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

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

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

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

Or have they?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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