Prescott's voice remained quiet and even throughout, but the last sentence's tone said he was unaccustomed to explaining himself . . . and was unlikely to make a habit of it.
Mukerji managed a jerky nod. Everyone else kept very quiet. Prescott's elaborate public explanation of what a member of his staff ought to have already known would have been a staggering insult, had it not been inherently impossible to insult Mukerji.
"And now," Prescott resumed, "if there are no further questions or comments, we'll proceed with the operational portion of the briefing. Commodore Bichet, if you please."
Jacques Bichet was another relatively new-minted captain. He went back even further on Prescott's staff than Chung, however, and by now the fighter types had gotten over their original misgivings at having an ops officer whose background was line-of-battle . . . as, for that matter, was Prescott's.
"Thank you, Admiral," he began, and adjusted the holo sphere to strategic scale, showing the entire Prescott Chain.
"We believe that the AP-5 System represents the only real barrier we face between here and El Dorado, and Home Hive One beyond it." He indicated the El Dorado System, and the broken string-light beyond it that denoted a warp line leading to a closed warp point. "The Bugs have no reason to suppose that there's anything in the rest of the chain that needs defending."
He switched to tactical scale.
"In accordance with our analysis of the RD2 returns, we'll concentrate on the minefields and laser buoys, conserving our SBMHAWKs for tactical deployment within the AP-5 System." He didn't even glance at Mukerji. "We'll clear a path through the mines with an initial AMBAMP bombardment, after which TG 71.1 will lead the way through the warp point, in this order."
A readout appeared on a flat screen behind the head table. The initial waves consisted of Terran assault carriers and Gorm superdreadnoughts of the gunboat-carrying Gormus-C and Zakar-B classes. Bichet allowed a few moments for his audience to study the display, then answered the unspoken question in the minds of many.
"Our new monitors are still unknown to the Bugs. The longer we can postpone revealing their existence, the better. Nor should they be required to deal with AP-5's defenses."
There was some muttering, but no discussion. The briefing moved on into the comfortable realms of detail.
The presence of superdreadnoughts among the opening waves of this assault was even more disturbing than the unexpectedly heavy AMBAMP bombardment which had preceded them. A reinforced survey mission was only to be expected, since the attack on the Enemy survey flotilla had established that this chain of systems must contain some point of contact with the Fleet. A further probe to attempt to determine where that contact lay had been inevitable, and had been planned for. But this level of force was beyond any mere survey operation.
Clearly, the first survey flotilla had found something.
But what?
The question was unimportant from the standpoint of this system's defenders-sixty battlecruisers, thirty-three of them configured to carry ten gunboats each. Their role had suddenly narrowed to inflicting as many casualties as possible before their own unavoidable cessation of existence.
TG 71.1's leading elements hadn't yet detected the Bug ships-doubtless cloaked, and hanging back from the warp point-when a wave of more than a hundred and sixty gunboats came sweeping down on them. In the gunboats' wake came assault shuttles that everyone knew to be antimatter-laden kamikazes.
But that response had been anticipated. Even as the Terran and Ophiuchi-piloted fighters and Gorm gunboats launched, courier drones sped back through the warp point into AP-4.
On Riva y Silva's flag bridge, Raymond Prescott read the report and nodded grimly. He turned to his com screen and met the eyes of Force Leader Shaaldaar, where the latter waited on his own flag bridge aboard Task Group 71.1's flagship, the Gorm monitor Jhujj.
"It appears you are correct," Shaaldaar rumbled. "If there really were Bug superdreadnoughts here, they would be actively involved in the warp point defense, seeking to take as many of our major combatants with them as possible."
Prescott gave only a grunt of acknowledgment, then turned and nodded to Anthea Mandagalla. The chief of staff nodded in return, and she and Bichet began to transmit already prepared orders.
Serried ranks of SBMHAWK carrier pods powered up and streaked through the warp point. They transited in massed formations, ignoring their interpenetration losses with cybernetic fatalism, and rushed on, past the capital ships of the first waves, past even the fighters and gunboats those capital ships had launched. Then they seemed-or would have seemed, in extreme slow motion-to disintegrate in the process of releasing clouds of high-tech spores . . . but spores that carried death, not life. Those missiles sped outward, seeking out the approaching Bug gunboats, homing in with a persistence that defeated any but the most rigorous maneuvers. And such maneuvers left the Bugs in less-than-optimum formation to meet the fighters and Gorm gunboats that followed.
Not a single defending gunboat got through. The assault shuttles did . . . to fly into a blizzard of second generation anti-fighter missiles from the capital ships. Four of them worked their way through a momentary lull in that death storm of AFHAWK2s and converged on GSNS Chekanahama. The Gorm point defense gunners exploded three of them at point-blank range. But the fourth smashed head-on into the superdreadnought with a cargo of antimatter that no mobile construct could absorb. There were no survivors.
The sanitized medium of a courier drone reported the cataclysm to Prescott, and he stole a glance at the com screen. Shaaldaar's broad nose-the most alien feature of the disturbingly human face-flared in a Gorm expression the Terran had learned to read only too well. But that indication of grief was the only one the force leader allowed to show through the stoicism of one paying the price synklomus demanded. Still, a moment passed before he turned to face Prescott from his own screen and spoke evenly.
"Well, now we know the approximate location of their ships."
"Yes." It had been the other part of the message. The gunboat attack on the leading formations of ships had been anticipated, so those ships' sensors had been prepared to trace its origin. Now a vague, pink-stippled area appeared in Prescott's plot, denoting the area where the gunboats had appeared. The cloaked bug ships which had launched them must be lurking somewhere in its midst, and he nodded at it. "Now we know where to send our fighter sweep."
"Remember, they must surely have held back gunboat reserves," Shaaldaar cautioned, with the matter-of-fact informality, even to a fleet commander, which was so much a part of the Gorm personality.
"No doubt. But we're agreed that they don't have anything bigger than battlecruisers, and I doubt if they have many of those. They must appreciate the hopelessness of their position in the system, so I imagine they committed almost all their gunboats to that first strike. Our fighters should be able to deal with whatever's left."