Those systems' intricate sophistication, and the interdependency of their components, made them vulnerable to any damage-even the five-centimeter-wide cylinder of destruction drilled by a primary beam. It was like lancing a boil.

Command ship after command ship bled atmosphere as the primary beams chewed deep into their hearts. And the defensive fire of battlegroup after battlegroup became even more ineffectual as the command ships' central direction was stripped away. As they looked at their readouts, Zhaarnak and Raymond Prescott watched the Bug battle-line devolve into a collection of individual ships as its datalink unraveled and its corporate identity lost its integrity.

And against the finely meshed, coordinated offensive fire of a fleet whose datalink was unimpaired, individual ships stood no chance at all.

Zhaarnak turned to his com screen, now split into two segments.

"I believe, Force Leader Shaaldaar, that it is time to bring the fighters back. They can interdict the remaining gunboats while TF 61 deals with the battle-line."

Prescott cleared his throat.

"As Fleet commander, I presume you'll want to assume direct command of TF 61 for the attack."

"By no means. Our original understanding holds. The task force is yours."

Prescott's eyes met Zhaarnak's in the com screen, and when he spoke, it was in the Tongue of Tongues.

"You give me honor, brother, by allowing me the kill. It will not be forgotten."

And then, with the fighters warding its flanks against despairing gunboat attacks, TF 61 advanced grimly.

It was almost twenty-four standard Terran hours later when, again in split-screen conference, they received the report that the last fugitive Bug ship had been run down and destroyed. But however long the mopping up had required, the actual battle had lasted only two of those hours.

With their command datalink gone, the point defense of individual Bug ships-even monitors-had been unable to abate the missile-storm which had broken over them. In silent desperation, they had been reduced to trying to ram as many Allied ships as possible, but they were slower and less maneuverable than their opponents, even at the best of times . . . which this most certainly was not.

The outcome had never really been in doubt.

Yet the magnitude and completeness of that outcome had still been awe inspiring. If anyone had still been able to doubt Raymond Prescott's abilities after the Kliean Chain campaign, Operation Pesthouse, and the defense of Centauri, no one could now. He had wielded his battle-line as a kendo master wields a katana, and that superbly tempered blade had responded with the readiness he had trained into it over the months of preparation in Zephrain. For the Bugs, the result had been not defeat, but annihilation.

But now their wide-ranging recon fighters had brought word that they were still not alone in the system.

"It stands to reason," Shaaldaar said in his deliberate way. "We are all agreed that this is-or was-one of their important systems. So it must be linked to other Bug systems by various warp points. As soon as they became aware of our presence here, they must have summoned reinforcements from those systems by courier drone. The five standard days it took us to bring their mobile forces to bay and then fight the battle must have given those reinforcements time to arrive."

"Yes," Zhaarnak muttered. Prescott had no difficulty recognizing the emotions raging behind that alien face. It was a characteristic of Orions-and Zhaarnak, more than most-that a successful kill only whetted their appetite for more.

"They have no idea of our strength, or even of exactly where we are. We could go back into cloak, ambush them. . . ."

Zhaarnak let his voice trail off as he met Prescott's eyes. He could read his vilkshatha brother as readily as the human could read him.

"We must face facts," Prescott said into the silence. "We've taken losses ourselves-nine superdreadnoughts, seven battlecruisers, over seven hundred fighters. . . . And our stores of missiles of all kinds have been depleted. More importantly, the recon fighters' reports make it pretty clear that these Bugs are behaving normally. Whatever affected the Bugs in this system evidently doesn't have interstellar range. We had an opportunity, and we were justified in seizing it. But boldness is one thing, and recklessness is another."

Shaaldaar gave a smile that was as disconcertingly humanlike as everything else about his face.

"I believe it was your Human philosopher Clausewitz who observed that a plan which succeeds is bold and that one which fails is reckless."

Prescott smiled back at him.

"That's precisely the distinction. And to take on unshaken monitor battlegroups, even if we did manage to obtain tactical surprise, would be to risk a judgment of recklessness when history got around to considering us."

Zhaarnak's features reflected his inner conflict so well as to remind Prescott that the Orion face, like that of humans but unlike that of Terran cats, had evolved as an instrument of communication. Finally, his ears tilted forward and he gave the fluttering purr that was his race's sigh.

"You are correct. We have accomplished our objectives, and more. We will return to Zephrain in accordance with our original plan."

Sixth Fleet fell back toward the warp point, covered by its weary fighter pilots as the strikegroups fought a series of bickering actions at extreme range against the fresh Bug gunboats.

The last Enemy units were gone, escaped from this system that they had rendered uninhabitable.

The Fleet had failed to protect the Worlds Which Must Be Defended, or to arrive in time to prevent the destruction of the Fleet component which had been assigned originally to that task. The repercussions of the destruction of the Worlds Which Must Be Defended would have grave consequences for the war effort, and the loss of so many ships in such futile combat was . . . annoying.

Yet the affair hadn't been a total loss. The gunboats had been ordered to track the withdrawing Enemy starships to their warp point of exit, regardless of casualties-and they'd succeeded.

A handful of them had even survived long enough to report that warp point's location.

TFNS Dnepr transited before KONS Celmithyr'theaarnouw. So Raymond Prescott had a few moments to appreciate the sight of Zephrain A's yellow glow, and the distant orange spark of Zephrain B, before turning to his com screen and speaking formally.

"Fang Zhaarnak, I relieve you."

"I stand relieved, Fang Pressssscott."

The little ceremony had been agreed to in advance. Now they were back in the Zephrain system, which was part of the Terran Federation, duly ceded by the Khan, and where the massive Terran orbital fortresses made the TFN the predominant service in terms of both tonnage and personnel. So Prescott was now in command of Sixth Fleet, and they exchanged closed-lipped grins at the formality.

Those grins faded for a moment as they looked into one another's eyes and recalled those who would not be returning to Zephrain. The count was in now: 22,605 personnel of all races. There were also 5,017 wounded aboard the remaining ships.

But then the grins were back.

"Did your staff intelligence officer ever complete that estimate of the system's total population, Raaymmonnd?"

"Yes. Commander Chung did an extensive analysis of the sensor returns from Planets I and II. Based on the Bug population density the energy outputs imply, he estimates a total of-"

"-at least twenty billion Bugs!" Lieutenant Commander Togliatti looked around the ready room, where VF-94's surviving pilots sprawled, exhausted. "The spooks figure that there were eight to ten billion of them on the planet we waxed, and another twelve to fourteen billion on the other one."

They stared at him, punch-drunk. They'd gone sleepless for days, sustained by drugs, and completed their recovery aboard Wyvern just before warp transit. They no longer had any response in them.

But then Irma Sanchez gave him a look of disappointment.

"Twenty billion? Come on, Skipper! Is that all we killed?"

CHAPTER FOUR: "Surely that can't be right!"

Zephrain was a distant binary system. The orange K8v secondary component, with its small retinue of what were by courtesy referred to as planets, followed an orbit of over fifty percent eccentricity. Even at periastron, it barely swung within three light-hours of Component A. Currently, it was headed out to the Stygian regions where it spent most of its year and was barely visible from Xanadu, the second of that privileged coterie of inner planets that basked in Zephrain A's warm yellow G5v light. Gazing out the window of his office, Raymond Prescott could almost imagine himself on Old Terra.

Not quite, of course. It was always "not quite." The tree whose branches almost brushed against the window was a featherleaf, product of a well-developed local ecosystem which showed little sign of yielding to Terran imports. And practiced senses told him that the gravity was a shade on the low side-0.93 G, to be exact. Still, Zephrain A II was a singularly hospitable world for the humans who'd dubbed it Xanadu.

It was equally comfortable for Orions-and they had discovered it first. Reactionaries like Zhaarnak's father, and even relatively enlightened old-timers like Kthaara'zarthan, had never recovered from the Khan's precedent-shattering act of ceding the system to the Terran Federation.

The move had made sense, though. Indeed, it had become unavoidable the moment the teeming Bug system was found on the far side of one of Zephrain's four warp points. On the far side of another of those warp points lay Rehfrak, a sector capital of the Orions, with billions of the Khan's subjects, squarely in the path of any Bug counterattack an offensive might provoke. Only the Terran Federation, with its prodigious industrial capacity, could fortify Zephrain so heavily as to make any offensive use of the system thinkable.

A project on that scale had required a workforce of millions, and millions more to service the workforce. They'd come from every corner of the Federation. In the streets of Xanadu's instant prefab "cities" could be seen every variety of human being that Old Terra had spawned, and quite a few it hadn't. That was unusual in today's Federation. The Heart Worlds' once-polyglot populations had long since blended into "planetary ethnicities," while the young Fringe Worlds had been settled by people seeking to preserve various traditional ethnicities from disappearance by giving each its own planet.

Nevertheless, this motley crew had sunk tendrils of root into the soil of Xanadu with surprising rapidity. The population had already outgrown government by a Navy administrator, and a provisional government had been organized under the duly appointed Federal governor preparatory to seeking full Federation membership. Watching the constitutional convention, Prescott had occasionally found himself wondering if someone had formed a club for disbarred lawyers. And yet, oddly enough, some genuine political creativity had come out of it. Architectural creativity, too; looking to the future, they'd approved plans for a stately Government House on a hill above the river-named the Alph, naturally-that Prescott could see in the distance, beyond the spacefield. Of course, actual construction was being deferred until things became a little less unsettled here . . . meaning, no Bugs a single warp transit away.

Which, Prescott reminded himself briskly, is why we're here. He turned away from the window. Zhaarnak was waiting with the patience that was one facet of his seemingly contradictory character.

"Have they arrived yet?" the human asked.

"Yes. In fact, they are waiting in the outer office."

Prescott nodded, sat down at his desk, and touched a button.

"Send Small Claw Uaaria and Captain Chung in."

Uaaria'salath-ahn, Zhaarnak's staff intelligence officer, was the senior of the two spooks. By the generally recognized rank equivalencies, a "small claw of the khan" was somewhere between a captain and a commodore. So she led the way into the room, and Prescott reflected on how unusual it was to see an Orion female wearing the jeweled harness that was their navy's uniform. Not so very long ago, it would have been unheard of, and that, too, was a change which owed more than a little to the Terran example. The patriarchal Khanate had been headed in that direction even before it discovered just how capable human females could be as warriors in the first two interstellar wars. Since then-and especially since ISW 3-the move towards full female integration into the military had gone on with what (for the extremely tradition-bound Orions) was enormous rapidity.

On the other hand, female Orions still had to "prove" their worthiness for their ranks by being even better at the same job than the vast majority of males could have been. In some ways, Uaaria's position was a bit easier than most, for Prescott knew that her father was an old friend and war comrade of Zhaarnak's. He also knew his vilkshatha brother well enough to realize that he retained enough of his race's old sexism to find his intelligence officer extremely pleasant to look upon, although he would no more consider taking liberties with her than he would have considered it with one of his own daughters. But in one respect, at least, Uaaria was a perfect exemplar of what it took for a female to succeed in the Khanate's military: she was very good at her job. In fact, she was very, very good. Despite her youth, Prescott considered her to be one of the half dozen finest intelligence officers, human or Orion, he'd ever met, and he knew Zhaarnak relied upon her analyses implicitly.

As did Prescott himself.

"Sit down," he invited.

"Thank you for seeing us on such short notice Fang Pressssscottt, Small Fang," Uaaria murmured, lowering herself into one of the chairs in front of Prescott's desk as naturally as if she hadn't been raised to sit on piles of floor cushions.

"No problem. When the two of you requested this meeting, we were eager to hear the results of your analysis of what we observed during the offensive."

"Particularly," Zhaarnak added, "your interpretation of the unprecedented confusion that overtook the Bahgs after our first major surface strike on Planet I."

"We still cannot be certain as to the cause," Uaaria replied cautiously. "Our working hypothesis is still the same one Fang Presssssscottt advanced at the time: that all the Bahgs in a given system are in some kind of telepathic rapport, and that destroying that many of them at once had an effect on the rest similar to . . . to . . ."

"To hitting them over the head with a hammer," Chung offered.

"Something of the sort," Uaaria allowed. "But whatever the precise mechanism of the phenomenon, its effects were clearly system-wide."

"A pity they are not universal," Zhaarnak muttered.

"That wouldn't do us much good, considering that the disorientation is only temporary and no one's ever figured out how to coordinate attacks in different systems," Prescott observed. One human head nodded and two sets of Orion ears flicked in agreement. Simultaneity was a meaningless concept in interstellar space. "But even so," the admiral continued, turning back to Uaaria, "this seems to offer an advantage we can exploit when attacking heavily populated Bug systems."

"Indeed, Fang. In order to throw such a system's defenders off balance, the inhabited planets should be bombarded as early and as heavily as possible."

"Hmmm. . . ." Prescott considered that for a moment. The ethical issues such a policy would have raised in a war with any other race never even entered his mind-these were Bugs. But that didn't mean there weren't practical problems.

"An ideal combination of circumstances let us land the punch we did," he mused aloud. "Possibly an unrepeatable combination. Still, it's something to bear in mind. For now, though, please continue with your other conclusions."

"A few conclusions and a great deal of speculation," Uaaria demurred. "I will let my colleague here state our first conclusion, as it was he who arrived at it."

"Before we left Alpha Centauri last May," Amos Chung began, "I got Admiral LeBlanc to copy me the data by which his Lieutenant Sanders had inferred the existence of five Bug 'home hives.' Based on the observations and sensor information we recorded during the engagement, I'm prepared to state that the system we attacked was Home Hive Three."

Prescott and Zhaarnak exchanged glances. Chung's announcement had the same kind of resonance as Sanders' briefing at Alpha Centauri: it imposed at least the beginnings of form on the threat they faced.

"We are not," Chung went on, "in a position as yet to place Home Hive Three in any larger context, as we have no idea where it lies in relation to any other Bug system-"

"Naturally," Zhaarnak said, and it was Prescott's turn to nod agreement. Not a single scrap of Bug navigational data had been captured in the entire war. Or, more accurately, tonnes of it might have been captured, but no one had any way to know.

"-but I've run a cost analysis of the defenses we encountered there. You may find the results informative."

"A 'cost analysis'?" Even someone far less familiar with the Tongue of Tongues than Prescott could have read the incredulity in Zhaarnak's voice. "How was this possible?"

"The energy-emission readings allowed us to estimate the system's total economic output. And by analogizing to our own defensive installations, we can estimate how much of such output is required to maintain them. Admittedly, this is a case of estimate piled atop estimate. But if our figures are at all valid-and we believe they are-the defenses were strangely light for the system they were protecting."

Both admirals sat up straight.

"Light?" Prescott echoed. He recalled that mastodonic space station. "Surely that can't be right!"

Chung read the admiral's thoughts.

"Yes, Sir, I know. That space station at Planet I was huge, and they had another one like it at Planet II. And I don't like to think about the firepower those orbital fortresses could have put out if we hadn't caught them flat footed." The spook visibly braced himself against an anticipated blast of high-ranking skepticism. "Nevertheless, if our assumptions are correct, the maintenance costs of those defenses amounted to only about forty-eight percent of the gross system product."

"That sounds like quite a lot," Prescott observed mildly, understating the case by several orders of magnitude. He tried to imagine the reaction of certain human politicians to a proposal to spend that much on orbital defenses. The perfect crime, an inner imp whispered. Give 'em all heart failure and then laugh like Hell. . . .

"On the face of it, Sir, perhaps. But the corresponding percentages for Sol, Alpha Centauri, Valkha'zeeranda, and Gormus are much higher. The figures are available for your perusal."

"Well, of course," Zhaarnak interjected. "After all, those systems are-"

The Orion stopped abruptly as understanding dawned, some fraction of a second after it had dawned on Prescott, and Chung nodded, recognizing that they'd grasped the point.

"Yes. Those systems can't be considered in isolation. They draw on other systems-many other systems. They're the capitals of interstellar polities, except for Alpha Centauri, whose unique strategic importance lifts it into the same class: systems which must be protected at any cost, including the diversion of resources from elsewhere. But . . . if our assumptions are even close to right, that's precisely the status the 'home hive' systems ought to hold among the Bugs! They shouldn't have to rely solely on their own resources, either."

"All right, Commander," Prescott acknowledged. "You've made your point. Home Hive Three wasn't as heavily defended as it should have been. Do you have a theory to account for this?"

"The majority view among the intelligence community here," Chung answered obliquely, "is that it's a matter of resource allocation. The Bugs skimp on static defenses in order to build the biggest mobile fleet possible."

"There is historical precedent for that," Zhaarnak remarked to Prescott. "The Rigelians had similar priorities."

"And," Prescott ruminated, "it would help account for the size of the mobile fleets they've kept throwing at us. And for the fact that those fleets have taken terrific losses without batting an eyelash-or whatever their equivalent is." He nodded to Chung. "Yes, Amos, your theory seems to make sense."

"Excuse me, Sir." Chung was all diffidence. "I didn't say it's my theory."

"But didn't I understand you to say that it's the consensus of the sp-of the intelligence community?"

"It is, Sir. But I don't happen to agree with it."

"So," Zhaarnak inquired, "only you are right, then?"

Uaaria's eyes met those of the Ninety-first Small Fang of the Khan unflinchingly.

"Not only him, Sir. I share his view," she said, and Prescott's lips gave a quirk too brief to be called a smile.

"I begin to understand why you two asked for a private meeting. All right, talk to us," he ordered, and Uaaria leaned forward earnestly.

"It is our considered judgment that the Bahgs did not draw on more outside resources for the defense of Home Hive Three-and, presumably, the other home hive systems, as well-because they do not have such resources."

Zhaarnak recovered first.

"In light of the resources we have watched the Bahgs expend without apparently so much as flinching over the past few years, Small Claw, I suggest that you have a bit of explaining to do."

"Certainly, Sir." Uaaria seemed to gather her thoughts. "To begin, let me cite two facts we observed in Home Hive Three. First, the incredible population densities on the two habitable planets. Second, the total absence of energy emissions or other indications of any Bahg presence elsewhere in the system. There were no orbital habitats, no hostile environment colonies on any moons or asteroids."

She paused expectantly.

"Well, yes," Prescott said. "That's undeniable enough. Although . . ."

"Although the precise relevance is not yet apparent," Zhaarnak finished for him, just a bit more tartly, and Uaaria gave an ear flick of acknowledgment.

