Shaaldaar didn't look entirely happy, but he made no protest.
As a general rule, the TFN preferred to keep the same group of fighter squadrons associated with a given carrier. But the formation of Seventh Fleet had involved a certain amount of reshuffling. Strikefighter Squadron 94 had been temporarily transferred from Wyvern to Basilisk, a new ship with a new strikegroup, which, it was felt, needed the leavening of some veterans of the Zephrain/Home Hive Three campaign.
Thus it was that Irma Sanchez found herself a participant in Operation Retribution, after one of her infrequent furloughs home.
She spared a thought for the all too brief time she'd had with Lydochka, almost unrecognizable at age eight. She was a big girl now, and it had been almost too hard to say goodbye. Then she brought herself back to the present, and looked around at the vast emptiness, lit only by the tiny white flame of AP-5's primary, shining across 5.2 light-hours. She was part of the vast screen of fighters that swept ahead of Admiral Prescott's advancing battle-line, curving in to wrap around targets that appeared only fitfully on Irma's scope, flickering in out of existence as the sensors of the recon fighters whose downloaded readings she was seeing struggled to overcome the Bugs' cloaking ECM.
"Heads up, people." Bruno Togliatti was a full commander now-as Irma was a full lieutenant, for fighter pilots who survived got promoted fast-but he was still in a lieutenant commander's billet as CO of VF-94. After this tour, he was due to move up to command of a carrier strikegroup. Irma wasn't particularly looking forward to that.
"We're not getting much on our displays yet," Togliatti went on, "but there's enough for the computers to have allocated targets. Stand by." Irma's scope went to tactical schematic as Captain Quincy, Seventh Fleet's farshathkhanaak assigned each of the ghostly battlecruisers ahead to one or more of his strikegroups while Togliatti's voice continued in her earphones. "We should be picking up visuals soon."
But before they could see the targets-the cloaking ECM operated on various wavelengths, but not that of visible light-they saw something else: the flashes up ahead that marked the graves of dying decoy missiles. Other squadrons, coming behind them, had launched those decoys, each of which simulated an F-4 to draw and disperse the Bug defensive fire. VF-94 and the other front line squadrons were fitted with ship-gutting primary packs.
Then there were flashes to port and starboard. Fighters were starting to die as well.
But then Irma began to glimpse the targets, glinting in the bright F-class starshine, growing in a way that gave a sense of breathtaking motion that hadn't existed against the backdrop of the distant stars as the fighters raced towards them.
"All right, people," Togliatti's voice rasped in her headset. "We're going in."
Raymond Prescott looked up from the last report, and his face wore a look of cold satisfaction.
"Fighter trap" suicide-riders had claimed thirty of the fighters, but few others had been lost. Indeed, Seventh Fleet's total losses so far, aside from Chekanahama, amounted to only sixty-three fighters and seven Gorm gunboats. In exchange, the fighters had savaged the Bug battlecruisers with their primary packs and hetlasers. With engine rooms reduced to twisted wreckage by the primary beams, those battlecruisers had been unable to outrun the Gorm superdreadnoughts-as fast as any other race's undamaged battlecruisers-which had pulled into standoff missile range and blown them apart.
Prescott turned to his staff and gestured at the report he'd been reading, which detailed the Gorm gunboats' hunting down of the last enemy battlecruisers with fully functional drives.
"Very well. I think we can declare AP-5 secured and bring the rest of the task forces through. . . . Yes, Amos?"
"Well, Sir," Captain Chung looked uncomfortable, "I can't help wondering about the rest of their gunboats."
"The rest of their gunboats?"
"Yes, Sir. Battlecruisers can carry ten gunboats each, which means that the battlecruisers confirmed as destroyed were just about sufficient to carry the gunboats in the attack wave we wiped out. But it's not like the Bugs to send in all of their available gunboats in one wave. Which suggests that they have other assets in the system."
Prescott frowned at the spook's unconscious echo of Shaaldaar. And a stubborn honesty forced him to wonder if he had reasons, unrelated to military rationality, for his haste to declare himself the conqueror of the system . . . and, almost certainly, the killer of the particular Bugs who'd wiped out the last elements of SF 62's gunslingers.
"Thank you, Amos," he acknowledged quietly. "You've raised a point we can't ignore. Nor have I forgotten the possibility of cloaked Bug pickets still in the vicinity of the warp point. We'll advance cautiously. As our monitors enter AP-5, they'll engage deception-mode ECM to appear as superdreadnoughts, and proceed in tight formation, with fighters deployed to secure the flanks." He turned to the com screen and addressed Shaaldaar, who hadn't commented. "Your real superdreadnoughts will lead the advance across the system, along with the CVAs, which will maintain a screen using the fighters that aren't detached to cover the monitors."
Task Force 71 completed its transit into AP-5, shook itself down into the formation Prescott had outlined, and proceeded to cross the two hundred and ninety-light-minute gulf to the warp point leading to the AP-6 System, the next way station on the road to El Dorado.
VF-94 had done its time in the forward fighter screen and would soon be relieved by another of Basilisk's squadrons. Irma Sanchez was starting to feel the "home free" sensation of one nearing the end of a watch.
That may have slowed her reaction a trifle when her HUD's tactical display suddenly blossomed with scarlet "hostile" icons. But not by much.
"What the-?!"
Togliatti cut her automatic exclamation short.
"Heads up, people!" He fired off a series of orders, which boiled down to "Ignore the gunboats and concentrate on the kamikaze assault shuttles." But few orders were necessary for veterans like these. Then he was off under emergency power, with the rest of the squadron in his wake.
Yeah, Irma had time to think. We didn't get all their battlecruisers after all, and the ones they held in reserve were really cagy. They maneuvered into position to launch their gunboats and kamikazes as close as possible to our fighter screen, so we'd have the least possible reaction time after detecting them.
Damned lucky we were about to be relieved. Our relief is already coming up behind us, and we can sure as hell use the support.
On the other hand, it means we've got minimal life support left. . . .
She chopped the thought brutally off, and focused her entire being on the task of zeroing in on one of the antimatter-laden assault shuttles that spelled potential death for Basilisk.
Raymond Prescott looked up and faced his staff, then turned to the com screen and faced Shaaldaar.
The understrength fighter screen had killed every one of the kamikaze shuttles that had erupted into their faces. But to do so, they had to pretty much leave the gunboats for the defenses of the superdreadnoughts and assault carriers of the vanguard. Only six gunboats had survived long enough to launch ripple salvos of FRAMs, and of those, only three had gone on to successfully ram their targets. But four Gorm superdreadnoughts (including Sakar, a datalink command ship) and the Terran CVAs Mermaid and Basilisk had suffered damage. The last two had come through despite devastating hits-which, Prescott reflected, argued in favor of the Terran design philosophy of treating an assault carrier as just that, and not as a fragile platform for as many fighters as could be crammed into it. Sakar and one of the other Gorm ships had been just as fortunate . . . but the third was almost destroyed, and the fourth totally so.