"Consider yourself well served, Alvaro," Tischendorf had finished. "Ensign Fahzi was the best available, and whatever spooks arrived are ships you wouldn't otherwise have. If he'd lost half of them, you'd still be better off than if they hadn't been sent. And if they hadn't been sent, they'd be meaningless. Because if you don't severely blunt the Wyzhnyny advance at Eridani-and I stress severely-we're lost. All of us."

Soong had listened with chagrin. He'd popped his cork-rare for him-and the indignation that sprayed out had turned to rue. He didn't counter that Indi Command should have held back a qualified officer from the 1st Indi Battle Wing, then transferred him back to it on arrival. Fahzi had done the job. And historically, war was notorious for erroneous planning assumptions, pressure situations, decisions made under severe stress, and the need to use unqualified personnel. In fact, Soong told himself, a perspective review of this war would probably discover fewer and less critical foul-ups than in most historical wars. Because regardless of its other shortages, War House was rich in resourceful ingenuity. Not to mention long centuries of contingency planning and simulation testing.

And no one in War House had joined the military for prestige or benefits.

Now Soong's fleet was fully gathered. Since Shakti, it hadn't grown much in manned fighting ships: his losses had been made up, but he had only a single new battle wing. War House had decided to concentrate on drone production; he had nearly twice as many maces as before.

And now spooks, drones of quite another type. With the 220 from Sol, he totalled 404. Named "Ball Spooks" (for a fabled 21st century gamer and writer), they carried opaque-image generators which could disguise them as battleships, maces or cruisers. Spooks had long been part of science-fiction gaming, and a War House budget proposal for their development had been rejected by the government centuries earlier. Then the Wyzhnyny had come, and industrial and research resources became the limiting factors, with maces and improved shield generators the Admiralty's top development priorities.

And properly so. Maces could kill enemy warships, layered shields could save ships and lives, and definitive research and development had already been done on them. But there was a role for sacrificial lambs-spook ships-that looked enough like lions to fool the enemy and occupy his efforts. So a project was also begun, small and exploratory at first, then more intensive.

When a spook-field generator had been successfully demonstrated, production began, because spooks could be produced quickly in quantities. Prospector hulls would serve, and could be mass-produced cheaply.

Prospector hulls had limited capacity, of course. And while spooks needed no crew facilities, they required lots of hardware, particularly generators of several kinds. Spook-field generators not only required hull space, they made serious energy demands, because ordinary holos were not enough. And of course there could be no skimping on strange-space generators; without them they couldn't travel. But limits could be set for other equipment. A spook without an energy shield would not fool enemy sensors, but their shield generators could be single-layer models, and needn't produce modified topologies.

As for "weapons"… Wyzhnyny shipsminds would be dealing with great volumes of urgent sensory intake, thus spook "war beams" needed only to fluouresce a battleship's shield convincingly. They required far less hull space, and drew far less power than a cruiser's guns, for example. And they carried no torpedoes at all.

Soong had gotten the necessary performance and operating specs in advance, and Charley Gordon had considered them in reprogramming the battlecomps. The Wyzhnyny would face a whole new set of Commonwealth Fleet tactics; the Commos had been sim drilling them for days. Now the Altai's shipsmind uploaded them to the newly arrived spooks from the Sol System.

Extrapolating, shipsmind had provided a probabilistic window of Wyzhnyny arrival. It left only four days for steel drills, then Soong would have to order ready formations, and wait. Wait for the final and decisive fight. If they lost, snooze ships on Terra, Indi Prime, Luneburger's World and Masada, there to load liberation forces, would instead embark women, children, and chosen specialists. None of whom knew yet the great and terrible secret. While cargo ships-so-called colony resettlement ships-loaded selected colonization equipment. They would rendezvous, then seek a new home, half a dozen hyperspace years distant.

But only a tiny fraction of one percent of humankind could be taken. Thus the iron-bound secrecy. The plan was too terrible to become known.

As for the rest of humankind-their future depended on the Battle of Eridani. If it was lost, they were lost. There'd be no opportunity, nor any meaningful force, to make a stand elsewhere.

In reviewing simdrills and coordinating steel drills, Alvaro Soong had occasionally spoken by radio with all his wing commanders. And on his secure, private channel, had twice spoken privately with Carmen Apraxin-DaCosta. Neither had mentioned marriage. This was neither the time nor place to discuss it.

Less than four seconds after his armada emerged, the raucous blare of an alarm horn resounded through the Wyzhnyny flagship. Grand Admiral Tualurog tensed. It was what he'd been hoping for, and he reacted with a mixture of eagerness and anxiety. His command screen showed several sources of technically produced radiation. The main source, very powerful, was the system's second planet, and there were numerous other sources farther outsystem-within an asteroid zone, and in the vicinity of a jovian giant. Their strength and distribution was far larger than in any system encountered since they'd left the Empire. Clearly a core world system-but hardly the crown system. The radio output wasn't that intense.

Also insystem, in the near fringe, was a source array that could only be a space fleet larger than any the armada had encountered before. Though still much smaller than his own. So. Not the Commonwealth's main fleet then. It was simply there to bleed him. That was the human strategy; had been all along.

That moment was pivotal, and even Charley had not foreseen it. For a moment, Tualurog considered generating hyperspace again and speeding onward. Find the human crown system, where their main fleet would be waiting. Defeat it and behead the enemy. But he rejected the idea almost at once. Because the fleet here would undoubtedly pursue him, and with his power advantage, it was better to deal with it now, by itself, rather than later, while engaged with their main fleet.

He voiced an order to shipsmind, and the armada, not greatly dispersed during the approach jump, began forming battle formations.

Alvaro Soong examined the pattern of emergence loci. A few yards away, Charley Gordon sat relaxed at his battle master's station, absorbing the displays on his screen, and no doubt much that was not on the screen. Calmly he began to give orders to shipsmind, the code words measured. Later they'd flow from him quick as pulses from a blaster. And this time he would not wait for the Wyzhnyny to start the fight.