The enemy had escaped.
It was not possible, yet he had. The Fleet had paid heavily to bait the trap, to close it behind him, to draw him in and expose his core systems to counterattack, and still almost half his warships had escaped.
Attack Force Four turned vengefully on the handful of cripples which remained in the system. The enemy's lamed vessels were no more than wrecks, yet they fought to the last, and when their final weapons were gone, they closed in agonizingly slow ramming attempts. Few succeeded, but each of those who did took yet another starship with it, and so the Fleet stood off and smashed the final units with missile and energy fire.
But when the last died, the Fleet's quandary remained. The plan had called for the enemy to perish here, and he had not. A review of the tactical data indicated that most of his escapees were damaged—many critically—and his losses in attack craft had been even heavier, proportionately, than in starships. Yet those starships remained faster than the Fleet's battle-line, else they had not escaped at all. The handful of new, fast battle-cruisers might be able to overtake, as could the light cruisers of the other attack forces, once they reached the warp point, but by that time the enemy's capital ships would have had many hours to make emergency repairs. Superdreadnoughts, even damaged, would be more than a match for such light units, and if the enemy had detached yet another sacrificial rearguard to cover the warp point, the Fleet's starships would pay a hideous price to pursue him.
Yet there might still be an answer. The gunboats of Attack Force One were barely twenty-five minutes from the warp point, with those of Attack Force Two only an hour behind. If Attack Force Four's survivors took those gunboats under command, they could be thrown through the warp point in a single wave fourteen hundred strong. The enemy's decimated attack craft could not stop such a mighty force, and gunboats had the speed to run down any starship.
The decision was made, and Attack Force Four closed on the warp point, licking its wounds and reorganizing its shattered datagroups while it awaited the gunboats.
* * *
Crete emerged from the warp point. Too much grief and heartache filled her flag bridge to permit of any sense of elation, but Raymond Prescott dragged himself up from the depths of his own despair. In ten days—no, in twelve hours—he'd gone from Second Fleet's most junior task force CO to its commander in chief. That terrible responsibility was his, now, and he felt it grinding down upon him.
"How many fighters made it out, Jacques?"
His voice was quiet, but Bichet flinched. Prescott had no idea how much grief had leaked through his self-control, and the ops officer-cleared his throat.
"I'm not certain, Sir. Captain Kinkaid made it—looks like she's farshathkhanaak for the fleet now—but I'm not even sure how many of the carriers got out. I'm trying to get reports now, but the rest of the fleet's command structure is shot to hell, Sir."
"How many aboard our carriers?" Prescott pressed.
"I make it two hundred, Sir," Bichet said softly. "Roughly."
Prescott winced, then drew a deep breath.
"Relaunch half of them immediately. I want them on the warp point as an antigunboat CSP. Rearm the other half with FM3s, if we still have enough. Each strikegroup will have fifteen minutes to reorganize its own squadrons, then I want them in space again. As soon as they launch, recall the first half to rearm and reorganize."
Bichet nodded, and Prescott turned to his chief of staff.
"Anna, your job is to find out what's left of the other task forces. I want a head count, and I want to know exactly what munitions—and weapons—everyone has. Sandy," he switched to Ruiz, "I want a complete inventory of what we have left, too. Work with Anna to give me a complete picture of the entire fleet ASAP."
The logistics officer nodded, and Prescott turned back to Mandagalla.
"Get me that info fast, Anna," he said with quiet urgency. "The Bugs'll be after us any minute, and I need to know what I have left to fight with."
"Yes, Sir." Mandagalla's ebon face was grim. "What about battlegroup reorganization?"
"That'll have to wait until we know what we've got. Jacques," the ops officer looked up from his console at his name, "for right now, assume whatever TF 21 has left is all we've got. You're authorized to reorganize battlegroups as you see fit. We'll fine tune your OBs later . . . if we get the chance."
"Aye, aye, Sir," Bichet replied, and Prescott turned back to his plot as his staff dived into the frantic effort of discovering how much of Second Fleet had survived.
He already knew the numbers were going to be bad.
