"I am informed," Prescott shot back, "that First Fang Ynaathar'solmaak has laid down the law to him on the subject of taking personal command of that offensive."
"Truth. Kthaara is now under direct orders from the Khan to keep his graying pelt at Alpha Centauri, where it belongs."
"I don't imagine he's very much fun to be around, just now," Prescott mused.
Murakuma ignored most of the byplay.
"I understand how he feels. I ought to be coming along with you two."
"We have been over all of that repeatedly, Vaahnesssa," Zhaarnak chided.
"Yes, yes, I know." Murakuma told herself firmly that he wasn't really being patronizing to a superior officer. But she must not have entirely succeeded in keeping her irritation out of her voice, for Prescott spoke up in his patented oil-on-the-waters tone.
"The important thing isn't who's commanding each of the two operations, but the fact that there are two of them. We've built up to the point where we can use multiple threat axes to whipsaw the Bugs with separate fleets."
"We could do so even more effectively if half our combat strength was not moldering away in systems far from the war fronts," Zhaarnak said sourly.
Neither human responded immediately. It was a sore point. Early in the war, when the nature of the threat was finally recognized by the politicians, Bettina Wister and others of her ilk-not all of them human-had created an atmosphere in which disproportionately large forces had to be kept tied down in static defensive positions. It might not have made military sense, but it had been a political necessity.
For the Federation, it still was.
The Khanate of Orion had responded in similar fashion earlier in the war, and with even greater justification, following the Kliean Atrocity's four billion dead. But the Orions were a warrior people, and the Khan had long since begun systematically reducing the nodal response forces he'd scattered about his domain in the horrifying wake of Kliean. The Federation had not, and for a depressingly simple reason. If the relatively sensible people now running the Federation didn't take care to soothe the popular jitters, they'd be out, and the Liberal-Progressives would be in. The potential consequences of that, at this particular historical juncture, didn't bear thinking about.
Zhaarnak read his companions' thoughts, and the chance to rub it in tempted him beyond his character.
"I believe a Human military historian of the last pre-space century once observed that a democratic government will always put home defense first."
Prescott and Murakuma avoided the slit-pupiled Orion eyes. Zhaarnak's words made uncomfortable hearing, however much one might privately agree with them.
"Still and all," Prescott insisted, "the fact remains that we can do it anyway. And if there's anything to our spooks' latest speculation, it's entirely possible that the Bugs have already done their worst."
"What speculation?" Murakuma asked.
"That's right, you wouldn't have heard about it yet. Well, Uaaria and Chung-with some input from Lieutenant Sanders, before he returned to Alpha Centauri-have had a chance to study the rubble of the Bug infrastructure in Home Hives One and Three. It's enabled them to refine their earlier conclusions. Now they're convinced that they've figured out the secret of the mammoth Bug fleets we faced at the beginning of the war."
"I'm all ears," said Murakuma, who had better reason than anyone else to remember those desperate early days.
"They claim those fleets must have been the product of a century of stockpiling. The Bugs were evidently thinking in terms of a short, extremely high-intensity war, so they built up an enormous reserve fleet to support their attritional tactics."
"But . . . a war with whom?" Murakuma demanded in perplexity. "They didn't even know we existed. Surely not even Bugs would make that kind of effort against some hypothetical enemy they might someday run into!"
"The possibility of such a threat must have been a very real one to them," Zhaarnak said in a measured voice. "Surely they could see that the existence of the aliens they had subjugated implied the existence of other aliens elsewhere-perhaps more advanced ones."
A silence descended, and Zhaarnak looked uncomfortable in the face of the ghost he'd summoned up. The problem of those subjugated-what a mild word!-races was something about which none of them liked to talk or even think. But Zhaarnak's discovery of Franos had brought it back to trouble their sleep. And in the path of Kthaara's projected offensive lay Harnah, where the Alliance had first seen the fate that awaited races conquered by the Bugs.
Murakuma had never been to Harnah, and although she sometimes thought it might be cowardly of her, she never intended to go there. Especially not after Justin. Most of the millions of civilians she'd lost there had at least gone to their horrible deaths with merciful quickness, but she still remembered the handful of brutally traumatized, filthy, broken-eyed survivors who'd seen everyone else devoured. Strangers. Friends . . . family . . .
Her dreams were hideous enough without seeing an entire species which had been turned into intelligent meat animals for generations.
Prescott had been there, and the imagery Second Fleet's orbital reconnaissance platforms had brought back had been just as terrible as the scenes he was certain Murakuma was visualizing. Especially the footage of Bugs actually feeding.
That was why he had never been to visit Franos.
"We don't know that for certain, Vanessa," he said now, hastening to haul the conversation back on course. "Maybe Bugs would invest such an effort against a purely hypothetical threat. Then again . . ." He shook his head. "No, never mind."
"What?" Murakuma prompted.
"Well . . . Have you considered the possibility that they've already met another enemy besides us? An enemy they expect to meet again?"
"That would account for their stockpiling," Zhaarnak mused, after a moment's silence.
"It would, but we're speculating beyond our knowledge," Murakuma said firmly. "And I've got to get back aboard Li in time to depart for Bug-10."
"That's right," Prescott agreed. "We've let ourselves talk altogether too much shop when we were supposed to be having a stirrup cup, as it were."
They raised their drinks.
"Here's to-" Murakuma began, then hesitated. "I was about to toast Operation Ivan, but that's just the name for Kthaara's show. What are you calling Seventh Fleet's end of the operation?"
"Actually," Prescott admitted, "we haven't given it a name. Let's just call it the return to Pesthouse."
Three glasses clinked together.
Theoretical physicists continued to ridicule the very concept of simultaneity as applied across interstellar distances. As a practical matter, however, every bridge in the TFN had a display-which no one had ever succeeded in proving wrong-which showed the current local time at Greenwich, England, Old Terra. So Raymond Prescott knew when the clock in that remote place struck 10:30 A.M., August second, 2368. And, knowing how reliable Keith al-Salah was, he knew that at that precise instant the SBMHAWK bombardment was going in from Home Hive One to Pesthouse.
He turned from the digital clock to the holo display of the Pesthouse System, as though to remind himself of why that bombardment was commencing from Home Hive One and not from here in Bug-05, where he and Zhaarnak waited with the overwhelming bulk of Seventh Fleet. It was a display uncomplicated by planets, for Pesthouse was a blue giant. Such massive stars generally had many warp points, so there might well be more than the four they knew about. But they'd been able to draw some conclusions from the layout of those four, and the location of the Bug mobile force.