Ynaathar smiled. He wasn't as old as Kthaara-So few are, the latter thought ruefully-and at this moment he seemed positively young.

"Do not be concerned about that, Lord Talphon. Our staffs set to work on this as soon as the drones' report was verified."

For an instant, the resentment that had been smoldering in Kthaara threatened to ignite. But only for an instant. After all, he reminded himself, why should he even have to ask me? Operation Ivan was Ynaathar's show-that had been made clear enough. And as First Fang, Ynaathar was his service superior.

And yet it wasn't that simple. Kthaara chaired the Joint Staff of the Grand Alliance, of which the Khanate was a part. Ynaathar and MacGregor might have already made up their minds that they were going to seize the inexplicable opportunity the Bugs had offered them with both hands, but they understood the need for coordination among allies. Their request for Kthaara's presence hadn't been an empty gesture, still less an insult. This had to be cleared with him.

"Very well," he said after only a moment's pause. "I concur. You should proceed as soon as possible. Which means," he continued briskly, rising to his feet, "that I should be returning to Nova Terra at once."

"One request, Lord Talphon," said Ynaathar. He turned to LeBlanc, who had risen with Kthaara. "Ahhdmiraaaal LeBlaaanc, I believe your subordinate Lyooo . . . Leyowoo . . . Cub Saaanderzz accompanied you here."

"Why, yes, First Fang. He's still closeted with your intelligence people, trying to make some sense of the RD2 findings. I was just on my way to collect him."

"My request is that you not do so. I would like him attached to my staff for the duration of this offensive."

Nonplussed, LeBlanc looked from Ynaathar to Kthaara and back again.

"But, First Fang, Lieutenant Sanders has only recently returned from temporary detached duty with Sixth Fleet-and that came hard on the heels of a similar assignment with Seventh Fleet!"

"Precisely the point, Ahhdmiraaaal. He has had much experience acting as your alter ego. And I know Lord Talphon cannot spare you." Ynaathar grew more somber. "What is happening in Aaahnnderrssson One is bizarre even for Bahgs. This disturbs me. I need an intelligence officer with experience in making sense of Bahg behavior."

Kthaara turned to LeBlanc. "Ahhdmiraaaal . . . ?"

"I'll break it to him, Sir."

It had finally happened.

And at the worst possible moment, as things continued so inexplicably to unravel.

The destruction of two of the five Systems Which Must Be Defended had been bad enough. But then the New Enemies had cut one of the remaining three off from all outside contact. So in effect there were only two left. And only two fragile lines of communication linked those two. And now the New Enemies were unwittingly threatening two systems through which those lines of communication ran.

And-the final blow-the Old Enemies, had fought their way through to one of those systems, as well.

If those systems fell, the Fleet would no longer exist as such. Instead, there would be three separate fleets, each with its own System Which Must Be Defended, each alone in the cosmos with no knowledge of how the other two fared-an unthinkable logical contradiction.

Furthermore, the New Enemies and the Old Enemies would at last know of each others' existence, and doubtless join forces. This must not be.

So, from every standpoint, there'd been no alternative. The Deep Space Force must hurl its full strength at the Old Enemies before they could establish themselves in this system beyond any possibility of being dislodged. With that decision, it had departed from its station, leaving the fixed defenses and the mobile warp point defense to watch the warp point beyond which the New Enemies crouched.

But the New Enemies had chosen that very moment to send through a cascade of their robot probes.

The intelligences which directed the Fleet shared nothing like their enemies' belief in fate, or karma, or even the Demon Murphy. Yet as the probes poured through the warp point the Deep Space Force had just left, something very like those beliefs flickered at the edge of their awareness. Unfortunately, the Deep Space Force had already been far beyond any range at which it might have changed plan and course and returned to defend the warp point. It had had no choice but to continue on its current mission, and the New Enemies had seized the opportunity without delay, smashing the fortresses and burning swathes through the buoys and mines with the assorted weapons their warp-transiting launch pods spewed forth in such abundance. Now their ships had followed and were shaking themselves out into their organizational components: thirty-one monitors, eighty-four superdreadnoughts, seventy-eight battlecruisers, sixty lesser cruisers, and forty-four carriers for their small strike craft, twenty of which belonged to the superdreadnought-sized variety.

It was unquestionably a more formidable force than the one the Old Enemies had put into this system. So it became imperative to obliterate the latter before the New Enemies could intervene on their behalf. The Deep Space Force's gunboats and assault craft would continue on their assigned course.

Admiral Francis Macomb, TFN, broke the stunned silence. "Who are those people?!"

Ynaathar turned to the bank of com screens which held the faces of his task force commanders. Macomb, commanding TF 81, Eighth Fleet's primary battle-line component, was a crusty war-dog of the old school, outspoken to a fault. Trust him to blurt out what everyone was thinking. The only surprising thing was that his ejaculation hadn't contained two or three obscenities.

 Ynaathar, however, felt he owed it to his position to maintain a façade of imperturbability.

 "Unknown, Ahhdmiraaaal. All our drones have been able to tell us is that the Bahg mobile force is engaged against a fleet of unknown origin. Is this not correct?" He turned to a bewildered-looking knot of intelligence officers. Kevin Sanders, with questionable propriety, spoke up first.

"Correct, First Fang. We haven't a clue as to who the unknowns are, but at least we can give you a rough count of their order of battle by ship types: twelve monitors, sixty superdreadnoughts, sixteen assault carriers, twenty fleet carriers, sixty battlecruisers and forty-eight heavy cruisers."

"A formidable force," Fifth Fang Shiiaarnaow'maahzaak, commanding Task Force 82, commented.

"But not in the same class as ours," Vice Admiral Samantha Enwright, CO Task Force 85, added.

"No, Sir," Sanders confirmed. "Which is probably why the Bugs are trying to defeat it in detail before turning on us. They're sending in what appears to be their entire complement of gunboats and kamikazes. Our analysis doesn't give the strangers a high probability of survival."

"I should think not," Ynaathar murmured as he studied the statistics of the tsunami of death sweeping down on . . . whoever it was that had emerged from Warp Point Two. He reached a decision and turned to face the com screen holding the Ophiuchi face of his carrier commander. "Ahhdmiraaaal Haaathaaaahn, am I correct in believing that our fighters, if launched without delay, can intercept the Bahg gunboat strike before it can reach the unknowns?"

Haathaahn recovered quickly, and responded after a hurried consultation with someone outside the pickup. "Ittt woulllld be exxxxtremely clossssse, Firsssst Ffffang. Nnnneedlesssss to ssssay, it woulllld require the fightttters to operrrrate at exxxxtreeme rrrrange, evvvven withhhh maxxxximummm llllload llllife ssssupport paccccks."

"Get them so loaded at once, then."

"You mean, Sir-?" Macomb's dangling question spoke for them all, and Ynaathar flicked his ears affirmitively.

"Yes." he met all four task force commanders' eyes, one com screen at a time. "I assume, at least provisionally, that anyone fighting the Bahgs is a potential friend of ours. On the strength of that assumption, I am prepared to commit Eighth Fleet to the unknowns' support."

No one commented, and Ynaathar saw no disagreement in the screens. He also saw no great regret over the fact that he, and not they, bore the burden of such a decision.

It was, Commander Thaamaandaan decided, difficult to fight a battle and readjust one's reality structure at the same time.

The weariness of a long flight in a fighter's cramped quarters didn't help.

Eighth Fleet's fighter strike had come close to its goal of catching the Bugs' gunboats and kamikazes before they could engage the enigmatic fleet which was their target. Indeed, considering that the fighters had had to cross almost four of the light-hours the Humans had made standard for the Alliance, the closeness was rather remarkable. But the unknowns had launched their own fighters with unexpected promptness, and those fighters had come to grips with the Bugs shortly before Thaamaandaan and his fellows could join the battle. So it had worked out well after all, in that the Bugs were now caught between two fires.

But it gave Thaamaandaan food for thought which he had little time to chew as he led his squadron into the maelstrom of battle.

That the Ophiuchi fighter pilots were the best in existence had been acknowledged for so long that it had assumed the dignity of a natural law. The Corthohardaa weren't insufferable about the advantage they derived from their evolutionary heritage; that would have been bad form. They merely took it as axiomatic.

Now, Thaamaandaan saw, they'd never be able to do so again. These strangers used their fighters like a hanaakaat master used his talon spur. Their dogfighting skill was such that he had to believe they were, to an even greater extent than his own race, born to it.

But as the range closed the sensors revealed something even more disconcerting. These fighters that had appeared so unexpectedly out of the infinite depths of the galaxy were replicas of the human-designed F-3 that Thaamaandaan himself had piloted a scant four years ago, before the F-4 had superseded it. Exact replicas.

But now he was in among the Bugs himself, and there was no time to ponder these matters. There was only time for killing and staying alive.

Ynaathar's trademark sang-froid was somewhat in abeyance.

In his holo sphere, the vast dogfight was a snarling, writhing pattern of fighters, gunboats and kamikazes, like some multicolored poisonous scorpion thrashing about as it tried to sting itself to death. But he could spare it little attention. The Bug capital ships had turned at bay, and Eighth Fleet, with its fighters otherwise engaged, had had no choice but to meet them ship to ship. So a titanic battle-line engagement now rose to crescendo, echoing on a larger scale the battle still raging between the unknowns and the remnants of the Bugs' Warp Point Two defense force.

Thus far, Hiarnow'kharnak hadn't sustained any hits in the bizarre, three-cornered battle. Ynaathar almost wished it had. At least it would have taken his mind off the rising tally of ships which had been damaged . . . or destroyed.

But the loss ratio was still in Eighth Fleet's favor. And the battle the strangers were fighting against the fixed defenses had not only started earlier; it had also been one-sided from the first, once the Bugs' mobile forces were prevented from intervening directly. Ynaathar was confident that they would soon be in a position to come to his own fleet's aid.

He wished he was equally confident that they would be inclined to do so. Their motivations were as enigmatic as everything else about them and might or might not include gratitude.

There was, of course, no point in even trying to establish communication with them at this point. Even at their leisure, getting past all the incompatibilities of technology, protocols and language would be a lengthy and tedious job. In the midst of a battle . . . ! No, there would be plenty of time later-

"First Fang," the communications officer diffidently interrupted Ynaathar's thoughts, "we are being hailed by the unknown fleet's flagship."

Ynaathar stared. "Did I understand you correctly?"

"Yes, First Fang." The communications officer's whiskers were aquiver with suppressed excitement and perplexity. "They are using Terran protocols-several years old, but nonetheless recognizable."

Ynaathar ordered himself to come out of shock.

"Acknowledge, and put them on," he ordered, then turned in the direction of the intelligence station. "Cub Saaanderzz, we are about to establish contact with the unidentified fleet. Please join me, as I believe your insights may be helpful."

"Aye, aye, Sir," said Sanders, just as the screen awoke.

Ever since entering this system and detecting those enigmatic strangers, they'd all given free rein to their imaginations. But none of the unheard-of lifeforms they'd visualized would have been as stunning or unexpected as what the screen now revealed.

"This is Rear Admiral Aileen Sommers, Terran Federation Navy, commanding Survey Flotilla 19," said the early-middle-aged human female in TFN black-and-silver, speaking like one finally delivering a message rehearsed over and over in the course of years-a message she'd doubted she would ever have the chance to utter. "I wish to report my flotilla's somewhat belated completion of the mission on which it departed this system approximately five and a half standard Terran years ago." She turned and beckoned, and a second being entered the pickup-smaller than herself, sandy-furred but vaguely batlike to Sanders' eyes with its large folded wings. It raised a four-digited hand in what was presumably a greeting, and Sommers resumed. "I also wish to report, in my capacity as de facto ambassador from the Terran Federation to the Star Union of Crucis, that the Grand Alliance has a new member."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: "I suppose we must approve. . . ."

"Well, Warmaster," Aileen Sommers said as they emerged from the conference room, "now you know what it's like to be an ambassador."

"Yes-an officially accredited one," Warmaster Robalii Rikka, now ambassador from the Star Union of Crucis to the Terran Federation, the Khanate of Orion and the Ophiuchi Association, shot back rather pointedly.

Sommers silently acknowledged the accuracy of the barb. But she couldn't help being struck by the irony of Rikka's appointment to a diplomatic position. "Diplomatic" was one of the last words she would have thought of applying to the warmaster, a fighting admiral with a reputation for being aggressive to a fault. He'd justified that reputation not long since, at the Second Battle of Skriischnagar, when he'd smashed open the road to Pajzomo-and, beyond it, the warp chain along which SF 19 had once fled, leading back to Anderson One and thence to Alpha Centauri. But his desire-no, his need-to slaughter as many Demons as possible had pushed his innate boldness almost over the edge into rashness. It was a need his family line came by honestly, and it was what gave him so keen an edge as the Star Union's sword. But it was also a two-edged weapon, and his losses had been so heavy that he'd only narrowly avoided the unthinkable calamity of the destruction of his entire force of two Grand Wings. Afterwards, he'd taken stock of himself and brought his lust for vengeance more firmly under the command of his training and discipline.

Still, there was something irresistibly amusing about the thought of Rikka as a diplomat.

He'd done rather well, though, with the help of the multispecies Star Union political staff that had accompanied First Grand Wing on its long offensive. That offensive had brought it, not without bitter fighting along the way, at last to Anderson One, whence SF 19 had departed so long ago . . . only to find it in Bug hands. Sommers and Hafezi had passed some of the worst moments of their lives as they'd contemplated the implications of that-and the size of the tidal wave of gunboats and kamikaze shuttles roaring down on them. But then exultation had banished their despair as Alliance forces had entered the system from the Alpha Centauri warp point and joined with First Grand Wing to grind the Bugs out of existence.

The victory hadn't come cheaply. First Grand Wing had lost four monitors, fourteen superdreadnoughts, five assault carriers, seven fleet carriers, eighteen battlecruisers and twelve heavy cruisers. Neither had Eighth Fleet escaped unscathed: six of its monitors, eight superdreadnoughts, three assault carriers, five fleet carriers and eleven battlecruisers were now cosmic detritus, while numerous other ships were damaged to varying degrees. But no living Bug remained in the Anderson One system. Which had been just as well on several levels. Sommers' lengthy explanations of just who her new friends were had left First Fang Ynaathar and his staff so thunderstruck that Sommers rather suspected their combat efficiency was well below maximum.

Once those explanations were completed, however, Ynaathar hadn't hesitated for a moment over what to do next. He'd sent them back to Alpha Centauri and this space station, where Ambassador Rikka and his political types had just finished a hectic round of preliminary talks with Alliance officials, by the fastest means possible.

"Are you coming down to the planet with us?" Rikka asked her, gesturing through a nearby transparency at the companion-planet Eden, rising over the cloud-swirling blue curve of Nova Terra.

All at once, Sommers' good spirits vanished like a pricked bubble.

"No, Warmaster. I've been ordered to report in person to Sky Marshal MacGregor, here on the station. My military superiors want an accounting of my actions over the last five and a half years."

"I can well imagine that they do," Rikka said judiciously. "Still, I understand the news media and the political leadership are anxious to have you on the planet without delay, for the purpose of public appearances."

Feridoun Hafezi joined them just in time to hear Rikka's remark. He grinned whitely in a beard that still held considerably more pepper than salt.

"That, Warmaster, is precisely the point. The word's gotten out, and the story's become a sensation down there. The Sky Marshal wants to debrief her before she goes groundside and the circus begins."

"I doubt if your governmental leaders are particularly happy with the delay," Rikka opined mildly.

"That's one way to put it. The politicos all want to get their pictures taken with her. Next election, they'll claim credit for the fact that we've suddenly got a new ally against the Bugs."

Sommers shot Hafezi a glare. Keep it in the family, Feridoun!

Rikka looked twenty centimeters up and met her eyes.

"I can't advise you on how to deal with the situation in which you find yourself, as it is completely foreign to my experience. I am not, however, unacquainted with the bureaucratic mind-set. If you should find yourself in difficulties over any arguably irregular actions you've taken over the last few years . . ."

He hesitated awkwardly, then shrugged his wings in a gesture which mingled the combination of apology and the decision.

"I realize that you're uncomfortable when my own people or our fellow citizens remind you that without the gifts of technology and the training in its use which you gave us, we would never have survived the coming of the Demons. We have no wish to embarrass you, but I am prepared to remind the responsible authorities-through channels, naturally!-of your unique and crucial role in forging the alliance with the Star Union. And to let it be known that my government would . . . take a negative view of any action against you."

A moment passed before Sommers could speak.

"Thank you, Warmaster," she said then. "But the Alliance is more important than my career. I must ask you not to do anything that would jeopardize it. And now . . ." She took a deep breath and drew herself up. "I have an appointment with Sky Marshal MacGregor."

Sky Marshal MacGregor. Sommers was still getting used to that, although early in the course of her hurried catching-up she'd learned what had happened to Ivan Antonov and Hannah Avram and so many others.

"Let me come with you," Hafezi said, and his voice held a number of things. Military propriety wasn't one of them.

"No, Feridoun. The order only mentioned me-it didn't say anything about bringing my chief of staff. Anyway, I was in command. The responsibility was mine." She glanced around. For the moment, no one else was around except Rikka. She took Hafezi's left hand in her right and gave it a quick, hard squeeze. Then she turned on her heel and strode off down the passageway.

The lump in her stomach seemed to grow heavier as she passed through the outer offices. It assumed the proportions of an ancient iron cannon ball as the door to the sky marshal's private office loomed ahead.

"Er, excuse me, Admiral," said the yeoman accompanying her. "This way, please."

"But isn't this . . . ?" Sommers gestured toward the door with MacGregor's name on it.

"Actually, Sir, they want to see you over here in the briefing room."

They? Sommers thought as she walked through the indicated door . . . and then stopped cold.

Sky Marshal MacGregor was there, all right, seated at a table along with four others of various species. Sommers' body, acting without orders from her forebrain, came to the most rigid position of attention she'd achieved since the Academy. Who the hell do I report to? she wondered frantically. She settled for focusing her eyes on a spot between MacGregor and the silvered-sable Orion at the head of the table and rapping out, "Rear Admiral Sommers reporting as ordered, Sir!"

"Please be seated, Ahhdmiraaaal Saahmerzz," purred Kthaara'zarthan. "You have, I believe, already met Sky Maaarshaaal MaaacGregggorr and First Fang Ynaathar'solmaak. Permit me to introduce Ahhdmiraaaal Thaarzhaan and Fleet Speaker Noraku, who represent, respectively, the Ophiuchi Association and the Empire of Gormus on the Grand Allied Joint Chiefs of Staff-which I have the honor to chair."

Sommers managed to mumble something as she lowered herself into a chair across the table from the awesome array of rank.

Kthaara seemed to read her mind.

"You probably were not aware that the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff were present here on this station. The fact has not been publicized. You see, you have become something of a celebrity, what with your miraculous return from the dead years after your flotilla was given up for lost." He gave a soft, rippling growl that Sommers-who hadn't seen an Orion in five and a half years and was still readjusting to the race-belatedly recognized as the equivalent of a human's nasty chuckle. "So if we had waited for you on the planet, it might have been too late. We wanted a chance to talk to you informally, before turning you over to the tender mercies of your politicians and news media."

