It was true that the primary beams could knock out internal systems-possibly even the critical internal systems-without having to first smash their way through shields and armor. Yet in the long run, it would not matter greatly. The crews of the special units engaged the attacking small craft with missiles as they closed, and then opened fire with their point defense. The attack craft took only moderate losses, and their crews continued to bore in, closing to minimum range to make every shot count.
Exactly as the Fleet had anticipated.
Commander Hiithylwaaan led the strike on the center unidentified battlecruiser himself, and he felt a deep, abiding sense of pride as his Human and Ophiuchi pilots followed him in. They drove through the weak, poorly coordinated point defense of their targets, closing in multisquadron strikes that were precisely sequenced to put the greatest number of fighters-and hence the heaviest possible weight of fire-onto their victims simultaneously from the closest possible range.
SF 62's pilots executed their attacks perfectly. And at the precise moment of their closest approach, each target's crew calmly threw a switch.
Andrew Prescott felt as if someone had kicked him in the belly.
He sensed the same shocked horror rippling through all the officers and ratings on Flag Bridge, and there was nothing he could do about it at all. He was as much a spectator as they were, staring at the plot. The information on it was minutes old, the events it showed already over and done, but it didn't feel that way, and his face clenched with pain as he watched two-thirds of his remaining fighter strength be wiped away in mere seconds.
Etnas. Those had to be Etnas, he thought numbly. But why didn't Hiithylwaaan recognize them? He was right on top of them, for God's sake! And he thought they were a brand new class, so-
His thought chopped off abruptly. Hiithylwaaan had thought they were a new class because the Bugs had wanted him to think that. The farshathkhanaak had been far too close for simple ECM to have deceived him, which meant that the ships had been a new design-or, at least, an older design which had been altered to make it appear to be something else entirely.
The SRHAWK. It's the Bugs' answer to the SRHAWK, he thought. We disguised those to look like SBMHAWK pods, so they returned the compliment. Our fighter pilots have gotten too smart to close in tight on suicide-riders unless they have to to intercept them short of an OWP or capital ship. So the bastards disguised an Etna as something else in the hope that our strikes would come into "fighter-trap" range of it, anyway.
The numbness of the moment of disaster began to pass, taking the anesthesia of shock with it, and he sucked in a deep breath. From the power of the explosions, he suspected the antimatter loads on these particular ships had been even heavier than the ones aboard the suicide-riders at Centauri had been. No doubt that had been part of the redesign which had fooled his pilots.
Wait a minute, Andrew, he told himself. Don't make the mistake of giving of the Bugs too much credit. It may have been a deliberate deception attempt that succeeded, but it could also just be that they have more classes of suicide-riders than we knew about, and this was simply one we hadn't seen yet.
He shook himself. Whether the Bugs had done it on purpose or not, didn't really matter. Once Hiithylwaaan had committed to attack the suicide-riders, the result had been all but inevitable. All the Bugs had needed to do was wait until the maximum number of fighters were within sufficiently close proximity and then blow themselves up . . . and in the process trap a horrific percentage of SF 62's precious fighters within the blast effect and destroy them.
He watched the remainder of the strike falling back and silently blessed whoever was in command over there now. He doubted very much that it was Hiithylwaaan, given the Ophiuchi strikefighter tradition of leading from the front. Not that Prescott blamed the farshathkhanaak for what had just happened. He hadn't seen it coming either, after all. No one had. But at least whoever had taken over had sufficient good sense and initiative to abort the rest of the attack on his own authority rather than throw away what remained of the tattered strikegroups against the unshaken defenses of the main Bug formation.
He made himself sit very still while the damage sidebar tallied the returning icons, and his jaws ached as his teeth clenched on his pipe. Only twenty-six of them were coming home again-barely four full strength squadrons from all three carriers-and he had only eighteen surviving gunboats to support them. That wasn't enough for long-range strikes to do what had to be done, and-
His thoughts broke off as a fresh wave of gunboats suddenly accelerated away from the Bugs.
"Sir-" Chau began hoarsely, but Prescott cut him off.
"I see them, Ba Hai. Contact Captain Shaarnaathy. Tell him we can't afford to send the fighters and gunboats back out for long-range interceptions. They're to engage only from within the rest of the flotilla's missile envelope so that we can support them with shipboard missile fire."
"Sir," Leopold pointed out very carefully, "if we let them in that close, we're likely to have leakers."
"I know that," Prescott replied, more harshly than he'd intended. "But we don't have a lot of choice. We need to-"
"Admiral, Tracking reports additional Bug small craft, probably assault shuttle and pinnace kamikazes, following the gunboats in!" Chau interrupted.
The small craft swept off on the heels of the remaining gunboats. The special units had performed well, crippling the Enemy attack craft. Now it was time to finish him off, and the Fleet's faster battlecruisers went to full power.
Andrew Prescott watched with a face of stone as the Arachnid attack came in. The Bugs were doing a better job than usual of keeping their pure kamikazes and gunboats together as a single coordinated force, and his own shaken squadrons had been given only minimal time to rearm and reorganize. His gunboats, in particular, reached the flotilla bare minutes before their Bug pursuers, although the fleeter fighters had been given at least a little more precious time.
But it wasn't going to be enough, and he heard his own voice giving orders as the Bug attack roared down on his command.
The gunboats and small craft swooped down upon their targets, and their motherships seized the opportunity to close. The Enemy had no option but to go to evasive maneuvering as the deadly little vessels streaked toward his starships, and that reduced his formation's forward speed drastically. The Fleet's long-range missile ships, unhampered by any similar need to bob and weave, closed the range quickly, and by now their sensors had hard locks on most of the Enemy ships. When battle damage began to slow their targets, the missile ships would be ready.
Space was ugly with butchery as the Bug gunboats led the attack into the heart of SF 62. Yet another wave of gunboats-much smaller, and with fewer accompanying kamikazes-raced towards the flotilla from Beta Force, but in that instance, at least, the Bug coordination had been thankfully poor. Whatever damage Alpha Force might do, its attack would be over and done before the Beta gunboats entered engagement range.