by David Weber
All of which had paled in comparison to the time they'd spent waiting by their fighters and launch bays, subsisting on low-residue chow. But finally the word had come, and the mass drivers had flung them out into space. To Irma, it was like a homecoming.
They'd taken fewer losses after entering the Bugs' defensive envelope than they'd dared to hope. No question about it, Vice Admiral Raathaarn knew his tactics. The fact that each of the F-4's could carry a primary pack, an ECM pack, a life-support pack, and a decoy missile-assuming that the Bugs were going to continue to cooperate by closing with the task force-had given him a degree of flexibility he'd taken full advantage of. The Ophiuchi squadrons flying behind the wavefront of Terran and Orion ones carried no primary packs at all, for they were tasked to support the Terrans and Orions with flights of additional decoys and to fend off counterattacking gunboats as the attack wave swooped in on the Bug superdreadnoughts and monitors.
Those massive ships met them with hair-raisingly dense patterns of point defense fire, especially the Aegis-class command monitors and Arbalest-class command superdreadnoughts. But Raathaarn had thought of a way to turn that defensive firepower to the Alliance's advantage. He'd had all the data Captain Chung and his own intelligence types had amassed on the command ships analyzed and found a way to identify them regardless of all the sophisticated ECM they mounted.
The Bugs, recognizing the absolute need to protect the ships whose command datalink installations made the battlegroup-level coordination of offensive and defensive fire possible, had crammed the Aegis and Arbalest ships with a horrific array of point defense and defensive missile launchers which no other unit in their inventory could match. Which meant that it didn't matter how good their ECM was if you could see how much defensive fire they were pumping out. The very strength of their defenses actually made it possible to identify them for attack.
The technique wasn't without its price tag. Over half of KONS Kompakutor's strikegroup had just died to draw the fire that revealed the identity of their killer, which now lay dead ahead of VF-94 in visual range.
"All right, people," Togliatti said over Irma's headset. "It's definitely an Aegis-that's the word from the CSG."
Georghiu might be a lifer of the deepest dye, but nobody had ever called CSG 137 a desk jockey. He was out here in person, leading his entire strikegroup. Togliatti was only one of fourteen squadron skippers involved in the strike.
Togliatti's orders came crisply and quickly, succinctly identifying a set of tactical contingencies. Irma punched them into her computer-voice recognition software was fine and dandy in a great many contexts, but combat was not one of them. Then they were off, piling on acceleration, and their titanic prey grew rapidly in the view-forward as they stooped on it from astern.
The Aegis never even saw it coming.
The stupendous command ship was still preoccupied with the distracting survivors of Kompakutor's strikegroup when VF-94 came screaming up from behind. One of the things fighter jocks hated most about command datalink was the way that it permitted other units of a battlegroup to pour defensive fire into the blind zones of their group mates. Before command datalink, no starship could effectively protect another from missiles or strikefighters which had targeted it, and no ship's fire control was able to see targets that small directly astern of it, which had created the classic blind spot from which all fighter jocks were trained to attack. Now, any unit of any battlegroup could fire upon any target that any of its members could lock up . . . including missiles and fighters in someone else's blind zone.
Strikefighter losses had gone up astronomically as a result. Improvements in fighter ECM, decoy missiles, and defensive tactics had offset that to some degree, but command datalink had probably killed more fighter pilots than any other technological innovation in the history of space warfare. Indeed, some fighter tactic pundits maintained that it was now all a matter of cold, uncaring statistics. They argued that an unshaken battlegroup of capital ships was such a dangerous target that the only solution was to swamp it and swarm it under by sheer weight of numbers, accepting the inevitably massive casualties in order to get enough survivors into attack range to get the job done.
