"There are still a few late arrivals yet to come," the lieutenant observed blandly, following LeBlanc's gaze around the crowded room and well aware of which late arrival the new-minted vice admiral was awaiting.
Then a side door opened to admit the combined staffs of Third and Sixth Fleet, just in from Home Hive Two. Vanessa Murakuma and Koraaza'khiniak entered side by side, but the former stopped dead when her eyes met LeBlanc's across the room.
LeBlanc muttered something that might have been "excuse me" and departed, leaving Sanders smiling.
As if the admirals' arrival had been a signal, the impending arrival of the Chairman was announced, and everyone hurried to his seat. Just as before, the high brass sat at the oval central table, with the staffers placed well back from it, and LeBlanc, despite his promotion, reluctantly took his place among the latter just before Kthaara'zarthan entered and everyone stood.
Intellectually, Sanders was aware that the Orions had no equivalent of the human antigerone treatments. Their natural spans were considerably longer than those of humans, which might explain some of the reason they didn't, and for some of them, a vague taint of dishonor attached to such research. The lieutenant also knew that once the Orion aging process set in, it proceeded with what humans found to be startling rapidity. But he hadn't seen the JCS chairman in some time, and he couldn't help being taken aback. Kthaara's pelt was ashen, like some ebon wood burned over by the fire of time. He'd grown gaunt, and could no longer manage the characteristic gliding Orion prowl-half-attractive and half-sinister to human eyes-but walked with a stiffness to which he imparted an awesome dignity.
Sanders looked around at the other Orions in the room. He'd come to know the race well, and now he read their body language. The pack elder has entered the circle of the fire-a mighty hunter, who's lived to such an extraordinary age that they know they're in the presence of great skill, or great luck, or maybe the great favor of Valkha. Even sophisticates like Ynaathar and Koraaza feel it; they're back at that campfire along with all the others, and they're unconsciously showing it.
Kthaara lowered himself carefully into his chair, and everyone else followed suit. When he spoke, his voice had lost some of its resonance, but none of its firmness.
"Thank you all for coming. I especially welcome Ahhdmiraaaal Muhrakhuuuuma and Great Fang Koraaza'khiniak, the conquerors of Home Hive Two. What they have done there has set the stage for this conference." Kthaara's pause seemed longer than the heartbeat it was. "We are here to plan the concluding campaign of this war."
For a moment, time hung suspended as all in the room sought in their own various ways to decide how to react to the words they'd sometimes doubted they would ever hear, to the imminent disappearance of what had been the central fact of their lives for a decade.
Will we know how to come to terms with the absence of this war? Sanders wondered. Is it even possible we may actually miss it?
In a pig's ass we will!
Kthaara raised a clawed hand to halt a low sound that had begun to rise from his audience.
"Do not misunderstand me. There will remain some work to be done afterwards. Worlds like Harnah and Franos will have to be dealt with, now that our allies of the Star Union have shown us how planets with hostage indigenous populations can be retaken. And, of course, the Star Union will have to complete the reduction of the Bahg stronghold at Rabahl-an operation for whose support we have already earmarked ten percent of the Grand Alliance's available units. But all of that will be in the nature of what Humans call 'mopping up.' Ahhdmiraaaal LeBlaaanc, who returned from Zephrain several local days ago and has had time to review and correlate the latest astrographic data, will present our reasons for believing this to be the case. Ahhdmiraaaal?"
LeBlanc stepped to a podium-cum-control console that had been set up at the opposite end of the table from Kthaara. He manipulated the controls, and the windows polarized to darken the room. Then a holographically projected display screen appeared against the wall behind the Chairman, showing a warp chart in the standard two-dimensional way: rather like a circuit diagram, or an ancient railway switching board, without any foredoomed attempt to approximate the real-space relationships of the stars in question.
It was the largest such display that most of them had ever seen, at least indoors. It had to be, to hold more warp lines and warp nexi than any of them had ever seen before on one chart.
Most of them recognized it for what it was even before LeBlanc spoke.
"Since securing Home Hive Two," he began, "Third and Sixth Fleets have probed through that system's warp points. Their findings have answered the last questions we had. We now know the warp layout of Bug space in its entirety. Here it is."
Everyone stared at that display, and especially at the five icons they'd all come to know as representing home hive systems. Four of them glowed sullenly with the dismal dark-red of clotted blood, meaning that they'd been burned clean of life in accordance with General Directive Eighteen. Only one-Home Hive Five-still glowed like a malevolent scarlet eye.
After a moment, though, people began looking elsewhere for other, secondary hostile-system icons, both living and dead. Presently, a low murmur began, and, finally, Raymond Prescott gave it voice.
"You mean-? Well, I'll be damned!" he turned in his chair and looked to where Amos Chung and Uaaria'salath-ahn sat, looking stunned. "When you two broached your theory about the Bugs back in late '64, did you expect this?"
"No, Sir," Chung admitted. "We believed that each of the five Bug sub-groupings Lieutenant Sanders had identified represented a small group of intensively industrialized systems. Since then, we've had to constantly revise our estimate of the number of those systems downward as more and more of Bug space was revealed. But we never dreamed that the entire Bug industrial infrastructure was concentrated in the five home hive systems, with only a few other occupied systems to support them with resources."
Sky Marshal MacGregor gave her head a slow shake of the wilderness.
"But how can that be possible?" She twitched a shoulder in an almost irritated shrug. "Granted that the home hives are overpopulated and overdeveloped beyond any nightmares we've ever had and that the whole concept of a 'standard of living' is foreign to the Bugs. Granted even that their single-mindedness is literally beyond our comprehension. But . . ." She shook her head again. "How could five industrialized systems-any five industrialized systems-have supported the overwhelming fleets we faced at the beginning of the war?"
"I believe I know the answer," Robalii Rikka said. "After their first war with the Star Union, the Demons began building up reserves in anticipation of a subsequent meeting. We ourselves did the same-but their buildup was far greater, due to the factors you just mentioned. Then they encountered the Terran Federation. So you, not us, had to face those reserves." Rikka looked somber, for he'd studied details of those desperate early battles in the Romulus Chain. "Truly, we owe you a debt above and beyond the new technology that Admiral Sommers brought to us. You bore the brunt of what was intended for us-and wore it down, at terrible cost to yourselves."
Eileen Sommers squirmmed uncomfortably in her place seated among Ynaathar's staffers. She looked around at the hectares of silver braid, stars, and other gleaming and gemmed insignia which made it painfully clear just how junior a mere rear admiral was in a room like this. But then she cleared her throat.
"We can't take undeserved credit, Warmaster. We were fighting for our own survival, not for the Star Union's. In fact, we didn't even suspect that you existed."