"I believe that the relevance will become apparent, Small Fang. Taken together, these two facts indicate that the Bahgs are interested only in life-bearing planets of the same kind favored by both our species, and that they are willing to accept what we Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee, or even Humans, would consider obscene overcrowding of such planets. Admittedly, we cannot begin to estimate how many such planets they have thus packed with their species. But as Ahhdmiraaaal LeBlaaanc and his subordinate Saaanderzzz have deduced, the existence of five sub-types within their ship classes, distinguished by differences in construction technique as marked as those between two closely associated races-Humans and Ophiuchi, let us say-implies the existence of five distinct subgroups among the Bahgs, each with its own identity."

"I think I see where this is leading," Prescott interjected. "But please continue."

"It seems to us, given the Bahgs' apparent propensity for overcrowding any available life-bearing planet to the limits of its capacity before considering expansion, that each of these five subgroups occupies no more than a few densely populated systems like Home Hive Three."

Chung could restrain himself no longer.

"Which means that, contrary to what we've been assuming all along, the Bugs don't have a far-flung interstellar imperium like the Federation or the Khanate. If Home Hive Three, say, was the nodal system of a sub-empire with anything like the number of sparsely settled colonial systems we have for each nodal system, they'd've drawn on the resources of those colonies and built really scary defenses for it."

"And so," Uaaria concluded as Chung stopped for breath, "Home Hive Three had to rely on its own resources, and those of no more than a very few other systems. By extension, that should be the case with the other four home hive systems, as well."

"I see." Prescott thought for a moment, in a silence which, he noted, Zhaarnak didn't break. Then he looked from Uaaria to Chung and back again. "Very cogently argued. But I wonder if you've thought out the full implications of what you're saying."

"Sir?" Chung sounded puzzled.

"Your theory is that the Bugs have put all their eggs in a small number of baskets. Not fragile baskets, unfortunately; I don't like to think about the battle those 'light' defenses could have given us if we hadn't caught them with their metaphorical pants down. But if you're right, the number of similar battles we're going to have to fight is much lower than anyone has dared to believe or even hope."

"Do not forget, we must first find those 'baskets.' " Zhaarnak's expressive face was a battleground for excitement and caution, and his tone reflected that struggle. "Of the remaining four home hive systems, we have only identified one so far. And five occupied systems-meaning up to five warp point assaults-stand between that one and Ahhdmiraaaal Muhrakhuuuuma's fleet."

"Granted. Still . . ."

Prescott turned to the spooks.

"All right. Set your conclusions down as a formal report and tell Anna I want it dispatched by special courier to Alpha Centauri. I want to bounce your theory off Admiral LeBlanc ASAP. Maybe he can poke a few holes that haven't occurred to any of us in it. But if you're right, you've just given us the first piece of good news the Alliance has had since the war began. If you're right," he repeated sternly.

He understood, and shared, Zhaarnak's inner conflict. He wanted to believe Uaaria and Chung were right, as he instinctually felt they were. But he also understood why he wanted to believe it. And because he did, he was reluctant to trust his instincts, influenced as they were by a hope bordering on desperation.

"And there is another aspect to the matter," Zhaarnak said heavily. "If this theory is correct, Home Hive Three's defenses were maintained by that system alone, with the help of a few others-for it goes without saying that a mere five industrialized systems, be they ever so heavily developed, could not possibly produce the forces we have already encountered in combat."

"Of course not, Small Fang," Uaaria agreed quickly enough to beat Prescott to it.

"So therefore," Zhaarnak resumed, "your initial cost estimate for maintaining Home Hive Three's defenses is somewhat high as a percentage of that one system's economic output, for it had some outside help. But still, the figure is probably correct to well within one order of magnitude. Say, ten percent of the gross system product. Not, be it noted, ten percent of the government's budget, whatever that may mean for Bahgs. No-ten percent of the gross system product. And that is just what they are prepared to spend for their static defenses, and completely exclusive of their mobile forces! Can you imagine what that would mean in terms of . . . well, of the standard of living of the population?"

"No," Prescott admitted flatly. In fact, he'd thought of it before Zhaarnak brought it up, but only to reject it as unthinkable. It suggested a society, if that was the word, which existed only to expand, and expanded only to secure the means for further expansion. A true cancer. They'd be eating each other simply to stave off famine . . . temporarily.

Dear God, Prescott, not normally a religious man, thought with full appreciation of what he was thinking. What are we really dealing with?

CHAPTER FIVE: "We know it's coming."

By the standard dating of Old Terra, December 2364 passed into January 2365. Prescott and Zhaarnak were out with Sixth Fleet in the cold reaches of the Zephrain system, five light-hours from the glowing yellow hearth of Zephrain A, as the year changed, holding station on the warp point leading to what they now knew to be Home Hive Three.

January became February, and they were still there.

"We can't go back yet," Prescott said patiently, looking into Zhaarnak's grumpy visage on the com screen. He was back aboard TFNS Dnepr, and the Orion was back aboard Celmithyr'theaarnouw, and they were both in Task Force 61's formation again. Of course, here in Zephrain space, Dnepr was Sixth Fleet's flagship, while Zhaarnak commanded TF 61 from Celmithyr'theaarnouw. There'd been examples in Terran history of rotating command structures which had actually worked in practice. Not a lot of them, of course, but Amos Chung, who was something of a historian, was fond of bringing up the ancient pre-space admirals Halsey and Spruance. Prescott, who'd done a little research of his own, harbored some fairly strong suspicions that even those two semi-mythical commanders had experienced their fair share of bumps and bruises along the way. Not to mention a not-so-minor pothole at a place called Leyte Gulf. And even if they hadn't, no inter-species alliance in history had ever attempted a similar arrangement.

Not successfully, at any rate.

Yet this time, it actually did work. In point of fact, Prescott was more than a little surprised by how well the entire Alliance managed to function in partnership. There was still the occasional spat, and there'd even been one or two knock-down, drag-out fights. The worst of them had been between so-called political leaders, and Prescott was forced to admit that more often than not those quarrels had been provoked by human politicos. There seemed to be something about human nature which promoted a more bare-knuckles approach to political interaction. The Khanate of Orion had its own political factionalism, and even the Ophiuchi had experienced the odd generation or so of feuding political combinations. As far as anyone knew, the Gorm never had, but, then, the Gorm were strange in a lot of ways.

On the other hand, when Orion disagreements and character assassination reached the level which appeared to be the normal state of affairs for the Terran Federation, the bodies were usually already stacked two or three deep and another round of civil war couldn't be too far away. The steadily increasing tension between the Corporate Worlds and the Fringe Worlds made that even worse, normally, but at least Samuel Johnson's famous formulation still held: the prospect of hanging did concentrate one's mind wonderfully. It even helped Fringer and Corporate Worlder find sufficient common ground to concentrate on fighting the Bugs instead of one another. Sort of.

Well, on fighting the Bugs as well as one another. Humans being humans, they seemed quite capable of waging both battles simultaneously.

Because of that, the sometimes prickly Orions had been unwontedly tactful and forbearing where human political processes-and even individual politicians-were concerned. The fact that for all of their differences over how to go about manipulating their fellow politicians Tabby and human politicos were very much alike under the skin probably also helped. Many of them might cherish boundless contempt for the other side's tactics, but all of them understood precisely what the object of the game was.

Differences of opinion on the military side tended to be more concrete and immediate and less about personalities and ideology. Oh, there were chauvinistic bigots (like Zhaarnak's father, for example) on both sides of almost any interspecies line, and fundamental differences in outlook and honor codes could contribute mightily to the . . . energy with which questions of strategy, tactics, and logistics were debated. But by and large, the people on the opposing sides of those debates found themselves forced to confront hard and fast limitations on physical resources and strategic opportunities. And, of course, all of them knew that if they let themselves get distracted by infighting over pet projects or priorities and lost this war, there wouldn't be another in which they could restore their position. If all else failed, the Joint Chiefs and the chiefs of naval operations of the Alliance's member navies had all demonstrated a ruthless willingness to summarily sack any officer who habitually created unnecessary problems between species. There'd been quite a few such "reliefs for cause" during the first year or so of the war; there had been exactly none of them since.

Of course, even without any chauvinism at all, there would have been plenty of other factors to kick sand into the gears. Language differences, for one. The recent advances in translation software were a great help . . . when the software was available. Unfortunately, the demands that software made on the computers on which it ran meant that it wasn't really practical on anything much smaller than a capital ship. That left the crews of lesser starships and strikefighter squadrons to labor under all of the inherent limitations of an organic translating interface.

The worst potential problems of all lay between human and Orion. Standard English had emerged as the lingua franca of the non-Orion members of the Alliance, because both the Gorm and the Ophiuchi were at least capable of reproducing the sounds English used. None of the other Allies, however, could do the same thing for the Tongue of Tongues, whatever the occasional highly atypical individual-like Prescott himself-might be able to manage. And in what was clearly a special dispensation of the great Demon Murphy, the Orions whose language no one else could speak were not only the touchiest and most prone to take offense of the lot but far and away the second most powerful member of the Alliance.

After so many years of brutal warfare against a common foe with whom any sort of accommodation was clearly impossible, however, most of the rough edges had been ground away . . . on the military side, at least. There simply wasn't any other choice when the only alternative to close cooperation was annihilation. The worst of the bigots on both sides had been retired or shifted into less sensitive positions, although a significant but thankfully small number of them continued to crop up-always at extremely inopportune moments, of course. And the occasional officer who created problems for everyone out of stupidity or ambition continued to survive . . . usually because they enjoyed the protection of powerful political patrons.

Yet there remained an enormous difference between the ability of allies to fight in cooperation, however close, and the ability to switch the ultimate command authority of a fleet back and forth across species lines without any friction at all. In fact, Prescott had come to the conclusion that Sixth Fleet's rotating command structure probably wouldn't have worked at all if it hadn't been headed by Zhaarnak'telmasa and himself-or, at least, by two beings who shared their relationship or something equivalent to it.

"I was not speaking of us so much as of you." Zhaarnak's response to his original observation pulled Prescott back up out of his thoughts. "I can stay out here with this task force, and Force Leader Shaaldaar with his. But you are needed back on Xanadu. There are too many details which require the Fleet commander's personal attention, and you could exercise overall supervision of these exercises from there as well as from here."

Prescott shook his head.

"At the moment, Xanadu is five light-hours away. I couldn't exercise on-scene command from there."

"Do you really need to?"

"Yes. And I'm not talking about the exercises."

"You mean-?"

"We know it's coming, Zhaarnak."

They both knew what "it" was.

Not long after their meeting with Uaaria and Chung, reports from second generation recon drones sent through the Home Hive Three warp point had laid to rest any doubts they might have cherished about whether Sixth Fleet's departure had been tracked. It was now clear, beyond any possibility of self-deception, that the Bugs knew the location of the closed warp point through which death had come to Home Hive Three's worlds. For now they were tractoring their orbital weapons platforms there from Home Hive Three's other warp points, and positioning clouds of mines and armed deep space buoys to support them. The next incursion through that warp point would be far less pleasant than the last.

Prescott and Zhaarnak had taken a calculated risk when they'd lingered in Home Hive Three to annihilate the disoriented Bug mobile forces even at the possible cost of giving away the warp point's location, but that kind of choice was what admirals were paid to make. The vilkshatha brothers had earned their salaries. And afterwards, they'd viewed the recon drones' reports with equanimity. Having made their decision, they were prepared to accept its consequences. To have been spared the need to face those consequences would have been sheer luck. And, as a wise man had noted centuries before, luck is like government. We can't get along without it, but only a fool relies on it.

Neither Prescott nor Zhaarnak was a fool, and so neither was unduly disturbed by the Bugs' fortification of their end of the Home Hive Three warp connection. What was disturbing was the large, fresh mobile fleet the Bugs were steadily amassing behind those static defenses.

"All right," Zhaarnak conceded, "we both know that an attack on this system is inevitable. But not necessarily during the course of these exercises! You cannot stay out here permanently, you know."

"I know. But all indications from the RD2s are that it's coming soon."

"If so, what of it? We have allowed for this possibility all along. And you cannot say we have not prepared for it."

Zhaarnak gestured at something outside the range of his com pickup-probably, Prescott guessed, an auxiliary plot like his own, displaying TF 63 as a cloud of color-coded lights swarming in stately procession around the violet circle of the warp point.

Sixth Fleet's third task force hadn't joined the other two in the scorching of Home Hive three for the excellent reason that it didn't include a single vessel that could move under its own power. Instead, Vice Admiral Alex Mordechai commanded orbital fortresses-fifty-seven of them, the smallest as big as a superdreadnought and the largest even bigger than the Bug monitors. Untrained eyes might have looked at the arrangement of those icons in the sphere and seen chaos. But Prescott recognized the product of careful planning rooted in well-developed tactical doctrine.

Interstellar travel was possible only via warp transit, and only one ship at a time could safely perform such transit, lest multiple ones irritate the gods of physics by trying to materialize in overlapping volumes of space. So it had always been a truism of interstellar war that the defender of a known warp point knew exactly where attacking ships had to appear . . . one at a time. In the face of such an advantage, many people-disproportionately represented, it often seemed, in the fields of politics and journalism-were at a loss to understand how any warp point assault could possibly succeed except through the defenders' incompetence. To be fair, a similar attitude hadn't been unknown among military officers in the early days-especially given the momentary disorientation that overtook both minds and instruments after the profoundly unnatural experience of warp transit. With beam-weapon-armed ships or fortresses stationed right on top of the warp point, the befuddled attackers would emerge one by one into a ravening hell of directed-energy fire. If missile-armed vessels were available for supporting bombardment from longer ranges, so much the better. The pre-space expression "make the rubble bounce" wasn't apropos to the environment, but it nevertheless came to mind.

Things hadn't quite worked out that way, for the lovely picture had run aground on certain hard realities. One was that, while the defender knew where the attack would come, he had no way of knowing when it would come. Another was that no military organization could keep all its units permanently at the highest state of alert. Taken together, those facts meant that attackers might appear at any time, without warning and in unanticipated strength, to pour their own point-blank energy fire into surprised defenders. Nor had it proven possible to clog the mouth of a warp point with mines; the grav surge and tidal forces associated with the warp phenomenon made it impossible to keep the things on station directly atop it. The space around a point could be-and was-covered with lethal concentrations of the things, backed up by independently deployed energy weapon platforms, but any mine or platform left directly on top of an open warp point was inevitably sucked into it and destroyed. So although it was possible to severely constrain an attacker's freedom of maneuver, the defender was seldom able to deny him at least some space in which to deploy his fleet as its units arrived.

And then, with the passage of time, had come what the TFN designated the SBMHAWK: the Strategic Bombardment Homing All the Way Killer-a carrier pod that was a small robotic spacecraft, capable of transiting a warp point only to belch forth three to five strategic bombardment missiles programmed to home in on defending ship types. Because they were throwaway craft, the carrier pods could and did make mass simultaneous transits, accepting a certain percentage of losses as the price of smothering a warp point's defenders with sheer numbers of missiles. With such a bombardment to precede it, the prospect of a warp point assault had become as nerve racking for the defender as for the attacker-arguably more so, because the attacker at least knew in advance when he was going in, and could prepare himself for the probability of death.

But eventually the march of technology had provided the defense with what it had most conspicuously lacked: warning of the attack. The second-generation recon drone had been designed to allow covert warp point survey work by robotic proxy-an excellent idea in a universe that held Bugs. But it also had a more directly military use. With its advanced stealth features, it could probe through a known warp point undetected and report back on any mobilization that portended an attack . . . just as Sixth Fleet's RD2s had been doing.

One thing, however, hadn't changed. The name of the game was to position your assets so that every unit was at its own principal weapons' optimum range from the warp point, and Alex Mordechai had done just that. His beam and missile-armed fortresses clustered around the warp point in concentric shells, prepared to pour fire into that immaterial volume of space. His six BS6Vs, each one the base for a hundred and sixty-two fighters, maintained station further out, outside direct weapons' range of the warp point. All the bases were on rotating general-quarters status, and had been ever since the RD2s first reported the Bug force building up like a thunderhead at the other end of the warp line. And in addition to the fortresses, the plot showed the lesser lights of unmanned munitions in multicolored profusion: twelve hundred patterns of antimatter mines, seven hundred and fifty laser-armed deep space buoys, twelve hundred independently deployed energy weapons (less powerful than the buoys' detonation-lasers, but reusable), and eight hundred SBMHAWK carrier pods tied into the fortresses' fire control.

Nothing, surely, could come through that warp point and live.

"Maybe you're right," Prescott conceded. "And I have got desk work waiting on Xanadu." Lots of it, he thought bleakly. Lots and lots of it. "I tell you what. Admiral Mordechai has an RD2 that's due to return from Home Hive Three in about four hours. I'll just wait until he's had a chance to study its data. If nothing's changed dramatically, then I'll go back."

"You are procrastinating, Raaymmonnd," Zhaarnak said sternly.

"I am not! It just can't hurt to-"

"Excuse me, Admiral."

Surprised by the interruption, Prescott turned to face his chief of staff.

"What is it, Anna?"

"Sir," Captain Mandagalla's black face was very controlled, "Jacques has just received a message from Admiral Mordechai. The RD2's just returned. Its data hasn't been downloaded yet, but-"

Prescott spared a quick glance for Zhaarnak, who'd heard it too-Mandagalla was within the pickup's range-before breaking in on her.

"Have Captain Turanoglu sound General Quarters, Commodore."

"Aye, aye, Sir." Mandagalla hurried off towards the com section, waving urgently for Jacques Bichet to join her, and Prescott heard Zhaarnak giving similar orders in the Tongue of Tongues.

They didn't need to wait for the RD2's report. The drones were dispatched through the warp point for twenty-four-hour deployments. That represented their maximum endurance, and they returned before that time limit only if their electronic and neutrino-based senses told them one thing.

The attack was under way.

The general quarters call whooped through Dnepr's echoing corridors, and the other elements of Sixth Fleet were uncoiling themselves to lunge towards the warp point to support Mordechai's command. Prescott ignored it all and kept his eyes riveted on the plot and- Yes, there was the tiny light of the fleeing RD2. He watched, unblinking, for what he knew would follow it.