Irma didn't much care for that school of thought . . . and neither did Vice Admiral Raathaarn. As VF-94 and the rest of Georghiu's strike group streaked in on the Aegis, an entire supporting strikegroup filled the space about them with decoys and jamming. The sheer multiplicity of targets-false ones generated by the decoys, as well as genuine threats-swamped the Bugs. Their fire control systems were probably capable of sorting out the chaos, but the organic brains behind those systems weren't. Individual survival instincts didn't even come into it. It was simply a matter of engaging the threats they could actually pick out from the swirling madness, and the Bugs aboard the Aegis chose the wrong targets. They-and, by extension, all the other units of their battlegroup-were too busy firing at Kompakutor's survivors (and the decoy missiles covering them) to see Angela Martens' group until it was too late.
Even tactical battlegrounds in space are immense. On the visual display, it almost looked as if VF-94 were all alone, charging single-handedly against the Aegis. In reality, the other seventy-eight fighters from Martens' Strikegroup 137 were in close support, dancing and bobbing in the complex, fire-evading pattern known to the TFN as the "Waldeck Weave." Other navies had their own variations and their own names for the Weave, but the essentials were the same for all of them, and what looked from the outside like utter confusion was actually an intricately choreographed, precisely timed maneuver which brought every single dispersed fighter together at exactly the critical instant behind the Bug monitor.
The strikegroup lost three fighters on the way in. At least one of them was lost to pure accident. In a fluke coincidence so unlikely that Irma couldn't even have begun to calculate the odds against it, a lieutenant in VF-123 actually collided with one of his own covering decoy missiles, and so proved that the Demon Murphy was alive and well. Of the other two, one fell afoul of a stray Bug gunboat which got in one screaming pass and plucked its victim out of space fractions of a second before the fighter's vengeful squadron mates killed it in turn. No one ever knew exactly how the third pilot bought it, because no one actually saw her go.
But the rest of the strikegroup was intact when it delivered a perfectly coordinated attack.
The primary packs took so long to recharge between shots that, unlike laser packs, each could effectively fire only once per firing pass. But that still meant that eighty-odd needlelike stilettos pierced the monster's vitals within the space of a few seconds. The actual primary beams were invisible, and the five-centimeter holes they punched effortlessly through the toughest armor were far too small to be seen on any visual display, but that didn't mean the damage wasn't obvious. As those deadly rapiers stabbed the leviathan to its heart, a blood trail of gushing atmosphere haloed it instantly. Water vapor, oxygen, carbon dioxide . . . Irma's blood blazed with vengeful triumph as her instruments detected the proof of internal death and destruction.
The fire of the Aegis' entire battlegroup faltered, losing its cohesion and focus as someone's primary fire sought out and destroyed the command datalink installation. And as they flashed on by, the fighters lacerated the huge ship with their internal hetlasers, splintering the armor the primaries had simply punched through.
Maybe the intelligence types would be able to use drastically slowed down imagery to infer the details of just exactly what happened to the monitor. But in Irma's view-aft, the rapid fire series of secondary explosions coalesced almost immediately into one, and then a short-lived sun awoke, from whose equator a disc of debris rapidly spread until it dissipated.
Well, she thought, I was wondering about records. That's got to be the shortest time it's ever taken to vaporize a monitor.
* * *
"The totals are in, Sir!" Chung was almost babbling with excitement as he and Bichet reported to Prescott. "The Ophiuchi fighters killed three hundred an
d seven of their gunboats, and the Terran and Orion squadrons and the Gorm gunboats got seven superdreadnoughts and four monitors. And three of the superdreadnoughts and two of the monitors were command ships!"
"That's got to hurt their battle-line." The admiral nodded soberly. "What about our own losses?"
Chung's animation faded, and Bichet shook his head.
"Sixty gunboats, Sir. And as for the fighters . . . Well, we haven't accounted for all of them yet, so I can't give you an exact figure. But we're talking almost a quarter of our total fighter strength."
Prescott nodded again, and did some mental arithmetic. Twenty or thirty fighters for a monitor-say thirty-five flight crew for a ship with a complement of three or four thousand . . . Many would have thought it the kind of loss ratio of which dreams were made. But he had to think in terms of his own available resources, which were limited. He couldn't keep losing fighters at this rate.
