force’s rattled defenses. It was clear—from the unprecedented appearance of the stickhives, the Baldies’ meticulous reconnaissance, and their attempts to exhaust her crews—that A Great Attack was coming into Raiden from Jason. Logically, Krishmahnta should meet that force with greater force—as much force as she could muster, in order to smash the invaders back from Raiden yet again.
But the ease with which she came to that conclusion, and the almost primal impulse to respond by taking more forces from Beaumont, was precisely what made Krishmahnta reject that option. As a seasoned flag officer, she had learned—sometimes the hard way—that any action that felt inevitable or compulsory often felt that way because it was a well-laid trap. The Baldies were trying to make her increasingly nervous about her ability to hold Raiden so that she would draw reserves from—and weaken—Yoshikuni’s fleet in Beaumont. The Baldies would then smash and roll up Yoshikuni’s diminished forces and cut straight through to Suwa. And so they would catch Krishmahnta’s swollen fleet in a bottle, plugged at one end by the forces in Jason and sealed at the other by the enemy armada in Suwa.
Of course, the opposite temptation was to fall back on Suwa now and signal Yoshikuni to do the same. But then they’d find themselves in the position of trying to defend two warp points in one system—and as it was, their combined fleets barely had enough strength to permanently secure any one warp point.
So the invaders had to be met in both systems. The strategy was simply one of attrition: to inflict as much damage upon them as possible as they emerged from the single warp point in each system—rather like intercepting the ships of an old-fashioned water fleet as they passed, one by one, through a narrow strait. And when the time came to fall back, Krishmahnta and Miharu Yoshikuni would have to fall back together. First to Suwa, and then,
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