Irma Sanchez told herself that VF-94 had been unreasonably lucky.

The squadron had come through the battles in Home Hive One without losing a single pilot. Not many could say as much. For a while, she'd thought the charm would hold through the slugging match in this system.

Maybe, she thought, that was the problem. Maybe she'd gotten too cocky, and relaxed the extra effort she'd always made to keep an eye on Davra Lennart and yell at her any time she seemed to drift out of the squadron's latticework of mutually protective fields of fire.

But, she repeated to herself, VF-94 was doing a damned sight better than the task force as a whole, to have come this far and lost only one pilot.

The first one it's lost since I assumed command . . .

Desperately: What's that expression again? Oh, yes: an acceptable loss ratio. Yes, that's right. Have to keep thinking that.

How many times did the Skipper . . . did Bruno go through this?

And how many times will I have to go through it?

Maybe it's only like this the first time.

Please, God, let that be true.

She forced her mind out of its black abstraction of raging thoughts as she strode along the passageway. The task force was forging outward towards the warp point through which the Brass had decreed that it would advance, and this would be their last briefing before transit. Up ahead was the familiar angle in the passageway just short of VF-94's ready room. She heard voices around the corner, and paused to eavesdrop.

"Hey, XO," the voice of Ensign Liang asked, "is it true this next system is going to be a cakewalk? That there aren't any Bugs there?"

"Why don't you settle down and wait for the briefing?" Meswami replied from the pinnacle of his superior maturity. Irma managed to stifle a laugh. "I'm sure the spooks will give us the straight word."

"Ha!" It was Ensign Nordlund. "Always a first time for everything!"

"Yeah," Liang muttered darkly. "Their brilliant theories are probably why we didn't get a replacement for Davra."

"Nobody else got any replacements either," Meswami reminded them sternly. "Don't ask me why. That decision was made at higher levels-a lot higher. Probably Admiral Prescott himself." That quieted them, and Meswami resumed briskly. "And now, let's go on in. Even if the spooks are full of shit as usual, you know the Old Lady will give it to us straight."

There was a mumble of assent. They filed into the ready room, leaving Irma in a state of irritated puzzlement.

What the hell are they talking about? she wondered. Who's the Old Lady?

It wasn't until later that it hit her. It was later still before she recovered.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: "We'll do whatever  we must, Admiral."

The lifeless red dwarf system really had held no organized resistance, and Task Force 71 had proceeded unmolested across the 3.6 light-hours that separated its warp point of entry from the only other warp point in the system.

Furthermore, as Prescott's lead elements closed in on that second warp point, the RD2s he'd dispatched through it had sent back the news he'd hoped for: the system beyond-a white star with a distant red dwarf companion-was the system where he and Zhaarnak would meet.

There was no possible doubt. The system matched the one Zhaarnak's RD2s had probed from the other side, as described in the reports he'd sent to Prescott. In addition to the expected warp point defenses, it held mobile forces corresponding in composition to those Zhaarnak had reported he still expected to have to face. Only now those forces were divided, for they had two warp points to cover. It would be unwise to rely too heavily on the colossal gunboat losses the Bugs had sustained in the recent battles, for the primary star's third planet gave off neutrino indications of the largest industrial base yet encountered in this warp chain-not in the same category as the home hive systems, but undoubtedly capable of cranking out large quantities of small vessels in short order. However, the losses in bases from which to operate those craft couldn't be so quickly made good. And the division of the Bugs' defensive assets was certainly hopeful.

All those factors were in Prescott's mind as he met with his staff. So was the fact that, in the teeth of his expectations, the Bugs had not appeared from somewhere along the Anderson Chain to pour through Pesthouse, reclaim Home Hive One, and isolate his task force. He was careful not to let his face and manner reveal to anyone his amazement that it hadn't happened . . . or his fear that it still might.

He grew aware that Chung had concluded his summary of the drones' findings. He opened the floor for comments, and a single throat was loudly cleared. The lack of any other response made it impossible not to recognize the throat-clearer, and Prescott suppressed a sigh.

"Admiral Mukerji?"

Mukerji had shaken off the jitters he'd experienced before they entered the system. Now he drew a deep breath and spoke like a man delivering a carefully prepared speech, a man who knew that his argument would be prejudiced by the very fact that he was the one presenting it.

"Admiral, these findings prove you were right. We are, indeed, looking from another direction at the same system Fang Zhaarnak faces. I therefore consider it likely that your other theory was equally well founded."

Prescott held the political admiral's eyes for a moment, and met only blandness. Mukerji was taking pains to construct a case too reasonable for Prescott to reject out of hand without laying himself open to the charge of personal bias.

"What 'other theory' is that, Admiral?" he inquired, knowing full well the answer.

"That Bug forces may appear in Pesthouse at any time, and move in to occupy Home Hive One. Indeed, I feel safe in saying that we're all somewhat puzzled that they haven't already done so."

Looking at the other staffers' faces, and the task force commanders' in the screens, Prescott saw no disagreement. Indeed, he felt none himself.

"Furthermore," Mukerji continued, still cautious, but visibly encouraged by Prescott's silence, "this task force and Fang Zhaarnak's have both suffered an unavoidable erosion of fighting power in the course of advancing to this point. And what we've just heard from Commodore Chung makes it clear that we're facing formidable defenses here. Now, surely, is a time for caution-a time to secure the gains we've made."

Not, Prescott noted, "the gains we've made through your sagacious plans," or anything like that. Mukerji was getting cagier. He'd carefully avoided any hint of overt flattery, or appeals to political self-preservation, or any of the other arguments he'd learned were counterproductive.

"What, precisely, are you proposing, Admiral Mukerji?"

"Simply this, Admiral: that instead of pressing on to the next system at this time, we pull back to Home Hive One, and that Fang Zhaarnak be ordered to join us there. Naturally, both task forces should leave warp point covering forces. But by sealing off this warp chain at the Home Hive One end with our combined fleet, we'll accomplish two things. First, we'll keep the system we're now facing isolated and neutralized, until fresh forces in overwhelming strength can be brought up along the Prescott Chain to reduce it. And secondly, we'll be in a position to protect the entire Prescott Chain while those forces are advancing along it."

And third, Prescott thought, we'll secure this task force-meaning you-from any nasty surprises coming up behind us from Pesthouse through Home Hive One. But the fact that danger to Task Force 71 also happened to be a personal danger to Mukerji didn't make it any less real. Did it?

He surveyed the room and the com screens.

"Comments, ladies and gentlemen?"

Anthea Mandagalla looked acutely uncomfortable.

"I must agree with Admiral Mukerji, Sir." She left off the arguably disrespectful qualifier regretfully. "I'm particularly disturbed by what Amos has told us about the way the Bugs are redistributing their fortresses to reinforce the warp point defenses we're facing." She turned to Chung. "I gather that still more are on the way."

"They are, Sir," the spook replied. "The RD2s report others being tractored in from across the system, presumably from other warp points which aren't immediately threatened. Still others are on the way to the warp point only eighty-four light-minutes from the one through which we'll enter-which confirms our identification of that warp point as the one where they're expecting Fang Zhaarnak, although we were already pretty sure of that on the basis of what his RD2s have reported."

He indicated the flat-screen system display, and the two warp points that lay less than ninety light-minutes apart, about 5.8 and 4.4 light-hours, respectively, and on the same approximate bearing from the system primary.

"Fang Zhaarnak's initial probes detected twelve fortresses of that warp point. The Bugs customarily allocate identical fixed defenses to all the warp points in a given system, so presumably that was the force level in place at this warp point, as well, at that time. Now, as I said earlier, we're looking at twenty fortresses . . . all more than monitor-sized. In addition, there are the almost two thousand deep space buoys I mentioned. Our RD2s weren't in a position to survey Fang Zhaarnak's warp point, of course, but I would be very surprised if they haven't been beefed up to the same degree."

A muttering ran around the room. Heads nodded.

I wish I knew my history better, Prescott thought. Which American president was it, centuries ago, who put a crucial question to his cabinet? All nine of them voted in the affirmative. And he said, "That's nine ayes . . . and one nay. The nays have it unanimously."

But I can't put it that way, can I? Never mind Mukerji. All these other splendid people, who've been with me through years of hell, deserve an explanation.

Especially considering what I'm going to have to tell them afterwards . . .

So he spoke deliberately.

"There's certainly a case for Admiral Mukerji's proposal to consolidate our fleet in Home Hive One and wait for fresh forces. But we're not going to do it." He ordered himself not to feel amusement or satisfaction at the way Mukerji's expression rose and then fell.

"I have two reasons for that decision. First of all, we have no way of knowing how great a force the Bugs will bring through Pesthouse against Home Hive One when they finally get around to it, as we're all agreed they eventually will. They ought to have done it already, and we dare not assume that their delay has been for lack of resources. It could just as easily mean that they're taking the time to amass a truly crushing superiority. If that's the case, we'll need a second line of retreat. Breaking open this warp chain is the only way to provide it.

"Second, we know the system ahead of us has more than just the two warp points. The fact that they have additional defenses they can redistribute to meet immediate threats proves that. But where do those additional warp connections lead? What reinforcements could they bring through those connections? We have no way to know."

Mandagalla filled the silence.

"Sir, there's no indication that system has been significantly reinforced."

"No, there isn't. But would there be, necessarily?" A wintry smile. "Remember, we're working from recon drone data. And I, of all people, am not likely to forget what the Bugs can do with third-generation ECM!"

His smile softened.

"Relax, people! I don't really believe that's what's happening here. I don't think any possible application of cloaking ECM could hide really massive forces from the swarms of RD2s we and Task Force 72 have both been expending. After all, the Bugs know the system is threatened from two separate directions. And we aren't the only ones who can't be certain about potential threats; for all they know, our side has massive reinforcements advancing along the Prescott Chain in Zhaarnak's wake. Under the circumstances, it would be logical for them to pour in any reinforcements they could and hold fast on both warp points. If we break into the system, it will become a war of movement in which our superior speed and our fighters will give us the advantage-which they won't in a warp point action. And that kind of saturation defense would involve forces so massive that, to repeat, our RD2s would probably have detected them regardless of ECM."

Prescott saw the relief spread through the room. He let it live for a couple of heartbeats, then leaned forward and spoke in a very different tone.

"But even if we assume such reinforcements aren't present, there's no guarantee that they couldn't arrive later. Remember, we know nothing about the warp lines beyond this system's other warp points. Suppose one of them leads to another of the remaining home hive systems by a very long and circuitous route. That would explain why reinforcements haven't arrived yet-but it would mean they were going to arrive. The question is when.

"Accordingly," Prescott resumed after a brief interval of dead silence, "we'll press the attack as we originally intended. Given the fact that the warp point defenses we're going to be facing are strong, and getting stronger, time is of the essence. We will, however, take the time to communicate our operational plan to Zhaarnak, along with orders to commence his attack just before ours is scheduled to go in. The purpose, of course, is to draw some of the massive gunboat reserves we know that system is capable of producing towards him in order to give us a window of opportunity."

"Aye, aye, Sir." Mandagalla's lack of enthusiasm was palpable. Her ancestry was African with a dash of French, lacking even a tincture of Japanese, but Prescott knew precisely the words she was thinking: Leyte Gulf. Those were words burned into the brains of all TFN officers, schooled in the perils of plans requiring precise coordination of widely separated fleet elements. It wasn't so much because of any wet-navy traditions as it was a result of finding a purely Terran teaching example of the perils of the sort of complex, converging operations the Khanate of Orion had been so fond of employing in its first two disastrous wars against the Federation.

"I must point out, Sir," the chief of staff went on, "that while the two warp points are unusually close together as warp points go, they are eighty-four-plus light-minutes apart. So the lag for any communications between them will be almost an hour and a half, and-"

"Rest assured, Commodore," Prescott said, his tone unusually formal, almost stiff, "Lord Telmasa won't fail us. Remember, his task force's fighter strength is closer to intact than ours, and he's had time to replenish his supply of SBMHAWKs. Furthermore . . ."

All at once, Prescott was at a loss for words. How to convey to these people, not one of whom belonged to the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee, the absolute mutual trust implicit in the oath of vilkshatha? And, on a less esoteric note, over the years of shared fleet command he and Zhaarnak had acquired an ability to read one another's minds that had nothing to do with telepathy. And besides . . . Prescott's lips quirked briefly upward as he contemplated the irony and remembered the lecture Zhaarnak had delivered to him when he'd first proposed this entire campaign to him. His vilkshatha brother had conscientiously cautioned him in terms not unlike those Mandagalla was using now. And, to his credit, he'd actually meant it . . . more or less. But if the truth be known, the Orions secretly reveled in complex operations like this.

He suppressed an inappropriate smile and started over.

"Take my word for it, Anna, we can count on Task Force 72. Zhaarnak will do his part. We only need to worry about doing ours." Prescott's flash of amusement-all too rare these days-guttered out, for he could no longer put off breaking this to them.

"In light of the urgency of bursting open our line of communication with the Prescott Chain, and the Federation beyond, it's necessary to adapt our warp point assault tactics. Accordingly, we'll expend our entire remaining SBMHAWK and AMBAMP stocks in the initial bombardment. The first wave to go in after the bombardment will consist of relatively expendable battlecruisers and fleet carriers.

"And that wave will go through in a simultaneous transit."

Prescott paused. For a while, there was no response beyond a generalized puzzlement as to what he was waiting for. Then his words began to register visibly, one thunderstruck face at a time.

"I realize," he resumed, "that we've never used this tactic before. I'm also aware that we've been accustomed to regard it as epitomizing the Bugs' appalling alienness from our own races. I myself have often thought-and said-as much. So I understand what you're feeling. But I've also come to understand that such an attitude is a luxury we can no longer afford. We must relearn the same lesson war has taught our ancestors throughout history: you cannot fight an enemy without becoming more like him. The more repugnant the enemy is, the more unpalatable that truth becomes-and the more necessary victory becomes, regardless of the means that must be used. In the case of this enemy, we're fighting for the very survival of our various species. In the face of such a moral imperative, all other ethical considerations shrink into insignificance. I will let nothing deter me from doing whatever it takes to eradicate the plague we're fighting! Do I make myself clear?"

None of them had ever heard Prescott speak like this, and no one even considered protesting or arguing. After a moment, though, Mukerji spoke very cautiously.

"Ah, Admiral, may I ask . . . Well, that is, will you ask for volunteers to crew the ships of the first wave?"

You had to get on record with that, didn't you? Prescott silently asked him. Very important to insulate yourself from any future political consequences of this, in case there's an inquiry later.

He opened his mouth, but before he could respond, Anthea Mandagalla stunned everyone present by stepping out of line in at least two ways. She not only answered Mukerji, who outranked her, but did it in place of Prescott, who outranked her even more. Not that she seemed in any mood to worry about improprieties.

"Certainly not, Admiral! Every one of those people-every member of the TFN and its allied services-understands what goes with his or her uniform. They all know warp point assaults are part of the ordinary, expected hazards for everyone-regardless of rank." The last three words were a little pointed, but they were true. Howard Anderson himself had chiseled that into the marble of the TFN's traditions, a century and a half ago. "Furthermore, we all take it as a given that the Bugs have substantial numbers of kamikazes available. Any losses we take from interpenetrations will probably be less than those we'd sustain if we didn't get our first wave through the warp point and into that system as quickly as possible."

At any other time, Mukerji might have reacted by indignantly protesting the chief of staff's "insolence." Uncharacteristically, he replied directly to her.

"But if the operation goes according to plan, Fang Zhaarnak's earlier attack will draw them away."

"The immediately available ones, Admiral. But a 'proper' warp point assault might well give them time to deploy fresh waves of kamikazes before we can get into the system and turn the battle into one of movement. I'm confident that our personnel understand the reasoning behind this-especially coming from . . ."

Mandagalla's voice trailed off, and if it had been possible, she would have blushed. She'd almost forgotten herself, almost spoken of those personnel's willingness to do this, and more, if asked to by Raymond Prescott. But anything that smacked of flattery was as foreign to her as it was repugnant to Prescott.

Force Leader Shaaldaar's basso came from the direction of the com screens like a rumble of distant thunder.

"I concur. And it is not completely without precedent. As you all may remember, on the occasion of our second incursion into Home Hive Three, my Gorm gunboat crews willingly performed a simultaneous mass warp transit. Synklomus mandated then that they do whatever the exigencies of war required in defense of their larger lomus. That same consideration applies here-with even greater urgency."

"But those were gunboats! We've never done it with starships. Besides, these are-" Mukerji jarred to a halt, stopping just short of saying, Human crews, not Gorm. He turned hastily to Prescott. "So, Sir, as you can see, there are unprecedented aspects to this. Perhaps, under the circumstances-"

"No, Admiral Mukerji. Commodore Mandagalla and Force Leader Shaaldaar are right. We'll do whatever we must, Admiral. All of us."

It had been expected that the two Enemy forces would attack the Franos system simultaneously. It seemed the logical thing to do, and it was clear enough that they were in communication with each other. It had therefore been somewhat surprising when one of them-the one that had come directly from the system where the survey flotilla had been ambushed-had commenced its assault, while the one which had advanced from the destroyed System Which Must Be Defended sat unmoving.

