"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' RD 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.