Star Wars_ X-Wing 09_ Starfighters of Adumar - Aaron Allston [92]
“What sort of bombs?”
“They’re officially named Broadcaps, for the shape of the cloud that results, but they’re commonly called Punch-and-Pops. They hit the ground and penetrate several meters—the idea being that they can get into underground chambers like this one—before detonating. A single one can level several city blocks.”
“Charming,” Wedge said. “All right. What’s your plan?”
“The perator of Cartann likes noontime assaults. They look very nice on the recordings, and a lot of his pilots enjoy diving down at their targets with the sun at their backs. We can expect his attack on Yedagon City perhaps as early as noon tomorrow … so we’re not going to give him the opportunity. We’ll be launching before dawn to be in Cartann airspace at sunrise.”
Wedge nodded. Getting the hard-living, hard-drinking Cartann pilots out of their bunks a mere handful of hours after they reached them would provide the allied forces with one more desperately needed advantage. “Go on.”
“From there, our first tactic is to deny them their strength by busting up their chain of command wherever possible. The standard assault group of several fighter squadrons and associated bombers and fortresses will analyze the approach of Cartann forces. When they know which portion of the formation is the Cartann target—the ‘center’—that portion will slow its approach and mill. The outer edges will swing out farther and increase speed, forming horns to either side of the Cartann formation and at a lower altitude, at distances that put our horns out of range of one another’s weapons—but keep the Cartann forces within range of both sets of weapons. Since our firing plane is below the target plane, misses by missiles will not endanger our own forces—they’ll just reach their programmed range limits and detonate themselves. Meanwhile, the Cartann forces will have to suffer an initial barrage in which we can concentrate fire and they have to diffuse theirs, and then will have to choose to maintain their original plan or break up to assault the diverse elements of our formation. Once they’ve committed themselves, we can choose whether to collapse our formation and pin them there, or send the horns—with their bombers—on to their primary objectives, the air bases and communications centers.”
“Good,” Wedge said. “Let me ask a few questions. On Adumari lightboards, a squadron tends to be a single signal until it’s close enough to be perceived as individual fighter-craft. How many Blades return the same-sized signal, at distance, as Scythe-class and Meteor-class vehicles?”
Tycho looked up at one of the uniformed officers standing by. “General ya Sethes?”
The officer, a gray-haired woman built like a champion wrestler, answered without hesitation. “Four for Scythes, six for Meteors. Unless the squadron is Blade-Twenty-eights or earlier, in which case five and eight.”
“I want every bomber and aerial fortress transponder programmed to issue a false response,” Wedge said. “When queried by a lightbounce signal, instead of responding with its true name and other information, it sends back that it’s one Blade in a squadron. Three Scythes end up looking like one squadron, and two Meteors likewise, until they’re close enough.”
“So their projections on our composition are thrown off just when it’s time to mix it up,” Tycho said. “I like that.”
“That’s not all. I want us to assemble a list of, oh, the thirty most prestigious pilots flying in our united force. I want the transponders of at least two Blades in each fighter squadron to be able to toggle between returning their correct data and the data for one of those pilots. Likewise, I want the