Tactical doctrine, however, had superseded perplexity, and the Fleet had responded as per contingency plans as the Enemy's ships had begun transiting in their usual manner, following the customary preliminary bombardment with the crewless missile-launching small craft of which he was so fond. Massive waves of gunboats and shuttles from the warp point's combat space patrol had swept down on them, and the holocaust of combat had raged with all its familiar ferocity.

As it became apparent that both Enemy forces weren't attacking simultaneously, the Fleet had seen an unanticipated opportunity to defeat them in detail. The attacking Enemy force, by itself, appeared to have sufficient firepower to blast its way into the system through both the combat space patrol and the starships and fortresses awaiting it. But as the preliminary reports accumulated, it became apparent that the attack force most probably was not powerful enough to defeat all of the Fleet's mobile combat resources if they could be brought to bear upon it. And the Enemy's failure to coordinate simultaneous assaults gave the Fleet the opportunity to concentrate all of those resources against a single attacker.

New directives went out quickly. The warp point fortresses, already two-thirds destroyed by the preliminary bombardment, were abandoned to their fate. They would wreak whatever additional damage they could, but the mobile units which had been assigned to support them withdrew, falling back in the direction of the second warp point which must be defended. And as those starships retreated, the starships on the warp point the Enemy had so inexplicably failed to exploit simultaneously, moved to meet them.

The gunboats and kamikazes which had been deployed to cover the attack warp point continued to spend themselves in ferocious attacks upon the Enemy. His own gunboats and small attack craft were now in the system, engaging the kamikazes in savage dogfights, and the massive gunboat reserve-which had stood ready to respond to attacks on either or both of the two threatened warp points from a central position-moved to support them.

A fresh gunboat force was dispatched from the inhabited planet to replenish the Reserve. Those gunboats had been intended for the final, close-in defense of the planet in the event that the Enemy succeeded in fighting his way into the system. Now that the opportunity to prevent him from doing so had been offered, however, they would be needed to replace the losses the reserves were bound to take in crushing the single attacking force.

The Mobile Forces moving away from the quiescent warp point launched all of their own shuttles and gunboats to reinforce the combat space patrol covering it. It was always possible that the Enemy had intended to exploit both warp points at once and that his failure to do so represented only a failure in coordination, not in strategy. If that were the case, then the standing CSP must be reinforced in case a second, belated attack should materialize. In that event, it was unlikely that the CSP could actually stop the second assault, but the waves of gunboats and kamikazes would at least be able to inflict massive attritional damage on the Enemy as he entered. And if the united starships, supported by the reserves, could engage and destroy the first attacking force in isolation, then the Fleet's surviving units and the fresh gunboats from the planet would turn upon the second, severely battered force.

There was no assurance of victory, yet following the Enemy's serious error, the projections had suddenly become far more favorable.

Raymond Prescott stood on the flag bridge of Irena Riva y Silva, and his face was carved from stone as he studied the latest RD2 data. The range to Zhaarnak's warp point was too great for the drones to provide detailed reports, but the detonation of antimatter warheads and laser buoys would be obvious enough.

They would also be ninety minutes old when the drones detected them and returned to TF 71 with the word that Zhaarnak'telmasa and his farshatok were fighting for their very lives a mere light-hour and a half away across the star system . . . and God only knew how far apart between the star systems from which both halves of Seventh Fleet converged upon this system.

Prescott knew when the attack was supposed to begin, and he looked again at the time. If everything had gone precisely according to schedule, Zhaarnak had begun his assault twelve minutes ago. And if that were the case, then in another seventy-two minutes, Prescott and TF 71 would have proof of it, and-

"Admiral!" Jacques Bichet looked up from his own console and beckoned urgently at the main plot. "We just got a fresh drone wave back, and it's reporting something very strange, Sir."

" 'Strange' in what way, Jacques?" Prescott asked, striding across the flag deck towards the plot.

"I'm not really certain, Sir," the ops officer replied. "But according to the drones, all of the Bug mobile units have begun moving directly out-system from our warp point toward Fang Zhaarnak's."

"What?" Prescott's eyebrows rose in surprise. "Are we picking up any evidence that Zhaarnak began his attack early?" he demanded.

"No, Sir. Our drones haven't detected any indications of combat."

"Then why should they be pulling their starships away from our warp point?" Prescott wondered aloud, and turned to look at Amos Chung.

"I don't know, Sir," the intelligence officer responded. Then he frowned. "Unless . . ."

"Unless what?" Prescott prompted with an unusual testiness as the spook's voice trailed off. Chung looked up at the sharpness of the admiral's tone, then shook himself.

"Excuse me, Sir. I was just thinking. We've pretty much established that the Shiva effect transmits itself at greater than light-speed. We haven't seen any evidence of an actual FTL communication ability between their military units, but perhaps that's because we never looked for it, since we 'knew' no one had one."

"You mean you think the force on the other warp point has . . . telepathically informed the one on our warp point that it's under attack?" Bichet was obviously trying to keep his incredulity out of his voice.

"I suppose it's possible that that's what's happening," Chung said. "On the other hand, I'd think that if they were capable of the sort of complex FTL communication which would be required for tactical coordination we would have seen evidence of it before now. Unless we have seen it and just didn't recognize it because we knew it was impossible . . ."

He shook himself again, obviously tearing himself away from the fascinating possibilities by sheer force of will, and turned back to Prescott.

"On the other hand, they might not need that sort of communication ability to explain this, Sir. The casualties TF 72 would inflict in a warp point assault obviously wouldn't approach the threshold required to trigger the Shiva effect, but the impact might be sufficient for the Bugs on our warp point to sense them, even at this range."

"So what you're suggesting," Prescott said, "is that our Bugs may know that Zhaarnak is killing his Bugs even though their sensors can't pick up any more proof of it than our drones can?"

"I think it's certainly possible, Sir," Chung replied, then waved at the master plot's report of the departure of the guardian starships. "But whatever's causing it, it certainly looks like the distraction effect of the Fang's attack is already being felt."

Prescott grunted in agreement, and his mind raced. His own attack had been scheduled to begin exactly two hours after Zhaarnak's. That interval had been calculated in order to give the Bugs the opportunity to detect Zhaarnak's arrival and then get themselves at least thirty minutes out of position from TF 71's warp point before his own task force made transit. But if the Bugs were already responding to TF 72's assault, then his own attack could be moved up correspondingly. And the quicker he got his units through the warp point, the sooner his own diversionary effect would pull some of the pressure off Zhaarnak. . . .

He watched the plot change as a fresh flight of RD2s made transit. The Bug starships were clearly continuing their movement towards the other warp point. At the same time, the icons representing the defending CSP were denser and heavier than they had been, so apparently the Bugs were reinforcing their covering gunboats and kamikazes as partial compensation for the withdrawal of their starships. Which was what he'd anticipated they would do, although he hadn't expected them to do it this soon.

And it was also what he'd planned his tactics to take advantage of. He turned back to Bichet.

"We're moving up the assault, Jacques. If they're going to pull off the warp point sooner than we expected, we might as well take advantage of it."

The Fleet's starships continued towards rendezvous with one another. As expected, the Enemy's assault force had successfully blasted its way through the protective minefields and reduced the warp point fortresses to rubble. The original warp point CSP had also been effectively destroyed, although it had managed to inflict serious damage before its own extermination. Now the massed power of the reserve gunboats and shuttles was hurtling towards the intruders, and soon the recombined Mobile Force would be able to bring its full strength to bear in support of the kamikazes. And-

Then everything changed as the familiar trans-warp point bombardment exploded out of the second warp point.

There was no way for the Fleet to know whether the staggered attack sequence was, in fact, a failure in coordination or something which the Enemy had planned in advance. It was certainly possible that his irritating warp-capable sensor drones had detected the Fleet's redeployment and that he was responding to it, whether he'd planned to do so or not.

But whatever he'd planned, he would still find his second attack force being ground away by the kamikazes just as his first had been. Even if the second force managed to fight its way into the system, the Fleet had a significant head start. By the time he could complete transit in his usual cautious way and reorganize, his starships-many of which would undoubtedly be slowed by combat damage from the kamikazes-would be too far behind to overtake the reunited Mobile Force before it engaged the first attack force and-

Wait!

No! This was contrary to the Enemy's normal procedure!

 The gunboats and small craft left to guard the warp point shuddered in torment under the lash of the SBMHAWKs which came thundering through it. The CAM2s were particularly deadly to the gunboats, slashing out in lethal shoals of destruction no point defense system could stop. The antimatter-loaded shuttles were too small, their emissions signatures too weak, to be locked up by the sprint-mode capital missiles, but there were far fewer of them to begin with.

Gunboat squadron datanets crumbled under the threshing machine fury of the bombardment, and the searing wavefront of plasma and EMP rolled outward, drowning sensor systems and fire control in waves of interference. Even as the gunboats and small craft reeled under the assault, AMBAMPs came vomiting through the warp point, spawning antimatter submunitions that fanned out like dragonseed. The deadly spores infiltrated the minefields, then detonated in a crashing wave that seared the mines from the face of the universe. And to complete the deadly preparation, still more SBMHAWKs hurled still more CAM2s at the fortresses. Their point defense was no more effective than the gunboats' had been, and the tidal wave of warheads destroyed nine of them outright and reduced the eleven survivors to battered, half-destroyed wrecks.

For the brief moments that lethal bombardment required, the environs of the warp point blazed as brilliantly as any star. Yet vicious as the explosions were, and brutally though the fortresses had been maimed, the CSP survived. It was shaken, confused-not even Bugs could take that sort of sudden, overwhelming explosion of violence without being shaken-but it was still there, and it had always known an attack just like this one was possible. And so, however disorganized it might be, every unit of it knew precisely what tactical doctrine required of it.

The gunboats-which had gone to evasive maneuvers the instant they detected the first SBMHAWKs-turned back towards the warp point, riding through the rapidly diffusing clouds of plasma while they prepared to concentrate vengefully upon the long chain of invading starships which must follow on the heels of the bombardment. The kamikaze shuttles, on the other hand, actually backed off the warp point just a bit. Their tactical doctrine required them to observe which starships required that they expend themselves against them, and which the gunboats could destroy with conventional FRAM attacks. Besides, their proper function was to destroy monitors and superdreadnoughts, not to waste themselves upon lesser craft.

But tactical doctrine abruptly became a weak reed in the face of Task Force 71's modification of its own doctrine.

Fifty-two battlecruisers and twelve fleet carriers flashed into existence.

Two of the carriers and six of the battlecruisers flashed out of existence, just as abruptly and far more violently, as they interpenetrated. But the other fifty-six Allied ships survived, and their abrupt, mass appearance took the already confused defenders completely by surprise. The Bug CSP which had expected to hurl itself upon one individual target after another, in rapid succession, suddenly found itself forced to pause, however briefly, to allocate targets to its units.

And that delay, brief as it was, was fatal.

The surviving carriers made transit in a tight, hairpin curve which carried them directly back into the warp point, remaining in real-space only long enough to launch over three hundred fighters. Then they disappeared back to the far side of the warp point, as quickly as they'd come-so quickly, indeed, that the kamikazes were able to catch only two of them, and failed to destroy even those.

Unlike the fighter platforms, the battlecruisers had come to stay. The Bugs had long since realized that the Allies' carriers were far more valuable strategic targets than any main combatant starship. As always, they'd concentrated their efforts on attempting to catch the carriers, but in this instance the carriers simply weren't available as targets long enough. And by the time the defenders realized the carriers were going to escape them, the battlecruisers' fire control systems and point defense had been given time to stabilize.

The CSP found itself confronted not by the isolated, transit-befuddled targets it had anticipated. Instead, it confronted intact battlegroups, with every weapon and defensive system fully on-line. Even the capital missile-armed battlecruisers, the long-range snipers who normally had no business at all in the short-range slaughter of a warp point assault, were deadly foes against gunboats. They'd made transit with full external ordnance racks of CAM2s, and they salvoed all of them in a devastating wave of destruction. Then they went to rapid fire with their internal launchers, hurling a steady stream of additional CAM2s into the gunboats' teeth.

Their energy-armed consorts, like the TFN's Guerriere class, with their heavy broadsides of force beams and hetlasers backed up by AFHAWK-firing standard missile launchers, left the gunboats to the BCRs and turned their own fury on the kamikaze shuttles. The kamikazes were as surprised as the gunboats, and the fire which ripped into them was devastating. A handful of them got through; the majority were dry leaves trapped in the heart of the furnace.

And even while the battlecruisers poured their devastating fire into the harrowed ranks of the CSP, the strikegroups added their own fury to the inferno. Half of them were armed to kill gunboats and shuttles, and they piled into the CSP with deadly effect. The remainder were armed with maximum loads of FRAMs, and they ignored gunboats and shuttles alike to swarm over the air-leaking wrecks of the surviving fortresses. A single pass was more than sufficient to reduce those fortresses to clouds of expanding vapor, interspersed here and there with droplets of alloy which had merely been liquified. Over a third of the squadrons tasked to hit the fortresses were forced to abort their attack runs because they no longer had targets.

The battlecruisers and fighters didn't achieve their goals without losses and damage, yet the total price they paid was far lighter than the one they might have faced in a traditional attack. And when the remainder of TF 71 made transit less than fifteen minutes later, there was no effective opposition.

The titanic monitors, accompanied by the lesser sisters of the superdreadnoughts and the carriers, shook down into battle formation and moved off across the system to trap the defending starships between the anvil of TF 72 and their own looming hammer.

The lovely blue curve of the planet they now knew was called Franos showed through the atmosphere curtain as Zhaarnak's shuttle eased into Riva y Silva's boatbay.

Prescott averted his eyes from its beauty and concentrated upon the shuttle. So did everyone else.

The recombined task forces of Seventh Fleet had required barely an hour of close combat to crush the defending Bug battle-line between them once they'd brought it to battle. Nothing in the system could realistically have hoped to stop the Allied fleet after that, but there'd still been grim work to do as the Bug mobile force made its last stand and fresh-though diminishing-waves of kamikazes had come in through a third warp point. Prescott had hastily reorganized his fighters in a way that was now so familiar as to cause minimal dislocation, concentrating them on the smallest possible number of carriers and sending the empty carriers to the now-accessible AP-4 to pick up replacements. Then, behind an umbrella of fighters, they'd advanced grimly through everything the Bugs could put in their path. They'd taken losses, of course. But the outcome had never really been in doubt, and a reduced but consolidated Seventh Fleet had closed in on Planet A III to exercise the Shiva Option once more.

Then, as the recon drones probing ahead of them had surveyed that planet closely, they'd become aware of a complicating factor. . . .

Prescott's mind returned to the present as the shuttle's hatch opened and he saw his vilkshatha brother in the furry flesh for the first time since the two task forces had parted in AP-5. The blue planet formed a backdrop to their greetings, and Zhaarnak noticed the way that Prescott's eyes strayed towards that gorgeous spectacle.

"It still troubles you, does it not, Raaymmonnd?" he asked quietly, and Prescott smiled wanly.

"Does it still trouble you that we didn't go ahead and sterilize it anyway?"

"No. I would have done it," the Orion said with bleak honesty. "But I have come to understand that the honor code of Human warriors like yourself will not permit the extermination of a sentient race-even when a Bahg population on the same planet has reduced it to slaves and meat-animals. I do not say I fully understand why that should be so. For one of the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee, death would be regarded as a gift from the gods themselves if it freed us from such a state, and I do not think my people would wish to live if they must look back upon having been so reduced. Yet I believe that the Human proverb-'Where there is life, there is hope'-applies in this instance, at least in your people's eyes. I accept this. And, on another level, I understand that any failure on my part to accept it might have adverse repercussions for the Alliance."

"That," Prescott said, "is one way to put it."

He recalled the days of Operation Pesthouse, four years past, when the discovery of Harnah had taken them all into the regions of nightmare. In retrospect, it was hard to see just why it had been so shocking. It had merely been a logical extension of what they'd already known about the Bugs. But they hadn't wanted to follow that logic out . . . not when they knew there were Bug-occupied human planets. It had been more comfortable to suppose that on such planets the Bugs had simply indulged in an orgy of eating until the food supply was gone. But that had never made much sense. Humans, after all, were farmers and ranchers, and so were Orions. And Ophiuchi. And Gorm. So it should have been obvious to any one of the Alliance's member species that Bug "farmers" would preserve breeding stock. But they'd been unwilling to see the obvious until they'd had their noses rubbed in it, until they'd viewed the vast pens that held the descendants of the builders of Harnah's ruined cities: food animals who could understand. . . .

Now they'd encountered it again, here at Franos.

Prescott didn't even know what the local natives looked like. The only reason he even knew what they had once called their planet was that the information had been gleaned from engravings on the ruins of ancient, pre-Bug public buildings which had been explored by remote orbital and air-breathing sensor platforms. The information had been included with the earliest reports, and they'd needed something to call the system in official correspondence, so there'd been no way for him to avoid that bit of knowledge. But he had been able to avoid learning more than that, and so he'd taken the specialists' word for the natives' sentience and resolutely concentrated his own attention upon other matters. It was, he supposed, a sign of weakness in himself. He couldn't bring himself to care.

They'd fought their way past the planet and looped back to the warp point between their warp points of entry-Warp Point Three, they'd designated it, the one that had spewed forth all the reinforcing gunboats. Prescott had ordered up all available mines and other defenses to seal it shut. He'd had no idea what lay beyond it, and Seventh Fleet had lacked the strength to try to find out. Instead, he'd turned back to his unfinished business here in Franos.

