The Stars at War

But that was the critical point: she'd expected to cover Second Fleet's rear, and like everyone else, she'd thought she had months to perfect her defenses. Second Fleet was driving the Bugs back, after all, and even if the enemy managed to mount a counterattack, Ivan Antonov's warships would be between him and Centauri. At the very least, Antonov would be able to slow him down and buy time for MacGregor and Pederson to dig in behind him.

That comfortable assumption no longer applied, and Pederson had every minelayer in the system employed in the frantic placement of more mines and platforms. It was going slower than MacGregor would have liked—(of course, she thought wryly, it couldn't go fast enough to make me happy!)—but that wasn't because the weapons weren't available. Mines and energy platforms were being produced at a staggering rate by the system's spaceborne industry, and even if they hadn't been, she and Pederson could have raided the other warp points' long established defenses for them. No, the problem was that there were only so many minelayers, and their crews, however skilled, could physically position weapons only so quickly. They were working till they dropped, but the mine densities needed to blunt a Bug attack simply couldn't be built up overnight.

Which was why she was having this conference. Pederson and his staff had stripped ten of Centauri's eleven open warp points of virtually all their OWPs and commandeered every available tug in Centauri and Sol to reposition those forts. Both he and MacGregor were aware that the Grand Alliance was straining every nerve to reinforce Fourth Fleet, and even if MacGregor lost control of the outer system, the forces rushing back towards Centauri would almost certainly regain it in time. But it was Oscar Pederson's job to see to it that there were still live humans on the system's planets when that time came—not to mention his responsibility to protect Centauri's mammoth orbital industrial infrastructure and provide the maximum possible cover for The Gateway. Humanity's home system was even more heavily fortified than Centauri, but Centauri was Sol's buffer and glacis. That had been the bedrock of the TFN's strategic pla

And a damned good thing, too, she thought mordantly, 'cause I sure as hell don't have anything else to do the job with!

She grimaced at the familiar thought. The Federation was enormous, and ships took months to travel from its core to its borders. Those vast distances had always spread the TFN far thi

Home Fleet, as the biggest single concentration of Terran warships, had been heavily raided in the war's opening phases. As every available forward-deployed unit had been rushed towards threatened sectors—the Romulus Cluster, originally, and then Kliean——Home Fleet units had been redeployed to fill the vacuum created by their departure. Then the need to build up nodal reaction forces throughout Allied Space had put still more strain on the Alliance's navies, and once again, Home Fleet had been tapped to help make up the required numbers. MacGregor understood the logic behind that. Given Sol's position at the very core of the Federation, it had certainly seemed as unthreatened as any star system was likely to be, and the needed ships had to come from somewhere.

But then the Bugs had stumbled into Centauri and Operation Pesthouse had been mounted—from Centauri—ten months before it was scheduled to kick off from Zephrain. Half the units originally earmarked for Second Fleet had already been en route to Zephrain, so the cupboard had been bare when GHQ started looking around for the muscle Pesthouse required, and its eye had fallen yet again on Home Fleet. All of which meant that, at this moment, Ellen MacGregor had precisely forty-seven starships, headed by only six superdreadnoughts, nine battleships, and Home Fleet's last eleven carriers and assault carriers, to support those seventy OWPs. More were coming as fast and hard as they could, but they weren't here yet, and she didn't even know precisely how many were on their way. And however many there might be, neither they, nor the forts, nor the minefields were on the warp point now.

She shook herself and produced a crooked half-smile for Pederson's benefit.

"It ought to be enough," she repeated. "And it damned well better be, hadn't it?"

The attack forces' courier drones confused the blocking force gunboats, for they clearly suggested that the enemy had somehow gotten a relief force through the warp point the gunboats were charged to block. Surely that was impossible. The attacks on the enemy's support echelon had put the blocking force behind schedule, true, but not enough for that. Unless, of course, the Fleet had misjudged the enemy's initial deployments. The Fleet had been unable to scout the intervening systems before attacking, after all. It was possible that the enemy's "relief force" had actually been a routine reinforcement echelon which had already passed through the blocking force's system of responsibility en route to the front when the trap was sprung, and the fact that it had included none of the attack craft mother ships made that seem even more likely.

But whatever had happened, the courier drones had reached the blocking force well before the enemy's survivors, and this time the gunboats would be waiting.

Captain Jeremiah Dillinger, MacGregor's chief of staff, and Commander Fahd Aburish, her operations officer, flanked her as she gazed at the holographic representation of Anderson Two in CIC's holo sphere. The icons representing Amaretsu and the core of Fourth Fleet's limited striking power floated in the sphere, and MacGregor felt her staffers' unhappiness—especially Aburish's—at being here. She couldn't blame them, yet she saw no alternative to her deployment. So far, the enemy appeared not to have entered this system. She couldn't be positive of that, but the interstellar comsats were still intact as far as the Anderson Three warp point, and the cruisers and destroyers she'd deployed to picket the known warp points in One and Two reported no enemy activity in-system. Unfortunately, she'd also brought along five Wayfarer-class freighters with heavy loads of RD2s to mount a watch on the Anderson Three side of the warp point, and the drones had made it clear the enemy was maintaining a massive gunboat screen there. If Antonov and Avram were going to break through that screen with acceptable losses, MacGregor was going to have to help clear their way.

That was why she'd brought Fourth Fleet forward... yet she dared not move any further forward before Second Fleet arrived. The fact that gunboats were warp-capable prevented her from putting her ships right on top of the warp point, so she had to hold them far enough back to give her time to get her fighters launched before any surprise gunboat strike could reach her. Which, she conceded silently to Aburish, gave her the worst of both worlds. This deep into Anderson Two, she ran a very serious risk of being cut off from her retreat to Centauri if the Bugs managed to run still another ambush force in behind her, yet she was compelled to do nothing constructive until Second Fleet arrived. If Second Fleet—