by David Weber
The Mobile Force watched the first waves of small attack craft arrowing in while the Enemy battlegroups closed to extreme missile range behind them, and prepared to expend itself as slowly as possible.
* * *
The battle with the Bug mobile force was still raging when Murakuma received word of what was sweeping in from behind her.
So far, Sixth Fleet had administered a most satisfactory drubbing to the mobile force, destroying a third of its ships outright and damaging most of the rest. But there were still a lot of Bugs to kill, and they were being stubborn about it.
That was perfectly all right with Murakuma, who infinitely preferred to expend missiles instead of people. Yet even as the intensity of the battle rose and fell with successive fighter strikes, she'd found it difficult to keep her attention focused on it. She kept waiting for the news she was sure had to come, and wondering what portion of the sky it would fall out of. Now Cruciero's urgent voice interrupted her abstraction.
"Admiral, the recon fighters have detected incoming hostiles. CIC is getting the data into the computer, and it should be appearing-"
As if on cue, a scarlet dot with an attached vector-arrow winked into life, and Murakuma gazed at it through narrowed eyes as her staffers crowded around.
"So," she said after a moment, "the warp point was further out from the star than ours, but on just about the same bearing. We've been heading directly away from it the whole time."
"Yes, Sir," Cruciero confirmed. "And we've been leading these new arrivals on a stern chase."
"Things might have gotten hairy if they'd already been in-system to back up their battle-line here," McKenna remarked.
"But they weren't," Murakuma replied with more serenity than she felt, and looked at her intelligence officer. "Have the scouts been able to provide any data on the composition of this second force, Marina?"
"Yes, Sir," Abernathy replied. "CIC is breaking down the initial take right now, and more data's coming in every minute. It should be appearing on the boards any time."
It did, and silence descended.
"My God," Olivera finally said softly as the data scrolled across the display and they digested the numbers. Twenty-four monitors, a hundred and two superdreadnoughts, sixty battlecruisers, and a hundred and five light cruisers. Plus-
"The scouts haven't been able to provide an exact total for the gunboat screen," Abernathy said in a voice which only seemed shockingly loud. "But we're looking at a minimum of fifteen or sixteen hundred."
"Ernesto," Murakuma said quietly into the renewed and intensified silence. "If we continue on our present course to the Orpheus 2 warp point, can we reach it before they intercept us?"
Cruciero seemed caught flat-footed, but Kevin Sanders, standing in the middle distance, rescued him.
"Actually, Admiral, I've just run a projection based on the maximum speed their ships can manage over that distance. The relative positions of the warp points will allow them to cut the angle on us and close the range, but, no, they can't catch us."
"Not even with our monitors slowing us down?"
"No, Sir. We've got a good head start." Even the insouciant Sanders recognized that he was on thin ice, intruding into the domain of operations as he was, which may have explained how he managed to restrain himself from reciting the platitude that a stern chase is a long chase.
"Their leading groups of gunboats should just barely be able to catch up with us, though," he added instead.
"Our fighters can handle gunboats," Olivera declared.
"Very well." Murakuma summoned up a smile. "In that case, ladies and gentlemen," she said with studied understatement, "I believe it's time to shut Operation Orpheus down."
* * *
The Enemy had detected the System Which Must Be Defended's deep space force too soon.
Had it been any part of the Mobile Force's original plan to survive, the Enemy's sudden alteration of course might have been welcome. Under the circumstances, however, it could only be considered a disaster. The projections indicated that the Deep Space Force's starships would be unable to overhaul the Enemy before he could escape, and there was nothing the Mobile Force could do to prevent that. Most of its surviving ships were battered, air-leaking wrecks. Many had no effective weapons left, and even those which did were utterly incapable of overtaking the swifter Enemy, or even of staying in missile range of him when he chose to break off.
And so the Mobile Force could only watch as the Enemy it had paid so dear a price to delay went speeding off towards safety.
It was most inconvenient.
* * *
Sixth Fleet's starships raced through space towards the warp point which spelled safety. Behind them, recon fighters and Gorm gunboats formed a watchful sensor shell, tracking the hurricane of gunboats which hurtled after them in pursuit.
There was something particularly nerve wracking about watching that massive blur of scarlet icons creep closer and closer in the plot. For the moment, however, there was no immediate danger, and the starships' crews went about their duties with disciplined calm. Those ships which had taken damage in the engagement with the original Bug mobile force took advantage of the break in the action to make repairs. Aboard the carriers, deck crews serviced the fighter squadrons as they were recalled from the CSP. Fighter missiles and gun packs replaced the anti-ship ordnance they'd been carrying. Pilots took the opportunity to gulp down hasty hot meals and hit the heads, then reassembled in their ready rooms for quick briefings before they hurried back to the launch bays, climbed into their cockpits, and waited.
And all the while, the pursuing cloud of scarlet death crept closer, and closer, and closer. . . .
* * *
It was unfortunate that the Enemy's small attack craft had detected the Deep Space Force's approach soon enough to break off and run. Such an outcome had always been possible, of course-that was one reason the Deep Space Force had been reluctant to commit itself initially. Revealing its existence-and its strength-to the Enemy had been a calculated risk, taken only because an opportunity to cut off and completely destroy this invading fleet had presented itself.
