Yet there remained an enormous difference between the ability of allies to fight in cooperation, however close, and the ability to switch the ultimate command authority of a fleet back and forth across species lines without any friction at all. In fact, Prescott had come to the conclusion that Sixth Fleet's rotating command structure probably wouldn't have worked at all if it hadn't been headed by Zhaarnak'telmasa and himself-or, at least, by two beings who shared their relationship or something equivalent to it.

"I was not speaking of us so much as of you." Zhaarnak's response to his original observation pulled Prescott back up out of his thoughts. "I can stay out here with this task force, and Force Leader Shaaldaar with his. But you are needed back on Xanadu. There are too many details which require the Fleet commander's personal attention, and you could exercise overall supervision of these exercises from there as well as from here."

Prescott shook his head.

"At the moment, Xanadu is five light-hours away. I couldn't exercise on-scene command from there."

"Do you really need to?"

"Yes. And I'm not talking about the exercises."

"You mean-?"

"We know it's coming, Zhaarnak."

They both knew what "it" was.

Not long after their meeting with Uaaria and Chung, reports from second generation recon drones sent through the Home Hive Three warp point had laid to rest any doubts they might have cherished about whether Sixth Fleet's departure had been tracked. It was now clear, beyond any possibility of self-deception, that the Bugs knew the location of the closed warp point through which death had come to Home Hive Three's worlds. For now they were tractoring their orbital weapons platforms there from Home Hive Three's other warp points, and positioning clouds of mines and armed deep space buoys to support them. The next incursion through that warp point would be far less pleasant than the last.

Prescott and Zhaarnak had taken a calculated risk when they'd lingered in Home Hive Three to annihilate the disoriented Bug mobile forces even at the possible cost of giving away the warp point's location, but that kind of choice was what admirals were paid to make. The vilkshatha brothers had earned their salaries. And afterwards, they'd viewed the recon drones' reports with equanimity. Having made their decision, they were prepared to accept its consequences. To have been spared the need to face those consequences would have been sheer luck. And, as a wise man had noted centuries before, luck is like government. We can't get along without it, but only a fool relies on it.

Neither Prescott nor Zhaarnak was a fool, and so neither was unduly disturbed by the Bugs' fortification of their end of the Home Hive Three warp connection. What was disturbing was the large, fresh mobile fleet the Bugs were steadily amassing behind those static defenses.

"All right," Zhaarnak conceded, "we both know that an attack on this system is inevitable. But not necessarily during the course of these exercises! You cannot stay out here permanently, you know."

"I know. But all indications from the RD2s are that it's coming soon."

"If so, what of it? We have allowed for this possibility all along. And you cannot say we have not prepared for it."

Zhaarnak gestured at something outside the range of his com pickup-probably, Prescott guessed, an auxiliary plot like his own, displaying TF 63 as a cloud of color-coded lights swarming in stately procession around the violet circle of the warp point.

Sixth Fleet's third task force hadn't joined the other two in the scorching of Home Hive three for the excellent reason that it didn't include a single vessel that could move under its own power. Instead, Vice Admiral Alex Mordechai commanded orbital fortresses-fifty-seven of them, the smallest as big as a superdreadnought and the largest even bigger than the Bug monitors. Untrained eyes might have looked at the arrangement of those icons in the sphere and seen chaos. But Prescott recognized the product of careful planning rooted in well-developed tactical doctrine.

Interstellar travel was possible only via warp transit, and only one ship at a time could safely perform such transit, lest multiple ones irritate the gods of physics by trying to materialize in overlapping volumes of space. So it had always been a truism of interstellar war that the defender of a known warp point knew exactly where attacking ships had to appear . . . one at a time. In the face of such an advantage, many people-disproportionately represented, it often seemed, in the fields of politics and journalism-were at a loss to understand how any warp point assault could possibly succeed except through the defenders' incompetence. To be fair, a similar attitude hadn't been unknown among military officers in the early days-especially given the momentary disorientation that overtook both minds and instruments after the profoundly unnatural experience of warp transit. With beam-weapon-armed ships or fortresses stationed right on top of the warp point, the befuddled attackers would emerge one by one into a ravening hell of directed-energy fire. If missile-armed vessels were available for supporting bombardment from longer ranges, so much the better. The pre-space expression "make the rubble bounce" wasn't apropos to the environment, but it nevertheless came to mind.

Things hadn't quite worked out that way, for the lovely picture had run aground on certain hard realities. One was that, while the defender knew where the attack would come, he had no way of knowing when it would come. Another was that no military organization could keep all its units permanently at the highest state of alert. Taken together, those facts meant that attackers might appear at any time, without warning and in unanticipated strength, to pour their own point-blank energy fire into surprised defenders. Nor had it proven possible to clog the mouth of a warp point with mines; the grav surge and tidal forces associated with the warp phenomenon made it impossible to keep the things on station directly atop it. The space around a point could be-and was-covered with lethal concentrations of the things, backed up by independently deployed energy weapon platforms, but any mine or platform left directly on top of an open warp point was inevitably sucked into it and destroyed. So although it was possible to severely constrain an attacker's freedom of maneuver, the defender was seldom able to deny him at least some space in which to deploy his fleet as its units arrived.

And then, with the passage of time, had come what the TFN designated the SBMHAWK: the Strategic Bombardment Homing All the Way Killer-a carrier pod that was a small robotic spacecraft, capable of transiting a warp point only to belch forth three to five strategic bombardment missiles programmed to home in on defending ship types. Because they were throwaway craft, the carrier pods could and did make mass simultaneous transits, accepting a certain percentage of losses as the price of smothering a warp point's defenders with sheer numbers of missiles. With such a bombardment to precede it, the prospect of a warp point assault had become as nerve racking for the defender as for the attacker-arguably more so, because the attacker at least knew in advance when he was going in, and could prepare himself for the probability of death.

But eventually the march of technology had provided the defense with what it had most conspicuously lacked: warning of the attack. The second-generation recon drone had been designed to allow covert warp point survey work by robotic proxy-an excellent idea in a universe that held Bugs. But it also had a more directly military use. With its advanced stealth features, it could probe through a known warp point undetected and report back on any mobilization that portended an attack . . . just as Sixth Fleet's RD2s had been doing.