The first wave consisted of Zarkolyan Kel'puraka-B and Kel'junar-B-class battlecruisers, crewed by beings whose fiery hatred for the Bugs was an elemental force, untempered by any tradition of dispassionate military professionalism. The original Kel'puraka and Kel'junar classes had been extraordinarily well-defended against missiles and kamikazes, with four advanced capital point defense installations each, which made them better adapted to warp point assaults than most battlecruisers. But the "B" refits, while retaining the original designs' defensive power, incorporated a truly radical offensive departure: the elimination of all normal missile launchers in favor of massed batteries of the new "box launcher" systems, effectively converting what had been conventional BCRs into highly unconventional specialized kamikaze killers.
The entire design concept was a calculated risk; the box launchers were slow and awkward to reload, for they lacked the sophisticated ammunition-handling equipment that made up so much of the mass and volume of conventional launchers. Because of that, the box launchers had to be loaded one round at a time, from outside the ship, with its drive field down. But the advantage of the "box launcher" was that multiple missiles could be simultaneously loaded into each box . . . and fired in one, massive salvo. And the very absence of the reloading equipment of other launchers meant that three times as many box launchers could be mounted in the same internal volume. Which meant that a single battlegroup of five Kel'puraka-Bsand one Kel'junar-B command ship could belch forth four hundred and thirty-five anti-fighter AFHAWKs in a single coordinated salvo.
They did, and as they fired, each battlegroup became the center of a spreading cloud of fiery death. Their missiles raced outward, like the blast wave of some stupendous explosion, and its crest was a solid, curving wall of kamikazes vanishing into the plasma-cloud death of their own massive loads of antimatter.
The Zarkolyans blasted enormous swathes through the ranks of suicide shuttles before the Bugs understood what they were dealing with. Then the kamikazes, as though in response to a single will, turned on the new attackers. Six of the battlecruisers who'd survived transit died, but most of the pressure was removed from the gunboats, which proceeded to torment and distract the kamikazes. Those gunboats had expended their own AFHAWKs, but they retained their internal weapons, and they took vicious advantage of the kamikazes' distraction. And while they did, the surviving battlecruisers withdrew through the warp point to reload their box launchers in the safety of Anderson Three.
As they withdrew, the main body of Grand Fleet began to transit-one at a time, led by more Zarkolyans. This time they were Shyl'narid-A, Shyl'tembra, and Shyl'prandar-class superdreadnoughts, the larger cousins of the Kel'purakas which had preceded them. They embraced precisely the same design philosophy, but with five times as many launchers each, and the defenders of Home Hive Five had never seen anything like them. The kamikazes turned once more, swinging back from the gunboats to leap upon these bigger, clumsier, more vulnerable targets . . . and the superdreadnoughts belched death into their faces like the blasts of some war god's titanic shotgun.
Mansaduk's squadron was down to only two gunboats by the time they broke through into the clear and saw those advancing behemoths. A quick glance at his HUD showed the surviving kamikazes regrouping for an attack on the new threat-the one they'd been intended to face. He had no need to look at his crew. Unlike his inanimate instruments, their minisorchi was woven with his; he knew what they felt.
"No, Chenghat," he said, his eyes still on his HUD. "Not just yet. We have work to do here before we can follow the battlecruisers back. We must give the superdreadnoughts our support. They won't have the option of retiring to rearm."
The Fleet tallied the losses of the warp point defenders with profound dissatisfaction.
Ultimately, there'd never been any realistic hope of preventing the Enemy from gaining entry to the System Which Must Be Defended, of course. The introduction of those extremely irritating warp-capable missiles had seen to that. Still, the Fleet had hoped to exact a far higher price of the invaders as they made their assault transits. Unfortunately, this Fleet component hadn't known of the new battlecruiser and superdreadnoughts classes. Sensor data shared with all of the Systems Which Must Be Defended by the System Which Must Be Defended which had been charged with the war against the Old Enemy suggested that the new classes came from the Old Enemy's fleet components, but no report had indicated that they would be capable of such massive salvos of AFHAWKs, and their appearance in simultaneous transits-coupled with the Enemy gunboats' earlier transits-had wiped out far more of the combat space patrol and kamikazes than projections had allowed for.
Still, total gunboat losses had been barely eighteen hundred, less than seven percent of the Fleet's total gunboat strength in this system, and thousands upon thousands of planet-based kamikazes remained to replace those lost on the warp point. The Fleet's Deep Space Force's starships were outnumbered by more than three-to-one by the Enemy units now in the System Which Must Be Defended, and the balance of firepower was even worse than those numbers suggested, for over half of the Deep Space Force's total starships were mere light cruisers. But even now, those ships could call upon the support of the planet-based kamikazes and almost twenty-four thousand more gunboats, and some of those gunboats carried the new, second-generation jammer packs. Clearly, the Enemy's total combined attack craft strength was less than half that-indeed, current estimates suggested it was less than ten thousand-and they were supported by little more than a thousand gunboats after their losses during the initial assault.
The odds against the Fleet were thus formidable, yet not truly impossible. The Fleet's greatest weakness lay in the disparity in the speeds of its component units and the tactical constraints that disparity imposed, but its numerical advantage in gunboats, properly applied, offered an opportunity to offset that weakness. Coupled with the new jammer technology, the Fleet estimated that it actually had one chance in three of inflicting sufficient damage to induce the casualty-conscious Enemy to break off short of the Worlds Which Must Be Defended.
This time.
Kthaara'zarthan and Vanessa Murakuma stood side by side on Li Chien-lu's flag bridge, watching Grand Fleet take form in the plot.
It was, inevitably, a somewhat diminished array. As usual, the destabilizing effects of warp transit had degraded the accuracy of the defensive fire that had met the kamikazes. Ten monitors and a dozen superdreadnoughts of the leading waves had either been destroyed or sent limping back to Anderson Three. But they'd absorbed all the damage the Bugs had been able to inflict. The carriers, coming afterwards, had entered unmolested and were now deploying a fighter cover of unprecedented strength. Behind that shield, the remainder of Grand Fleet was streaming in and coalescing into its prearranged formation with practiced ease.
As well it should, Murakuma thought. This operation was unprecedented in numbers and tonnage, but in nothing else. It was the kind of offensive which nearly a decade's experience had rendered almost-not quite-routine. From any prewar viewpoint, Grand Fleet's experience level would have been as awe inspiring as its size.