* * *
The last gunboat had finally arrived. Attack Force Four spent several more minutes rechecking its new battlegroups. Over half its ships had been destroyed, and another ten percent were too damaged to be committed, but it remained a powerful force—and far closer to intact than its enemies could possibly be. It was time.
* * *
"Gunboats making transit!" Crete's tactical officer snapped.
Prescott's raised hand interrupted Captain Mandagalla's report as he wheeled back to the plot. Icons already spangled it, but the Bugs had given him eighty-one priceless minutes. Every surviving fighter—three hundred and seventy-one of them, barely thirty percent of Second Fleet's original fighter strength—had been rearmed and stationed directly atop the warp point. TF 21's carriers' combined magazines had retained only two hundred and six FM3s. They were mounted aboard a hundred and three fighters; the others had been fitted with three additional laser packs and one life support pod each. Most of those flight crews were exhausted, and every squadron was a scratch-built, jury-rigged improvisation. They were far, far below their usual standards of effectiveness . . . but they were also waiting in ambush.
The gunboats blinked into existence, and the fighters tore into them like demons. Missiles brushed past transit-addled point defense, and the rest of the fighters screamed in with their massive external laser armaments. They killed almost four hundred gunboats in their first pass, and another seventy before the Bugs' systems restabilized . . . but that left almost a thousand.
The fighter jocks wanted to loop back yet again, but Prescott's orders to Captain Kinkaid had been both clear and nondiscretionary. She broke off, using her superior speed to draw clear, and streaked after the rest of Second Fleet.
Prescott watched them come, and his heart was cold. They'd done better than he'd dared hope and lost only twenty-three of their own to do it, but the gunboat force was far stronger than expected. He'd had time for a brief conference with Antonov's exhausted battlegroup COs, and after the enormous hard kills Second Fleet had scored, it had seemed impossible for even Bugs to have that much left.
But they did, and it was coming straight for him.
"All right, Jacques. Go to Ivan Two," he said flatly.
"Aye, aye, Sir." Bichet's orders went out, and TF 21, supported by all the rest of Second Fleet's combat-capable superdreadnoughts and battleships—all twelve of them—dropped further astern of the other survivors. None of those ships' crews expected to survive the next hour . . . but that wasn't their job. All they were supposed to do—all they could hope to do, with their depleted magazines and battle damage—was throw up a roadblock. When the fighters reached them, half would peel off to support them; the rest would continue to the fleeing carriers to provide the survivors with whatever frail protection they could after the roadblock died. But Raymond Prescott knew one thing with absolute certainty: if he could draw the Bugs down on his command, few of them would survive his last fight to go after his cripples.
"Enemy ETA forty-seven minutes," Bichet announced quietly, and Prescott nodded.
"Anna, contact Admiral Mosby. I know her. Make absolutely certain that she understands she is not, under any circumstances, to send the other fighters back into this."
* * *
The gunboats recognized what the enemy intended, but they were willing to accept his sacrificial gambit, even at the price of their own destruction, for those had to be his last combat-capable units. With them gone, there would be nothing to prevent the other attack forces' new, fast battle-cruisers from overhauling and smashing his wounded ships on their long road home.
* * *
"ETA twenty minutes," Bichet announced. Prescott nodded acknowledgment without looking away from the plot. At least it won't take long against this many of them, he thought. I wonder—
"Sir! Admiral Prescott!" The sudden shout jerked his attention to his com officer, and his eyebrows flew up as he saw the wild exultation transfiguring Commander Hale's face. "Sky Marshal Avram!" she blurted. "Sky Marshal Avram is on the priority channel!"
* * *
Hannah Avram's heart twisted as her cloaked starships streaked past the first staggering, broken wrecks. She could feel the agonized exhaustion with which those ships clawed towards home. Second Fleet hadn't been defeated; it had been shattered, yet its survivors fought on, and she remembered Second Lorelei. This was the second time she'd seen the wreckage of a Terran Fleet, and heartbreak warred with pride as she watched that wreckage which had refused to die.
"I have Admiral Prescott, Sir," her com officer said.
