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# CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO:
Cushion Shot

To Vanessa Murakuma, the 4.8 light-hour-distant dot of white brilliance that was Home Hive Two A as viewed on emergence from Warp Point One was getting to be an old . . . not "friend," certainly, but perhaps the word "acquaintance" was permissible.

In one respect, though, this transit from Orpheus 1 was different from her previous two. It was almost unopposed.

Not altogether, of course. As her probes had indicated, the Bugs had abandoned any hope of mounting a full-dress crustal defense after the losses they'd taken in starships and orbital fortresses. But they'd continued to patrol the warp point with planet-based gunboats—lots of them, many equipped with jammer packs.

But Murakuma had anticipated that. She'd employed SBMHAWKs with devastating prodigality, then sent her own gunboats from Force Leader Maahnaahrd's Task Force 62 through to deal with the survivors before allowing her starships to commence transit.

So Sixth Fleet stood in these now-familiar spaces undepleted in its starship strength: eleven monitors, seventy-one superdreadnoughts, eighteen battleships, thirty-four assault carriers, twenty-four fleet carriers, and seventy-six battlecruisers in the three primary task forces. Small Fang Meearnow's Mohrdenhau-class light carriers provided additional fighter support, and were escorted in turn by ten battlecruisers, thirty light cruisers and twenty destroyers. Also under Meearnow's command was Commodore Paul Taliaferro's Task Group 64.1: eleven Guerriere-C-class command battlecruisers, thirty-one combat tugs of the Turbine-B and Wolf 424 classes (built on battlecruiser and battleship hulls respectively), and twenty-four massive freighters, including nine of the Krupp-A-class mobile shipyards.

Murakuma smiled as she contemplated Taliaferro's command. The Bugs might well wonder what such an oddly constituted formation—all those command ships in a task group that didn't even include any other combatants—was doing amid a battle fleet. They'd have a while yet to wonder, but it would become clear in the end. Essentially, the rest of Sixth Fleet was here to protect TG 64.1 as it set up what Murakuma had had in mind when she'd quipped to her staffers—human, so most of them had understood—that "it's time for a cushion shot."

Her smile deepened as she recalled the hardcopy that rustled against her rib cage where it lay inside her tunic. Indeed, it was all she could do to avoid chuckling at Fujiko's references to a certain Marine captain—references whose disdain was exceeded only by their frequency. The message's Terran Standard date was December 9, 2369, for Fujiko had sent it from Telik just after the liberation of that tragic world. Now that the Star Union was hooked into the local interstellar communications network at the Telik-Franos warp point, that message had taken less than one full standard day—twenty-three hours and twenty-two minutes, to be precise—to reach her across the real-space light-minutes between the light-year-distant stars. It was more wonderful than Murakuma could have expressed to have her daughter so close, figuratively speaking, at last, but she didn't allow herself to dwell upon it at this particular moment. She had other things to think about, for it was now late December and Sixth Fleet was here in Home Hive Two again, for what they confidently hoped would be the last time, awaiting Third Great Fang Koraaza's Third Fleet and wondering—

"Where is Third Fleet?"

Murakuma sighed at Leroy McKenna's irritable ejaculation. This wasn't the first time she'd heard it, from the chief of staff and others as well, and she set her persona on "soothing" mode.

"Remember the time lag, Leroy. We're thirty-six light-minutes away from Warp Point Two."

"I haven't forgotten, Sir. But we've been here long enough—especially with our recon fighters deployed in the direction of Warp Point Two—to have picked up Lord Khiniak's signal, if he were here to send it."

"Communications between us and Third Fleet have been incredibly roundabout even with the ICN. Yes, the plan called for both fleets to enter this system simultaneously. But . . ." Murakuma stopped herself short of the patronizing lecture on military history Tadeoshi would probably have delivered, with emphasis on the words "Leyte Gulf." McKenna was well aware of the difficulty of coordinating widely separated forces. "If Lord Khiniak had really made transit at precisely the same time we did, it would have restored my faith in miracles! Let's give him a little longer before we start panicking."

"Aye aye, Sir," McKenna clearly wasn't happy, but just as clearly he understood the force of Murakuma's argument.