"Bring them back, Steve," he said quietly to Captain Landrum.
* * *
It was clear what the Enemy was up to. In its concern to protect its critical command ships, the Fleet had never considered that those ships' lavish defensive armaments might serve to identify them. But the Enemy's single-minded targeting of them left no doubt on the matter, and the resultant losses were making it difficult to maintain datalink integrity.
It was equally clear that the Enemy had been maneuvering his way towards the warp point through which he had originally entered this system, all the while adroitly preventing the Fleet from closing the range and launching a coordinated strike by gunboats and shuttles.
Now, however, the Enemy attack craft were retiring, after expending most of their external ordnance. Perhaps this was the time to send out the gunboats.
* * *
Jacques Bichet stiffened as the Bug fleet suddenly spawned a shoal of blood-red icons. They streamed into existence as the gunboats they represented separated from their motherships, and a solid wall of hostiles flowed across the plot towards TF 71.
"Plotting makes it more than eight hundred of them, Sir!" he told Prescott. "It must be their entire surviving gunboat strength."
"Admiral," Landrum's voice was urgent, "our fighters can turn on them now!"
"No," Prescott replied. "Order them to jettison their remaining external ordnance and return at maximum speed to rearm. Our gunboats will fight a delaying action."
"But, Sir," Landrum took his courage in both hands, "you've already ordered our capital ships to turn away from the gunboat strike-which means away from our returning fighters."
The other staffers held their breath as Prescott turned to face the farshathkhanaak. They knew what Landrum meant. The carriers' high-speed turn away would slow the fighters' ability to overtake them and recover to their launch bays. In turn, that would delay their return to combat . . . and require them to expend even more life support, which some of them were already running out of. Landrum might not have put that into so many words, but he hadn't really needed to, and the staff waited for the admiral's explosive reaction to the implied criticism. But Prescott spoke mildly.
"I realize that, Commodore. But if we let them turn to engage now, we'll have to hold the carriers-which means the entire task force-where they are, or the fighters will definitely have insufficient life-support to recover. If they jettison, their 'clean' speed will be enough for most of them to rendezvous with their carriers without exhausting their life support even if we continue on our present course." The inertial "sump" that made reactionless drives possible was far shallower for a craft as small as a fighter, which meant that external ordnance loads significantly degraded its performance. "They should also be fast enough to recover and rearm before the Bug gunboats can reach us-especially if our gunboats can delay them. And whether we can get them all rearmed and relaunched in time or not, we have to get them refitted with anti-gunboat munitions before we send them in."
Landrum opened his mouth, as if to protest, then closed it, because the farshathkhanaak knew Prescott was right. The slow-firing primary packs were virtually useless as dogfighting weapons, and a strikefighter equipped only with its internal hetlasers would be at a serious disadvantage against AFHAWK-armed gunboats. What was needed were missiles of their own, for the long-range envelope, and gun packs when it fell to knife range.
But the captain wasn't at all sure it would be possible to recover and rearm his fighters before the Bugs came in on them. The carrier deck crews in TF 71 were all veterans, and Landrum knew better than most just how good they really were. But Prescott was about to ask the impossible of them . . . and some of the fighters weren't going to make it home before they ran out of life support whatever happened. Their pilots' powerful locator beacons might be picked up by post-battle search and rescue efforts after they bailed out . . . but they might not be, too. Landrum, knew there were times, especially in fighter ops, when risks had to be run, but much as the farshathkhanaak respected and admired the admiral, at this moment he couldn't forget that Prescott had come up through the battle-line. He wasn't a fighter pilot-had never even commanded a fleet carrier. Did he truly understand what he was about to demand from Landrum's flight and deck crews?
But then Landrum looked at Prescott's expression and knew the subject was closed.
"Aye, aye, Sir," he said.
* * *
"This is Vincent Steele, Trans-Galactic News, and I'm here, on the hanger deck of TFNS Angela Martens, where urgent preparations to repel an anticipated Bug attack are under way."
