Prescott turned to his staff and gestured at the report he'd been reading, which detailed the Gorm gunboats' hunting down of the last enemy battlecruisers with fully functional drives.
"Very well. I think we can declare AP-5 secured and bring the rest of the task forces through. . . . Yes, Amos?"
"Well, Sir," Captain Chung looked uncomfortable, "I can't help wondering about the rest of their gunboats."
"The rest of their gunboats?"
"Yes, Sir. Battlecruisers can carry ten gunboats each, which means that the battlecruisers confirmed as destroyed were just about sufficient to carry the gunboats in the attack wave we wiped out. But it's not like the Bugs to send in all of their available gunboats in one wave. Which suggests that they have other assets in the system."
Prescott frowned at the spook's unconscious echo of Shaaldaar. And a stubborn honesty forced him to wonder if he had reasons, unrelated to military rationality, for his haste to declare himself the conqueror of the system . . . and, almost certainly, the killer of the particular Bugs who'd wiped out the last elements of SF 62's gunslingers.
"Thank you, Amos," he acknowledged quietly. "You've raised a point we can't ignore. Nor have I forgotten the possibility of cloaked Bug pickets still in the vicinity of the warp point. We'll advance cautiously. As our monitors enter AP-5, they'll engage deception-mode ECM to appear as superdreadnoughts, and proceed in tight formation, with fighters deployed to secure the flanks." He turned to the com screen and addressed Shaaldaar, who hadn't commented. "Your real superdreadnoughts will lead the advance across the system, along with the CVAs, which will maintain a screen using the fighters that aren't detached to cover the monitors."
Task Force 71 completed its transit into AP-5, shook itself down into the formation Prescott had outlined, and proceeded to cross the two hundred and ninety-light-minute gulf to the warp point leading to the AP-6 System, the next way station on the road to El Dorado.
VF-94 had done its time in the forward fighter screen and would soon be relieved by another of Basilisk's squadrons. Irma Sanchez was starting to feel the "home free" sensation of one nearing the end of a watch.
That may have slowed her reaction a trifle when her HUD's tactical display suddenly blossomed with scarlet "hostile" icons. But not by much.
"What the-?!"
Togliatti cut her automatic exclamation short.
"Heads up, people!" He fired off a series of orders, which boiled down to "Ignore the gunboats and concentrate on the kamikaze assault shuttles." But few orders were necessary for veterans like these. Then he was off under emergency power, with the rest of the squadron in his wake.
Yeah, Irma had time to think. We didn't get all their battlecruisers after all, and the ones they held in reserve were really cagy. They maneuvered into position to launch their gunboats and kamikazes as close as possible to our fighter screen, so we'd have the least possible reaction time after detecting them.
Damned lucky we were about to be relieved. Our relief is already coming up behind us, and we can sure as hell use the support.
On the other hand, it means we've got minimal life support left. . . .
She chopped the thought brutally off, and focused her entire being on the task of zeroing in on one of the antimatter-laden assault shuttles that spelled potential death for Basilisk.
Raymond Prescott looked up and faced his staff, then turned to the com screen and faced Shaaldaar.
The understrength fighter screen had killed every one of the kamikaze shuttles that had erupted into their faces. But to do so, they had to pretty much leave the gunboats for the defenses of the superdreadnoughts and assault carriers of the vanguard. Only six gunboats had survived long enough to launch ripple salvos of FRAMs, and of those, only three had gone on to successfully ram their targets. But four Gorm superdreadnoughts (including Sakar, a datalink command ship) and the Terran CVAs Mermaid and Basilisk had suffered damage. The last two had come through despite devastating hits-which, Prescott reflected, argued in favor of the Terran design philosophy of treating an assault carrier as just that, and not as a fragile platform for as many fighters as could be crammed into it. Sakar and one of the other Gorm ships had been just as fortunate . . . but the third was almost destroyed, and the fourth totally so.
The aftermath of this second Bug strike had been even more definitive than the first. The Bug battlecruisers' close-range launch, whatever its short-term tactical advantages, had rendered escape impossible, and TF 71's full massive fighter strength had remorselessly hunted them down. The advance to the AP-6 warp point continued.
"Are our cripples on their way back to AP-4, Anna?" Prescott asked, breaking into everyone's mental rehashing of the engagement.
"Yes, Sir," Captain Mandagalla replied. Mermaid and Basilisk, and the Gorm superdreadnought Chekanos, were withdrawing, escorted by Task Group 71.4's light cruisers. "As per your orders, the damaged carriers' remaining fighters are being redistributed among the undamaged ones. How that's going to affect the squadrons' continuity is still being worked out. To a great extent, it will depend on which of them have the highest percentage of survivors."
"Survival of the fittest, eh?"
"Yes, Sir . . . although the seniority of the surviving squadron commanders is, inevitably, going to play a part."
Prescott grunted, dismissed the matter from his mind, and looked at his plot, with its system-scale display. It showed the warp point through which they'd entered, and the one toward which they were advancing. It did not show the one which must have admitted the Bug ambush force into the system.
The tale of SF 62's survivors made it clear that there must be such a third warp point-probably a closed one, and if not closed, certainly hidden somewhere in the cold vastness of the outer system beyond the region of anything but the kind of extended survey he didn't have time for. And he didn't doubt for a second that there were still cloaked pickets in the system, reporting the battle that had just ended to whatever Bug command echelons lay beyond that warp point. Leaving such pickets here was precisely what he himself would have done-in fact, what he intended to do before departing.
No question about it. He'd have to fight his way back through AP-5 on his return from Home Hive One.
But Zhaarnak will be here by then with Task Force 72, he told himself. Won't he?
The ready room deep inside TFNS Banshee had belonged to one of that assault carrier's squadrons. Now, what little remained of that squadron had been merged with VF-94, off the crippled Basilisk.
One of VF-94's newly acquired pilots, his j.g.'s insignia still shinily new, was holding forth to his equally junior fellows.
"The Skipper and the XO had just bought it, and the rest of us were maneuvering to let that shuttle have it up the ass, when two gunboats came at us out of the-"
Commander Bruno Togliatti stretched out his weary form in one of the comfortable chairs and muttered to his senior surviving pilot. "Christ, will you listen to this kid? Maybe four months out of Brisbane. Five max."
"And now he thinks he's King Shit on Turd Island," Irma Sanchez remarked from the depths of the chair to his right, and Togliatti chuckled. Then he sobered.