"It's from one of the engineers overseeing the work in the Galactic Eye. He says the Unifieds sent battleships to destroy the Mogat Fleet," Warshaw said.

"So much for harvesting broadcast engines," he said, planting his arms along the edges of the table to prop himself up.

Franks's face turned pale as he looked from Warshaw to me. "Maybe we should send our ships back . . ."

"Three ships," Warshaw said. "We have three self-broadcasting ships."

"Did we get all of our men out?" Thorne asked.

"No," answered Warshaw. He turned to me, and said, "We had eight thousand men out there."

On the chart table, another wave of anomalies appeared. Five ships broadcasted in this time, giving the U.A. a total of twelve ships in the area. They had twelve ships, we had five hundred. They would not attack.

"Just a few more days . . . all we needed was a few more days." Warshaw groaned in a soft voice, still leaning on the table for support. With his huge muscles and tired posture, he looked like a Hollywood hero resting after a long battle. "Not even another week. How the h.e.l.l did they know?"

"The same way Freeman knew how to find me," I said.

"Fahey?" Warshaw asked. "I told you you should have shot that traitor b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He told them everything from the prison camp, didn't he?"

"Anything and everything he knew," I said. "He probably wanted us to arrest him."

"Wanted us to arrest him?" Franks asked.

"He's a lot safer down there than he would be up here with us," I said.

"Speck!" Warshaw slammed his fist on the chart table. Then we all went quiet as five more anomalies appeared. Now the U.A. Navy was up to seventeen ships. It didn't really matter if they sent their whole specking fleet, we had ten times as many ships as they did. They might have taken the Galactic Central Fleet from us, but they could not touch us here.

A small herd of officers had gathered around the chart table. Not only did Warshaw and Franks have aides, but it appeared that their aides had aides as well. It takes a lot of officers to control a fleet, and the Scutum-Crux Fleet was the largest fleet in the galaxy.

Six more anomalies appeared on the table, and suddenly it looked like the U.A. Navy might really attack. With twenty-three battleships gathered along one of our flanks, it no longer looked as if they had simply come to send a message. Most of those ships were still three million miles away, too great a distance for us to exchange shots; but it suddenly looked like they'd come for a fight.

We all shared the same thought-the Unified Authority could not possibly win a fight out here. They had fewer than forty self-broadcasting ships, and there were no fighter carriers in their self-broadcasting fleet. If it came to a fight, we could win just using our carriers. They had to know that. Brocius had to know that, and that was what scared me. If he had come to fight, he knew something we didn't know.

Ten more anomalies appeared. They had thirty-three ships in a single sector, the vast majority of their self-broadcasting fleet.

"What are they doing?" Warshaw asked. "That's almost everything they have."

Franks looked over at an aide, and snapped, "Get me a.n.a.lysis on those anomalies, now!"

Warshaw said what we all were hoping, "They're bluffing."

"No, they aren't," said Thorne.

Forgetting that he had threatened to have Thorne thrown off the bridge a few minutes earlier, Warshaw now tried to argue with him. "They're not going to send their fleet against us; we outnumber them ten-to-one. They'd be crazy."

But they were not trying to scare us, and they were not crazy. Fifteen more anomalies appeared on the chart table, giving them forty-eight ships, more self-broadcasting capital ships than they were supposed to have in their entire fleet.

An officer approached Franks with the first a.n.a.lysis of anomalies. He looked like he was choking on words, as he said, "We were not able to identify several of the anomalies, sir."

Twelve more anomalies bloomed on the chart table.

"Sixty ships," Franks whispered.

"They're sending in the new fleet," Warshaw said.

Ice-cold fingers seemed to have wrapped themselves around my vitals. Somewhere out there, in the dark clarity of s.p.a.ce, some of those ships would have shining shields wrapped tightly around their hulls like a luminous skin. We had bested three of those ships in an ambush, but this time it would be a head-on collision.

On the chart table, the U.A. ships did not move. They seemed to have come all the way across the galaxy just to park.