MacGregor muttered something, which Kthaara ignored. He resumed with renewed seriousness.

"Let me emphasize the word 'informally.' This is not an official board of inquiry. Whether any such proceedings are indicated is a matter for your own Human service, not the Alliance. We merely wish to let you orally supplement the report you tendered to First Fang Ynaathar in Aahnnderrssson One."

Ellen MacGregor leaned forward, a movement unsettlingly reminiscent of the way a force beam projector's business end extruded itself from the hull for action.

"To put it another way, we kidnaped you so we could hear in your own words just what the hell you've been doing out there in the name of the Terran Federation and its allies."

"Before we proceed," came Noraku's soothing basso, "I for one would appreciate an update from Admiral Sommers on the more recent stages of the Crucians' war with the Bugs, as I fear that my briefing on the subject was cut short by my hurried departure for this station. I am familiar with Survey Flotilla 19's escape from the Bugs, its first contact with the Star Union, and the early stages of the war, including the Bugs' conquest and colonization of the Rabahl system and the check the Crucians-with your help-administered to them at the battle of Rey . . . Rey. . . ."

"Reymiirnagar, Fleet Speaker," supplied Sommers, grateful for the reprieve. "That was the First Battle of Reymiirnagar, where the Crucian fighters got their baptism of fire. The Bugs came back, of course, a few months later. But we held. By that time the Star Union had deployed a lot more fighters. Their pilots were green, but even a green Crucian pilot is . . . well, you have no idea!"

"Actually, I do," Ynaathar put in, "having observed them in action in Aaahnnderrssson One. So in my case, at least, you are-how does your Human expression go? Expounding religious doctrine to the temple singers?"

"Close enough," MacGregor allowed impatiently. "Go on, Sommers."

"After Second Reymiirnagar, the Star Union was able to go on the offensive. Our initial objective was to reestablish communication with the Zarkolyan Empire, which the Bugs' advance had cut." Sommers was unconscious of her own shift to the first person, but she became conscious of the bewildered looks on some of the faces across the table, especially Noraku's.

"Allow me," Kthaara said. Sommers' report had already been downloaded into the secure data section of the space station's computer net. Now the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs gave an oral command in ripply-snarly Orion, and a holographic display of the Star Union's warp network appeared on the room's screen. Sommers studied that pattern, now so familiar to her, and picked up a light-pencil.

"The Zarkolyans' primary point of contact with the Star Union was through a closed warp point here, in the Giizwahn system," she began. "A secondary one, at the end of a long supply line, was over here, at Jzotayar-"

"What's the story on these Zarkolyans, anyway?" interrupted MacGregor. "Are they Star Union members or not?"

"They were in the process of amalgamation when Survey Flotilla 19 arrived. The disruption of their lines of communication didn't exactly help. But at the same time, they . . . proved themselves. You see, in addition to their physical oddity-" Sommers didn't elaborate; if they hadn't already seen holos of the trilaterally symmetrical, multitentacled egg-layers they soon would, and nothing short of that could truly convey their weirdness "-they're very different from the Crucians psychologically and socially. To put it unkindly, they're a bunch of stereotypical money-grubbing capitalists, with no military tradition. However, they're an industrial powerhouse, and if they weren't warlike to start with, they've certainly gotten warlike enough lately to hold up their end."

"Close acquaintance with the Bugs tends to have that effect on people," MacGregor remarked drily.

"Too true, Sir. The Telikans are an even better example."

A brief, uncomfortable silence fell. By now they all knew of that race's tragedy. Sommers, however, had had far longer than they had to become accustomed to it, and she didn't allow the silence to linger.

"The Telikans' original homeworld was almost uniquely pacifistic and nonviolent," she said. "But now . . . well, let's put it this way: if I were the Bugs and had to be at the mercy of somebody, I'd rather have it be anyone in this room than a Telikan!"

"Quite a transformation," Noraku observed.

"Indeed, Fleet Speaker. The tiny Telikan minority of the Star Union's total population now accounts for over eighty percent of their fleet's ground-assault troops. The racial Crucians are unsuited to that kind of thing." Sommers smiled reminiscently. "The Telikan social pattern is matriarchal-the females are at least half again as large and strong as the males-and any Telikan field commander is addressed as the talnikah, or 'battle mother.' But our xenologist who first translated the term was Ophiuchi, and in Standard English his translation got garbled into something our Marines-having seen them in action-decided was actually better: 'combat mama.' "

The nonhumans-even Kthaara-looked blank. But MacGregor had to choke back a guffaw.

"I'll bet your grunts even use that in official paperwork by now," she chortled. Then she remembered herself and forcibly banished her huge grin. "Ah, continue, Sommers."

"Uh, yes, Sir. After retaking the Menkasahr warp nexus and rolling up the Giizwahn System, we reestablished contact with the Zarkolyans and learned they hadn't just been hiding behind their closed warp points. They'd been raiding through Jzotayar, disrupting the Bugs' supply lines to their forward base at Rabahl-which, by then, had become what you might call the Bugs' Zephrain. Our next objective, in conjunction with the Zarkolyans, was the warp chain from Reymiirnagar to Pajzomo."

"The system where you had initially encountered the Crucians," Noraku put in.

"Yes, Fleet Speaker. At Skriischnagar, Warmaster Rikka opened the way to Pajzomo . . . at considerable cost." Sommers' eyes momentarily clouded over with dark memories, for she'd been at Skriischnagar and knew what lay behind those dry words considerable cost. "In fact, we had to slow the operational tempo down a bit afterwards due to the Star Union's losses. But a coordinated offensive by us from Skriischnagar and the Zarkolyans through Jzotayar finally took Pajzomo. That accomplished the first objective of our offensive: to cut Rabahl off from Bug space completely. It's still there, tremendously strong but now isolated. We'll take it eventually."

"And the other objective of the offensive?" Kthaara asked mildly, and Sommers swallowed, knowing she could procrastinate no longer.

"After Pajzomo was secured, Warmaster Rikka and First Grand Wing-accompanied by me and Captain Hafezi, my chief of staff, with the remainder of my people remaining behind to serve as cadres-advanced from that system, following Survey Flotilla 19's old route in reverse. The objective, of course, was to break through to Alpha Centauri so that we could . . . uh, formalize the Star Union's membership in the Grand Alliance."

"Ah, yes." Kthaara exuded an air of finally coming to the point. "The membership that you had already taken it upon yourself to offer them."

Sommers had always heard that the actual arrival of a moment one has dreaded for years is never truly as bad as one has feared. The hell it isn't, she thought as the leaden lump reappeared in the pit of her stomach.

"That's correct, Sir. In my capacity as commander of a Survey Flotilla temporarily out of communication with higher authority, I exercised the broad discretionary powers granted by Article Twenty-Seven, Section-"

"I'm aware of that regulation" MacGregor leaned forward again in the same alarming way. "I'm not aware of any regulation that empowers Survey commanders to call themselves 'ambassadors'-or to treat a newly contacted polity as an ally, with all that implies regarding security of classified information. Are you aware of one, Admiral?"

Sommers knew how unflattering the sheen of sweat on her face must be in the room's lighting. It really ought, she reflected, to be the least of her worries.

"Ah, no I'm not, Sir. But-well, the Star Union is a sovereign power, and they treated me as the Grand Alliance's representative for purposes of diplomatic protocol. It was a practical necessity if the alliance was to go forward."

"And," Kthaara said mildly, "you made the decision-on behalf of the Khan'a'khanaaeee, among others-that this alliance was worth whatever irregularities were necessary to bring it about?"

The force of absolute conviction stiffened Sommers' resolve and steadied her voice.

"Yes, Sir, I did. I was among beings who'd saved my life and the lives of my entire command-absolute strangers to them at the time. Beings who were fighting for their existence against the Bugs . . . and even then I had some inkling of what that meant, having heard rumors about what Admiral Antonov had found on Harnah."

Since returning, she'd learned those rumors had been true. It was a bit of knowledge she had not shared with Rikka. Still less had she shared it with Warmaster Garadden, Rikka's second in command. . . and a racial Telikan. They continued to believe that the Telikan homeworld's agony had at least been quick. She knew better now, and her voice wavered momentarily as she looked inward on the vistas of nightmare. Terrible as they were for her, she knew they would be infinitely worse for the beings she'd come to know as friends, not just allies in a war, and it was an agony she simply could not inflict upon them. But then she blinked those nightmares away and met the row of eyes across the table.

"Now we all know what the Bugs are. That's why we have a Grand Alliance. Not just to defend our own particular races from the Bugs but to destroy them before they eat the universe hollow of everything individual consciousness has brought into it. The capacity to love-and, yes, to hate, because some things ought to be hated. The capacity to recognize beauty and sometimes even create it. Most of all, the capacity to make moral choices-including the ultimate choice of sacrificing that very individual consciousness in the name of what all of us recognize, in one form or another, for what it is: honor. All of our races, however different, have those things in common. And so do the Crucians! They're part of what the Grand Alliance exists to keep alive in the universe. I did what I did because I couldn't do otherwise. What else would any of you have done?"

Abruptly, Sommers stopped. In the ringing silence, the realization of what she'd said caught up to her.

Well, she thought in the midst of a strangely relieved calm, I can always do something else for a living.

The rustling purr of an Orion sigh finally dispelled the silence, and Kthaara'zarthan flattened his ears in his race's gesture of resigned melancholy.

"Well, let me make certain I am clear on the facts as they seem to stand. On your own initiative, without any authority whatever, you released the Alliance's latest classified military technology to a hitherto unknown interstellar polity and committed the Alliance to support that polity against the Bahgs-"

"Yes, Sir," Sommers murmured.

"-all for no better reason than to save the lives of the personnel under your command, force the Bahgs to fight on a second front, split the enemy's attention and spread his resources thinner, and add another industrial base almost as large as the Khanate to the Alliance's support structure?"

"Yes, Sir. . . ." Huh?

Kthaara leaned back and sighed more deeply.

"Well, under the circumstances, I suppose we must approve your actions." His slit-pupiled eyes held a twinkle that transcended species. "Sky Maaarshaaal, do you concur?"

"Oh, I suppose so. Only . . ." MacGregor looked at Sommers, and sternness dissolved into a huge grin that made her face almost unrecognizable. "Don't let it happen again!"

"I'll try not to, Sky Marshal," Sommers said in a small voice.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: The Last Roadblock

The staffers and subordinate commanders crowding Hiarnow'kharnak's flag briefing room rose respectfully as Ynaathar'solmaak entered. The First Fang didn't notice. Instead he stared aghast at the screen, where the planet Harnah showed in all its blue loveliness.

What graaznaak-brained idiot left the outside view on? The sight of that planet is not what we need! And of course it would be out of the question for me to order it turned off now. All I can do is try to ignore it.

So he made the best of a bad situation and proceeded to his place at the table with a mumbled "Please be seated." They did so, led by the trio directly across from him: Warmaster Rikka, who'd asked for this conference; his Telikan second in command, Warmaster Kazwulla Garadden; and Aileen Sommers.

Even though Ynaathar considered himself-not without reason-a cosmopolite, it was never easy to read the body language of aliens, especially of aliens whose species one had only recently encountered. Despite that, he could tell that Rikka and Garadden were in the grip of some strong emotion, sternly controlled-an emotion rising, in Garadden's case, to the level of waking nightmare. Equally obvious was an element of strain between Rikka and Sommers that hadn't been there before, a certain stiff, self-conscious separateness in the way they sat side by side.

"This meeting," Ynaathar began, "has been convened at the request of the commanding officer of Task Force 86."

That was First Grand Wing's designation within the organizational context of Eighth Fleet. Rikka had accepted it with every appearance of good grace, and Ynaathar was certain it had nothing to do with whatever was bothering the Crucian. It was certainly an appropriate designation, given the sheer size of Eighth Fleet, and the warmaster had clearly recognized the need to fully integrate his own command into the far larger Allied force structure in a way which would minimize communications and command bottlenecks.

At the same time, Ynaathar was beginning to realize that the Crucian "task force" was a strategic asset whose value far exceeded its mere tonnage. The SBMHAWK bombardment of the Anderson One warp point fortresses had reduced them effectively to rubble, and no major Bug fleet units had been committed to the defense of the system. But that didn't mean they'd been unopposed, and the gunboats and kamikaze shuttles based on Harnah had swarmed to meet them. The Crucian fighter pilots were eager to upgrade to the specially modified F-4s the Federation was already putting into production to suit their own life support and body form requirements, but what they could do with the "obsolete" F-3s was an eye opener. They'd cut their way through the Bug gunboats and small craft like a laser scalpel, and Ynaathar knew their efforts had substantially reduced the casualties Eighth Fleet would otherwise have suffered.

Which made Rikka's obvious unhappiness even more distressing to the fang. He watched the warmaster's folded wings quivering, as if he was constantly forced to restrain their need to unfold in agitation, and hoped this meeting wasn't going to be as bad as he feared it might.

"As all of you know," he continued after a moment, "our recon fighter screen has reported that the only starships still in Aaahnnderrssson One are the thirty warp point defense cruisers in orbit around the planet." He neither named Harnah nor indicated the blue globe floating serenely in the screen behind him as he went on. "Our sensors have confirmed that the starships are tied into the planetary defense nets, which, of course, means they would be able to use the planetary point defense installations to support their own anti-missile defenses if we should decide to attack them in a . . . conventional manner."

He paused, considering his circumlocution, and decided it was time to stop worrying about awakening ghosts.

"Now, in the absence of a thorough reconnaissance of this system we have no way to be certain that there really are no additional Bahg starships in it. They could be lying in cloak, waiting to come in behind us. And ever since our experience in Operation Pessssthouse, we have known better than to discount the threat of Bahg traps."

An uncomfortable muttering ran through the room, but Ynaathar had expected it and continued calmly.

"As we all know, Second Fleet did not bombard Harnah when it passed through this system in the course of Operation Pessssthouse-and we all know the reason why. That reason has lost none of its force. But that was before we knew what the abrupt annihilation of a large Bahg population does to the remaining Bahgs in the local planetary system. In light of what we now know, we must seriously consider the possibility of exercising what has become known as the 'Shiiivaaa Option.' "

Ynaathar gestured toward the commander of Task Force 82.

"Fifth Fang Shiiaarnaow'maazaak has proposed that, after taking out Harnah's orbital fortresses and cruisers, we position SBMHAWK carrier pods in a dense orbital pattern around the planet, to be activated if we come under attack from additional, heavy Bahg mobile forces, searing the surface clean of life and thereby stunning and disorienting our attackers."

He ran his eyes over the room. It held a variety of expressions.

"Needless to say, the ethical implications cannot be ignored. I am sure Fifth Fang Shiiaarnaow is as sensible of them as any of us." Actually, Ynaathar wasn't sure of any such thing. Shiiaarnaow was a reactionary who fancied himself a warrior of the old school. "But before we turn to this issue, I invite Warmaster Rikka to address the meeting."

"Actually, First Fang, it was on this very issue that I wished to make my views known."

Rikka straightened up and, in the very limited space available to him, fluttered his folded wings back and forth a few times in what Ynaathar suspected was the equivalent of a Human or an Orion drawing a deep breath.

"I first learned of the 'Shiva Option' while at Alpha Centauri," the warmaster began. "When we entered this system and I learned there was a Demon planetary population of billions here, I asked one of my human liaison officers why we even hesitated to use it. That was how I learned . . ." All at once, Rikka's self-control gave way and he whirled on Sommers. "Why did you never tell us?"

Sommers stared back at him for several agonizing seconds, then spoke from the depths of obvious misery.

"I didn't know myself, until our return to Alpha Centauri. Oh, there'd been rumors about Harnah, just before my survey flotilla departed. But that was all: rumors!"

"You could have shared those rumors with us."

"I didn't really believe them . . . because I couldn't let myself believe them! Remember, there are human colonies that have been under Bug occupation since the early days of the war."

 "But after we arrived at Alpha Centauri, you learned that the rumors had been true all along, and still you said nothing!"

"All right, damn it!" flared Sommers. "Yes, I could have told you. But would you really have wanted to me too? Are you sure you really would have wanted to know? You . . . and Garadden?" A low sound escaped the Telikan warmaster. Ynaathar's interpreter earpiece-aside from the personnel of the original SF 19, no one in the Alliance had had time to learn Crucian, so SF 19 had downloaded its own translation software to the flagship's computers-didn't translate it. But Sommers needed no translation, and something seemed to go out of her.

"Cancel all that bullshit," she muttered. "Yes, I should have told you. Call me a coward if you want to. I can't argue."

Rikka also subsided.

"I, too, have been uttering grazing-animal excrement. I understand why you didn't tell us, and it has nothing to do with cowardice-a thing no one in the Star Union would ever accuse you of. No, you knew only too well how we would react. You knew how you yourself had reacted, knowing that the Demons had held certain Human worlds for a few of your years. And you thought to yourself: 'But a hundred years. . . ?' "

Ynaathar had been getting ready to reprove Rikka and Sommers for the impropriety of their exchange. Now he felt no inclination whatsoever to do so. For he, too, understood.

He cursed himself for not understanding sooner.

He had no excuse. He'd reviewed Sommers' report, and talked to the Crucian representatives. So he'd known, as a matter of dry historical fact, the way the First Crucian-Arachnid War had ended, a century before. He'd even known-on the same bloodless level-that the closed warp point through which the Crucians had withdrawn had been located in the home system of the Star Union member-race known as the Telikans. He'd known all that. He'd just never felt it.

What is wrong with me? he wondered. Have the last nine years so surfeited us with horror that we have lost the capacity to notice it? That one who calls himself a warrior of the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee could not even think about the implications . . . or realize how any being sworn to the defense of his-or her-people would react to such news?

If so, that is not the least of the things the Bugs have robbed us of.

Garadden's hands twisted together. They were surprisingly humanlike-the most humanlike thing about her. To Humans, she resembled an animal known as a koala bear-sheer coincidence, for the koala was a mammal, while the Telikans laid eggs-but with arms that hung almost to ground level when she stood up to her full 1.7-meter height. Humans, Ynaathar had heard, regarded koalas as irresistibly cute. There may have been some, although he hadn't met any, who thought that about Telikans. But nobody thought it of Garadden.

"One of the children the retreating Crucian fleet evacuated from Telik was my direct maternal ancestor," she said without looking up, in a voice of acid-etched lead. "When those children were thought old enough for the truth, they were told what everyone in the Star Union believed to be the truth. That is the myth that has sustained us ever since: our families purging the planet's databases of all reference to the closed warp point, leaving us and the rest of the Star Union safe to someday avenge them, and then sitting down to wait for the Demons to arrive, bringing a death which, however obscene, was at least quick."

Garadden rose to her feet, gray fur bristling, and her voice grew louder and harsher. No, not cute at all, thought Ynaathar.

