"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.