Waves of fourth-generation SBMHAWKs had obliterated Planet A III's orbital installations, and surgical fighter strikes had excised its space ports and planetary defense centers. Now the planetside Bugs, though still shielded from direct attack by their hundreds of millions of hostages, were isolated and impotent. To assure that they stayed that way, Prescott had already assigned a carrier battlegroup to remain in orbit around the planet.

Now the vilkshatha brothers turned their backs upon the beautiful blue world whose surface had seen so much horror and headed for the elevators to the flag bridge. It was a lengthy trip in a ship the size of Irena Riva y Silva, and an outsider might have been surprised that they passed it in silence. It wasn't the silence of two warriors lost in the black abstraction of their own thoughts as they contemplated the fate of Franos' inhabitants. It was the comfortable-and comforting-silence of two who had become in truth the brothers their oath had made them. Neither of them would have been prepared to put it into words, but both of them sensed the truth that Kthaara'zarthan had recognized in them from the beginning: they'd become far more than the mere sum of their parts. Formidable as either of them would have been alone, the interweaving of their strengths had made them a deadly weapon in the arsenal of the Grand Alliance. All of that was true, but what mattered to Raymond Prescott and Zhaarnak'telmasa at this particular moment was that each of them was once again united with the being they knew beyond any shadow of doubt would die to protect his back . . . or to avenge him.

The elevator reached its destination, and a knot of staffers stood respectfully up from a terminal as they entered the flag bridge.

"As you were," Prescott told them, then raised an eyebrow at his chief of staff. "Anna, have you finished the compilation I requested?"

"I have, Sir," she said, and indicated a screen where the total ship losses of Seventh Fleet since its arrival in AP-5 ten standard months before were displayed in an appropriate blood-red.

Fourteen monitors. Twenty-three superdreadnoughts. Nine assault carriers. Thirteen fleet carriers. Thirty-one battlecruisers. Three thousand and seventy-six fighters. Four hundred and twelve gunboats.

"Ah, Admiral," the chief of staff ventured, "if you'd like to see the figures for personnel casualties-"

"That's all right, Anna," Prescott said mildly. "Later, perhaps."

The silence resumed.

"Admiral," Chung finally broke it, "on the basis of confirmed kills, I've come up with totals of the Bug ships we've destroyed over the same period, to . . . set against this."

Without waiting for permission, he activated another screen.

There was a low chorus of gasps as the figures appeared: ninety-one monitors, one hundred and fifty-eight superdreadnoughts, one hundred and sixty-one battlecruisers, and eighty three light cruisers.

"These figures may be regarded as minimal," Chung said into the silence. "They don't include gunboats, because the total for those is literally incalculable. We can only estimate the number we've destroyed-and the lowest estimate is forty thousand." The gasps were louder this time. "Nor do they include the warp point fortresses or the orbital defenses of four populated systems."

Bichet did a quick mental calculation.

"Even without the fixed defenses, and without the gunboats, the ship losses are over six to one in our favor. And the tonnage ratio is even better."

"All of which," Zhaarnak said after a moment, "pales into insignificance beside the annihilation of every living Bahg in five systems-including a home hive system."

"Yes." Prescott nodded slowly. "That's all true. At the same time, let's not deceive ourselves. Anna doesn't have to give me precise figures for me to know we've probably lost almost as many people as Second Fleet lost at Pesthouse. And more than half our ships are fit only for the shipyards, even if we do have to keep them on-line for now with emergency repairs. We've already run a projection of how long it will be before the fleet is ready for further offensive operations, and it comes out to a standard year and a half."

He glanced at Mandagalla for confirmation, and she nodded unhappily. But then something seemed to thaw in him, and he surprised them all with a warmer smile than they'd believed he was still capable of.

"Nevertheless, Seventh Fleet has performed in such a manner that I'm honored to have commanded it. Ladies and gentlemen, I declare Operation Retribution at an end. For now, the initiative is in the hands of Admiral Murakuma and Sixth Fleet, at Zephrain."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Closing the Net

Admiral Vanessa Murakuma allowed her gaze to linger a moment longer on the featherleaf branches outside the window of the office that had been Raymond Prescott's, in the slanting afternoon rays of Zephrain A. Then she swung her swivel chair back to face her visitor.

"Well, Lieutenant Sanders, you've had quite a journey."

"I have that, Sir," the famously insouciant intelligence lieutenant agreed. He looked appropriately disheveled, but of course that was only from just having been whisked from the space port to this office the instant his shuttle had touched down. It had nothing to do with the truly immense voyage that had gone before: from Home Hive One to Zephrain by way of Alpha Centauri.

Speaking of Alpha Centauri . . .

"How is Rear Admiral LeBlanc?" Murakuma asked in a carefully neutral voice.

"Quite well, Sir. He sends his best regards. In fact, he asked me to deliver a personal message." Sanders reached inside his tunic and withdrew a datachip security folder-supposedly not to be used for mere private correspondence. Murakuma's scrutiny of his foxlike features turned up nothing but bland propriety-except, possibly, a very slight twinkle in his blue eyes.

"Thank you, Lieutenant." She reached out, took the folder, and, with an inner sigh, put it in a drawer. Business before pleasure. . . .

Sanders seemed to be having the same thought.

"Of course, I was only at Alpha Centauri very briefly," he prompted.

"Ah, yes. And you'd departed from Seventh Fleet just after Admiral Prescott shut down Operation Retribution. We've only just learned of that via the ICN here. I gather that the Joint Chiefs had some reason for sending you off again after barely letting you catch your breath."

"Yes, Sir. I've also brought official correspondence from them." Sanders patted the briefcase at his side. It looked unremarkable, but it was constructed of the same molecularly aligned composite as powered combat armor, and it incorporated a computer system whose miniaturization was just beyond cutting-edge. "Specifically, new orders for you and Sixth Fleet."

"Oh?" Murakuma kept her voice level. Could this be it? "Your duties aren't normally those of a simple courier, Lieutenant."

"No, Sir. I'm to report directly to Admiral LeBlanc on the state of this front, just as I was previously doing when attached to Seventh Fleet."

"Well, I can certainly find a place for you in Lieutenant Commander Abernathy's organization." Despite two promotions since the days when she'd been Marcus' painfully young understudy, Marina Abernathy was still very junior for her position as Murakuma's staff spook, which she'd been ever since her mentor had been called back to Alpha Centauri. She had, however, gotten over most of her youthful insecurity, and she should be able to cope with Sanders. "In the meantime, though, I gather that you're also supposed to give me some of the background to these orders. Am I correct in assuming that your recent experience with Seventh Fleet has something to do with your knowledge of that background?"

"You are, Sir. If I may . . . ?"

Taking Murakuma's assent for granted, Sanders opened the briefcase and activated the flat display screen on the inside of its top. A warp line chart appeared, filling the right-hand side of the screen. Murakuma recognized it before Sanders explained.

"As you know, when Admiral Prescott entered Home Hive One for the second time and commenced his destruction of the warp point defenses, he probed each of those warp points."

"And discovered that Home Hive One is connected to Pesthouse and the Anderson Chain," Murakuma agreed, leaning across her desk to trace that warp chain with a slim finger, all the way to Alpha Centauri and Sol, which were as far as this little display extended. "It's a pity he wasn't in a position to do anything about it, but given the Bug forces holding the intervening systems and our ignorance of how many warp points in those systems might serve them as avenues of attack . . ."

She shrugged, and her face clouded with the memory of Operation Pesthouse.

"Yes, Sir. But he sent RD2s through all of Home Hive One's warp points, not just that one." Sanders indicated the wheel-spokes extending from the hub that was Home Hive One. "None of the others turned up anything even remotely as interesting . . . including this one." Sanders pointed at the undistinguished dot of light at the end of one of the spokes. "Nevertheless, as a matter of course, all the data was sent to Alpha Centauri.

"Now, you're also aware that back when Admiral Prescott and Fang Zhaarnak were here in Zephrain commanding Sixth Fleet, there was a period after the 'April Fool' offensive in '65 when the situation in Home Hive Three was very fluid and unsettled-a war of raids and counter raids. The Bugs weren't bothering to watch Home Hive Three's other warp points very closely-"

"They still aren't," Murakuma interjected. "My own probes indicate that they only have serious defenses at Warp Points Four and Six, as Survey's gotten around to designating them. Warp Point Four is the one connecting to Zephrain."

"Well," Sanders continued, "Admiral Prescott took advantage of that inattention at the time. In the course of his raids, his ships carried a lot of RD2s into Home Hive Three, and he was able to send at least a few through the system's warp points and get back some data on what lay beyond them. That data, naturally, was also sent back to Alpha Centauri."

Sanders gave the briefcase a command, and another warp line chart appeared, on the left side of the screen, showing Zephrain, Home Hive Three, and the warp lines radiating out from the latter, terminating in the little dots representing the systems Prescott's probes had discovered.

"It was only recently-while I was on my way back from Seventh Fleet, in fact-that the two sets of data got correlated."

Another murmured command, and the two charts moved together on the screen until two dots-one of them connected to Home Hive One, another to Home Hive Three-touched, and merged into one.

"You mean-?"

"Yes, Admiral. They're one and the same system. Spectrographic analysis of that star-it's a red giant, by the way-leaves no room for doubt on that score."

"Well, well . . ." Murakuma leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers. "In addition to being one transit away from Home Hive Three, Zephrain is also only three away from Home Hive One." Her eyes remained on the screen with its now-unbroken pattern of warp connections, but they seemed focused on something far more distant. "Another piece of the puzzle."

"That's a good way to put it, Sir. Bit by bit, we're learning the layout of Bug space. Frustratingly little, so far. But-"

"But enough to account for the orders you're bringing me," Murakuma finished for him.

"Very perceptive, Sir." It wasn't the sort of thing lieutenants usually said to admirals. But Sanders' position as the Joint Staff's messenger was an anomalous one, and Murakuma possessed her soul in patience as he fell into lecture mode.

"As you've pointed out, Admiral Prescott was in no position to do anything with the new astrographic knowledge he'd acquired. We're as sure as we can be of anything that the Bugs have only three home hive systems left, but we don't know how big a 'support structure' of secondary colonies each of them has. The fact that Seventh Fleet found half a dozen such colonies that apparently existed to supply Home Hive One with resources is fairly discouraging. It suggests maybe fifteen to twenty remaining Bug systems-fewer than we once assumed, but still a lot, any or all of which could lie along the flanks of the Anderson Chain."

He ran a finger along the light-string from Home Hive One to Alpha Centauri, with its branching warp lines trailing off into unknownness.

"Now, I'm only repeating common knowledge when I tell you the Alliance is gradually assembling a new force-to be known as Grand Fleet-at Alpha Centauri for a massive push through Pesthouse to Home Hive One. But in the meantime, we need to get support to Admiral Prescott without delay. And since we've built up Zephrain's logistics capability, as well as its defenses-"

"I believe I'm one step ahead of you, Lieutenant," Murakuma interrupted.

"No doubt, Sir." Sanders patted the briefcase again. "The details are here. But in essence, you're being directed to seize control of Home Hive Three, destroy the remaining Bug warp point defenses-destruction of their mobile forces is secondary to that-and proceed to link up with Admiral Prescott."

Murakuma leaned forward, not troubling to conceal her eagerness.

"So we're finally going to kick the Bugs out of Home Hive Three permanently. Good! That will end the threat to Zephrain once and for all."

"And, by extension, the threat to Rehfrak," Sanders nodded. "That's an added benefit of the plan-and one reason why the Orions, including Lord Talphon, pushed hard for it."

Murakuma leaned back again, all thoughts of slapping Sanders down for his informality even further from her mind than before.

So, finally, I'm to go on the attack, for the first time in five years. . . . For the first time since Justin.

Five years of sitting on the defensive, first at Justin and then here, honing Fifth Fleet and then Sixth Fleet to a fine edge in preparation to stand off a counteroffensive that never came.

The ghosts still visit me, sometimes. I thought they might stop after I left Justin. But I suppose distance doesn't matter to them.

No, they have to be exorcized. With fire.

Their first inkling of unpleasant surprises came after they'd entered Home Hive Three, leaving the drifting debris that had been the warp point defenses astern.

Murakuma's extended RD2 reconnaissance from Zephrain had left her uncertain of the strength of the defenses she would face-some of those fortress readings were bound to have deep space buoys lurking behind them, spoofing the drones with third-generation ECM. So she'd taken no chances. Her initial bombardment had saturated all of them with the new HARM2 missiles, which had homed in unerringly on the DSBs, leaving the real fortresses standing alone against the subsequent SBMHAWK storm.

Those SBMHAWKs had been less numerous than they might have been if Murakuma hadn't had to withhold a large reserve of the fourth-generation ones as anti-gunboat insurance. But they'd carried the new warheads that the physicists' prim disapproval had been powerless to keep people from calling "shaped-charge antimatter." The name might be nonsense, but the extremely dense, open-ended antiradiation field formed in the microsecond before detonation, had performed as advertised in its combat debut, channeling all those inconceivable blast and radiation effects on a single bearing. It had burned through the shields and armor of the great immobile fortresses like a war god's blowtorch. Granted, it was ill-adapted to dealing with small, nimble targets like the gunboats that teemed around the warp point . . . but that was what the SBMHAWK4s and SRHAWKs were for, and the few Bug gunboats that survived them had done so only to be swarmed under by Murakuma's own Gorm-piloted gunboats.

So now Sixth Fleet proceeded, intact, towards the location of the Bug deep-space forces, as reported by the RD2s, on as direct a course as possible.

Murakuma observed that progress from the flag bridge of TFNS Li Chien-lu. The green icons in the holo sphere were neatly arranged into three task forces. Li herself was part of Admiral Janet Parkway's TF 61, along with five other monitors, thirty-six superdreadnoughts, twelve battleships, and twelve battlecruisers. Force Leader Maahnaahrd's TF 62 was also a battle-line formation-but Gorm-crewed in its heavier units, and therefore faster-with six monitors, twenty-three superdreadnoughts, and fifteen battlecruisers. TF 63, under Eighty-Seventh Small Fang Meearnow'raalphaa, supplied fighter cover from twenty-three assault carriers and twenty-two fleet carriers, escorted by twenty-six battlecruisers. A tenuous shell of Gorm gunboats screened the whole interlocking series of formations.

Murakuma's satisfaction dimmed as she turned to the larger-scale display in which her fleet shrank to a mere three task force icons and the hostiles were little more than a vague scarlet blur up ahead. Her recon drones, constantly pounced on by roving Bug gunboats, had been unable to provide a detailed threat profile.

So, she told herself, we'll just have to be ready for anything. . . .

"Has Fang Meearnow acknowledged?" she asked her chief of staff.

"Yes, Sir." Leroy McKenna was a captain now and gray was starting to invade his skullcap of short, kinky black hair. "All his CSGs have reported their squadrons armed with anti-ship ordnance but standing by to rearm for anti-kamikaze dogfighting if necessary."

Good." McKenna's steadiness always had a calming effect on Murakuma, and if anything, the chief of staff was even steadier now that Demosthenes Waldeck was no longer around. McKenna had learned to work smoothly, even closely, with Waldeck, but he was also a Fringe Worlder who'd never been able to completely rid himself of his prejudice against Corporate Worlders-especially ones with surnames that were bywords for plutocracy.

Murakuma had never blamed McKenna for his feelings, because she knew exactly what the Corporate Worlds had done to the chief of staff's once affluent family. But she'd also known Demosthenes for close to fifty years, and she knew that whatever other members of his sprawling family might be, there was no finer officer in the TFN's black and silver. Eventually, even McKenna had been forced to admit that in Demosthenes' special case. But hard as he'd tried-and Lord knew he had tried!-the mere fact that Demosthenes was related by blood to someone like Agamemnon Waldeck had been a hurdle McKenna had simply been unable to completely overcome.

Just as well Demosthenes stayed in Justin, Murakuma reflected. The thought was no reflection on her former second in command who'd succeeded to command of Fifth Fleet. Quite the reverse, in fact. But it was a realization that she needed her chief of staff as free as possible of the one single source of instability in his character.

She dismissed the thought and turned back to the display. Too bad the returns on the Bug battle-line were so indistinct. . . .

* * *

Craft Commander Mansaduk-his official rank was "Son of the Khan" when he was required to have a rank-title for some administrative purpose or other, but it was only an "acting" rank, to borrow a useful concept from the Humans who were now part of the extended lomus-shifted his hexapedal form. A lengthy patrol like this seemed even lengthier in the cramped accommodations of the gunboat, but Mansaduk was used to it. And he ordered himself not to let his attention waver, lest his gunboat's portion of the elaborate multiplex pattern of sensor coverage become a window of vulnerability for the fleet.

He also ordered himself not to voice the thought to his sensor operator. Chenghat knew his duties, and unnecessary reminders might be taken as a reflection on his sense of synklomus. Another Human concept-chickenshit-came to mind.

No, he would hear from Chenghat if anything untoward appeared on the gunboat's sensor readouts.

