They led the way now, stooping upon their prey as their long-ago ancestors had stooped upon living prey in the air of the Ophiuchi homeworld. They volleyed their own missiles as they closed, ripping the heart of the Bug formation with blinding glares of cleansing fire, and then they followed the missiles in, gun packs and internal lasers blazing.
They sliced through the Bug formation, already disordered and riven by the missile fire directed upon it by the Gorm, like a whirlwind, and space burned in their wake, littered with the broken debris which had been Bug gunboats. But the Ophiuchi, like the Gorm who'd begun the engagement, were selective in their slaughter. Like the Gorm, they took their victims from different squadrons, killing mercilessly and further eroding the ability of those squadrons to kill their allies . . . or to defend themselves in turn.
And then it was the rest of the CSP's turn.
The Terran and Orion pilots who formed the overwhelming backbone of Sixth Fleet's total fighter strength roared down on the shaken gunboat formation like the wrath of God. Their missiles went in front of them, spreading out in a lethal cloud that enveloped the Bugs and blotted them from the face of the universe. And then, like the Ophiuchi, they followed their missiles in.
To an untrained eye, the plot before Anson Olivera was pure chaos, with no more order than the forest fire of nuclear and antimatter explosions blazing in stroboscopic spits of fury in the visual display. But Olivera's eye was trained. He knew precisely what he was looking at, and a fierce sense of pride and vengeful hunger raged behind his disciplined façade as his farshatok ripped into the Bug formation which had outnumbered them by almost two to one.
It wasn't really a contest. Some of his pilots died. Losses were particularly heavy among the Ophiuchi who led the main interception, who lost almost fifteen percent of their pilots. However skilled they might have been individually, they'd also faced the heaviest and best coordinated defensive fire of any of the strikegroups. But their attack runs were decisive. Coupled with the damage the Gorm had already wreaked, they broke the back of the Bugs' squadron organization, and the Terran and Orion pilots took vicious advantage of the opening which had been created for them. Sixth Fleet lost no gunboats in the interception, and its total fighter losses were under a hundred and fifty.
The Bugs lost one thousand six hundred and twelve gunboats. Only seventeen of them got close enough to attack Sixth Fleet's battle-line. Only five of them scored shield hits with FRAMs.
None of them rammed successfully.
"Yes," Raymond Prescott nodded. "I agree. Continuing to run toward the Orpheus 2 warp point was exactly the right decision. And I can't help thinking that it exemplifies the kind of tactical flexibility we have and the Bugs seem inherently incapable of duplicating. If anything is going to win this war for us, that's it."
"On a slightly less metaphysical level," Zhaarnak put in, "it must have been gratifying to give the Bahg gunboats such a bloody nose, to use your charming Human idiom."
Murakuma grinned and took a sip of her drink. The whiskey caught the orange light of Bug-10's primary sun, flooding in through the wide, curving armorplast viewports of Riva y Silva's flag lounge. That lounge was empty, but for the three of them.
"Yes, Fang. We barely made it through into Orpheus 2 ahead of them, and they barreled through after us without even slowing down. I understand our personnel are calling it the 'Great Orpheus Turkey Shoot.' "
"Yes," Prescott, one of whose ancestors had claimed two air-to-air victories in the battle which had prompted the allusion, agreed. "I can see how they might-even if some of your in-laws might not particularly appreciate it, Admiral Murakuma. So none of the gunboats lasted long enough to complete their ramming runs?"
"Not successfully. And as nearly as we can tell, no more than a dozen or so of them even got away. We assume that the few who did are the reason the Bug capital ships didn't make transit after they finally lumbered up."
"You are undoubtedly correct," Zhaarnak allowed. "I, for one, am never truly happy when the Bahgs demonstrate something approaching tactical wisdom, but I am forced to concede that they do so upon occasion."
"More often than I'd like," Murakuma agreed. "Still, how much 'wisdom' does it take to stay on your own side of the warp point when you know an entire fleet worth of strikefighters is waiting to ambush you on the far side . . . and that your own ships are too slow to overtake the enemy you're chasing even if you survive the ambush?"
"Truth," Zhaarnak admitted, and stroked his whiskers thoughtfully. "We must now assume that the third warp point in Orpheus 1 definitely leads to another home hive system, however. Nothing less could support a force as large as the one you detected."
Neither human could muster any grounds for contradicting him. For a space, they all nursed their drinks in silence. Finally, Prescott drew a deep breath and leaned back in his comfortable chair.
"You're correct, of course," he told his vilkshatha brother, "but that can be left for the future. We'll have to go back to Orpheus 1 eventually, but the fact that we hold both Orpheus 2 and Home Hive One gives us two avenues of attack and requires them to divide their forces to cover both of them."
"Truth," Zhaarnak agreed. "Operation Orpheus accomplished a great deal."
"And," Murakuma said, returning the courtesy, "Seventh Fleet wasn't exactly idle while it was going on."
"Well," Prescott acknowledged with just a trace of complacency, "we'd been wanting to eliminate those holdouts in Bug-11 for some time. The damaged ships we're getting back into service, coupled with our fighter reinforcements, meant we could finally do it."
"Unfortunately," Zhaarnak added glumly, "the same was not true of the system beyond Franos' Warp Point Three."
"Remind me to light a fire under astrography," Prescott told him in an annoyed tone that failed to mask a deeper frustration. "It's about time they assigned that system a designation."
Murakuma took another sip of her drink, this time to hide a smile. Marina Abernathy had already briefed her on Seventh Fleet's abortive attempt to force its way through Warp Point Three. Prescott and Zhaarnak had been able to smash the fixed defenses on its far side with a smothering wave of SBMHAWKs, but the sheer number of gunboats which had supported those defenses had prevented them from doing much more. They'd managed to get RD2s through for a fairly detailed look at the system's astrography, but they'd been forced to abandon any thought of sending manned units through when they saw the hordes of gunboats those same drones had detected.
"I still think we should have pressed on," Zhaarnak growled. "We could have taken that system!"
"Perhaps, brother," Prescott said, speaking in the Tongue of Tongues, as he often did when Zhaarnak was like this. "But it would have meant heavy losses-which we can ill afford at present if we are to . . ."
His voice trailed off into a silence of mutual understanding, and Murakuma's gaze sharpened, and darted from one of her companions to the other.
"You two," she stated, "are up to something."
"Well, we do have a proposal," Prescott admitted. His tone held a complex freight of meaning: acknowledgment that Murakuma outranked both of Seventh Fleet's joint commanders, and realization of how little that had proven to mean between them. "As you know, the repairs in AP-4, plus our reinforcements, have pretty much gotten Seventh Fleet back up to strength. At the same time, Sixth Fleet took some losses in the course of Operation Orpheus. So we feel it's time for you to revert to a defensive stance while we undertake the next offensive."