David Weber - Ashes of Victory

But things change, and over the last four or five T-years most strategists, Allied and Peep alike, had come to regard Lovat as the penultimate stop on any advance to Nouveau Paris. Always well fortified, the system now bristled with defenses almost as tough as those protecting the capital system itself, not to mention a local defense fleet built around several squadrons of the wall.

All in all, Lovat was a formidable military obstacle, and after eleven years of war, it had come to seem hopelessly remote. Something, some people had joked, to make them grateful for prolong, since that was the only thing which gave them a chance of living long enough to see it taken.

But now, as White Haven gazed into the plot, a solid cone of green stars glowed amid the crimson traceries of Peep-held space. That cone's base rested on the systems of Sun-Yat, to the northwest, and Welladay, to the southeast, and its tip was the Tequila System—pointing straight at Lovat from a distance of barely 3.75 light-years.

It was incredible, he thought, contemplating the campaign he'd fought to reach this point. It had been utterly unlike the grinding, brutal slogging match for Trevor's Star. Indeed, it was unlike any campaign any admiral had waged in over seven hundred years, and White Haven was honest enough to admit it had been made possible only by the new ship types he'd once dismissed so cavalierly. But he'd learned his lesson, he told himself. First when Honor—his lips curved in a small, secret smile—jerked him up short, and now, especially, when Alice Truman's LAC wings had spearheaded Operation Buttercup with such power and panache.

The Peeps are done, he thought almost wonderingly. Finished. They don't have a prayer against the new hardware, and our people are learning how to use it more effectively every day.

His thoughts ranged back over the hectic, furiously paced series of actions which had brought them to this point. Secure in his technological and tactical superiority, he'd embraced the operational concept Truman and Honor had devised for Buttercup and split Eighth Fleet into independent, fast-moving, hard-hitting task forces. The main force, TF 81, built around a solid core of Harrington/Medusas , had hammered straight up the middle, smashing the defenses of one fortified system after another with missile bombardments to which the Peeps could make no reply. At the same time, lighter forces, each based around three or four CLACs and escorts, with one or two SD(P)s to keep an eye on things, had spread out from the main axis of advance. They'd slashed into more lightly held systems, ravaging the picket forces covering the flanks of the nodal task forces TF 81 had reduced to wreckage. Even when the Peeps detected the LACs on their way in, the fleet, lethal little craft invariably managed to accomplish their missions. Partly that was because those missions were carefully planned, but it was also because of the sheer tenacity and ability of the LAC crews. They'd taken losses along the way—much heavier losses than TF 81, in point of fact—but grievous as those casualties were among the small, tight knit communities of the LAC wings, they were minute compared to the cost a conventional advance through so many systems would have exacted.

Yet for all his tactical superiority, he knew he'd accepted some serious risks to maintain the speed and fury of his advance. Caparelli and the Allied Joint Chiefs were working furiously to dig up the conventional forces to hold what he'd taken, but the Peeps were growing more ambitious as he cut deeper and deeper into the PRH. They couldn't fight Eighth Fleet head-on, but they knew that, so they were concentrating on working around his flanks, striving to threaten his rear and cut his supply lines, instead. He had too few of the new ship types to detach any for rear area security, so they could at least hope to pounce on conventional ships of the wall. On the other hand, those "conventional" capital ships were well equipped with pods stuffed full of Ghost Rider missiles, which meant even the flank attacks were producing catastrophic Peep losses.

Nonetheless, it was a mathematical impossibility for the Alliance to adequately picket and garrison all of the systems in which Eighth Fleet had blitzed the defenses. Indeed, the Allies lacked the ground troops to occupy or even take the formal surrenders of all of the inhabited planets in the systems through which Eighth Fleet had rampaged. But that was all right. White Haven's units had smashed the defenses and orbital infrastructure in any system he wasn't prepared to occupy and then moved on, leaving them crippled and impotent behind him. They might still serve as support bases for the raiding squadrons trying to operate against his rear, but that was all they could do, and eventually the Alliance would get around to gathering them up in a neat, orderly sort of way.

It was a sort of wild, freewheeling warfare that was downright intoxicating, and he'd had to step on his own enthusiasm more than once. He had an arrogant streak. He knew it and admitted it, and that arrogance embraced the division of his fleet with enthusiasm. Indeed, it wanted to divide into even smaller forces, taking on its enemies with a numerical inferiority no sane fleet commander of the last seven centuries would have contemplated even in an opium dream, and some of his squadron and task group commanders were even more drunk with victory than he was.

It's going too well, he told himself. There has to be a catch somewhere!

But even as he told himself that, he didn't believe it. It was no more than the reflex of a professional, automatically watching for the unanticipated, the unexpected.

But however heady the moment, the time had finally come when he had no choice but to call a halt. Not a long one. No more than a few weeks—a month and a half; two months at the outside—while his mobile repair ships dealt with a growing litany of minor repairs and deferred maintenance requirements. While the missile colliers labored forward from Trevor's Star, to reload his SD(P)s' pods. While other freighters came forward with replacement LACs for his CLACs... and, in too many cases, replacement crews. The LACs had been worked hard, and he welcomed the opportunity to stand them down for a little much needed rest. And he was determined that he would not run his maintenance cycles too far into the red this time. This time he would be certain he had no need to stop and send a third of his combat power back to the yards!

But it wouldn't be a long pause, he promised himself. And when Eighth Fleet advanced once more, it would be as a single, concentrated force that would reduce the defenses of Lovat to splinters.

And from there, he thought, astounded even now that he dared to so much as contemplate the possibility, Haven and Nouveau Paris.

"And here we are," Citizen Admiral Giscard said, and there was a universe of bitterness in his voice.

He sat in a briefing room off PNS Salamis ' flag deck, and there were very few other people present. Indeed, aside from Citizen Captain McIntyre, his chief of staff, and Citizen Commander Tyler and Citizen Lieutenant Thaddeus, his staff astrogator and intelligence officer, respectively, the only other people in that briefing room were Lester Tourville and Citizen Commissioner Everard Honeker.

And, of course, Citizen Commissioner Eloise Pritchart.

It was dangerous for them to be here, and all of them knew it. Esther McQueen's death, the destruction of the Octagon, the disbandment of the Naval Staff and the arrest of all its surviving members, Oscar Saint-Just's emergence as the dictator of the PRH, and the replacement of both the Naval Staff and the General Staff with State Security officers—those things had riven their universe down to bedrock. None of them had even suspected such cataclysmic upheavals might be coming. Even if they'd guessed, there'd been nothing they could have done to prepare for it, and Giscard and Tourville had realized instantly that their lives, and the lives of their staff officers, hung by threads. Indeed, both admirals were amazed when they weren't summarily ordered home within days of McQueen's abortive coup and "disappeared" as a routine precaution.