Murakuma sensed the unhappiness, but it wasn't blatant enough to merit a rebuke. Instead, she leaned close enough to speak privately.

"I know he'll come, Leroy. And so do you."

"How long do we wait, Sir?" McKenna's question might have been regarded as truculent. Murakuma knew it wasn't. The chief of staff was raising a legitimate point.

"I'll decide that. For now, we'll use the time to shake down the fleet and resolve any organizational issues that may exist. When Third Fleet appears, we'll be ready."

"Aye aye, Sir."

In the end, it took less time than Murakuma had feared before the signals of Lord Khiniak's emerging ships began to impinge on Sixth Fleet's electronic consciousness. Ignoring the excitement around her, and carefully concealing her relief, she turned to the flag bridge's system-scale holo sphere, where the green icon of Third Fleet was blinking into life at Warp Point Two, a hundred and twenty degrees counterclockwise from Warp Point One's bearing and 4.2 light-hours from the primary. The incoming data indicated that Koraaza'khiniak was encountering the same kind of limited resistance as she had, and was dealing with it in the same way. No surprise. RD2 findings and logic alike had suggested that the Bugs wouldn't try to contest the warp point. No, they'd pull back within medium-to-close range of the three inhabited planets and exact the highest possible price from any who violated those spaces.

Not that Murakuma and Koraaza had any intention of paying it. That was what Taliaferro was here for with his curiously constituted task group. And it was why the Bugs were about to watch, with whatever degree of surprise they were capable of feeling, as the two invading fleets proceeded toward their rendezvous—away from those planets.

Murakuma's eyes went to the halo of tiny lights that girdled the central sun-icon—a very wide halo, well outside the orbits of the inhabited planets. Twenty-four light-minutes was uncommonly far from a sun to find an asteroid belt; normally, a Jupiter-sized gas giant coalesced just outside the outermost limits of the liquid-water zone, gravitationally aborting planet formation just inside it and leaving a trail of planetoidal rubble to mark what would have been the orbit of an unborn world. But, as astronomers had been learning for centuries, the rules of planetography were made to be broken. The brutally massive Home Hive Two B had somehow formed at a forty light-minute orbital radius, and the result was the stream of glowing dust motes in the sphere towards which Sixth and Third Fleets were bound. When they met, Murakuma would assume overall command of the combined fleets—a truly massive array of killing machinery with the addition of Third Fleet's two hundred and forty starships.

Leroy McKenna followed the admiral's eyes and read her thoughts.

"I wonder what the Bugs will think?" he murmured.

* * *

The staggered arrival of the two Enemy forces, while somewhat unexpected, was of no material advantage to the Fleet given the decision to make no attempt to contest the outer system. Instead, the Deep Space Force was to interpose itself between the invaders and the inner planets.

Except . . . the enemy wasn't advancing toward those planets.

His unexpected behavior had been the source of much perplexity. Eventually, the indecision had been resolved, and the planet-based gunboats and small craft launched, with the first Enemy force to enter the system as their objective. But the delay had enabled the later-arriving force to approach rendezvous close enough to lend the support of its small attack craft. An unacceptable number of craft had been expended for no significant result.

Now, however, the directing intelligences of this System Which Must Be Defended had regained their accustomed equilibrium. There would be no more ill-coordinated attacks. All available gunboats and small craft would be consolidated into a single, massive strike which must surely overload the Enemy's defenses.

* * *

"And so, Great Fang Koraaza," Murakuma concluded the prearranged spiel, "pursuant to orders from the Grand Allied Joint Chiefs of Staff, I assume overall command of Third and Sixth Fleets."

"Acknowledged, Ahhdmiraaaal Muhrakhuuuuma," Koraaza'khiniak replied with equal gravity.

As a practical matter Murakuma had been exercising command throughout the battle they'd just concluded. But now her flagship Li Chien-lu and Koraaza's Kinaahsa'defarnoo had finally approached close enough to permit the little ceremony to proceed without irritating time-lags.

The disparity in sustainable speeds between the Bugs' gunboats and shuttles had—not for the first time—been a priceless gift to the Allies. And while the oncoming clouds of kamikazes had employed jammer packs lavishly, the Alliance's fighter pilots had by now worked out the tactics for dealing with them. They'd picked off every jammer they could identify from long range with third generation fighter missiles, then closed in to knife-range, slashing through those seemingly inexhaustible formations with hetlasers and gun packs, then coming around to slash again.