In fact, he knew it before the sensor operator spoke. His head came up as the minisorchi awareness weaving back and forth between him and every member of his crew jangled with sudden tension. He'd already begun moving over to stand behind the sensor operator's hobbyhorselike "chair" to look over his double shoulder at the red blips that had appeared-and were appearing in greater and greater numbers, like a spreading rash, now that Chenghat knew where to look.

They'd crept around the fleet's flank under cloak. And now they'd just about maneuvered into its blind zone.

In some corner of his mind, as yet uninvaded by shock, Mansaduk reflected that at times like this the notorious Gorm indifference to what their allies regarded as normal standards of military punctilio had its uses. He turned to the communications operator-only a few feet away, as was everyone else on the little control deck.

"Bypass ordinary channels," he ordered. "Go directly to Force Leader Maahnaahrd's flag communications operator. This must be communicated to Fleet Flag without delay."

"Bring the Fleet to a heading of zero-three-zero! I want our broadsides to those hostiles!"

Captain Ernesto Cruciero knew better than to protest when Vanessa Murakuma's voice crackled in command mode.

"Aye, aye, Sir," he acknowledged. But after the helm orders had begun to go out, his natural conservatism asserted itself.

"Sir, maybe we should investigate the data a little further before we commit the entire fleet to a major course change on the basis of a single gunboat's report," he suggested.

Murakuma spared a moment to study Cruciero's dark, hawk-nosed face. Ever since replacing Ling Tian as her ops officer, he'd demonstrated certain qualities with impressive consistency. One was intelligence and an analytical approach to planning operations. Another was the moral courage to argue forthrightly with the chief of staff and even with the fleet commander in support of his views, as he was doing now. But another was a certain lack of flexibility. Give him a definite, inarguable objective, and his technical competence was second to none. But put him in a fluid situation with a multiplicity of potential threats, and the very analytical ability which made him such an effective planner could become a liability. His instinct was almost always to hold his initial course until he'd been able to consider any sudden, unanticipated threat carefully. Whether there was really time for that or not.

"No, Ernesto. Those-" she indicated the scarlet fuzz-ball of indistinct hostile icons which the fleet's base vector was now swinging away from "-are ECM3-equipped buoys simulating capital ships to suck us in while their real deep space force works its way around us under cloak. Thank God for that Gorm gunboat! As it is, we just barely have time to get turned around before they get into SBM range."

"CIC makes it less than two minutes, Sir," McKenna put in. His black face held an ashen undertone.

Murakuma felt the way the chief of staff looked. McKenna hadn't completed the thought, nor had he needed to. Another two minutes, and the Bugs would have launched from within Sixth Fleet's blind zone. Now, at least, any missiles would fly into clear point defense envelopes.

Sheer luck. After five years, what made me think I still had it in me to command a fleet in combat?

She dismissed the useless self-doubt and turned away from the plot.

"Commodore Olivera," she told her farshathkhanak formally, "rearm the fighters. I think we can expect kamikazes."

* * *

The ploy had come tantalizingly close to complete success, and even while falling short, it had left the Fleet in an advantageous position, in relatively short range of an Enemy fleet which was only now awake to its presence, and which was in the process of changing course. The small attack craft would be denied the kind of long-range dogfighting they preferred.

Now, clearly, was the time to launch every available gunboat and small craft.

Furthermore, the Fleet's lighter starships-sixty battlecruisers and seventy-eight light cruisers-should simultaneously be committed to a headlong attack. Those ships were too vulnerable to the Enemy's firepower to survive in a battle-line action. They were, therefore, expendable. Whatever damage they could inflict would be useful. And they might cripple enough ships to force the Enemy to slow down, allowing the Fleet's fifty-three superdreadnoughts to close the range

Murakuma and her staff were still on Li's flag bridge, which they'd left only to answer calls of nature, when the final reports of the defensive action filtered in.

In what had become standard Alliance tactical doctrine, the Ophiuchi fighter pilots had concentrated on the kamikaze small craft while the human and Orion pilots dealt with the gunboats. But the late detection of the threat, the need to delay the fighters' launch until they could be rearmed for dogfighting, and the absolute necessity of intercepting the kamikazes short of the battle-line, had sent those pilots into action under a huge disadvantage. There'd been no time for careful planning and squadron briefings, no time for CSGs to meticulously assign targets and zones of responsibility. Strikegroups and individual squadrons had been vectored into head-on, least-time interceptions which stripped away at least half of their normal combat advantages, and their losses had been painful.

But those pilots had also turned in the sort of superb performance that too many of the Federation's political/media class never acknowledged. Despite everything, they'd stopped all but one of the kamikazes short of striking a target directly. (The monitor Danville Sadat, lost with all hands-a fact the newsies would, of course, report with ghoulish attention to detail.) Sixty-two other gunboats had survived long enough to ripple-fire their FRAMs . . . but the swarms of pursuing fighters had forced them to do so from extreme range. So only (!) two Terran assault carriers had died, and two other ships had suffered severe damage.

But then, while the fighters were still engaged with the gunboats and small craft, a wave of battlecruisers and light cruisers had swept in-super-kamikazes, far more resistant to fighter attack at the best of times.

This hadn't been the best of times. The fighters, still armed for dogfighting, and not for anti-shipping strikes, had been forced to turn their battle weary attention to the new targets and to attack from knife-range, using only their internal lasers-and all too many of them had died in the antimatter fires of those ships' suicide-rider fighter traps. Again, the fighters had performed magnificently, but a few dozen Bug cruisers had gotten through them despite all they could do.

Not that it had done the Bugs much good. Murakuma's cruiser screen had been waiting for them, supported by long-range missile fire from the battle-line. Even command datalink hadn't enabled the light ships to survive the avalanche of missiles, and not one of them had succeeded in ramming. But some had died at ranges close enough for their huge internal antimatter warheads to inflict damage even on capital ships.

Now Murakuma stood, exhausted, and emotionally spent, and read the tale of that damage on the readouts.

"It could have been worse, Sir." Coming from McKenna, it wasn't the fatuity it might have been from some people.

"Yes, it could have." Murakuma stopped herself short of saying anything more. She didn't want to acknowledge how relieved she was, not to McKenna, and perhaps not even to herself. She gazed at the display a moment longer, then drew a deep breath. When she turned back to the chief of staff, she'd shaken off the worst of her fatigue.

"Now, then," she said briskly. "We'll detach our worst damaged ships and leave them here with a screen of battlecruisers and a fighter CSP while we close with their battle-line."

She indicated the main enemy force-the real one-in the holo sphere.

"Our fighter cover's been seriously weakened, Sir," Olivera pointed out.

"I know. But our battle-line's practically intact, and their kamikazes have shot their bolt." Murakuma wore an expression the staffers hadn't seen on it for a long while. They'd all known her too long to be fooled by her fragile appearance anyway, but now they were reminded anew that a bird of prey is also fine-boned. "It's been some time since we and the Bugs have fought a good old-fashioned line-of-battle engagement without significant fighter or gunboat involvement. I believe I'd like to try it. And we have the tactical speed to force engagement."

The monitor Irena Riva y Silva grew in the shuttle's forward ports, gleaming faintly with the feeble reflected light of the orange local star.

There'd been some debate about who should go to see whom after Sixth Fleet entered the system. Some had felt Raymond Prescott should come to Li Chien-lu and pay his respects to Murakuma, who was, after all, senior to him.

In Murakuma's mind, though, there'd never been any doubts. This was Prescott's system by right of conquest, bought by Seventh Fleet with blood. She was the newcomer, and she would make the ritual request for permission to enter.

Not that we haven't paid some blood ourselves, she thought as Riva y Silva continued to grow, displaying the daunting blend of massiveness and intricacy that characterized capital ships of space. The meeting of the battle-lines had cost her three battleships, and other ships had suffered various degrees of damage. But the Bug deep space force had perished in a cataclysm of massed missile salvos, with only three of its ships escaping into cloak and evading destruction. Afterwards, Murakuma had taken her fleet across the system Raymond Prescott and Zhaarnak'telmasa had depopulated in the very first application of the Shiva Option to Warp Point Six. It was the sole fortified warp point remaining . . . until its defenses, too, died beneath the missile-storm, and in all the Home Hive Three System, only humans and their allies lived.

The sequel had been anticlimactic. Sixth Fleet had proceeded through the undefended Warp Point Five and the equally undefended red giant system beyond-the one whose identification had revealed the very possibility of this operation. Then they'd pressed on through the equally lifeless emptiness of Home Hive One, and her advance elements had fired courier drones through that system's Warp Point Five to greet Seventh Fleet . . . and the circle had been closed.

No, Murakuma told herself as the boatbay entrance gaped in Riva y Silva's side to swallow up her shuttle. It's not closed yet. Soon, though.

The shuttle settled to the deck. She stood up, adjusted her tunic, and descended the ramp to face a Marine honor guard and an array of officers headed by a man she'd last seen in Kthaara'zarthan's office on Nova Terra, over three standard years before. A short man, rather nondescript-looking when viewed from a distance, who stepped forward to greet her.

"Welcome aboard, Admiral Murakuma."

"Thank you, Admiral Prescott." They shook hands . . . and the circle was closed.

The moment lasted perhaps a human heartbeat. Then Prescott's hazel eyes twinkled.

"Well, Kthaara did say he'd find an offensive command for you!"

CHAPTER NINETEEN: Operation Orpheus

Zhaarnak hadn't been present for Murakuma's arrival. He'd been back in AP-4 at the time, reviewing the battle damage repairs. But since then, he'd returned to Bug-10, as they were calling it in accordance with the system of designation Seventh Fleet's astrographic specialists had devised for the new systems that Operation Retribution had uncovered. Now the three of them were relaxing in Prescott's quarters.

"Well," said their host, whose family tradition reached back to the wet navies of pre-space Old Terra, "I believe the sun is over the yardarm."

Zhaarnak gave the chopped-off growl that answered to a human snort. Murakuma suspected he'd heard the expression once or twice.

"Which sun?" he inquired, with a gesture that encompassed the binary star system outside Riva y Silva's hull. The monitor flagship, not surprisingly given the nature of Seventh Fleet's composition, had the latest version of the Alliance's translation software. The electronically produced voice in Murakuma's earbug still lacked the ability of a human translator to interpret the finer nuances of the Tongue of Tongues, but it was far better than any of the others she'd encountered. It actually recognized and indicated the Tabby's amusement, but she noticed that that amusement didn't stop him from accepting a drink. She was a bit surprised by his choice of beverage, however. The Khanate had long been a major export market for the region of North America still known as Kentucky, but Lord Telmasa apparently preferred vodka.

She sipped her own Irish and studied Prescott. She'd heard of his reaction to his brother's death, and she'd half expected to find a congealed-lava sculpture of a human soul. Of course, she told herself, I never really knew him before Andrew's death-barely met him, in fact. And he's had time to get over it. . . .

And yet, she felt she could sense something of what lay behind the stories she'd heard. It wasn't that his affability was a mere façade. It was perfectly sincere-as far as it went. But now it enclosed something that hadn't been there before. She still hadn't seen him under circumstances calculated to summon that something up. And yet . . . I remember laughing out loud the first time I heard someone compare him to Ivan Antonov. The mental image was just too droll. But now I wonder.

Her eyes wandered to the private work area that abutted on Prescott's living quarters. Even in this day of reactionless drives, and even for full admirals, space vessels were penurious of personal elbowroom. The desktop computer terminal was too small to incorporate its own holo display, for example. But the warp network lent itself to two-dimensional representation, and the flat liquid-crystal display screen showed a pattern Murakuma recognized-for the most part.

"I see you've got your computer trained to show the new designations you've assigned to the systems out here."

"Yes." Prescott stepped over to join her. "We have to do something to keep them straight."

The systems of the warp chain between AP-5 and Home Hive One-Prescott's "high road"-and the ones disclosed by RD2 probes through the warp points no Allied task force had yet to transit had each been dubbed "Bug" followed by some arbitrarily assigned number. The display showed everything from Zephrain to AP-5, and Murakuma saw that the red giant system through which she'd passed between Home Hive Three and Home Hive One was now Bug-04. She also noted that the system into which the enemy survivors had fled from Bug-10, and where they presumably still lurked, was Bug-11. Bug-12 lay between here and Franos, and beyond Franos was Bug-14. Other such designations were appended to the various systems connected with Home Hives One and Three. And yet . . .

She pointed at three red dots, one of them connected to Home Hive Three by the string-lights of warp lines and the other two similarly linked to Home Hive One.

"You haven't gotten around to assigning designations to those?"

"Oh, those." Murakuma had no difficulty recognizing Prescott's eagerness to spring a surprise. What she wasn't in a position to recognize was how unusual that eagerness had become since his brother's death.

"Well, we've learned something new about the systems, which suggests they need something more distinctive," he said, and paused significantly. But Murakuma declined to rise to the bait, and he resumed before the pause could lengthen. "First of all, we sent RD2s through Bug-04's third warp point-the one other than those you used to enter and leave the system. It turned out to lead to this system."

He indicated the unnamed red dot already connected to Home Hive Three. Another red string-light appeared between it and Bug-04, and the three dots formed the points of a triangle.

"Hmmm. Interesting," Murakuma allowed. "But-"

"At the same time," Prescott overrode her, "we decided to launch a raid-a reconnaissance in force-from Home Hive One. Our RD2s had determined that one of the two unexplored systems connected with it was heavily defended, but that the other one had nothing but a screening force of their slow picket cruisers." He pointed at the middle dot of the three. "So our raiding force was able to get loose in the system, do a little quick-and-dirty surveying, and fire RD2s through the two warp points they turned up. And where do you suppose those warp lines led?"

The impression of pulling a rabbit from a hat was unmistakable now, and Prescott grinned as Murakuma watched two additional string-lights grow outward from that middle system to the other two.

"So," she breathed. "They're another chain. . . ."

"The 'Orpheus Chain,' " Prescott agreed, and shrugged as she arched an eyebrow at him. "No special significance. It's just that our fleet Survey types belong to the school that prefers names from the grab bag of Classical mythology." He gave another command, and the names "Orpheus 1," "Orpheus 2," and "Orpheus 3" appeared in red beside the three dots, from right to left. Serious again, he pointed to Orpheus 1.

"None of our RD2s have penetrated far enough into the system to search for additional warp points. But the heavy fixed defenses, and the substantial battle-line force backing them up, suggest that it's the gateway to more Bug population centers."

"Perhaps another home hive system," Zhaarnak rumbled.

"We can't know that," Prescott cautioned his vilkshatha brother, then turned back to Murakuma and continued in measured tones. "I think all we can say for certain is that the evidence suggests that there are fairly major Bug populations somewhere along this chain. Coming up with anything more definite than that would require a serious, manned survey effort, at the very least, and that would require a heavy naval covering force." He shrugged. "For now, we can't think in terms quite that ambitious. Our current emphasis has to be on extending our defensive perimeter-our 'glacis'-around our present position. I've been thinking in those terms ever since Sixth Fleet arrived."

"Because Seventh Fleet is still below strength," Murakuma finished the thought for him.

"True," Prescott admitted. "And it's also worrisome that we still have enemy holdouts in Bug-11-" he indicated the system beyond Bug-10's third warp point "-and the system where the Bug survivors fled from Franos."

"The gunboat raids from those systems have not allowed us to forget about their existence," Zhaarnak put in dryly.

"Nevertheless," Prescott maintained, "we can contain that problem-especially with the help of the carriers that have recently arrived from Alpha Centauri."

Murakuma nodded. She'd been advised of the Joint Chiefs decision to dispatch seventy Terran light carriers and thirty Ophiuchi escort carriers to help buttress Seventh Fleet's rear-area fighter platforms. Those ship classes had been viable battle fleet units in the days of the Third Interstellar War and (though less so) the Theban War, but they were simply too light to survive in today's battle-line combat environment. They could still carry fighters, though, and enough of them could cover the warp points beyond which those bothersome Bug holdouts lurked, staying well back themselves but maintaining fighter patrols that tracked down and obliterated the gunboat incursions in extended running battles.

"Still," Prescott admitted, "we are, as you observed, still repairing our damaged units back in AP-4. We're hoping to get some of them back into action in a month-"

"Based on what I have just seen there," Zhaarnak interjected dourly, "two months might be more realistic."

"-and substantial reinforcements are on the way. But for now, I think Seventh Fleet had best stand on the defensive."

"Sixth Fleet," Murakuma observed quietly, "has essentially completed its repairs."

"I'd thought of that." Prescott looked up to meet her eyes.

"And," Zhaarnak added, "it would lend our bridgehead here more depth if we could secure control of that chain."

A moment of three-way eye contact passed, with no further conversation, nor any need of it. Then Murakuma turned back to the screen and spoke matter-of-factly.

"Tell me more about the defenses of the Orpheus systems."

The System Which Must Be Defended, threatened from two directions, was now isolated from all contact with its two remaining fellows. But there was no way the Enemy could know that. This new offensive must be simply an effort to extend the zone of occupied systems.

If so, it was succeeding, despite the ploy that the Fleet's light picket force had attempted in the first system to come under attack and despite the Mobile Force's attempt to take the attackers in the rear after they'd turned aside to deal with the empty system further along the chain.

Of course, the Mobile Force had had to act alone in seizing that opportunity. The System Which Must Be Defended, understandably cautious in its present extremity, would release no forces for operations beyond the system where the Mobile Force was based, one warp transit away. To venture further along the warp chain, it was felt, was to risk being cut off from the one remaining source of supply.

