"A lot of damaged units," the chief of staff murmured, "but very few destroyed outright."
They'd gotten into Home Hive Two more cheaply than Murakuma had allowed herself to hope. The RD2s had reported a starship total compatible with Marcus LeBlanc's projections. Naturally, they'd considered the possibility that some of the ships were electronic ghosts conjured by ECM3 buoys, but Murakuma had placed absolutely no reliance on that. She'd spent SBMHAWKs as if the multi-megacredit pods were mere firecrackers, and the avalanche of warheads had blown away the twenty-three fortresses the Bugs had been able to emplace since her previous visit. The CAM2-armed SBMHAWK4s had annihilated the few suicide-riders covering the OWPs and wrought havoc among the patrolling gunboats, and the kamikazes on hand had been able to inflict only the limited damage Murakuma and McKenna were now observing with relief. Quite evidently, the SBMHAWKs had made a clean sweep of the starships.
As the computer analysis of the wreckage began to accumulate, it became clear that they'd more than done so.
"So," Marina Abernathy said, bending over a terminal as the admiral and chief of staff looked over her shoulder, "most of those capital ship readings were bogus."
"You'll never hear me complaining about wasted SBMHAWKs," McKenna growled. "That's what they're for."
"Still," the intelligence officer mused, "you have to wonder: where are the ships the Bugs could have had here?"
"I'm sure Admiral LeBlanc will be intrigued." Murakuma smiled briefly at the thought of Marcus, back in Orpheus 1, a slave to orders. "But I take your point, Marina. They must have other deep-space forces somewhere in the system, so we'll exercise caution. Leroy, we'll wait here until all our units have transited, and I want the heaviest possible fighter CSP out at all times. While Anson is getting that organized and deployed, we'll send our cripples back and reorganize our battlegroups around lost units."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
"And then . . ." Murakuma's smile returned, but this time it was very different. Predatory. "We'll execute Operation Nobunaga."
In a war against an enemy with whom no communication was possible, the security rationale for giving operational plans irrelevant or even nonsensical code names no longer obtained. But military habit died hard. And, she told herself, Tadeoshi would have appreciated this one: Oda Nobunaga, the sixteenth-century Japanese warlord who, time and again, had left his enemies choking on his dust by attacking unexpected objectives.
"I'd love to know," she said, aloud but more to herself than to her staffers, "what the Bugs will think-if that's what they do-when they analyze our course."
This was . . . unexpected.
The remaining units of the Mobile Force-the ones which hadn't been stationed at the warp point and so had survived the initial bombardment-were continuing in cloak. Rather than squander themselves in an attack against an Enemy whose tonnage and firepower were exceeded only by the caution with which he proceeded, they were conserving their gunboats and small craft to assist the thousands of such craft even now speeding out from the planetary bases to meet the invaders.
All very well, and according to doctrine. Only . . . the Enemy had set course for the system's secondary star!
The Mobile Force would pursue, of course. But it couldn't possibly catch up, given the Enemy's head start and superior speed. The waves of planet-based gunboats would be able to intercept, despite being slowed by the inclusion of shuttles and pinnaces in their formations, but their attacks might not be as well coordinated as might have been hoped.
Home Hive Two B blazed in the view-forward, an F-class white sun barely less massive and less hot than Component A, now little more than a zero-magnitude star in the view-aft at almost two hundred and fifty light-minutes astern. Given the geometry of the star system, Component B lay approximately 9.2 light-hours from the warp point to Orpheus 1. At Li Chien-lu's maximum sustainable velocity of just over three percent of light-speed, the direct trip would have taken four and a half days. Allowing for the need to stay well clear of the inner system of Component A-which, unfortunately, lay directly between the warp point and the secondary component-the actual transit time had been well over six days.
It was about the longest trip anyone could have taken within the confines of a single star system, binary or not, and this one had seemed even longer than it was as one wave of planet-based kamikazes after another had smashed into Sixth Fleet.
But this time Sixth Fleet at least knew about the Bugs' new jammer technology-its dangers, and also the ease with which its emissions could be detected and locked up by fire control, once the Allied sensor techs knew what to look for. Operation Nobunaga had incorporated defensive doctrine based on that knowledge. Murakuma had formed her capital ships into concentric protective screens around the fragile carriers, then dispatched her fighters to engage the kamikazes at extreme range. The fighter strikes, rather than press home to point-blank dogfighting range, had launched their missiles at extreme range, which kept them outside the jamming envelope and permitted each squadron to coordinate its fire in precise time-on-target salvos. They'd concentrated on the readily identifiable emissions signatures of the gunboats carrying the jammer packs, and although the gunboats' point defense had degraded the effectiveness of such long range fire, enough of it had still gotten the job done.
Once the jammer gunboats had been savaged, the strikegroups fell back to their carriers to rearm. By then, the range had fallen, and Murakuma had maneuvered to hold it open as long as possible with a view to giving them more time to relaunch and continue their work of destruction. Those maneuvers accounted for much of the extra time which had been required for the voyage.
The fighters had gone back out to meet the attack waves coming in on the fleet, and, with the jammer packs effectively taken out of the equation, they'd been able to close for a conventional dogfight without worrying about the loss of their datanets. They couldn't stop those oncoming waves-King Canute couldn't have done that. But the kamikazes were depleted and disorganized by the time they entered the battle-line's missile envelope.
Murakuma kept telling herself that Sixth Fleet's losses were well within the acceptable parameters for this stage of Operation Nobunaga. It didn't help.
At any rate, she couldn't let herself think about it. She had a decision to make.
She turned away from the viewscreen and studied the holo display of the Home Hive Two B subsystem. They'd been close enough for some time to get sensor readings on the inhabited worlds-yes, worlds, plural. Planets II and III blazed with high energy emissions, bringing the binary system's total to five-easily the most heavily populated and industrialized system in the known galaxy. In particular, Planet BIII, which Sixth Fleet was now approaching, evinced a population as massive as any yet encountered in Bug space. It lay on a bearing of two o'clock from the local sun at a distance of fourteen light-minutes, guarded by the customary enormous space station and a coterie of twenty-four more massive OWPs. Fortuitously, it was also close to the somewhat less massively developed Planet BII, ten light-minutes from the primary at three o'clock.
"In essence," Marina Abernathy was telling the assembled core staff, "the Bug deep-space force has fallen so far behind that it's no longer a factor in the tactical picture. In fact, it's not even bothering to stay in cloak anymore. But two more really scary waves of kamikazes are bearing down on us."