"Prescott?"
"Yes, Sir." The com officer sounded stunned, as if he couldn't believe his own words. "Admiral Antonov is dead, Sir."
It hit Hannah like a fist, and even through her shock, she knew it would hit every other Terran officer—and all of their allies—with equal ferocity. But for now she was grateful for her shock. It kept the news from being real while she grappled with what she had to do, and she turned to her com screen as Raymond Prescott's exhausted, harrowed face appeared upon it.
"I'm coming in cloaked from your zero-zero-six, zero-zero-niner," she said flatly. "I have seventeen superdreadnoughts, ten battleships, eleven battle-cruisers, and twelve heavy cruisers, but no carriers. Keep coming; I estimate contact in twenty-three minutes. Stay alive, Raymond. Keep them bunched and concentrating on you until I can hit them by surprise, but stay alive!"
* * *
Raymond Prescott turned away from his com screen.
"Jacques, new orders for Kinkaid! All of her fighters stay with us."
"Yes, Sir!"
Icons shifted wildly as the fighters which had already passed Crete broke back towards her. The gunboats were only sixteen minutes out; he had to survive for five minutes, and without those other fighters, he wouldn't.
Minutes limped into eternity. His own sensors hadn't picked up the Sky Marshal yet, but he knew she was there . . . and the Bugs didn't. He watched the gunboats sweeping closer. Ten minutes out. Eight. Six. Kinkaid's fighters smashed into them head-on, and the plot was ugly with the fireballs of dying gunboats and allied pilots. His Dunkerques began punching SBMs and capital missiles into the Bugs, and the furnace roared hotter. Four minutes. Two. Crete's missile batteries began to fire, and then the madness was upon him.
TF 21 and its supporting, scratch-built battlegroups writhed under a tsunami of gunboats. Ships twisted and danced in wild evasion maneuvers, and the visual displays were a kaleidoscope of explosions. The battleship Timoléon was the first to die, then the superdreadnoughts Ellesmere and Namcha Barwa. Crete's sisters Titicaca and Lake Michigan followed, then the battle-cruiser Arizona and her squadron mate Moltke. But even as they were pounded to pieces, they fired back in an orgy of mutual destruction and hate. It went on and on, seconds stretching into hours and minutes into eternities, and Crete staggered again and again. Her shields were down, her armor shattered, her breached hull belching air, but somehow she lived and killed and killed and killed . . .
And then, suddenly, Hannah Avram was there. Her undamaged, unshaken ships slammed into the Bugs like the hammer of God, and they flushed their XO racks as they came. The gunboats had been so intent on their prey they never even saw her coming, and the fresh hurricane of fire took them totally by surprise.
It was the Bugs' turn to die, caught between two fires. But they, too, struck back. The superdreadnoughts Luzon and Palawan, the SDEs Mercedari, Tasmania, and Paricutan, and the battleships San Genera and Terrible had raced all the way from Centauri to Anderson Four in just fourteen days only to die, but they accomplished their mission. The Bug gunboats burned like a prairie fire, and in their ashes lay the survival of what remained of Second Fleet.
Yet there was one last, agonizing price for the Terran Federation Navy to pay. Even as Hannah Avram's ops officer announced success and she turned to her com link to Crete, one last flurry of gunboats evaded every weapon targeted upon them in their death runs. They salvoed their external ordnance and followed it in, tearing deep into TFNS Xingú's armored hull, and Raymond Prescott's com screen went blank with terrible, sudden finality.
* * *
The gunboats' destruction was final. The Fleet had no idea how many enemy starships had come to their fellows' rescue, nor of how they could have avoided the blocking gunboat force which should have stopped them, but there was no point in sending battle-cruisers and CLs against such heavy units without battle-line support. Courier drones were sent ahead, alerting the forces still between the enemy and home, but although the waiting gunboats might harass them, they were too weak to stop them.
The trap had failed . . . but not completely. The enemy had been decisively crippled, and all four attack forces would pursue as rapidly as possible. The Fleet would arrive on his heels, and this time it would send no mere survey force into the system from whence he had come.