He knew . . . but even so, he sucked in his breath when it happened.

It wasn't something anyone grew accustomed to-not even someone like Raymond Prescott or Zhaarnak'telmasa, who'd seen it before.

The Bugs had introduced the tactic, unthinkable for any other race, of mass simultaneous warp transits. Prescott knew he had no business being shocked by the phalanx of red "hostile" icons that suddenly appeared-and, in fact, he wasn't. What he felt was flesh-crawling, stomach-quivering horror at the mindset behind it: absolute indifference to personal survival.

As if to emphasize the point, the usual percentage of those scarlet lights began going out.

Prescott had seen actual visual imagery, not just CIC's dispassionate icons-recorded robotically from long range, of course-of a similar assault when he and Zhaarnak stood with their backs against the wall in defense of Alowan. That had been bad enough, yet he'd seen worse-and from a much closer perspective-in the final desperate stages of the Bugs' assault on Centauri. So he wasn't deceived by the peaceful way those lights flickered and then vanished, leaving a fleeting afterimage on the retina. When two solid objects tried to resume existence in the same volume, the result was of an intensity to stress the very fabric of space/time. Indeed, no one really knew precisely what happened-the phenomenon had never been studied closely enough, and doubtless never would be.

Every TFN officer had seen imagery like that . . . in a way. The Federation had learned the hard way that there was only so much simulators, however good, could teach its personnel. And so regular deep-space drills, with real hardware, were part of the day-to-day existence of the Fleet. As part of those drills, SBMHAWKs were fired through warp points, where-as always-a certain percentage of them disappeared in those intolerably brilliant spasms of madly released energy.

Yet there was a difference between those exercises and this. SBMHAWKs were, after all, just expendable machinery.

But, then, so were the Bugs . . . by their own definition. And as Prescott watched those icons vanish, he realized anew that humankind and the Bugs were too alien to share the same universe.

The deaths of Bug ships from interpenetration ceased immediately after transit. But those ships kept dying without letup, for Mordechai was clearly resolved to burn Zephrain space clean of them before they could deploy away from the warp point. Swathes of deep space buoys vanished from the sphere, committing thermonuclear suicide to focus the gathered energies of their deaths into lances of coherent X-rays that impaled the Bug ships almost too fast for their types to be identified. Almost too fast, but not quite . . . and Prescott frowned. These were all light cruisers.

That wasn't like the Bugs. True, in the first years of the war, they'd used light cruisers for their initial assault waves. But that had changed with their introduction of the gunboat. Smaller and far cheaper than even an austere light cruiser design, gunboats were even better suited for this self-immolating form of attack, and that was precisely how the Bugs had come to use them. But today they weren't, and Prescott began to worry.

"Raise Admiral Mordechai," he ordered his com officer. The command was barely out of his mouth when a second mass simultaneous transit appeared. These were gunboats-and Prescott's worry hardened into certainty.

Mordechai must have seen it too. He'd let himself be drawn into expending practically all of his bomb-pumped lasers on the light cruisers of the first wave. He still had his reusable independently deployed energy weapons-but the IDEWs' puny powerplants took half an hour to power them up between shots, which meant effectively that they were good for only one shot per engagement each. He was faced with the choice of using them against the gunboats, or holding them in reserve against the big ships he knew were coming.

Fortunately, he had another card to play: the defensively deployed SBMHAWKs. By the time the communications lag allowed Prescott to speak with him, he'd already decided to use those, rather than the IDEWs, to counter the gunboats.

An SBMHAWK pod's fire control was normally extremely effective, but only within limited parameters. Designed to survive the addling effect of warp transit and then find and attack its designated target type, its fire control suite was extremely powerful but limited to a single target for every bird in the pod. The entire idea, after all, was for the pods' combined fire to swamp and overwhelm the defenses of their targets, so dispersing the individual pod's missiles between multiple targets was contraindicated.

Bug gunboats were far more fragile targets than even the smallest starships. Although they did mount point defense, unlike strikefighters, they didn't have very much of it, and a single hit from any weapon was sufficient to destroy them. Which meant that just as dispersing fire against starships was an exercise in futility, concentrating the entire load of an SBMHAWK on such a vulnerable target would have been a wasteful misuse of critically valuable weapons.

But there was a way to avoid doing that. The pods Mordechai committed were linked directly to the extremely capable fire control systems of TF 63's fortresses. The pods didn't have to find their targets; the fortresses did that for them, and the clouds of missiles they expelled were more than sufficient to compensate for the targeting problem posed by the gunboats' numbers. The space between the warp point and the nearest fortress shell began to blaze as the energies of antimatter annihilation expended themselves on the relatively insignificant masses of mere gunboats, leaving no debris. But the little craft pressed the attack with the insensate persistence humans had come to know over the last few years, and the fortress crews braced themselves for the worst: kamikaze attacks by gunboats whose crews knew they'd have no chance at a second pass.

As it happened, they were mistaken about what constituted the worst.

After the attack on Home Hive Three, it was no news that the Bugs had developed the close-attack antimatter missile. But no one had fully reasoned out the implications of that fact, as applied to mass assaults by gunboats which could externally mount sixteen of the things and ripple-fire twelve of them in the course of a single firing pass. They should have, but the Allies were accustomed to thinking of FRAMs as fighter munitions, and even the TFN's F-4, the most capable strikefighter anyone had yet deployed, could mount only four of them. There was an enormous difference between that weight of fire and what a gunboat was capable of putting out . . . as the Bugs proceeded to make horrifyingly evident.

The gunboats drove in through the defensive fire of the forts. Scores of them perished in the attempt, but there were simply too many of them for the fortresses to destroy them all, and as each individual that broke through reached knife range, it salvoed twelve FRAMs. No point defense system in the galaxy could stop a FRAM once it launched, and even the mightiest fortress staggered like a galleon in a hurricane as that concentrated flail of super heated plasma and radiation smashed home.

Prescott was as horrified as anyone by the sheer carnage a single gunboat could wreak with a full ripple-salvo, and even as he watched, the surviving Bugs departed from their standard practice by breaking off after that devastating pass rather than seeking self-immolation. Instead, they broke back towards the warp point, firing their remaining FRAM on the way out.

Jacques Bichet, studying the readouts intently, offered an explanation.

"It makes sense, Sir. Four FRAM hits can inflict almost two and a half times as much damage as a ramming attack by a 'clean' gunboat could."

"So of course they're not ramming." Prescott's voice sounded far too calm to his own ears, but he nodded. "It would be better if they were," he went on, and Bichet gave him a puzzled look. But he was speaking more to himself than to the ops officer. "Their willingness to make suicide attacks has always caused us to unconsciously picture them in the mold of human religious fanatics, eagerly seeking self destruction. But they're not. The Bugs don't want to die. It's just that they also don't want not to die. They simply don't care. We'll never understand that-never understand them. And I don't think we want to understand them."

Bichet shivered and turned away, seeking the concrete world of facts and figures. He studied the readouts of the subsequent waves of mass simultaneous emergences from warp, and his eyes narrowed as he realized that something else was happening that was new. He started to call it to Prescott's attention, but Amos Chung was studying the same data, and he beat the ops officer to it.

"Admiral, there are some gunboats in these latest waves, but fewer in each. Most of what's coming through now seem to be pinnaces."

Prescott looked at him sharply. The pinnace was the largest type of small craft which could be carried internally in a starship's boatbay, and the only small craft type (other than a gunboat) that was independently warp-capable. Now that he knew what to look for, he recognized the signs in the readouts himself: the lesser mass combined with inferior speed and maneuverability, relative to gunboats. The Bugs had used them in the kamikaze role before, especially against Fifth Fleet in the original Romulus fighting, but the Allies hadn't seen much of them in the past year or two. The assumption had been that the Bugs had finally decided that pinnaces did too little damage, even as kamikazes, to make practical weapons-particularly because they were much easier to kill than gunboats were.

"What can they be thinking?" Chung jittered as he watched the pinnaces take murderous losses from Mordechai's AFHAWKs. "Granted, they're too small for the mines to lock them up as targets, and we can't use standard anti-ship weapons against them, but still . . ."

"We'll soon find out," Prescott muttered as the first of the pinnaces closed to attack range of the inner fortress shell.

Part of the answer emerged instantly. The Bugs had loaded the pinnaces' external ordnance racks with FRAMs. They couldn't mount anywhere near the load a gunboat could manage, but what they could mount was devastating enough in its own right, and more shields went flat under antimatter fists, more armor vaporized and splintered, more atmosphere streamed through broken plating, and more human beings died.

Nasty stingers when they get close enough to fire, Prescott conceded grimly to himself as he watched them attack . . . and watched the fortresses' defensive fire thresh their splintered formations with death. But not many of them will.

He was right. Very few of them got close enough to fire, but then he watched as one of the pinnaces continued straight onward in the wake of its FRAMs, closing in on the fortress it had targeted. Unlike the gunboats, it was making a suicide run, and the range was too short and its closing velocity too high for it to be stopped. Its icon converged with the fortress's, blended . . .

The readouts went wild, and the icon of the fortress vanished as completely as that of the pinnace.

"Admiral!" Chung yelled. "We getting downloaded data from the nearby fortresses-we can assess the force of that explosion."

He paused momentarily while the computers did just that, and his pale-complexioned face went bone-white as the uncaring cybernetic brains presented the numbers.

"Sir, that pinnace must've had its cargo bay loaded with at least six hundred FRAMs! That's the equivalent of sixty times an SBMHAWK's entire missile load!"

Prescott blanched. No fortress could take that!

Maybe not many of them will have to take it, he thought a moment later, as he watched whole flights of pinnaces vanish like moths in the flame of defensive fire. Small craft, like fighters, could be engaged by point defense, and the fortresses' point defense crews had suddenly become very highly motivated.

"Jacques!" the admiral snapped. "Order all standby carriers to launch their ready fighters. They can get into range faster than we can."

Mordechai's fighter bases, further from the warp point than his innermost fortress shell and thus far unscathed, were already launching.

But even as they did, the tactical picture became still more complicated. Bug monitors began to emerge from warp, and as they did, they began to deploy small craft of their own. These were assault shuttles . . . and they, too, had been crammed full of antimatter munitions to enhance their deadliness as kamikazes. As they came streaking in to ram, the fortresses were forced to divert still more fire from the retreating gunboats to concentrate on the incoming threat-which, of course, improved the latter's chances of completing their own firing runs and then breaking off.

On the main plot, the spherical area of space around the warp point, inside the innermost shell, now resembled a stroboscopic ball of swarming, flashing lights. And through that maelstrom, the first monitors were advancing ponderously towards the fortresses-fewer fortresses than anyone had expected to be there at this stage of the battle

"My fighters are fully engaged," Mordechai reported, as Dnepr and her consorts drew into position to reinforce the decimated fortresses and a conversation without time lags became possible. "But the ready squadrons were configured to engage ships and gunboats. None of them are armed with gun packs. Most of the BS6Vs don't even have the packs in stores!"

Prescott's face tightened in understanding. Against targets as small, fragile, and nimble as small craft, "guns" were far and away the most efficient close-in weapon. They weren't actually anything a pre-space human would have considered a "gun," of course, but they were the closest thing twenty-fourth-century humanity had, and their clusters of individually powered flechettelike projectiles covered a far greater volume than the focused pulse of any energy weapon.

"They'll just have to use their internal lasers, Alex," Prescott told the fortress commander grimly. "And at least my fighters are joining in, as well."

"Thank God for that!" Mordechai's face was smoke-blackened, and behind him Prescott glimpsed a scene of desperate damage-control activity. "Are you arming the next wave with gun packs?"

Prescott hesitated some fraction of a heartbeat.

"Negative, Alex. Their battle-line's main body is bound to come through any time. I'm going to need them in the anti-ship role. They'll launch with FRAMs, not guns."

"But, Admiral-"

"Incoming!" The scream from somewhere behind Mordechai interrupted the task force commander. His head snapped around towards the shout, and . . .

. . . Prescott's com screen dissolved into a blizzard of snow, then went dark.

"Code-"

Prescott closed his eyes and waved the young com rating silent.

"I know, son," he said. "I know."

He didn't need to hear the "Code Omega" from Mordechai's command fortress. He'd seen its icon blink out of existence on the plot.

Yet he had no time to grieve, for the Bugs' final surprise appeared on the plot with soul-shaking suddenness.

By now, everyone was inured to mass simultaneous warp transits of Bug gunboats and even light cruisers, however incomprehensible the mentality behind them might be. But suddenly Raymond Prescott was back at the "Black Hole of Centauri," face-to-face with something no human being, no Orion, could ever become inured to. Not gunboats, not cruisers-superdreadnoughts.

Twenty-four of them appeared as one, lunging through the invisible hole in space between Zephrain and Home Hive Three. He watched them come, watched them pay the inevitable toll to the ferryman as five of them interpenetrated and died, and a part of him wanted to flatly deny that any living creature could embrace such a tactic.

But these living creatures could do just that, and they had. It was a smaller wave than they'd thrown through at Centauri, yet "smaller" was a purely relative term which meant nothing. Not when any navy was prepared to sacrifice so many personnel, so many megatonnes of warships, so casually.

People wonder why the Bugs have never developed the SBMHAWK. There's no technological reason for them not to have it. But the problem isn't technological. It's . . . philosophical, if the word means anything as applied to Bugs. They probably can't imagine why anyone would want to use technology to minimize casualties.

The surviving superdreadnoughts began to fire. They were using second-generation anti-mine ballistic missiles, sweeping away the minefields and the independently deployed energy weapons-and as seconds turned to minutes, the latter didn't fire back.

"Why are the IDEWs just sitting there?" Prescott demanded.

"Admiral Mordechai's fortress was the one tasked to control them," Mandagalla replied. "Admiral Traynor is shifting control now, but it takes time for the standby to gear up to order them to fire."

Something that will have to be rectified in the future, Prescott thought behind his mask of enforced calm.

"Are Force Leader Shaaldaar's second-wave fighters ready to launch?" he asked aloud.

"Yes, Sir," Bichet said. "In fact-"

"Good. Tell him to launch them."

Three minutes had ticked by before the seriously reduced volley of energy-weapon buoy fire lashed out at the Bug capital ships. But now Prescott's battle-line was moving inward, pouring in long-range missile fire to support the fighters that were already beginning to engage, and there was something odd about the fire coming to meet it.

"What's the matter with the Bugs' fire control?" the admiral asked, and Bichet looked up from his console.

"We've been able to identify the classes of those superdreadnoughts, Sir. And they don't have as many Arbalest command ships as they should for that many Archers. Their interpenetration losses must've included a couple of Arbalests."

"Thank God for that," Prescott said with feeling. About time we got a break, he added silently as he watched Shaaldaar's fighters slash in.

Irma Sanchez functioned as emotionlessly as any other component of the F-4 as she maneuvered the fighter around the flying steel mountain of death that was a Bug superdreadnought. It was only after she'd commenced her attack run in the big ship's blind zone and launched her FRAM load that she allowed herself to visualize Armand's face, and the imagined face of a certain unborn child.

Segments of the superdreadnought bulged outward in a shroud of blinding flame as the matter/antimatter explosions tore out the ship's insides. To Irma, it was as though she had thrust a knife into a Bug's guts, forearm-deep, and dug and dug. . . .

Can you feel pain, you motherfuckers? I know you can't scream, but can you hurt? I want you to hurt, and go on hurting. . . .

"Sanchez!" Lieutenant Commander Togliatti's yell ripped from her earphones. "Pull up!"

But she raked the flanks of the wounded monster with hetlaser fire before she wrenched the F-4 into a hard turn and flashed away.

The battle was stunning in its intensity, but not as long in duration as it seemed at the time. Afterwards, Prescott and Zhaarnak would freely admit that the Bugs might have broken through if they'd used all their superdreadnoughts in mass waves. But the remaining SDs and monitors began coming through the warp point in a more conventional fashion. There wasn't a single undamaged fortress in the inner shell left to receive them, but Prescott's battle-line was there. And the second wave of fighters from the BS6Vs arrived, armed with primary packs and eager to hunt monitors. After six of those titanic ships had died, the Bugs broke off the attack.

Prescott was left staring at a plot that was far less colorful than it had been. Few of the fortresses of the inner shell remained, and virtually all of those were critically damaged. The stardustlike lights of mine patterns and weapon buoys were largely gone. And Sixth Fleet had lost six superdreadnoughts, three assault carriers, two battleships, nine battlecruisers and over six hundred fighters.

But, he thought wearily, we held.

All things considered, the Fleet had had the better of the exchange. True, in addition to six monitors, forty-one superdreadnoughts had been lost. So had all ninety-three light cruisers, and over ninety-five percent of the gunboats-but they didn't count. Admittedly, the failure to penetrate to the system's inhabited planet was disappointing. Still, the probe of the defenses had yielded valuable information, which could be put to good use when the new technology currently nearing the end of its development process was operationally deployed.

Prescott put down the sheet of hardcopy he'd been studying as Zhaarnak entered the office.

"You should not let yourself dwell upon it, Raaymmonnd," the Orion said with the reproving concern a warrior's vilkshatha brother was permitted.

"I know." But Prescott's eyes kept straying toward the flimsy paper, then shying away from it towards the window with its swaying featherleaf limbs and the panorama of Xanadu beyond them.

Sixth Fleet's final casualty figures were in: 24,302 dead. Fortress Command was still tracking down some unaccounted-for escape pods, but the fortresses' confirmed dead were around 23,000. It was worse than the losses in ships and orbital fortresses. And it had been inflicted despite months of preparation aimed at preventing it.

Zhaarnak studied his vilkshatha brother as unobtrusively as possible. His caution wasn't really required, for Prescott carried too heavy a load of grief and guilt to notice.

It was odd, really. Until this Human had come like some chegnatyu warrior from the ancient myths to succor his own bleeding command and save the lives of billions of his people, Zhaarnak'diaano had never thought about how Humans might deal with the aftermath of battle. What true warrior would have cared how chofaki felt? And even if he'd ever felt the slightest curiosity, how could he have understood how such an alien being, sprung from such an alien culture, felt about such things?

