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.

Four or five of the unknowns lay between his strikegroups and the Antelopes, and he began to tap commands into his onboard computer, designating them as the first targets. The Bugs had allowed a gap to open between them and the rest of their fast starships, he noted, putting them beyond the range at which the Antelopes' point defense could assist their own close-in defenses, and he clicked his beak in the Ophiuchi equivalent of a smile. He would hit each of them simultaneously with a two or three-squadron attack, he decided. That would swamp their own point defense and let him kill them quickly, with minimal losses, before he turned on their more distant consorts.

The special units watched the Enemy strike bear down upon them, noting the distribution of drive sources. It would appear that the deception measures had succeeded. The removal of certain weapons and systems and the reconfiguration of the special units' shields had significantly altered their emissions signatures. The Fleet had hoped that the alteration would prevent the Enemy from guessing what the special units truly were-rather as the Enemy had done to the Fleet by disguising his antimatter laden gunboat lures as standard missile pods. There was, of course, no way to be certain that the deception had succeeded in this instance, yet the developing pattern of the attack appeared hopeful. Certainly the Enemy seemed to have decided to sweep the special units aside before they could fall back within the defensive perimeter of the remainder of the Fleet.

Fortunately, the special units had no intention of doing anything of the sort.

Hiithylwaaan's eyes narrowed as his five-pronged strike's components reached their IPs and turned in to the attack. At this range, his fighters' scanners should have been able to see through the Bug EW and recognize their targets, and they couldn't. Or, at least, what they were seeing didn't match any Bug ship types in his onboard computer's threat recognition files.

He didn't like that. The first people to attack any new class of warship were likely to encounter unpleasant surprises, especially if the infernal Bugs had come up with another nasty innovation like the plasma gun or the suicide-rider. On the other hand, someone always had to be the first . . . although he could have wished for a more convenient time.

He considered the readouts carefully. There wasn't a great deal of time to make up his mind, and he wished he had even a little more information. The Bugs' ECM might be being more effective than usual, but some details were leaking through. He didn't see any sign of new and fiendish weapons-as nearly as he could tell, this was simply a new fast-battlecruiser design with standard weapons, albeit in a slightly different configuration.

He considered aborting the attack, but it was too late to do it without engendering mass confusion in his squadrons. Better to carry through and hope that these things were important enough to justify the effort he was going to expend killing them. And even if they weren't, he had to start the killing somewhere.

Whatever these ships were, they'd just have to do.

The Enemy strike craft screamed down on the special units, and a ripple of surprise ran through the Fleet as they opened fire not simply with the anticipated lasers, but with primary beams, as well. That had not been expected, and the special units staggered as unstoppable stilettos of energy stabbed through them again and again. The implications of the Enemy's choice of armament was not lost upon the Fleet, however. Clearly the Enemy had been as badly deceived as the Fleet could have hoped, or he would not have elected to employ a weapon which brought him so close to his targets.

It was true that the primary beams could knock out internal systems-possibly even the critical internal systems-without having to first smash their way through shields and armor. Yet in the long run, it would not matter greatly. The crews of the special units engaged the attacking small craft with missiles as they closed, and then opened fire with their point defense. The attack craft took only moderate losses, and their crews continued to bore in, closing to minimum range to make every shot count.

Exactly as the Fleet had anticipated.

Commander Hiithylwaaan led the strike on the center unidentified battlecruiser himself, and he felt a deep, abiding sense of pride as his Human and Ophiuchi pilots followed him in. They drove through the weak, poorly coordinated point defense of their targets, closing in multisquadron strikes that were precisely sequenced to put the greatest number of fighters-and hence the heaviest possible weight of fire-onto their victims simultaneously from the closest possible range.

SF 62's pilots executed their attacks perfectly. And at the precise moment of their closest approach, each target's crew calmly threw a switch.

Andrew Prescott felt as if someone had kicked him in the belly.

He sensed the same shocked horror rippling through all the officers and ratings on Flag Bridge, and there was nothing he could do about it at all. He was as much a spectator as they were, staring at the plot. The information on it was minutes old, the events it showed already over and done, but it didn't feel that way, and his face clenched with pain as he watched two-thirds of his remaining fighter strength be wiped away in mere seconds.

Etnas. Those had to be Etnas, he thought numbly. But why didn't Hiithylwaaan recognize them? He was right on top of them, for God's sake! And he thought they were a brand new class, so-

His thought chopped off abruptly. Hiithylwaaan had thought they were a new class because the Bugs had wanted him to think that. The farshathkhanaak had been far too close for simple ECM to have deceived him, which meant that the ships had been a new design-or, at least, an older design which had been altered to make it appear to be something else entirely.

The SRHAWK. It's the Bugs' answer to the SRHAWK, he thought. We disguised those to look like SBMHAWK pods, so they returned the compliment. Our fighter pilots have gotten too smart to close in tight on suicide-riders unless they have to to intercept them short of an OWP or capital ship. So the bastards disguised an Etna as something else in the hope that our strikes would come into "fighter-trap" range of it, anyway.