That risk had failed. The Enemy was going to escape, and now he knew the Deep Space Force existed. He would be prepared for it when he finally moved against the System Which Must Be Defended, which would materially increase his chance of defeating it.
But at least the gunboats might be able to overtake him short of his warp point of escape. They couldn't possibly destroy such a force, but if they could catch it, they could bleed it.
* * *
"All right, people," Captain Anson Olivera said over the fleet flight control net while he gazed into his master plot. Sixth Fleet's starships continued to speed onward, into the depths of Orpheus 2 and directly away from the warp point they'd just transited. But even as they fled, the icons of the carriers and the Gorm capital ships spawned a diamond dust of even tinier icons.
Olivera watched those little chips of light gather themselves, settling into the precisely arranged formation of a combat space patrol directly atop the warp point.
"We all know what to do," Sixth Fleet's farshathkhanak told his glittering galaxy of lights. "Now do it."
* * *
The Enemy formation had disappeared through the warp point before the gunboats could overhaul it. After so much had been risked and revealed in order to attack it, it was . . . unacceptable to allow it to escape intact.
At least the gunboats were hard on the Enemy's heels. And unlike the Enemy's small attack craft, gunboats were warp capable.
* * *
Anson Olivera's pilots were waiting.
The Allied gunboats opened fire first. Unlike their Bug counterparts, who were armed to kill starships with short range FRAMs, the Gorm gunboats carried standard missiles on their ordnance racks. They opened fire from far outside the effective range of any weapon their enemies mounted, and those missiles carried far better penetration aids than had been available at the beginnin
g of the war. Point defense could still stop them, of course, but that assumed point defense was available.
It wasn't.
Just like any starship, a gunboat's internal systems were subject to the grav surge of warp transit. For a brief, helpless moment, the Bugs had no effective point defense, and a forest of fireballs glared in their formation as the Gorm missiles slammed into them like blows from the Thunder God's hammer. The window before the Bugs' point defense came back on-line was brief, but the Gorm made the most of it-and even after the point defense came back up, a high percentage of their missiles got through.
After so many years of warfare, the Allies had amassed an enormous body of operational data on the Bugs. They used that data now. Carefully programmed tactical computers aboard the command fighters which led each strikegroup analyzed the seemingly total chaos of the Bugs' transiting formation, and within that chaos, found underlying order. Individual gunboat squadrons could be identified by the formations in which they flew, once one knew what to look for. The command fighters' computers knew. So did the ones aboard the Gorm gunboats, and targets were assigned with merciless precision.
Survival in a deep space dogfight depended upon many things. Individual pilot ability and training were highly important, of course. So was experience. But most important of all was teamwork. That was why pickup squadrons assembled out of random pilots unaccustomed to one another's individual strengths and weaknesses tended to be less effective in anti-shipping strikes and had low survival rates in fighter-on-fighter combat. But the underlying bone and sinew of deep space teamwork was the datanet which tied the individual units of the squadron together into a single, cohesive fighting force. And what made that fighting force dangerous, was its ability to concentrate its full combat power against a single target or small, carefully selected group of targets.
Which was why the Gorm crews deliberately split their fire between multiple squadrons. Any Bug gunboat they could kill was worth destroying, but killing a squadron worth of gunboats out of several different squadrons was more effective than simply destroying a single squadron in its entirety. Taking them from many squadrons reduced the combat power of each of those squadrons in the same way that the picadore's darts weakened the bull before it faced the matador.
Of course, there were a great many "bulls" in the Bug formation . . . but there were also a great many matadors waiting for them.
The picadore Gorm pulled up and away as they fired the last of their missiles, and then it was the strikefighters' turn. There were no suicide pinnaces in this formation, because pinnaces couldn't have kept up with the gunboats in their long, high-speed run after Sixth Fleet. And because there were no pinnaces or shuttles, this time the Ophiuchi pilots who found themselves held in reserve, again and again, to pick off kamikazes short of the battle-line, were free to join their Terran and Orion allies in the gunboat hunt.
They led the way now, stooping upon their prey as their long-ago ancestors had stooped upon living prey in the air of the Ophiuchi homeworld. They volleyed their own missiles as they closed, ripping the heart of the Bug formation with blinding glares of cleansing fire, and then they followed the missiles in, gun packs and internal lasers blazing.
They sliced through the Bug formation, already disordered and riven by the missile fire directed upon it by the Gorm, like a whirlwind, and space burned in their wake, littered with the broken debris which had been Bug gunboats. But the Ophiuchi, like the Gorm who'd begun the engagement, were selective in their slaughter. Like the Gorm, they took their victims from different squadrons, killing mercilessly and further eroding the ability of those squadrons to kill their allies . . . or to defend themselves in turn.
And then it was the rest of the CSP's turn.