"Now we know the real truth. We know the agony went on for generation after generation. We know that Telik today is not a world of honored ghosts, but of meat animals that know. And that those meat animals are our cousins!"

Garadden looked like she was going to be sick. In any other circumstances, it would have astonished anyone who knew her. But Ynaathar didn't find it incongruous at all. He belatedly recalled-as I have been belatedly recalling a great many things, he reproached himself-that the Telikans were herbivores. Garadden had been speaking of things even more horrifying and revolting for her than they would be for an omnivorous Human, and far more so than for a carnivorous Orion.

Rikka also stood, a diminutive form beside his massive second in command, but radiating no less horror . . . or fury. He glared around the room, letting his eyes linger on every other officer present before he finally brought them to rest on Ynaathar.

"All members of the Star Union-not just Telikans-are as one on this point. We cannot countenance the idea of killing the Demons' victims along with the Demons. Nor can we allow ourselves to be associated with such an act!"

Ynaathar met the Crucian's eyes. Rikka had retained enough diplomatic poise to not state the obvious corollary of his own words: that the alliance had no future if Ynaathar did this thing. And Ynaathar, of course, could hardly utter it aloud either.

"Thank you for your forthright expression of the Star Union's position, Warmaster Rikka," he said instead. "For my own part, I regret the breakdowns of communication and failures of sensitivity that led us to this unfortunate misunderstanding. Now that I understand your viewpoint, and appreciate the horror that lies behind it, I fully accept your argument."

Rikka and Garadden resumed their seats amid a general relief that was as palpable as it was unvoiced, and Ynaathar turned a subtly pointed look on the Task Force 82 commander.

"Fang Shiiaarnaow, I presume you will wish to withdraw your proposal."

Shiiaarnaow hesitated, and for a horrible instant Ynaathar was afraid the crusty warrior was going to ruin everything. Traditionally, the honor code of the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee had held that, while it was the duty of the warrior caste to defend the Khanate's civilian populace, even some of those citizens were expendable if the harsh necessity of war required it to defend the Khanate as a whole. And Shiiaarnaow was just the being to indulge in some totally inappropriate huffiness along those lines at this of all moments. But when he finally spoke, it was with his very best attempt at diplomacy.

"Of course, First Fang. We all share our allies' fury and revulsion at what these chofaki have done. And, at any rate, the issue is hardly a vital one here in Harnah, where there is no major enemy fleet element to oppose us. But . . ."

Again, Shiiarnaow paused. Then he spoke unswervingly, and Ynaathar found himself reluctantly recalling the Human expression big brass ones.

"There will be other systems where populations like the Harnahese-and, yes, the Telikans-still exist in their millions among the Bahg billions. What if we encounter a massive concentration of defensive power in such a system? Are we to unconditionally deny ourselves the option of disorganizing and befuddling the Bahgs in such a situation? Will our Crucian allies insist that we abide by their principles at any cost, no matter how many avoidable casualties it entails?"

"I respect your viewpoint, Fang," Rikka replied heavily. "But you must respect the fact that for us this is more than a 'principle,' which is how my translator renders your term. It is a cultural and religious imperative!"

"But," TF 85's Vice Admiral Samantha Enwright protested in a deeply troubled voice, "we're talking about beings degraded almost below the level of sentience, Ambassador. They're the end products of generations of ruthless selection in favor of individuals willing to go on living and reproducing in the full knowledge of what awaited them and their children. Forgive me, Warmaster Garadden, but might death not be a mercy for them? A release?"

"I will not accept that death or continued animalism are their only alternatives," Garadden ground out. "They can be . . . rehabilitated. And no, I don't expect it to be easy. It will take a heartbreaking effort. But we must make that effort!"

The commander of Task Force 81 looked up, and his expression surprised Ynaathar. Admiral Francis Macomb was what one might call a human equivalent of Shiiarnaow, and Ynaathar would have expected him to give the Orion his full-throated support. But he looked uncharacteristically troubled.

"Warmasters, I understand what you're saying. From the bottom of my heart, I understand it! But how can we liberate a subjugated population on a world like this?" Macomb's usual persona returned with a bark of scornful laughter. "When Admiral Antonov first discovered Harnah, there was a lot of talk about some kind of gene-engineered bioweapon that would wipe out the Bugs without harming the native life forms. Typical! As far back as the twentieth century, we humans got into the habit of expecting a high-tech 'silver bullet' for every dilemma. But it came a cropper in the end."

There was much nodding of heads, and the various nonhuman equivalents thereof. In retrospect, the failure of the bioweapons research was no surprise. Galactic society was far less advanced in that area than a twentieth-century Terran would have expected. The reason was simple: fear. The kind of fear that had assumed the stature of a full-blown cultural taboo. Everyone knew that tailored microorganisms could mutate beyond their creators' control faster than you could say "Frankenstein." Humans knew it in their forebrains, from theoretical studies and computer models. Orions knew it in their guts . . . from what had actually happened to their original homeworld.

"So," Macomb continued, "if we want to selectively exterminate the Bugs on a planet like Harnah while sparing the natives, we're going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: put our Marines down into the mud. Now, the only time we've gone toe-to-toe against the Bugs on the ground was during Admiral Murakuma's counteroffensive in the Romulus Chain. I've talked to General Raphael Mondesi, who commanded the landing force-he's at Alpha Centauri now, in a staff billet. So I have some conception of what it's like."

Macomb hesitated, and sought for the words that would give these people a glimpse of the hell Mondesi had evoked for him. In the end, he knew, no one who hadn't seen it for himself could possibly grasp the full implications, but he went ahead and tried anyway.

"It's not like fighting a normal enemy, one whose spirit you can break by hurting him enough," he said. "It's more like fighting a force of nature-like a hurricane or a tidal wave, but one with a brain. One that can think and plan and adjust its responses in the face of resistance. One made up of millions of units that individually just don't care whether they live or die! And it's not just the warriors. They can use the workers to screen their warriors' assaults-to soak up our fire until they can get across any kill zone we could set up. And on a planet like Harnah, there are billions of them. Billions! Do you have any idea what that means? Any idea of the losses our Marines would take?"

There was a dead silence as everyone in the room tried to see through the eyes of those Marines-necessarily limited in numbers, for even the Grand Alliance's spacelift capacity was finite. It would be like staring up at a towering tsunami of malignant, insensate protoplasm.

"The position is, undeniably, a difficult one, First Fang," Rikka said into the silence at last. "We fully grasp the implications of what we're insisting on-the sacrifices we're asking of your personnel. And we are prepared to make you an offer as an earnest of our commitment."

"An . . . offer?"

"Yes First Fang. I make it in my capacity as ambassador. But Warmaster Garadden has asked to speak for me-as, I believe, is fitting."

Garadden stood up again.

"Our proposal is this," she said. "If the other members of the Grand Alliance will pledge to refrain from bombarding Demon-occupied planets with subjugated native populations on their surfaces, the Star Union will pledge in return to furnish a minimum of fifty percent of the ground-assault forces necessary to take any such planets."

At first, Ynaathar wondered if the translator software had rendered the Telikan's words correctly.

"Ah, Warmaster, did I understand you to say-?"

"You did, First Fang. I refer not to a ceiling, but a minimum of half the total landing force for the entire Alliance for every planet like Harnah."

Sommers stared up at Garadden. Clearly, this was news to her.

"But . . . but the Star Union Ground Wing is far smaller than either the Federation's Marine Corps or the Khanate's Atmospheric Combat Command-much less both of them!" she protested, her expression horrified. "And it consists overwhelmingly of racial Telikans, drawn from the small refugee population base. Garadden, were you listening to Admiral Macomb? Do you realize we're probably talking about millions of casualties?"

"Yes," Garadden replied simply. Her muzzle wrinkled in her race's smile. "You see, we take our convictions in this matter very seriously."

Silence fell yet again. A different sort of silence, this time.

"As far as the Grand Alliance as a whole is concerned," Ynaathar said at last, "this will of course have to be ratified by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But pending their decision-as to which I have little doubt-I undertake on my own initiative to abide by the agreement you have proposed. In other words, there will be no bombardment of Harnah by Eighth Fleet." He looked around the very subdued conference room, letting his gaze linger pointedly on Shiiarnaow. "Is there any further discussion?"

There was none.

"Good," said Ynaathar with finality, "for we must turn to other matters. In particular, I fear the unanticipated lack of opposition in this system may have disturbing implications. Indeed, it may invalidate some of the basic assumptions behind our entire joint operation with Seventh Fleet."

The Fleet waited.

There was very little else it could do, for the united strength of the New Enemies and the Old had effectively completed the destruction of all those thousands of warships which had been laboriously built up after the Old Enemies' long ago disappearance. Now the combined Enemies stood poised to smash the last link between the remaining Systems Which Must Be Defended, and the Fleet lacked the strength to drive those Enemies back. It could only await their attack and hope that the division between the Enemy forces and their points of contact would create a lapse of coordination which would permit the Fleet's surviving united strength to fall upon one of them and crush it in isolation.

It was in the fading hope of such an opportunity that the Fleet had chosen not to resist the Enemies' intrusion into the most recent system to fall. The decision had not been an easy one. With the loss of two Systems Which Must Be Defended and their supporting satellite systems, every productive population center had become critically important to the Fleet's continued operations, yet there had never really been any other possible choice, for that system could be dispensed with. That in which the Mobile Force which had once defended it now stood could not. Nor could the one in which the only other Mobile Force the Fleet retained now waited to face its allotted share of the Enemies' warships.

In a way the Fleet had never contemplated, those systems, too, had become Systems Which Must Be Defended. They simply could not be lost, for if they were, they would take with them any hope of coordinated action between the old Systems Which Must Be Defended. And at least they were directly linked, without any intervening warp junctions to separate them, which provided at least the possibility of rapidly reinforcing one Mobile Force with the other to achieve the sort of crushing superiority which had eluded the Fleet for so long. That superiority would give the Fleet victory, if it could be achieved. If it couldn't be, the only possible outcome was defeat, and if the Fleet lost here, then any hope of ultimate victory-or survival-would be equally lost.

Which would be most unfortunate, indeed.

"You know," Raymond Prescott remarked, gazing somberly into the glowing display before him, "this is more your sort of operation than mine, in a lot of ways."

"Indeed?" Zhaarnak walked over to stand beside him, letting his own eyes rest on the glittering icons and light-strings of warp lines stretching from Pesthouse to Centauri.

"Of course it is," Prescott said with a small, tight smile. "If there's one thing we humans pound into our midshipmen in their tactical courses, it's the KISS principle!"

"Aye, yes!" Zhaarnak purred a chuckle. " 'Keep It Simple, Stupid.' " His Orion accent mangled the Standard English indescribably. "What a delightfully Human concept! Although," he sobered considerably, "one which has certainly demonstrated its soundness under certain circumstances."

"That it has, brother," Prescott said in the Tongue of Tongues. "On the other hand, your own traditions have their place, as well, much as some admirals I know would like to deny it. Still, this sort of complicated coordination of operations is something the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee's instincts are far more comfortable with."

"Truth," Zhaarnak agreed. "Yet whether we are more 'comfortable' with it or not, there are times when there is no other road to victory. Just as your Fang Aaahnnderrssson taught us in the Wars of Shame that there are times when your own warriors' ways are the only road. Which," he added quietly, "does not make me one bit less . . . anxious than you, brother."

Prescott nodded soberly. He was well aware that Zhaarnak wouldn't have made that admission so freely to any other human, but there was only too much justification for any anxiety his vilkshatha brother might feel.

On the scale of the display, the glittering icons representing Seventh and Eighth Fleets were mere centimeters apart in the Anderson One System and Pesthouse, respectively. Only the crimson stars of Harnah, Anderson Three, and Anderson Four separated them. A mere three warp transits, and the two fleets-with over seven hundred and twenty starships, thousands of fighters, and hundreds of gunboats between them-would join forces and, in the process, secure total control of the Anderson Chain. Only three.

A civilian, looking at that display, would see instantly that only a tiny step remained, that only the tiniest gap lay between those forces. And, although the astrophysicists' best guess was that Harnah and Anderson Four lay something like a hundred and three light-years from one another in real-space terms, the civilian would have been correct, for light-years meant nothing to the starships which plied the crazy quilt of the warp lines.

Or not usually, at any rate.

But this time wasn't usual, for between Pesthouse and Anderson One lay not simply three star systems, but two massive Bug fleets, each dedicated to smashing any intruder foolish enough to come within its reach. And because those sullen Bug warships waited there, the light-years between Pesthouse and Anderson One meant a very great deal, indeed, for any message from Eighth Fleet must be relayed by the ICN from Anderson One, back to Centauri, through a score of additional star systems and starless nexi to L-169, and thence down the length of the Prescott Chain, through Home Hive One, to Pesthouse. Even with light-speed transmission relays across every one of the intervening star systems, that message would take literally weeks to reach its destination. The "shortcut" across Zephrain helped a little, but not enough to make any real difference, and that made the coordination of the step across that "tiny gap" physically impossible.

Unfortunately, Zhaarnak's observation that no other approach was possible was damnably acute. Those three star systems had to be taken, at whatever risk or cost, and so the strategists had no choice but to coordinate on the macro scale what could not be coordinated on the micro scale. Which was, of course, the reason for Zhaarnak's-and Prescott's-anxiety. According to the plan painstakingly worked out and communicated over the weeks between Centauri and Pesthouse, Seventh Fleet was to time its attack on Anderson Five to commence on March 11, 2369, Terran Standard Reckoning, exactly five days after Eighth Fleet began its assault on Harnah . . . and there was absolutely no way to confirm that First Fang Ynaathar's attack had actually begun on schedule.

Prescott drew a deep breath and chided himself-again-for his doubts. Of course there was no way to confirm it, yet there was no real need to, either. If one thing in the universe was certain, it was that Eighth Fleet had begun its attack on time. Ynaathar's proximity to Centauri assured him of completely secure support down a far shorter supply line than the long stretch of systems which lay behind Seventh Fleet. It was possible, even probable, that there'd been last-minute changes to his projected order of battle, additions and subtractions alike from the list of forces which he'd forwarded to Prescott, but the ships, personnel, and munitions for his attack had been assembled, and Ynaathar and every one of his flag officers was only too well aware of how critical it was to distract the Bugs. Given the enemy's interior position, the Alliance had no choice but to force him to split his attention between two separate threats at opposite ends of the section of the Anderson Chain he still controlled, and Eighth Fleet knew it.

Just as Prescott and Zhaarnak knew that their own attack on Anderson Four must begin on schedule to provide the counterbalancing diversion Ynaathar would require to reduce the odds against him. And at least Seventh Fleet was once again at full strength and ready for the challenge it faced.

The human allowed his eyes to move from the warp links to the endless lists of task forces, task groups, squadrons, strikegroups, and battle divisions which filled the data display, spelling out the sheer, ponderous might of the force he commanded. Sixty monitors, forty-six superdreadnoughts, twenty-five assault carriers, thirty-one fleet carriers, thirty-one battlecruisers, twenty-one light carriers, and twenty light cruisers, all supported by more than forty-four hundred fighters, and over seven hundred and fifty gunboats. The stupendous firepower under his control was, as he and Zhaarnak had demonstrated only too grimly-sufficient to sterilize entire planets, yet Eighth Fleet was even more powerful. It had only half as many monitors as Seventh Fleet, but four times the superdreadnoughts and battlecruisers as compensation, and its more numerous assault and fleet carriers, coupled with the proximity of Centauri, more than balanced the twenty-one CVLs of Vice Admiral al-Sahla's TG 72.4.

Surely that crushing mass of destruction had to be enough, properly handled, to smash even the soulless, uncaring ranks of death which were a Bug fleet!

Of course it was, he told himself flatly, and his eyes hardened as he remembered his brother and all the men and women-human and nonhuman alike-who had died under his command since the Battle of Alowan to reach this moment. He no longer quailed under the weight of his blood debt to those thousands upon thousands of warriors and the billions of civilians who'd died under the monstrous tsunami of the Bugs' ravenous omnivoracity. It was a burden he'd been given no choice but to learn to bear, just as Ivan Antonov had learned, but Raymond Prescott knew the great secret Antonov had tried so fiercely and with so much success to hide.

Whatever one might learn to bear, one could never learn to forget. That much he understood perfectly when he looked into Vanessa Murakuma's eyes and saw the shadows and darkness no one else seemed to recognize. And those memories and that debt, and the cold, savage hatred for Andrew's death, came to him now as he inhaled once more and then turned to look into the slit-pupiled, alien eyes of the being who had become not just his comrade in arms but the brother Andrew had never known . . . and who shared Raymond Prescott's determination to avenge his death.

"You should return to your ship, brother," he said quietly in the Tongue of Tongues, his expression calm, almost serene. "We will begin the attack in three standard hours."

"May our claws strike deep," Zhaarnak replied, equally quietly, and Prescott nodded and laid a hand briefly on the Orion's broad, powerful shoulder.

"May our claws strike deep," he agreed.

* * *

It had worked.

The decision against opposing the attack of the New Enemies who had been joined by the Old had exposed the approaches to no less than two Systems Which Must Be Defended to potential attack, but it had also disordered the Enemies' battle plan. It was obvious that the two Enemy fleets had intended to attack in close coordination, staggering their assaults just enough to draw the Fleet into committing against the first threat before the second revealed itself. But the Fleet's withdrawal had caught the Enemies off-balance, instead.

Half of the Mobile Force which had been withdrawn before the first Enemy thrust stood in place, prepared to delay any thrust on his part. But the other half sped to join the other Mobile Force as it fell back before the second Enemy attack. The joint forces of two Systems Which Must Be Defended raced to rendezvous and throw themselves upon the second Enemy force, the one which had already slain two other Systems Which Must Be Defended, and for the first time in far too long, the Fleet knew that victory lay within its reach. Three hundred and fifty warships, headed by sixty-three monitors and ninety-six superdreadnoughts, reached out to wrap their tentacle clusters about a mere hundred and eighty Enemy ships and crush the life from them, and the unsuspecting Enemy continued blindly towards them.

Raymond Prescott stared at the plot and tried not to be sick.

The master holo sphere was set to system scale, and Anderson Four's primary was a yellow dot at the center of a system Prescott remembered only too well. Just over five light-hours from it, at nine o'clock, was Warp Point Three, through which Seventh Fleet had entered the system from Pesthouse, blowing away the defenses with minimal loss and proceeding across the system toward Warp Point One, which led onward along the Anderson Chain. That was a long haul, for their destination was four and a half light-hours from the primary on an almost diametrically opposite heading of two o'clock. Warp Point Three, whose terminus was still unknown, lay on a bearing of eight o'clock, at 5.6 light-hours.

But Prescott had eyes for none of that, much less for the system's lifeless planets. Like everyone around him on Riva y Silva's flag bridge, he could only stare at the swarming red "hostile" icons that his wide-ranging recon fighters had revealed.