But Raymond Prescott had overturned that comfortable, bigoted chauvinism. He had stunned Zhaarnak with his courage, shamed him with the gallantry with which Human ships stood and died to defend an entire twin-planet system of people not their own. He had astonished Zhaarnak with his command of the Tongue of Tongues, his grasp of the precepts of Farshalah'kiah . . . and his understanding of a warrior's grief for his farshatok and his pride in all they'd died to accomplish.

And because Raymond Prescott had done and understood those things, Zhaarnak'telmasa knew what a chofak felt when those under his command fell. And he knew that as well as Prescott understood and honored the ways of the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee, he was also the product of his Human code, his Human sense of honor . . . and responsibility. It was difficult for Zhaarnak to wrap his mind around some aspects of that part of his vilkshatha brother, yet he'd made great strides in the years since Prescott had shown him there was another truth, another Warriors' Way that was just as valid, just as true, as the Farshalah'kiah itself. And so he knew it would take time for his brother to heal. Time for him to accept what any Orion commander would already have seen-that no one could have anticipated what the Bugs would do. Alex Mordechai's death wasn't Raymond Prescott's fault, yet that death was one more burden Prescott would bear, and it would weigh all the heavier upon him because he would tell himself that Mordechai had died believing his Fleet commander had refused to commit the fighters which might have saved so many of his people from the Bugs' kamikazes.

There was little Zhaarnak could do to speed that healing process. What he could do, he would. But for the moment, all that consisted of was distracting his brother from his grief.

"At least," he said briskly, "we have a definite set of recommendations to submit to the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

"Right!" Prescott swung around to face him, ghosts put behind him . . . for the moment, at least. "If necessary, I'll go to Alpha Centauri and argue it to Lord Talphon and the Sky Marshal personally. We need more BS6Vs and more fighters for them. The day of the close-in warp point defense is over. Energy weapon-armed fortresses are nothing but death traps." He ordered himself not to recall his last glimpse of Alex Mordechai's face. "We need to smother the approaches to that warp point in mines and IDEWs, supported by distant missile-armed fortresses and even more distant fighter platforms."

"In particular," Zhaarnak added, eyes gleaming as his vilkshatha brother roused himself from his melancholy, "we want enough fighters to maintain a constant patrol of the warp point in strength."

"Precisely!"

Zhaarnak let his own eyes stray to the window. The featherleaf had grown.

"We will be able to report something else, as well. Something that should be of interest to your Ahhdmiraaaal LeBlaaanc."

"You mean the new tactics the Bugs employed? Their small craft's heavier antimatter loads and the gunboats' new effectiveness?"

"No. Those were implicit in our initial report of the action. I mean the inference we have drawn from the Bahgs' uncharacteristic withdrawal after sustaining heavy but not annihilating losses."

"Ummm . . ." Prescott frowned throughtfully. "It is just inference, you know," he cautioned after a moment.

"Truth. Nevertheless, they seem to be displaying a new sensitivity to losses, at least by their own previous standards. You and I both saw them recoil in Alowan, but that was a special case. That time, they were obviously exploiting an unexpected opening with whatever forces were locally available, and they could not afford to see those forces destroyed until they were able to reinforce behind them. But this time, they had months to prepare their assault. No doubt that explains much about the sheer weight of their attack, but surely it must also mean that they were given sufficient time to assemble all available forces to support the operation. Yet despite the time they were given to concentrate, they broke off rather than accept annihilation. Can it be that they are finally beginning to feel a need to conserve their major combatants? That it was not possible for them to assemble sufficient reserves to feel confident of their ability to resist our attacks if they persisted in their own as they always have before?"

He cocked his ears at Prescott, his expression eager, and watched the line of speculation he had sparked working behind his brother's eyes.

"It is not unreasonable, Raaymmonnd," he continued, "considering the number of such ships we have destroyed in the course of the war." He leaned forward with a predator's controlled eagerness. "And if it is true, perhaps it is time for a riposte into Home Hive Three."

Prescott considered. He couldn't let himself believe that the Bugs were at last beginning to scrape the bottom of their barrel of major combatants-not without stronger evidence.

"Remember how many fortresses the RD2s have detected covering their end of the warp line," he cautioned Zhaarnak. "Even if they're running short of starships, they've got plenty of firepower waiting for us."

"Granted. But that very drone data provides us with excellent SBMHAWK targeting information on those fortresses. And their supporting mobile forces have just received a serious battering, including the loss of practically all of their gunboats."

"We took losses, too." For a moment, Prescott's eyes flickered back toward the sheet of hardcopy, then shied away once more.

"But we have reinforcements on the way-heavy carrier and battle-line units to more than make up our losses."

"Until those reinforcements get here, we can't afford to risk heavy losses to our own mobile forces. For now, those forces are essential to the defense of the system."

Prescott recognized the signs of sobering in his vilkshatha brother. Zhaarnak knew that the warp point lay practically denuded of its inner defenses, but the Orion stuck to his guns.

"Agreed. But we have the shipyard facilities here to repair our units' battle damage and replenish our expendable munitions-unlike the Bahgs in what was once Home Hive Three." Very briefly, carnivore's teeth flashed in russet fur.

Prescott considered only a moment. Characteristically, he'd been attempting to moderate Zhaarnak's aggressive instincts because he understood them only too well.

"All right. I agree. Our strikegroups should be back up to strength by the first of standard April. We'll tell the staff to plan on that date, and factor in those of our damaged ships we can get back into action by then-which should be all but the really heavily damaged ones."

"Good. Let us set up a staff conference to discuss the details." Zhaarnak stood, and as he did, something outside the window caught his eye. "Raaymmonnd, what is that?"

Prescott stood up and followed Zhaarnak's pointing hand. In the distance, beyond the spacefield, the land rose in a curve of the Alph River. Atop that hill, a building of monumental proportions was in the early stages of construction.

"Oh, that. The provisional government of Xanadu has decided to go ahead with the plans for Government House. It's going to be quite an establishment for such a young colony. A lot bigger than they need or can afford, really."

"But it was my impression that they were postponing actual construction until such time as the system is secure from attack."

"That's what they were planning. But after the battle, they voted to go ahead with it."

Zhaarnak reminded himself that his vilkshatha brother was, after all, an alien-and, as such, was bound to occasionally say things that made no apparent sense.

"Ah . . . Raaymmonnd, do they not understand that-?"

"Oh, yes. We haven't tried to censor the news of the battle. They know that even though the Bugs were stopped, it was a near thing. They also know the Bugs are still only one transit away, and that, barring a miracle, they'll be back to try again."

"Then. . . ?" Zhaarnak's voice trailed to an uncomprehending halt, and Prescott smiled.

"I believe it's their way of saying that Xanadu is theirs, and that they mean to stay here permanently."

"But, Raaymmonnd, we have never even considered evacuating this planet!"

"Oh, no. They're not making the statement to us. They're making it to the Bugs."

"To the Bahgs?!"

"Yes. What they're telling the Bugs is . . ." Prescott sought for a way to explain it. "Zhaarnak, are you familiar with this human gesture?" He held up his right hand, loosely formed into a fist but with the middle finger vertically upraised.

"I know of it. Like so much else that pertains to Humans, I have never really understood what it means. But I believe I am beginning to."

CHAPTER SIX: April Fool!

KONS Celmithyr'theaarnouw hovered motionless in space while the units of Sixth Fleet gathered about her in ponderous ranks of destruction. The superdreadnought was once again the fleet flagship, for Sixth Fleet was going back to Home Hive Three, and that meant Zhaarnak'telmasa was once again its commander.

Zhaarnak sat in his command chair, watching the quiet, efficient bustle of his staff, and allowed himself once more to feel that pride in his warriors which only an Orion-and, he reminded himself, one or two very special Humans-could truly understand. Since Raymond Prescott had changed his perception of all things Human, Zhaarnak had attempted to make up for the many years he'd lost in understanding the virtually hairless, naked-skinned, flat-faced aliens who once had humbled almost a thousand of their own years of the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee's pride and were now their allies. The demands of the war had left him precious little time for his studies, but his vilkshatha relationship with Prescott had compensated by giving him a priceless and unique perspective. And because he'd gained that perspective, he was aware of the difficulty inherent in correctly translating the term farshatok into Standard English. The best the Humans had been able to do was a mere literal rendering: "warriors of the fist." So far as it went, that was a fair enough translation, but the full concept-the concept of a group of warriors so finely and completely integrated as to represent the individual fingers which combined into a lethal weapon as their commander's fist was closed-carried connotations and implications few Human analysts had ever truly grasped. There were levels of mutual commitment, strands of trust and courage, a willingness to sacrifice everything for victory-or for one another-and a fine fusion of efficiency in it which seemed to have eluded even some of the best Humans who had considered the concept.

Perhaps that was because so few Humans truly understood the full implications of the Farshalah'kiah. Raymond did, of course, but, then, Raymond was an extraordinary individual, whatever his birth race. Most Humans, though, Zhaarnak knew, viewed his own species' concept of honor through a veil woven of obstacles that ranged from the same sort of stereotypical contempt he himself had once had for the ill-understood concepts of Human honor, to simple incomprehension which strove with genuine open-mindedness to cross the gap between two very different races . . . and failed. He knew that many-perhaps most-Humans found his own people unreasonably touchy in matters of personal honor. That they found the notion that the only truly honorable form of combat required a warrior to risk his own life bizarre and vainglorious, and that many of them believed the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee never truly bothered to think at all, because it was so much simpler to react as an honor-bound automaton.

Perhaps that was chauvinistic of them, but he'd been more than sufficiently chauvinistic himself in his time. And, although he might not particularly care to admit it, there were those among the Khan's warriors who fit that stereotype depressingly well. But what those Humans missed was the absolute centrality of an Orion warrior's sense of honor to the way in which he defined himself. It was that sense of honor which told him who he was, which linked him to all of the generations of his fathers and mothers in honor and charged him never to disgrace them. It gave him the ability to know what his Khan and his people expected of him, and-even more importantly-what he expected of himself as his Khan's representative in the defense of his people. And so, in a way he sometimes wondered if even Raymond fully recognized, it was that sense of honor which tied a species of fiery individuals, with all of the natural independence the Humans associated with the Terran species called "cats," into the unified cohesion of the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee and had launched them into the creation of the first interstellar imperium in recorded history.

It was what made all of his people, warriors and civilians alike, farshatok in a greater sense, and he wished he could find the way to explain that side of them to their Human allies.

But perhaps it is not something which can be "explained," he thought, watching the icons of Sixth Fleet settle into their final formation in his plot. Perhaps it is something which may only be demonstrated. Yet whether it can be explained or analyzed or not, it can certainly be shared, for surely each and every one of the warriors of this Fleet, whatever their races, have become farshatok.

It was almost time, and he made himself lean back in his command chair. He felt the tips of his claws gently kneading in and out of its padded armrests, and his mind went back to that moment when the awareness of the many strands of honor which bound this force together had suddenly flowed through him.

"I don't like it," Raymond Prescott said unhappily, looking back and forth between Zhaarnak and Force Leader Shaaldaar.

"I am not especially delighted with it myself, Raaymmonnd," Zhaarnak replied mildly. "Unfortunately, I do not see an alternative."

"Truth," Least Fang Meearnow'raalphaa agreed glumly, and the Tabby carrier commander and Rear Admiral Janet Parkway, his human counterpart, exchanged grim looks.

Unhappy as Prescott might be, Meearnow was even less happy, although for somewhat different reasons. Like every Orion carrier commander, he disapproved in principle of the gunboat. He was far too canny a tactician to reject the innovation, even if it had come from the Bugs, but he regarded it as no more than a clumsy substitute, fit to be adopted only by those species so handicapped by nature as to be incapable of true fighter operations.

But however little he might care for the weapon system, he wasn't about to underestimate the effectiveness of massed gunboat attacks, especially upon starships during the first moments after a warp transit. Not only was the effectiveness of shipboard weapons degraded by the addling effect of transit, but so were the electromagnetic catapults of Meearnow's beloved carriers. In those brief instants of vulnerability when no weapon could fire and no fighter could launch, the shoals of gunboats with which the Bugs routinely smothered warp points could be lethal.

"The SRHAWKs should blunt of the worst of the threat without this sort of desperation tactic," Prescott argued, yet he heard a note of obstinacy in his own voice, a stubborn resistance to accepting Shaaldaar's proposal based less on logic than on acute discomfort with the entire notion.

"Yes, they will blunt the worst of the threat . . . if they perform as their developers hope and if the Bahgs react to them as we hope," Zhaarnak agreed, and his vilkshatha brother nodded in unhappy acknowledgment of his point. "We dare not rely upon those hopes, however. Certainly not before we have had the opportunity to test them in actual battle. And we do know that we cannot task the SBMHAWKs with the anti-gunboat role this time."

Prescott nodded once more. The sheer scale of the fixed fortifications the Bugs had thrown up on the far side of the warp point to Home Hive Three had stunned even the most pessimistic Allied analyst. As of the last RD2 report, they had emplaced no less than two hundred and seventeen OWPs, supported by just over sixty of their specially designed warp point defense heavy cruisers. The cruisers were extremely slow, but that was because they'd been designed as little more than slightly mobile weapons barges whose sole function was to back up more conventional fortifications. That made each of them considerably more dangerous than any normal starship design of the same displacement would have been.

Nor were the fortresses and cruisers alone. No Allied analyst was prepared to explain why the Bugs failed to make the same heavy use of laser buoys and IDEW that the Alliance did. Prescott certainly wasn't, but that didn't mean he couldn't be grateful for that particular Buggish blindspot. Unfortunately, they compensated to some degree for the oversight by the sheer density of the minefields they routinely employed.

Those inevitable clouds of mines had been duly laid to cover the approaches to this warp point, and the fact that it was a closed warp point made it even worse. Still, there were ways to deal with mines, even on closed warp points. Besides, that much had been anticipated. The numbers of fortresses being picked up by the RD2s had not, and they were the true reason for Sixth Fleet's disquiet. Even now, it was less the sheer number of OWPs the Fleet must confront than the speed with which they'd been assembled which had taken Sixth Fleet's intelligence types by surprise. Everyone had seen ample previous examples of the resources the Bugs were prepared to commit to defensive works, but in the past, they'd always been slower to emplace fortifications in forward star systems. Certainly, they'd never been able to equal the speed with which the Terran Federation's Fortress Command could do the same thing.

This time was different. They'd obviously assembled the core of their new fortress shell by simply towing the OWPs which had guarded the star system's other warp points into position to cover this one. But that accounted only for a relatively small percentage of the total number of forts now placed within weapons range of it. Obviously, they'd taken a page from the Terran playbook and shipped the individual fortresses forward as component parts, to be assembled on site. It was something they'd done before, but this time they'd set records for construction speed that not even the Federation's technicians could have equaled.

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.

Craft Commander Laalthaa crouched on the saddlelike construction which served his people as an acceleration couch and watched his small tactical repeater plot as the rest of the squadron settled into place about his gunboat.

Unlike the Orions, the Gorm thought the gunboat was a marvelous idea. Part of that difference in viewpoints could have resulted from the psychological differences between the two species, but the vast majority of it stemmed from the physical differences. Quite simply, the three-meter-long, centauroid, massively-thewed Gorm made extremely poor fighter pilots. Just cramming someone their size into something as small as a fighter cockpit was hard enough in the first place. Add the fact that the reactionless drive used by strikefighters had a much shallower inertial sump and so imposed brutal g-forces on their flight crews-and that Gorm physiology was poorly adapted to handle such forces-and the reasons Laalthaa's species preferred the gunboat became evident. The fact that gunboats, unlike fighters, could make independent warp transits was another major factor, but Laalthaa, like most Gorm, was honest enough to admit that in some ways that was almost an afterthought.

Yet it was that "afterthought" which had brought Laalthaa and his squadron to this moment, and he felt his own tension and anticipation reaching out to and returning from his crewmates.

Laalthaa knew that none of the other races allied to the Gorm shared their sense of minisorchi, but he was devoutly glad that he did-especially at a moment like this one.

On an emotional level, it was difficult for him to understand how anyone could function without that ability to sense the emotions and the innermost essence of his fellows. On an intellectual level, it was obvious to him that it was not only possible but that in very many ways it appeared to be the norm. But that intellectual acceptance that beings could live and love and even attain greatness without minisorchi did nothing to abate his pity for them. What must it be like for them, at a moment like this, when each found himself trapped within the unbreachable boundaries of his own mind and heart? When he faced the crucible of combat all alone?

He shivered inwardly at the very thought and made himself concentrate once more upon his instruments even while the other members of his crew stood at the back of his thoughts and feelings.

"Stand by for transit!" Force Leader Shaaldaar's order sounded over his helmet communicator, stripped of its minisorchi by the impersonality of electronics, and Laalthaa settled his double-thumbed hands more firmly upon his controls.

"Begin the attack," Zhaarnak'telmasa commanded, and the waiting shoals of SBMHAWKs, SRHAWKs, and AMBAMPs flashed into the invisible flaw in space Sixth Fleet had come to invade. They flicked out of existence in Zephrain and rematerialized in Home Hive Three, and the boiling light and fury as dozens of them interpenetrated and destroyed one another announced their coming to the Bugs.

The Fleet was as ready as it could have been.

Of course, not even the Fleet could be completely ready at all times, and so, as had been anticipated, the actual moment of the Enemy's attack came as a surprise. But the Fleet had allowed for that in its own planning, and the gunboat combat space patrol responded almost instantly to the fiery wall of explosions as the robotic missile pods erupted from the warp point. They turned directly into the attack, accepting that at least some of those pods would be targeted on them, not the sensor images of the orbital weapons platforms awaiting the attackers. Turning into them would simplify their targeting solutions and make them marginally more accurate, but it would also permit the gunboats' point defense to most effectively engage any missiles which were fired . . . and it was necessary if the gunboats were to lock up and destroy the pods before they attacked more important units.

Of course, some of the pods managed to stabilize their internal systems, lock on to the targets they'd been programmed to seek out, and fire before the gunboats could range upon them. Still others-the ones which carried the minesweeping missiles-fired even more quickly, since they were area attack weapons which were not required to pick out individual targets. That was inevitable. But the vast majority were still stabilizing when the gunboats opened fire upon them.

