On the main plot, the spherical area of space around the warp point, inside the innermost shell, now resembled a stroboscopic ball of swarming, flashing lights. And through that maelstrom, the first monitors were advancing ponderously towards the fortresses-fewer fortresses than anyone had expected to be there at this stage of the battle

"My fighters are fully engaged," Mordechai reported, as Dnepr and her consorts drew into position to reinforce the decimated fortresses and a conversation without time lags became possible. "But the ready squadrons were configured to engage ships and gunboats. None of them are armed with gun packs. Most of the BS6Vs don't even have the packs in stores!"

Prescott's face tightened in understanding. Against targets as small, fragile, and nimble as small craft, "guns" were far and away the most efficient close-in weapon. They weren't actually anything a pre-space human would have considered a "gun," of course, but they were the closest thing twenty-fourth-century humanity had, and their clusters of individually powered flechettelike projectiles covered a far greater volume than the focused pulse of any energy weapon.

"They'll just have to use their internal lasers, Alex," Prescott told the fortress commander grimly. "And at least my fighters are joining in, as well."

"Thank God for that!" Mordechai's face was smoke-blackened, and behind him Prescott glimpsed a scene of desperate damage-control activity. "Are you arming the next wave with gun packs?"

Prescott hesitated some fraction of a heartbeat.

"Negative, Alex. Their battle-line's main body is bound to come through any time. I'm going to need them in the anti-ship role. They'll launch with FRAMs, not guns."

"But, Admiral-"

"Incoming!" The scream from somewhere behind Mordechai interrupted the task force commander. His head snapped around towards the shout, and . . .

. . . Prescott's com screen dissolved into a blizzard of snow, then went dark.

"Code-"

Prescott closed his eyes and waved the young com rating silent.

"I know, son," he said. "I know."

He didn't need to hear the "Code Omega" from Mordechai's command fortress. He'd seen its icon blink out of existence on the plot.

Yet he had no time to grieve, for the Bugs' final surprise appeared on the plot with soul-shaking suddenness.

By now, everyone was inured to mass simultaneous warp transits of Bug gunboats and even light cruisers, however incomprehensible the mentality behind them might be. But suddenly Raymond Prescott was back at the "Black Hole of Centauri," face-to-face with something no human being, no Orion, could ever become inured to. Not gunboats, not cruisers-superdreadnoughts.

Twenty-four of them appeared as one, lunging through the invisible hole in space between Zephrain and Home Hive Three. He watched them come, watched them pay the inevitable toll to the ferryman as five of them interpenetrated and died, and a part of him wanted to flatly deny that any living creature could embrace such a tactic.

But these living creatures could do just that, and they had. It was a smaller wave than they'd thrown through at Centauri, yet "smaller" was a purely relative term which meant nothing. Not when any navy was prepared to sacrifice so many personnel, so many megatonnes of warships, so casually.

People wonder why the Bugs have never developed the SBMHAWK. There's no technological reason for them not to have it. But the problem isn't technological. It's . . . philosophical, if the word means anything as applied to Bugs. They probably can't imagine why anyone would want to use technology to minimize casualties.

The surviving superdreadnoughts began to fire. They were using second-generation anti-mine ballistic missiles, sweeping away the minefields and the independently deployed energy weapons-and as seconds turned to minutes, the latter didn't fire back.

"Why are the IDEWs just sitting there?" Prescott demanded.

"Admiral Mordechai's fortress was the one tasked to control them," Mandagalla replied. "Admiral Traynor is shifting control now, but it takes time for the standby to gear up to order them to fire."

Something that will have to be rectified in the future, Prescott thought behind his mask of enforced calm.

"Are Force Leader Shaaldaar's second-wave fighters ready to launch?" he asked aloud.

"Yes, Sir," Bichet said. "In fact-"

"Good. Tell him to launch them."

Three minutes had ticked by before the seriously reduced volley of energy-weapon buoy fire lashed out at the Bug capital ships. But now Prescott's battle-line was moving inward, pouring in long-range missile fire to support the fighters that were already beginning to engage, and there was something odd about the fire coming to meet it.

"What's the matter with the Bugs' fire control?" the admiral asked, and Bichet looked up from his console.

"We've been able to identify the classes of those superdreadnoughts, Sir. And they don't have as many Arbalest command ships as they should for that many Archers. Their interpenetration losses must've included a couple of Arbalests."

"Thank God for that," Prescott said with feeling. About time we got a break, he added silently as he watched Shaaldaar's fighters slash in.

Irma Sanchez functioned as emotionlessly as any other component of the F-4 as she maneuvered the fighter around the flying steel mountain of death that was a Bug superdreadnought. It was only after she'd commenced her attack run in the big ship's blind zone and launched her FRAM load that she allowed herself to visualize Armand's face, and the imagined face of a certain unborn child.

Segments of the superdreadnought bulged outward in a shroud of blinding flame as the matter/antimatter explosions tore out the ship's insides. To Irma, it was as though she had thrust a knife into a Bug's guts, forearm-deep, and dug and dug. . . .

Can you feel pain, you motherfuckers? I know you can't scream, but can you hurt? I want you to hurt, and go on hurting. . . .

"Sanchez!" Lieutenant Commander Togliatti's yell ripped from her earphones. "Pull up!"

But she raked the flanks of the wounded monster with hetlaser fire before she wrenched the F-4 into a hard turn and flashed away.

The battle was stunning in its intensity, but not as long in duration as it seemed at the time. Afterwards, Prescott and Zhaarnak would freely admit that the Bugs might have broken through if they'd used all their superdreadnoughts in mass waves. But the remaining SDs and monitors began coming through the warp point in a more conventional fashion. There wasn't a single undamaged fortress in the inner shell left to receive them, but Prescott's battle-line was there. And the second wave of fighters from the BS6Vs arrived, armed with primary packs and eager to hunt monitors. After six of those titanic ships had died, the Bugs broke off the attack.

Prescott was left staring at a plot that was far less colorful than it had been. Few of the fortresses of the inner shell remained, and virtually all of those were critically damaged. The stardustlike lights of mine patterns and weapon buoys were largely gone. And Sixth Fleet had lost six superdreadnoughts, three assault carriers, two battleships, nine battlecruisers and over six hundred fighters.

But, he thought wearily, we held.

All things considered, the Fleet had had the better of the exchange. True, in addition to six monitors, forty-one superdreadnoughts had been lost. So had all ninety-three light cruisers, and over ninety-five percent of the gunboats-but they didn't count. Admittedly, the failure to penetrate to the system's inhabited planet was disappointing. Still, the probe of the defenses had yielded valuable information, which could be put to good use when the new technology currently nearing the end of its development process was operationally deployed.