Clearly, the first survey flotilla had found something.

But what?

The question was unimportant from the standpoint of this system's defenders-sixty battlecruisers, thirty-three of them configured to carry ten gunboats each. Their role had suddenly narrowed to inflicting as many casualties as possible before their own unavoidable cessation of existence.

TG 71.1's leading elements hadn't yet detected the Bug ships-doubtless cloaked, and hanging back from the warp point-when a wave of more than a hundred and sixty gunboats came sweeping down on them. In the gunboats' wake came assault shuttles that everyone knew to be antimatter-laden kamikazes.

But that response had been anticipated. Even as the Terran and Ophiuchi-piloted fighters and Gorm gunboats launched, courier drones sped back through the warp point into AP-4.

On Riva y Silva's flag bridge, Raymond Prescott read the report and nodded grimly. He turned to his com screen and met the eyes of Force Leader Shaaldaar, where the latter waited on his own flag bridge aboard Task Group 71.1's flagship, the Gorm monitor Jhujj.

"It appears you are correct," Shaaldaar rumbled. "If there really were Bug superdreadnoughts here, they would be actively involved in the warp point defense, seeking to take as many of our major combatants with them as possible."

Prescott gave only a grunt of acknowledgment, then turned and nodded to Anthea Mandagalla. The chief of staff nodded in return, and she and Bichet began to transmit already prepared orders.

Serried ranks of SBMHAWK carrier pods powered up and streaked through the warp point. They transited in massed formations, ignoring their interpenetration losses with cybernetic fatalism, and rushed on, past the capital ships of the first waves, past even the fighters and gunboats those capital ships had launched. Then they seemed-or would have seemed, in extreme slow motion-to disintegrate in the process of releasing clouds of high-tech spores . . . but spores that carried death, not life. Those missiles sped outward, seeking out the approaching Bug gunboats, homing in with a persistence that defeated any but the most rigorous maneuvers. And such maneuvers left the Bugs in less-than-optimum formation to meet the fighters and Gorm gunboats that followed.

Not a single defending gunboat got through. The assault shuttles did . . . to fly into a blizzard of second generation anti-fighter missiles from the capital ships. Four of them worked their way through a momentary lull in that death storm of AFHAWK2s and converged on GSNS Chekanahama. The Gorm point defense gunners exploded three of them at point-blank range. But the fourth smashed head-on into the superdreadnought with a cargo of antimatter that no mobile construct could absorb. There were no survivors.

The sanitized medium of a courier drone reported the cataclysm to Prescott, and he stole a glance at the com screen. Shaaldaar's broad nose-the most alien feature of the disturbingly human face-flared in a Gorm expression the Terran had learned to read only too well. But that indication of grief was the only one the force leader allowed to show through the stoicism of one paying the price synklomus demanded. Still, a moment passed before he turned to face Prescott from his own screen and spoke evenly.

"Well, now we know the approximate location of their ships."

"Yes." It had been the other part of the message. The gunboat attack on the leading formations of ships had been anticipated, so those ships' sensors had been prepared to trace its origin. Now a vague, pink-stippled area appeared in Prescott's plot, denoting the area where the gunboats had appeared. The cloaked bug ships which had launched them must be lurking somewhere in its midst, and he nodded at it. "Now we know where to send our fighter sweep."

"Remember, they must surely have held back gunboat reserves," Shaaldaar cautioned, with the matter-of-fact informality, even to a fleet commander, which was so much a part of the Gorm personality.

"No doubt. But we're agreed that they don't have anything bigger than battlecruisers, and I doubt if they have many of those. They must appreciate the hopelessness of their position in the system, so I imagine they committed almost all their gunboats to that first strike. Our fighters should be able to deal with whatever's left."

Shaaldaar didn't look entirely happy, but he made no protest.

As a general rule, the TFN preferred to keep the same group of fighter squadrons associated with a given carrier. But the formation of Seventh Fleet had involved a certain amount of reshuffling. Strikefighter Squadron 94 had been temporarily transferred from Wyvern to Basilisk, a new ship with a new strikegroup, which, it was felt, needed the leavening of some veterans of the Zephrain/Home Hive Three campaign.

Thus it was that Irma Sanchez found herself a participant in Operation Retribution, after one of her infrequent furloughs home.

She spared a thought for the all too brief time she'd had with Lydochka, almost unrecognizable at age eight. She was a big girl now, and it had been almost too hard to say goodbye. Then she brought herself back to the present, and looked around at the vast emptiness, lit only by the tiny white flame of AP-5's primary, shining across 5.2 light-hours. She was part of the vast screen of fighters that swept ahead of Admiral Prescott's advancing battle-line, curving in to wrap around targets that appeared only fitfully on Irma's scope, flickering in out of existence as the sensors of the recon fighters whose downloaded readings she was seeing struggled to overcome the Bugs' cloaking ECM.

"Heads up, people." Bruno Togliatti was a full commander now-as Irma was a full lieutenant, for fighter pilots who survived got promoted fast-but he was still in a lieutenant commander's billet as CO of VF-94. After this tour, he was due to move up to command of a carrier strikegroup. Irma wasn't particularly looking forward to that.

"We're not getting much on our displays yet," Togliatti went on, "but there's enough for the computers to have allocated targets. Stand by." Irma's scope went to tactical schematic as Captain Quincy, Seventh Fleet's farshathkhanaak assigned each of the ghostly battlecruisers ahead to one or more of his strikegroups while Togliatti's voice continued in her earphones. "We should be picking up visuals soon."

But before they could see the targets-the cloaking ECM operated on various wavelengths, but not that of visible light-they saw something else: the flashes up ahead that marked the graves of dying decoy missiles. Other squadrons, coming behind them, had launched those decoys, each of which simulated an F-4 to draw and disperse the Bug defensive fire. VF-94 and the other front line squadrons were fitted with ship-gutting primary packs.

Then there were flashes to port and starboard. Fighters were starting to die as well.

But then Irma began to glimpse the targets, glinting in the bright F-class starshine, growing in a way that gave a sense of breathtaking motion that hadn't existed against the backdrop of the distant stars as the fighters raced towards them.

"All right, people," Togliatti's voice rasped in her headset. "We're going in."

Raymond Prescott looked up from the last report, and his face wore a look of cold satisfaction.

"Fighter trap" suicide-riders had claimed thirty of the fighters, but few others had been lost. Indeed, Seventh Fleet's total losses so far, aside from Chekanahama, amounted to only sixty-three fighters and seven Gorm gunboats. In exchange, the fighters had savaged the Bug battlecruisers with their primary packs and hetlasers. With engine rooms reduced to twisted wreckage by the primary beams, those battlecruisers had been unable to outrun the Gorm superdreadnoughts-as fast as any other race's undamaged battlecruisers-which had pulled into standoff missile range and blown them apart.