The Bug deep space force in this system, pulling back ahead of Seventh Fleet, was bad enough: thirty monitors, sixty-six superdreadnoughts, ninety-six battlecruisers, and seventy-eight light cruisers. But he and Zhaarnak, though expecting a stiff fight, had pressed on into the system, confident of their ability to take that force. Until the new Bug forces had appeared, bearing down from Warp Point One. A detailed force breakdown was impossible as yet, but at least thirty-five monitors, forty-five superdreadnoughts, and sixty-five battlecruisers had streamed in from Anderson Three, where they were supposed to be fully engaged in the defense of Harnah. Nor was that the end of Warp Point One's capacity to spew forth death, for an estimated five hundred oncoming gunboats had now been detected behind that daunting array of capital ships.

Finally, the quiescent icon of Warp Point Two behind them had erupted with the scarlet of still more gunboats. Their number was unknowable as yet, but there were tides of them, streaming in from what Prescott was now sure must be one of the three remaining home hive systems.

All those converging red icons seemed to swim before his eyes, and he stared into a nightmare from which there would be no awakening.

Well, now we know how it happened. This system and Anderson Three are the conduits from at least two of the home hives. And now we're here, just like Second Fleet was. . . .

Amos Chung cleared his throat softly.

"Sir, it appears that they're using the same tactical disposition they did in Pesthouse."

He indicated the icon of the deep space force that had now turned on them. Then he gestured at an auxiliary plot with its tactical display. Yes, Prescott reflected. It was the same globular juggernaut of battlecruisers, light cruisers, gunboats, and kamikaze small craft.

He stared at them for a handful of endless heartbeats, then inhaled sharply, almost spitefully. He faced his sense of paralysis and drove it back into its kennel as he pulled himself ruthlessly together. This was not Operation Pesthouse all over again. Battle-hardened though Second Fleet had been by the time it reached Pesthouse, its temper couldn't have begun to match that of the blade he wielded. Seventh Fleet stood behind him, its monitor battle-line immeasurably more powerful than Second Fleet's had been, forged and hammered beyond common conception in the crucible of history's bloodiest series of campaigns and calm in the knowledge that the Bugs could be beaten. And he and Zhaarnak had made the decision to bring along the light carriers, not generally regarded as viable battle fleet units but able to augment the combat space patrol of fighters.

They would need them now.

"Raise Lord Telmasa, and the task force commanders," he told the communications officer quietly. "Put them on screens in the flag briefing room." Then he gestured to his staffers to follow him and strode into the adjacent compartment with its array of com screens.

"Evidently," Zhaarnak began without preamble, "First Fang Ynaathar's attack on Harnah did not distract the attention of the enemy forces in Aaahnnderrssson Three after all."

"Evidently not," Prescott agreed. If either of them doubted that the attack had taken place, he did not voice those doubts. Instead, Prescott turned to all of the flag officers watching him from their individual screens. "Ladies and gentlemen, I think it's time for us to activate Case Doppelganger."

If there was anyone in Seventh Fleet who felt no trace of panic as word of the odds against them spread, then that "anyone" had to be a lunatic. But if anyone in Seventh Fleet was about to let panic paralyze him, there was no sign of it as the fleet's personnel responded to its commander's orders.

Case Doppelganger was the product of endless hours spent gaming out possible responses to the Bugs' globular kamikaze formations in the tactical simulators aboard Irena Riva y Silva and Hia'khan. As the name suggested, it was in many respects an adaptation of the Bugs's own concept-in this case, a tight globe of mutually defending capital ships, packed as closely as their own drive fields and the need to allow for evasive maneuvers would permit.

There was plenty of time to assume the formation as the enemy attack forces swept towards Seventh Fleet across light-hours of vacuum, and Captain Stephen Landrum and the farshathkhanaaks of each separate task force briefed their pilots carefully. Those fighters would sweep outward from the fleet's globe, engaging and weakening the kamikazes and gunboats while the globe ran before them.

It was all about defense in depth to bleed the Bugs as they closed and then meet them with the most murderous close-in defensive fire into history of space combat.

Now all that remained was to see if it worked.

Clearly the Enemy had been as completely surprised as the Fleet could have hoped. If he hadn't been, he would never have continued onward with a force so much weaker than that waiting to destroy him.

Yet as the Fleet's strike elements swept towards him, it became evident that he had adapted his own doctrine once again. The Fleet had never before seen the spherical formation he'd adopted, yet it quickly recognized the similarity between it and the Fleet's own new attack formation. From its own experience, the fleet was fully aware of the defensive effectiveness of such an arrangement, and the Enemy's decision to turn away from his pursuers would make it even more effective. The strikes were faster than his battle-line, but the need to include cruisers and battlecruisers in their defensive shells limited their speed advantage to barely fifty percent. That meant they could overtake the Enemy only slowly, and while they did so, his small attack craft would hammer at the formations's defenses.

That was regrettable. Yet the small attack craft could venture into their own attack range only at the expense of casualties, and as they were ground away, so would be the Enemy's ability to wear down and fend off the next attack formation.

Stephen Landrum watched his strikegroups go in again and again and again. They were good, those pilots, possibly the most experienced and best trained in the history of interstellar combat, with the sort of kill ratios that fighter pilots throughout history could only have dreamed of.

But good as they were, there were only so many of them, and the Bugs had devised a formation which denied them at least half their usual advantages in combat. If the strikefighters wanted to attack the gunboats and the kamikazes who represented the true threat to their starships, they must first run the gauntlet of the massed anti-fighter missile batteries of the Bugs' starships.

And they did.

They did it over and over again. The glare of nuclear and antimatter warheads, the invisible death of x-ray lasers, the sudden mid-word interruption of deep-space death . . . By now, they were only too familiar to Landrum and every other fighter commander in Seventh Fleet. And if they were familiar to the COs, how much more common were they to the fighter jocks who lived and died through them? Yet not one strikegroup balked, not a single squadron hesitated.

The first of the Bug attack globes was clearly visible in the visual display now. Not the ships themselves. No one could have picked them out even yet. But Seventh Fleet's personnel didn't need to see the ships.

They could see the explosions that marked the deaths of humans, Orions, and Ophiuchi, as well as Bugs. The explosions that wrapped themselves around the outer perimeter of the globe and turned it into a solid sphere of brimstone come straight from Hell as it rumbled dreadfully onward in Seventh Fleet's wake.

After a while, Raymond Prescott had found, one passed beyond fatigue into a state of heightened awareness.

It was something he'd experienced before, of course. He was, after all, one of the two most experienced combat commanders in human history. It had shaken his perception of the universe when he realized that he and Vanessa Murakuma now had actually seen more-and more intense-combat even than Ivan Antonov. Of course, fighting Bugs either gave one experience quickly or killed one . . . when it didn't do both of those things at once.

Yet for all the dreadful history of combat and slaughter which lay behind him, he'd never experienced anything to surpass this.

He'd lost track of how long it had been since he'd left the flag bridge. He ate meals brought to him there, and disposed of their end products in facilities a few steps away. But sleep was something dimly remembered, a fading memory of some prior life, recalled only when it appeared in the form of an irresistible temptation he nonetheless had to resist.

But why resist it? an inner voice he didn't want to hear asked. What's the difference? Death is death, regardless of whether or not you're awake when it comes. And it's coming.

He shook himself as if to physically throw off the incubus of despair.

The fighters had done their magnificent best, but some of the gunboats and shuttles had broken through. A screen of battlecruisers and light cruisers had interposed themselves-and the bodies of their crews-between them and Seventh Fleet's main body. Almost seventy of those ships had died. But the Bugs had come on with something beyond their normal indifference to losses-something that Prescott, had he been talking about any other race, might have called desperation. At least two hundred gunboats and a hundred kamikaze assault shuttles had broken through and plunged into the battle-line's final defensive envelope with fighters still on their tails.

There were no reliable figures on how many of them had completed their attack runs-nor did Prescott need them. The figures that mattered were those of the ships they had taken with them into death: eight monitors, twelve superdreadnoughts, and eleven light carriers. And, of course, the people. Prescott was still coming to terms with the fact that he would never hear Force Leader Shaaldaar's rock-steady basso again. Vice Admiral Janos Kolchak had died with his flagship, as well. Twelfth Small Fang Yithaar'tolmaa's Howmarsi'hirtalkin had survived, but the small fang's own remains were somewhere in the twisted mass of wreckage that comprised most of his flagship.

And yet, Prescott kept forcing himself to remember, the battle-line had mostly survived. The Bug deep space force originally assigned to this system had evidently underestimated the extent of that survival, for it had pressed on without waiting for support from the massive Bug formations coming in from Anderson Three. That miscalculation had almost certainly saved Seventh Fleet-for now, at least. That and its own battle-forged toughness. It had met the incoming Bug starships with a hurricane of missiles, wrapping them in a shroud of purifying antimatter flame that swept them from the continuum. But the Allied battle-line had paid with fourteen more of its own monitors to do it, and the number of other ships destroyed or damaged was in the usual proportion.

And now the monstrous array of fresh capital ships from Anderson Three was closing inexorably in, its BCRs racing ahead of the slower monitors and superdreadnoughts in their haste to begin finishing off the crippled prey. And Zhaarnak was comming him.

He turned to the com screen, and the vilkshatha brothers looked at each other. Each of them saw the memory of Alowan and Telmasa in the other's eyes and knew how precious the shared years which had passed since that unexpected reprieve had been to both of them. Yet there seemed little to say. There was no need for them to put what they felt into words . . . and there was certainly no point in saying that the next fight would be Seventh Fleet's last, for they both knew it.

So instead, Zhaarnak turned to practicalities with a briskness that anyone familiar with his race would have recognized as a mask for despair.

"We must reorganize our battle-line, Raaymmonnd."

"Yes." Prescott looked again at the loss totals, then looked away. "Our task force organization has pretty much vanished. We'll abandon our worst damaged ships and scuttle them, so they won't slow up our withdrawal. I've already got Anna and Jacques at work forming new battlegroups around whatever command ships are still alive."

"Can we manage such a fundamental restructuring in the midst of battle?"

"We can." Prescott's tone held no doubt, only certainty. Only a force as superbly trained and battle-tried as Seventh Fleet could even have considered plugging units from different Alliance members into the same datagroups on the fly. Prescott knew that, and the pride was like ashes in his mouth.

"I want those BCRs to encounter the kind of coordinated missile fire they're not expecting," he said. "Maybe it'll give them pause."

"We will also need to reorganize our strikegroups to cover the withdrawal."

"Truth. Raathaarn and Stephen are working on it, but it's going to involve even more organizational improvisation. We'll base all of the surviving fighters on Terran carriers because they're the best equipped to meet multispecies life-support requirements."

And because the surviving Terran carriers alone have ample hangar space for every one of the fighters we still have left, he left unsaid.

"Very well. I will have Small Fang Jarnaaa coordinate with Claw Laaandrummm."

There was little left to say. Zhaarnak said it anyway.

"It has been a good hunt, brother."

Prescott gazed into the screen at the brother he would almost certainly never see in the flesh again. This electronic image would have to do, and in a way he knew Zhaarnak would have understood, it was Andrew to whom he spoke, as well.

"Truth, brother. A good hunt. Our claws struck deep indeed."

 TFN safety regulations imposed strict limits on the number of sorties a given fighter pilot could fly in a given time. In Seventh Fleet's present pass, those regulations-like so much else-had long since gone by the boards.

Several times, Irma Sanchez had almost yielded to the enormous army of exhaustion, sleeplessness, stress, and grief for her gallant, too-young pilots. Meswami had been the latest to go-she'd let herself feel it later. Pink-cheeked Rolf Nordlund was now, by default, the XO of a "squadron" reconstituted out of ingredients from three species. And Irma was still skipper, senior to Cub of the Khan Mnyeearnaow'mirnak, Lieutenant (j.g.) Eilonwwa and the two human pilots who'd been foisted on her.

That, she reflected, was probably what had kept her from simply letting go: the problem of running this motley crew that still went by the call-sign "Victor Foxtrot Niner-Four." That, and the small blue-eyed face that occasionally floated up to the surface of her mind amid all the fatigue and horror-for what kind of universe would Lydochka inhabit after all this was over?

A snarl of Orion brought her back to the present. She'd never learned the Tongue of Tongues. Eilonwwa understood it, however, and could speak Standard English with his own race's extended consonants. Irma wondered what she'd do if the Ophiuchi bought it.

This time, though, she didn't need Eilonwwa's services as a translator, for she had a pretty good idea what Mnyeearnaow was talking about.

"I see them, Lieutenant," she cut in as Eilonwwa began to interpret. It was yet another formation of kamikaze shuttles, stooping like raptors on Seventh Fleet's dwindling battle-line. She rapped out a series of commands. At least Mnyeearnaow could understand Standard English, and he kept formation as well as anyone in this ad hoc squadron as they altered course and went to the attack.

Their external ordnance was long gone, and hadn't been all that copious to start with, given their need to carry extended life-support packs for this endless patrolling. But their F-4s' internal hetlasers jabbed and thrust, turning antimatter-laden assault shuttles into expanding miniature suns. But the kamikazes went into evasive action, and fresh formations of gunboats appeared to complicate the tactical picture.

A scream of static and a brief fireball, and Irma winced. Johnson, she thought. Or was her name Jackson? God, I can't even remember, I've known them so few hours.

But then the last kamikaze was free of them, and only Mnyeearnaow was in a position to intercept it. The Orion swooped in . . and didn't fire.

Irma heard the snarling, mewling voice in her headset and cursed her inability to understand. "Eilonwwa-?"

"He sayss hiss firrring mechanisssm hass mallllfunctionned, Ssir," the Ophiuchi fluted.

"Mnyeearnnaow," Irma snapped, "pull up! That's a direct order."

But the Orion's fighter continued to close with the shuttle that now had nothing between it and the battle-line.

"Goddamn it, don't pretend you can't understand me!" Something caught Irma's eye. The computer had deduced the kamikaze's target: TFNS Irena Riva y Silva.

Fleet Flag she thought automatically. Maybe Mnyeearnaow's seen it too.

"Mnyeearnaow," she yelled, "talk to me!"

The Orion voice finally sounded in her headset-but only in a howling, quavering war cry that sent primal ice sliding along her spine. And then fighter and shuttle met at a combined velocity that was an appreciable fraction of light's. Irma's outside view automatically darkened; the flash wasn't why she had to squeeze her eyes tightly shut and blink them rapidly a few times.

Then they were past the gunboats and into the clear. Irma let herself take a deep breath among the clean stars for a moment while receiving the survivors' acknowledgments, then braced herself for the gunboats to resume the engagement.

Only . . . they didn't.

Bewildered, Irma wondered if she'd heard something. But no, the sudden break in the battle-pattern had triggered a sense deeper than hearing. Yet to her or any veteran it was practically audible.

Nordlund must have "heard" it, too.

"Uh, Skipper-?"

"Yeah, Rolf . . . er, XO. Resume our patrol pattern. I don't know where they've gone, but I'm not arguing."

"No, Ahhdmiraaaal Maaaacomb," First Fang Ynaathar said flatly, "we will not probe the warp point first."

"But, First Fang-" TF 81's commander began, and Ynaathar forced himself not to snarl. It wasn't easy, and only the fact that he'd fought shoulder to shoulder with Macomb and knew the Human was no chofak but as true a farshatok as the First Fang had ever known made it possible.

"There can be no other decision," Ynaathar cut off the TFN commander of Eighth Fleet's battle-line. "You know as well as I that Fang Presssssscottt and Fang Zhaarnaak commenced their attack precisely on schedule. And if the Bahgs have chosen not to defend Harnah, then it can only have been to employ their warships-and their gunboats and kamikazes-somewhere else. We cannot allow them to combine against Seventh Fleet and crush it in isolation!"

"Sir, I agree completely with your analysis of the Bugs' actions and probable intentions," Francis Macomb said respectfully. "It's the logical thing for them to have done, if they're willing to simply write Harnah off. But they've certainly proven in the past that they can do the unexpected. If they have more strength than our analysts believe they do, they may have elected to repeat their Pesthouse strategy and draw us forward so they can cut us off from retreat, not Seventh Fleet. Or they may have already defeated Seventh Fleet and be prepared to turn their combined strength in our direction if we continue to advance. I fully accept that we have no choice but to advance anyway. I'm only pointing out that we've carried out no detailed reconnaissance of this warp point and that we have no existing operational plan for an advance beyond Harnah into Anderson Three. Sir, we're not prepared for this operation. If we push ahead too hard and too fast, we may put ourselves into precisely the same situation we're afraid Seventh Fleet's already in."

Ynaathar gazed at the Human face on his com screen and heard the echo of Operation Pesthouse in Macomb's voice. It was understandable, the First Fang thought, for the ambush of Second Fleet was the sort of traumatic shock from which few warriors ever fully recovered. The loss of so many ships-and of Ivan Antonov and Hannah Avram-had cost his Terran allies something else, as well. It had cost them much of that calm assumption of ultimate victory which had so infuriated so many of the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee before the present war, much of that mantle of invincibility they'd won largely at the expense of the KON.

Under some circumstances, Ynaathar admitted to himself, he might have taken a certain grim satisfaction in the humbling of that pride, for it had been the Humans who had humbled the pride of the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee in the Wars of Shame. But that had been before the Bugs burst upon Human and Orion alike. Before they had fought and died as farshatok before the faceless, implacable menace which had come out of the Long Night to murder both their species. And before Ynaathar'solmaak had realized what a priceless asset that Human confidence and almost innocent arrogance truly was.

And because all of that was true, the First Fang chose his words with care.

"There will be no more debate, Fraaaaancisssss," he said, and if his voice was calm, it was also unflinching. "Seventh Fleet depends upon us-Fang Presssssscottt depends upon us-and we will not fail them. This is not Operation Pesssthouse, my friend . . . nor will we allow it to become such. Your reservations are noted and acknowledged. They have much merit, but that merit must be set against our responsibilities to Seventh Fleet. The decision to advance immediately into Aaahnnderrssson Three without further reconnaissance is mine, and I assume full responsibility for it."

He held Macomb's eye for perhaps two breaths, and then the Terran officer nodded.

"Yes, Sir," he said crisply.

"Thank you," Ynaathar replied quietly, then straightened. "Prepare the SBMHAWKs and stand by for transit."

* * *

Disaster.

It had never happened before. It could never happen. Yet it had, and the Fleet-

No. Not the Fleet, for the impossible action had destroyed forever that which had been "the Fleet." That which had always fought as one being, with one awareness and only one purpose, had broken at last under the strain which could no longer be endured, and from one, it had become two. Or perhaps even more than that.

The ships which had first flung themselves upon the second Enemy attack watched in something for which those who crewed them had no word. Another type of being might have called it shock, or disbelief-possibly even betrayal. But these beings had no terms for those concepts, and so they had no way to describe it or categorize it, or even to understand it clearly. Yet even in their confusion, they recognized the shattering of the Unity which had always been theirs and which had bound them eternally to the same inexorable Purpose.