The Terran and Orion pilots who formed the overwhelming backbone of Sixth Fleet's total fighter strength roared down on the shaken gunboat formation like the wrath of God. Their missiles went in front of them, spreading out in a lethal cloud that enveloped the Bugs and blotted them from the face of the universe. And then, like the Ophiuchi, they followed their missiles in.
To an untrained eye, the plot before Anson Olivera was pure chaos, with no more order than the forest fire of nuclear and antimatter explosions blazing in stroboscopic spits of fury in the visual display. But Olivera's eye was trained. He knew precisely what he was looking at, and a fierce sense of pride and vengeful hunger raged behind his disciplined façade as his farshatok ripped into the Bug formation which had outnumbered them by almost two to one.
It wasn't really a contest. Some of his pilots died. Losses were particularly heavy among the Ophiuchi who led the main interception, who lost almost fifteen percent of their pilots. However skilled they might have been individually, they'd also faced the heaviest and best coordinated defensive fire of any of the strikegroups. But their attack runs were decisive. Coupled with the damage the Gorm had already wreaked, they broke the back of the Bugs' squadron organization, and the Terran and Orion pilots took vicious advantage of the opening which had been created for them. Sixth Fleet lost no gunboats in the interception, and its total fighter losses were under a hundred and fifty.
The Bugs lost one thousand six hundred and twelve gunboats. Only seventeen of them got close enough to attack Sixth Fleet's battle-line. Only five of them scored shield hits with FRAMs.
None of them rammed successfully.
* * *
"Yes," Raymond Prescott nodded. "I agree. Continuing to run toward the Orpheus 2 warp point was exactly the right decision. And I can't help thinking that it exemplifies the kind of tactical flexibility we have and the Bugs seem inherently incapable of duplicating. If anything is going to win this war for us, that's it."
"On a slightly less metaphysical level," Zhaarnak put in, "it must have been gratifying to give the Bahg gunboats such a bloody nose, to use your charming Human idiom."
Murakuma grinned and took a sip of her drink. The whiskey caught the orange light of Bug-10's primary sun, flooding in through the wide, curving armorplast viewports of Riva y Silva's flag lounge. That lounge was empty, but for the three of them.
"Yes, Fang. We barely made it through into Orpheus 2 ahead of them, and they barreled through after us without even slowing down. I understand our personnel are calling it the 'Great Orpheus Turkey Shoot.' "
"Yes," Prescott, one of whose ancestors had claimed two air-to-air victories in the battle which had prompted the allusion, agreed. "I can see how they might-even if some of your in-laws might not particularly appreciate it, Admiral Murakuma. So none of the gunboats lasted long enough to complete their ramming runs?"
"Not successfully. And as nearly as we can tell, no more than a dozen or so of them even got away. We assume that the few who did are the reason the Bug capital ships didn't make transit after they finally lumbered up."
"You are undoubtedly correct," Zhaarnak allowed. "I, for one, am never truly happy when the Bahgs demonstrate something approaching tactical wisdom, but I am forced to concede that they do so upon occasion."
"More often than I'd like," Murakuma agreed. "Still, how much 'wisdom' does it take to stay on your own side of the warp point when you know an entire fleet worth of strikefighters is waiting to ambush you on the far side . . . and that your own ships are too slow to overtake the enemy you're chasing even if you survive the ambush?"
"Truth," Zhaarnak admitted, and stroked his whiskers thoughtfully. "We must now assume that the third warp point in Orpheus 1 definitely leads to another home hive system, however. Nothing less could support a force as large as the one you detected."
Neither human could muster any grounds for contradicting him. For a space, they all nursed their drinks in silence. Finally, Prescott drew a deep breath and leaned back in his comfortable chair.
"You're correct, of course," he told his vilkshatha brother, "but that can be left for the future. We'll have to go back to Orpheus 1 eventually, but the fact that we hold both Orpheus 2 and Home Hive One gives us two avenues of attack and
requires them to divide their forces to cover both of them."
"Truth," Zhaarnak agreed. "Operation Orpheus accomplished a great deal."
"And," Murakuma said, returning the courtesy, "Seventh Fleet wasn't exactly idle while it was going on."
"Well," Prescott acknowledged with just a trace of complacency, "we'd been wanting to eliminate those holdouts in Bug-11 for some time. The damaged ships we're getting back into service, coupled with our fighter reinforcements, meant we could finally do it."
"Unfortunately," Zhaarnak added glumly, "the same was not true of the system beyond Franos' Warp Point Three."
"Remind me to light a fire under astrography," Prescott told him in an annoyed tone that failed to mask a deeper frustration. "It's about time they assigned that system a designation."
Murakuma took another sip of her drink, this time to hide a smile. Marina Abernathy had already briefed her on Seventh Fleet's abortive attempt to force its way through Warp Point Three. Prescott and Zhaarnak had been able to smash the fixed defenses on its far side with a smothering wave of SBMHAWKs, but the sheer number of gunboats which had supported those defenses had prevented them from doing much more. They'd managed to get RD2s through for a fairly detailed look at the system's astrography, but they'd been forced to abandon any thought of sending manned units through when they saw the hordes of gunboats those same drones had detected.