As important as it was to destroy the pods, it was almost equally important for the gunboats to retain the ability to engage the starships which must follow them into the system. The Fleet had considered the two responsibilities, which were at least partly mutually exclusive, and devised an approach to reconcile them. All external ordnance-missiles and FRAMs alike-would be reserved to engage the starships. Only the gunboats' internal weapons systems would be released for employment against the pods. That might make them somewhat less efficient as pod-killers, and it would inevitably require them to close to shorter attack ranges, but it would also preserve their ability to engage larger targets when the time came.

And so the Fleet's combat space patrol swooped into the clouds of stabilizing missile pods, selected its targets, and fired.

The result was . . . unanticipated.

"Transit now!"

Laalthaa heard Force Leader Shaaldaar's order, and he obeyed.

The Fleet's CSP staggered in surprise as the gunboat-trap pods hidden among their missile-carrying counterparts blew up in its face. The resultant explosions were less violent-marginally-than the fiery holocaust of a proper suicide-rider or the blast when two missile pods interpenetrated upon transit. But they were quite violent enough for their designed function, and over thirty gunboats vanished almost simultaneously in the fireballs of their own creation.

The remainder of the combat space patrol hesitated briefly. Not in fear or out of self-preservation, for those concepts had no meaning for the Fleet. Rather, the surviving gunboats paused long enough for the intelligences which commanded the Fleet to decide whether or not to continue expending them. The decision was made quickly, dispassionately, with none of the need to balance crew survivability against military expediency which might have afflicted another species.

The gunboats swerved back to the attack, closing in on their targets and engaging at minimum range, and the devastating explosions of the SRHAWKs resumed.

As always, the CSP's efforts were insufficient to destroy more than a relatively small percentage of the total number of missile pods the Enemy had committed to the attack, and the cost in destroyed gunboats was relatively high. Certainly it was much higher than the Fleet had experienced in any similar operation in previous engagements, and the gunboat squadrons suffered a higher than anticipated level of disorganization as a result.

The Fleet wasn't particularly disturbed by that outcome, however. By the very nature of things, gunboats were designed to be lost, and the degradation of the Enemy's pre-attack bombardment was well worth the price. Besides, the losses they'd taken, numerous though they might have been, remained considerably lower than would have been the case under normal circumstances. As the Fleet had anticipated, the Enemy had programmed few or none of the standard robotic missile pods to target gunboats in this attack. The Fleet took note of how well the new technology had performed its intended function and prepared for the next stage of the engagement, confident that any confusion from which the surviving CSP units might suffer would be more than offset by the inevitable disorganization any fleet suffered in any warp point assault.

The minesweeping missiles were a matter for somewhat greater concern. As this was a closed warp point, it had been possible to place mines directly atop it, and the Fleet had done just that. Unfortunately, the Enemy's mine-clearance missiles had proven even more effective than usual at blowing lanes through the minefields. If the Enemy's starships succeeded in breaking through the CSP, they would find numerous chinks in the mine barrier to exploit.

But, of course, first he had to get past the CSP.

The surviving gunboats prepared themselves to maneuver into the blind zones of the Enemy starships as they emerged one by one, in the Enemy's usual, inefficient manner, from the warp point. The greater than normal number of surviving gunboats should wreak havoc upon an opponent too persistently stupid to recognize how he handicapped himself by inserting his units into combat piecemeal rather than simultaneously. When the first starships appeared, they would-

And then, abruptly, the Fleet's calculations went awry.

* * *

It was called "synklomus." The Gorm word translated into Standard English as "House Honor," and it was a very simple concept. But, like many simple concepts, its implications were profound.

The Gorm homeworld was a place of massive gravity, deadly background radiation, and the dangerous flora and fauna of an ecosystem evolved to survive in such an . . . extreme environment. That homeworld had bestowed upon the Gorm a physical strength and toughness, and a radiation resistance, which gave them many advantages over other species who had evolved in kinder, gentler environments. And it also explained what fueled the Gormish soul.

Virtually every aspect of Gorm society, religion, and honor focused on the lomus, or household. The lomus was central to everything any Gorm was or might become. It was not a limitation-rather, it was a liberation. A support structure which encouraged each individual to explore his or her own capabilities, talents, and desires. But even more importantly, membership within the lomus carried with it synklomchuk, the duty owed to the house-kin under synklomus.

In the final analysis, every aspect of synklomchuk came down to a single obligation, a response to the harshness and danger of their homeworld which was programmed into the Gorm on an almost genetic level. And that obligation was to die before they allowed any other member of the lomus to come to preventable harm. Any harm.

For all their dispassion, all of their justly renowned logic, there was no fiercer protector in the known galaxy than a Gorm. Nor was there a more implacable avenger. Perhaps they lacked the fire of the Orion, or the flexibility of the Terran, or the instinctive cosmopolitanism of the Ophiuchi, but the Gorm compensated with a determination and a remorseless, driving purpose which Juggernaut might have envied.

It was synklomus and synklomchuk which had once brought the Orions and the Gorm to war, for the Gorm had been determined to protect the lomus of their species from conquest by the militant Khanate. But in the course of fighting one another, Gorm and Orion had also learned to respect one another, and at the end of their war, the Orions had offered the Gorm the unique associated status with the Khanate they continued to enjoy to this very day. It had been a mark of the Orions' respect for the smaller and less powerful opponent who had fought superbly, with a gallantry and a determination any adherent of Farshalah'kiah could not but appreciate, and who had come within centimeters of victory before they were defeated. And as the Gorm came to understand the Orions better, they had extended the concept of their lomus to include their one-time enemies and newfound allies.

Just as they had now extended it to the entire Grand Alliance.

That was what the Bugs in Home Hive Three faced on April 1, 2365. An enemy they would never be able to comprehend or understand, but one whose determination and refusal to yield fully equaled their own.

There were only sixty Gorm gunboats in all of Sixth Fleet. Every one of them made simultaneous transit into Home Hive Three on the heels of the SBMHAWK bombardment.

Nine of them interpenetrated and destroyed one another, and ninety-nine Gorm died with them. But fifty-one of them survived, and the Bugs had never expected to see them. The defenders had anticipated the normal Allied assault pattern-a stream of tightly focused but individual transits, designed to get the maximum number of starships through the warp point in the minimum amount of time without interpenetrations. That was what they'd always seen before, and it was what their doctrine had been adjusted to confront.

And because it was, the surviving gunboats of the warp point combat space patrol were taken totally by surprise. With their squadron organizations and datanets already badly damaged by the SRHAWK surprise, they were still maneuvering to swing into the blind spots of the anticipated starships when the Gorm gunboats emerged instead and began to fire into their own blind spots.

Craft Commander Laalthaa and his fellows were still hideously outnumbered, but they rode the advantage of that surprise with ruthless efficiency. Of the sixty gunboats which made transit into Home Hive Three, only twelve survived to return to Zephrain, but their attack shattered what remained of the Bug combat space patrol.

Laalthaa was not among those who returned.

Raymond Prescott's face was like a stone as Jacques Bichet and Anthea Mandagalla tallied the surviving Gorm gunboats.

The losses weren't quite as severe as Prescott had anticipated. But that, he told himself as Bichet completed the list of the dead, was only because he'd never expected any of them to return alive.

Bichet finished his report, and Prescott inhaled deeply. Zhaarnak had delegated tactical command of the initial assault to his vilkshatha brother, since Prescott's TF 61 contained virtually all of the heavy battle-line units suitable for a warp point assault operation. That responsibility left no time to let himself truly feel the weight of the sacrificial price Shaaldaar's gunboats had just paid.

"Enemy losses?" he asked in a dreadfully expressionless tone.

"The SRHAWKs must've taken a real bite out of them even before the Gorm ever made transit," the ops officer replied. "CIC estimates that between them and the gunboats, they destroyed virtually the entire combat space patrol."

"And the fortresses?"

"Concentrating all of the SBMHAWKs on them and the warp point cruisers paid off in a big way, Sir!" Mandagalla replied exultantly before the ops officer could answer. The chief of staff was bent over her console, studying the raw numbers from CIC. "My God, Admiral! According to the Gorm's sensor data, the SBMHAWKs killed all of the cruisers-all sixty of them! And they blew hell out of the fortresses, too! There's no more than seventy of them left!"

Prescott's eyebrows flew up in surprise. Only seventy? There'd been over two hundred of them before the attack!

"Do the RD2 results confirm those numbers, Jacques?" he demanded.

"As far as I can tell, yes, Sir," the operations officer said. "It's hard to be certain. There were so many explosions going on during the actual shooting that the on-site drones' sensor records leave a lot to be desired, and we're only just beginning to get the follow-on flight back through the point. CIC is setting up the analysis now, but the preliminary take tracks right with the Gorm's estimates."

"There is one odd aspect to it, though, Sir," Amos Chung offered from where he'd been studying the same data.

"Odd?"

"Yes, Sir. There doesn't seem to be enough wreckage."

"What do you mean?"

"Just that, Sir. There doesn't seem to be enough wreckage for the leftovers from the better part of two hundred OWPs."

"Come on, Amos," Bichet said. "We took the damned things out with antimatter warheads! Enough of those don't leave very much in the way of wreckage."

"I understand that," Chung replied. "But we didn't have that many warheads, Jacques. That was the entire reason we couldn't spare any of them to go after the gunboats."

"We can worry about the amount of wreckage later," Prescott decided. "What matters right now is whether or not we killed enough of them to continue to the next phase of the assault. Jacques? Anna?"

"We're within parameters, Sir . . . barely," Mandagalla said after a moment. She and Bichet exchanged glances. "We've done much better against the fortresses than we anticipated, and there are open assault lanes in the minefields. On the other hand, there seem to have been substantially stronger reserve forces in the system than we expected. Before they pulled back out, Shaaldaar's people picked up two more waves of incoming gunboats, each of them considerably more powerful than the CSP was. They also detected the approach of a Bug fleet built around at least twenty-five monitors. And although Jacques is right about the numbers of fortresses we've already taken out, the seventy or so survivors appear to be pretty much intact. They were putting out plenty of fire when Shaaldaar's gunboats pulled out, anyway."

"And we don't have enough reserve SBMHAWKs to take them out with a second wave," Prescott thought aloud.

"Doesn't look that way, Sir," Bichet agreed.

"On the other hand, Raaymmonnd," Zhaarnak put in from the com screen at Prescott's elbow, "we seem to have earned a high return on the investment we made with the first wave."

"Agreed." Prescott nodded firmly. "I'm just not certain that the return was high enough for our purposes."

"Sir," Bichet said diffidently, "if we move quickly, we'll have more than enough time to get the entire fleet through the minefield lanes before the main Bug force can get into shipboard weapons range of the warp point. We'll take some heavy fire from the surviving fortresses, and at least one gunboat strike will reach us before we get completely clear of the mines, but we can do it."

"And in deep space, we can match our speed and maneuverability and our advantage in fighters against their numbers," Zhaarnak observed.

"We could," Prescott agreed. "But would we be justified in doing that?" He held up one hand before Zhaarnak could reply. "I don't doubt that we can get through the mines before they hit us, Zhaarnak. I'm just questioning whether or not we can justify risking heavy losses-or even, conceivably, the complete loss of Sixth Fleet? I'd be more than willing to fight the mobile units, if it weren't for the fortresses-or the fortresses, if it weren't for the mobile units. But I don't think we have the reserve strength to justify taking both of them on when we don't have to."

"I dislike the thought of allowing any of them to escape," Zhaarnak grumbled. "Especially when the SBMHAWKs and Shaaldaar's farshatok have already achieved such an enormous success! Such opportunities should not be wasted."

"I hate not following up on an opportunity the Gorm paid such a price to buy for us," Prescott agreed. "And I'd prefer to finish them off, myself. The only problem I have is that I'm not sure they'd be the ones who got finished!"

"There is that," Zhaarnak admitted with the ghost of a purring chuckle. Then he inhaled deeply. "I am always impressed by your ability to maintain your strategic equilibrium, Raaymmonnd. And, as always, you are correct once more. This is not Telmasa or Shanak. Desperate chances may be justified under desperate circumstances, but even the Bahg forces which the gunboats detected are insufficient to threaten our grip on Zephrain . . . unless we advance too rashly and allow them to whittle down our own strength before they counterattack."

"My own thought, exactly." Prescott nodded. "What we've already accomplished represents a major victory, and I feel confident that we've forestalled any thoughts the Bugs might have entertained of launching another offensive against Zephrain." He shrugged. "We structured this entire operation from the beginning so that we could shut it down at any moment of our choice, right up to the instant we actually made transit into Home Hive Three and committed to action with their main forces. I'd say this is a time to count our winnings and walk away from the table."

"My heart may not be fully in it," Zhaarnak sighed, "but my brain agrees with you. Very well. We shall satisfy ourselves with the 'mere' destruction of a hundred and fifty fortresses, their entire CSP, sixty heavy cruisers, and several hundred patterns of mines."

He bared his fangs in a lazy carnivore's smile and chuckled once again, this time more loudly.

"A modest little victory," he observed, "but our own."

Three standard weeks later, they were in Prescott's office on Xanadu, staring at each other. Prescott let the sheet of hardcopy flutter down onto the desktop.

"I dislike being had," he finally said through lips that were an immobile straight line of anger.

"That is a trifle strong, Raaymmonnd."

"The hell it is! You've read this report. One of our RD2s actually caught them in the act of emplacing the buoy and observed what happened when they activated it! Presto! A new fortress!"

"I suppose," Zhaarnak philosophized, "that it was inevitable that they would develop third-generation ECM buoys. We ourselves have had them for some time."

"And never deployed them because there was no percentage in revealing the system's existence to them," Prescott agreed. "After all, it isn't nearly as useful to us as it is to them. The great advantage of something that can spoof sensors into thinking it's any class of ship-or fortress-is that it can dilute the effect of mass SBMHAWK attacks. And they don't have SBMHAWKs!"

"Truth," Zhaarnak agreed with a dry humor and an outward control that would have fooled most humans. "On the other hand, we now possess empirical proof that our own ECM3 buoys should function just as well as their developers predicted if the Bahgs ever do develop the SBMHAWK."

Prescott gave a furious snort and scowled ferociously down at the hardcopy report, and Zhaarnak joined his own scowl to his vilkshatha brother's. Uaaria and Amos Chung had delivered the latest bad news less than an hour before this meeting. Now that the analysts knew what to look for in their probe data, they'd been able to amass a more complete statistical picture, and the current estimates were that no more than ninety of the fortresses Sixth Fleet had attacked-and none of their supporting heavy cruisers-had been real. All of the others had been artificially generated sensor ghosts.

"Remember how puzzled we were by the shortage of wreckage?" Prescott said after a long, fulminating moment. His voice was less harsh than it had been, for he'd reached the stage where he was once again capable of wryness.

"Indeed . . . even though we did destroy a full third of the real fortresses."

The Orion spent a moment in silent, brooding contemplation of the number of SBMHAWKs that had been wasted. Thanks to the enormous productivity of the heavily industrialized Human Corporate Worlds, the expenditure was only an inconvenience, not a disaster. Still, it would require months to ship replacement missile pods to Zephrain, and while Sixth Fleet waited for them, any fresh offensive would be out of the question. He found that he . . . disliked the notion of having been so thoroughly taken in by something like the Arachnids, and he felt his claws creep ever so slightly out of their sheathes. Then he shook himself out of the mood.

"If anyone was had, in your human idiom, Raaymmonnd," he said, "it was me. I was in command for the operation."

"I was sucked in just as far as you were," Prescott reminded him. "If you'll recall, you took the course of action you did on my advice."

"Nevertheless, the responsibility is mine. So is the embarrassment."

Prescott groaned.

"There's going to be plenty of that to go around," he observed. "By now, our initial report of the action-complete with our original estimate of Bug losses-has reached GFGHQ. Which means it's probably reached the media-"

An indescribable low moaning sound escaped Zhaarnak, and Prescott cocked an eyebrow at him.

"It is even worse than that, Raaymmonnd," Zhaarnak admitted. "I have been putting off telling you this, but. . . . Well, the news has also reached Rehfrak."

"Yes?" Prescott prompted, puzzled by the reference to the Orion sector capital that lay one warp transit away from Zephrain, and Zhaarnak looked out the window to avoid his eyes.

"The governor there has decreed a celebration, complete with a spectacular parade, in honor of our 'victory.' He has invited you and me to participate. I am afraid I took the liberty of accepting for both of us, before . . ."

He indicated the sheet of hardcopy with a vague wave, like an object to which there was no well-bred way to refer by name.

Prescott buried his face his hands, muffling his groan.

Presently, he looked up and sought Zhaarnak's eyes. The Orion was already looking at him levelly.

"You're thinking what I'm thinking," Prescott stated, rather than asked.

"Yes, I suspect I am."

There was no need to verbalize what it was they were both thinking: that the new findings, unlike the preliminary report, had not yet been dispatched to Alpha Centauri. Instead, they considered each other in speculative silence. Then Prescott gave his head an emphatic shake.

"No, of course not-"

"Out of the question," Zhaarnak declared simultaneously.

"GFGHQ needs to know that the Bugs have the DSB-ECM3."

"Most certainly."

Thus they briskly put temptation behind them. Afterwards, the human sigh and the Orion rustling purr were almost inaudible.

Well, Prescott reflected with a small, crooked grin as he considered the date of the battle, Zhaarnak has been after me to explain some of our human holidays to him. At least now I have an excellent example of how April Fool's Day works!

Kthaara'zarthan looked across his desk at his two human visitors and nodded reassuringly in the manner of their race.

"Yes, Sky Marshaaal, I have sent personal messages to both Lord Telmasa and Fang Presssssscottt, assuring them of my unabated confidence in them. I have also sent a personal message to the Khan'a'khanaaeee stating the same thing-although that was really little more than a formality, for Small Fang Zhaarnak was never in any real danger. I imagine your own similar message was of more urgency."

Ellen MacGregor winced. The media-induced hysteria was dying down by now. But it had created such an uproar in the Legislative Assembly that she'd thought it was worth explaining the facts of life to Federation President Alicia DeVries directly. Admittedly, the Presidency wasn't what it once had been. The Corporate Worlds had amended the Federation's Constitution into a parliamentary cabinet system, with the actual levers of government in the hands of the Legislative Assembly that they and their Heart World allies controlled. But the popularly elected president still commanded a kind of prestige unequaled by the prime minister . . . and was still commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

"I think we're past the point where there's any danger of anything stupid being actually done, as opposed to merely said," she said cautiously. "It wouldn't have been so bad at any other time."