In that moment, however dimly, the beings aboard those starships and at the controls of those gunboats and suicide shuttles which still survived recognized in the sudden appearance of the combined forces of the Old Enemies and the New the same moment of final desperation they had brought to every other species-save one-they had ever encountered. For in that moment, the Mobile Force which had been sent forth by the System Which Must Be Defended in which the New Enemies had first been encountered, broke off without instructions from the Fleet. Indeed, broke off against the orders and the plan which had sent it here in the first place. It responded not to the threat to the Unity and the Purpose, but to the threat to its own System Which Must Be Defended, and so it abandoned the attack. Deserted the Unity to fall back in desperate defense of its own single fragment of that Unity . . .  and so abandoned the Purpose that Unity served.

It could not happen.

Yet it had.

"No, First Fang." Raymond Prescott's exhaustion detracted not at all from his obvious resolution, and he spoke in the Tongue of Tongues with careful emphasis. "I cannot entertain such a proposal."

Ynaathar stared across the table of his private office.

The orange light of the Anderson Three binary shone through the viewport, and Prescott knew precisely what the First Fang was thinking. Not that understanding could undermine the adamantine power of his determination.

He and Zhaarnak had brought what was left of Seventh Fleet here to Anderson Three after the Bugs' inexplicable withdrawal from Anderson Four. By then, Eighth Fleet had finished off the system defenses, and the Bug mobile forces had vanished into cloak, presumably to slip out through this system's unexplored Warp Point One. Both vilkshatha brothers had been properly grateful for their deliverance. But now . . .

"Fang Presssssscottt, look at the loss figures!" Ynaathar protested with an edge of respect which might have seemed odd to a human, coming from a superior officer to one of his juniors. "Seventh Fleet comprises barely more than an oversized task force now. The only reasonable course is to dissolve it and merge its units into Eighth Fleet."

"Seventh Fleet is more than just an organization chart, Sir," Prescott replied, still in the Tongue of Tongues. "It is more than just a total of ships and personnel. It has come to . . . to mean something that transcends all that. I admit that we are in no shape to fight again, at present. We should return to Alpha Centauri for refitting and reinforcement. But I will resist any move to dissolve Seventh Fleet, by all the means in my power. That includes going to Alpha Centauri and personally appealing to the Joint Chiefs. It also includes, as a last resort, resigning my commission if my arguments are unavailing."

Zhaarnak leaned forward.

"And I, First Fang, will go further. I will go all the way to New Valkha and put the case before the Khan himself. I will make it a matter of the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee's honor . . . and of his."

"Do you understand what you are saying?" Ynaathar breathed. And does your vilkshatha brother realize what it would mean? That if you test the Khan'a'khanaaeee's own honor in this matter and he decides against you only your death will maintain your honor?

But then the First Fang looked at Raymond'prescott-telmasa's hard, set Human expression and knew that this Human understood perfectly.

"Yes, First Fang," Zhaarnak replied to the question flatly, "for it is a matter of honor. Seventh Fleet has become my farshatok. Breaking it up would be a greater wrongness than I would care to live with."

Ynaathar regarded the two fathers in honor of Clan Telmasa, sitting there in their haggardness-and in their mantle of legend-and recognized defeat.

"Very well, I agree," he capitulated. "I will so advise the Joint Chiefs, and I believe they will concur."

"No, Commander."

Commander Jeanne Nicot looked up sharply.

"What did you say, Lieutenant Commander Sanchez?"

Irma remained steady under the new CSG's glare. Commander Georghiu's atoms were scattered through the spaces of Anderson Four, and Irma was still trying to understand her own feeling of loss. In retrospect, there was something almost endearing about his stuffiness, which had lacked Nicot's hard edge.

"Sir, you know our record, so you know how much the Ninety-Fourth has been through. Hell, we've been down to less than this-down to me and Lieutenant Meswami, in fact." She swallowed the lump of memory and pressed on. "Now there are four of us: me, Lieutenant (j.g.) Nordlund, Lieutenant (j.g.) Eilonwwa, and Ensign Chen . . . I mean Chin."

"Three," Nicot corrected. "You can't count Mister Eilonwwa. These mixed squadrons were strictly a desperation expedient. Come to think of it, you only got Mister Chin as part of the same emergency consolidation. So it's really down to you and Mister Nordlund-who, as you know, has even less business being an executive officer than . . . Well, the point is, do you really think you can put VF-94 back together with some green replacements?"

Irma met Nicot's eyes unwaveringly.

"I've done it before, Sir."

"Hmmm . . . So you have." Nicot flipped through some sheets of hardcopy. "There's quite a bit about you in the records I inherited from Commander Georghiu. He thought highly of you," she said, and Irma's facade collapsed into a pile of astonishment.

"He did . . . Sir?"

"Yes, in his own way-although I don't think he ever knew quite what to make of you. At one point, he refers to you as a 'character.' " Nicot shook her head dismissively. "Well, if you think VF-94 is still viable . . ."

Irma decided to press her luck.

"It would help, Sir, if we could keep Chin. And . . . it would help even more if we could keep Eilonwwa."

"We've been through that," Nicot snapped irritably. "Come on, you know it's out of the question! The different dietary requirements, the variant life-support specifications-"

"Our fleet and assault carriers have had Ophiuchi squadrons along with Terran ones ever since the Zephrain offensive, Sir. They have a lot of experience handling whatever logistical complications that causes. Maybe VF-94 could be transferred to one of those carriers." And get us off this goddamned monitor at last, Irma forced herself not to add. Belatedly, it occurred to her that Nicot might take the idea as a personal affront, but the CSG gave no sign of it if she had.

"So now we're supposed to accommodate Seventh Fleet's entire strikegroup organization to VF-94's convenience? You do think a lot of yourself, don't you Sanchez?"

 "I think a lot of the squadron, Sir. So should anyone who knows its record."

"Commander Georghiu's estimate of you wasn't exaggerated, Sanchez," said Nicot coolly. Then, unexpectedly, she smiled. "All right, I'll make the suggestion to Captain Landrum. Maybe something can be arranged."

"And about Mister Eilonwwa, Sir . . . ?"

"Yes, yes, that too-although I'll be amazed if you get your way on that." Another small smile. "On the other hand, if this idea does go through, I won't be getting a chance to know you better. I'm almost sorry about that. Almost."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: "Some cripple!"

Restless, Vanessa Murakuma got up, threw on a sheer robe and walked to the open window. The morning light of Zephrain A streamed in, and a breeze off the Alph River caused the robe to flutter, caressing her slender body.

"Do you have any concept of how erotic you look?" Marcus LeBlanc inquired from the bed, and Murakuma gave a fairly delicate snort.

"Not bad for an old broad, I suppose."

"Spare me the false modesty." That, in fact, was precisely what it was. Murakuma couldn't take credit for the generations in low gravity that had produced a body form not unlike the elves of myth, nor could she take credit for the development of the antigerone therapies which kept her looking physically so much younger than her calendar age. But she wasn't unaware of her good fortune, and she did take the trouble to keep herself in condition.

Besides which, of course, now she knew Fujiko was alive after all-still inaccessible, somewhere in the far reaches of the Star Union of Crucis, but alive. LeBlanc, after the years of separation, could see the rejuvenation more clearly than she could herself.

She returned to the bed and settled in beside him.

"It's almost time," she murmured.

"Yeah, I know. You've got to go. One or the other of us always has to go. Are we ever going to get more than a few days at a stretch together?"

"We're lucky you're here at all."

"True," LeBlanc allowed, not particularly mollified. "But damn it, I should be going with you to join Sixth Fleet at Orpheus 1, not staying here at Zephrain!"

"That's not exactly our decision," she reminded him gently.

The Joint Chiefs had finally come to the realization that Prescott, Zhaarnak, and Murakuma, in their remote detached commands, were too far from Alpha Centauri for any kind of realistic turnaround on intelligence questions. The occasional Kevin Sanders junket was no substitute for ready access to the best possible intelligence information and analysis. And the organization LeBlanc had trained was by now quite capable of functioning without him. So the decision had been made to station him in Zephrain, to serve as a local resource of Bug expertise for Sixth and Seventh Fleets.

Now, of course, with the entire Anderson Chain in Alliance hands, that rationale had lost much of its validity as far as Seventh Fleet was concerned. So LeBlanc had argued-not entirely without ulterior motives-that it would make better sense to attach him to the staff of the one commander still operating in isolation from Alpha Centauri. He'd then proceeded to learn an immemorial truth: military orders are so hard to change that they often outlive the circumstances that caused them to be issued.

"Kthaara said something about not wanting to risk me with Sixth Fleet," LeBlanc groused. "Gave me direct orders to stay at Zephrain, in fact. Come to think of it . . ." He trailed off, then sat up straight as suspicion reared its ugly head. "Say! You don't suppose he's so bitter about . . . Well, I know they say misery loves company, but surely he wouldn't . . . Would he?"

"Kthaara? No!" Murakuma smothered a laugh.

"Anyway, I suppose it's just as well. They could just as easily have canceled the whole thing and kept me at Alpha Centauri. It probably helped that they wanted to send somebody anyway, to deliver your new orders."

"Yes." Murakuma sat up straight, and the room's atmosphere underwent a sudden change.

"You still have reservations about the plan, don't you?"

"Damned right I do! Everything about it oozes overconfidence-even that stupid code name GFGHQ's assigned to it. 'Operation Cripple' indeed!"

LeBlanc smiled at her vehemence. The "cripple" the code name referred to was the home hive system Sixth Fleet's RD2s had detected beyond Orpheus, which Murakuma had been ordered to attack.

"Well, your drones have established that there's a lot of industrial capacity in that system-"

"You might say that!" Probing through Orpheus 1's Warp Point Two, the RD2s had reported a binary system of two bright F-class stars. The secondary star, currently two hundred and fifty light-minutes out, was too remote for examination. But the primary had no less than three inhabited planets, each of them pulsating balefully with the intense energy signature of a heavily industrialized Bug world.

"And yet with all that capacity," LeBlanc pressed on, "they've made no attempt to dislodge Sixth Fleet from their doorstep at Orpheus 1. Headquarters thinks that means they can't, that they lack the mobile firepower."

"Of course they do!" Murakuma said with withering sarcasm. "It all just evaporated in the solar wind."

"Not quite," LeBlanc replied, suppressing an urge to smile while he wondered if there was anyone else she would have felt comfortable enough to vent with this way. "In fact, the theory is that between you, Seventh Fleet, and Fang Ynaathar, the mobile forces assigned to that system must have taken quite a beating."

"That's Headquarters thinking if ever I heard it. Have they even considered the fascinating little possibility that for all we know that system may have warp connections to both of the other two remaining home hives?"

"Maybe it does," LeBlanc said, still in devil's advocate mode. "But, by the same token, that could mean a lot of strength has been bled off from it to help those other home hives try to hold the Anderson Chain. You have to admit, your RD2s have detected very little in the way of heavy mobile forces."

"Which proves exactly nothing. The Bugs have been patrolling that warp point so heavily the drones haven't been able to penetrate any distance beyond it. Just because we haven't detected an ambush-"

"Relax!" LeBlanc sat up beside her. Their knees didn't quite touch. "I'm just pulling your chain. The fact is, I happen to agree with you. GFGHQ is suffering from a bad case of 'victory disease.' You'd think the losses in Operation Ivan would have cured it, but . . ." He trailed off into a brooding silence before resuming. "You're not going to protest it, though, are you?"

"No. I'll follow their orders. But that doesn't mean I have to share their cockiness. I've got a few precautions in mind."

"Yes, I know you do." LeBlanc brooded a moment longer. "I ought to be going with you," he repeated mulishly.

"No," Murakuma smiled, but her voice was very serious, "you shouldn't. You probably don't remember what we said to each other once-"

"-on a terrace on Nova Terra, looking out to sea, almost five years ago," LeBlanc interrupted, and she turned her head to stare at him.

"So you do remember! Then you must understand."

"No," he said flatly. "I didn't understand then, and I still don't. It's not your responsibility to keep those you care about alive, Vanessa."

"You're right: you don't understand. Can't you see? It's not a matter of some sort of moral responsibility, Marcus. It's fear." She turned her head and met his eyes unflinchingly as she finally admitted the truth and put it into words for them both. "It's bad enough having to function in the face of death, even though I've had to learn to do it. But if your life were on the line at the same time . . ."

And he did, indeed, see. He just didn't want to admit it, and so, without any words-he could think of none, anyway-he took her in his arms.

With the always fragile line of communication long since cut, it was impossible to know whether the other two remaining Systems Which Must Be Defended were still in contact with one another. Nor did it make any practical difference at the moment. This system was uncompromisingly thrown back on its own resources and those of the systems which serviced it.

Fortunately, those resources were far from inconsiderable. This, after all, was the most densely populated and heavily industrialized of all the Systems Which Must Be Defended. The enemy had no way of knowing the full extent of that population and industrialization, for none of his probes had gotten close enough to the secondary stellar component to detect the two fully developed planets that orbited it, for a total of five Worlds Which Must Be Defended. They could produce gunboats and small craft in virtually any desired quantity, to support the twenty-five monitors, seventy-two superdreadnoughts, seventy-two battlecruisers, and ninety light cruisers that stood behind the massive warp point defenses.

Arguably, however, the most valuable resource of all was the Enemy's strategic ignorance. He had no inkling that more of his own kind lay three systems away in the opposite direction, where they had faced the Fleet, stalemated, for so long. A coordinated two-front offensive would have been very difficult to deal with.

And this time, that strategic ignorance would be matched by tactical ignorance.

The Fleet had gone to great lengths to counter the Enemy's intensely inconvenient robot probes. It had smothered the space around the warp point with continuously patroling gunboats and armed small craft. Furthermore, it had pulled those capital ships not on full alert status well back from that warp point, and powered their drives down to standby level, rendering their emissions effectively undetectable.

And, of course, the Enemy couldn't possibly imagine the number of gunboats and small craft that crouched on the planetary surfaces. Or the new innovation with which those gunboats had been supplied.

Vanessa Murakuma permitted herself a grim smile when the sensor reports of awakening Bug starship drives began to light up TFNS Li Chien-lu's flag bridge threat board. She visualized Marcus, back on Zephrain, smiling the same way at the confirmation of their suspicions. . . . But no, he'd be too eaten away by worry to smile about anything.

At least he'd be pleased that their shared skepticism had led her to proceed cautiously into the system-now identified as Home Hive Two from analysis of the orbital fortresses through whose wreckage they were currently advancing.

There'd been forty-eight of those immense constructs, to say nothing of ninety-six defensive heavy cruisers and thirty suicide-rider light cruisers, all surrounded by a veritable haze of mines-eight thousand patterns of them-spangled with thirty-three hundred deep-space buoys. Murakuma had had no intention of rushing in against such defenses. She'd emplaced over half her total inventory of mines around the Orpheus 1 side of the warp point in thin shells which would have been largely useless against capital ships. But by accepting a lower density, she'd been able to emplace them in much greater depth, which would provide an attritional shield to absorb and blunt any gunboat counterattack. Then she'd committed her SBMHAWKs in careful waves, provoking the Bugs into activating shell after shell of ECM-equipped buoys and then sweeping them away with further waves of HAWK2-equipped missiles. Now, with her battle-line making transit against the crippled fortresses and the remnants of the cruisers, she still held a substantial emergency supply of SBMHAWKs in reserve.

It might be a good thing she did, she reflected, for the sensor readings continued to pour in, and the figures mounted and mounted. It wasn't so much the total numbers and tonnage opposing her-daunting though those were-as it was the Bugs' closeness to the warp point. And they were getting even closer, closing in for a point-blank duel.

"They were lying with their drives stepped down to almost nothing," Leroy McKenna stated, echoing her own thoughts.

"It would appear," Murakuma remarked, "that we've been had."

"I wasn't going to put it that way, Sir-" the chief of staff began.

"Nor should you," Murakuma cut in briskly. "Because it's inaccurate. I've been had. But at least most of our capital ships have already completed transit and our CSP is out." She glanced at Anson Olivera for confirmation of the last, and the farshathkhanaak nodded emphatically. "Good. If they want a toe-to-toe slugging match, I'm not averse to it."

She spoke loudly enough to be sure everyone nearby heard her, but it wasn't just bravado. She knew the quality of her personnel.

"And now, Captain Delbridge" she resumed, speaking into the intercom to her flag captain, "please sound General Quarters. This won't be long in coming."

The initial portion of the plan had worked.

Unfortunately, there were no perfect solutions to the problems the Fleet faced. Unlike starships, gunboats and small craft could not cloak, and the Fleet had begun to appreciate at least some of the advantages the Enemy's warp-capable missile pods bestowed upon him. Those advantages had become more pronounced as the Fleet's supporting resource base was carved away and the Enemy's industrial advantage became more and more overwhelming. In the final analysis, no combat space patrol of gunboats was survivable in the face of the unending hurricane of missile pods the Enemy could pour through a warp point, especially since the introduction of the missiles which point defense couldn't intercept.

The only way gunboats or small craft could be hidden from the Enemy's sensors-and so from destruction-was to hold them entirely beyond sensor range of the warp point or to retain them on the external gunboat racks and in the internal boat bays of starships which could cloak. Unfortunately, if they were held beyond sensor range, then they were also beyond any range at which they could immediately intervene against an Enemy incursion. But if they were held on the racks and in the bays of their motherships, only the number which the mobile units had the capacity to support would be available.

Faced with this dilemma, the Fleet had decided that some gunboats and kamikazes would be superior to none. And so, as the Enemy advanced inward from the warp point and the starships of the Deep Space Force brought their drives on-line and revealed themselves, a mass wave of small craft erupted from them.

No one in Sixth Fleet was surprised by the sudden appearance of the gunboats and kamikaze assault shuttles. Indeed, if there were any grounds for surprise, it was that the Bugs hadn't made a greater effort to coordinate the swarms of gunboats which must be just beyond sensor range with the commitment of their starships.

But I suppose it's not really that surprising after all, Murakuma thought as she watched the icons of the Bug small craft dashing towards her battle-line. After all, how much coordinating could they do? Their capital units are still slower than ours, so the only way their battle-line could reasonably hope to intercept ours is to catch us within relatively close proximity to the warp point, before we have time to disappear into cloak and use our speed to dance rings around them. But if they'd kept their gunboats close enough to the warp point to intervene, then they'd have been in our sensor envelope and we could have sent the SBMHAWKs after them.

Which was all very interesting, no doubt, but didn't change the fact that she had to deal with the scores of gunboats and hundreds of shuttles coming straight down her throat.

Anson Olivera's fighter squadrons went to meet them, and the plot was suddenly speckled with thousands of even tinier icons as anti-fighter missiles and gunboat-killing FM3s crossed between the two forces. Scarlet "hostiles" began to vanish in appalling numbers, but a handful of the bright green "friendlies" went with them, and the Bugs' success at hiding their starships meant the kamikazes had only a very short way to go, as distances went in deep-space combat.

Fortunately, these Bugs weren't employing the globular version of the "Bughouse Swarm" formation which had given Seventh Fleet so much difficulty. The defensive fire from the gunboats and the scores of pinnaces scattered among the assault shuttle kamikazes was bad enough, but at least Murakuma's fighters didn't have to break through a solid barrier of ship-launched AFHAWKs before they could even get at their true targets. It was possible that that was an indication that this home hive system had been completely cut off from its fellows long enough that whichever Bug lord high admiral had devised the new doctrine had been unable to communicate it to them. Murakuma reminded herself not to put too much faith in any such assumption and checked the seal on her vacsuit, then locked her shock frame as the first gunboats broke past the CSP.

