Unfortunately, there was nothing the Deep Space Force could do about it . . . except to kill as many of the Enemy as possible before it died itself.
Anson Olivera's strikefighters screamed straight into the teeth of the Bug battle-line's horrific array of defensive firepower. Deadly though a fighter could be, it was a frail and tiny thing when thrown all alone against the unshaken wall of devastation those sullen Bug leviathans could project.
Which was why Case Rupert did nothing of the sort.
Oh, the fighters led the way, but the rest of Sixth Fleet came right behind them. Entire squadrons of fighters salvoed nothing but decoy missiles into the Bugs' defensive envelope, providing hundreds of false targets to lure fire away from the real attackers. Fighter ECM did its bit, as well, fighting to deny point defense laser clusters and AFHAWKs the ability to lock their targets up, and intricate evasive maneuvering-the Waldeck Weave-made them even more difficult to hit. But what truly cleared the way for them was Vanessa Murakuma's decision to take her starships into the Bugs' long-range missile envelope right along with them.
Her monitors and superdreadnoughts flushed their XO racks, sending stupendous volleys of antimatter-armed SBMs and capital missiles straight for the Bugs. Those missiles howled down upon their targets like lethal hammers, and the Bugs had no alternative but to honor the threat. Fending off that torrent of destruction diverted their point defense almost entirely from the strikefighters, cutting the totality of their anti-fighter firepower by almost fifty percent.
The battle-line paid a price to open the door for the fighters, for if it could hit the Bugs, then the Bugs could hit it, and warheads began to go home. Shields flashed and died as the hearts of small, violent stars exploded against them. Most of the Bug missiles concentrated on the battle-line, but here and there an enemy battlegroup decided to vent its fury on easier prey and an entire monitor or superdreadnought battlegroup vomited its entire missile broadside at a single battlecruiser squadron.
No battlecruiser could survive that sort of punishment, and Murakuma's jaw clenched as the Code Omega transmissions began to sound once again.
But offering her ships as targets had accomplished its goal. Olivera's F-4s went howling in to point-blank range. Dozens of them died, despite anything decoy missiles, ECM, or diversions could accomplish. But if dozens perished, hundreds did not, and once again, the sheer volume of the Bug command ships' defensive firepower stripped away their anonymity.
Taut-voiced CSGs vectored their squadrons in on the suddenly revealed targets, and the unstoppable power of the primary pack ripped straight to the hearts of their gargantuan foes. Command datalink installations died under the pounding of those vicious stilettos, and the coordination of their battlegroups faltered.
And that, of course, was the other reason Murakuma had closed on her fighters' heels. She would allow no time for the Bugs to recover from the disorientation as the voices of their command ships were silenced forever. She would give them no respite, no opportunity to reorganize. She would seize the instant of their nakedness mercilessly, and as any battlegroup faltered, at least two battlegroups of her own focused a tornado of missile fire upon it.
Bug monitors writhed like spiders in a candle flame, and Vanessa Murakuma watched them burn with eyes of frozen jade ice.
Afterwards, it was hard to believe the head-on clash had been so brief.
Every combat veteran knows the protracted nature of time in battle, and Murakuma had thought herself long since beyond astonishment at it. But now the old "that can't be right" sensation was back in full force. Surely so much carnage, of such intensity, couldn't have been crammed into a mere thirty standard minutes.
She shook the feeling off, annoyed at herself. She also blocked out the noise of the damage control teams, the residual ringing in her own ears, and all the other distractions as she concentrated on the incoming reports.
It had been a holocaust, but at least the loss ratios were heavily in Sixth Fleet's favor. She watched the list of damaged and destroyed ships and tried-without success-not to think about all of the lost and ruined lives hiding behind that passionless electronic display. She made herself watch until the report scrolled downward to the very end, then drew a deep breath, turned, and beckoned to Leroy McKenna.
The chief of staff crossed the flag deck to her, his helmet in the crook of his left arm, and she nodded to him.
"Please get with Ernesto about this," she said, waving a hand at the damage reports she'd just perused. "I want to cull out the most heavily damaged ships and send them back to Orpheus 1, and I want proposals for reorganizing our battlegroups around our losses. And tell Anson I want recon fighters out as soon as possible." She managed a wan smile. "Our fighters have been a bit occupied," she said with studied understatement, "and the lack of fresh reconnaissance is making me just a little nervous."
The destruction of the Deep Space Force was, no doubt, regrettable. But, viewed in one way, it could be regarded as an advantage. It would induce overconfidence in the Enemy, who would assume that his hardest battles in this system were now behind him.
It was also unintendedly advantageous that the formations of gunboats and small craft from the planets of the secondary stellar component were still far behind the more closely based ones. When the Enemy detected the first wave of planet-based craft speeding toward him, he wouldn't recognize the full magnitude of the threat. For that wave represented only a third of it. . . .
"Did you say eight thousand?"
Marina Abernathy swallowed, hard. But the intelligence officer didn't wilt under the admiral's regard.
"Yes, Sir. I know the original report said two thousand gunboats and kamikazes. The first fighter to detect them immediately turned back into com range and transmitted that report. But the rest of his squadron stayed out there, and now they've detected three more formations, each as large as the first."
"I see," Murakuma acknowledged, and nodded slowly.
Her acknowledgment was the only sound and motion on the shock-frozen flag bridge, and she turned to McKenna, who was as pale as it was possible for him to get.
"I wonder how much more there is to be detected?" she said in an almost conversational tone.
"Sir?"
"We keep forgetting about that secondary component," she pointed out with a touch of impatience. "It's another class F main-sequence star, and even though they're usually not old enough to have life-bearing planets, Component A here obviously is, and both components of a binary star system coalesce at the same time. So Component B could have another heavily developed planet-or more than one of them, given the wide liquid-water zone around a bright star like that. We really have no idea of the total resources we're facing here. And if those idiots at GFGHQ-"
She chopped herself off and shook her head irritably. This time her impatience was with herself.
"That doesn't matter. Eight thousand of them are quite enough. It's time we got ourselves back to Orpheus 1."
"Thank God we hadn't penetrated any further from the warp point before we picked up the trailers," McKenna muttered, and Ernesto Cruciero looked up from a computer terminal.
"You're right about that, Sir," the ops officer agreed fervently. "Two thousand we could take, and I'd have advised doing just that. But eight?" He shook his head. "But even if we start pulling back immediately, we're already in too deep to be able to exit this system before they can reach us. We'll be right at the warp point when they do, but they're still going to catch us short of Orpheus 1."