But however understandable that caution might be, it didn't change the fact that the Mobile Force, on its own, had lacked sufficient gunboats to make the stroke a decisive one. And now it was back in this system, facing an imminent attack. At least the System Which Must Be Defended had promptly replenished its gunboat strength, and was prepared to commit its massive battle-line if needed to hold this system.

* * *

As she stood on Li Chien-lu's flag bridge, Vanessa Murakuma thought back to the briefing she'd gotten from Prescott's spook Chung and reflected on what she was about to face in Orpheus 1.

Twice as many picket cruisers as either of these last two systems, she thought. And the deep space force is nothing to sneeze at: thirty-three superdreadnoughts and seventy-five battlecruisers. At least they've expended their gunboats.

Or have they?

Sixth Fleet had transited from Home Hive One to Orpheus 2 behind an SBMHAWK and AMBAMP bombardment that she'd hoped would clear the way through a gunboat combat space patrol considerably heavier than the system's picketing force-level would have led one to expect-evidence for Zhaarnak's notion of a home hive system further up the line?-and leave her crewed vessels with little to do. It hadn't quite worked out that way. Why, she'd wondered, doesn't it ever quite work out that way?

The Bugs had reacted with their usual stereotype-shattering adaptability to the Alliance's use of HARMs to kill their decoy buoys. They'd refitted large numbers of their Director-class warp point defense cruisers to mount advanced deep space buoy control systems, and deployed their ECM3 equipped buoys in multiple shells. One shell was active at all times; but if the SBMHAWK-launched HARM2 took out too many of those active buoys as they ate their way in toward the real starships, then the cruisers were tasked to bring up still more buoys, giving the whole system a reactive feature.

But Murakuma, wary of ECM-related dirty tricks such as Prescott and Zhaarnak had recounted to her, had sent in RD2s in the wake of the last SBMHAWKs to assess the bombardment's effect. They'd reported altogether too many surviving targets. So she'd expended practically every SBMHAWK she had left on a second bombardment before transiting, and then exterminated the surviving twenty or thirty cruisers at the cost of damage to only a handful of her ships.

She'd found herself in possession of the lifeless red dwarf system. With nothing to detain her in Orpheus 2, she'd sent her damaged ships to Zephrain for repairs, accompanied by freighters she'd borrowed from Prescott with orders to bring back fresh supplies of SBMHAWKs.

The unexpectedly high rate at which she'd expended the warp-capable missiles had been some cause for concern, although the situation would have been far worse before she'd broken through to Seventh Fleet from Zephrain. Neither she nor Prescott had ever specifically mentioned it, but she knew both the vilkshatha brothers had to be immensely relieved by the shortening of their supply lines. Munitions, as such, hadn't been a problem since the end of the first year of the war. Even Leroy McKenna, with his hatred of all things Corporate World, had to admit that the incredible industrial base the Corporate Worlders had managed to build up over the past century had come fully into its own since the Bugs had made their presence known. Murakuma would never have admitted it to her chief of staff, whose prejudice against the industrial magnates who owned the Corporate Worlds needed no reinforcement, but the unscrupulous and increasingly overt ways in which Agamemnon Waldeck and his ilk manipulated the Federal laws and fiscal policy for their greedy self-interest sickened her. But however they'd done it, the stupendous manufacturing capacity of their worlds was all that had saved the Federation-and probably its allies, as well-from something far worse than mere destruction.

It was that capacity which had permitted the TFN to rebuild itself after Operation Pesthouse, and to provide the entire Grand Alliance with expendable munitions which were fully interchangeable between any of its member navies. And, for that matter, to find the yard space to build entire monitors for the less industrially capable Khanate. Now that the new assembly lines which had been set up when the war began had fully hit their strides, the fighters and missiles and SBMHAWK pods required to meet the Bugs in battle without resorting to their own self-immolating expenditure of life were literally pouring into the military's depots.

Unfortunately, merely producing the weapons didn't automatically get them to the front, where they were needed. That was the job of freighters and supply convoys, and the sheer length of the lifeline stretching between Seventh Fleet and its source of supplies meant that Prescott and Zhaarnak had been forced to be extremely sensitive to their ammunition expenditures.

But Sixth Fleet's long-time base at Zephrain was only a single warp transit from the major commercial nexus of Rehfrak. Once the Khanate had become confident that Zephrain could hold against any potential Bug counterattack from the ruins of Home Hive Three, the Rehfrak warp point had been opened to Sixth Fleet's supply convoys, and Zephrain had been built up into the second largest naval base ever built by the Terran Federation. The stockpiles of ammunition, spare fighters, and every other imaginable requirement for war fighting which had been built up in Zephrain were more than ample to support the operations of Sixth and Seventh Fleet, alike.

Yet however short and convenient their new supply line might be, the weapons still had to be physically moved from Zephrain to where they were required, and waiting while the freighters made the round trip between there and Orpheus 2 had at least given her time to decide where to turn next.

Her real objective was Orpheus 1, where she knew major Bug forces awaited her. She would have preferred to leave Orpheus 3 to die on the vine, isolated as it was by her occupation of Orpheus 2 . . . assuming that it was, in fact, isolated. But because she couldn't be certain that that system held no warp connections to yet more Bug-inhabited planets, she'd had no choice but to go ahead and occupy it at least long enough to find out.

The operation had proved an easy one, and the planetless red giant known as Orpheus 3 had turned out to have no warp points-or, at least, no open ones-other than the three they already knew about. So she'd turned back towards Orpheus 2 . . . only to encounter courier drones bearing the news that the Orpheus 1 deep space force had made its move.

The Bug superdreadnoughts and battlecruisers had brushed aside the light screening force she'd left in Orpheus 2, but remained there only long enough to empty their gunboat racks before returning to their bolthole of Orpheus 1. The almost six hundred gunboats had then screamed across six light-hours to the warp point through which Murakuma must return from Orpheus 3.

Much as it irked her to acknowledge it, the Bug maneuver had very nearly worked. Less than a thousand gunboats could never have destroyed Sixth Fleet, but they could have inflicted serious damage upon it, especially striking from ambush as it made transit through a warp point it believed to be secure. Obviously, that was precisely what the Bugs had had in mind, but the courier drones from her screening force had reached her just ahead of that onrushing wave of death, and she'd begun her return transit in time . . .  barely.

All right, so maybe God sometimes remembers which side He's supposed to be on, she admitted grudgingly, recalling the haste with which she'd rushed the fleet through that warp point and into a defensive posture. Her hurriedly launched fighters had burned their way through the masses of gunboats. But, as always, no defense was totally kamikaze-proof. Only one superdreadnought had actually been destroyed, but two monitors, an assault carrier, and three fleet carriers had been sent limping to Zephrain.

Despite her losses, Murakuma remained confident that she could deal with the Bug forces in Orpheus 1 as soon as she'd completed emergency repairs and brought up fresh SBMHAWKs. Still, the experience had been sufficiently chastening to make her decide a little misdirection was in order.

Which was why she now stood on Li's flag deck in Home Hive One, waiting at that system's Orpheus 1 warp point with the bulk of Sixth Fleet and listening to the report from the elements she'd left in Orpheus 2.

"Force Leader Maahnaahrd confirms that he's prepared to fire his first wave of SBMHAWKs into Orpheus 1 according to plan," McKenna concluded.

"Very good." Murakuma nodded. Maahnaahrd's SBMHAWKs were loaded exclusively with HARM2s, and her plan called for him to launch them in extended waves, over a period of several hours, beginning in-she checked the chrono-twelve standard minutes. Maahnaahrd's confirmation of his readiness had taken almost eight hours to reach her, even with the ICN she and Seventh Fleet had been busy laying, so there would be no way for him to tell her if he somehow missed the schedule after all, but the Gorm flag officer was utterly reliable, and she cherished no qualms about that side of the operation. Whether it worked or not was something else, of course.

 The idea was for the Bugs to conclude that Maahnaahrd's lengthy bombardment was the prelude to a serious attack, intended to clear away the decoy buoys in order to allow the true defenses to be targeted, and she ordered herself to stay calm-or, at least, to project a calm image-as she awaited the news she hoped to hear. Since the Orpheus 1-Home Hive One warp point was nine light-hours from the one at which Sixth Fleet currently waited, however, that news wasn't going to come any time soon.

Nor did it. In fact, just over ten hours had passed before Marina Abernathy, with Kevin Sanders in tow, brought her the report she'd waited for.

"Admiral, the RD2s report substantial movement of gunboats in Orpheus 1-movement away from our warp point to the system. They also report that the Bugs' mobile forces are moving in the same direction."

"Which is the direction of the Orpheus 2 warp point," Sanders finished for her-an impropriety to which Murakuma, in her excitement, was oblivious.

"So they've fallen for it!" McKenna exclaimed. "They're sending everything they've got to meet Maahnaahrd's 'attack.' "

"Absolutely!" Ernesto Cruciero agreed. "Which means the're leaving the door wide open for us!"

"But we're not going through it just yet." Murakuma told him rather more sedately, and her amusement at the ops officer's frustrated eagerness was tempered by sympathy. "We'll let their battle-line get a little further away, first."

But she didn't make Cruciero fidget much longer before she gave the order, and waves of SBMHAWKs-this time a serious attack, and not a feint-leapt for the warp point.

Sixth Fleet's starships proceeded more slowly in the missiles' wake. They emerged, with Li Chien-lu not far behind the van, into a volume of space blasted clean of the mines and laser-armed buoys that had covered it, and the ECM3 buoys that had pretended to be still more of the latter. Murakuma, now well aware of the deception, had disdained subtlety in her response to it. Given the massive supplies of SBMHAWKs available in Zephrain, she'd simply poured enough of them through the warp point to wipe out everything on the far side.

But the Bug picket cruisers, outside the immediate kill zone about the warp point, had survived the missile-storm which had annihilated the fixed defenses. That was a mixed blessing, however, because cheating death only meant that they found themselves standing alone against the entire strength of Sixth Fleet as Murakuma's chain of stupendous capital ships emerged into Orpheus 1.

They closed in anyway, clearly hoping to overwhelm the transiting ships in detail with missile fire. But they were slow, and by the time they could draw into missile range, Sixth Fleet's leading waves had reoriented themselves and gotten their datalink back on-line. Against the datalinked point defense of capital ship battlegroups, the heavy cruisers' missile fire was as futile as hail against a metal roof. So, with the horribly familiar suicidal passionlessness, they commenced their ramming runs.

The battle was intense but brief. The cruisers were slow, and not very maneuverable, but the space around the warp point was congested. Worse, they chose as their targets ships of the following waves, the ones which were still coming through and whose internal systems hadn't yet stabilized after the grav surge of transit. Even slow and clumsy kamikazes could get through against such befuddled targets, unless they were stopped short by active defenses.

Murakuma's massive, firepower-heavy ships blasted the cruisers out of existence as they closed, but some of them managed to get through, anyway. They cost Sixth Fleet two superdreadnoughts and heavy damage to one monitor, but painful as those losses were, they were far lower than the fleet might have suffered without the distracting effect of Maahnaahrd's decoy attack.

Now, as she waited for the remainder of her ships to make transit, Murakuma was able to pause and take stock.

She was 3.4 light-hours from Orpheus 1's red-giant primary, and on a bearing that the computer placed at about two o'clock in the holo sphere. The Orpheus 2 warp point lay 5.4 light-hours from that sullen central fire, at seven o'clock. Not quite diametrically opposite to us, she reflected, but close enough. The Bug deep space force had been proceeding in that direction, preceded by a cloud of gunboats. Now it was pulling up, clearly not avoiding battle, but keeping a certain distance.

She turned away from the display and waved for McKenna to join her.

"I want to begin the next phase as soon as all elements have completed transit," she told him. "We'll head for the deep space force-but we'll keep a fighter screen out at all times. And tell Anson I want his combat space patrols to be prepared to counter kamikaze attacks from any direction."

"Sir?" McKenna looked puzzled by her emphasis.

"Think about it, Leroy. We wiped out as many gunboats as those capital ships could carry back in Orpheus 2. But now they've got a full complement of them again. For my money, that confirms Zhaarnak's belief that there's at least one more warp point somewhere around here, leading to some major Bug population center. Now that we're loose in the system, they're bound to call in more reinforcements. I want that fighter screen out. And I also want recon fighters probing in every direction."

So the Enemy had entered from an unexpected direction. The courier drones hastily dispatched to the System Which Must Be Defended had made that clear to the Fleet's directing intelligences.

Clearly, the replacement gunboats already sent to that system would not suffice. The System Which Must Be Defended would have to intervene in more emphatic fashion.

Unfortunately, any such intervention would come through a warp point lying at the same bearing from the local star as the one through which the Enemy had entered-and almost twice as far out from it. And the Enemy was already headed inward, in pursuit of the system's defenders.

The Bug deep space force found itself in the position that awaited any Bug mobile force which failed to hold a warp point against a stronger Allied fleet. Its slower capital ships were simply unable to avoid interception, even in a stern chase. Nor could they control the range of an engagement when they were brought to action. Vanessa Murakuma had used that advantage ruthlessly when her brutally outnumbered Fifth Fleet had stood alone against the juggernaut in defense of the Romulus Chain at the very beginning of the war.

Now, she used it again.

Anson Olivera's fighter squadrons waited, with the confident deadliness which had been trained into them in Zephrain and polished in combat in Home Hive Three, as the Bug gunboats made their runs. By now, it was as stylized as a kabuki play. Both sides knew their opponent's strengths and weaknesses, and both could predict how the other would respond far more often than not. The gunboats came roaring in, determined to break through to the Allied starships in hopes of at least inflicting sufficient damage to slow them and equalize the speed differential. And the fighter pilots of Sixth Fleet met them head-on, at extreme range, equally determined that they would not.

Fireballs began to blossom in the visual display as missiles reached out from either side to pluck victims from space. The fronts of the converging formations were picked out in antimatter fireflies that flashed with brilliant, dreadful beauty against the sooty black of the endless vacuum. It was a sight Vanessa Murakuma had seen far too many times since she'd first met the Bugs in battle in the starless K-45 warp nexus before Justin. As she saw it once more, she felt the pain of every flight crew she'd lost in every battle since, yet she couldn't look away. Those brief, poignant funeral pyres-for Bugs, as well as humans and their allies-drew her eyes like magnets which she literally could not turn away from.

But there was one enormous difference between Orpheus 1 and K-45. Then she'd been hideously outnumbered, able only to delay the juggernaut, not to stop it, and forced to pour out the lives of her men and women like water to accomplish even that. But this time . . . this time she held the force advantage, and she heard the ghosts of Justin, the ghosts of her own dead, the ghost of her daughter, as eyes of pitiless jade watched the moving waves of flame meet. Saw the fire coverge, crest . . . and die as her fighter pilots slashed the last of the gunboats out of existence.

"Recall your pilots, Anson," she heard herself say, so calmly, so dispassionately. "Get them reorganized and rearm them for an anti-shipping strike."

The Enemy's small attack craft had annihilated the gunboats. That had been expected, but the fact that this time not a single one of them managed to penetrate the Enemy's defensive screen was a disappointment.

Still, they'd accomplished their primary goal. The System Which Must Be Defended had accepted that it must intervene decisively in this system. Its battle-line was preparing to make transit, but moving such a powerful force would take time, and the battle-line had declined to send its own gunboats ahead lest their arrival alert the Enemy of its approach.

So it was the task of the Mobile Force to keep the Enemy's attention focused firmly upon itself for as long as possible. The Enemy must be enticed into pursuing it, thrusting himself deeper and deeper into this system until it was too late for him to escape. Thus the gunboats had been committed to the attack less in the hopes that they would actually inflict damage, than in hopes that the Enemy would waste time destroying them . . . precisely as he had.

Now it was the Mobile Force's turn to do the same thing.

"We'll do this cautiously, Ernesto," Murakuma told her ops officer. "We hold all the cards now, so you and Anson-" her eyes flicked to her farshathkhanak's face "-will coordinate the fighter strikes carefully. I don't want any avoidable losses, any lives thrown away because someone gets overeager. Remember, the object is to overload their point defense so we can get through with shipboard missiles strikes, not to feed our squadrons into a sausage machine making close attacks."

"Understood, Sir," Olivera replied, and there was more than simple acknowledgment of an order in his tone. Vanessa Murakuma had never been a fighter pilot, but she was, perhaps, the strikefighter community's most beloved flag officer. Perhaps it was because her husband had been a member of that lodge, or perhaps it was simply because of who and what she herself was, but Murakuma had always agonized over her fighter losses, and that was something the fighter jocks appreciated deeply.

Every fighter pilot knew that, in the final analysis, he represented an expendable asset. He might not care for that knowledge, but he could hardly pretend he didn't know it . . . or that it was unreasonable. Flight crews might require long and arduous training, but an F-4 carried only a single pilot. Even the F-4C command fighter carried only a crew of three. A maximum effort strike by a TFN assault carrier's entire group exposed less than sixty individuals to the enemy's fire.

So, yes, the jocks understood that any admiral with a gram of sense would far rather expose-and expend, if necessary-that strikegroup than risk the loss of, say, a battlecruiser with a crew of over a thousand.