It was as well that the Fleet had never placed a great deal of reliance on the Deep Space Force's gunboats and kamikazes. When there was no great expectation of success, there was no great disappointment when all that was achieved was failure.

At least the attacking small craft had forced to the Enemy to expend some depletable munitions, and a few score of his small attack craft had also been destroyed. It would have been preferable to achieve at least some damage to his starships, but the Fleet had no option but to settle for what it could get.

In truth, the Fleet had no great expectation that the Deep Space Force would defeat the Enemy. The Enemy's numbers were too great, and his entry warp point was too close at hand. At best, the Deep Space Force might drive him into retreating from the system, yet the Fleet was far from fully convinced that that would be the best possible outcome. After all, if the Enemy managed to disengage intact, the Fleet would only have to fight him again. In the end, the decision to stand at the warp point had been made less on the basis of purely military considerations than on the necessity of preventing the Enemy from getting deep enough in-system for his sensors to tell him what it was he truly faced in this System Which Must Be Defended.

His ignorance was the Fleet's greatest single strategic asset, and so the Deep Space Force was committed at the earliest possible moment. If it succeeded in driving the Enemy back whence he'd come, well and good. If it failed, then the true backbone of the defenses would deal with him. Of course, the entire Deep Space Force would be dead by then, but the probability of its destruction was a paltry price to pay for the possibility of maintaining the Enemy's ignorance.

The Bug battle-line had used the attack of its gunboats and kamikazes to close with Sixth Fleet. Murakuma's capital ships couldn't use their superior speed to pull away from the enemy when they were busy using that same speed in desperate evasive maneuvers to avoid kamikazes. As a result, the Bugs were able to draw into SBM range before the final, despairing wave of kamikazes was blown apart short of the monitors.

But that was fine with Murakuma. Even with the diversion of their kamikazes, the Bugs were unable to close much beyond the very fringe of the SBM missile envelope. They could hurt her at that range, but they couldn't kill her-not quickly, at any rate-and as soon as the last of the attacking small craft had ceased to exist, Sixth Fleet began opening the range once again.

But not by too much. She drew her starships out of range from the Bug battle-line, and while she was doing that, her carrier flight deck crews rearmed her fighters and her CSGs reorganized their squadrons around the thankfully few holes the Bug gunboats had blown in their tables of organization. She waited a few moments longer, in hopes that the Bugs might be tempted into sending their BCRs in unsupported. But it would appear that the enemy's increased sensitivity to losses was at work. Or perhaps it was simply a recognition that no battlecruiser in the universe could survive within the missile envelope of an unshaken monitor battle-line long enough to achieve anything at all. Vanessa Murakuma would never understand the way Bugs thought, and she was just as glad that was true. But it would appear that even Bugs could choose not to expend themselves for no return at all.

Well, she thought. If they won't come out, we'll just have to go in after them.

"Ernesto," she said quietly to her ops officer, "tell Anson to kill the command ships. Then execute Case Rupert."

Had the beings which crewed the Fleet's ships been capable of such an emotion, they might have felt despair as their sensors blossomed once again with the fresh spoor of hundreds of small attack craft. The fact that the Enemy had opened the range once more-and had stopped opening it just before he relaunched his attack craft-told the Deep Space Force what he was about.

Unfortunately, there was nothing the Deep Space Force could do about it . . . except to kill as many of the Enemy as possible before it died itself.

Anson Olivera's strikefighters screamed straight into the teeth of the Bug battle-line's horrific array of defensive firepower. Deadly though a fighter could be, it was a frail and tiny thing when thrown all alone against the unshaken wall of devastation those sullen Bug leviathans could project.

Which was why Case Rupert did nothing of the sort.

Oh, the fighters led the way, but the rest of Sixth Fleet came right behind them. Entire squadrons of fighters salvoed nothing but decoy missiles into the Bugs' defensive envelope, providing hundreds of false targets to lure fire away from the real attackers. Fighter ECM did its bit, as well, fighting to deny point defense laser clusters and AFHAWKs the ability to lock their targets up, and intricate evasive maneuvering-the Waldeck Weave-made them even more difficult to hit. But what truly cleared the way for them was Vanessa Murakuma's decision to take her starships into the Bugs' long-range missile envelope right along with them.

Her monitors and superdreadnoughts flushed their XO racks, sending stupendous volleys of antimatter-armed SBMs and capital missiles straight for the Bugs. Those missiles howled down upon their targets like lethal hammers, and the Bugs had no alternative but to honor the threat. Fending off that torrent of destruction diverted their point defense almost entirely from the strikefighters, cutting the totality of their anti-fighter firepower by almost fifty percent.

The battle-line paid a price to open the door for the fighters, for if it could hit the Bugs, then the Bugs could hit it, and warheads began to go home. Shields flashed and died as the hearts of small, violent stars exploded against them. Most of the Bug missiles concentrated on the battle-line, but here and there an enemy battlegroup decided to vent its fury on easier prey and an entire monitor or superdreadnought battlegroup vomited its entire missile broadside at a single battlecruiser squadron.

No battlecruiser could survive that sort of punishment, and Murakuma's jaw clenched as the Code Omega transmissions began to sound once again.

But offering her ships as targets had accomplished its goal. Olivera's F-4s went howling in to point-blank range. Dozens of them died, despite anything decoy missiles, ECM, or diversions could accomplish. But if dozens perished, hundreds did not, and once again, the sheer volume of the Bug command ships' defensive firepower stripped away their anonymity.

Taut-voiced CSGs vectored their squadrons in on the suddenly revealed targets, and the unstoppable power of the primary pack ripped straight to the hearts of their gargantuan foes. Command datalink installations died under the pounding of those vicious stilettos, and the coordination of their battlegroups faltered.

And that, of course, was the other reason Murakuma had closed on her fighters' heels. She would allow no time for the Bugs to recover from the disorientation as the voices of their command ships were silenced forever. She would give them no respite, no opportunity to reorganize. She would seize the instant of their nakedness mercilessly, and as any battlegroup faltered, at least two battlegroups of her own focused a tornado of missile fire upon it.

Bug monitors writhed like spiders in a candle flame, and Vanessa Murakuma watched them burn with eyes of frozen jade ice.

* * *

Afterwards, it was hard to believe the head-on clash had been so brief.

Every combat veteran knows the protracted nature of time in battle, and Murakuma had thought herself long since beyond astonishment at it. But now the old "that can't be right" sensation was back in full force. Surely so much carnage, of such intensity, couldn't have been crammed into a mere thirty standard minutes.

She shook the feeling off, annoyed at herself. She also blocked out the noise of the damage control teams, the residual ringing in her own ears, and all the other distractions as she concentrated on the incoming reports.

It had been a holocaust, but at least the loss ratios were heavily in Sixth Fleet's favor. She watched the list of damaged and destroyed ships and tried-without success-not to think about all of the lost and ruined lives hiding behind that passionless electronic display. She made herself watch until the report scrolled downward to the very end, then drew a deep breath, turned, and beckoned to Leroy McKenna.

The chief of staff crossed the flag deck to her, his helmet in the crook of his left arm, and she nodded to him.

"Please get with Ernesto about this," she said, waving a hand at the damage reports she'd just perused. "I want to cull out the most heavily damaged ships and send them back to Orpheus 1, and I want proposals for reorganizing our battlegroups around our losses. And tell Anson I want recon fighters out as soon as possible." She managed a wan smile. "Our fighters have been a bit occupied," she said with studied understatement, "and the lack of fresh reconnaissance is making me just a little nervous."

The destruction of the Deep Space Force was, no doubt, regrettable. But, viewed in one way, it could be regarded as an advantage. It would induce overconfidence in the Enemy, who would assume that his hardest battles in this system were now behind him.

It was also unintendedly advantageous that the formations of gunboats and small craft from the planets of the secondary stellar component were still far behind the more closely based ones. When the Enemy detected the first wave of planet-based craft speeding toward him, he wouldn't recognize the full magnitude of the threat. For that wave represented only a third of it. . . .

"Did you say eight thousand?"

Marina Abernathy swallowed, hard. But the intelligence officer didn't wilt under the admiral's regard.

"Yes, Sir. I know the original report said two thousand gunboats and kamikazes. The first fighter to detect them immediately turned back into com range and transmitted that report. But the rest of his squadron stayed out there, and now they've detected three more formations, each as large as the first."

"I see," Murakuma acknowledged, and nodded slowly.

Her acknowledgment was the only sound and motion on the shock-frozen flag bridge, and she turned to McKenna, who was as pale as it was possible for him to get.

"I wonder how much more there is to be detected?" she said in an almost conversational tone.

"Sir?"

"We keep forgetting about that secondary component," she pointed out with a touch of impatience. "It's another class F main-sequence star, and even though they're usually not old enough to have life-bearing planets, Component A here obviously is, and both components of a binary star system coalesce at the same time. So Component B could have another heavily developed planet-or more than one of them, given the wide liquid-water zone around a bright star like that. We really have no idea of the total resources we're facing here. And if those idiots at GFGHQ-"

She chopped herself off and shook her head irritably. This time her impatience was with herself.

"That doesn't matter. Eight thousand of them are quite enough. It's time we got ourselves back to Orpheus 1."

"Thank God we hadn't penetrated any further from the warp point before we picked up the trailers," McKenna muttered, and Ernesto Cruciero looked up from a computer terminal.

"You're right about that, Sir," the ops officer agreed fervently. "Two thousand we could take, and I'd have advised doing just that. But eight?" He shook his head. "But even if we start pulling back immediately, we're already in too deep to be able to exit this system before they can reach us. We'll be right at the warp point when they do, but they're still going to catch us short of Orpheus 1."

"I know." Murakuma gazed at the system display for a few seconds, then inhaled and turned to her farshathkhanaak. "Our fighters are going to have to do what they can to keep those kamikazes off us, Anson."

In retrospect, it might have been better after all if the system's entire twenty-four thousand planet-based gunboats and their supporting small craft had been in a position to arrive as one overwhelming wave. Even the ones the Enemy had sighted had been enough to send him instantly into a course-reversal which might well take him back out of the system before the wave could reach him, and he'd deployed his small attack craft to cover the retreat.

Those craft would, of course, concentrate on the antimatter-loaded small craft which posed the most deadly threat to the capital ships. They always did. This time, however, they were in for a surprise.

They've done it again, Anson Olivera thought, watching in horror as his plot told the tale.

Like Admiral Murakuma, Olivera had faced the Bugs from the very beginning of the war. He still didn't know how he'd survived the unbelievable butchery of the strikegroups in the desperate fight to defend the Romulus Chain. He'd never blamed Murakuma for the losses the squadrons had taken, and in all fairness, all the rest of Fifth Fleet had been hammered almost equally as hard. It was just that someone aboard a superdreadnought still had a chance of coming home if his ship took a hit; a fighter jock didn't.

Which was why Fifth Fleet had suffered well over three thousand percent casualties among its fighter pilots.

Anson Olivera had no idea why he hadn't been one of those casualties, and there were times when the phenomenon the shrinks called "survivor's guilt" kept him up late at night. But it had never hit him as hard as it did at this moment.

I ought to be out there, he thought numbly, cursing his own relative safety as he manned his station in Sixth Fleet PriFly, the nerve center of its fighter ops coordination and control, and listened to the broken bits of panicked combat chatter coming back from his pilots through the bursts of strobing static.

An isolated corner of his mind wondered, almost absently, why it still seemed so surprising whenever the Bugs introduced a new technological surprise. It wasn't as if they hadn't done it often enough, God knew. But somehow, it still seemed . . . unnatural for an unthinking force of nature to innovate.

Which didn't keep them from going right ahead and doing it anyway.

No doubt the intelligence types would get together with BuShips' R&D experts to figure out exactly how they'd done it, but that would be cold comfort for all the pilots Olivera was losing . . . and about to lose. What mattered at the moment was that somehow the Bugs had engineered an ECM installation capable of jamming fighter datalink down into something small enough to mount on a gunboat. To the best of Olivera's knowledge, no one in the Alliance had ever even considered such a possibility. Certainly, no one had ever suggested it to him. And no one had ever evolved a doctrine for how a fighter squadron suddenly deprived of the fine-meshed coordination which spelled life in the close combat of a dogfight was supposed to survive the experience, either.

The space around the warp point was a hideous boil of exploding warheads and disintegrating fighters and gunboats. The term "dogfight" had taken on an entirely new meaning as individual fighter pilots, deprived not just of datalink, but of almost all communication, found themselves entirely on their own on a battlefield that covered cubic light-seconds. The mere concept of visual coordination was meaningless in deep-space, and from the fragments Olivera and his assistants could piece together, even the fighters' individual onboard sensors seemed to be affected by whatever it was the Bugs were using.

It was fortunate that the starships of Sixth Fleet were outside the jammers' apparent area of effect. And it was even more fortunate that Sixth Fleet's fighter squadrons were as finely honed and trained as any in space. Good as Seventh Fleet was, Olivera had always privately believed his own pilots were at least as good or even better, and as he listened to the slivers of chatter he could hear, he heard them proving it. Yes, there was panic and confusion-even terror-but these were men and women, whatever their species, who'd been tried and tested in combat and never found wanting.

Nor were they wanting today, and Anson Olivera tried not to weep as he watched their icons vanishing from his plot and pride warred with grief, for not one of them vanished running away from the enemy.

The protracted late-afternoon light of Alpha Centauri A was slanting through the windows of Kthaara'zarthan's office when Ellen MacGregor unceremoniously entered it.

"You've read it," she stated, rather than asked.

"Yes. I have only just finished." Kthaara put down the last hardcopy sheet of Vanessa Murakuma's report on Operation Cripple.

The Sky Marshal plopped herself down on one of the scattered cushions Orions favored-she'd acquired a taste for the things, even though Kthaara always kept chairs for human visitors.

"We fucked up," she said succinctly.

"As ever, your directness is refreshing." The response was completely automatic. Kthaara's mind was entirely on what he'd just read.

"Murakuma warned us we were talking out our asses," MacGregor pointed out after a pause, bringing Kthaara back to the present. "And she was right. Although not even her crystal ball was up to predicting a gunboat-portable device for jamming data nets!"

"No," Kthaara agreed. "Of course, she was hardly alone in that. Still, the concept requires no fundamental theoretical breakthroughs, and we no longer have any right to feel surprise at Bahg inventiveness."

None of which, thought the pilot who'd made his own name in the elite ranks of the Khan's strikegroups, had been any comfort to Murakuma's fighter pilots when they suddenly found themselves operating as unsupported individuals. On the other hand, there were so many targets it must have been hard to miss. . . .

MacGregor read his thoughts and smiled grimly.

"Murakuma says seventy-five percent of her pilots made ace that day. Ah, that's an old Terran expression dating back to the days of atmospheric combat with hydrocarbon-burning airfoils. It means-"

"I know what it means," Kthaara said quietly.

Those fighter pilots' ferocious resistance had probably saved Sixth Fleet from annihilation. But given the numbers they'd faced and the technological surprise that had been sprung on them, it had been inevitable that some of the Bugs had gotten past them. Not in hundreds, but in thousands.

It was only by the grace of the gods themselves-coupled with Murakuma's wisdom in falling back as soon as the first reports of the incoming strike reached her-that her starships had been almost back to her entry warp point and the reserve SBMHAWK4s she'd left in Orpheus 1. The courier drones she'd sent ahead to the control ships she'd left with the missiles had sent the pods flooding back in the opposite direction, targeted for gunboats.

Their CAM2s had winnowed the attackers down to numbers the capital ships' defensive armaments could deal with, but by the time it was over, every one of Murakuma's capital ships had suffered at least some degree of damage . . . and the second wave of kamikazes had been screaming in. She'd barely had time to recover her remaining fighters and evacuate the surviving personnel from the ships too heavily damaged to escape. Then she'd funneled the rest through the warp point into Orpheus 1 space.

The pursuing Bugs had followed-straight into the precautionary minefields she'd left behind. That, combined with the massed fire of Sixth Fleet's surviving starships and desperately relaunched fighters, had stopped them. Barely.

"Murakuma's going to need months to make repairs," MacGregor observed dourly.

"Truth. Nevertheless, we can count ourselves fortunate." Kthaara shook off his brooding. "We cannot count on good fortune to come to our rescue in the future. We must not underestimate that system's strength again."

"No. Murakuma makes the same point in her report-rather forcefully."

"Indeed she does. I suppose she can be forgiven for waxing a bit . . . idiomatic towards the end."

"That's one way to put it." MacGregor picked up the final page of the hardcopy and chuckled grimly as she quoted. " 'Some cripple!' "

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: "I feel them still."

KONS Eemaaka loped across the last few light-seconds to her destination, and Admiral Raymond Prescott stood silently on her flag bridge with Zhaarnak'telmasa and watched his vilkshatha brother with carefully hidden concern. The Kweenamak-class battlecruiser was a lowly vessel to fly the lights of not one, but two, fleet commanders, but she was also one of the minority of Seventh Fleet's units to escape Operation Ivan completely undamaged. With so much of the rest of the fleet down for repairs, Eemaaka at least offered the advantage of availability. She was also fast enough for Prescott and Zhaarnak to make this trip within the time constraints the repair and refitting of Seventh Fleet imposed. And it was entirely appropriate for them to use an Orion vessel.

Neither of them was particularly happy about leaving the responsibility for the necessary repairs in other hands, even when those hands belonged to their own highly trained and reliable staffs. But neither of them had even considered not making this trip, either. The request for their presence had come directly from Third Great Fang Koraaza'khiniak, and although it wasn't an order, it had carried an honor obligation which would have made any possibility of refusal unthinkable.

Yet now that they were here, Prescott felt the waves of remembered pain radiating from his vilkshatha brother, and he reached out to lay his flesh and blood hand on the Orion's furred shoulder.

The CIC master display was configured in astrographic mode, showing the layout of an entire star system. The portion of that star towards which Eemaaka was headed was dotted with the frosted light icons of a massive military fleet, but it wasn't those light codes which held Zhaarnak's attention, and Prescott heard him draw a deep breath as his eyes rested upon two other icons. They were the symbols for two oxygen-nitrogen planets, well within the liquid water zone of the brilliant white system primary, but they weren't the welcoming green of the habitable worlds they ought to have been. Instead, each planet was represented by a small, blazing red sphere of light surrounding the four interlocked triangles which served the Orions as the ancient trefoil symbol served humanity.

The symbol which would mark those planets on Tabby astrogation charts for the next several thousand years.

"I feel them still," Zhaarnak said, very quietly, and Prescott's grip on his shoulder tightened. "Four billion. Four billion civilians."

"I know," Prescott said in the Tongue of Tongues, his voice equally quiet. "I hear them, as well. But you had no choice, Zhaarnak. You know that as well as I do . . . just as you know how many other lives you saved by falling back."

