Even Mukerji had a momentary inkling. But then, banishing it, came the comforting recollection of his exalted political patronage. The thought puffed him up visibly.

"Yes, Admiral! I remind you that I speak for the civilian leadership of the government we serve. And I solemnly assure you that those leaders would view with grave, yes, grave misgivings any further operations in this system at the present time. There could not fail to be adverse career repercussions for everyone here. Everyone, Admiral."

Prescott leaned forward, and his eyes narrowed into slits in a very uncharacteristic way.

"Is that what's uppermost in your mind, Admiral Mukerji? 'Career repercussions'?"

"Of course not, Admiral!" Mukerji said, instantly and just a bit too heartily. "Naturally, my first concern is for the safety of this task force. Thanks to your sagacity, we've destroyed two of the three inhabited planets in exchange for acceptable losses. Surely it's time to . . . 'quit while we're ahead' is, I believe, the expression."

"My first concern, Admiral Mukerji, is the completion of our mission-which is to implement General Directive Eighteen throughout the system."

Sweat began to pop out on Mukerji. His eyes were wild as he sought desperately for the right combination of words to convince Prescott that he must not, could not, send the task force-including Riva y Silva, with Mukerji's own personal body aboard her-against the remaining planet and its fully prepared armada of gunboats, every one of them laden with antimatter and crewed by beings to whom the very concept of individual survival was foreign.

"Admiral, I assure you that what you've accomplished so far is all that anyone could expect-all that the government will expect! You've already won a great victory. Why jeopardize it for mere personal vengeance?"

"That will do!" Prescott's voice wasn't extraordinarily loud; it just sounded that way because it came from a man who never shouted at his subordinates. Everyone jumped, and Mukerji recoiled backwards. "I will not leave an untouched Bug-inhabited planet in this system to serve as a base for them to open a new front along the Prescott Chain, simply to spare you the unaccustomed sensation of personal danger!"

"Admiral, when we return to the Federation I will protest this outrageous treatment to higher authority. Very high authority!"

"I have no doubt of that, Admiral Mukerji. But for now, you're under my command, and we're in a war zone. For the remainder of this conference, you will not speak unless I give you leave. If you display any insubordination, I will place you under close arrest. If you endanger this command by cowardice in the face of the enemy, I will have you summarily shot! Do I make myself clear?"

Mukerji swallowed and nodded jerkily. Prescott's flinty eyes impaled him for perhaps five more seconds, and then the admiral drew a deep breath, released it slowly, and addressed the rest of his stunned staff in a normal voice.

"Commodore Bichet will now outline the tactical dispositions we'll adopt when we rendezvous with Force Leader Shaaldaar. It's going to involve reorganizing and rearming our fighters, and deploying most of our SBMHAWK4s under shipboard control. . . ."

The Bug gunboats seemed noticeably sluggish and uncertain as they moved outward from Planet II-probably residual aftereffects of what they'd undergone when Planets I and III died. But that hangover was beginning to wear off by the time they overtook TF 71 and began to close in.

All seventeen hundred and eight of the task force's remaining fighters met them head-on.

Once, in the days of reaction drives, it had been confidently asserted that there could be no such thing as a "dogfight" in space. At most, antagonists might exchange fire briefly as they flashed past each other at enormous relative velocities, or else they might match orbits and settle into a slugging match that would end the instant one side scored a thermonuclear hit. Reactionless drives, with their inertial compensators, had changed all that. And now the yellow sun of Home Hive One shone on the vastest dogfight in history.

The reactionless drive wasn't magic, however. The fighters couldn't instantaneously reverse direction, or any such fantasy. And the Bugs weren't interested in killing fighters-they only wanted to break through and get their real targets, the capital ships. Inevitably, quite a few of them did. . . .

"Let me send out my gunboats." Shaaldaar's face in the com screen wore a pleading look. "The crews have volunteered to go."

I don't doubt that for a second, Raymond Prescott thought. This task force is their immediate lomus at present. But deeply though he understood, he shook his head.

"I appreciate their willingness, but we need to conserve them. We'll stick with the original plan."

Shaaldaar looked for just a moment as if he were going to argue, but then he gave a curt human-style nod and turned away from his pickup. Prescott drew a deep breath, then turned away from his own com station to watch the sanitary violence in his plot while the quiet, clipped voices of communications and plotting officers and ratings rustled in the background of a cathedral-like hush.

He knew what Shaaldaar had been thinking, but he and Jacques Bichet had planned carefully for this moment, and as the icons of the incoming gunboats swept closer and closer to the far slower starships they sought to kill, that plan unfolded.

The gunboats were a ragged mass as their survivors broke past the intercepting strikefighters. Hundreds of them had already been blown out of space, and their squadron datanets were so riven and broken that it was impossible really to tell whether or not they were still suffering the lingering aftereffects of the Shiva Option. But they were Bugs. Neither disorganization nor slaughter could turn them from their mission, and they continued to close in a pulsating swarm of what were effectively manned missiles.

But as they closed, they suffered successive decimations.

First came the SBMs. The strategic bombardment missiles were the longest-ranged shipboard weapons in space, and these were fired from SBMHAWK pods, which were themselves deployed the better part of ten light-seconds out from the fleet to give them even more standoff range. The pods seemed to disintegrate as their cargoes of death streaked off towards the oncoming Bugs, and Seventh Fleet's plots glittered with the icons of outgoing missiles.

SBMs were less accurate at extreme range than capital missiles were, and they were relatively easy targets for point defense to intercept. But they also had half again as much reach, and there were hundreds of them as they slammed into the gunboats at a range far in excess of any weapon with which the Bugs might have replied. Huge fireballs blazed at the heart of the formation as warheads designed to kill starships expended themselves upon mere gunboats, and clouds of plasma and vaporized alloy, mixed with scattered atoms of what had once been organic matter trailed behind the stream of kamikazes.

And then it was the capital missiles' turn.

Shorter-ranged than the SBMs, the capital missiles carried warheads that were just as powerful, and they used the internal volume freed up by their smaller drive systems to pack in sophisticated onboard ECM, which made them extremely difficult targets for the missile defenses. A far higher percentage of them got through, and the furnace consuming the Bugs roared hotter.

Still the gunboats came on, and as they closed through the extended-range defenses they were met by standard missiles in sprint mode. Point defense was completely useless against sprint-mode fire, for there was insufficient flight time for missile defenses to track the incoming birds. The same velocity which made them impossible to intercept limited their own tracking time and degraded both their accuracy and their range, but they struck like unstoppable hammers from Hell, and they were backed in turn by anti-ship energy weapons, and finally by point defense laser clusters.