Vanessa Murakuma was no different from any other flag officer in that respect. What made her unlike some was that she never became callous about expending them, never became comfortable with the term "acceptable loss rate." She cared, and while she was just as capable of committing them to high-casualty strikes as she was of exposing herself to similar risks, she never lost sight of the need to minimize losses. And because the flight crews knew that, they would run risks for her they would never willingly run for someone else.

The Admiral looked at him a bit oddly, almost as if she sensed something of what was running through his mind, but he only returned her gaze levelly. After a moment, she inhaled and nodded.

"Very well, gentlemen. Let's get it done."

The Enemy clearly had decided to use his range and speed advantage as ruthlessly as the Fleet would have used it, had the positions been reversed. Normally, that would have been . . . frustrating. Today, it was precisely what the Fleet wished him to do. True, it would prevent the Mobile Force from exacting anything approaching an equivalent level of loss, but such a long range engagement would also, of necessity, be slower than a close action. The outcome might never be in doubt, but it would take time for the Enemy to kill all of the Mobile Force's starships, and time, really, was all the Mobile Force was fighting for.

The Mobile Force watched the first waves of small attack craft arrowing in while the Enemy battlegroups closed to extreme missile range behind them, and prepared to expend itself as slowly as possible.

The battle with the Bug mobile force was still raging when Murakuma received word of what was sweeping in from behind her.

So far, Sixth Fleet had administered a most satisfactory drubbing to the mobile force, destroying a third of its ships outright and damaging most of the rest. But there were still a lot of Bugs to kill, and they were being stubborn about it.

That was perfectly all right with Murakuma, who infinitely preferred to expend missiles instead of people. Yet even as the intensity of the battle rose and fell with successive fighter strikes, she'd found it difficult to keep her attention focused on it. She kept waiting for the news she was sure had to come, and wondering what portion of the sky it would fall out of. Now Cruciero's urgent voice interrupted her abstraction.

"Admiral, the recon fighters have detected incoming hostiles. CIC is getting the data into the computer, and it should be appearing-"

As if on cue, a scarlet dot with an attached vector-arrow winked into life, and Murakuma gazed at it through narrowed eyes as her staffers crowded around.

"So," she said after a moment, "the warp point was further out from the star than ours, but on just about the same bearing. We've been heading directly away from it the whole time."

"Yes, Sir," Cruciero confirmed. "And we've been leading these new arrivals on a stern chase."

"Things might have gotten hairy if they'd already been in-system to back up their battle-line here," McKenna remarked.

"But they weren't," Murakuma replied with more serenity than she felt, and looked at her intelligence officer. "Have the scouts been able to provide any data on the composition of this second force, Marina?"

"Yes, Sir," Abernathy replied. "CIC is breaking down the initial take right now, and more data's coming in every minute. It should be appearing on the boards any time."

It did, and silence descended.

"My God," Olivera finally said softly as the data scrolled across the display and they digested the numbers. Twenty-four monitors, a hundred and two superdreadnoughts, sixty battlecruisers, and a hundred and five light cruisers. Plus-

"The scouts haven't been able to provide an exact total for the gunboat screen," Abernathy said in a voice which only seemed shockingly loud. "But we're looking at a minimum of fifteen or sixteen hundred."

"Ernesto," Murakuma said quietly into the renewed and intensified silence. "If we continue on our present course to the Orpheus 2 warp point, can we reach it before they intercept us?"

Cruciero seemed caught flat-footed, but Kevin Sanders, standing in the middle distance, rescued him.

"Actually, Admiral, I've just run a projection based on the maximum speed their ships can manage over that distance. The relative positions of the warp points will allow them to cut the angle on us and close the range, but, no, they can't catch us."

"Not even with our monitors slowing us down?"

"No, Sir. We've got a good head start." Even the insouciant Sanders recognized that he was on thin ice, intruding into the domain of operations as he was, which may have explained how he managed to restrain himself from reciting the platitude that a stern chase is a long chase.

"Their leading groups of gunboats should just barely be able to catch up with us, though," he added instead.

"Our fighters can handle gunboats," Olivera declared.

"Very well." Murakuma summoned up a smile. "In that case, ladies and gentlemen," she said with studied understatement, "I believe it's time to shut Operation Orpheus down."

The Enemy had detected the System Which Must Be Defended's deep space force too soon.

Had it been any part of the Mobile Force's original plan to survive, the Enemy's sudden alteration of course might have been welcome. Under the circumstances, however, it could only be considered a disaster. The projections indicated that the Deep Space Force's starships would be unable to overhaul the Enemy before he could escape, and there was nothing the Mobile Force could do to prevent that. Most of its surviving ships were battered, air-leaking wrecks. Many had no effective weapons left, and even those which did were utterly incapable of overtaking the swifter Enemy, or even of staying in missile range of him when he chose to break off.

And so the Mobile Force could only watch as the Enemy it had paid so dear a price to delay went speeding off towards safety.

It was most inconvenient.

Sixth Fleet's starships raced through space towards the warp point which spelled safety. Behind them, recon fighters and Gorm gunboats formed a watchful sensor shell, tracking the hurricane of gunboats which hurtled after them in pursuit.

There was something particularly nerve wracking about watching that massive blur of scarlet icons creep closer and closer in the plot. For the moment, however, there was no immediate danger, and the starships' crews went about their duties with disciplined calm. Those ships which had taken damage in the engagement with the original Bug mobile force took advantage of the break in the action to make repairs. Aboard the carriers, deck crews serviced the fighter squadrons as they were recalled from the CSP. Fighter missiles and gun packs replaced the anti-ship ordnance they'd been carrying. Pilots took the opportunity to gulp down hasty hot meals and hit the heads, then reassembled in their ready rooms for quick briefings before they hurried back to the launch bays, climbed into their cockpits, and waited.

And all the while, the pursuing cloud of scarlet death crept closer, and closer, and closer. . . .

It was unfortunate that the Enemy's small attack craft had detected the Deep Space Force's approach soon enough to break off and run. Such an outcome had always been possible, of course-that was one reason the Deep Space Force had been reluctant to commit itself initially. Revealing its existence-and its strength-to the Enemy had been a calculated risk, taken only because an opportunity to cut off and completely destroy this invading fleet had presented itself.

That risk had failed. The Enemy was going to escape, and now he knew the Deep Space Force existed. He would be prepared for it when he finally moved against the System Which Must Be Defended, which would materially increase his chance of defeating it.

But at least the gunboats might be able to overtake him short of his warp point of escape. They couldn't possibly destroy such a force, but if they could catch it, they could bleed it.

"All right, people," Captain Anson Olivera said over the fleet flight control net while he gazed into his master plot. Sixth Fleet's starships continued to speed onward, into the depths of Orpheus 2 and directly away from the warp point they'd just transited. But even as they fled, the icons of the carriers and the Gorm capital ships spawned a diamond dust of even tinier icons.

Olivera watched those little chips of light gather themselves, settling into the precisely arranged formation of a combat space patrol directly atop the warp point.

"We all know what to do," Sixth Fleet's farshathkhanak told his glittering galaxy of lights. "Now do it."

* * *

The Enemy formation had disappeared through the warp point before the gunboats could overhaul it. After so much had been risked and revealed in order to attack it, it was . . . unacceptable to allow it to escape intact.

At least the gunboats were hard on the Enemy's heels. And unlike the Enemy's small attack craft, gunboats were warp capable.

Anson Olivera's pilots were waiting.

The Allied gunboats opened fire first. Unlike their Bug counterparts, who were armed to kill starships with short range FRAMs, the Gorm gunboats carried standard missiles on their ordnance racks. They opened fire from far outside the effective range of any weapon their enemies mounted, and those missiles carried far better penetration aids than had been available at the beginning of the war. Point defense could still stop them, of course, but that assumed point defense was available.

It wasn't.

Just like any starship, a gunboat's internal systems were subject to the grav surge of warp transit. For a brief, helpless moment, the Bugs had no effective point defense, and a forest of fireballs glared in their formation as the Gorm missiles slammed into them like blows from the Thunder God's hammer. The window before the Bugs' point defense came back on-line was brief, but the Gorm made the most of it-and even after the point defense came back up, a high percentage of their missiles got through.

After so many years of warfare, the Allies had amassed an enormous body of operational data on the Bugs. They used that data now. Carefully programmed tactical computers aboard the command fighters which led each strikegroup analyzed the seemingly total chaos of the Bugs' transiting formation, and within that chaos, found underlying order. Individual gunboat squadrons could be identified by the formations in which they flew, once one knew what to look for. The command fighters' computers knew. So did the ones aboard the Gorm gunboats, and targets were assigned with merciless precision.

Survival in a deep space dogfight depended upon many things. Individual pilot ability and training were highly important, of course. So was experience. But most important of all was teamwork. That was why pickup squadrons assembled out of random pilots unaccustomed to one another's individual strengths and weaknesses tended to be less effective in anti-shipping strikes and had low survival rates in fighter-on-fighter combat. But the underlying bone and sinew of deep space teamwork was the datanet which tied the individual units of the squadron together into a single, cohesive fighting force. And what made that fighting force dangerous, was its ability to concentrate its full combat power against a single target or small, carefully selected group of targets.

Which was why the Gorm crews deliberately split their fire between multiple squadrons. Any Bug gunboat they could kill was worth destroying, but killing a squadron worth of gunboats out of several different squadrons was more effective than simply destroying a single squadron in its entirety. Taking them from many squadrons reduced the combat power of each of those squadrons in the same way that the picadore's darts weakened the bull before it faced the matador.

Of course, there were a great many "bulls" in the Bug formation . . . but there were also a great many matadors waiting for them.

The picadore Gorm pulled up and away as they fired the last of their missiles, and then it was the strikefighters' turn. There were no suicide pinnaces in this formation, because pinnaces couldn't have kept up with the gunboats in their long, high-speed run after Sixth Fleet. And because there were no pinnaces or shuttles, this time the Ophiuchi pilots who found themselves held in reserve, again and again, to pick off kamikazes short of the battle-line, were free to join their Terran and Orion allies in the gunboat hunt.

They led the way now, stooping upon their prey as their long-ago ancestors had stooped upon living prey in the air of the Ophiuchi homeworld. They volleyed their own missiles as they closed, ripping the heart of the Bug formation with blinding glares of cleansing fire, and then they followed the missiles in, gun packs and internal lasers blazing.

They sliced through the Bug formation, already disordered and riven by the missile fire directed upon it by the Gorm, like a whirlwind, and space burned in their wake, littered with the broken debris which had been Bug gunboats. But the Ophiuchi, like the Gorm who'd begun the engagement, were selective in their slaughter. Like the Gorm, they took their victims from different squadrons, killing mercilessly and further eroding the ability of those squadrons to kill their allies . . . or to defend themselves in turn.

And then it was the rest of the CSP's turn.

The Terran and Orion pilots who formed the overwhelming backbone of Sixth Fleet's total fighter strength roared down on the shaken gunboat formation like the wrath of God. Their missiles went in front of them, spreading out in a lethal cloud that enveloped the Bugs and blotted them from the face of the universe. And then, like the Ophiuchi, they followed their missiles in.

To an untrained eye, the plot before Anson Olivera was pure chaos, with no more order than the forest fire of nuclear and antimatter explosions blazing in stroboscopic spits of fury in the visual display. But Olivera's eye was trained. He knew precisely what he was looking at, and a fierce sense of pride and vengeful hunger raged behind his disciplined façade as his farshatok ripped into the Bug formation which had outnumbered them by almost two to one.

It wasn't really a contest. Some of his pilots died. Losses were particularly heavy among the Ophiuchi who led the main interception, who lost almost fifteen percent of their pilots. However skilled they might have been individually, they'd also faced the heaviest and best coordinated defensive fire of any of the strikegroups. But their attack runs were decisive. Coupled with the damage the Gorm had already wreaked, they broke the back of the Bugs' squadron organization, and the Terran and Orion pilots took vicious advantage of the opening which had been created for them. Sixth Fleet lost no gunboats in the interception, and its total fighter losses were under a hundred and fifty.

The Bugs lost one thousand six hundred and twelve gunboats. Only seventeen of them got close enough to attack Sixth Fleet's battle-line. Only five of them scored shield hits with FRAMs.

None of them rammed successfully.

"Yes," Raymond Prescott nodded. "I agree. Continuing to run toward the Orpheus 2 warp point was exactly the right decision. And I can't help thinking that it exemplifies the kind of tactical flexibility we have and the Bugs seem inherently incapable of duplicating. If anything is going to win this war for us, that's it."

"On a slightly less metaphysical level," Zhaarnak put in, "it must have been gratifying to give the Bahg gunboats such a bloody nose, to use your charming Human idiom."

Murakuma grinned and took a sip of her drink. The whiskey caught the orange light of Bug-10's primary sun, flooding in through the wide, curving armorplast viewports of Riva y Silva's flag lounge. That lounge was empty, but for the three of them.

"Yes, Fang. We barely made it through into Orpheus 2 ahead of them, and they barreled through after us without even slowing down. I understand our personnel are calling it the 'Great Orpheus Turkey Shoot.' "

"Yes," Prescott, one of whose ancestors had claimed two air-to-air victories in the battle which had prompted the allusion, agreed. "I can see how they might-even if some of your in-laws might not particularly appreciate it, Admiral Murakuma. So none of the gunboats lasted long enough to complete their ramming runs?"

"Not successfully. And as nearly as we can tell, no more than a dozen or so of them even got away. We assume that the few who did are the reason the Bug capital ships didn't make transit after they finally lumbered up."

"You are undoubtedly correct," Zhaarnak allowed. "I, for one, am never truly happy when the Bahgs demonstrate something approaching tactical wisdom, but I am forced to concede that they do so upon occasion."

"More often than I'd like," Murakuma agreed. "Still, how much 'wisdom' does it take to stay on your own side of the warp point when you know an entire fleet worth of strikefighters is waiting to ambush you on the far side . . . and that your own ships are too slow to overtake the enemy you're chasing even if you survive the ambush?"

"Truth," Zhaarnak admitted, and stroked his whiskers thoughtfully. "We must now assume that the third warp point in Orpheus 1 definitely leads to another home hive system, however. Nothing less could support a force as large as the one you detected."

Neither human could muster any grounds for contradicting him. For a space, they all nursed their drinks in silence. Finally, Prescott drew a deep breath and leaned back in his comfortable chair.

"You're correct, of course," he told his vilkshatha brother, "but that can be left for the future. We'll have to go back to Orpheus 1 eventually, but the fact that we hold both Orpheus 2 and Home Hive One gives us two avenues of attack and requires them to divide their forces to cover both of them."

"Truth," Zhaarnak agreed. "Operation Orpheus accomplished a great deal."

"And," Murakuma said, returning the courtesy, "Seventh Fleet wasn't exactly idle while it was going on."

"Well," Prescott acknowledged with just a trace of complacency, "we'd been wanting to eliminate those holdouts in Bug-11 for some time. The damaged ships we're getting back into service, coupled with our fighter reinforcements, meant we could finally do it."

"Unfortunately," Zhaarnak added glumly, "the same was not true of the system beyond Franos' Warp Point Three."

"Remind me to light a fire under astrography," Prescott told him in an annoyed tone that failed to mask a deeper frustration. "It's about time they assigned that system a designation."

Murakuma took another sip of her drink, this time to hide a smile. Marina Abernathy had already briefed her on Seventh Fleet's abortive attempt to force its way through Warp Point Three. Prescott and Zhaarnak had been able to smash the fixed defenses on its far side with a smothering wave of SBMHAWKs, but the sheer number of gunboats which had supported those defenses had prevented them from doing much more. They'd managed to get RD2s through for a fairly detailed look at the system's astrography, but they'd been forced to abandon any thought of sending manned units through when they saw the hordes of gunboats those same drones had detected.

"I still think we should have pressed on," Zhaarnak growled. "We could have taken that system!"

"Perhaps, brother," Prescott said, speaking in the Tongue of Tongues, as he often did when Zhaarnak was like this. "But it would have meant heavy losses-which we can ill afford at present if we are to . . ."

His voice trailed off into a silence of mutual understanding, and Murakuma's gaze sharpened, and darted from one of her companions to the other.

"You two," she stated, "are up to something."

"Well, we do have a proposal," Prescott admitted. His tone held a complex freight of meaning: acknowledgment that Murakuma outranked both of Seventh Fleet's joint commanders, and realization of how little that had proven to mean between them. "As you know, the repairs in AP-4, plus our reinforcements, have pretty much gotten Seventh Fleet back up to strength. At the same time, Sixth Fleet took some losses in the course of Operation Orpheus. So we feel it's time for you to revert to a defensive stance while we undertake the next offensive."

"Whose objective is . . . ?"

"Pesthouse."

It was as though that one word had fallen from Prescott's lips into a well of silence. So we're going back there, Murakuma thought. For the barest instant, resentment flared in her, fueled by the realization of what returning to Pesthouse meant-above and beyond its strategic significance-and the suspicion that this pair of vilkshatha brothers wanted to exclude her from it.

But only for an instant. Only until she remembered who'd led Second Fleet's bleeding, fighting withdrawal from that nightmare . . . and realized how very right it was that that same man should lead the Alliance's return there.

"Lieutenant Sanchez, reporting as ordered, Sir."