Vincent Steele crouched in an alcove in the battlesteel bulkhead of Fighter Bay 62 with his shoulder-mounted microcam and felt his pulse hammer while he stared out at the frantically busy Navy personnel.
He wished now that he'd paid more attention to the official Navy briefers who'd gassed on interminably about the flight deck procedures. At least then he might have had some genuine idea of what was going on.
It would have helped if Sandra Delmore were here, too, but the brown-nosing bitch had disappeared the minute that pompous asshole Morris had ordered "all nonessential personnel" out of the hanger spaces. Stupid bastard. Just because the precious Navy had decided to annoint Sherman Morris as the captain of one of its monitors, the arrogant prick thought someone had died and made him God!
Well, Vincent Steele had news for Captain King Shit Morris. He hadn't risen to number four at TGN's prewar military affairs desk without learning how to bust the balls of people a lot more important than one miserable captain with a god complex. Lord knew he'd uncovered enough dirt on the Navy before the Bugs turned up. He was forced to admit, not without a certain degree of chagrin, that since Survey Command had fucked up the Federation's first contact with the Arachnids, the Navy had finally found something to do that actually justified all the millions of megacredits which had been wasted on it during peacetime. Of course, if Survey Command had done its job properly in the first place, this entire war might have been avoided. At the very least, the incompetent jackasses should have been able to retire through a closed warp point without showing the Bugs where it was! But, no. And this was the result.
To be honest, the thing Steele hated most about his present assignment was his producers' demand that he pander to the viewing public's current adulation of all things Navy. He'd spent his entire career trying to get the monkey of military spending off the Federation's back, and now this! It offended every ethical bone in his body to betray a lifetime's principles this way, but he had no choice. Trying to stand up to the sycophantic gushing about the Navy's courage, and the Navy's dedication, and the Navy's dauntless spirit would have been professional suicide. And being assigned to work with Sandra Delmore was the final straw. While he'd been ferreting out all of the Navy's prewar abuses of its position and misuse of its funding, she'd been writing ass-kissing odes to it as if the uniformed deadbeats who couldn't have found jobs in the civilian economy if they'd tried were some kind of paladins.
What really stuck in his craw sideways, though, was th
e way all of the Navy old-timers were so delighted to see her. Every one of them seemed to remember some little "personal interest" piece she'd done on them, or on their families, or on someone they knew, or on their dogs, for God's sake! They invited her to join them in their messes, bought her drinks in the O-Club, and set up special deep-background briefings for her, and they never even seemed to realize that she was nothing but a third-rate stringer. Of course, it was probably too much to expect any of those uniformed Neanderthals to recognize a serious journalist when they saw one.
But Steele's nose for news hadn't deserted him. Everybody in Task Force 71 seemed to think Raymond Prescott could walk on water, but Steele hadn't forgotten the way the Bugs had made a fool out of him at his famous "April Fool" battle. The reporter hadn't been able to make up his mind whether Prescott really was the loose warhead that people like Bettina Wister thought he was, or if he was just an unreasonably lucky screwup. The Orions certainly thought highly of him . . . which, given their history and lunatic warrior-cult "honor code," was probably a bad sign.
Up to this point, however, and almost despite himself, Steele had been leaning towards the theory that Prescott might actually be as good-in a purely and narrowly military sense, of course-as his vociferous supporters insisted. He'd done a thorough job of destroying Home Hive One, at any rate. Although, Steele reminded himself, all anyone really had to prove that he had were the reports and imagery the Navy itself had handed out.
But now . . .
Steele tucked himself into a smaller space, squeezing further back into the alcove in the launch bay bulkhead. Even Delmore had gotten more and more tight-faced as the two of them listened to the occasional situation reports Captain Morris had put out over the general com system for the benefit of his crew. The official press pool had been pretty much closed down for the duration of the battle-officially to keep the reporters out of harm's way, although it also just happened to mean no media watchdogs would be in position to report any screwups which might occur along the way. But even the reports Morris was willing to share had indicated that things were getting pretty tight.