Kthaara knew his human politics well enough by now to understand what she meant. The second message from Sixth Fleet headquarters had reached Alpha Centauri while a special select subcommittee of the Assembly's Naval Oversight Committee-including Chairman Waldeck-had been on a junket to Nova Terra. Naturally, they'd seized the opportunity to extend their stay and hold endless hearings, basking in the media limelight and artificially prolonging the furor.

"You are due to appear before them later this afternoon, are you not?" the Orion asked with a twinkle of mischievous malice.

"Don't remind me!" MacGregor kneaded her forehead, behind which she felt the beginnings of a migraine.

The other human present didn't quite dare to emulate Kthaara's smile, although the temptation was undeniable.

"There's a good side to this," he ventured cautiously instead, and MacGregor turned her brooding, dark-brown eyes on him.

"Whatever would that be, Admiral LeBlanc?"

"Well, Sky Marshal, if you think about it, the public's reaction has been one of disappointment that not as many Bugs were killed as they'd been led to believe. It may be petulance, but at least it isn't panic."

"Hmmm . . . Something to be said for that, I suppose."

"Also," LeBlanc continued, stroking his beard thoughtfully, "there's the analysis by Sixth Fleet's two top intelligence types, Uaaria and Chung."

"The-?" MacGregor furrowed her brow, then nodded. "You're talking about the addendum to the second report?"

"Yes, Sir. Admiral Prescott and Lord Telmasa both endorsed it."

"I remember seeing it, but I haven't had time to read it, what with the hearings," MacGregor admitted, looking back over the vistas of wasted time much as Zhaarnak and Prescott had contemplated their wasted SBMHAWKs.

"What do they say?" Kthaara asked.

"They were struck by the way the Bugs' behavior in seeking to exaggerate the strength of their warp point defenses seemed to dovetail with their behavior at the time of their attack on Zephrain. As you'll recall, they broke off the assault while they still had forces left."

"So they did," Kthaara acknowledged. "Very out of character. They have always pressed on without regard to losses when an outcome was still in the balance."

"Well, Uaaria and Chung put all this together with their theory of the Bugs' socioeconomic structure, which Admiral Prescott forwarded to us after the initial incursion into Home Hive Three-"

"Yes, I remember," MacGregor put in impatiently. "You briefed us on it. I found myself wondering if we dared to let ourselves believe a bit of it."

"Then you'll be even more hesitant to believe what they're theorizing now, Sky Marshal. They think the Bugs' new sensitivity to losses, and their attempt to defend the warp point as cheaply as possible, argue that they're finally getting overextended. If they are, then the loss of Home Hive Three's industrial base would have made them even more so-which would help explain why it's only just now becoming apparent."

"The very fact that they have nothing left to defend in Home Hive Three might have influenced their decision not to commit as much actual-as opposed to illusory-force to its defense as they could have," Kthaara observed.

"Still and all," LeBlanc rejoined, sticking to his guns, "they've never passed up an opportunity to bleed an attacking force before, regardless of losses to themselves." He met his superiors' eyes unflinchingly. "I don't know for certain that Uaaria and Chung have the right answer. But something has changed in the Bugs' behavior."

"Hmmm . . ." MacGregor frowned. "Interesting. Possibly even relevant." She stood up slowly. "But at the moment, I'm due for another hearing before the select subcommittee-where, you can be assured, interest and relevance will both be in short supply."

* * *

Legislative Assemblywoman Bettina Wister's irritatingly nasal voice had never been an insufferable political handicap, because sound mixers directed by a sophisticated computer program edited it out of her broadcast campaign speeches. But Ellen MacGregor, sitting across the table from her, had to endure it, for this was a closed session of the subcommittee . . . and an opportunity for Wister to vent her raging contempt for all things military without risk of voter fallout.

"I am appalled, Sky Marshal, by your blatant bypassing of properly constituted civilian authority! Your improper and illegal action in communicating directly with President DeVries, attempting to shield your Prescott from the consequences of his criminal incompetence, is a slap in the face to the Legislative Assembly-and to the people of the Federation, whom it represents!"

MacGregor didn't need to consult the legal officer seated behind her to answer that one.

"I remind the honorable assemblywoman that as Sky Marshal, I report directly to the President, in her capacity as Commander in Chief. The Naval Oversight Committee is not in my chain of command, for all the profound respect in which I hold it." Since becoming Sky Marshal, she'd learned to say things like that without gagging, and a lifetime's habit of self-discipline had held her alcohol intake steady.

"How typical! I warn you, Sky Marshal, the time will come when the human race, under the enlightened guidance of the Liberal-Progressive Party, will have evolved to a state of consciousness far above the mindless aggressiveness you and your kind represent! We will no longer need hired thugs like you and Prescott to fight the wars that you yourselves provoke, creating imaginary enemies in order to justify your own existence!"

"Point of personal privilege, Mr. Chairman," MacGregor said with a mildness which deceived absolutely no one-except, perhaps, Bettina Wister-as she turned to the corpulent figure at the head of the table. "Do I gather that the honorable assemblywoman from Nova Terra is accusing the Navy of 'provoking' the war with the Bugs? A war in which a large number of 'hired thugs' have forfeited their own existence by dying in defense of the Federation against this 'imaginary enemy'?"

Agamemnon Waldeck sighed inwardly. Wister represented Nova Terra, so there'd been no way to keep her off the select subcommittee visiting her own bailiwick. And there were times when it was useful to let her rant on unchecked. But this wasn't one of those times.

The problem was that she actually believed the slogans she spouted. Which, Waldeck thought, explained her long-term political success, although it might be a tactical liability at just this moment. She was mush-minded enough to reflect her constituency perfectly. Wealth and security had insulated Heart Worlders like those of Nova Terra from the real universe for so long that they could ignore it and float blissfully about in a rarefied atmosphere of ideological abstraction, and, under normal circumstances, Wister had to periodically reassure them that she floated with them, lest they worry that she might be letting her feet come into contaminating contact with reality. Otherwise, they could fly off on a hysterical tangent, like the arrested adolescents they were.

At the moment, of course, Nova Terran public opinion had suffered something of a sea change where the military was concerned. Playing host to the most powerful warp point assault in the history of the galaxy, conducted by creatures which intended-literally-to eat you and your children alive if they broke through, was enough to make even Heart Worlders as militant as any Fringer could have desired. That had required a certain . . . modification of Wister's public attitude towards the Navy, and she hated it. She (or her staff organization and handlers, at least) was canny enough to know she had no choice but to embrace her voters' current pro-war enthusiasm, and she'd done it, but that in turn only strengthened the virulence of her true contempt and hatred for the military.

Eventually, Waldeck knew, when the war had been won, Nova Terra's present militancy would fade back into its usual mush-mindedness. It might take a while, but it would happen as surely as the sun would rise, and when it did, the original, unmodified Wister would once again become a political asset rather than a liability.

Waldeck himself had no such worries. Corporate Worlds like his own New Detroit were quite democratic; the voters simply voted as they were told, just as they did everything else as they were told, by those who dispensed their livelihood. Waldeck was a great believer in democracy. No other system was so perfectly controllable.

And, he reminded himself, it was by manipulating the Heart Worlds into supporting them that the Corporate Worlds had gotten a choke hold on the Legislative Assembly. So it ill behooved him to complain about the necessary elements of that manipulation-such as indulging cretins like Wister. Putting up with her tirades in closed sessions like this one was probably the only way to keep the bile she felt over what she was forced to say in public from killing her off before the war could be won, after all. But she could be so boring! After a while, there came a time when the grownups simply had to cut her off-as he proceeded to do.

"I am certain, Sky Marshal," he rumbled from deep inside his enormous bulk, silencing Wister in mid-sentence, "that you won't read unintended meanings into what was perhaps an unfortunate choice of words on the part of the honorable assemblywoman." He gave Wister a side-glance that killed a renewed bleat aborning. "Indeed," he continued, "this entire course of events has placed all of us under a great deal of stress. It all points up the need for better coordination between the military and civilian authorities, to prevent future misunderstandings. Don't you agree?"

MacGregor's eyes narrowed with suspicion at Waldeck's conciliatory tone.

"Misunderstandings are certainly to be deplored, Mr. Chairman," she observed cautiously.

"Excellent! We're in agreement." Waldeck leaned back and folded his hands over his ample paunch. "I believe the current unpleasantness could have been avoided if Sixth Fleet's command structure had included a high-ranking human officer who was more . . . Well, let us say, more sensitive to the political nuances than Admiral Prescott. His battle record speaks for itself." Another quelling side-glance at Wister. "But he tends to lose sight of the need for the Federation's high-ranking military officers to cultivate political awareness."

MacGregor's eyes narrowed still further, becoming dark slits of apprehension.

"What, precisely, are you proposing, Mr. Chairman?" she asked, and Waldeck settled his bulk into an even more comfortable position.

"There is an officer whose services have, in my view, been sadly under-utilized since Operation Pesthouse, owing to certain . . . unresolved questions concerning his conduct in the campaign. I suggest that he be assigned to Sixth Fleet in some appropriate capacity. There, he could advise Admiral Prescott on the political realities, a subject on which he's demonstrated admirable sensitivity in the past." Waldeck heaved himself up and leaned forward. "I refer to Vice Admiral Terence Mukerji."

At first, only shocked speechlessness saved MacGregor from saying the unsayable. Then, as that faded, cold calculation took its place. Waldeck had been about as clear as his compulsive deviousness ever allowed him to be: Rehabilitate Mukerji and send him to Sixth Fleet, and this committee will make no further trouble about Prescott.

"Yes!" Wister exclaimed, no longer able to restrain herself. "Admiral Mukerji understands the proper role of the military in a constitutional democracy-unlike a fascistic beast like Prescott! He's always shown the proper deference to the elected representatives of the people! He-"

MacGregor ignored the noise and looked steadily into the eyes that peered out from between Waldeck's rolls of fat. She knew she would have to accept this. So it wasn't worth the political price to say what she wanted to say: "Unresolved questions" my ass, you tub of rancid lard! There was never any question about Mukerji's cowardice in Operation Pesthouse. He should have been shot-and would have been, if he hadn't spent years assiduously sucking up to you and other maggots like you.

No, the most we could do was relieve him. And it was Raymond Prescott's report that enabled us to do even that much. And now even that is going to have to be undone, as the price of keeping Prescott where he is and able to function effectively.

She waited until Wister had run out of breath or rhetoric or, perhaps, both. Then, ignoring the assemblywoman totally, she addressed Waldeck.

"I'll certainly take your suggestion under advisement, Mr. Chairman. Perhaps something of the sort can be arranged." She told herself that her self-imposed limits in the matter of Scotch could go to hell, just for tonight. But even that thought couldn't keep her from adding one thing, in a carefully diffident voice. "One point, Mr. Chairman. In light of the . . . history of Admiral Mukerji's relationship with Admiral Prescott, have you considered the possible impact of this move on the efficiency of Sixth Fleet's command structure?" Waldeck looked blank. She tried again. "I mean, the effectiveness of Admiral Prescott-and, by extension, of Sixth Fleet-in doing its job, which is protecting all of us from the Bugs."

Waldeck continued to wear an uncomprehending look, as though MacGregor had spoken in a foreign language-as, in fact, she had. Then he brushed it aside.

"Well, I'm sure any difficulties can be worked out. And now, the Chair will entertain a motion to adjourn."

CHAPTER SEVEN: To Hold Back Hell

Another wave of fighters swept outward, glinting in the light of the blue giant star called Reymiirnagar-dazzling even across 3.6 light-hours-and arrowed away towards a warp point which, from the standpoint of the Bugs, justified this system's nickname: "Hell's Gate."

Actually, Reymiirnagar was called that because one of its eight warp points led to the system of Telik, which the Bugs had turned into a fair approximation of Hell after their first war with the Star Union of Crucis. Still, the mammoth asteroid fortresses which now guarded the system had given the name a whole new meaning. There were only six of those monstrous constructs, squatting sullenly within the minefields that protected them from ramming attacks. But they had expelled waves of missiles, over and over, each armed with the warhead equivalent of a deep-space laser buoy, to sear the warp point's circumambient space with bomb-pumped x-ray lasers.

And that warp point is about to get even more hellish, thought a shaken Aileen Sommers.

She stood before the great curving observation screen on the flag deck of Glohriiss. The flagship was a converted Niijzahr-class fast superdreadnought, but she thought of it as an assault carrier-which, functionally speaking, it now was. The deck vibrated under her feet as another squadron of fighters began to launch-the first fighters the Crucians had ever built.

No, she reminded herself firmly. Not "Crucians." The correct term is ghornaku, or "sharers of union." The Zarkolyans and Telikans and Br'stoll'ee and so forth like being called "Crucians" almost as much as the Scots and Welsh like being called "Englishmen."

But, she amended the thought as she watched the fighters streak outward, it's appropriate for those pilots. They really were Crucians, members of the batlike (to Terran eyes) race which had founded and still dominated the Star Union.

Wingmaster Demalfii Furra had also been a racial Crucian. Sommers would take to her grave the memory of her first sight of Survey Flotilla 19's mysterious rescuer in the com screen-the first time the two races had ever set eyes on each other. How long ago had it been . . . ? She did the mental arithmetic with practiced ease. Fourteen standard months. It was now April, 2365, on the world she didn't let herself spend too much time remembering.

She felt another launch through the soles of her feet, and watched as the fighters flashed outward into the starfields. "Green" was too weak a word for these pilots, going into action for the first time after crash training in their race's first fighters. But Sommers had watched that training, and understood the implications of what she was watching. The Crucians were unique: toolmakers who were also functional flyers. A species that possessed two such extreme specializations at once was like a custard pie in the pompous face of scientific dogma. Sommers couldn't bring herself to worry about the headache the news would give human xenologists. What mattered was that the Grand Alliance now had an ally-without knowing about it just yet-with the potential to produce even better fighter pilots than the Ophiuchi.

Now that they have fighters, came the inevitable, guilt-inducing afterthought.

As if to underline it, Feridoun Hafezi appeared beside her, looking his most disapproving.

"Don't say it!"

"Don't say what?" Hafezi's black eyebrows were arches of uncomprehending innocence.

"You know perfectly well what! You're going to tell me I had no authorization to give the Crucians strikefighter technology."

"I wasn't going to say that. Besides, I don't have to. Your own guilty conscience obviously already did it for me."

"I do not have a guilty conscience! How could I have kept it from them, short of blowing up all of SF 19's fighters and carriers, as well as wiping all our databases? Should I have done that just to keep a vital technological edge away from a race that's fighting for its existence against the Bugs? A race, I might add, that saved our personal bacon! And furthermore-"

"All right, I admit it! You don't have a guilty conscience." Hafezi held up a hand to ward off renewed expostulations. "Besides, that really wasn't what I was thinking of."

"Oh?" Sommers cocked her head. "Then how come you're looking like the righteous wrath of Allah?"

"You know perfectly well why," he grumped, echoing her in a way of which neither of them was aware, and she sighed.

"I thought we'd been over that. It's vital that I accompany this fleet personally, as an earnest of our commitment to-"

"You could have sent me to represent you. Or Milos." He waved vaguely outward, indicating the part of the formation where Kabilovic was launching his human and Ophiuchi-piloted fighters-the few that weren't scattered around the Star Union to serve as training cadre-in support of the Crucians. "Or . . . somebody. But you've got no business anywhere near this battle, Aileen!"

It had been some time since they'd called each other by anything but first names in private. She gazed at him appraisingly.

"There wouldn't, by any chance, be any personal feelings behind this line of argument, would there?"

"Of course not! I'm merely pointing out that you're too valuable to be risked."

"As is obvious to any dispassionate, objective person," she deadpanned.

"Precisely! You're the ambassador, damn it! The Crucians trust you. You're irreplaceable."

Sommers could no longer sustain a straight face.

"What a crock! You know as well as I do that my ambassadorial status is, to put it very politely, unofficial. I don't exactly carry credentials from the Federal Foreign Secretary, you know. How could I? In case you haven't noticed, we're completely out of contact with home."

"That's just the point. Survey commanders have always had broad latitude in dealing with newly contacted races. As senior officer, you represent the Federation. Your status may be a little irregular, but it's still real." His sudden smile was like the sun through a rift in dark clouds. "Don't be such a damned hypocrite! You didn't let questions about your authority prevent you from going ahead and handing the Crucians every bit of technology in our databases, and offering them full membership in the Grand Alliance."

"No, I didn't, did I?" Sommers looked thoughtful. "All things considered, maybe it's just as well that we're out of touch with the Federation!"

After their combined commands had finished off the last Bugs in the red-giant system Sommers had come to know as Pajzomo, she and Wingmaster Furra had managed to establish communication of a rudimentary sort. It hadn't been up to deep philosophical discourse, but it had sufficed for Furra to suggest that SF 19 proceed, escorted by the Scout Wing she'd been supporting, to the great base at Reymiirnagar, four systems away. The suggestion had made excellent sense to Sommers, who'd been only too willing to put as much distance as possible between SF 19 and the Bugs.

Reymiirnagar's blue giant primary had a red dwarf companion, one of whose barren moons held a hostile-environment settlement of Telikans. Their koala-bear-like forms (albeit with arms of gorilla length) had brought home to Sommers that she was dealing with a multispecies polity. The tales they'd told had brought home even more.

A little over a standard century before, the Crucians had encountered an enemy beyond their most diseased minds' imaginings of horror-an enemy who committed acts inconceivable to any save the demons of Iierschtga, the anti-god of their theology. Hence, in the absence of any responses to communication, the Crucians had named their enemy the Demonic Realm (it might sound a little old-fashioned, but Sommers' specialists had assured her that no other translation captured the flavor of the Crucian term) and its denizens the Demons. The Star Union had survived only through a fortunate dispensation of astrographics . . . which hadn't been so fortunate for the Telikans.