"Those crazy sp.e.c.k.e.rs really came to fight," Franks announced. "They're ma.s.sing a specking attack." Far from panicking, he sounded excited. This was an empirical experience for him; he was about to put his education to the test. Using signal officers to relay his orders around the fleet, Franks began reeling off a series of commands. I did not recognize much of what he said, but I watched the results on the chart table.

Our outlying ships slid into place. The loose configuration of the fleet tightened into a fist.

"He's circling the wagons," Thorne whispered to me.

"Sounds like a good call," I said.

"Not against a foe with superior firepower," Thorne said. "You want to spread out. We have more ships than they do. We should take a more aggressive stance and hit them from every angle."

"The way we fight this battle is not your concern, Admiral Thorne," Warshaw warned. "As far as I am concerned, you are still an officer of the Unified Authority."

Franks gave the order to scramble the fighters and sent them to the front of the fleet. On the table, the simulation showed our self-broadcasting battleships approaching the fleet. The curtain of fighters split, allowing the battleships in, then closed in behind them.

"We better keep those babies tucked away," Warshaw said.

Franks looked up at Warshaw and nodded.

Fifteen more anomalies appeared. Three million miles away, the Unified Authority was preparing to attack.

"Seventy-five ships?" Franks sounded amazed. "How many ships do you have, Admiral Brocius?" he hummed. "How many are you willing to risk?"

Thorne stared down at the table, taking in every nuance and movement. He was like a blind man reading Braille. To me, the various blips and dots meant nothing. To him, they were ships with specific speeds and weapons capabilities.

Warshaw stepped between me and the chart table. I moved out from behind him; but as I stepped toward the table, he said, "Excuse me, General, this is a naval operation."

I shuffled back, aware that Warshaw really could have me removed from the bridge. Thorne wisely followed my lead. I floated over to him, and asked, "Where are our self-broadcasting ships?"

Thorne leaned forward slightly and pointed.

I would not have recognized them without his help. To me, they looked like little dashes in a field of dots and dashes.

As I looked at the symbols representing our self-broadcasting ships, I noticed they had stopped beside a small, red triangle. "Is that us?" I whispered to Thorne.

He nodded.

Looking at the tight formation on the chart table, I had a premonition and started edging my way off the bridge.

Ten more anomalies appeared. So the Unified Authority had eight-five ships. One of Franks's aides had a new round of a.n.a.lysis. "Sir, we can't be sure, but those ships appear to be fighter carriers."

"Fighter carriers? How the h.e.l.l can they possibly have fighter carriers? It's not possible; there are no self-broadcasting fighter carriers." Franks coughed out the words as if they had barbs attached to them. He did not sound scared, but his confidence had dwindled.

Three more anomalies appeared about a hundred thousand miles away.

"What do they have now, a d.a.m.n floating planet?" Warshaw asked.

"Explorers," the aide answered.

"Explorers? Why send explorers out here? What the h.e.l.l do they want with explorers?" Franks asked.

We have three self-broadcasting ships, and they have three explorers, I thought to myself, and an evil memory came to mind. I remembered the sinking of the Doctrinaire, the most indestructible juggernaut of our time, and I ran from the bridge.

"Where the speck do you think you are going?" Warshaw yelled behind me.

I ignored him and ran to the observation deck.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE.

I looked out of the viewport and saw miles of s.p.a.ce and ships. With so many ships hovering in such close proximity, the Scutum-Crux Fleet would appear as a single block on most navigation screens. The captains had lit the navigation lights along the hulls of their ships as visual beacons for fighter pilots to see.

From the observation deck, I could see hundreds of ships forming what looked like a mosaic of sparkling, monochrome tiles against the velvet backdrop of s.p.a.ce. The glow of sunlight radiating from Terraneau shone up on the gray underbellies of our ships. With their wedge-shaped hulls, the ships of the SC Fleet lined up like the teeth on a saw.

Slowly pushing through the flotilla, our self-broadcasting battleships had diamond-shaped hulls and bloated bows. Their shape and charcoal gray hues bore no resemblance to the ships around them. They looked obsolete-military icons rescued from a different era as they hid themselves in a pod of naval ships. I did not see the self-broadcasters themselves, just the runner lights blinking along the lengths of their hulls.

