And that was the crux of the problem which had brought the senior flag officers of Sixth Fleet to this conversation. The numbers of fortresses waiting to resist them left them no choice but to commit the full fury of their SBMHAWKs against the OWPs. Which, in turn, meant that few or none of those SBMHAWKs could be used for the task of suppressing the combat space patrol of gunboats the Bugs routinely maintained to cover the warp point.
The SRHAWKs might provide at least partial compensation, although as Zhaarnak had just pointed out, they remained an unproven concept. Personally, Prescott expected the new system to prove much more effective than its detractors predicted, and much less effective than its proponents hoped. Not that he didn't approve of the somewhat devious thinking behind it. Or of the notion of hoisting the Bugs by their own petard . . . literally.
The Arachnids had introduced what the Allies had code-named the "suicide-rider" at the Battle of Alpha Centauri. As usual, it was a tactical concept which emphasized their alienness: a sizeable antimatter containment field and the equipment necessary to manufacture the large quantity of antimatter intended to go into it just before battle. It required relatively little internal hull volume, yet if a ship mounting it managed to perform a successful ramming attack, the ensuing explosion was invariably lethal to the attack's target. While not very effective at catching targets which were capable of evasive maneuvers, it had demonstrated its effectiveness against immobile OWPs and cripples only too convincingly.
It had a secondary effect, as well, for the sheer power of the explosion was sufficient to damage starships and forts even without striking them directly if they were in sufficiently close proximity to the blast. And as a sort of tertiary side effect, it was capable of completely destroying any fighter, gunboat, mine, buoy, or small craft which found itself within the blast zone when it went up.
The Gorm were widely and correctly noted for a methodical, logical approach to problem solving, and not for leaps of the imagination or sudden flashes of inspiration. Yet it was the Gorm who'd come up with the notion of applying the same principle-with a few modifications-to the Bugs. The initial suggestion had languished for several months without attracting much support, until the Ophiuchi, who'd lost more than a few strikefighter pilots to suicide-riders and the blast effect of small craft kamikazes overloaded with antimatter, heard about it. They thought it was a marvelous idea, and after some strenuous lobbying, the OADC had convinced the TFN's BuWeaps to devise what looked exactly like a standard SBMHAWK carrier pod, right down to ECM which duplicated its active sensor emissions, but was, in fact, stuffed to the gills with an antimatter charge almost twenty percent the size of that carried by a suicide-rider. The idea was that since the Bugs used their gunboat CSPs to attack and destroy SBMHAWKs before the pods could stabilize their systems, find their targets, and launch their missiles, those gunboats would also swoop down on the SRHAWKs, attack them . . . and be destroyed in the resultant explosion.
Given that the Bugs regarded themselves as completely expendable, the new weapon was almost certain to inflict heavy losses on them, and those losses would continue even after the Bugs figured out what the SRHAWK was. After all, it should be effectively impossible to distinguish between the two even if one knew they existed. That meant that any SRHAWK could be a standard SBMHAWK, and from the Bugs' viewpoint it would undoubtedly make perfectly good sense to sacrifice a gunboat and its crew in exchange for the destruction of a weapon which might threaten to damage a larger vessel.
But Sixth Fleet didn't have enough SRHAWKs to destroy all of the gunboats in the combat space patrol waiting in Home Hive Three, even assuming that they worked perfectly and that the gunboats attacked every one of them.
Unfortunately, we also don't have time to do anything about it, Prescott thought, feeling as glum as Meearnow looked. That's another consequence of how quickly the Bugs got their defenses organized this time around. It would take months-weeks, at the very least-to ship in enough additional SBMHAWKs to take out the fortresses and the CSP, and we don't have months. In fact, we've had to move Heaven and Earth just to make our April first schedule. And if we let it slip past, who knows how many more OWPs the bastards will have dredged up in the meantime?
"I still don't like it," he sighed, "but I don't see any alternative, either." He looked at Shaaldaar. "Please don't take my resistance to the idea wrongly, Shaaldaar. Believe me, I fully appreciate your crews' willingness to run such risks. And the cold blooded part of me can accept the logic behind it. I suppose it's just . . . too similar to too many things we've seen Bugs do. I know the reasons for it are completely different, but the thought of anything that makes us even remotely like them in any way . . . bothers me."
"I appreciate that, Admiral," the massive Gorm replied. "But, as you say, our reasons for making the suggestion are quite different. And all of the crews have volunteered."
"And we shall accept their offer," Zhaarnak said firmly, speaking as the commander responsible for the operation and meeting his vilkshatha brother's eye levelly. Unlike their Human allies, the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee had amassed a vast store of experience in fighting and training shoulder to shoulder with their Gorm partners. They were not Gorm themselves, and Zhaarnak knew there were nuances of the Gorm philosophical concept of synklomus they had not completely grasped even now. Yet they'd seen what that concept meant to the Gorm, and they fully accepted that however different the Gorm might be, they understood the essence of the Farshalah'kiah.
He deeply respected his vilkshatha brother's Human determination to safeguard his Gorm allies' personnel as fiercely as he would his own. It was, he knew, a fundamental part of Raymond's own unyielding code of honor. But Zhaarnak'telmasa also understood the Gorm who had made this offer, and he would not diminish their honor by rejecting it.
The Fleet had anticipated the moment when the Enemy would return to the System Which Must Be Defended which had died. Nothing of importance remained here, whether for the Fleet to defend or for the Enemy to destroy, and yet the ruined system was still a point of contact between them. Eventually, the Enemy must attempt to expand that point of contact.
Once, the Fleet would not have concerned itself with the Enemy's plans to exploit an avenue of attack, for it would have been the Fleet which sought to use that same avenue to attack the Enemy. But that doctrine had come to require . . . modification as the result of recent unfortunate events. Fortunately, although the concept of passive defense had never been an acceptable strategic stance for the Fleet, the tactical need to occasionally stand upon the defensive had been recognized. The wherewithal with which to do so existed, if not in the quantities or with the degree of sophistication which the Enemy appeared to bring to the same task, and so did a doctrine to employ that wherewithal.
The Enemy's development of his stealthy reconnaissance drones complicated things, of course, just as the destruction of the industrial node within this System Which Must Be Defended had reduced the resources available. It had taken the Fleet some time to realize that the new drones even existed, far less to hypothesize their capabilities, and to date there was no immediate prospect of similar devices for the Fleet. Or, rather, the Fleet had more pressing concerns than the need to develop a robotic survey device when they could use swarms of expendable gunboats or pinnaces for the same sorts of missions. The Enemy's new reconnaissance capability did pose its own problems, however, particularly the fact that, as yet, the Fleet could neither reliably intercept and destroy the drones nor even know for certain when one might have spied upon its own defensive deployments. Still, there might actually be a way to make the Fleet's reconnaissance disadvantage compensate for its material weakness.