The paralysis of that realization threatened to freeze him in place, but then he sucked in a deep breath and pulled himself together.

No, there's no way to warn Shaaldaar in time. But there's something else we can do!

"Commodore Landrum!" he snapped.

The farshathkhanaak hurried over. That wasn't Captain Stephen Landrum's official title, of course, but except in official paperwork, nobody ever called the staff officer specializing in fighter ops anything else.

"Steve," Prescott said rapidly, "alert all fighter squadron commanders that we're changing the plan. We'll drop back to our earlier tactical projections of the absolute minimum strength needed to deal with the space station fortresses. All other fighter assets will be reassigned to the surface strike. It won't be perfect, but if Amos is right about the gunboat strength down there, then our only option is to go with a partial Shiva Option . . . and pray that Home Hive Three wasn't a fluke."

Landrum's jaw dropped, and his eyes darted to the countdown clock. It showed less than two minutes remaining before launch, and Prescott hurried on.

"I know it's bound to generate confusion. That can't be helped. I also know there's no time to assign the additional fighters to specific surface targets. They'll just have to go after targets of opportunity-concentrating on population centers. Any questions?"

Landrum had plenty of those, but he knew there was no time to ask them.

"No, Sir. I'll get those orders out at once."

He departed at a run, and Prescott turned back to the holo display. The scale expanded to show the approaching Allied forces, and presently the tiny icons of fighters began to go out.

The admiral felt someone at his elbow and turned his head. It was Chung, who'd been one of the stronger advocates of going with a Shiva approach from the very beginning, and Prescott cocked an inviting eyebrow at him.

"So it looks like we get to try the Shiva Option after all, Sir," the intelligence officer said quietly.

"Not under exactly the sort of controlled test circumstances I might have preferred," Prescott agreed with a crooked smile which held no humor at all.

"No, Sir. I can see that. Still," the spook's nostrils flared as he inhaled, and he turned his head to meet his admiral's eyes, "given what happened to SF 62, I can't think of a better laboratory for it."

"Are you sure there aren't any more last-minute changes in plan, Skipper?" Irma Sanchez inquired as Planet I's atmosphere began to whistle around her fighter, far below the orbital fortresses VF-94 had originally been slated to attack. "After all, we've still got almost two whole minutes to the launch point."

At the moment, no one seemed to be shooting at their squadron, but not everyone could have made that claim. One of the other squadrons in their own strikegroup had been virtually wiped out by the point defense crews of a Bug OWP which had gotten its systems on-line just a little faster than any of its fellows. And the gunboats and fighter squadrons tasked to suppress the rest of the fixed fortifications were taking ever heavier fire as the Bugs fought to respond to the attack. These defenders had been given a little longer to respond than the orbital defenders of Home Hive Three, and Irma suspected that they'd been at a somewhat higher level of readiness even before they'd picked up Seventh Fleet. Whether that was true or not, Planet I's high orbitals had become a seething furnace of flashing warheads, failing shields, and exploding fighters and gunboats, which made her own momentary immunity feel brittle and profoundly unnatural.

"Can the chatter!" Togliatti snapped. "And get your targeting solutions locked in, everybody. We're going in now."

Irma complied. For all her griping, she wasn't averse to going after the kind of target they'd been told to seek out just before they'd been launched into this cluster fuck.

The whistle of the F-4's passage through atmosphere grew louder as she crossed the terminator and entered the night side, and it didn't take long to acquire her target visually. The Bug cities weren't a nighttime blaze of light like human ones. Still, Bugs did see in the visible-light wavelengths, and presumably they did like to be able to do things after dark. A galaxy of rather dim stars grew ahead of her.

The city was vast, as Bug cities tended to be. A mountain range upswelling of oddly massive towers and bulging domes that rose like some disturbing alloy of toadstools and stalagmites. Irma had seen imagery of the cities on Home Hive Three-or, at least, of what those cities once had looked like-from the operational debriefs after that attack. These cyclopean ramparts of Hell looked exactly the same, and her mind pictured the chittering, scuttling throngs swarming like maggots in their bowels while the flash and glare of the warheads hammering at the orbital defenses flickered on the outer walls like distant lightning.

The city seemed huge, indestructible and invulnerable. But the FRAM she fired into its heart was a weapon designed for deep-space combat, using the inconceivable energies of matter-antimatter annihilation to produce a blast that was terrifying even when there was no atmosphere to carry the shock wave and thermal pulse. Its designers, surely, had never imagined it being set for a ground burst on a Terra-type planet.

Irma's fighter had shot ahead at Mach 5, streaking over the city and beyond it, before the event-"explosion" was a banality-occurred. Her view-aft simply shut down, and she hauled her nose up, seeking altitude and the refuge of vacuum ahead of the expanding sphere of Hell.

Then she spared a glance to port, and another to starboard. She'd been part of the first wave to hit the surface, but others had followed. It was as if a wall of inconceivable fireballs marched across the planet's nightside, leaving burned-out lifelessness behind it-a landscape lit by firestorms and the glow of lava oozing up through the splits and cracks in the planet's skin.

She turned her eyes from the flaming planet and looked ahead. The fighter was continuing to climb, and the stars appeared.

"How're the others doing against the forts, Skip?" she asked, and there was a pause before Togliatti responded

"They're mopping them up now. The Bugs seem to have stopped resisting effectively."

Force Leader Shaaldaar was confused.

As was always likely to be the case in an operation in which forces separated by interplanetary distances were expected to coordinate, Seventh Fleet's timing had been off. Not by very much-this was a superbly trained force which had rehearsed exhaustively in preparation for the attack-but by enough to be significant. His own task force had been forced to deviate slightly from its planned course by a Bug freighter which had chosen to bumble through exactly the wrong volume of space at precisely the wrong time. Making up the lost time had required him to use rather more drive power than he would have liked, and he suspected that the extra power had allowed a Bug sensor platform to pick him up early. At any rate, he'd been forced to launch his attack slightly later than Prescott's and from slightly further out because the emissions signatures of the OWPs protecting his target had suddenly begun to shift and change as they'd abruptly began rushing to a higher readiness state.

Because of that, Shaaldaar's intelligence people had been given somewhat less opportunity to gather and analyze data on the planetary infrastructure than Amos Chung had been granted. They were still trying to deduce the reason for the extraordinarily high number of ground bases when, suddenly, his sensor crews began reporting antimatter ground bursts on Planet I.