Irma didn't know why Commander Georghiu had sent for her. VF-94 had certainly held up its end of the Bug-11 operation, suffering no losses and racking up a score that solidified her kids' reputation as the best gunboat-killers in Strikegroup 137. Among the best in Seventh Fleet, she told herself. Not that she would have dreamed of telling them that. Encouragement of cockiness was the last thing fighter pilots needed. Heads that swelled had a way of getting blown off.

She had a pretty good idea of what this was about, though. She'd been expecting the summons for a long time. Now it seemed to have finally arrived, and she wondered why her emotions were so mixed.

"Sit down, Lieutenant." The CSG blew out his cheeks as if to pump up his pomposity. "As you doubtless recall, on the occasion of your assumption of acting command of VF-94 following Commander Togliatti's death, I explained that the appointment was only a temporary one. Fighter squadron command is, after all, a lieutenant commander's billet, and you hadn't even been a lieutenant senior-grade very long."

"Yes, Sir." Yep, I was right. This is it. It had to happen. In fact, when I accepted command, it was the light at the end of the tunnel. I knew that sooner or later they'd send some lifer to take the responsibility off my shoulders.

And, damn it, it is a relief. Isn't it?

So why aren't I happy?

"At the time," Georghiu continued, "I never expected the arrangement to last as long as it has-sixteen standard months now." Irma nodded unconsciously; she hadn't either. "But other positions have always seemed to have higher priority whenever senior officers with the right qualifications were available, and . . . Well, during that time, the squadron's performance has been . . . satisfactory." Georghiu looked as if pronouncing the word hurt his face. "Furthermore, I'm advised that a change in command at this time might do more harm than good in terms of the squadron's morale."

Yes, I suppose the relief and the happiness will come later, when it's sunk in.

But . . . Hey, wait a minute! What's he saying?

"I have therefore," Georghiu droned on, "recommended to Captain Landrum that, for organizational reasons, an accelerated promotion may be in order. In fact, I did so some little time ago. And he concurred. But of course it had to go through BuPers, and I wanted to wait for confirmation before informing you."

This can't be right! The leaden lump of depression in Irma's gut was gone, expelled by something akin to panic. It can't! Only lifers make lieutenant commander. That's a law of nature.

"Uh, excuse me, Sir, but are you saying-?"

Georghiu's face gave the same odd quirk she'd seen on it once before, sixteen months ago. In anyone else, it might have been suspected of being a very brief smile.

"Your promotion won't become official for a few weeks. But I think we can go ahead and make the announcement that your appointment as commanding officer of the Ninety-Fourth is no longer provisional." Again, that almost invisibly quick facial twitch. "I think you'll agree that it will be almost anticlimactic by now."

"Uh, yes, Sir," was all she could think of to say. Afterwards, she had no clear recollection of being dismissed and bumping into the frame of the hatch as she left the office.

What's the matter with me? she wondered. I was depressed before, and now . . . I don't know what I feel.

What do I really want?

She rounded a corner . . . and almost ran into the knot of figures waiting beyond it. Meswami was in the front. Behind him were Liang and Nordlund and the other pilots, crowding the narrow passageway. All of them were grinning from ear to ear.

Figures, she thought resignedly. Even in a ship the size of this goddamned monitor, Rumor Central always gets the word first.

CHAPTER TWENTY: Return to Pesthouse

While Sixth Fleet had been carrying out Operation Orpheus and Raymond Prescott and Zhaarnak'telmasa had been conducting their tidying-up operations beyond Bug-10 and Franos, other elements of Seventh Fleet had been busy.

They'd probed aggressively out through Home Hive Three's Warp Point One, and on through the lifeless binary system beyond that warp point. They'd pressed on, against virtually nonexistent opposition, to the blue giant they'd dubbed Bug-05. Unlike most massive stars, it had possessed only one other warp point . . . and that one had led to Pesthouse.

And now the bulk of Seventh Fleet was flowing through Home Hive Three toward that system.

The Enemy had surely identified this as the warp chain from whose far end others of his kind had once advanced towards disaster. But of course he wasn't-couldn't be-aware of what his seizure of control of it would mean.

It was just as well that he wasn't.

The directing intelligences of the three remaining Systems Which Must Be Defended were, however, all too aware. It would mean that each of them would be on its own, isolated from the other two.

But there was little the other two could do to help. They had their own commitments. One was still bogged down in what amounted to its own private war with the Old Enemies. Another was responsible for the defenses of the long-quiescent warp chain where the first contact with the New Enemies had occurred. No, the Deep Space Force must stand alone. And its defensive problems were complicated by the number of avenues of advance open to the Enemy.

True, one of this system's four warp points was almost certainly of no concern, even though it led to a system the Enemy had scouted with his tiny automated probes. No amount of scouting could have detected the closed warp point to which it connected in that system. But the Fleet was no longer prepared to make assumptions about the surprises this unpleasantly resourceful Enemy might spring. It had not, after all, expected the Enemy to discover closed warp points admitting him to two separate Systems Which Must Be Defended, either. The Enemy's success in that regard might suggest that the Fleet's decision against aggressive exploration by its own units had been in error, but that was a matter which could be considered later. What mattered now was that it was remotely possible that one of the Enemy's all but invisible probes had managed to detect a cloaked system security picket as it made transit from that system to this one through the closed warp point. Accordingly, it could not be absolutely assumed that the Enemy didn't know of all three separate routes by which he might enter this system.

Under the circumstances, it was tempting to withdraw to the next system along the chain, abandoning this position for one with only a solitary warp point to defend. But that system held the most direct route linking the other two Systems Which Must Be Defended. If it fell, too much else would also be lost.

No, a stand must be made here. The available static defenses would be divided among the threatened warp points-even the one leading to the closed warp point, in the absence of absolute certainty of the Enemy's ignorance. So would the cruisers. But the Deep Space Force itself would be kept together, and positioned to cover the warp point connecting to the most recently devastated System Which Must Be Defended. That was the most direct route for the Enemy to take. Besides, it was the warp point closest to the one through which the Deep Space Force must withdraw if necessary to avoid being trapped here.

Not that the Fleet intended to be driven away. This Enemy might be unpleasantly resourceful, but he would find that certain new defensive doctrines had been introduced by the Fleet, as well. . . .

* * *

Ghostlike in its silence, mountainous in its mass, another monitor slid past the armorplast transparency in Riva y Silva's flag lounge. Vanessa Murakuma had long since stopped trying to keep track of how many millions of metric tonnes of death she'd watched depart for Bug-05.

Task Group 72.4-a light covering force of twenty-one light carriers escorted by an equal number of light cruisers under Vice Admiral Keith al-Salah-would remain here in Home Hive One. The rest of Seventh Fleet was streaming toward Bug-05 in an awesome procession which Riva y Silva herself would presently join. Intellectually, Murakuma realized that what had paraded before her within visual range was only a small fraction of the stupendous total: sixty monitors, thirty-six superdreadnoughts, twenty-two assault carriers, thirty-four fleet carriers, ninety-eight battlecruisers, and eleven light cruisers. And that didn't even count the freighters and tugs of Vice Admiral Alexandra Cole's Support Group.

She became aware that Zhaarnak'telmasa had joined her at the viewpoint. And his thoughts had evidently been running parallel to hers.

"It would seem," he remarked through her earbug's translation program, "that, however much our confidence in it may have been shaken at times, the Alliance's initial faith in the supremacy of the Terran Federation's industrial capacity was not misplaced." His voice held understandably mixed emotions.

"It's difficult to imagine," Murakuma said, as much to herself as to the Orion, "that this operation is just half of a two-pronged attack on the same warp chain."

Before Zhaarnak could reply, Prescott entered the lounge.

"Sorry I was called away. What were you two just saying?"

"Oh," Murakuma turned away from the spectacle beyond the armorplast, "I was just recalling the other offensive Kthaara'zarthan is planning from Alpha Centauri. I understand he's named the combined plan Operation Ivan."

"Of course," Prescott nodded. "After all, Admiral Antonov was his vilkshatha brother."

"And," Zhaarnak deadpanned, "I am reliably informed that he comes closer than most Humans speakers of Standard English to an accurate pronunciation of its name."

"I am informed," Prescott shot back, "that First Fang Ynaathar'solmaak has laid down the law to him on the subject of taking personal command of that offensive."

"Truth. Kthaara is now under direct orders from the Khan to keep his graying pelt at Alpha Centauri, where it belongs."

"I don't imagine he's very much fun to be around, just now," Prescott mused.

Murakuma ignored most of the byplay.

"I understand how he feels. I ought to be coming along with you two."

"We have been over all of that repeatedly, Vaahnesssa," Zhaarnak chided.

"Yes, yes, I know." Murakuma told herself firmly that he wasn't really being patronizing to a superior officer. But she must not have entirely succeeded in keeping her irritation out of her voice, for Prescott spoke up in his patented oil-on-the-waters tone.

"The important thing isn't who's commanding each of the two operations, but the fact that there are two of them. We've built up to the point where we can use multiple threat axes to whipsaw the Bugs with separate fleets."

"We could do so even more effectively if half our combat strength was not moldering away in systems far from the war fronts," Zhaarnak said sourly.

Neither human responded immediately. It was a sore point. Early in the war, when the nature of the threat was finally recognized by the politicians, Bettina Wister and others of her ilk-not all of them human-had created an atmosphere in which disproportionately large forces had to be kept tied down in static defensive positions. It might not have made military sense, but it had been a political necessity.

For the Federation, it still was.

The Khanate of Orion had responded in similar fashion earlier in the war, and with even greater justification, following the Kliean Atrocity's four billion dead. But the Orions were a warrior people, and the Khan had long since begun systematically reducing the nodal response forces he'd scattered about his domain in the horrifying wake of Kliean. The Federation had not, and for a depressingly simple reason. If the relatively sensible people now running the Federation didn't take care to soothe the popular jitters, they'd be out, and the Liberal-Progressives would be in. The potential consequences of that, at this particular historical juncture, didn't bear thinking about.

Zhaarnak read his companions' thoughts, and the chance to rub it in tempted him beyond his character.

"I believe a Human military historian of the last pre-space century once observed that a democratic government will always put home defense first."

Prescott and Murakuma avoided the slit-pupiled Orion eyes. Zhaarnak's words made uncomfortable hearing, however much one might privately agree with them.

"Still and all," Prescott insisted, "the fact remains that we can do it anyway. And if there's anything to our spooks' latest speculation, it's entirely possible that the Bugs have already done their worst."

"What speculation?" Murakuma asked.

"That's right, you wouldn't have heard about it yet. Well, Uaaria and Chung-with some input from Lieutenant Sanders, before he returned to Alpha Centauri-have had a chance to study the rubble of the Bug infrastructure in Home Hives One and Three. It's enabled them to refine their earlier conclusions. Now they're convinced that they've figured out the secret of the mammoth Bug fleets we faced at the beginning of the war."

"I'm all ears," said Murakuma, who had better reason than anyone else to remember those desperate early days.

"They claim those fleets must have been the product of a century of stockpiling. The Bugs were evidently thinking in terms of a short, extremely high-intensity war, so they built up an enormous reserve fleet to support their attritional tactics."

"But . . . a war with whom?" Murakuma demanded in perplexity. "They didn't even know we existed. Surely not even Bugs would make that kind of effort against some hypothetical enemy they might someday run into!"

"The possibility of such a threat must have been a very real one to them," Zhaarnak said in a measured voice. "Surely they could see that the existence of the aliens they had subjugated implied the existence of other aliens elsewhere-perhaps more advanced ones."

A silence descended, and Zhaarnak looked uncomfortable in the face of the ghost he'd summoned up. The problem of those subjugated-what a mild word!-races was something about which none of them liked to talk or even think. But Zhaarnak's discovery of Franos had brought it back to trouble their sleep. And in the path of Kthaara's projected offensive lay Harnah, where the Alliance had first seen the fate that awaited races conquered by the Bugs.

Murakuma had never been to Harnah, and although she sometimes thought it might be cowardly of her, she never intended to go there. Especially not after Justin. Most of the millions of civilians she'd lost there had at least gone to their horrible deaths with merciful quickness, but she still remembered the handful of brutally traumatized, filthy, broken-eyed survivors who'd seen everyone else devoured. Strangers. Friends . . . family . . .

Her dreams were hideous enough without seeing an entire species which had been turned into intelligent meat animals for generations.

Prescott had been there, and the imagery Second Fleet's orbital reconnaissance platforms had brought back had been just as terrible as the scenes he was certain Murakuma was visualizing. Especially the footage of Bugs actually feeding.

That was why he had never been to visit Franos.

"We don't know that for certain, Vanessa," he said now, hastening to haul the conversation back on course. "Maybe Bugs would invest such an effort against a purely hypothetical threat. Then again . . ." He shook his head. "No, never mind."

"What?" Murakuma prompted.

"Well . . . Have you considered the possibility that they've already met another enemy besides us? An enemy they expect to meet again?"

"That would account for their stockpiling," Zhaarnak mused, after a moment's silence.

"It would, but we're speculating beyond our knowledge," Murakuma said firmly. "And I've got to get back aboard Li in time to depart for Bug-10."

"That's right," Prescott agreed. "We've let ourselves talk altogether too much shop when we were supposed to be having a stirrup cup, as it were."

They raised their drinks.

"Here's to-" Murakuma began, then hesitated. "I was about to toast Operation Ivan, but that's just the name for Kthaara's show. What are you calling Seventh Fleet's end of the operation?"

"Actually," Prescott admitted, "we haven't given it a name. Let's just call it the return to Pesthouse."

Three glasses clinked together.

* * *

Theoretical physicists continued to ridicule the very concept of simultaneity as applied across interstellar distances. As a practical matter, however, every bridge in the TFN had a display-which no one had ever succeeded in proving wrong-which showed the current local time at Greenwich, England, Old Terra. So Raymond Prescott knew when the clock in that remote place struck 10:30 A.M., August second, 2368. And, knowing how reliable Keith al-Salah was, he knew that at that precise instant the SBMHAWK bombardment was going in from Home Hive One to Pesthouse.

He turned from the digital clock to the holo display of the Pesthouse System, as though to remind himself of why that bombardment was commencing from Home Hive One and not from here in Bug-05, where he and Zhaarnak waited with the overwhelming bulk of Seventh Fleet. It was a display uncomplicated by planets, for Pesthouse was a blue giant. Such massive stars generally had many warp points, so there might well be more than the four they knew about. But they'd been able to draw some conclusions from the layout of those four, and the location of the Bug mobile force.

All four of the warp point icons lay in the lower right-hand quarter of the sphere. Warp Point Three, roughly three light-hours from the star at a bearing of six o'clock, led to an unknown terminus and was, for the moment, unimportant. Warp Point One, a like distance out, but at three o'clock, was the one leading to the next system up the Anderson Chain (Anderson Four, as Ivan Antonov had named it) toward Alpha Centauri. It was evidently the Bugs' escape route, given the fact that the mobile force had positioned itself nearby-as interplanetary distances went-to cover Warp Point Four, 3.8 light-hours out at four o'clock, which led to Home Hive One. From there, it was difficult to see how they could be cut off from their bolthole of Warp Point One . . . least of all by an attack from Bug-05, which must enter through Warp Point Two, the furthest from the blue giant of the four at 5.6 light-hours and lying at a five o'clock bearing.

So Prescott and Zhaarnak weren't basing their plans on trapping the mobile force before it could escape to Anderson Four. Still, it would be nice if they could do so.

That was why they now waited in Bug-05 while the SBMHAWK-storm from Home Hive One was-they hoped-convincing the Bugs that the main attack would come through Warp Point Four. Better still would be if it drew a gunboat counterattack through that warp point, to be pounced on by the fighters of al-Salah's light carriers . . . but only after detecting the two hundred deep space buoys whose deceptive ECM was counterfeiting heavy starships poised to attack.

Unfortunately, there was no way Prescott and Zhaarnak could know about that. They could only wait until the prearranged time-10:00 P.M. GMT-and then launch their own bombardment into Pesthouse. They only took the time for a single massive wave of SBMHAWKs, then immediately began pushing their monitors through.

As Riva y Silva emerged into Pesthouse, Prescott found himself gazing at the system display and visualizing what must have happened five years before.

Yes, now I see how they did. A force from Home Hive Three must've entered Pesthouse through Warp Point Two, just as I'm doing now. Another must've come directly from Home Hive One, through Warp Point Four. What about the third force that appeared here? Maybe it came through Warp Point Three, from some system we don't know about yet.

No wonder they were so eager to lure Second Fleet here.

God, what suckers we were!

No, that's not fair. There was no way Antonov or any of us could have known. We thought we'd recognized what we were up against, but we hadn't. Not really. Not then. And because we hadn't, who could have dreamed that even Bugs would go to such lengths, sacrificing whole flotillas as bait? Abandoning entire planetary populations they had the firepower to defend just to suck us into a trap? All our decisions were rational, given the information we had.

Tell that to the ghosts hovering in this system and all the other systems along the trail of death back to Alpha Centauri.

Some of the people on Prescott's flag bridge wondered why his eyes had grown so very cold. The senior members of his staff, who'd been to this system with him once before, did not.

But the moment passed as the initial trickle of reports swelled to a torrent.

