The Fleet's starships continued towards rendezvous with one another. As expected, the Enemy's assault force had successfully blasted its way through the protective minefields and reduced the warp point fortresses to rubble. The original warp point CSP had also been effectively destroyed, although it had managed to inflict serious damage before its own extermination. Now the massed power of the reserve gunboats and shuttles was hurtling towards the intruders, and soon the recombined Mobile Force would be able to bring its full strength to bear in support of the kamikazes. And-

Then everything changed as the familiar trans-warp point bombardment exploded out of the second warp point.

There was no way for the Fleet to know whether the staggered attack sequence was, in fact, a failure in coordination or something which the Enemy had planned in advance. It was certainly possible that his irritating warp-capable sensor drones had detected the Fleet's redeployment and that he was responding to it, whether he'd planned to do so or not.

But whatever he'd planned, he would still find his second attack force being ground away by the kamikazes just as his first had been. Even if the second force managed to fight its way into the system, the Fleet had a significant head start. By the time he could complete transit in his usual cautious way and reorganize, his starships-many of which would undoubtedly be slowed by combat damage from the kamikazes-would be too far behind to overtake the reunited Mobile Force before it engaged the first attack force and-

Wait!

No! This was contrary to the Enemy's normal procedure!

The gunboats and small craft left to guard the warp point shuddered in torment under the lash of the SBMHAWKs which came thundering through it. The CAM2s were particularly deadly to the gunboats, slashing out in lethal shoals of destruction no point defense system could stop. The antimatter-loaded shuttles were too small, their emissions signatures too weak, to be locked up by the sprint-mode capital missiles, but there were far fewer of them to begin with.

Gunboat squadron datanets crumbled under the threshing machine fury of the bombardment, and the searing wavefront of plasma and EMP rolled outward, drowning sensor systems and fire control in waves of interference. Even as the gunboats and small craft reeled under the assault, AMBAMPs came vomiting through the warp point, spawning antimatter submunitions that fanned out like dragonseed. The deadly spores infiltrated the minefields, then detonated in a crashing wave that seared the mines from the face of the universe. And to complete the deadly preparation, still more SBMHAWKs hurled still more CAM2s at the fortresses. Their point defense was no more effective than the gunboats' had been, and the tidal wave of warheads destroyed nine of them outright and reduced the eleven survivors to battered, half-destroyed wrecks.

For the brief moments that lethal bombardment required, the environs of the warp point blazed as brilliantly as any star. Yet vicious as the explosions were, and brutally though the fortresses had been maimed, the CSP survived. It was shaken, confused-not even Bugs could take that sort of sudden, overwhelming explosion of violence without being shaken-but it was still there, and it had always known an attack just like this one was possible. And so, however disorganized it might be, every unit of it knew precisely what tactical doctrine required of it.

The gunboats-which had gone to evasive maneuvers the instant they detected the first SBMHAWKs-turned back towards the warp point, riding through the rapidly diffusing clouds of plasma while they prepared to concentrate vengefully upon the long chain of invading starships which must follow on the heels of the bombardment. The kamikaze shuttles, on the other hand, actually backed off the warp point just a bit. Their tactical doctrine required them to observe which starships required that they expend themselves against them, and which the gunboats could destroy with conventional FRAM attacks. Besides, their proper function was to destroy monitors and superdreadnoughts, not to waste themselves upon lesser craft.

But tactical doctrine abruptly became a weak reed in the face of Task Force 71's modification of its own doctrine.

Fifty-two battlecruisers and twelve fleet carriers flashed into existence.

Two of the carriers and six of the battlecruisers flashed out of existence, just as abruptly and far more violently, as they interpenetrated. But the other fifty-six Allied ships survived, and their abrupt, mass appearance took the already confused defenders completely by surprise. The Bug CSP which had expected to hurl itself upon one individual target after another, in rapid succession, suddenly found itself forced to pause, however briefly, to allocate targets to its units.

And that delay, brief as it was, was fatal.

The surviving carriers made transit in a tight, hairpin curve which carried them directly back into the warp point, remaining in real-space only long enough to launch over three hundred fighters. Then they disappeared back to the far side of the warp point, as quickly as they'd come-so quickly, indeed, that the kamikazes were able to catch only two of them, and failed to destroy even those.

Unlike the fighter platforms, the battlecruisers had come to stay. The Bugs had long since realized that the Allies' carriers were far more valuable strategic targets than any main combatant starship. As always, they'd concentrated their efforts on attempting to catch the carriers, but in this instance the carriers simply weren't available as targets long enough. And by the time the defenders realized the carriers were going to escape them, the battlecruisers' fire control systems and point defense had been given time to stabilize.

The CSP found itself confronted not by the isolated, transit-befuddled targets it had anticipated. Instead, it confronted intact battlegroups, with every weapon and defensive system fully on-line. Even the capital missile-armed battlecruisers, the long-range snipers who normally had no business at all in the short-range slaughter of a warp point assault, were deadly foes against gunboats. They'd made transit with full external ordnance racks of CAM2s, and they salvoed all of them in a devastating wave of destruction. Then they went to rapid fire with their internal launchers, hurling a steady stream of additional CAM2s into the gunboats' teeth.

Their energy-armed consorts, like the TFN's Guerriere class, with their heavy broadsides of force beams and hetlasers backed up by AFHAWK-firing standard missile launchers, left the gunboats to the BCRs and turned their own fury on the kamikaze shuttles. The kamikazes were as surprised as the gunboats, and the fire which ripped into them was devastating. A handful of them got through; the majority were dry leaves trapped in the heart of the furnace.

And even while the battlecruisers poured their devastating fire into the harrowed ranks of the CSP, the strikegroups added their own fury to the inferno. Half of them were armed to kill gunboats and shuttles, and they piled into the CSP with deadly effect. The remainder were armed with maximum loads of FRAMs, and they ignored gunboats and shuttles alike to swarm over the air-leaking wrecks of the surviving fortresses. A single pass was more than sufficient to reduce those fortresses to clouds of expanding vapor, interspersed here and there with droplets of alloy which had merely been liquified. Over a third of the squadrons tasked to hit the fortresses were forced to abort their attack runs because they no longer had targets.