"Recall your pilots, Anson," she heard herself say, so calmly, so dispassionately. "Get them reorganized and rearm them for an anti-shipping strike."
The Enemy's small attack craft had annihilated the gunboats. That had been expected, but the fact that this time not a single one of them managed to penetrate the Enemy's defensive screen was a disappointment.
Still, they'd accomplished their primary goal. The System Which Must Be Defended had accepted that it must intervene decisively in this system. Its battle-line was preparing to make transit, but moving such a powerful force would take time, and the battle-line had declined to send its own gunboats ahead lest their arrival alert the Enemy of its approach.
So it was the task of the Mobile Force to keep the Enemy's attention focused firmly upon itself for as long as possible. The Enemy must be enticed into pursuing it, thrusting himself deeper and deeper into this system until it was too late for him to escape. Thus the gunboats had been committed to the attack less in the hopes that they would actually inflict damage, than in hopes that the Enemy would waste time destroying them . . . precisely as he had.
Now it was the Mobile Force's turn to do the same thing.
"We'll do this cautiously, Ernesto," Murakuma told her ops officer. "We hold all the cards now, so you and Anson-" her eyes flicked to her farshathkhanak's face "-will coordinate the fighter strikes carefully. I don't want any avoidable losses, any lives thrown away because someone gets overeager. Remember, the object is to overload their point defense so we can get through with shipboard missiles strikes, not to feed our squadrons into a sausage machine making close attacks."
"Understood, Sir," Olivera replied, and there was more than simple acknowledgment of an order in his tone. Vanessa Murakuma had never been a fighter pilot, but she was, perhaps, the strikefighter community's most beloved flag officer. Perhaps it was because her husband had been a member of that lodge, or perhaps it was simply because of who and what she herself was, but Murakuma had always agonized over her fighter losses, and that was something the fighter jocks appreciated deeply.
Every fighter pilot knew that, in the final analysis, he represented an expendable asset. He might not care for that knowledge, but he could hardly pretend he didn't know it . . . or that it was unreasonable. Flight crews might require long and arduous training, but an F-4 carried only a single pilot. Even the F-4C command fighter carried only a crew of three. A maximum effort strike by a TFN assault carrier's entire group exposed less than sixty individuals to the enemy's fire.
So, yes, the jocks understood that any admiral with a gram of sense would far rather expose-and expend, if necessary-that strikegroup than risk the loss of, say, a battlecruiser with a crew of over a thousand.
Vanessa Murakuma was no different from any other flag officer in that respect. What made her unlike some was that she never became callous about expending them, never became comfortable with the term "acceptable loss rate." She cared, and while she was just as capable of committing them to high-casualty strikes as she was of exposing herself to similar risks, she never lost sight of the need to minimize losses. And because the flight crews knew that, they would run risks for her they would never willingly run for someone else.
The Admiral looked at him a bit oddly, almost as if she sensed something of what was running through his mind, but he only returned her gaze levelly. After a moment, she inhaled and nodded.
"Very well, gentlemen. Let's get it done."
The Enemy clearly had decided to use his range and speed advantage as ruthlessly as the Fleet would have used it, had the positions been reversed. Normally, that would have been . . . frustrating. Today, it was precisely what the Fleet wished him to do. True, it would prevent the Mobile Force from exacting anything approaching an equivalent level of loss, but such a long range engagement would also, of necessity, be slower than a close action. The outcome might never be in doubt, but it would take time for the Enemy to kill all of the Mobile Force's starships, and time, really, was all the Mobile Force was fighting for.
The Mobile Force watched the first waves of small attack craft arrowing in while the Enemy battlegroups closed to extreme missile range behind them, and prepared to expend itself as slowly as possible.
The battle with the Bug mobile force was still raging when Murakuma received word of what was sweeping in from behind her.
So far, Sixth Fleet had administered a most satisfactory drubbing to the mobile force, destroying a third of its ships outright and damaging most of the rest. But there were still a lot of Bugs to kill, and they were being stubborn about it.
That was perfectly all right with Murakuma, who infinitely preferred to expend missiles instead of people. Yet even as the intensity of the battle rose and fell with successive fighter strikes, she'd found it difficult to keep her attention focused on it. She kept waiting for the news she was sure had to come, and wondering what portion of the sky it would fall out of. Now Cruciero's urgent voice interrupted her abstraction.
"Admiral, the recon fighters have detected incoming hostiles. CIC is getting the data into the computer, and it should be appearing-"
As if on cue, a scarlet dot with an attached vector-arrow winked into life, and Murakuma gazed at it through narrowed eyes as her staffers crowded around.
"So," she said after a moment, "the warp point was further out from the star than ours, but on just about the same bearing. We've been heading directly away from it the whole time."
"Yes, Sir," Cruciero confirmed. "And we've been leading these new arrivals on a stern chase."
"Things might have gotten hairy if they'd already been in-system to back up their battle-line here," McKenna remarked.
"But they weren't," Murakuma replied with more serenity than she felt, and looked at her intelligence officer. "Have the scouts been able to provide any data on the composition of this second force, Marina?"
"Yes, Sir," Abernathy replied. "CIC is breaking down the initial take right now, and more data's coming in every minute. It should be appearing on the boards any time."
It did, and silence descended.
"My God," Olivera finally said softly as the data scrolled across the display and they digested the numbers. Twenty-four monitors, a hundred and two superdreadnoughts, sixty battlecruisers, and a hundred and five light cruisers. Plus-
"The scouts haven't been able to provide an exact total for the gunboat screen," Abernathy said in a voice which only seemed shockingly loud. "But we're looking at a minimum of fifteen or sixteen hundred."
"Ernesto," Murakuma said quietly into the renewed and intensified silence. "If we continue on our present course to the Orpheus 2 warp point, can we reach it before they intercept us?"
Cruciero seemed caught flat-footed, but Kevin Sanders, standing in the middle distance, rescued him.
"Actually, Admiral, I've just run a projection based on the maximum speed their ships can manage over that distance. The relative positions of the warp points will allow them to cut the angle on us and close the range, but, no, they can't catch us."
"Not even with our monitors slowing us down?"
"No, Sir. We've got a good head start." Even the insouciant Sanders recognized that he was on thin ice, intruding into the domain of operations as he was, which may have explained how he managed to restrain himself from reciting the platitude that a stern chase is a long chase.