The Demon onslaught-the kind of grinding, crushing, unfeeling advance Sommers found all too familiar-had never been halted by the outmatched Crucians. Rather, it had finally reached a system where its sole avenue of further advance had been a closed warp point through which the Crucians retired . . . without revealing its location. That closed warp point had been in the Telik system. Heroic efforts by the forces of Warmaster Nokajii Rikka-now the most revered, almost deified, figure in Telikan history, Crucian though he'd been-had won time for the evacuation of part of the Telikan population. But at length the last ship had departed through the cosmic anomaly which the Demons could not find unless shown the way. The Telikan refugees had received two things from the Star Union whose location their race's tragic sacrifice had preserved inviolate: resettlement on the world of Mysch-Telik ("New Telik"), and confirmation of Nokajii Rikka's dying pledge that their homeworld would eventually be liberated.

Sommers had learned all of this as she and her experts labored to establish in-depth communications with the Star Union's representatives. Given both sides' experience in such things, it hadn't taken long. Less than two standard months had passed before she offered the Star Union co-equal status in the Grand Alliance-including full access to technology the Crucians found dauntingly advanced-in exchange for assistance to her command and a promise of future cooperation in taking the war to the Bugs. Little more time than that had passed before the Niistka Glorkhus, the "Speaking Chamber," or all-Union legislature, had ratified the treaty produced by Sommers' legal officer-a mere lieutenant, who was surely the most junior individual ever to draw up such a document.

It was well that matters had proceeded so swiftly. Barely was the figurative ink metaphorically dry on the treaty when the word had arrived: the Demons had returned to Pajzomo.

The Crucians had held, but only at the cost of heavy casualties-including Warmaster Tuuralii Kerra, who'd arrived to take over from Wingmaster Furra during the four months that had passed since the latter's first contact with Sommers. Less than three standard weeks later, when the Bugs had come again in greater force, Furra-once again in command, following the warmaster's death-had been unable to do much more than beat a fighting retreat through a warp point other than the one Sommers had traversed to reach Reymiirnagar, seeking to draw the Bugs away from the most direct routes into the Star Union's heart.

However, in doing so Furra had led them toward the worlds of the Star Union member race known as the Br'stoll'ee. First in the Bugs' path, three systems away from Pajzomo, had been the infant Br'stoll'ee colony of Rabahl-a fabulously rich system with no less than three habitable planets.

Over the long generations of watchful waiting, the Star Union had built up a massive Reserve Fleet of mothballed warships, ready for instant activation, and the Reserve's mobilization had begun the moment Wingmaster Furra's first courier drones from Pajzomo had spread the tidings that the War of Vengeance had begun. The first of the Reserve formations to reach the front had, by a suicidal self-sacrifice against a technologically superior enemy that Sommers wondered if humans could have matched, won time to evacuate Rabahl's colonists. The Bugs had taken possession of an empty system, which they'd proceeded to convert into an impregnable bastion.

By then, the Bugs had completed their survey of Pajzomo, and located the system's third warp point-the one leading eventually to Reymiirnagar.

The heroes of Rabahl had inflicted losses sufficient to bring Bug offensive operations to a few months' halt. But it couldn't last, and at length the remorseless machine had begun clanking forward again, smashing its way through system after system in a series of battles almost unimaginable in their destructiveness and intensity.

But by then, desperate improvisation had borne fruit. Despite all the difficulties-language barriers, technological incompatibilities, building up a Crucian infrastructure that could make the machines that made other machines-fighter production had commenced earlier than anyone had a right to expect. Those first fighters and their half-trained pilots had been rushed to Reymiirnagar. They'd arrived there by the time the remnants of the defending force had straggled in from the neighboring system of Tevreelan, convoying that system's evacuated Telikan colonists and bearing the news that Reymiirnagar was next.

Warmaster Robalii Rikka, great-great-grandson of the famous Nokajii Rikka, commanding First Grand Wing, joined the two humans at the observation screen, bringing Sommers back to the present.

"Ambassador," the Crucian addressed her gravely, "the fighters are all away. Would you like to observe at my holo display?"

"Thank you, Warmaster." Sommers knew it was a little irregular for the ambassador of an allied power to be allowed on the flagship of a war fleet engaged in battle, but this whole situation was irregular. The Crucians, vastly experienced in interspecies diplomatic relations, had possessed a pretty good idea of how spurious the title "ambassador" was even as they granted it to her. But they'd also learned how far behind the Federation they were in technological terms-and she hadn't tried to hold back the fact that this meant they were very nearly as far behind the Demons. She might not be an officially accredited diplomatic representative, but to them she'd represented something far more important than that: hope.

Something else she hadn't held back was her total ignorance of how her own race and its friends were faring. It mattered scarcely more than the legalities of her status. Even the possibility of powerful aid against the Demons was enough to win a wholehearted commitment from the Crucians to join the Grand Alliance at such time as it could be contacted.

Too bad the Grand Alliance doesn't know it has a new member, Sommers reflected. A member which, while maybe not in the same league as the Federation or the Khanate, is considerably larger than either the Ophiuchi Association or the Empire of Gormus. And one with some offsetting tech advantages of its own, like those anti-shield missiles and their laser warheads. Or those box launchers of theirs. And one whose peoples are just as motivated as any human or Orion to hate the Bugs.

She thought of that motivation as she looked into Rikka's holo display and recalled the earlier stages of this battle. The Crucians had displayed once again their capacity for countering Bug technological superiority with sheer guts, and she'd watched, speechless, as swarms of corvettes had gone unflinchingly in against the mammoth ships emerging from the warp point. Those corvettes, smaller than any starships the TFN had used since the Second Interstellar War, almost a century and a half ago, were little more than second-generation ECM installations with engines strapped on, and their crews had spent themselves like wastrels to get in among the invaders and use their ECM2 to jam the Bugs' command datalink. By their suicide-there was no other word-they'd momentarily stripped away the Bug battlegroups' ability to coordinate their offensive fire . . . or point defense.

The Crucians had prepared for this moment by towing their asteroid fortresses and orbital weapon platforms across the Reymiirnagar system from the Telik warp point to this one, which they'd never expected to have to defend. Now that awesome array of fixed defenses had taken ruthless advantage of the Bugs' fleeting vulnerability and poured missile fire into the maw of the warp point, turning it into a searing hell of x-ray detonation lasers. Bug ships had died at a rate that, Sommers had told herself, must surely be more than even Bugs could endure.

Robalii Rikka had evidently been thinking the same thing.

"I hadn't wanted to commit the fighters in this action," he said. "I'd hoped to hold them in reserve for a time when they're truly ready and can be employed with decisive effect."

Sommers nodded. It seemed a shame to tip their hand now, revealing the Star Union's new fighter capability rather than waiting until it could be sprung as an overwhelming surprise. She knew exactly how Rikka felt.

But, like Rikka, she'd watched in the holo display as the Bugs, characteristically, kept coming without any apparent consciousness of the terrific losses they'd sustained. And as the deaths of the last of the gallant little corvettes had given the invaders back their command datalink and the rate of those losses had dropped, Rikka had seen that every remaining card had to be played.

He'd given the order to launch the fighters.

Now they were sweeping outward from Glohriiss and her sisters, a curving wall of tiny lights in the holo display that converged on the warp point and the spreading infection of "hostile" icons. No words were spoken as Rikka and his two human companions watched. They knew that, but for the few fighters piloted by Kabilovic's veterans, every one of those lights represented a young being about to pit an untried vehicle and all-too-brief training against enemies that summoned up nightmares from the depths of his culture's most terrible mythology.

But, Sommers reminded herself, those pilots had more than their inadequate training and nonexistent experience standing behind them. They had countless generations of ancestors who'd sought prey in the skies of the Crucian homeworld, swooping and soaring through a three-dimensional environment. Humans had to be taught the kind of spatial sense the Crucians got gratis from their upbringing and from their chromosomes.

The light-points swept in, and swatches of them were blotted out by the tremendous wealth of defensive fire from the Bug ships. But the missile-storm from the fortresses was unabated, and the damage it inflicted inched back up as the fighters distracted the Bugs' point defense. And as the Bugs sought to apportion their resources in response to multiple threats, more and more of the fighters got through, as well.

Sommers wasn't a specialist in fighter operations, but she was sure Kabilovic would confirm the impression that grew on her as she watched the display with occasional side-glances at the statistical readouts. The Crucian pilots displayed the raggedness one might expect of newbies, but little of the awkwardness and none of the hesitancy. What they performed was an inexpert dance, but it was a dance. And they remembered the fundamental rule of fighter warfare, and used their superior maneuverability to work their way into the blind zones created by enemy starships' drive fields. It was what made the tiny craft so deadly, despite their limited ordnance loads, that Federation and Khanate had once been forced to forget their own enmity, however temporarily, out of sheer self-preservation in the face of the fighter's genocidal Rigelian inventors.

Sommers maintained her ambassadorial gravitas when the fighters claimed their first Bug ship. Hafezi, under no such constraints, whooped something in Iranian.

There weren't enough fighters to be decisive by themselves. But they complicated the tactical problem faced by Bug ships already dealing with the massive bombardment from the fortresses, rather like a swarm of mosquitos around the head of a man trying to fend off a bear. And Rikka's battle-line was closing in to missile range.

And yet the Bugs kept emerging from the warp point, in their patented nightmare way.

Will that nightmare ever stop coming back for me? Sommers wondered.

But then there came a kind of crack, almost audible. Rikka, Sommers and Hafezi looked at each other wordlessly, recognizing it a heartbeat before the readouts confirmed it. The Bug ships already in Reymiirnagar space turned away, and new ones ceased to appear. The cacophony of death began to give way to a diminuendo.

Sommers became aware that she was drenched with sweat. Barely able to make the effort of turning her head, she looked around the flag spaces. The Crucians were physically and psychologically able to at least partly suppress their need for room, which otherwise would have made space vehicles out of the question for them. But this area was still more open and spacious than any human ship's interior, and she was able to see many of the crew.

Their reaction was interesting. It wasn't the demonstrative jubilation that humans might have evinced. It wasn't her own drained weariness. It was a kind of dawning awe. The Demons had been stopped.

"They'll be back," Rikka was saying. "And in greater strength. But reinforcements are on the way. . . including many more fighters. We will be ready for them."

Sommers nodded. They would. Reymiirnagar would hold. Humanity, without knowing it, had an ally that would live.

Assuming, said the voice she could never dismiss, that it's not too late for humanity. And once again her nightmare returned-her real nightmare, the one that battle and sex and a few other things could momentarily banish but which always came crowding back to fill her waking consciousness with unthinkable dread.

So it was confirmed. The elusive survey flotilla had survived after all. There was no other explanation for the fact that these other Enemies-rediscovered after their seeming vanishment so long ago-now had the small attack craft that had given the Fleet so much trouble, and which their own technological base could not have produced unaided. Worse, much of the huge stockpile of mothballed warships the Fleet had built up since the Old Enemies' disappearance, steadily assembling the mammoth reserve forces its doctrine called for, had been seriously depleted by the war against the New Enemies. Those ships had been intended as the spiked mace which would demolish any fleet the Old Enemies might have managed to build up by the time the Fleet found them once more. Now, at the very moment for whose inevitable coming all of those years of industrial effort had been committed, virtually all of the reserve had already been destroyed.

It was most inconvenient.

Of course, the strength of the warp point defenses-especially those asteroid fortresses-had also been unexpected. Such fortresses, unlike ordinary orbital weapons platforms, could hardly have been brought in piecemeal from elsewhere. To justify such extraordinary protection, there must be something special about the system from which the Fleet had just been repulsed. Perhaps it was these Enemies' equivalent of one of the Systems Which Must Be Defended.

But the attack craft had been the worst surprise. Now the Old Enemies had access to the technology of the new ones. That made it even more imperative that the two threats be kept from communicating with each other. Which, in turn, necessitated diverting more resources to this front. One of the Systems Which Must Be Defended had been assigned the responsibility for dealing with the Old Enemies while the others continued to concentrate upon the new, but that decision had been made in large part because the Old Enemies' technology had appeared substantially inferior to that of the New Enemies. Now, it seemed, that might no longer be the case . . . and that the resources of a single System Which Must Be Defended might not be enough.

But it would have to be. For one of the other four was now radioactive cinders, leaving only three to deal with the far greater threat posed by the New Enemies.

It was, indeed, inconvenient.

CHAPTER EIGHT: Ride Boldly

Rear Admiral Andrew Prescott had discovered that he hated survey missions. This was only the third he'd commanded, but that was enough to know that he hated survey missions.

Someone had to command them, he admitted, and the ships assigned to them these days certainly made them big enough to be a rear admiral's responsibility. And the rise to flag rank which had made him a candidate for the job, while less meteoric than his brother Raymond's explosive elevation, was both professionally satisfying and a mark of his superiors' confidence in him. For that matter, his assignment to Survey Command at this particular point in the war was an enormous compliment . . . looked at in the proper light, of course.

He sighed and tipped back in his command chair on TFNS Concorde's quiet, efficiently functioning flag bridge while he contemplated the peaceful imagery of the main plot. They were nine months out of System L-169, floating near yet another anonymous, uncharted flaw in space, and he'd spent a lot of time on Flag Bridge over that long, weary voyage. The flotilla had charted sixteen new warp points during that time, including the present object of its attention, which wouldn't have been all that many for a peacetime cruise of that length but was quite an accomplishment under wartime conditions of stealth and caution. Yet despite their achievements, the peculiar amalgam of tension, concentration, and utter boredom of their mission so far would have been impossible to beat. It was far harder than a civilian might have believed for people to remain alert and watchful-even deep in unexplored, potentially hostile space for weeks on end-when absolutely nothing happened.

Of course, boredom is a lot better than what we'd be feeling if something did happen, he reminded himself, and let his eyes linger on the icons representing his command. Every unit was cloaked, and Concorde's sensors couldn't actually have found them all, even knowing where to look, but CIC managed to keep track of all their positions anyway.

Survey Flotilla 62 boasted twenty-three ships, from Concorde and the Borsoi-B-class fleet carrier Foxhound all the way down to four Wayfarer-class freighters and the escort cruisers Dido and Yura. They were all fast ships, too, and the flotilla's nine battlecruisers and three carriers represented a powerful striking force. But they weren't supposed to do any striking. If they were forced to, then their mission would have failed in at least one respect, for all this effort and tonnage truly focused on insuring that the five Hun-class survey cruisers and their crews of highly trained specialists were allowed to do their jobs unmolested and undetected, and everyone knew it. Especially the aforementioned specialists, who somehow managed (solely out of deeply ingrained professionalism and courtesy, no doubt) not to look too obviously down their noses at the ignorant louts from Battle Fleet assigned to do unimportant things like keeping the Bugs off their backs.

Prescott's lips twitched in a faint smile. It was possible, he supposed, that he was being just a bit overly sensitive. Under more normal circumstances, he suspected he would actually have enjoyed Survey Command. Even under those which presently applied, he wasn't completely immune to the wonder and delight of going places and seeing things no human could possibly have seen ever before. Unfortunately, circumstances weren't normal. Worse, he was one of those ignorant louts the specialists deprecated (although very respectfully in his case), for he'd never served aboard a single Survey Command vessel before he was assigned to ramrod an entire flotilla.

If it hadn't been for the war-and the Bugs-he probably would have repaired that omission in his resumé by now. The Prescott family had a long, distinguished tradition of service to the Federation's navy. Indeed, there'd been Prescotts in the TFN for as long as there'd been a TFN, and before that they'd served in the pre-Navy survey ships of the Federation, and before that they'd served in wet-navy ships clear back to the days of sail and muzzle-loading cannon. In many ways, the Prescotts and the handful of families like them were anachronisms in a service whose officer corps took self-conscious pride in its tradition as a meritocracy. Ability was supposed to matter more than family connections, and by and large, it did. Yet everyone knew there were also dynasties within the Navy, families whose members were just a bit more equal than anyone else.

Andrew Prescott had always known it, at least. There were times he'd felt guilty over the inside track an accident of birth had bestowed upon him, yet in an odd way, that advantage had actually conspired to make him a better officer than he might otherwise have been. Family tradition was a powerful force, and generation after generation of Prescotts had simply taken it for granted that their sons and daughters would carry on their own tradition and excel in the process. Andrew's parents had been no exception to that rule, and there'd never been any question in anyone's mind, Raymond's and his own included, what the two of them would do with their lives. Yet the knowledge that the name he bore might give him an unfair advantage or let him get by with less than the maximum performance of which he was capable (and, worse, that some among his fellow officers would think it might, whether it did or not) had given Andrew a special incentive to prove it hadn't. He'd entered the Academy determined that no one would ever have the slightest reason to believe he hadn't earned whatever rank he might attain, and that determination had stayed with him ever since.

At the same time, he'd been aware for years that he was being groomed for eventual flag rank, and in the peacetime TFN, that had meant at least a brief stint attached to Survey Command. An admiral was supposed to have well-rounded experience in all phases of the Navy's operations, which meant that on his way to his exalted status he had to have his ticket punched in battle-line and carrier ops, survey missions, dirtside duty with BuShips and BuWeaps, War College duty, JCS staff duty, and probably some diplomatic service, as well. As both a Prescott and an officer who'd demonstrated high ability (and ambition), Andrew had been in line for the appropriate ticket punching when the Bugs appeared. He'd commanded the battlecruiser Daikyu, and he'd already known his next command would be the Borsoi-class fleet carrier Airedale, after which he'd been almost certain to move over to Survey for at least one tour with one of the smaller prewar flotillas. Not as its CO, of course. That was a job for the specialists who spent virtually their entire careers in Survey. But he would have commanded one of the survey cruisers, which would have given him some hands-on experience with the job. From there, he would probably have moved up to take over a destroyer squadron or a cruiser division and might well have finished up with a second Survey tour as a flotilla's tactical coordinator, in command of its attached escort of "gunslingers."

But all nonessential personnel reassignments, including his transfer to Airedale, had been frozen when the sudden explosion of combat rocked the Navy back on its heels. That had been fortunate in many ways, given Airedale's destruction with all hands at Third Justin, but it also meant that, as the war's enormous casualty toll shattered the Bureau of Personnel's neat, peacetime training and promotion plans, Prescott never had gotten a carrier command. On the other hand, he'd been kicked up to commodore, despite his lack of carrier experience, at least eight years sooner than could possibly have happened in time of peace, and he'd made rear admiral by forty, barely two years after that. He could wish his indecently rapid promotions owed less to the old tradition of stepping into dead men's shoes, but he was scarcely alone in that. And by prewar standards, virtually all of his new-minted flag officer colleagues and he were drastically inexperienced for their ranks. Ticket punching had been placed on indefinite hold, because the holders of those tickets had suddenly found themselves faced with doing something no Navy officer had done in sixty years: fighting an actual war.

