It had been obvious to Sanders from conversations with Uaaria on the voyage out that she and Chung had an exceptionally close working relationship. The fact that Uaaria clearly regarded Chung as a friend, as well as a colleague, hadn't been lost on the lieutenant either. Yet for all of that, he hadn't quite been prepared for the way in which the two of them fitted together. Uaaria was the imagination of the partnership. She possessed the ability to think "outside the boxes" to a degree Sanders had never seen in anyone else, except, perhaps, Marcus LeBlanc himself. Chung was less intuitive, but he compensated with a logical, deductive approach and an exhaustive ability to research and pull the salient facts out of any analysis. He was the one who went out and found the data that didn't fit the conventional interpretation. Once he had it, Uaaria was the one who played with the pieces until she produced a hypothesis where they did fit. And once she had, Chung was her sounding board, perfectly prepared to shoot holes in her reasoning-and to have holes shot in his own, in return-until they produced a theory no one else could perforate.
Both of them also possessed the ability to accept criticism without taking it as a personal attack, and to offer it in the same way. That, Sanders had already discovered, was considerably rarer than simple brilliance, and he rather suspected it was that quality, more even than their shared passion for puzzle solving, which made them so effective. And the odd thing was, that even though it had taken the most horrible war in galactic history to bring the two of them together, it was obvious that both of them were having an enormous amount of fun working together.
At the moment, however, "fun" was in short supply.
"We knew you had suffered severe casualties, Aaamosssss," Uaaria said quietly, her eloquent ears half-flattened in dismay. She fidgeted with the glass on the table before her. Like many Orions, she'd developed a pronounced taste for Terran bourbon. Chung himself preferred wine, but he'd been able to fix Sanders up with the sort of nice blended scotch that a mere lieutenant would have had problems affording. Now Uaaria took a sip, and her whiskers quivered in an Orion grimace. "Severe, yes. That much we knew, but we had not realized they were that severe. And it is perhaps as well that Lord Telmasa did not know how desperate the situation here truly was before we reached AP-4."
"They were heavy, all right," Chung sighed, which, Sanders reflected, was one of the more substantial understatements he'd heard recently. Eight monitors, eleven superdreadnoughts, nine assault and fleet carriers, fourteen battlecruisers, and eighteen hundred fighters-not to mention virtually every gunboat TF 71 had possessed-certainly ought to qualify as "heavy" in anyone's book.
"On the other hand," Chung went on, straightening his shoulders like someone determined to look on the bright side, "even losses that heavy were an amazingly low price for what the Admiral managed to pull off. An entire home hive system, plus the damage we did to their mobile forces. If our original estimates-and Admiral LeBlanc's," he added, with a nod to Sanders, "-are accurate, then they only have three home hives left. And we shot them up in AP-5 at least as badly as they did us."
"Indeed," Uaaria agreed. TF 72's fighters had been responsible for the final pursuit of the fleeing Bugs, and she actually had better loss and damage totals than Chung did. "Our figures are not yet definitive, but if our fighter pilots' initial claims stand up, then, combined with what your own farshatok accomplished before we arrived, the Bahgs lost at least a third of their total strength before they could escape. Most of those who did manage to retire through the warp point were damaged in varying degrees, as well."
"That, unfortunately, is also true of Task Force 71," Chung observed wryly, then quirked a smile. "Still, our repairs are already underway, and the replacement fighters you brought along should let us fill practically all our surviving carrier capacity. And to be honest, the most satisfying damage we've done the Bugs is the insight we've obtained into the strategic situation. We've pinpointed the closed warp point here in AP-5, we know that warp point is the terminus of the chain between Home Hive One and AP-5, and we know approximately how long it took the Bugs to get to AP-5 from Home Hive One. Assuming average in-system real-space distances between warp points, we're probably looking at a maximum of five star systems, and probably less."
"Knowing Fang Presssssscottt and Lord Telmasa, I believe we may feel confident that they will soon be taking advantage of that knowledge," Uaaria agreed with a soft, hungry purr of agreement and touched the defargo honor dirk at her side. Every KON officer carried one of them, but the way in which her clawed hand caressed its hilt reminded Sanders that "spook" or not, Uaaria'salath-ahn was an Orion, and for just a moment, he felt a flicker of what might almost have been pity for any enemy besides the Bugs.
"From the kinds of questions the Admiral's been asking, I'd say you've got that one right," Chung agreed. "But in the meantime . . ."
He flipped the keyboard of his personal terminal up out of the tabletop and brought it on-line. He tapped a few keys, and a hologram appeared above the table. It showed a rough, hypothetical schematic of the local warp lines when it first came up, Sanders noted. Obviously, Chung had been putting in a little work of his own on the strategic possibilities, but he cleared that quickly and brought up an index of report headings.
"Since our guest," he grinned at Uaaria and then nodded at Sanders, "has a homework assignment from the Admiral, I thought it would be only kind of us to help him pull together his term paper. And since we have a lot of information to collate, it's probably time we got started."
At that very moment, in the far more palatial quarters the Terran Federation Navy had seen fit to assign to the admirals who commanded its fleets, Raymond Prescott and Zhaarnak'telmasa had pretty much finished catching one another up on their own recent experiences. Prescott had discarded his uniform tunic, kicked off his boots, and tipped back his chair while he nursed a bottle of dark, Bavarian-style beer from the planet Freidrichshaven. Zhaarnak, who had once been as fond of bourbon as any Orion, had obviously been corrupted by his contact with Kthaara'zarthan. Unlike Uaaria's glass, the one in his hand contained vodka. The only thing that Prescott wasn't completely sure about was whether his vilkshatha brother was drinking it because he actually liked it, or because it was Lord Talphon's beverage of choice. Given Zhaarnak's immense respect for Kthaara, either was possible.
"And so I managed to arrive in time after all, despite all that GFGHQ's quartermasters could do to prevent it," Zhaarnak observed with unmistakable relief.
"Yes, you did," Prescott agreed in the Tongue of Tongues. "I will not pretend that I would not have preferred to see you sooner, but things worked out quite well in the end, I thought."
"As always, you demonstrate your gift for understatement."
"A modest talent," Prescott said with a small smile. Then he finished off his beer, set the empty bottle on the table, and leaned forward, with a more intent expression.
"Now that you're here, though," he went on in Standard English, "I think it's time to move on to considering what we do next."
"Raaymmonnd," Zhaarnak began in a tone of unaccustomed caution, "Task Force 71 is in no condition to-"
"Don't worry. I have no intention of charging off before our repairs are completed and the dust from the reorganization of our strikegroups has settled."
"From which I am to infer that you do intend to charge off as soon as repairs are completed?"