Eventually the Bugs had grasped that limiting their kamikaze mass's speed to that of the slower shuttles simply enabled the Allied starships to avoid being overtaken. So they'd sent the gunboats streaking ahead at their maximum velocity, leaving the shuttles to follow as best they could. But that had enabled the Allied battle-line to concentrate its tremendous wealth of defensive fire on the unsupported gunboats, burning vast numbers of them out of the plenum before they could complete their ramming runs. Still more were blown apart by the fighters that snapped at their heels.

As always, some of those multitudes had gotten through—more than enough, for Vanessa Murakuma's money. But her gaze held steady as she studied the totals of ships damaged or, in a few cases, destroyed outright. It had to be considered an acceptable loss ratio, given how few gunboats of the attack wave had made it back to their planetary bases.

The shuttles had fled back there, too. Lagging behind the gunboats, they—or, rather, whoever or whatever did their thinking for them—had seen the futility of pressing on with an independent attack on ships they'd have had difficulty overtaking in any case. So, along with a second, as yet uncommitted wave of gunboats, they'd retired to the planets which they knew to be the Allies' objectives, evidently concluding that they need only wait for the Allied combined fleets to enter their effective attack envelope, as they must do sooner or later in order to reach those objectives.

It was, Murakuma reflected, a perfectly logical conclusion on their part. It just happened to be wrong.

"So, Ahhhdmiraal," Koraaza's voice from the com screen brought her back to the present, "matters are now in the doubtless capable hands of your Small Claw Tahlivver."

Murakuma chuckled inwardly. Koraaza, without the spelling to mislead him, came closer to pronouncing Paul Taliaferro's surname accurately than most humans who didn't come from the region on Old Terra's North American continent known as Virginia.

"Indeed, Lord Khiniak—as soon as we can locate enough asteroids that meet his somewhat exacting requirements," she agreeed, and Koraaza favored her with a tooth-hidden smile.

"I, too, am not altogether unacquainted with the foibles of engineers. But we have an entire asteroid belt to choose from. Shall we proceed?"

* * *

The case for abandoning the outer system to the Enemy had been an unexceptionable one. If the speed differential between gunboats and shuttles made it impossible to coordinate a single overwhelming attack as planned, the obvious solution was to draw all available resources of both sorts back around the Worlds Which Must Be Defended, where the Enemy must come to them and would surely be swamped by sheer numbers. Viewed in that light, there was no need for undue concern over the fact that the Enemy's carriers for their small attack craft had vanished into cloak in the outer system.

However, the Enemy's subsequent behavior had continued to refuse to conform to expectations. It was extremely difficult for the Fleet's scout craft to penetrate the dense shells of small attack craft the Enemy was maintaining about his starships. And, lacking a foothold in the asteroid belt itself, the Fleet possessed no sensor stations in position to substitute for that lack of reconnaissance with direct observation.

Still, the essential facts seemed clear enough, judging from the handful of fragmentary reports from the few gunboats which had gotten through and lived long enough to send back any data at all. In contrast to the usual pattern of events, the Enemy was preparing for a protracted campaign by constructing bases on three of the largest asteroids and six smaller ones. The defensive installations being emplaced on those asteroids were certainly consistent with the hypothesis.

* * *

"Coming up on Sledgehammer Three, Commodore."

Paul Taliaferro, sitting in the position from which he'd unceremoniously displaced the copilot, grunted something unintelligible. The pilot expected no better in the way of a response, accustomed as she'd become to the commodore's preoccupied taciturnity, so she went on piloting.

Taliaferro wasn't quite the surly misanthrope his reputation suggested. Indeed, he occasionally wished he possessed more of the social graces whose lack—in the opinion of many, including and especially his former wife—helped account for his failure to rise above the rank of commodore. He just didn't have the time for them . . . nor, to be honest, the motivation. When manipulating and reshaping the inanimate physical universe through engineering, there was generally one best way to do a thing, and that was that. It was so straightforward! None of the irritating ambiguities and irrationalities with which humans insisted on complicating their lives. Often they actually seemed to resent having the path of maximum efficiency pointed out to them as succinctly as possible. He wondered why.