From where I stood, I could see the ma.s.sive bow of a nearby fighter carrier. The s.p.a.ce ahead of us was filled with battleships. Beyond that, I caught a glimpse of several fighters, Phantoms, weaving in and out among the larger ships. The fighters looked like motes swirling in a dark wind.

"No! No! No!" I muttered, as I looked at the rows of ships standing as stationary as toys in a chest. It was just like Thorne said, only worse. Even Thorne could not possibly have realized what those self-broadcasting explorers would do in another moment.

I hit the intercom on the table and called down to the Marine compound. "Thomer, are your men loaded up?" I yelled.

"We're ready. How many do you want?" he asked.

"Every available man. Every available transport."

"Just the Kamehameha?"

"Fleet-wide," I said.

Knowing that Warshaw would never listen to me, I reluctantly went back to the bridge. As I entered, he glared up at me for a moment, and muttered, "What are you doing here?"

"You need to scramble your ships," I said.

Thinking I meant his fighters, Franks said, "We already launched." He did not understand, and I could not explain myself quickly enough. Time was slipping away. The Unified Authority did not need to cross the three-million-mile no-man's-zone to attack our self-broadcasting ships.

I fumbled for words, then blurted out, "Break formation. You can't give them a stationary target." Realizing too late that he would not understand, I added, "If the self-broadcasting ships stay in one place, Brocius will broadcast his ships into them."

"What are you talking about?" Warshaw sounded impatient. Standing off in a corner, even Admiral Thorne looked irritated by my babbling.

I took a deep breath to calm myself. "That was what happened to the Doctrinaire," I said. The Mogats had destroyed the Doctrinaire with a single shot by broadcasting a ship right into the center of it.

"He doesn't know what he's talking about," Warshaw said. "Get him off my bridge now."

I lost control and yelled, "Listen, a.s.shole!"

"Warshaw." Admiral Thorne barely had to raise his voice to take control of the conversation; his voice was as cold and as bracing as a slap across the face. Franks, Warshaw, and I all turned to look at him, all of us giving in to native feelings of inferiority.

But Thorne was too late. The chart table displayed the event in miniature-tiny silver blooms appeared as one of the Unified Authority explorer ships broadcasted out. At that same moment, a bloom appeared in our ranks.

Explosions make no sound in s.p.a.ce. We did not see or hear anything on the bridge of the Kamehameha as three battleships and thousands of lives died in a cataclysm as deadly as an atomic explosion.

A new set of alarms sounded throughout the ship, reporting the attack.

"What the speck?" Franks asked.

Warshaw, the consummate officer-engineer, turned to an aide, and yelled, "Damage report! I need a damage report!"

"They destroyed our self-broadcasting ships," I said, not even bothering to look at the chart table to be sure.

"But that's not . . ." Franks began.

"Admiral, thirty of their ships have broadcasted to the other side of Terraneau," one of the aides said.

"We lost three ships," another officer reported. He had not yet identified which ships were gone. Franks did not need the aide to tell him which ships-he already knew.

I could see it in Franks's face. He was beaten. He no longer wanted to fight now that his strategy had fallen apart. He looked at me, then he turned to Admiral Thorne. He needed someone to tell him what he should do next.

"Harris, you better get your Marines down to that planet," Admiral Thorne said. He had new color in his face. He had the energetic, excited eyes of a young officer preparing for a fight.

Warshaw watched the conversation, but remained silent. Maybe he finally realized he was not made to command a fleet. As damage reports filtered in, Warshaw left the bridge. I did not need to ask to know he was headed to Engineering.

Apparently seeing the same thing that Thorne saw, Franks turned to me, and asked, "Harris, how fast can you load up your Marines?"

"They're already on the transports," I said, speaking more to Thorne than Franks, but facing them both. We were ready, but we might already have been too late. By the time we launched, the U.A. ships would be on us.

"They're launching transports," an aide said.

"You better get going, Harris," Thorne said. He hunched over the chart table, reading details out of tiny points of light. "We'll give you whatever cover we can . . ." He did not finish the sentence, but I knew what he was trying to say. With all of those battleships out there, we were in for a b.u.mpy ride.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO.