by David Weber
He chuckled sourly at the thought and reached for his lighter. He'd just puffed the fresh tobacco alight when the sudden, shocking wail of a priority alarm sliced through Flag Deck's calm quiet.
"We have bogies!" Lieutenant Commander Chau's voice was flat, almost sing-song with the half-chant of long training while his emotions raced to catch up with the shocking realization of his intellect. "Multiple hostile contacts bearing two-eight-one by zero-one-one, range three light-minutes! CIC calls them gunboats, coming in across a broad front. Minimum of forty-plus confirmed inbound, Admiral!"
Andrew Prescott stared down into his repeater plot, watching the venomous red icons spring into existence off Concorde's port bow and come sweeping to meet his flotilla, and a fist of ice closed about his heart. Gunboats couldn't cloak. There were very few things in the universe easier to detect than a gunboat under power, even at extreme range, and their sudden appearance at such relatively close quarters could only mean they'd launched from cloaked mother ships.
They must have launched on a time estimate, he thought with a queer, detached sense of calm. Can't have been a hard sensor contact, or they'd have closed up before launch, sent them at us in a tighter stream. But if it's a time estimate, it's a damned good one. So they must've had something sitting there in cloak the whole time, something the probes missed. But that didn't miss us coming through before we could go back into cloak. And even if whoever launched them doesn't see us directly when we launch our own birds, that many gunboats are bound to spot us pretty damned quick.
"I see them, Ba Hai," he said, and the calm of his own voice amazed him. He felt that calm reaching out, meeting and overcoming his staffers' ripples of panic, and made himself sit back in his command chair before he began issuing orders.
"Bring the flotilla to one-one-zero, same plane," he said then. "I want those gunboats held directly astern of us to slow their overtake. Then contact Captain Shaarnaathy." Shaarnaathy was the skipper of Zirk-Ciliwaan, one of the two Ophiuchi light carriers attached to SF 62. Although they were much smaller than the Foxhound, the larger Terran fleet carrier, each carried twenty-four fighters, over half as many as the Foxhound, and Shaarnaathy was senior to Foxhound's skipper. "Tell him I want a full deck launch from all three carriers. And get the Cormorants' gunboats out there, too. If the Bugs think forty or fifty gunboats are enough to deal with us, I think it's time we taught them the error of their ways!"
That actually won a small chuckle from someone, and Prescott smiled and shoved his pipe back into his mouth. But he himself felt no temptation to laughter. Forty or fifty gunboats was too small a force to stop SF 62. Between them, Condor and Corby, his two Cormorant-class battlecruisers, alone, carried twenty gunboats of their own, and Foxhound and her two attached CVLs could put almost ninety fighters into space, forty-eight of them with Ophiuchi pilots. Against that sort of firepower, the gunboats sweeping towards them didn't stand a chance.
But if he was right about how the Bugs had known when to launch, then presumably they also had a good notion of what they faced, and while Bugs were capable of suicidal attritional attacks no human admiral would contemplate for a moment, they were also capable of a much higher degree of subtlety than he could have wished. And by now they'd had ample opportunity to analyze standard Allied doctrine for using fighters to blunt gunboat attacks . . . and to come up with a response of their own.
* * *
The Enemy's small craft swept towards the gunboats, and there were rather more of them than had been anticipated. Of course, there were also more Enemy starships than expected, as well. Clearly the picket which had detected them when they passed through this system months before had missed almost half of them. That was most unfortunate. With more accurate initial information, a larger force could have been dispatched to absolutely insure these intruders' destruction. As it was, reinforcements had been called for, but it was unlikely they could arrive in time to affect the issue.
On the other hand, the Fleet should have sufficient strength on hand to deal with the situation, despite the numbers of Enemy small craft so far detected. A matter for somewhat greater concern than the absolute numbers was the presence of gunboats among the more usual attack craft. Their presence had been completely unexpected, and no provision had been made for their ability to mount standard shipboard anti-attack craft missiles on their ordnance racks. There was neither time nor means to adjust for their presence, however, and the second wave of the fleet's own gunboats separated from their racks.
* * *
"We have a second gunboat wave coming in from zero-zero-two zero-six-three, at least as strong as the first, Admiral!" Chau reported tersely. "Range is only two light-minutes. Tracking is picking up some of the launch platforms now. They look like battlecruisers. CIC designates this Force Beta, Sir."
Prescott grunted, but it wasn't really a surprise. Either the Bugs had gotten an excellent passive sensor lock on them as they made transit and managed to hold them long enough to project their course, or else they already knew which warp point the flotilla was bound for. It didn't really matter which at the moment. What did matter was that, armed with their knowledge, they'd managed to position their units so as to catch SF 62 between two forces . . . and one of them was between Prescott and the only way home. Worse, the second one was in front of him on his present course, positioned so that he had to close with it if he meant to keep running away from the first gunboat wave. And worse yet, with that many starships, plus the gunboats' onboard scanners, the Bugs must know precisely where Prescott's forces were. The fighter and gunboat launch would have defined a general locus for them, just as the second wave's launch had pinpointed Force Beta for Concorde's sensors, for not even the best ECM could defeat that horde of passive and active sensors when it knew where to look. And once they'd been located the first time, dropping back into cloak and evading would be enormously more difficult.
Yet one aspect of the Bugs' tactics did puzzle him. The new gunboat wave was headed to join the first in a clear bid to engage Shaarnaathy's fighters and gunboats rather than trying to pounce on SF 62's starships while its fighter cover was away. The flotilla's shipboard weapons would undoubtedly have inflicted heavy casualties on the gunboats if they'd come in on the ships, but Bugs had never shied away from losses before, and it would probably have been their best shot at getting in among the datagroups. So why-?
Of course. The Bugs knew his carriers' strikegroups were both his primary defense against kamikaze small craft and his best offensive weapon, and they wanted to destroy that weapon before they sought a decisive engagement. Or they might be present in sufficient strength to feel confident of crushing the flotilla in a standard ship-to-ship engagement if Prescott's fighters could simply be whittled down. Yet either way, he had no choice but to meet the gunboats head-on and try to whittle them down, and at least his own strikegroups were positioned to engage the two Bug forces sequentially and in isolation. It would probably be his best opportunity to defeat the gunboats in detail. It might also be the only one he got, and so he said nothing as his pilots' icons began to merge in the plot with the angry red hash of the Bug gunboats' first wave.
* * *
The Cormorants' human-crewed gunboats struck first, and they hit the Bugs hard. The enemy clearly hadn't expected to face such units, for they'd opted to equip their own craft with standard fighter missiles. Against pure fighter opposition, that made sense, since they could fit far more of the smaller fighter-sized missiles onto their racks. But the human gunboats were armed with all-up AFHAWKs, and they salvoed their less numerous but heavier weapons from outside even FM2 range.
Brief, vicious fireballs spalled the Bug formation as the big missiles tore home, and almost half the first wave was destroyed before it could get a shot off in reply. But the remainder kept coming, and now it was their turn, for unlike the fighters which opposed them, they had point defense. They had to enter the fighters' range to engage them, but they stood an excellent chance of picking off retu
rn missile fire, and they arrowed straight at the Terran and Ophiuchi strikegroups behind a cloud of missiles of their own.
They ignored the human gunboats completely, electing not to waste missiles against the bigger vessels' matching point defense, and now explosions glared among SF 62's defenders. The tornado of fighter-launched missiles was sufficient to wipe out virtually all the Bugs, despite their point defense, without ever entering energy weapon range, but Prescott felt a cold sense of foreboding as he watched his plot. The two or three first-wave gunboats to evade destruction were no longer headed for the flotilla. They were breaking off, turning to run from the fighters rather than trying to get through to his starships, and that was very unlike standard Bug tactics.
The fugitives' courses back towards their launch platforms took them directly away from their own second wave. Perhaps they hoped the Allied fighters, feeling the pressure of the second wave bearing down upon them, would turn to face it and let the survivors make good their escape. If so, they were wrong, and Prescott clenched his teeth on his pipe as his faster fighters went in pursuit. They ran down the escapees and nailed them, not without losses of their own, then wheeled once more and turned back as the second Bug wave drew into extreme missile range. Again clouds of missiles erupted into his fighters' formations, and this time the long-range losses were completely one-sided, for there were no answering Allied missiles. But they were only one-sided for the time it took the vengeful human and Ophiuchi pilots to overtake the slower gunboats, despite their efforts to evade, and rip them apart with energy fire.
A sidebar in his plot gave his losses, and he felt a spasm of pain as he absorbed them. Only two of his gunboats had been destroyed, but twenty-one of his eighty-plus fighters were dead. The Bugs had lost well over twice that many units, and each of theirs carried much larger crews than his fighters, but they were Bugs. There was no such thing as an "acceptable rate of exchange" against Bugs . . . and he'd lost almost a quarter of his own fighter strength in killing them.
He watched a small cluster of icons speeding even further outward as the rest of the strike wheeled to return to their motherships to rearm and reorganize. Those were Foxhound's recon fighters, splitting up to sweep down reciprocals of both gunboat waves' tracks to seek out the ships from which they'd come. If SF 62 was lucky, those ships would be the old, original Bug designs, with commercial grade engines Prescott's own starships could easily outrun.
If SF 62 was lucky.
* * *
"It's confirmed, Admiral," Chau said unhappily. "We probably don't have a complete count on them-Foxhound only carries six recon birds, and the Bugs are still cloaked-but we've positively IDed a minimum of five Antelopes and two Antlers in Force Alpha." Prescott nodded. Force Alpha was the one which lay between them and their escape warp point. "We have military grade drives on all but five of the other Alpha units our pilots saw, as well," Chau went on. "The commercial-drive ships look like Adder-class BCs, which makes sense, given the weight of gunboats we saw coming at us. Our IDs on Beta Force are more tentative, but it looks like there may be a higher percentage of Adders out there."
"I see." Prescott rubbed his jaw thoughtfully while he glanced around at the com images of his ship commanders and Commander Hiithylwaaan, his Ophiuchi farshathkhanaak. A matching awareness of what that meant looked back at him from every face, and he hid a mental sigh.
The Adders were gunboat carriers, with only standard missile launchers to back up their attack groups, and they were from the old, slow philosophy of Bug warship design. Antlers and Antelopes were very different propositions, however, for they were capital missile ships, at least as heavily armed as his own Concorde and the flotilla's five Dunkerque-C-class ships. They had not only the speed to match SF 62 stride for stride, but also the weapons fit to engage it from well beyond the range of most of its starships, and if his recon pilots had seen seven of them, there were probably more with the forces already engaged against him. Even if there weren't, it was highly likely that still more Bug ships were headed towards him, either already in-system or en route for it.
Much of the Bugs' shipboard gunboat strength must have been killed, but that, unfortunately, didn't necessarily mean as much as it might have, given gunboats' ability to make transit on their own. There could be hordes of the things lurking just beyond his sensor range, waiting to pounce, although he tended to doubt it. If they were present in that kind of overwhelming strength, the Bugs wouldn't have bothered with fancy attritional tactics. They would simply have bored straight in to overwhelm the flotilla and be done with it.
But their data on his strength was almost certainly at least as good as his estimate of theirs. And whether they knew it or not, they were between him and his exit warp point. Worse, their speed meant they could stay between him and his warp point unless he could somehow drop back into cloak. Which he couldn't do as long as they had any gunboats with which to shadow him. And since said shadowers were too spread out for him to get all of them, that meant the only way to prevent the Bug starships from intercepting him was to destroy or at least lame those ships so that they could no longer catch his own vessels.
Which meant fighter and gunboat strikes at extreme range, he admitted unhappily to himself. He didn't like it, and he hated the thought of the casualties his strikegroups would suffer. But he had no choice, for only six of his own battlecruisers were armed with capital missiles. He would be outnumbered and outgunned in any duel with the similarly armed Antelopes, and his ships would be just as vulnerable to drive damage as they would . . . except that any of his ships slowed by damage would be doomed, for the rest of the flotilla could not slow its own pace to cover them.
"We'll have to take them out-or at least slow them down-with fighter strikes," he said finally, unable to keep the heaviness from his tone. "And we're going to have to do it in a way that leaves us enough reserve fighter strength to catch and finish off their shadowers once the starships are dealt with. Can your people hack that, Commander Hiithylwaaan?"
"I believe so, Sir," the fierce-beaked Ophiuchi replied after a moment. "It will not be easy, but we should have the strength for it, especially with the gunboats to assist." It was a mark of the direness of their straits that not a trace of the habitual Ophiuchi disdain for the slow, heavy-footed gunboats colored his manner. "I suggest that we engage the Antelopes and Antlers first, then go back and kill the Adders later if we must. We are unlikely to catch them with gunboats actually on their racks, but they will probably commit their surviving gunboat strength to the combat space patrol role against our strikes on their faster units, which will give us the opportunity to engage and destroy them in passing."
"I agree," Prescott said, nodding sharply. "But I don't want to expose your pilots to high attrition with repeated strikes, so let's try to do this in a single wave if we can. I want two-thirds of the fighters fitted with primary packs. The remaining third can fly escort with missiles, but a primary-armed squadron or two should be able to take out enough of an Antelope's engines to cut its speed in half in a single pass."
"It will mean more exposure to their close-in defenses," Hiithylwaaan pointed out, then made the small gesture his people used for a shrug. "But you are correct, Admiral. We will have to enter their defensive envelope anyway; best to engage with our most effective crippling weapon so that we need not enter it a second time."
"Very well, then." Prescott turned to Leopold and Chau. "At the same time, the flotilla will alter course to follow the strike towards Alpha Force. I want to be close enough to take them out completely if the strike results warrant it, and I don't want to get any closer to any of Beta's surviving gunboats than we have to. I don't want us in missile range of Alpha yet, either, but there's no point pretending they don't have a damned good idea of where we are already."
"No, Sir, there isn't," Leopold agreed. "On the other hand, closing the range on them will make it even easier for them to track us . . . and harder for us to drop back into cloak if the opportunity pres
ents itself."
"Josh, every time we launch or recover-or engage one of their strikes-they'll find us all over again, anyway, and as Ba Hai just pointed out, we have a much poorer idea of what Beta has. On top of that, Alpha is the one between us and our warp point, and until we can cripple at least one group badly enough to give us a chance of outrunning it-and deal with their damned gunboats once and for all-we're not going to shake them. That being so, I'd rather keep our combat strength concentrated and give our pilots as short a recovery flight time as possible."
"Yes, Sir," Leopold said, and Prescott nodded.
"All right, then, people. Let's do it," he said briskly.
* * *
Sensors detected the sudden resurgence of drive sources as the Enemy launched his attack craft once more. It was unfortunate, though scarcely unexpected. Clearly the Fleet units between him and escape must be destroyed or disabled if the Enemy were to have any hope of disengaging and evading successfully. And it was quite possible he would succeed, for rather more of his attack craft survived than the plan had allowed for at this point. But there were ways that situation might be redressed, and orders went out to the special units to prepare to initiate the new anti-attack craft tactics.
* * *
Commander Hiithylwaaan, OADC, led the massed pilots of SF 62 towards their foes. The Cormorants' gunboats came with them, but they were too big and slow, relatively speaking, for the close-in attack role. Instead, they carried AFHAWKs once again, and the plan was for them to lie well back and provide long-range supporting fire against any Bug gunboats which might attempt to intercept the main strike.
Unfortunately, the Bugs seemed disinclined to commit their gunboats . . . and their ECM was more effective than usual, making exact unit identification difficult. It couldn't successfully disguise a military-grade drive as a commercial one, yet there was more uncertainty than Hiithylwaaan could have desired, and a few additional military-drive ships had turned up. Some of them clearly weren't Antelopes or Antlers, but that was about all he could say for certain. It was even possible they represented a new class no Allied force had previously encountered. In any case, they wouldn't have had military drives unless the Bugs thought it was important for them to be able to keep pace with Allied designs, and that made them worthwhile targets.