The only way gunboats or small craft could be hidden from the Enemy's sensors-and so from destruction-was to hold them entirely beyond sensor range of the warp point or to retain them on the external gunboat racks and in the internal boat bays of starships which could cloak. Unfortunately, if they were held beyond sensor range, then they were also beyond any range at which they could immediately intervene against an Enemy incursion. But if they were held on the racks and in the bays of their motherships, only the number which the mobile units had the capacity to support would be available.
Faced with this dilemma, the Fleet had decided that some gunboats and kamikazes would be superior to none. And so, as the Enemy advanced inward from the warp point and the starships of the Deep Space Force brought their drives on-line and revealed themselves, a mass wave of small craft erupted from them.
No one in Sixth Fleet was surprised by the sudden appearance of the gunboats and kamikaze assault shuttles. Indeed, if there were any grounds for surprise, it was that the Bugs hadn't made a greater effort to coordinate the swarms of gunboats which must be just beyond sensor range with the commitment of their starships.
But I suppose it's not really that surprising after all, Murakuma thought as she watched the icons of the Bug small craft dashing towards her battle-line. After all, how much coordinating could they do? Their capital units are still slower than ours, so the only way their battle-line could reasonably hope to intercept ours is to catch us within relatively close proximity to the warp point, before we have time to disappear into cloak and use our speed to dance rings around them. But if they'd kept their gunboats close enough to the warp point to intervene, then they'd have been in our sensor envelope and we could have sent the SBMHAWKs after them.
Which was all very interesting, no doubt, but didn't change the fact that she had to deal with the scores of gunboats and hundreds of shuttles coming straight down her throat.
Anson Olivera's fighter squadrons went to meet them, and the plot was suddenly speckled with thousands of even tinier icons as anti-fighter missiles and gunboat-killing FM3s crossed between the two forces. Scarlet "hostiles" began to vanish in appalling numbers, but a handful of the bright green "friendlies" went with them, and the Bugs' success at hiding their starships meant the kamikazes had only a very short way to go, as distances went in deep-space combat.
Fortunately, these Bugs weren't employing the globular version of the "Bughouse Swarm" formation which had given Seventh Fleet so much difficulty. The defensive fire from the gunboats and the scores of pinnaces scattered among the assault shuttle kamikazes was bad enough, but at least Murakuma's fighters didn't have to break through a solid barrier of ship-launched AFHAWKs before they could even get at their true targets. It was possible that that was an indication that this home hive system had been completely cut off from its fellows long enough that whichever Bug lord high admiral had devised the new doctrine had been unable to communicate it to them. Murakuma reminded herself not to put too much faith in any such assumption and checked the seal on her vacsuit, then locked her shock frame as the first gunboats broke past the CSP.
It was as well that the Fleet had never placed a great deal of reliance on the Deep Space Force's gunboats and kamikazes. When there was no great expectation of success, there was no great disappointment when all that was achieved was failure.
At least the attacking small craft had forced to the Enemy to expend some depletable munitions, and a few score of his small attack craft had also been destroyed. It would have been preferable to achieve at least some damage to his starships, but the Fleet had no option but to settle for what it could get.
In truth, the Fleet had no great expectation that the Deep Space Force would defeat the Enemy. The Enemy's numbers were too great, and his entry warp point was too close at hand. At best, the Deep Space Force might drive him into retreating from the system, yet the Fleet was far from fully convinced that that would be the best possible outcome. After all, if the Enemy managed to disengage intact, the Fleet would only have to fight him again. In the end, the decision to stand at the warp point had been made less on the basis of purely military considerations than on the necessity of preventing the Enemy from getting deep enough in-system for his sensors to tell him what it was he truly faced in this System Which Must Be Defended.
His ignorance was the Fleet's greatest single strategic asset, and so the Deep Space Force was committed at the earliest possible moment. If it succeeded in driving the Enemy back whence he'd come, well and good. If it failed, then the true backbone of the defenses would deal with him. Of course, the entire Deep Space Force would be dead by then, but the probability of its destruction was a paltry price to pay for the possibility of maintaining the Enemy's ignorance.
The Bug battle-line had used the attack of its gunboats and kamikazes to close with Sixth Fleet. Murakuma's capital ships couldn't use their superior speed to pull away from the enemy when they were busy using that same speed in desperate evasive maneuvers to avoid kamikazes. As a result, the Bugs were able to draw into SBM range before the final, despairing wave of kamikazes was blown apart short of the monitors.
But that was fine with Murakuma. Even with the diversion of their kamikazes, the Bugs were unable to close much beyond the very fringe of the SBM missile envelope. They could hurt her at that range, but they couldn't kill her-not quickly, at any rate-and as soon as the last of the attacking small craft had ceased to exist, Sixth Fleet began opening the range once again.
But not by too much. She drew her starships out of range from the Bug battle-line, and while she was doing that, her carrier flight deck crews rearmed her fighters and her CSGs reorganized their squadrons around the thankfully few holes the Bug gunboats had blown in their tables of organization. She waited a few moments longer, in hopes that the Bugs might be tempted into sending their BCRs in unsupported. But it would appear that the enemy's increased sensitivity to losses was at work. Or perhaps it was simply a recognition that no battlecruiser in the universe could survive within the missile envelope of an unshaken monitor battle-line long enough to achieve anything at all. Vanessa Murakuma would never understand the way Bugs thought, and she was just as glad that was true. But it would appear that even Bugs could choose not to expend themselves for no return at all.
Well, she thought. If they won't come out, we'll just have to go in after them.
"Ernesto," she said quietly to her ops officer, "tell Anson to kill the command ships. Then execute Case Rupert."
Had the beings which crewed the Fleet's ships been capable of such an emotion, they might have felt despair as their sensors blossomed once again with the fresh spoor of hundreds of small attack craft. The fact that the Enemy had opened the range once more-and had stopped opening it just before he relaunched his attack craft-told the Deep Space Force what he was about.