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In the proverbial nick of time
, he continued silently to himself.
The
Invincible began to shudder as the Speeds darted out of the launch bays. The
screens showed enemy fighters coming about, part of the rear guard of the
force that was englobing the Commonwealth s navy and hammering it back towards
the jump points that led to humanity s inner worlds. A carrier and a
battlecruiser started the slow business of killing their forward vectors and
reversing to engage this new but tiny threat. That made the red cones of their
possible trajectories narrow and shorten; the
Invincible
 s lay broad and blue across the screens.
 Oh, how surprised they re going to be, Raeder said.
Alarms beeped discreetly as the Fibian the friendly
Fibian fleet started to emerge behind him.
The Commonwealth s fleet ought to be getting their first hint that something
new was on the chessboard about now. Despite fear and tension, a slight wry
grin quirked at Raeder s mouth. He would bet his pension that a certain
acquaintance would be watching those reports firsthand.
All the webs trail broken, General Kemal Scaragoglu thought to himself, as he
watched the figures and columns in the display tank, astonished at his own
dispassion.
All the tools fall broken from my hands. At the end, nothing works.
The lines on Admiral Grettirson s face were deep, graven as if with a laser
etcher in the mountain granite lining a Norwegian fjord. He drew a deep breath
and spoke:  There s one good thing about this, he said.  The Mollie fleet is
effectively defunct. They came right at us and we annihilated them.
Scaragoglu nodded. He looked over at Adrienne Clarkson, the Prime Minister s
liaison with Space Command. The elderly civilian looked a little lost on the
command deck of the
Chateau Laurier
, but her blue eyes were firm.
 What s the situation, Admiral? she asked crisply.
 Madame Minister, as I said, we ve destroyed the Mollie fleet. Always knew we
could, if they came out and gave us a stand-up fight. We ve also inflicted
heavy damage on their
Fibian allies. Our people have inflicted casualties at a two-to-one ratio.
 But? she said sharply.
 But the Fibians outmass us by three to two; rather more, in heavy units. We
have more carriers, but we ve lost a lot of Speeds and it ll be the heavy
metal that counts from now on.
The admiral s long fingers moved, and patterns of scarlet and green webbed
over the
display tank.  It s become an attritional battle, not least because we must
hold this jump point. As our strength declines, the gap in capacities grows
geometrically.
 We ve lost?
 Madam Minister, if we don t withdraw now, we will be forced away from the
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jump point in no more than three more days of combat possibly half that, if
they re willing to pay the butcher s bill. Then the Fibians can move units
through, and still have enough force to englobe us. We can t retreat for
long we re running short of munitions. If there s to be anything left to
defend Earth and Tau Ceti, we must retreat and attempt to hold the jump point
from the Sol-system exit.
 And the rest of the Commonwealth? Clarkson asked quietly.
 We can hold the two central systems with what we have left. For a period of
some months, at least; we ve hurt them badly. If we disperse the remaining
Space Command units, we will not be able to defend anything for so much as a
week. The enemy will mass and smash us one system at a time.
 You re telling me that we ve lost the war, Admiral?
 We ve lost this battle, ma am. I m giving you my best advice, and that of my
staff. It is of course your prerogative, as representative of the civil power,
to accept or refuse it. We stand ready to carry out your orders. His
shoulders slumped.  I . . . I don t want to lose any more of my people without
a reason.
Scaragoglu gave a brief prayer of thanks to his grandfather s God that he
wasn t in
Clarkson s shoes, or the admiral s.
 Sir! one of the staff aides said.  Sir, we have new footprints! Multiple
units emerging from jumpspace, Fibian signatures 
The multithousand-ton mass of the
Invincible shuddered as it drove through a cloud of ionized gas that had been
a Fibian an enemy
Fibian ship not long before. Invisible fields wrenched the debris aside, their
shape streamlined in a way that no deep-space craft was;
sensors would see a bullet-headed spear cleaving the thin haze that had been
ceramet and steel and the occasional carbon atom that had started out as a
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