But it also meant he'd never gotten that assignment to Survey, either, and more than a few Survey officers (including, unfortunately, Captain George Snyder, who commanded SF 62's Huns from TFNS Sarmatian) deeply resented being placed under the command of someone who had no exploration experience of his own. Snyder was at least professional enough to keep his resentment under control and accept Prescott's authority gracefully, but he was Survey to his toenails. He might be forced to admit the force of the logic which put experienced Battle Fleet officers in command of flotillas which might run into Bugs at any moment, yet that didn't mean he had to like it. And, truth to tell, Prescott had to admit that there was at least a little reason on Snyder's side. Survey work was a specialist's vocation, and it was painfully obvious to Prescott that Snyder, two ranks his junior or not, knew far more about the art and science of their current mission than he did.

The rear admiral rummaged in a tunic pocket and dragged out his pipe, and a throat cleared itself pointedly behind him.

He glanced over his shoulder with a grin as he extracted a tobacco pouch as well, then stuffed the pipe slowly under the disapproving frown of Dr. Melanie Soo. He met her gaze squarely, noting the twinkle lurking in her dark eyes, and replaced the pouch and reached for his lighter.

Dr. Soo-Surgeon Captain Melanie Soo, formally speaking-was the flotilla's chief medical officer. But her commission was a "hostilities only" one, and she would always remain a civilian at heart, with little of the veneration career Navy types extended to the lordly persons of flag officers. And for all that she was technically his subordinate, he always felt just a little uncomfortable giving her orders, since the white-haired surgeon captain was almost thirty years his senior. But all that was fine with Prescott. Soo had more medical experience than any three regular Fleet surgeons, and although she was the only officer of the flotilla who could legally remove him from command, he found her enormously likable. Which was one reason he enjoyed provoking her with his pipe.

Smoking wasn't-quite-officially banned on TFN ships, but that was solely a concession to the Fleet's increasing percentage of Fringe Worlders. Modern medicine had been able to handle the physical consequences of abusing one's lungs with tobacco smoke for centuries, and the lingering Heart World and Corporate World laws banning the vice in public places had less to do with health concerns than with core world standards of courtesy. Or that was they way they saw it, anyway. Fringers were more inclined to see it as an enforced courtesy, one more example of the intrusion of the Federal government into matters of personal choice which were none of its business, and the result had been an amazing resurgence of a habit which had been almost entirely wiped out over three hundred years earlier. And an insistence that they be permitted to indulge in that habit publically, as per the personal liberty provisions of the Constitution.

As a Heart Worlder himself, Prescott felt no need to make his pipe into a political statement. It was simply something he enjoyed, although he'd found lately that he took a sort of gloomy pleasure in knowing his vice was bad for him. And in indulging a habit he knew at least half his staff-and especially Dr. Soo-disapproved of strongly.

Does them good, he thought. Hell, think how miserable they'd be if I didn't give them something to disapprove of!

He chuckled mentally as he applied the lighter and sucked in the first fragrant smoke. As always, the ritual was soothing and comforting, and the fond resignation of his staffers only made it more so, in an odd sort of way.

Probably a sign of senility on my part, he told himself with another mental laugh, studying his unlined face in an inactive com screen. Or maybe it's just the beginning of lunacy brought on by terminal boredom.

Or tension, perhaps.

"That is a truly disgusting habit . . . Sir," Soo's soprano voice observed. It was, perhaps, a sign of her essentially civilian background that a mere surgeon captain would make such a remark to a rear admiral, and Prescott smiled around the pipe stem.

"Oh, yes? Well, at least it's not as disgusting as something like chewing gum!" he retorted. "And given all the other things that could happen to me-or any of us-out here, I fear that even your disapproval, much though it pains me, is endurable. Besides," he jabbed a thumb upward at the mesh covered opening directly above his command chair, "I had that air intake relocated specifically to prevent my smoke from offending your effete, over-civilized nostrils."

"And sinuses. And lungs," she agreed.

"All those persnickety internal components," he said with a lordly dismissive gesture.

"Just wait until your next physical, boy-o."

"Ha!" He grinned at her again, then looked over his other shoulder. Commander Joshua Leopold, his chief of staff, was bent over a console with Lieutenant Commander Chau Ba Hai, his operations officer, conversing in lowered voices rather like those of students who hoped the professor wasn't going to call on them until they got their class notes straightened out.

"Problems, Josh?" Prescott asked mildly, and Leopold looked up quickly.

"We don't have a complete report yet, Sir," he said.

"What's the delay, Commander?"

Leopold was not misled by the admiral's amiable tone. Andrew Prescott was a fair man and a considerate boss, but God help the man or woman he decided was incompetent or (far worse, in his book) a slacker.

"We're having problems with interference and disorientation again, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Chau said before Leopold could respond. The dark-haired, slightly built ops officer was the staff officer technically responsible for the use of the new RD2 recon probes, and he met the admiral's gaze squarely. "I know the probes are officially cleared for field use, but they still don't reorient well after emergence-especially from an uncharted point. The guidance and memory systems just aren't tough enough to handle the grav surge yet."

"You're saying the data have been delayed."

"Yes, Sir. I'm afraid I am. We lost seven out of eight from our flight, and the docking program on the only one we got back aborted. I had to bring it in on a tractor, and it's pretty well scrambled. In fact, the computer rejected our first two data runs. I've got two yeomen decoding now, but I'm afraid these things can still stand some improvement."

"Understood," Prescott said after a moment. "Inform me as soon as you have something positive; don't bother with preliminary reports. And check with Sarmatian, too, Josh. Captain Snyder and his people seem to have some sort of mystical understanding with those drones of yours."

"Aye, aye, Sir," Leopold said just a tad stiffly, and Prescott nodded and turned back to his own plot.

"That was nasty, Andy," Soo chided too quietly for other ears to hear, and he quirked an eyebrow at her.

"Nasty? Whatever do you mean, Melly?" he asked equally softly.

"Commander Leopold is a nice young man, and that crack about Captain Snyder was a low blow. We all know he's some kind of electronic genius. Is it really fair to underline his superior performance for Commander Leopold and Commander Chau?"

"It keeps them on their toes, Melly. Besides, why do you think Snyder is an 'electronic genius'-aside, of course, from his extensive Survey Command experience? I'll tell you why. Some senior SOB like me dumped all over him when he was just a little feller, and he got good just to spite the bastard. That's known as proficiency enhancement."

"I don't believe I've ever had the mysteries of command explained to me quite so clearly, Admiral." Dr. Soo grinned. "But, then, I'm only an old country doctor who got drafted. As soon as this unpleasantness with the Bugs is over, I'll hie me back to my cottage and retire for good."

Prescott snorted derisively. Dr. Soo had been number two in the neurosurgery department at Johns Hopkins-Bethesda back on Old Terra before she volunteered for naval service. And she'd volunteered only because she knew about the grim, genocidal reality behind the 'unpleasantness' with the Bugs and couldn't not try to do something about it. She knew he knew it, too, and that he was damned glad to have her. It had always been TFN policy to assign only the best medical talent to survey flotillas, for there was always the chance of running into some new and nasty microorganism or disease, and there was no time to reach base med facilities if something went wrong in the Long Dark. The longer (and much more risky) survey missions which had become the norm over the last five years had only reinforced the logic behind that policy, but Dr. Soo was heavy metal even for survey duty.

"Watch me," she assured him. "But as a pseudo-civilian, I've been wanting to ask you something. It's driving me crazy, in fact."

"What? Asking for free professional advice? For shame, Doctor!" Prescott chuckled, but he also swung his chair to face her fully and cocked it back. "Okay, Melly. What's on your mind?"

"These probes keep breaking down. Everybody knows that, and Josh and Ba Hai just lost seven out of eight, and the one they got back at all is obviously pretty addled. So how come you professional military types carry on like they're the greatest thing since sliced bread if they're so temperamental and unreliable?"

"Because those probes are what's going to win the war-if anything will-once we get the kinks out," Prescott said flatly. Soo's eyebrows rose at his suddenly dead serious tone, and he reminded himself that she really was the pseudo-civilian she'd called herself. It was easy to forget, most of the time, given how thoroughly and well she'd gained command of the areas of responsibility which were her own. But questions about things like the probes drove home the fact that she truly wasn't a Navy surgeon. Not the way men and women who'd spent their entire careers attached to the Fleet were, at any rate. She simply didn't have the background to understand why the new probes were like a gift from the gods themselves in the eyes of professional naval officers.

"I mean it," he told her, and then puffed on his pipe again while he considered how to continue. "This war isn't like any of the others we've fought," he went on after a moment. "We knew a hell of a lot more about the opposition from the outset when we went up against the Tabbies and the Rigelians-even the Thebans-than we do about the Bugs. Aside from the fact that this time the galaxy really isn't big enough for the two of us, of course."

He smiled around his pipe stem, totally without humor.

"Even the best failsafe system can't guarantee total destruction of a ship's astrogation database, Melly. And even when the main system's scrubbed exactly as intended, there are so many backup data files, or even hard copy records, that after most really big battles one side or the other usually captures at least part of the other side's nav data. We catch some of theirs; they catch some of ours; and we both churn it through computers to translate and correlate it. And what do we get for our trouble?"

"Information, I suppose," Dr. Soo said.

"Exactly. We get pictures of how their systems look, possibly an idea of how many inhabited systems and worlds they have, and maybe we can even figure out how some of their internal warp lines run. Even in best case situations, it's information we can't use without a starting point, a break-in on one of their warp lines we can recognize . . . and one where there's not a damned fleet or fortifications from Hell to keep us out. But at least it gives us some notion of what we're up against.

"But not this time. I suppose it's possible some egghead back at Centauri will eventually figure out how to read what-if anything-we've actually captured from the Bugs, but it's not going to happen soon. Which means that everything we know, or think we know, about the enemy in this war is pure speculation. We like to think it's informed, intelligent speculation, but the hard evidence we have to work from is mighty sparse, and that's particularly true where their astrogation data is concerned.

"Oh, we know more than we did before the war began." He tamped the tobacco in his pipe and sucked in more smoke. "We know how the Anderson Chain lays out, for example. As far as Pesthouse, at least," he added grimly, and Soo nodded soberly. "And we know that Zephrain links directly to one of their central systems-one of the 'home hive' systems, to use Admiral LeBlanc's terminology. But we don't know anything about any point in their territory beyond Pesthouse or Home Hive Three, and every time we poke our heads through from Zephrain, they chop us off at the ankles. And we do the same for them, of course."

He smiled again, this time much less grimly, with pride in his older brother.

"But even if we were able to break through from Zephrain, take Home Hive Three completely away from them, and keep it, they'd only fall back fighting and fort up in the next systems down the warp lines, because by now they know about that connection. We managed to do to them more or less what they wanted to do to Centauri . . . and did do to Kliean. However big they are, we know we must have hurt them badly in the process, but we need to do it again. We need to break into their internal warp lines again somewhere else-preferably somewhere important enough that they have to commit to defending it-and rip them up. Cut loose in their rear areas and hit their battle fleet from as many directions as we can. Doing as much damage as possible before they can redeploy to stop us would be worthwhile in its own right, but a big part of our objective is to force them to redeploy. We want to avoid easily predicted frontal attacks and their casualty tolls as much as possible, but we also want to stretch them out, force them to defend as many points as we can. Given the nature of warp points, it's virtually certain that there are more points of contact waiting to be found, too-ones that would let us into their rear areas . . . or them into ours. But we don't know where they are."

"Well, the same thing's true for them, isn't it?" Dr. Soo pointed out. "I mean, we're no worse off than they are in that respect."

" 'No worse off' doesn't win wars, Melly. Besides, how can we be sure that's true? The Tabbies thought Kliean was a safe rear area, and we thought the same thing about Centauri, but we were both wrong, and the Bugs found both connections before we did. Remember the Centauri Raid? We were lucky as hell we spotted their survey force and that they didn't have one of their damned assault forces handy. And that they probably don't have any more of a clue about how our warp lines lay out, or how close to Sol they were, than we have about theirs. By the time they were ready to try a real assault, Ray and Sky Marshal MacGregor were ready to slap them down, but it was all a matter of timing, and it could have broken in their favor just as easily as in ours.

"But what if the same thing happens again? What if they find a closed warp point in Galloway's Star? Or what if they find the warp point-in Sol or New Valkha-this time without our noticing before they bring in the heavy attack force? I'm sure you've heard what everyone's calling what Ray and Zhaarnak did to Home Hive Three. How would you like the Bugs to apply 'the Shiva Option' to Old Terra?"

"But they haven't found anything like that," Dr. Soo pointed out with a shiver. "Damn you, Andy! You shouldn't give old lady doctors the shakes!"

"No, they haven't found it . . . yet," Prescott agreed. "But they still can if we don't find them first. And find them quietly, without an engagement that tells them we've done it. Which is why we're sweating bullets to make these probes work. We've already proved at Home Hive Three that they're our best chance to sneak into the Bugs' backyard without their knowing we've done it, and sending them through does two things. It doesn't risk lives sending ships into God knows what, and, more important, we may get a glimpse of another El Dorado without alerting the local Bugs. If we get a look-see at another of their home hives, say, and they'd don't know it . . . Well, let's just say Battle Fleet would drop in one afternoon without calling ahead for reservations."

"I see." Dr. Soo rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "But if the probes are so good-or will be, once the bugs (you should pardon the expression) are out of them-wouldn't that also let us send out smaller survey forces?"

She gestured at the tactical display, whose three-dimensional sphere showed the glittering light codes of everything within thirty light-seconds, by way of illustration. Concorde herself showed gold, denoting her flag status. The other battlecruisers, the carriers, and the destroyers and freighters burned the color-codes of their types, all ringed in the green which identified them as friendly Battle Fleet ships. Only the Huns gleamed the blue-banded white of Survey Command.

 "Surely that would let us use our strength more economically! And wouldn't smaller forces be less likely to be detected in the first place?"

"What? Leave the gunslingers behind?" Prescott's grin was just a trifle sour as he used Survey's derisive nickname. "Melly, you're a hell of a doctor, but you'd make a lousy fleet commander. Space is pretty big, you know, and an entire flotilla isn't measurably easier to spot than a single unit, assuming the flotilla in question exercises proper caution. So sending out a smaller force wouldn't appreciably lessen the risk of detection but would lessen the flotilla's ability to stand up to anything that did detect it. Hence the gunslingers. Only five of those ships really matter-Sarmatian and her bunch." He jabbed his pipe stem at the white dots. "The rest of us are just along to make sure their information gets home. That's why a mere light cruiser like Sarmatian has a full captain for a CO. And why Snyder is my second in command."

"Redundancy?"

"Partly. Any good com net has built-in redundancy, of course. We could lose every ship but one and still do the job, which is why all our databases copy all astro data. In fact, though, the rest of us are here to protect those cruisers. They've got better instrumentation and specialist crews, thus our Captain Snyder, who's so good at his job. If only one ship gets home, GHQ hopes she'll be one of those five, though they'd never be so tactless as to tell the rest of us so."

"They don't have to with you along," Dr. Soo told him.

"Upset to find out you're expendable?" he teased.

"At my age, you're always expendable. But is there any chance of transferring to Sarmatian? I'd feel better knowing you were protecting me along with the crown jewels over there."

"Shame on you, Melly!"

"Cowardice is a survival trait," Dr. Soo said tartly.

"Well, there is always the chance of running into-or over-a cloaked Bug picket," Prescott conceded. "They don't seem to survey on anywhere near the scale we do, but intelligence's estimate is that they probably station picket ships in permanent cloak in every system they know about. Which is another reason for the probes, of course. We send them through to sanitize the area within scanner range of any warp point before we send any manned units through, then go back into cloak ourselves immediately. But the chance of our actually running into one of those pickets-and being spotted-is pretty slim, so the odds are a thousand to one that you'll get home safe and sound. Even aboard the flotilla flagship."

"Oh? And if we do run into Bugs?" She was suddenly serious.

"If they're electronic, we sic Captain Snyder on them. And if they're eight-legged, warm-blooded pseudo-insects," he turned serious himself, "why, then, Melly, we gunslingers do our job."

Soo was about to reply when Prescott's console beeped the tone of an outside com connection. He raised an eyebrow and touched a stud, and the com screen lit with Captain Snyder's boyish face.

"Captain," the admiral said with the courtesy he and Snyder were always careful to show one another. "A welcome surprise."

"I've got a bigger one for you, Admiral," Snyder said, and his taut, barely suppressed excitement pulled Prescott up in his command chair. Snyder had spent over twelve years in Survey command. He wouldn't be this excited just because his probes had worked.

"Perhaps you'd better tell me about it, Captain," the admiral said quietly.

"The point's a type fourteen, Sir," Snyder said, and Prescott's intent gaze sharpened. A type fourteen was rare-a closed warp point, with extreme tidal stresses, which probably helped explain the high RD2 loss rate Chau and Leopold had reported.

"A type fourteen, eh? How close in is it?"

"About six light-hours, Sir," Snyder replied. "That's our best guess, anyway. The probe data are pretty badly scrambled, and we could be off by as much as ten or fifteen light-minutes. The tidal stress is more wicked than usual, even for a type fourteen, but we can use it all right."

"And you think we'll want to use it?" the admiral asked softly.

"I think we'll have to, Sir," Snyder said soberly, but still with that undertone of excitement.

"Why?"

"As I said, the data are badly scrambled, but I've got my best people working on it, and their consensus is that there's a high-tech presence in the system. A big one. And even if our astro data are less than perfect, we've been able to establish that this isn't any system we've ever seen before." His eyes blazed on the com screen, and he showed his teeth in a hungry grin. "Admiral, I may be wrong, but it looks to me like there's a damned good chance we just hit an El Dorado!"

". . . so all we can really say," Commander Leopold concluded in his most tactful tones, "is that this may be an El Dorado." He looked around the table in Prescott's flag briefing room and met Snyder's eyes squarely. "The data absolutely confirm a high-tech presence, but from this far out, and with such poor resolution, there's no way to positively identify it as belonging to the Bugs. And while the system clearly doesn't belong to any member of the Alliance, that's no proof that it belongs to the Bugs, either."