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

Now, she used it again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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