The preliminary bombardment had done its work. The single wave of carrier pods had been programmed with a staggered firing sequence, the HARM2 missiles taking out the ECM-generated phantom targets first and leaving the actual fortresses and defense cruisers exposed for the rest. But there was even better news: the Bug mobile force still seemed to be regarding this attack as a feint, refusing to react to it. Instead of bothering his subordinates with useless orders to do what they were already doing, Prescott ordered himself to appreciate the priceless gift of every minute that went by with the Bug starships still fully engaged against Warp Point Four and his own ships deploying into Pesthouse in a steady stream.

It was easier said than done, as he awaited al-Salah's courier drones, hoping that one of them at least would have broken past the Bugs into Pesthouse space with tidings of what was going on at Warp Point Four.

When those tidings finally arrived, they banished the last of the ghosts from his mind.

Al-Salah's SBMHAWKs had been less effective than might have been hoped, for the Bugs had adopted a new readiness posture-inexplicably overdue, in the opinion of the Allies' analysts. All their units within SBMHAWK range of warp points now lay inside clouds of buoys equipped with fire-confusion ECM, which had significantly degraded the accuracy of the pod-launched missiles. But however little actual damage it had done, the missile-storm had achieved its objective. It had fixated the Bugs' attention on Warp Point Four, through which they'd dispatched a gunboat counterattack. And now the mobile force sat on that warp point in all its awesome might, awaiting the two hundred phantom capital ships the gunboats had reported waiting in Home Hive One.

Yes! Prescott thought, trying not to exult. Let them squat there while we head for Warp Point One!

But, of course, it was too good to last. Hours crept past while Seventh Fleet ground ponderously across the light-hours towards Warp Point One and scouting gunboats sped towards Warp Point Four to establish direct observation of the Bugs there. Prescott knew it was foolish, but as the time trickled away with no report that the Bugs were moving, he allowed himself to hope that they would just sit there, mesmerized by al-Sallah's deception, after all.

But they didn't. By the time the first report came back across the three light-hours from Warp Point Four, the mobile force had already been under way for at least two hours, and it had only sixty percent as far to go. Its slower speed meant he'd be able to bring it into fighter range before it escaped from the system, but unless it decided to let him, his battle-line would be unable to engage it.

He gazed as expressionlessly as possible at the mobile force's scarlet icon as it began to move in response to the scouts' reports even as Chung approached him diffidently.

"They seem to have finally caught on, Sir. They're moving off on a course calculated to keep us from cutting them off short of Warp Point One. And they've launched a gunboat strike towards us."

"I see." Prescott gave a command, and the master plot reconfigured to "tactical" scale, showing the stupendous power of the mobile force, with the red streaks of gunboat formations beginning to race away from it to meet Seventh Fleet.

Good, Prescott thought as he watched those streaks. Well aware that their battle-line was outweighed, he and Zhaarnak had counted on being able to first wear down the Bug gunboat strength with their fighters, which would free those fighters to seek out to the Aegis and Arbalest-class command ships.

"Anna," he said quietly to his chief of staff, "tell Steve to get our fighter cover deployed."

But the gunboat wave had covered only a few light-minutes before it turned back, refusing engagement in a most un-Bug-like manner. It was an anticlimax Prescott didn't care for at all.

Worse was to come.

"They're doing what?" Jacques Bichet demanded at the hastily convened staff conference.

Amos Chung was clearly unhappy, but he stood his ground.

"I know it's unprecedented. But you can understand their reasoning. They can read the figures as well as we can, so it must be clear to them that they're not going to be able to reach Warp Point One before we can hit them with mutiple fighter strikes, given our speed advantage. So they've decided to send in a spoiling attack to push us further away from the warp point."

"But they had a gunboat strike heading for us earlier, and they recalled it," Landrum protested.

"My guess is that they recalled it before it was clear to them that they couldn't maneuver past us without entering our fighter envelope," the spook replied. "And they probably decided they didn't want to send their unsupported gunboats into a fighter envelope as strong as the one this fleet can put out, given what seems to be their new sensitivity to losses." Chung paused briefly, but his better nature triumphed, and he didn't remark on the apparent confirmation of his and Uaaria's theories. "So instead, they're sending this in."

Chung didn't need to point at the display. Every pair of eyes turned to the unique formation it showed: a tight sphere of baleful scarlet "hostile" light-points, like a bloody snowball hurled at Seventh Fleet.

"The Bugs," Chung said into the silence, "detached every one of their battlecruisers and light cruisers, and sent them at us in this globular formation. At the same time, they put all their assault shuttle kamikazes in the center of the globe. And finally, they wrapped their gunboats around the globe, an outer shell within the battlecruisers' protective missile range."

"Not a particularly easy formation to attack." Mandagalla's tendency to understatement had a way of emerging under what many considered the most inopportune circumstances.

"No, it isn't," Prescott agreed with commendable restraint as he looked at the sidebar listing the forces within that globe: a hundred and sixty-two cruisers of all types, all of them faster than his own battle-line, covering hundreds of antimatter-loaded kamikazes, and covered in turn by over two thousand gunboats.

Zhaarnak'telmasa, aboard Task Force 72's flagship Hia'khan, was looking at the same display, and had heard Chung's words without noticeable time-lag. Now he spoke from the com screen.

"Raaymmonnd, we are going to have to respond to this."

"Yes," Prescott sighed. "And we'll have to hold the range open as long as possible while we do it." Reversing course and allowing the Bug battle-line, slow as it is, to reach Warp Point One ahead of us. Which, of course, is precisely what they want. But we never did count on trapping it in this system. Did we?

"In the meantime," he went on, "this is how I propose . . ."

VF-94 launched as part of the vastest assault wave Irma Sanchez had ever seen or imagined: four thousand human- and Orion-piloted fighters and six hundred Gorm-crewed gunboats. The huge strike soared towards the oncoming Bugs, and behind it came a solid screen of battlecruisers.

Yet something was missing. Even as they approached the onrushing, multilayered sphere of Bug vessels, that something was a subject for com chatter.

"Hey, Skipper," came Liang's nervous voice. "I was talking to a guy in VF-88 before we launched, and he says he heard that they're holding back the Ophiuchi fighters because-"

"Can it!" Irma snapped. "When you make admiral, then you can start worrying about decisions like that. For now, just pull up and get your ass into proper formation!"

"Aye, aye, Sir."

Liang's deviation from the squadron's formation had been so minor that it would normally have gone unremarked. But Irma was irritable because she shared the general uneasiness at the absence of the Ophiuchi, acknowledged even by the Tabbies as the Alliance's best natural fighter pilots-and, unlike the others, couldn't say so out loud. Snapping at Liang had to substitute.

Commander Georghiu's voice invaded her consciousness, calling for his squadron skippers to sound off.

"All right, people," he said after the last of the acknowledgments, "we're coming up on Point Griddle. Synchronize on my mark."

Irma couldn't help smiling at the code word as she complied. That glowing sphere of hostiles on her HUD did resemble a snowball. Couldn't have been Georghiu who thought of it, she reflected.

But then, as the count wound down and she gave the order to attack, the tiny display began to blossom with myriad tiny red pinpricks-AFHAWKs, she thought automatically-that separated from the battlecruisers of the intermediate layer and sped outward through the surrounding gunboats.

"Skipper-!"

"Yeah, I know." Her own fighter's computer had already screamed "Incoming!" at her. "Evasive action, everybody! And follow me in!"

She rolled her fighter inward with practiced ease, to engage the gunboats while letting the computers fend off the AFHAWKs. Like trying to fight a karate bout with a swarm of bees buzzing around your head, she thought. And no Ophiuchi. . . .

Then they were in among the gunboats, and there was no more time for thought.

Liang was the first to die.

Raymond Prescott kept his face expressionless as he watched the loss figures add up.

We've gotten spoiled, he told himself. I can't even remember the last time we lost more fighters than the Bugs did gunboats in an engagement like this.

It had been the AFHAWKs from the Bug battlecruisers, of course. But in spite of them, in spite of everything, the fighters had smashed the Bug formation's outer gunboat layer. Now their survivors were returning to be rearmed, and the battlecruiser screen was placing itself in the Bugs' path.

Those battlecruisers were BCRs of the Terran Dunkerque-C, Orion Prokhalon II-B, and Gorm Bolzucha-C classes, able to dance away from heavier foes while delivering blows with the capital missiles that constituted their exclusive offensive armament. They needed that agility now, lest the Bug formation get close enough to crush them beneath the weight of its hoarded kamikazes. Their need to stay away from the kamikazes meant that they couldn't stop that formation's inexorable progress. They could, however, inflict losses entirely out of proportion to the twenty-seven of their own who died in the missile exchange. More important by far, they weakened the formation's integrity, for every Bug battlecruiser slowed by engine damage was left behind. So it was a badly weakened globe of Bug cruisers that finally delivered the kamikazes within striking range of Seventh Fleet's battle-line. In the cold, remorseless calculus of combat, Prescott was willing to accept the loss of well over a quarter of his total battlecruiser strength for that result.

He dragged his attention back to Jacques Bichet's most recent report.

"The Bug light cruisers-particularly the Epee-class and suicide-riders-are still trying to press home attacks. But our own cruiser screen has stopped all of them well short of the battle-line. It looks-"

What it looked like to the ops officer would remain forever unknown, for at that moment the shrunken Bug globe-formation in the display dissolved.

It really was that abrupt. The carefully husbanded kamikazes at the center of the now almost nonexistent battlecruiser shell joined with the remaining battlecruisers and streamed toward Seventh Fleet's battle-line in a crimson tide of death.

"Commodore Landrum," Prescott said quietly to the farshathkhanaak, "inform Vice Admiral Raathaarn that it's time to commit the Ophiuchi fighters."

"That's the last of their light cruisers, Sir," Mandagalla reported wearily.

Prescott nodded. Four hundred fighters with fresh Ophiuchi pilots had massacred the Bug kamikazes before a single one of them had reached Seventh Fleet's battle-line. After that, it had been a simple matter to eradicate the unsupported Bug cruisers from long range. And yet . . .

"What about their heavy units?"

Mandagalla's weariness seemed to deepen.

"They're still in the process of transiting through Warp Point One, Sir. Of course, there's no way we can get there in time to-"

"Of course." The Bugs' attack might not have so much as scratched the paint of Prescott's heavy units, but it had bought time for their battle-line to escape to Anderson Four before his badly disorganized strikegroups could get themselves sorted back out and swarm over them.

He dismissed his disappointment with a headshake. At a cost of twenty-nine battlecruisers (plus another six seriously damaged), three hundred and two gunboats, and 2,781 fighters, Seventh Fleet had secured Pesthouse.

Zhaarnak agreed with his conclusions as the two of them conversed later via com screen.

"The loss ratio was overwhelmingly in our favor, Raaymmonnd. They lost well over three hundred cruisers of all classes. Of course, our own battlecruiser losses are disturbing."

"Especially given that we've just seen a demonstration of how essential a battlecruiser screen is against their new kamikaze formation. We're going to have to be a little stingier with ships of that class in the future."

"That could hamper our tactical flexibility," the Orion said glumly.

"Truth. But . . ." Prescott straightened up. "Never mind. There are still the warp point fortresses to worry about. Let's get them cleaned up. I want every living Bug out of the system."

"Of course."

Zhaarnak, who hadn't been at the First Battle of Pesthouse, looked at Prescott, who had. Very few people who hadn't survived Second Fleet's agony in Operation Pesthouse could have understood what was happening behind Raymond Prescott's round-pupiled Human eyes, but Zhaarnak'telmasa had been at Kliean. His task force had been driven out of that system . . . and he'd commanded another, far more powerful task force, when Third Fleet fought its way back in and discovered that two entire core world planetary populations had been annihilated. So, yes, he understood what taking this system meant to his vilkshatha brother as he watched Prescott's gaze shift to the outside view of the spaces lit by Pesthouse's blue giant star.

The ghosts were still there. But now they were appeased.

"Yes," Raymond Prescott said after a moment. "By all means, let's finish sanitizing the system."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Who are those people?

Kthaara'zarthan might be under a direct personal command from the Khan to leave Operation Ivan to others and remain in the Alpha Centauri system. But-so he reasoned-nobody had said he had to stay dirtside on Nova Terra.

So it wasn't quite disobedience when he came almost four light-hours out, to the vicinity of the closed warp point behind which Anderson One lurked. And now, with the prowling gait age had finally begun to stiffen, he moved through the passageways of Hiarnow'kharnak, flagship of the newly organized Eighth Fleet.

As he entered the conference room and acknowledged its occupants' greetings, Kthaara consoled himself, as he often did, with the thought that it wasn't everyone who had two First Fangs to execute his plans in his stead. Not that the Humans called Ellen MacGregor that, of course. The Sky Marshal was to remain here with a weakened Terran Home Fleet, supported by a massive shell of mines, fortresses and buoys, to secure Alpha Centauri-and Sol behind it-while Ynaathar'solmaak led Eighth Fleet through the closed warp point and down the Anderson Chain to meet Seventh Fleet.

Those two weren't the only ones in the conference room. Marcus LeBlanc had beaten Kthaara here by hours, which meant he'd had time to study the news that had brought both of them rushing out from Nova Terra.

"Well, Ahhhdmiraal LeBlaaanc?" Kthaara prompted as he lowered himself onto the cushions, less smoothly and more cautiously than he once had.

LeBlanc cleared his throat.

"As we all know, Sir, the Bugs have long since figured out what our second-generation recon drones are for-although they haven't duplicated them yet, for reasons which, inevitably, remain obscure. And, unfortunately, even the stealthiest drone isn't completely invisible if you know what to look for. So now they routinely patrol their warp points heavily, and we have to send enormous waves of RD2s through to assure the survival of any of them. Continuous, ongoing RD2 surveillance is a thing of the past."

"Yes, yes," muttered MacGregor, who lacked the patience of the two Orions, descendants of pouncer carnivores. "Get to the point."

"Of course, Sky Marshal. The point is that on November 5, 2368, Terran Standard-yesterday-Eighth Fleet got its latest glimpse of the far side of this closed warp point. Only this time, the RD2s had no trouble getting back and reporting. Which is directly attributable to what they reported: that the Bug fleet covering their end of this warpline was in motion away from the warp point. What's more, that fleet was in the process of launching what we calculate to be the bulk of its gunboat strength!"

First Fang Ynaathar'solmaak, to whom this was not news, leaned forward as though getting closer to pouncing.

"And what conclusions do you draw from this? Why should they be fleeing toward the next system along the Aaahnnderrssson Chain, when we have not yet even attacked? And why would a withdrawing fleet launch its gunboats? Most of my task force commanders believe it is some kind of trick."

"I can't say just exactly what they're up to, First Fang. But I can say this: our initial interpretation of their course was mistaken." LeBlanc placed a tactful emphasis on the word "our," as opposed to "your intelligence people's." He activated a holo of the system of Anderson One's primary star-the distant red-dwarf companion didn't count, and neither did the lifeless planets. The warp point connecting with Alpha Centauri lay six light-hours from that star, at eleven o'clock. By contrast, nestling only thirty-six light-minutes from that orange fire at twelve o'clock was the one that led to Anderson Two-like everyone else, LeBlanc shied away from using the name "Harnah," bestowed on that system by its natives, once civilized, now barely sentient after God-or His opponent-knew how many generations as meat-animals. The two warp points had been designated Three and One respectively.

"At first, it was assumed that they were heading toward Warp Point One,"said LeBlanc. "But it turns out that their course isn't quite compatible with that. It is compatible with this destination." He indicated the third warp point icon, 3.6 light-hours out at three o'clock.

"Warp Point Two," MacGregor mused. "We never seem to think about that one."

"That undoubtedly had something to do with the fact that no one considered it as a possible destination, Sky Marshal. Nevertheless, as you can see, while the two courses are fairly close . . ."

"Yes, yes-I'm not questioning your analysis." MacGregor peered at the display intently. "What do we even know about Warp Point Two?"

"Nothing, Sky Marshal. It was surveyed during the course of Operation Pesthouse. Admiral Antonov dispatched a survey flotilla through it-Survey Flotilla 19, to be exact-as he continued to advance along the Anderson Chain. It was dispatched early enough in Pesthouse that it was beyond communications range when the Bugs sprang the trap, of course, so there was never any hope of recalling it when they closed in behind the Admiral. Which, unfortunately, means that any data the flotilla had amassed on further warp connections beyond Two was lost right along with it."

"Of course," MacGregor echoed. She studied the conjectural course. "They've got a long way to go."

"Yes," Ynaathar agreed. "Almost four light-hours. Which means that, whatever they are going there for, they are already too far away to support the fixed defenses at Warp Point Three." He turned eagerly to Kthaara. "Whatever it is they think they are doing, they have in fact presented us with a unique opportunity."

"Yes!" agreed MacGregor. "Without their battle-line to support them, their fortresses are vulnerable-we can blow them to dust-bunnies! And First Fang Ynaathar can probably get Eighth Fleet into that system to stay. But we have to move now."

"But are you prepared to do so?" inquired Kthaara.

"Task Force 83, under Force Leader Haaldaarn, is unfortunately engaged in exercises, too far away to be recalled in time," Ynaathar admitted.

"Forty fast superdreadnoughts," mused Kthaara, who had Eighth Fleet's order of battle memorized. "He will be missed."

"Truth. But we cannot wait. And the rest of Eighth Fleet is, indeed, ready."

"But the staff work-?"