Furthermore, the New Enemies and the Old Enemies would at last know of each others' existence, and doubtless join forces. This must not be.
So, from every standpoint, there'd been no alternative. The Deep Space Force must hurl its full strength at the Old Enemies before they could establish themselves in this system beyond any possibility of being dislodged. With that decision, it had departed from its station, leaving the fixed defenses and the mobile warp point defense to watch the warp point beyond which the New Enemies crouched.
But the New Enemies had chosen that very moment to send through a cascade of their robot probes.
The intelligences which directed the Fleet shared nothing like their enemies' belief in fate, or karma, or even the Demon Murphy. Yet as the probes poured through the warp point the Deep Space Force had just left, something very like those beliefs flickered at the edge of their awareness. Unfortunately, the Deep Space Force had already been far beyond any range at which it might have changed plan and course and returned to defend the warp point. It had had no choice but to continue on its current mission, and the New Enemies had seized the opportunity without delay, smashing the fortresses and burning swathes through the buoys and mines with the assorted weapons their warp-transiting launch pods spewed forth in such abundance. Now their ships had followed and were shaking themselves out into their organizational components: thirty-one monitors, eighty-four superdreadnoughts, seventy-eight battlecruisers, sixty lesser cruisers, and forty-four carriers for their small strike craft, twenty of which belonged to the superdreadnought-sized variety.
It was unquestionably a more formidable force than the one the Old Enemies had put into this system. So it became imperative to obliterate the latter before the New Enemies could intervene on their behalf. The Deep Space Force's gunboats and assault craft would continue on their assigned course.
Admiral Francis Macomb, TFN, broke the stunned silence. "Who are those people?!"
Ynaathar turned to the bank of com screens which held the faces of his task force commanders. Macomb, commanding TF 81, Eighth Fleet's primary battle-line component, was a crusty war-dog of the old school, outspoken to a fault. Trust him to blurt out what everyone was thinking. The only surprising thing was that his ejaculation hadn't contained two or three obscenities.
Ynaathar, however, felt he owed it to his position to maintain a façade of imperturbability.
"Unknown, Ahhdmiraaaal. All our drones have been able to tell us is that the Bahg mobile force is engaged against a fleet of unknown origin. Is this not correct?" He turned to a bewildered-looking knot of intelligence officers. Kevin Sanders, with questionable propriety, spoke up first.
"Correct, First Fang. We haven't a clue as to who the unknowns are, but at least we can give you a rough count of their order of battle by ship types: twelve monitors, sixty superdreadnoughts, sixteen assault carriers, twenty fleet carriers, sixty battlecruisers and forty-eight heavy cruisers."
"A formidable force," Fifth Fang Shiiaarnaow'maahzaak, commanding Task Force 82, commented.
"But not in the same class as ours," Vice Admiral Samantha Enwright, CO Task Force 85, added.
"No, Sir," Sanders confirmed. "Which is probably why the Bugs are trying to defeat it in detail before turning on us. They're sending in what appears to be their entire complement of gunboats and kamikazes. Our analysis doesn't give the strangers a high probability of survival."
"I should think not," Ynaathar murmured as he studied the statistics of the tsunami of death sweeping down on . . . whoever it was that had emerged from Warp Point Two. He reached a decision and turned to face the com screen holding the Ophiuchi face of his carrier commander. "Ahhdmiraaaal Haaathaaaahn, am I correct in believing that our fighters, if launched without delay, can intercept the Bahg gunboat strike before it can reach the unknowns?"
Haathaahn recovered quickly, and responded after a hurried consultation with someone outside the pickup. "Ittt woulllld be exxxxtremely clossssse, Firsssst Ffffang. Nnnneedlesssss to ssssay, it woulllld require the fightttters to operrrrate at exxxxtreeme rrrrange, evvvven withhhh maxxxximummm llllload llllife ssssupport paccccks."
"Get them so loaded at once, then."
"You mean, Sir-?" Macomb's dangling question spoke for them all, and Ynaathar flicked his ears affirmitively.
"Yes." he met all four task force commanders' eyes, one com screen at a time. "I assume, at least provisionally, that anyone fighting the Bahgs is a potential friend of ours. On the strength of that assumption, I am prepared to commit Eighth Fleet to the unknowns' support."
No one commented, and Ynaathar saw no disagreement in the screens. He also saw no great regret over the fact that he, and not they, bore the burden of such a decision.
It was, Commander Thaamaandaan decided, difficult to fight a battle and readjust one's reality structure at the same time.
The weariness of a long flight in a fighter's cramped quarters didn't help.
Eighth Fleet's fighter strike had come close to its goal of catching the Bugs' gunboats and kamikazes before they could engage the enigmatic fleet which was their target. Indeed, considering that the fighters had had to cross almost four of the light-hours the Humans had made standard for the Alliance, the closeness was rather remarkable. But the unknowns had launched their own fighters with unexpected promptness, and those fighters had come to grips with the Bugs shortly before Thaamaandaan and his fellows could join the battle. So it had worked out well after all, in that the Bugs were now caught between two fires.
But it gave Thaamaandaan food for thought which he had little time to chew as he led his squadron into the maelstrom of battle.
That the Ophiuchi fighter pilots were the best in existence had been acknowledged for so long that it had assumed the dignity of a natural law. The Corthohardaa weren't insufferable about the advantage they derived from their evolutionary heritage; that would have been bad form. They merely took it as axiomatic.
Now, Thaamaandaan saw, they'd never be able to do so again. These strangers used their fighters like a hanaakaat master used his talon spur. Their dogfighting skill was such that he had to believe they were, to an even greater extent than his own race, born to it.
But as the range closed the sensors revealed something even more disconcerting. These fighters that had appeared so unexpectedly out of the infinite depths of the galaxy were replicas of the human-designed F-3 that Thaamaandaan himself had piloted a scant four years ago, before the F-4 had superseded it. Exact replicas.
But now he was in among the Bugs himself, and there was no time to ponder these matters. There was only time for killing and staying alive.
Ynaathar's trademark sang-froid was somewhat in abeyance.
In his holo sphere, the vast dogfight was a snarling, writhing pattern of fighters, gunboats and kamikazes, like some multicolored poisonous scorpion thrashing about as it tried to sting itself to death. But he could spare it little attention. The Bug capital ships had turned at bay, and Eighth Fleet, with its fighters otherwise engaged, had had no choice but to meet them ship to ship. So a titanic battle-line engagement now rose to crescendo, echoing on a larger scale the battle still raging between the unknowns and the remnants of the Bugs' Warp Point Two defense force.
Thus far, Hiarnow'kharnak hadn't sustained any hits in the bizarre, three-cornered battle. Ynaathar almost wished it had. At least it would have taken his mind off the rising tally of ships which had been damaged . . . or destroyed.