"Perhaps." Zhaarnak gazed down at the Orion-style flat-screen display for several more seconds, then shook himself. "You speak truth, brother," he said then, "although you would be more accurate if you added the modest part you played in stopping the Bahgs in Alowan and in retaking Telmassa. Yet there are times when truth is cold comfort, and I wonder what the ghosts of Kliean would say of my decision to leave them to the Bahgs."

"They are the ghosts of Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee," Prescott replied, "and they know what choice you had to make and how much it cost you. Just as they know there was no way you or anyone could have predicted what the Bugs would do when they retreated from this system."

"I think you may be too kind to me," Zhaarnak told him with a small ear flick of grim amusement. "The Bahgs had not bombarded planets into nuclear cinders in the past, true, but that was only because they had never been given the opportunity to destroy what were obviously major industrial and population centers which they could not retain in their possession. No, Raaymmonnd." He shook his head in a human gesture of negation he'd picked up from his vilkshatha brother. "Whatever the rest of the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee may think, I knew when I ordered Daarsaahl to fall back from Kliean what would happen to the planets here. I think that I tried to fool even myself into believing we could retake the system before the Bahgs could . . . devour more than a small percentage of the total population. But that was a lie I told myself because I had to."

The Orion inhaled again, then turned his back resolutely upon the display and met the human admiral's eyes levelly.

"You are correct, of course, Raaymmonnd. I had no choice, not with so many more billions of civilians behind me, but I knew I had signed the death warrants of Zhardok and Masiahn when I withdrew from the system. I could not have prevented their destruction if I had not withdrawn. I know that, too. But there are times even now when they come to me in the night and I wish with all my heart that I had died with them."

"It may be selfish of me," Prescott said after a moment, "but I, for one, am delighted you did not. It would be a colder and a lonelier war without your claws to ward my back, Clan Brother."

"Or without yours to ward mine," Zhaarnak agreed, reaching up to rest one clawed hand briefly and lightly upon the human hand on his shoulder. "And do not mistake me, Raaymmonnd. I know full well that the dead who reproach me live only in my own heart and mind. They are the scars of my soul, and I must bear them, as a warrior bears the scars of his flesh-without ever forgetting, but without permitting sorrow and grief to paralyze me or prevent me from making other decisions out of fear." His ears flicked again, this time in an expression of wry irony. "I think, perhaps, only Vahnessssssa could truly understand."

"You may be right," Prescott replied after a brief, thoughtful pause, still speaking Orion. "I never really considered her stand at Sarasota and Justin from that perspective." He waved one hand. "Oh, I knew there had to be at least some 'survivor's guilt,' but I was like everyone else. I saw only the lives she saved and how hard-how brilliantly-she fought to retake Justin. But she sees it from the other side . . . just as you see it here. She sees the lives she could not save, and it is that which puts the ghosts in her eyes."

"We have each of us paid our own tolls to loss and grief and regret, brother," Zhaarnak said. "This is not a warrior's war. Not one in which one may take honor from matching strength to strength against a foe worthy of respect. It is a war against a plague, a pestilence. Against creatures who massacre entire worlds . . . and who give us no choice but to do the same to them. I cannot forgive the Bahgs for that, and most of all, I cannot forgive them for filling me with the hatred which makes the 'Shiiivaaa Option' something to be embraced."

Koraaza'khiniak, Lord Khiniak, stood in the enormous, echoing boat bay of KONS Kinaahsa'defarnoo. The Hia'khan-class monitor was vastly larger than the battleship Ebymiae aboard which he'd flown his lights when last he met with both Raymond Prescott and Zhaarnak'telmasa. That was as it should be, for she was also the flagship of a far more powerful fleet than he'd commanded then. But for all of that, he felt a remembered echo of that other meeting as he watched the cutter from Eemaaka settle into the docking arms.

Bagpipes wailed and the side party snapped to attention as the vilkshatha brothers whose presence he'd specifically requested emerged from the cutter and saluted the boatbay officer. This was a ship of the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee, and so Zhaarnak requested permission to come aboard for both of them, and Koraaza stepped forward to greet them in person as permission was granted.

"Welcome, Fang Zhaarnak, Fang Presssssscottt," he said, and offered each in turn the flashing claw slap of an Orion's warrior greeting. "We are all most happy to see you, and I am especially happy to see you looking so much better than when last we met in Telmasa, Fang Presssssscottt."

"Thank you, Great Fang," Prescott replied. "It is hard to believe, sometimes, that it has been over seven standard years."

"If it is hard for you," Koraaza said, "it is even harder for me and for my farshatok. It seems at times that everyone has forgotten we even exist!"

"That seems to be the nature of war, and especially of this one," the Human said. "The only options seem to be boredom or sheer terror."

"Truth," Koraaza agreed. There were not many, even of the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee, to whom he would have admitted he could ever feel terror, but Raymond'prescott-telmasa was one of them. He considered that thought for a moment, then brushed it aside and gave his guests a fang-hidden Orion smile.

"In this case, however," he told them, "I hope you will forgive me if I admit that my invitation to you was made at least partly in hopes of transforming my fleet's boredom into something more lively."

"The possibility had crossed our minds, Great Fang," Zhaarnak said dryly. "Neither of us is quite so . . .  inexperienced in the machinations of fleet commanders who must deal with the inertia of Fleet Headquarters as we were when last all three of us met."

"Good!" Lord Khiniak gave a grunting chuckle-purr. "I would not have you think I do not value your presence for many reasons, but I am glad both of you understand all of my motives. It would never do to have lured you here under false pretenses!"

"There is little fear of that, Great Fang," Prescott assured him.

"I am relieved to hear it, Fang Presssssscottt. But there will be time enough to deal with my ulterior motives later. For now, Third Fleet is prepared to pass in review to commemorate this anniversary of our reconquest of this system. You and Fang Zhaarnak would do me great honor if you would join me on Flag Deck for that evolution, and afterward, I would value your impressions of the maneuvers my staff has laid on."

"The honor," Prescott said sincerely, "will be ours."

"In that case," Koraaza said, "let us go. The Fleet awaits us."

The word for Third Fleet, Raymond Prescott decided, was "impressive." He'd known all along that Lord Khiniak's fleet area had held a lower priority for the new construction which had flowed with ever increasing force towards his own and Zhaarnak's commands. The fact that the Tabbies simply didn't have the industrial plant to build as many monitors as the Federation and that Third Fleet was effectively a pure Orion and Gorm command meant that Koraaza's task groups were heavily biased towards lighter ship types. Third Fleet's official order of battle-which wasn't entirely present even now-listed a total of two hundred and sixty-seven ships of all classes, but only six were monitors. Over a quarter of Koraaza's strength lay in his sixty-eight superdreadnoughts, which-along with eighty-nine battlecruisers-constituted fifty-eight percent of his total hulls. Of course, it was a Tabby fleet organization, so it boasted far more total fighters than its twenty-four carriers and twenty-eight light carriers would have suggested . . . particularly since five of Koraaza's monitors were the big, monitor-hulled Shernaku-class carriers, each of which embarked no less than a hundred and thirty-two strikefighters. In fact, its mobile units alone carried almost three thousand fighters and almost four hundred Gorm-crewed gunboats, and the orbital bases covering the Shanak-Kliean warp link provided a reserve of over five thousand more fighters from which losses might be replaced.

Even with the oversized fighter components typical of Orion fleet mixes, Third Fleet was weaker than Seventh Fleet had been before Operation Ivan, especially in the sluggers of its battle-line. Yet as he and Zhaarnak had watched Koraaza and his staff put the fleet through its paces in a complex series of week-long maneuvers, Prescott had realized that Third Fleet's fighting power should not be assessed in terms of tonnages and weight of broadside alone.

The Orion naval tradition, dating as far back as there'd been an Orion Navy, had seen a warship not so much as a platform for weapons as as a single weapon in its own right. It was an ideal better suited to light warships, and best of all to fighters, which helped explain why the Tabbies had never truly been happy with superdreadnoughts and battleships. But it was also an ideal which had never been abandoned for those heavier ship types, either. It was far more difficult to infuse a crew the size of a capital ship's with the sort of elan and sense of unity which could be created aboard smaller ships, and the Orions recognized that, but that recognition didn't prevent them from trying to achieve it anyway.

As Third Fleet had come very, very close to doing.

Prescott knew, as only one could whose forces had survived Operation Retribution and Operation Ivan, what that meant in terms of its fighting power. His and Zhaarnak's own Seventh Fleet and Vanessa Murakuma's Sixth Fleet were the most superbly drilled and battle-hardened naval forces he'd ever hoped to see. They were certainly more efficient and effective on a ship-for-ship and task force-for-task force basis than Eighth Fleet . . . or had been, at least, before the brutal casualties of Operation Ivan. To admit that was not to in any way denigrate Eighth Fleet or the part it had played in Ivan, either. Murakuma had been given literally years to put together her command team and staff before their transfer to the already superbly drilled fighting machine he and Zhaarnak had created in Zephrain before her arrival. Since taking over, she and her staff had turned Sixth Fleet's subordinate commanders and crews into virtual extensions of her own central nervous system.

He and Zhaarnak had been given less time to build Seventh Fleet, but they'd also possessed the huge "advantage" of forging their command teams in the very furnace of battle. Eighth Fleet had been allowed neither the years of training time which Sixth-and Fifth-Fleet had been granted, nor honed and polished in the unforgiving crucible of combat, and so it had been inevitable that First Fang Ynaathar's command should lack the incomparable temper those fleets had attained.

But Great Fang Koraaza had also been given years to train and drill his forces, and the grim and silent charnel houses of Zhardok and Masiahn had provided all the motivation any fleet commander could have desired. Even the Gorm-or perhaps especially the Gorm-of Koraaza's command were filled with a white-hot flame of determination to repay the Bugs in full and bitter measure for the atrocity of Kliean, and the fact that Third Fleet consisted solely of Orions and Gorm had prevented any tiniest dilution of that incandescent purpose. That single ambition unified them all, from the Great Fang to the lowliest rating aboard his lightest vessel, and it showed. Third Fleet was a rapier in the hand of a fencing master, and in some ways its lack of monitors might actually make it more effective. It was faster, unfettered by the slow and ponderous might of a heavier battle-line, and its maneuverability and flexibility were perfectly suited to the fighter-oriented Tabbies and the fast capital ships which had always been the hallmark of the Gorm.

It was impossible for anyone to say with complete assurance how any unblooded warship or force of warships would respond to the reality of battle before the actual test, but Raymond Prescott had no doubt that Third Fleet would acquit itself in a manner to make Varnik'sheerino himself proud.

Assuming, of course, that it was ever allowed to do so.

" . . . and so we have emphasized training in both the assault mode and in more mobile and far-ranging operations," Koraaza said. He leaned back on the low cushions on his side of the Orion-style briefing room table and showed just the tips of his fangs in a predator's smile. "We have given particular attention to the techniques you and Ahhdmiraaaal Murrraaahkuuuuma evolved for dealing with the 'Bahghouse Swarm.' The fact that neither we nor the Bahgs have been in a position to commit our full strength to battle has given as much time to refine our approach. Unfortunately, it does not appear that Grand Fleet Headquarters is prepared to allow us to put our training into practice."

"That conforms with my own impression, I fear," Prescott said after a moment, and glanced at Zhaarnak, sitting at his side.

"And mine," his vilkshatha brother confirmed. "I believe that both Lord Talphon's and Fang Ynaathar's instincts are to give you leave to begin offensive operations, Great Fang, but the advice of their planning staffs is another matter."

"That, unhappily, is not news to me," Koraaza told them. "I was, of course, delighted to learn of the existence of the Star Union and of its readiness to fight at our sides against the Bahgs. Nonetheless, the sudden introduction of the Union's forces into the strategic equation provoked a complete upheaval in the war plans and calculations of everyone in Centauri. No doubt the two of you are even more aware of that than we here in Kliean, but the same impetus which inspired GFGHQ to accelerate the timetable for Operation Eeevaan also caused it to divert many of our scheduled reinforcements to Eighth Fleet. I do not begrudge Fang Ynaathar the strength he required to carry that operation to a successful conclusion, yet I deeply regret the manner in which the diversion of warships has set back our own schedule."

"I am afraid I am less fully familiar with events here in Kliean and in Shanak than I ought to be," Prescott admitted.

"That is fully understandable," Koraaza said. "It is not as if you and Fang Zhaarnak had not had matters of your own to consider!"

"Truth," Prescott agreed. "Nonetheless, it is my understanding that you were able to pinpoint the location of the Bugs' closed warp point in Shanak almost a full standard year ago."

He made the statement a question, and Koraaza flicked an ear in agreement.

"Indeed. The Bahgs have obviously been too hard pressed-by your own actions, in no small part-to attempt any further offensive operations along the Kliean Chain. No doubt the fate which befell their earlier offensives also had much to do with that, but at the same time, the strength of our response and the richness of their prize here in Kliean must have suggested to them that this line of advance would have led them to further important systems. Perhaps that is the reason they did not revert to a completely passive posture in Shanak. I do not pretend, of course, to understand how what passes for intelligence among Bahgs operates, but I suspect that they could not quite bring themselves to totally abandon any possibility of resuming the offensive should our own fleet dispositions present them with an opportunity to strike. I can think of nothing else which would have inspired them to continue operations in Shanak at all."

"Not even Admiral LeBlanc is prepared to suggest how Bug analysts-assuming that they have analysts-would approach such a situation," Prescott said. "Nonetheless, I think you are probably correct. Certainly if they intended to stand solely upon the defensive, it would have been pointless for them to operate in Shanak."

Zhaarnak gave a grunting purr of agreement, and Prescott knew that his vilkshatha brother was thinking about the botched survey update of Shanak which had led directly to the Kliean Atrocity. Least Claw Shaiaasu's entire survey squadron had perished in a hopeless, suicidal charge straight into the teeth of the Bug battle fleet which had driven Zhaarnak's hopelessly outnumbered command out of Kliean. It had been the final, despairing stroke of a warrior who knew he was totally over-matched by his foe, but for all its determination and sacrifice, it had required far less courage of Shaiaasu and his personnel than Zhaarnak's decision to fall back on Telmasa had required of him. In a sense, it had been almost an act of cowardice, for under the honor code of the Orions, it had expiated Shaiaasu's "guilt" for having led the Bugs to Kliean in the first place.

It hadn't really been the least claw's fault. Prescott never doubted that Shaiaasu had followed his orders to insure he and his squadron weren't spotted and tracked by any Bug starships. Unfortunately, it was far easier to order someone to avoid detection than it was to carry out that order against hostile vessels hiding in cloak at the moment their sensors detected your own drive fields, and that was almost certainly what had happened to Shaiaasu. It was entirely possible that the least claw had allowed himself to be just a bit casual about his procedures in the case of Shanak, but that was understandable enough, for he'd had no prior reason to suspect that Shanak was unique in the experience of both Orion and Terran galactic exploration. Many systems contained closed warp points, but to date, only Shanak contained only closed points. Of course, it was conceivable that there were dozens of similar star systems, and that possibility had been the subject of a great deal of lively speculation over the last seven years. Unfortunately, there was no practical way to test it. By the very nature of things, a closed warp point couldn't be detected. Which meant that the only ways to know a star system contained more than one of them were to find the additional closed point from its open end . . . or to see someone else make transit through the closed point you didn't already know was there.

And that was undoubtedly precisely what had happened to Shaiaasu.

The consequences for Kliean had been catastrophic, and if not for the desperate backs-to-the-wall stand which had brought Zhaarnak and Prescott together for the first time, the catastrophe would have been far wider and more terrible still. The four billion dead of Kliean could all too easily have become thirty or even forty billion before the Khanate assembled a fleet strong enough to meet the Bugs head on. Only the sacrificial gallantry of his and Zhaarnak's crews had enabled them to hang on by their very fingernails until Koraaza could relieve the pitiful wreckage which had been all that remained of their commands.

But Koraaza had relieved them, and he'd carried on from their bridgehead in Telmasa to retake the gutted Kliean System, then pressed forward to retake Shanak, as well. He'd paid a high price in ships and lives to drive the enemy out of Shanak, but the Bugs had been in a perfect position to cut their losses and their exposure. After all, the Alliance had no idea how to locate the closed warp point which had given them entry into Shanak in the first place. All they had to do was retire from the system and stay retired to effectively climb down the rabbit hole and pull the hole in after themselves, precisely as the Star Union had done in the case of Telik.

Only the Bugs hadn't done that. They'd continued to probe Shanak with light forces, creeping stealthily about under the protection of their cloaking ECM, no doubt in an effort to keep tabs on the Alliance's actual strength in the system. Koraaza was probably correct about their motivations, although Prescott wasn't about to allow himself to draw any hard and fast conclusions about how Bugs thought. Still, the only possible explanation for their behavior which he could conceive of was that they'd hoped the Allies might somehow be stupid enough to reduce their strength in Shanak and Kliean to a level which would permit them to launch a fresh attack. No doubt a human or Orion strategist would have entertained the same possibility, however wistfully, but given how completely the Bugs had been driven back upon the defensive themselves, they surely ought to have recognized that the likelihood of any such blunder on their opponents' parts was minute.

Whatever had or hadn't passed through whatever Bugs used or didn't use for brains, they had, in fact, continued their stealthy probes, and their scout cruisers and Third Fleet's light picket units had fought their own long, bitter war of ambush and counterambush. Cloaked cruisers and battlecruisers had stalked one another through the useless yet strategically vital star system's depths with implacable determination. The Bug ships had sought ceaselessly to determine Third Fleet's dispositions, and the Orion and Gorm pickets had striven with equal determination to track the Bugs to their hidden entry warp point.

And finally, fourteen months ago, the Orion battlecruiser Basnkykhan had succeeded in doing just that.

She hadn't survived her success, but her captain had known his business and been fully aware of the critical importance of his discovery. He'd gotten his courier drones off before the first Bug gunboat had come into range to detect their drives, and so he and his crew had gotten their priceless data home despite the total destruction of their ship.

"I have not had the opportunity to actually discuss the situation here in Kliean or in Shanak with any of Lord Talphon's planners," Prescott said after a moment. "My impression, however, is that they believe the Bugs probably failed to detect Basnkykhan's courier drones. Coupled with the fact that she had already begun to retreat, probably before they even knew she was there, they may not have realized she ever managed to track one of their vessels through the closed warp point in the first place."

"That is indeed essentially what they think," Koraaza agreed. "Their view is that if the Bahgs do not realize that their bolthole has been discovered, there is no compelling reason to hasten an attack through it. Undoubtedly, the Bahgs have been preparing their defenses on the far side of the warp point ever since we retook Shanak from them, but GFGHQ believes the security of a closed warp point will have inspired them to give fortifying it a lesser priority, particularly in light of the greater threats they have faced along other axes of advance. The fact that the Bahgs have continued to operate their scouting vessels in Shanak, entering and exiting through their closed warp point only with extreme caution and stealthiness, is seen as further supporting evidence for that thesis."

