Andrew Prescott had little time to feel grateful for small favors, however, as the ships of his command and the men and women, human and Ophiuchi alike, who crewed them fought desperately against a tide of destruction. The gunboats were far less numerous than the kamikazes, but they were also faster and far harder to kill, and so he was forced to commit his fighters against them. He hated it. He would far rather have sent the fighters against the relatively defenseless small craft, but those gunboats had to be stopped, and his already riven and harrowed fighter squadrons stopped them.
At a cost. Half his remaining fighters died in the dogfight, and four gunboats broke through despite all the exhausted fighter jocks could do. They charged down on Foxhound, the battlecruiser Courageous, and the freighter Vagabond, and all four of the gunboats ripple-salvoed their external ordnance loads of FRAMS . . . then streaked in to ram.
Foxhound and Vagabond vanished with all hands in hideous blossoms of light and fury, and Courageous staggered. She managed to pick off her single assailant just before the gunboat could follow its FRAMs in, but she was brutally wounded and fell out of formation. The flotilla's small craft swarmed out of their boat bays, ignoring the carnage raging around them, and dashed towards her to take off her survivors before the charging Bug battlecruisers came into range to finish her off, but she was obviously a total loss . . . and a sixth of Prescott's capital missile launchers went with her.
The small craft kamikazes accomplished much less, despite their greater numbers. Captain Shaarnaathy had vectored his own gunboats to meet them, and, intercepted far short of the flotilla's perimeter, they were mowed down without ever reaching attack range. But then the strike from Beta Force arrived, and Shaarnaathy's fighters were too spent and disorganized to stop them. It was up to the gunboats and the batteries of the flotilla's ships, and the Bugs came streaking in through the savage defensive fire.
Six gunboats got through this time, and all six charged squarely down on the battlecruiser Frolic, the command ship for the flotilla's battlegroup of Huns. The Guerriere-C-class battlecruiser was heavily armed with standard missile launchers, not the capital missile launchers of the Dunkerque-class BCRs, and they went to maximum rate sprint-mode fire as the Bugs entered her envelope. One of them survived to get off its FRAMs, and the big ship staggered as her shields vanished and explosions ripped at her armor. But that armor held, and she raced on, holding her place in formation and maintaining the Survey Command ships' datanet intact.
Then it was over, and an ashen-faced Andrew Prescott counted his losses. His flotilla was still essentially intact, but the Bugs had succeeded in their primary goal, for Zirk-Ciliwaan and Zirk-Likwyn, his only remaining carriers, had only eleven fighters, less than two full strength squadrons, between them, and only nine of Condor's and Corby's twenty-three gunboats survived. The Bugs had stripped away his long-range striking power . . . and their Antelopes had closed the range sharply while his own ships maneuvered to avoid attack. His sensor crews had their positions clearly plotted now, and that meant that they had his ships plotted just as clearly.
And that he wasn't going to shake them.
The faces on the com screens were grim as Prescott took his place before them. They understood the situation just as well as he did, but he was their commander, and the lack of condemnation in their expressions as they listened to Leopold's summary cut him like a sword. Intellectually, he knew they were right. It wasn't his fault, and even if he'd somehow managed to realize at the last minute what the Etnas were and what would happen if Commander Hiithylwaaan closed with them, there would have been nothing he could have done. The choice of exactly which units to attack, and in what order, had been Hiithylwaaan's; that was what a farshathkhanaak did. And even if Prescott had known all those things, the light-speed communications lag would have prevented him from overriding Hiithylwaaan's decision in time to matter.
But even though his intellect knew that, it didn't matter. Not deep down inside where an officer's responsibility to the men and women under his command lived.
"I believe," he said quietly, when Leopold had finished, "that we have to assume additional Bug units are en route to this system. They may even already have arrived, although they obviously have not yet reached a position from which they can engage us, or they would have done so in support of Alpha and Beta. Further, the fact that Beta hasn't closed the range on us as Alpha has suggests that Beta probably is, as Commander Chau suggests, composed primarily of Adders, which lack the speed to overhaul us.
"But Alpha has us firmly on its sensors, just as we have it, and it has almost three times our long-range missile capability now that Courageous is gone. Worse, it remains between us and our exit warp point, and while we can't be positive that the Bugs know where that warp point lies, it's certainly possible that they do. In either case, the Flotilla's only hope is to somehow break contact with-or cripple or destroy-Alpha and make a break for that warp point. At least," he smiled bitterly, "we appear to have finished off all of their available gunboats, so if we can get beyond Alpha's sensor range, we should be able to go back into cloak and, with a little luck, stay there.
"The problem, of course, is how we deal with Alpha."
Silence hovered for a moment, and in its depths he heard their understanding. They had no idea how deep into Bug territory they were at this moment, how soon or in what strength other enemy forces might sweep down upon them. But they knew what painful losses they'd already taken and that their enemy had them on his sensors.
And they also knew that the information they possessed might mean victory or defeat in the war against the Bugs . . . and that in this war, defeat and extinction were identical.
"With your permission, Admiral?"
Prescott blinked as the unfamiliar voice cut the silence of awareness. He had to sweep his eyes across the com screens before he found the speaker, and then his eyebrows rose. Lieutenant Eleanor Ivashkin was the most junior officer present for the electronic conference. With Hiithylwaaan's death, SF 62 no longer had a farshathkhanaak, but Ivashkin was the senior of TFNS Corby's surviving gunboat skippers. That made her as close to a farshathkhanaak as they were likely to come, and he nodded for her to continue.
"Admiral," she said, dark eyes intent in a thin, severely attractive face, "everyone in this flotilla knows how important an El Dorado is. And everyone in it knows how deep the shit is. But if we're going to break free of Alpha Force long enough to get back into cloak and get anyone home with our data, we have to take out all their fast ships. Or that's the way it looks to me. Would you agree?"
"I would," he said, sitting very still as he met her eyes on the screen. There was something about the young woman's voice, the set of her shoulders. Something frightening, and he felt his jaw tighten as she nodded slowly.