It was different, though, with Admiral Murakuma. She understood! Or at least she listened with appropriate attentiveness, and with none of the unreasonable resentments that he'd always found so hard to understand. True, she sometimes smiled in a way that left him vaguely puzzled on the rare occasions when he noticed it. But she'd presented him with such an interesting problem. Even better, she'd provided him with the authority and the tools he needed to do his job, and then left him alone to do it. Bliss!

Now the asteroid they'd dubbed Sledgehammer Three was visible in the shuttle's lights, waxing to fill the viewport whose presence was the reason Taliaferro had appropriated the copilot's seat. He studied the asteroid with care, for this was his last stop on his last inspection tour of it and its two mates, and of the lesser asteroids designated Hammer One through Six.

Sledgehammer Three was a rugged sphere almost four hundred kilometers in diameter. As far back as the twentieth century, it had been recognized that above a certain minimum mass an astronomical body's own gravity would prevent it from retaining a grossly irregular shape. Only four of Sol's asteroids were above that minimum. Here in Home Hive Two's fifth orbital position, though, it was pretty clear that the unborn planet would have been a true whopper if it had succeeded in clumping together. In spite of a vastly greater radius, this asteroid belt was as dense as Sol's, and held far more giant members. The three Sledgehammers had been easy to find, the six smaller rocks for the mere Hammers effortless.

Then had come the toil of constructing the installations which Taliaferro now observed. Over a hundred robotic point-defense emplacements dotted Sledgehammer Three's wild and barren surface. Also, buried deep under the crevasses and craters, were the command datalink facilities that would enable Taliaferro's eleven Guerriere-C-class command ships to coordinate the three Sledgehammers' defensive fire. The six Hammers mounted proportionately lighter defensive works.

All of that, however, was secondary, meant only to keep these asteroids in existence long enough to fulfill their destiny. Only one engineering work on Sledgehammer Three really mattered—the one that couldn't be given a trial run.

"Get me Commander Lin," Taliaferro muttered. The pilot had barely complied before he leaned forward and snapped into the grille. "What's the word on that flaw in the pusher plate?"

"We're not certain there is one, Sir," Lin Yu-hsiang replied from his temporary command post on the surface of Sledgehammer Three. "When it comes to constructing Orion drives, we don't exactly have much experience—and having to stop what we're doing to answer questions about it doesn't exactly help!"

The pilot blanched, expecting thunderbolts. But Taliaferro actually chuckled—partly in recognition of a kindred spirit, and partly at what had become a standing joke in TG 64.1. When the name for what the task group was constructing had reached the Tabbies, they'd thought they were being honored. No one had had the heart to tell them that the name dated back to a time centuries before humanity had dreamed their race existed.

Nuclear pulse propulsion—"Project Orion"—had been a product of the twentieth century, one of many notions for liberating the infant Space Age from the dismal mathematics of chemical rocketry. Conceptually, it set some kind of record for brute-force crudity: detonate a series of nuclear explosions behind you and let them kick you forward! Naturally, it required a massive shock-absorbing plate for your vehicle's rear end. Worse, however, it had faced insurmountable political obstacles in a world understandably jittery about allowing anyone to send up spaceships packed full of what were in effect hundreds of small nuclear weapons. But for a time it had seemed to offer the best hope for reaching the outer planets and—especially after the Bussard ramscoop had come to grief on the hard facts about the interstellar medium in Sol's vicinity—the stars.

Then had come the unanticipated breakthrough into reactionless drives, and the Orion concept had gone the way of Jules Verne's giant cannon. At the same time, the idea of "dinosaur killers"—asteroids used as kinetic-energy weapons against planets—had joined reaction drives in the dustbin. It just wasn't practical to enclose an entire asteroid in a drive field. And tractoring such an object would have no effect except to rip the tractor-beam projectors out of ships that instantaneously took on velocities measured in percentages of c.

No, it couldn't be done with reactionless drives . . . but Vanessa Murakuma had wanted it done anyway. When she'd put the problem to Taliaferro, he'd automatically snorted that it was preposterous. Then he'd gone off and thought about it, to the near-exclusion of eating and sleeping. And when he'd put his solution before her, she'd backed him to the hilt, selling the idea to a skeptical Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Taliaferro's moment of amusement passed.

