But that was fine with Murakuma. Even with the diversion of their kamikazes, the Bugs were unable to close much beyond the very fringe of the SBM missile envelope. They could hurt her at that range, but they couldn't kill her-not quickly, at any rate-and as soon as the last of the attacking small craft had ceased to exist, Sixth Fleet began opening the range once again.
But not by too much. She drew her starships out of range from the Bug battle-line, and while she was doing that, her carrier flight deck crews rearmed her fighters and her CSGs reorganized their squadrons around the thankfully few holes the Bug gunboats had blown in their tables of organization. She waited a few moments longer, in hopes that the Bugs might be tempted into sending their BCRs in unsupported. But it would appear that the enemy's increased sensitivity to losses was at work. Or perhaps it was simply a recognition that no battlecruiser in the universe could survive within the missile envelope of an unshaken monitor battle-line long enough to achieve anything at all. Vanessa Murakuma would never understand the way Bugs thought, and she was just as glad that was true. But it would appear that even Bugs could choose not to expend themselves for no return at all.
Well, she thought. If they won't come out, we'll just have to go in after them.
"Ernesto," she said quietly to her ops officer, "tell Anson to kill the command ships. Then execute Case Rupert."
Had the beings which crewed the Fleet's ships been capable of such an emotion, they might have felt despair as their sensors blossomed once again with the fresh spoor of hundreds of small attack craft. The fact that the Enemy had opened the range once more-and had stopped opening it just before he relaunched his attack craft-told the Deep Space Force what he was about.
Unfortunately, there was nothing the Deep Space Force could do about it . . . except to kill as many of the Enemy as possible before it died itself.
Anson Olivera's strikefighters screamed straight into the teeth of the Bug battle-line's horrific array of defensive firepower. Deadly though a fighter could be, it was a frail and tiny thing when thrown all alone against the unshaken wall of devastation those sullen Bug leviathans could project.
Which was why Case Rupert did nothing of the sort.
Oh, the fighters led the way, but the rest of Sixth Fleet came right behind them. Entire squadrons of fighters salvoed nothing but decoy missiles into the Bugs' defensive envelope, providing hundreds of false targets to lure fire away from the real attackers. Fighter ECM did its bit, as well, fighting to deny point defense laser clusters and AFHAWKs the ability to lock their targets up, and intricate evasive maneuvering-the Waldeck Weave-made them even more difficult to hit. But what truly cleared the way for them was Vanessa Murakuma's decision to take her starships into the Bugs' long-range missile envelope right along with them.
Her monitors and superdreadnoughts flushed their XO racks, sending stupendous volleys of antimatter-armed SBMs and capital missiles straight for the Bugs. Those missiles howled down upon their targets like lethal hammers, and the Bugs had no alternative but to honor the threat. Fending off that torrent of destruction diverted their point defense almost entirely from the strikefighters, cutting the totality of their anti-fighter firepower by almost fifty percent.
The battle-line paid a price to open the door for the fighters, for if it could hit the Bugs, then the Bugs could hit it, and warheads began to go home. Shields flashed and died as the hearts of small, violent stars exploded against them. Most of the Bug missiles concentrated on the battle-line, but here and there an enemy battlegroup decided to vent its fury on easier prey and an entire monitor or superdreadnought battlegroup vomited its entire missile broadside at a single battlecruiser squadron.
No battlecruiser could survive that sort of punishment, and Murakuma's jaw clenched as the Code Omega transmissions began to sound once again.
But offering her ships as targets had accomplished its goal. Olivera's F-4s went howling in to point-blank range. Dozens of them died, despite anything decoy missiles, ECM, or diversions could accomplish. But if dozens perished, hundreds did not, and once again, the sheer volume of the Bug command ships' defensive firepower stripped away their anonymity.
Taut-voiced CSGs vectored their squadrons in on the suddenly revealed targets, and the unstoppable power of the primary pack ripped straight to the hearts of their gargantuan foes. Command datalink installations died under the pounding of those vicious stilettos, and the coordination of their battlegroups faltered.
And that, of course, was the other reason Murakuma had closed on her fighters' heels. She would allow no time for the Bugs to recover from the disorientation as the voices of their command ships were silenced forever. She would give them no respite, no opportunity to reorganize. She would seize the instant of their nakedness mercilessly, and as any battlegroup faltered, at least two battlegroups of her own focused a tornado of missile fire upon it.
Bug monitors writhed like spiders in a candle flame, and Vanessa Murakuma watched them burn with eyes of frozen jade ice.
Afterwards, it was hard to believe the head-on clash had been so brief.
Every combat veteran knows the protracted nature of time in battle, and Murakuma had thought herself long since beyond astonishment at it. But now the old "that can't be right" sensation was back in full force. Surely so much carnage, of such intensity, couldn't have been crammed into a mere thirty standard minutes.
She shook the feeling off, annoyed at herself. She also blocked out the noise of the damage control teams, the residual ringing in her own ears, and all the other distractions as she concentrated on the incoming reports.
It had been a holocaust, but at least the loss ratios were heavily in Sixth Fleet's favor. She watched the list of damaged and destroyed ships and tried-without success-not to think about all of the lost and ruined lives hiding behind that passionless electronic display. She made herself watch until the report scrolled downward to the very end, then drew a deep breath, turned, and beckoned to Leroy McKenna.
The chief of staff crossed the flag deck to her, his helmet in the crook of his left arm, and she nodded to him.
"Please get with Ernesto about this," she said, waving a hand at the damage reports she'd just perused. "I want to cull out the most heavily damaged ships and send them back to Orpheus 1, and I want proposals for reorganizing our battlegroups around our losses. And tell Anson I want recon fighters out as soon as possible." She managed a wan smile. "Our fighters have been a bit occupied," she said with studied understatement, "and the lack of fresh reconnaissance is making me just a little nervous."
The destruction of the Deep Space Force was, no doubt, regrettable. But, viewed in one way, it could be regarded as an advantage. It would induce overconfidence in the Enemy, who would assume that his hardest battles in this system were now behind him.
It was also unintendedly advantageous that the formations of gunboats and small craft from the planets of the secondary stellar component were still far behind the more closely based ones. When the Enemy detected the first wave of planet-based craft speeding toward him, he wouldn't recognize the full magnitude of the threat. For that wave represented only a third of it. . . .