The Enemy who had so savaged the System Which Must Be Defended wasn't following the course which had been predicted for him. True, he was returning from the secondary component of the system, but he wasn't headed directly for the remaining Worlds Which Must Be Defended. Instead, he'd chosen a course which would ensure he could retreat to the warp point by which he'd first entered the system . . . before the Fleet could intercept him. The Fleet could scarcely complain if the Enemy chose not to kill those worlds, but his maneuvers meant the Fleet would be unable to bring him to action.
Worse, the withdrawal of the mobile units from the warp point in this system had greatly facilitated the successful incursion of the second Enemy force. Given the flood of warp-capable missiles which had poured through the warp point, it was certainly possible that the mobile units would have been destroyed along with the fortresses had they not withdrawn, but that didn't alter the fact that the Fleet now had no choice but to flee from a force which it might otherwise have met in deep space battle with at least some prospect of victory. Not when the Enemy was in position to wipe all life from this system's inhabited world and so paralyze and disorganize the Fleet.
No. All the Fleet could do now was to continue to run, hoping it could reach the warp point and make transit to the System Which Must Be Defended before this fresh force of New Enemies was able to carry out the attack which would disrupt and disable the last intact force remaining to defend it. And at least enough time had elapsed for the gunboats and kamikazes in the System Which Must Be Defended to recover from the death shock of the Planets Which Must Be Defended which had already died. So when the Fleet did make transit, it was probable that there would be at least some support for it.
Any other species might have reflected upon the bitter irony which had sent the Fleet racing from one position towards another only to find itself caught between them and unable to intervene at either at the critical moment. But the beings which crewed the Fleet weren't like any other species. They were as immune to irony as they were to the concept of love or pity, and so the Fleet continued its headlong flight from one hopeless battle towards another, and there was only silence in the dark bowels of its ships.
"Here they come!"
Koraaza could overhear the chatter of combat reports from his fighter pilots to farshathkhanaak Raathnahrn quite clearly. The small claw of the Khan's command station was scarcely ten paces from Koraaza's own, and the great fang listened tautly as the intensity of combat mounted.
The visual display was a chaotic pattern of brilliant, short-lived stars as Third Fleet's fighter strength slashed and tore at the incoming hurricane of gunboats.
"Break left, White Three! Break left! Break-" The squadron commander's frantic warning to one of his pilots ended with the knife-sharp abruptness of thermonuclear death, and Koraaza's grip on the arms of his command chair tightened.
This avalanche onslaught wasn't what he'd anticipated. The mobile units from Bug-06 had continued to flee at their maximum speed even as Kraiisahka and her task force closed in on the inhabited world they'd abandoned. Third Fleet had cut the distance between them almost in half before the first Bug starship disappeared abruptly through the warp point less than one standard hour before Kraiisahka's initial attack went in, but Koraaza's command had been unable to overtake them in time to prevent their successful withdrawl from the system.
He'd known that the enemy's escape from the consequences of the Shiva Option would permit it to mount an effective warp point defense, which meant his own losses would be much, much worse than they might have been, but he hadn't hesitated. This was what Third Fleet had come for-to follow the enemy wherever he fled, to meet him in battle, and to destroy him utterly. And the only way to do that was to pursue through the warp point whose location he had so considerately revealed.
Yet the Bugs hadn't done the expected. Koraaza had paused long enough for a single recon drone volley when he reached the warp point in turn, and the drones' reports had galvanized him back into immediate motion. The Bugs showed no intention of defending the warp point; instead, the starships he'd followed from Bug-06 had continued to flee at their best speed. They were already far enough from the warp point that the recon probes had experienced the utmost difficulty in locating and tracking them. But they hadn't quite managed to slip entirely out of detection range, despite their ECM, and Koraaza had no intention of allowing them to do so.
Once again, Third Fleet achieved the unheard of and made transit through a Bug warp point in the presence of the enemy without losing a single starship. There weren't even any OWPs to protect it, although it was surrounded by extensive minefields which ought to have been seeded with fortresses. The only reason Koraaza could come up with for the absence of those fortresses was that they'd been removed to cover some other, more immediately threatened warp point. If the Bugs were becoming as strapped for major combat units as all of the intelligence reports suggested, then they were probably short of OWPs, as well, and they must be moving those they still possessed to cover their most vital spots.
But Third Fleet's unprecedented immunity hadn't lasted long. The first long-range strike against the fleeing Bug starships had roared out, with murder in its pilots' eyes, but before they could make contact with their targets, the recon fighters covering the flanks of the attack formations had picked up the incredible tidal bore of gunboats thundering in to the attack.
It was the first time Koraaza or any of his personnel had seen the "Bughouse Swarm" with their own eyes, and the sight had been almost more than he could credit. He'd thought he was intellectually prepared for the reality. He'd been wrong. No one could be prepared until they'd actually experienced it, yet the sheer, stunning impact of that onrushing tide of destruction hadn't paralyzed him. Nor had it paralyzed his vilka'farshatok. They'd planned and trained to face precisely this threat ever since Raymond Prescott and Zhaarnak'telmasa first encountered it, and his pilots reacted with the instant precision of drilled, bone-deep response.
No one in Third Fleet had ever seen a dogfight a fraction as intense as the one which erupted as their strikefighters met the gunboats head-on. The Bugs had enjoyed the advantage of knowing they would encounter fighters, and they'd armed their gunboats accordingly, with heavy loads of anti-fighter missiles. The AFHAWKs had taken a grim toll of the Orion fighters, but the pilots of those fighters had sound doctrine of their own and no one in the explored galaxy-with the possible exception of their new Crucian allies-was better than an Orion in this sort of combat environment. The loss rate was entirely in Third Fleet's favor. Indeed, well over a thousand gunboats had been blown out of existence in return for scarcely two hundred fighters, but some of them had still gotten through, and Kinaasha'defarnoo and the Shernaku-class MTVs, as the largest units in Third Fleet's order of battle, had drawn the full brunt of their fury. But that, too, had been anticipated in Koraaza's battle plans and training. Third Fleet had turned its monitors into kamikaze traps, surrounded by escort vessels especially trained to coordinate with the strikegroups specifically tasked for the short range defense of the huge carriers and the fleet flagship.
No Human admiral-with the possible exceptions of Raymond Prescott or Vanessa Murakuma-would have as much as considered such tactics. TFN doctrine was explicit and unyielding on this point: fighters were responsible for long-range interceptions; starships were responsible for the close range defense against fighters or kamikazes. Above all, one kept one's own fighters out of the envelope of one's own AFHAWKs, because the possibility of friendly fire casualties became a virtual certainty if one did not.