"I tell you what, Commander," he said. "You've got precisely as long to decide whether there's a problem—and, if there is, to fix it—as there is between now and Sledgehammer Three's scheduled ignition."

"But . . but, Commodore—"

"But me no buts, Commander. I've just finished checking out all the other asteroids, and they all report that they're ready for ignition. The first of them, Hammer Four, is due to light off in—" Taliaferro glanced at his wrist chrono "—thirteen minutes and a little less than twenty seconds. After that, there's no turning back. I'm damned if I'll stop the clock now to wait for you to get your act together!"

"Commodore, I protest!"

"Protest all you want to, Yu-hsiang—later. But right now, if I were you I'd get busy on that pusher plate. Sledgehammer Three is going to get kicked out of its orbit on schedule, and if you're still there at the time . . . well, it ought to be an interesting trip to Planet III, especially with fusion bombs going off under your ass!"

Taliaferro cut the connection while Lin was in mid-splutter, and turned to the pilot.

"All right, get us back to Alfred. And raise Fleet flag."

While he waited, Taliaferro studied a two-dimensional schematic of the Home Hive Two A System out to and including the asteroid belt. Sheer habit, for he'd long since memorized it. Still, he gazed at the little lights of the nine asteroids which TF 64.1 had transformed into weapons. They were strung out over forty-odd degrees of the belt's circumference, a curving scimitar of death. That was where they'd been found, and it had been out of the question to move them together, for the same reason their drives couldn't be tested: an Orion drive in operation was something the Bugs could hardly fail to notice. So they would start moving in staggered order starting with Hammer Four, each asteroid lighting off its drive as the others came up level with it on the hyperbolic orbit that would send them careening across the inner system, terminating at one of the three scarlet planet-icons on the display. Sledgehammer Three, the tip of the scimitar, would be last, so Lin actually had a fair amount of time left. Just as well, Taliaferro thought. I wouldn't really leave him there. Probably.

He'd barely finished reporting to Murakuma across the light-minutes when a multi-megatonne fusion fireball awoke a few score meters behind Hammer Four, its brilliantly defined shock wave surging toward the asteroid but never quite touching it. Then another . . . and another . . . and slowly, ponderously, Hammer Four began to move out of its immemorial orbit, trailing what looked (or would have looked, to anyone who'd braved the sleet of gamma rays) like a trail of small suns connected by a stream of glowing gas.

Operation Cushion Shot had begun.

* * *

It had taken an appreciable amount of time for the realization of what was happening to sink home through layers of unexpectedness—not a fatal delay, perhaps, but certainly a disadvantageous one. But there was no longer any room for doubt. The orbits into which those asteroids had been moved could be projected without difficulty, and all of them intersected at the point that would then be occupied by the third planet. Calculating the kinetic energy such impacts would release was equally simple. And the Fleet knew only too well what would happen to the system's remaining defenders at the instant that planet's population died.

Abandoning the outer system to the Enemy had been an error. That it was an error grounded in flawless logic was no excuse. Neither was the totally unprecedented nature of what the Enemy was doing.

There was, however, a positive aspect to the situation. The asteroids could be deflected from their courses—or, in the case of the smaller ones, actually broken up. It would not be easy, but with antimatter weapons it could be done. And the Enemy must be as aware of that fact as the Fleet was, so his freedom of action was limited by the need to defend those incredible kinetic projectiles as they followed their immutable hyperbolic courses in free fall, at a velocity which, while high on the standards of normal interplanetary bodies, was practically stationary to vehicles using reactionless drives.

There could be no further thought of waiting in defensive posture on and around the planets. Those asteroids must be intercepted as far away as possible. All available gunboats and small craft must be fitted with antimatter loads and launched immediately. And the Deep Space Force must go with them.

* * *

"Well, we expected it, Sir."

"So we did," Vanessa Murakuma replied to Leroy McKenna's observation. The response was purely automatic. Her entire consciousness was focused on the approaching Bug formation—a classic "Bughouse swarm."