"And the theory is that we should let sleeping zegets lie?" Zhaarnak suggested with a wry twitch of his whiskers.

"In part," Koraaza conceded, "but, to be fair, only in part. I believe GFGHQ intends ultimately to allow Third Fleet to take advantage of Basnkykhan's discovery and launch our attack through Shanak. What most concerns me are two points. First, the fact that all of my farshatok are as prepared and ready to strike now as they ever will be and that every day which passes threatens to dull the keenness of their edge through overtraining or frustration. Second, and even more importantly, I do not share the analysts' faith that the Bahgs are unaware that Basnkykhan pinpointed their warp point.

"I have, of course, done all I may to encourage them in their ignorance, assuming that they are in fact ignorant in the first place. My survey ships continue to 'search' assiduously and to track every Bahg vessel we detect. Indeed, I have lost two more battlecruisers since Basnkykhan's destruction as a direct result of our persistence in such operations.

"Despite this, my staff and I have come to the conclusion that we dare not ignore the possibility that the Bahgs' operations are a mirror image of our own. As we seek to convince them we continue to search for the closed warp point because we do not know where it is, so-we suspect-do they maintain the same operational patterns in an effort to deceive us into thinking that they do not know we have already located that point. Needless to say, there is no way we could possibly prove our theory without actually firing recon probes through the warp point to determine what defenses, if any, they have erected against us. Since doing that would absolutely confirm our knowledge of the warp point's coordinates, we dare not do anything of the sort until we are prepared to commit immediately to a full-scale assault through it."

"And GFGHQ is so busy concentrating on other fronts just now that it has no interest in permitting you to test your theory," Prescott said.

"Precisely. My strength continues to build, although at a slower than projected rate due to the diversion of units originally earmarked for Kliean to Operation Eeevaan and its follow-up operations," Koraaza said. "Nonetheless, we remain considerably below the force levels the Strategy Board has specified as the minimum necessary for us to begin offensive operations through Shanak. As I have said, I understand the logic which has led to that decision, but-"

"-but if your theory is correct, then every day your attack is delayed increases the losses you are likely to take when you are finally permitted to attack," Zhaarnak finished for him.

"Precisely," Koraaza said again, flattening both ears for emphasis. "I believe it is highly probable that they have assigned a higher priority to fortifying the far side of the warp point ever since Basnkykhan located it. Valkha only knows how powerfully they have already fortified it, but I do not care at all for the thought of giving them still more time to improve their defenses even further. Moreover, the power of the attack force they originally committed against Kliean and Telmasa, coupled with how quickly and powerfully they reinforced that force, has always suggested that at least one of their major star systems lies within relatively close proximity to Shanak. If that is correct, then I believe it is important to take the offensive as quickly as possible and so, hopefully, force still more dispersal of whatever strategic reserve remains to them. Every additional dispersion on any front can only weaken them further on every front now that we have obviously driven them back onto the defensive."

"You make a strong case, Great Fang," Prescott said after a moment. "Of course," he went on dryly, "Zhaarnak and I are also mere fleet commanders whose opinions are of strictly limited value to the droshkhouli who slave over their analyses under the dreadful conditions which exist on Nova Terra." Zhaarnak and Koraaza produced matching purr-chuckles of amusement, and Prescott grinned at them. Then he sobered.

"In seriousness, Great Fang, I understand both your concerns and the opportunity you sense, and I think I share your conclusions, as well. Am I correct in assuming that you wish for Zhaarnak and me to present those conclusions to Lord Talphon and Sky Marshal MacGregor?"

"You are," Koraaza admitted. "I realize that technically you and Lord Telmasa are mere fleet commanders yourselves, but as I believe a Human writer observed several of your centuries ago, some animals are more equal than others." The Orion admiral chuckled again at Prescott's obvious surprise at his reference. As the Human's reputation as a student of Orion history, culture, and philosophy had spread among the officers of the Khan, a certain competition to beat him at his own game had sprung up among some of them, and Koraaza took considerable pleasure from the knowledge that he'd just scored a telling point in that contest.

"I know Lord Talphon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff give full attention to my own reports and suggestions," the Third Fleet commander went on more seriously after a moment. "But I also know that any senior flag officer's views and conclusions are inevitably shaped and colored by the fashion in which their staffs present their own analyses to them. To be honest, what I hope is that the personal relationships the two of you have developed with the Joint Chiefs and, especially, with Lord Talphon will lend additional weight to your views. I feel sure that an exposition of your views would go far to cut through that inevitable layer of insulation between field commanders and commanders in chief, assuming you are willing to support my own conclusions and arguments."

"It is possible you over estimate the extent to which we have the ear of the JCS," Prescott replied wryly. "Even if you do not, anything we say must be properly presented if we hope to overcome that insulation you have mentioned. And I would like the opportunity to fully explore the evidence and analysis which have led you to your conclusions before committing myself to support them."

"Of course," Koraaza agreed instantly. "I would not expect you to endorse my ideas without the fullest opportunity to test my evidence and my logic."

"In that case, speaking for myself, and assuming that-as I feel confident will be the case-I share your conclusions after studying the data, I would be honored to speak in their favor to Lord Talphon and the rest of the Joint Chiefs," Prescott said seriously.

"And I," Zhaarnak agreed. He gazed at his vilkshatha brother for a moment, then turned his eyes to Koraaza. "All you have said makes excellent sense to me, Great Fang. And there is another point, one I feel certain Lord Talphon, at least, will recognize. Vilknarma for Kliean is due and overdue, and what place could be more fitting than this from which to exact it? What attack more appropriate than one upon the very systems which dispatched the ships which murdered our worlds?"

He raised one palm and extended the knife-edged claws of his predator ancestors, and his steady eyes never flickered as he closed his fist, sinking those claws into the heel of his hand to draw blood. Then he opened his hand once more, showing the blood upon his claws, and his voice was very, very quiet.

"I have told my brother that I hear the dead still, Great Fang, and so I do. I hear the terror of the cubs, the sorrow of their dams, and the rage of their sires. I have heard them in my dreams and, if I listen carefully, in my waking thoughts, as well, and I hear them now. But now they are no longer ghosts, crying out in protest at their own deaths and the murder of all they loved. Now they are the voice of vengeance, the voice of the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee, crying out from the very stones, and I, too, will be their voice."

He closed his hand once more, his eyes burning into Koraaza's, and his ears were flat to his skull.

"I will speak for you before the Joint Chiefs, Great Fang, and in my voice they will hear Kliean, and the fury of the Zheeerlikou'valkhannaiee will sweep over the Bahgs like the very fists of Valkha Himself."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: "Take them at a run."

"Well. Lieutenant Sanders, isn't it?" Vice Admiral Winnifred Trevayne pronounced it lef-tenant. Her medium-dusky coloring, a throwback to some twentieth-century Jamaican ancestor, was the only thing about her that wasn't stereotypically British. "What do you hear from Admiral LeBlanc, out at Zephrain?"

"Nothing lately, Sir." Kevin Sanders' usual insouciance was somewhat in abeyance. The Director of Naval Intelligence didn't exactly encourage informality, even among those well acquainted with her and close to her in rank, and Sanders was neither. "I and the rest of First Fang Ynaathar's staff have only just arrived."

"Of course. You had to come all the way from Anderson Four. I've been here less than two local days myself." Trevayne didn't get to Alpha Centauri often, but she'd made a special trip out from Old Terra for this conference, which promised to be crucial. Matters were coming to a head.

"I see the Sky Marshal gesturing for me, Lieutenant. And you'd best rejoin the First Fang's staff." With a final nod, Trevayne turned on her heel and crossed the GFGHQ formal conference room.

Sanders watched her go, then gazed around the room. It was much as he remembered it from the time he'd sat here with Marcus LeBlanc, nearly six standard years earlier. The light of Alpha Centauri A was even streaming in through the tall windows at about the same afternoon angle. But this was Nova Terra's spring, and the light wasn't the same dismal winter grayness.

As before, the top brass sat at the oval table: the Joint Chiefs and Ynaathar. Their staffers sat behind them, backs toward the wall. Trevayne was so close behind MacGregor that she was almost within the magic circle that shimmered-invisibly, to the uninitiated-around the table. Sanders sighed and took his own place, well back from Ynaathar.

In accordance with ritual, everyone rose as Kthaara entered-even Ynaathar, who technically outranked him. To Sanders, who hadn't seen him in a long while, the signs of Orion aging were unmistakable: the gait had grown too stiff to be called a prowl, and the fur too silvery to be called black.

"As some of you are aware," Kthaara began after the formalities were concluded, "I had hoped Fangs Presssssscottt and Zhaarnak would be present for this conference. Unfortunately, they are still en route from Shanak, where they have been consulting with Lord Khiniak. However, they have sent a dispatch ahead. It raises an issue which I would like to place at the head of our agenda."

He paused for a moment, then glanced sharply at Admiral Curtis Treadman and Fang Haairdaahn'usaihk, the senior permanent Terran and Orion members of the Joint Strategy Board. Neither of them seemed particularly pleased to find themselves the focus of his attention, but they returned his gaze steadly, and he gave a small Orion smile before he turned back to his colleagues.

"Fang Presssssscottt and Fang Zhaarnak have both informed me that they completely share Lord Khiniak's conclusions and his recommendations. In particular, Fang Presssssscottt's despatch emphasizes his belief that Lord Khiniak is entirely correct to fear that the Bahgs realize that we now know the location of their entry warp point and are making preparations to receive any attack from Shanak. I realize-" he glanced once more at Treadman and Haairdaahn "-that the consensus here at Centauri remains that the Bahgs do not know we have pinpointed their warp point. Further, I am aware that there is no hard evidence to prove or disprove the possibility, and I am familiar-as are we all-with the analyses of their dispositions in Shanak which argue that they do not.

"I am, as always, impressed by the thoroughness and energy with which the Strategy Board and its analysts have examined this entire question, and we are all painfully well aware that trying to determine how the Bahgs 'think' is . . .  problematical, at best. Nonetheless, I am also impressed by the arguments Fang Presssssscottt and Fang Zhaarnak have presented. As Fang Presssssscottt points out, while it is essential that we do not allow ourselves to be misled by imputing our own thoughts and motivations to the Bahgs, it is equally essential that we do not simply conclude that they are completely inscrutable and unknowable. He agrees with the Strategy Board that it is best to rely on analysis of hard data rather than upon an evaluation of enemy intentions, but he points out that the data must be considered from all angles. And alien as the Bahgs have proven themselves, they face essentially the same physical and material constraints we do.

"He therefore respectfully suggests that the Joint Chiefs reconsider the timetable for Third Fleet and accede to Lord Khiniak's request that we bring forward the date of his attack from Shanak. Would anyone care to comment?"

It was obvious how Kthaara himself felt on the matter, Sanders decided. And it was clever of him to emphasize Prescott's position, since it neatly undercut at least some of the impression that he was pushing a purely Orion perspective. Having watched Prescott and Zhaarnak operate, the lieutenant felt certain the vilkshatha brothers had deliberately drafted their recommendations in a way which gave precedence to the human partner's views, as well, in order to help Kthaara do exactly what he just had. But that didn't necessarily mean the decision was going to sail smoothly to a preordained rubber-stamp conclusion, and Fleet Speaker Noraku gave the basso rumble that was the equivalent of a human clearing his throat for attention.

Over the years, the Gorm had more and more emerged as the voice of caution on the Joint Chiefs. He'd also proven more and more willing to stake out positions independent of Orion ones. Indeed, there were rumors that Noraku had been the main advocate within the JCS for the Strategy Board's view of the position in Shanak, and Sanders sensed the tension which suddenly focused upon the fleet speaker.

"I have, of course, reviewed the despatches from Admiral Prescott and Fang Zhaarnak." As always, Noraku's tone was measured and thoughtful, and he cocked his head as if to consider Kthaara's expression. "I share the Strategy Board's view that it is best to err on the side of caution in analyzing the Bugs' intentions. Certainly we have all discovered that it's wiser to limit ourselves to analyses which depend upon known physical deployments and the capabilities those deployments and the enemy's known strength make possible rather than attempting to predict what they may do in a given situation. This has been my view in regard to the war in general and, especially, in respect to Shanak and Third Fleet."

Sanders carefully hid a frown of disappointment he was much too junior to go around showing in such senior company. Noraku had the definite sound of a being laying the groundwork to disagree with the Chief of the Joint Chiefs, and the lieutenant suspected it was a mistake. He had a lively respect for both Raymond Prescott and Zhaarnak'telmassa, and he felt certain Marcus LeBlanc would have supported them if he'd been present.

"Nonetheless," Noraku went on after a moment in exactly the same tone, "in this instance, I believe I must agree with Lord Khiniak, Admiral Prescott, and Fang Zhaarnak." Sanders managed not to blink in astonishment, and even from his distant position, something in the massive Gorm's body language suggested that the fleet speaker was rather enjoying the reaction he'd just drawn. Even Kthaara seemed surprised, but Noraku allowed no indication of amusement to color his voice or his manner as he continued.

"It's always wise to consider the viewpoint of the actual commander on the spot," he rumbled, "and Lord Khiniak's arguments have been, I believe, both cogent and persistent. This is not a sudden 'inspired guess' on his part, but rather the product of long and careful consideration. As for Admiral Prescott and Fang Zhaarnak, their reputations obviously speak for them. They are aggressive and bold, true, but they're also thinkers who have, I believe, demonstrated that they've come as close as anyone can to divining the essential principles which guide the Bugs' strategy. I am, therefore, disposed to support the recommendation that Third Fleet's operational schedule be advanced as per Lord Khiniak's request."

 There was a moment of complete silence as the Gorm finished delivering his bombshell and then sat back in his saddlelike "chair" with an air of imperturbability which Sanders, at least, found distinctly irritating. But then Kthaara shook himself and turned his head to look at each of the other members of the JCS in turn, with one ear cocked in the Orion equivalent of a raised eyebrow. No one said a word, although it seemed to Sanders that MacGregor was having a hard time not grinning broadly.

"Very well," Kthaara said after a moment in a tone of calm finality. "It would appear we are agreed. I will have Lord Khiniak's orders prepared and dispatched. And now, let us turn to the original subject of this meeting: the timetable for Eighth Fleet's attack on Home Hive Four."

At once, Sanders perceived a change in the room's atmosphere. The debate on Lord Khiniak's request had aroused no great acrimony, but now the discussion was entering territory in which positions had been staked out and were bristling with emotional defenses. Looking at Ynaathar's back, Sanders could see it stiffen-the First Fang could sense it too. So could Robalii Rikka and Aileen Sommers, sitting close to him, and Noraku cleared his throat once more.

"I understand, of course, the desirability of eliminating Home Hive Four," the fleet speaker said. "And I also understand that it lies beyond Anderson Four's second warp point, judging from Eighth Fleet's analysis of the wreckage in that system. But the fact remains that we have no idea how many systems lie between Anderson Four and Home Hive Four. We would be going in blind."

"Perhaps not altogether, Fleet Speaker," Kthaara said. He turned to Ynaathar. "First Fang, would you like to respond?"

"Yes, I would, Lord Talphon. As would Warmaster Rikka. He has a particular stake in this, as he will now explain."

The Crucian shifted his folded wings back and forth slightly, drawing breath. His words reached his listeners through their translators, in their various native languages.

"Now that Lieutenant Sanders has supplied us with your intelligence data on the technological characteristics that identify the different Home Hives, we've been able to compare them with our own databases. The results are unambiguous: the Demon forces fighting the Star Union have all come from Home Hive Four."

There was a stir around the table. This was news to everyone but Kthaara and a few others.

"Well and good," Noraku's deeply reverberating voice replied. "But I wonder, Warmaster, if you may be allowing that discovery to prejudice your judgment. No offense intended-"

"None taken," Rikka interjected.

"-but you may be predisposed to favor aggressive action against what you now know to be the particular Bug system that has been your people's nemesis. And, at any rate, how does this relate to the problem of determining Home Hive Four's location?"

"Cub Saaanderzz," said Ynaathar. "If you please. . . ."

Sanders stood and walked to the controls at the far end of the table from Kthaara. An immaterial warp line diagram appeared above the gleaming tabletop. It showed Alpha Centauri at the upper left corner, with the Anderson Chain extending below it to Anderson Four, whence a branching warp line led to a system designated Bug-21 under the new system, beyond which a broken string-light straggled out to the right, into the unknown. From Anderson One, another series of system-icons linked by string-lights grew out to the right: the warp chain Rikka had followed from the Star Union to Alpha Centauri.

Using a light-pencil, Sanders indicated the second system of that chain.

"As you will recall, ladies and gentlemen," he began, "Warmaster Rikka's forces encountered stiff fighting here, in Bug-25, on their way to Alpha Centauri. The Bugs withdrew essentially intact, however, proving that the system has a closed warp point-which, unfortunately, wasn't located." He touched the controls, and Bug-25 sprouted another of the dashed string-lights, pointing downward.

"A dissssturrrrbing datummmm," Admiral Thaarzhaan fluted.

"Indubitably," Rikka admitted. "However, I left a force there to watch for any Demon incursions and, hopefully, follow them to the closed warp point. Lieutenant Sanders, please continue."

"Yes, Warmaster. Our analysis of the data on the Bug ships involved in that fight confirms, to no one's surprise, that they came from Home Hive Four." Sanders gestured vaguely at the blank area of the display, toward which the two broken lines pointed from different directions. Here there be dragons, he thought, recalling the unexplored areas of Old Terra's ancient maps. "But, more to the point, certain individual Bug ships that fought Warmaster Rikka in Bug-25 turned up later in Anderson Four."

"Can you be certain of that?" rumbled Noraku.

"Yes, Fleet Speaker. Comparison of Warmaster Rikka's data with First Fang Ynaathar's leaves no room for doubt. They were the same ships. And the elapsed time between their two appearances was short enough to suggest that the warp chain they followed from Bug-25 through Home Hive Four to Bug-21 can't be a very long one."

"In other words," Ynaathar took up the thread, "there cannot be many warp transits between Anderson Four and Home Hive Four. It is my personal belief that there are only two, that Home Hive Four lies just beyond Bug-21."

"You're asking us to stake a great deal on your 'personal belief,' First Fang." Noraku's tone wasn't truculent, but it held profound skepticism. "Even assuming you're correct, we have no up-to-date intelligence concerning what you would have to face in Bug-21. After all, you haven't been probing it with RD2s recently."

"Truth, Fleet Speaker. We have refrained from doing so in order to lull the Bahgs into a false sense of security. However, we did some probing in the immediate aftermath of the fighting in Aaahnnderrssson Four, so we can speak with some confidence on the warp point defenses. These consist of eighty heavy cruisers of the Danger and Derringer classes, twenty Estoc-class suicide-rider light cruisers, thirty-two thousand patterns of mines, and slightly over eleven thousand deep-space buoys of various configurations."

Thaarzhaan stirred, with a rustle of feathers, on the framework that served his species as a chair. To anyone familiar with the Ophiuchi, as Sanders was, his ambivalence was blatantly obvious.