Yes, she had expected it. Not even an idiot or a politician could harbor any remaining doubts about the Bugs' capacity to reason from observed data—or, at least, to perform some process that filled the same function as reasoning. They understood what that formation of asteroids meant, and they were committing everything they had left to what they knew was their final stand against apocalypse.

She studied the readouts on the mobile force that trailed behind the tens of thousands of kamikazes: sixty-seven superdreadnoughts, fifty-two battlecruisers and a hundred and thirty-four light cruisers. At least there were no monitors; evidently intelligence was correct in supposing that the Bugs had had insufficient time to complete any new ones since she and Lord Khiniak had made their last, regrettably uncoordinated incursion into this system.

Her eyes went to the holo sphere on whose scale that formation shrank to a single scarlet icon, moving to intercept a cluster of tiny green lights representing the asteroids and the combined fleets' battle-line, together with the fighter screen spread before them by Small Fang Meearnow'raaalpha's eighty light carriers.

Finally, she let her gaze rest on another emerald icon, near the inner fringes of the asteroid belt—one which she hoped and believed appeared on no similar displays aboard the Bug ships whose course it was paralleling.

Anson Olivera approached. The farshathkhanaak had had his eyes on that remote green icon from the first.

"Admiral, we've gotten another call from Fang Koraaza's staff. They want to know if it's time to—"

"Not yet. A little longer, I think." Murakuma had a multitude of figures, actual and projected, at her fingertips. But in the end it came down to a matter of feel, complicated by the need to factor in communications time-lags.

Still, Olivera only had a minute or so longer to fidget before Murakuma straightened up abruptly.

"All right, Anson," she said crisply. "Signal Small Fang Iaashmaahr."

The signal flashed across the light-minutes to Iaashmaahr'freaalkit-ahn, commanding her own Task Force 63 and also Third Fleet's TF 33—thirty-four assault carriers and forty-eight fleet carriers, which had gone into cloak and maneuvered among the asteroids until they were in position to cover the Bugs' anticipated course. The signal was received, and thirty-four hundred primary-pack-armed fighters launched undetected.

They couldn't remain undetected quite long enough to reach their targets, of course. The ships of the Bugs' deep space force managed to launch their gunboats into the path of the fighter strike, and other gunboats hastily detached from the "Bughouse swarm" joined them. But that desperately erected barrier could barely even slow Orion and Terran and Gorm pilots who smelled blood. One Bug starship after another died in a stroboscopic cluster of fireballs, and the com frequencies rang with cries of triumph in three languages, from three different sets of vocal apparatus.

Then the fighter strike was through, emerging into clear space and sending reports flooding into the databases of Fleet flag.

"It worked, Admiral!" Ernesto Cruciero exclaimed. "The data are incomplete, of course, but most of the deep space force ships were either destroyed outright or damaged so severely they won't be able to keep formation . . . and wouldn't be much use if they could!"

Murakuma permitted herself a brief smile at the ops officer's enthusiasm.

"Very good, Ernesto. Convey my congratulations to Small Fang Iaashmaahr—and also my desire that she expedite the recovery of her fighters so she can rendezvous with us as quickly as possible." Cruciero and Olivera both looked somewhat crestfallen. "Let's face it, gentlemen. Crippling the deep space force, while certainly desirable, was really something of a sideshow. That's the real threat." Murakuma pointed at the innocuous-looking ruby icon that represented clouds of antimatter-laden gunboats and shuttles. "And we're going to need Iaashmaahr's fighters very badly to deal with it."

* * *

There was a basic inelegance to it: the Allies had to defend the asteroids and the Bugs had to neutralize them, and both sides knew it. All of which left little scope for finesse.

Iaashmaahr's carriers remained in cloak for their run to rejoin the rest of the combined fleets, so they had the benefit of one more undetected launch. Those fighters, and the nineteen hundred others from Small Fang Meearnow's Mohrdenhaus (whose usefulness even the Terrans were coming to appreciate), went out to meet the Bug kamikazes in a dogfight whose scale was exceeded only by its desperation.

As always, the fighters cut great gashes through the massed Bug formations. And, as always, they couldn't possibly kill enough of those endless, uncaring hordes. Like water pouring through a collapsing dike, streams of kamikazes closed in on the asteroids.

The battle-line slid in, interposing itself, suffering hideous losses as it burned away hundreds more of the kamikazes. Vanessa Murakuma lay in her command chair crash frame, trying to disassociate her mind from her bruised body as Li Chien-lu shuddered from hits that sent even a monitor's mass reeling. It was all she could do. She'd already given sufficient orders: stand and fight.

Again, many of the attackers broke through—into a latticework of death around the asteroids, whose defensive installations were directed by Taliaferro's command ships. And again, not all the kamikazes could be denied their rendezvous with death. Two of the smaller "Hammer" asteroids were shattered into pieces which wouldn't even stay on trajectories that would bring them into collision with Planet III to burn up in its atmosphere, for their fragments—unlike their intact sisters—were no longer accelerating down their precisely calculated track. But not even the ultimate violence of antimatter annihilation could break up the big planetoids.

At last it was over, and Murakuma and her staff surveyed the readouts of carnage.

"Their remaining kamikazes are falling back to Planet III to regroup," Marina Abernathy concluded.

"We need to do the same thing," Murakuma pointed out, and turned from the intelligence officer to address the ops officer and the farshathkhanaak.

"Ernesto, Anson, I want a schedule for our carriers with undamaged drives to shuttle back to Orpheus 1 and Bug-06 in relays for replacement fighters. We have a long way to go, and the Bugs will be back."

She proved to be right. The Orion drives had kicked the asteroids into fairly flat hyperbolas involving far less transit time than the years simple Hohmann transfer orbits would have taken, and those same drives continued to accelerate them steadily. But on the standards of this era's spacefarers, the pace was a veritable crawl. There was plenty of time for the Bugs to return to the attack, again and again. But they did so with steadily weakening forces, for this system was on its own. They inflicted losses, which the combined fleets grimly took. They disrupted or deflected all but two of the "Hammer" asteroids. They even managed to alter the orbit of Sledgehammer One, sending it careening harmlessly aside.

It wasn't nearly enough.

* * *

They were all feeling drained as they stood on Li Chien-lu's flag bridge and watched Home Hive Two A III die.

The Bug attacks had come with greater and greater frequency as doom had drawn closer to the planet—but they'd also grown weaker and weaker. In the end, the Bugs had nothing left to throw at the onrushing asteroids, which had gradually picked up speed as they'd fallen down the sun's gravity well and, eventually, the planet's. By now they were moving at what the pre-reactionless-drive era would have accounted a very high interplanetary velocity.

They watched the view on the big screen, downloaded from recon fighters that were continuing to shadow Sledgehammer Three. Gazing at that rugged spheroid—even more rugged now, after all the hits it had taken—Murakuma contemplated the inappropriateness, verging on banality, of the popular term "dinosaur killer." That asteroid, which had slammed into Old Terra's Yucatan peninsula sixty-five million years ago, was estimated to have been a mere ten kilometers in diameter, rather like the two "Hammer" asteroids that continued to follow the monster in the screen, like lesser sea creatures in the wake of a whale. And it had almost certainly been traveling a lot more slowly. If the thing she was now watching had struck Earth, neither she nor any other life form of Terran origin—not even a microbe—would now exist.

Leroy McKenna was calling out the minutes to impact in a leaden voice. She didn't listen. Instead, she watched Planet III grow and grow in the screen. Presently, the fighters swerved away to stay out of range of the planet-based defenses, and the panorama expanded.

A seemingly small, artificial-looking object appeared, glinting in the planet's reflected light. She'd been told to expect it. By sheer coincidence, Sledgehammer Three was going to sideswipe the planet's space station on its way down. That station was as titanic as all such Bug constructs, but its mass was as nothing compared to the falling planetoid, and the pyrotechnics of its death were disappointing. The asteroid, trailing a scattering of debris that had been the space station, dwindled in the distance against the clouded bluish backdrop. It had probably been deflected a bit, but not enough to matter this close to the planet.

"Minus ten seconds," McKenna intoned, his voice even deeper than usual.

Time crept by. At minus three seconds, an extraordinary thing happened. The swirling cloud-patterns of Planet III abruptly vanished, replaced by concentric rings rushing away from the black dot that had suddenly begun to glow redly with the heat of friction. Sledgehammer Three had entered atmosphere like a three-hundred-kilometer cannonball, generating a shock wave that blew a hole in the air as it went.

Murakuma had only two seconds to absorb that spectacle. Then Sledgehammer Three crossed the terminator into darkness. A protracted second later, a blinding fireball erupted on that nighted surface, impossibly huge given the fact that it was a planet they were looking at. The night vanished as thermal pulse drove a shock wave that overwhelmed the earlier one, pushing outward in all directions from that inferno of an impact-point. Following it across the oceans came hundred-meter walls of water that would, in another hour or so, flood the coastal plains, finally expending their last efforts against the highest mountain ramparts. The earthquakes erupting along every fault line on the planet passed unnoticed. So would the glowing sleet of red-hot rock as the gigatons of debris that had been blasted into space returned in an hour or so; there would be no living eyes to see it, no living organisms to be immolated in the heat.

The impacts of the two surviving "Hammer" asteroids were barely worthy of comment. Sledgehammer Two, when it arrived, was sheer redundancy.

Murakuma finally turned to face the strangely silent flag bridge and the people who'd just witnessed the greatest single act of destruction ever unleashed by sentient beings. She spoke like a machine.

"Commodore McKenna, convey my personal congratulations to Commodore Taliaferro on the success of Operation Cushion Shot. And please raise Fang Koraaza. Given the total depletion of this system's kamikaze assets and the psychic effect the remaining defenders must now be experiencing, I believe we can proceed to reduce the other inhabited planets by . . conventional means."

* * *

Lord Khiniak and his staffers came aboard Li Chien-lu, to full military honors, as the combined fleets orbited around the lifeless hulk of Planet IV. There was now the leisure to indulge such niceties.

As she led the Orions into the flag lounge, Murakuma's eyes strayed to the calendar display on the bulkhead, with its Terran Standard equivalency: January 23, 2370. It was so easy to lose track.

A little over a standard year since they'd entered this system. Operation Cushion Shot hadn't been quick. Neither had it been cheap. Even the Orions looked very sober as they contemplated the losses they'd taken in the battles that had swirled around that phalanx of asteroids. Nearly thirty-two percent of the combined fleets' starship strength. Two hundred and four ships—seven monitors, forty-five superdreadnoughts, twenty battleships, nine assault carriers, eighteen fleet carriers, nineteen light carriers, thirteen heavy cruisers, twenty-two light cruisers and sixteen destroyers—had died that those inconceivable projectiles might reach their destination. So had forty-two percent of all fighters engaged. It was a loss total that would have been beyond prewar comprehension.

But . . .

"So, Ahhdmiraaaal Muhrakhuuuuma," Koraaza interrupted her brown study. "Is it confirmed?"

"Yes, Lord Khiniak. We had plenty of time to scout the outer system during the preparation of the asteroids, and found nothing. Commodore Abernathy is prepared to state categorically that every Bug in this system is dead. I propose we dispatch a courier drone so informing the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Koraaza gave a long, rustling purr of a sigh. "So. One home hive is left."

"Don't forget the Bugs' base at Rabahl," Murakuma cautioned, recalling Fujiko's messages.

"I have not. But according to the latest message traffic, our allies of the Star Union are preparing the final assault on that system. It will no doubt be a major operation, yet they clearly consider it a matter of no immediate urgency."

"True." Fujiko had intimated as much. "They've invested Rabahl thoroughly. It isn't going anywhere, and the Crucians want to completely assimilate the new technologies they've gotten from us before going in."

"So," said Koraaza once again. "We can safely leave our allies to deal with the Bahg defilers of their own worlds. For us, there remains but one great task. Both our fleets, and those of Fangs Zhaarnak and Presssssscottt will come together and meet at last." The slitted pupils in his amber eyes narrowed, and all at once the cosmopolite Murakuma had thought she'd known was no longer there behind those eyes. "It will be a gathering of warriors beyond anything in legend. I imagine that even Lord Talphon will be there, for he owes a vilknarma, a blood-balance for the death of his vilkshatha brother. Surely the Khan will relent and allow him to be personally present at the killing of the last Bahgs in the universe."

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Framed