When the old transports and the ships too damaged to keep were destroyed, the fleet formed up and left the system. We moved in a defensive sphere formation with our slowest and most damaged ships protected in the center. This included our few remaining FACs, some captured alien ships and the faster support ships who could keep up with the fleet.

As we negotiated the first transit station, God's Gift reappeared with twenty or so ships. He approached rapidly sending out a message asking us to wait for him. Half of the fleet had already transited the station when his ships caught up to us and opened fired.

Alerts flashed across my tac screens as dozens of ship AIs reported damage from energy weapons. At close range, particle emission weapons can quickly carve a ship to pieces. Our ship's point defense weapons seemed to come online slowly but by the time our ships responded with their own energy beams and missiles, the attackers went FTL and disappeared.

I cycled through the ship-to-ship coms and heard an unbroken string of curses and shouts of outrage from my tac officers. Harlow was the first to log into command space followed by Mike Williams and Debbie Fowler who I selected to fill Phil and Cathrine's slots. Mike was a wing sub-commander with some fleet operations experience and Debbie was a talented Tac officer from Phil's flagship, the Athena.

"Get me a status report on your ships as soon as you can," I said. "Send it to display zero one eight." I watched our attackers on the gravimetric scanners as they stopped about 2AU out. They're not done with us, I thought.

Fleet status reports began popping up on my displays. I was pleased to see far more green status indicators than I had feared. There were more yellow indicators than I liked, but at least the handful of red status ships all had working drives, power plants and life support systems.

"They're coming back," Harlow said.

"Alert your wings," I told them. Our options were limited. When the enemy was traveling under H-drive, we could throw a whole ship at them and, unless it overloaded the QWEGs, they wouldn't even feel it. The same was true with energy and kinetic weapons. A high enough energy based attack might possibly succeed, but it wasn't possible to attack while traveling under H-drive and it wasn't possible to hit a FTL ship unless you were.

Only our anti-matter missiles had a chance to stop a ship under H-drive. The missiles wouldn't be able to catch the ship so the ship would have to be attacking head-on and we would have to use an inordinate number of missiles since gravimetric sensors are not accurate enough for targeting. The missile itself would disintegrate on contact and fail to explode, but the anti-matter within would still be effective. The problem was we didn't have those numbers of missiles.

The Cack fleet stopped further out, beyond effective energy range but well inside missile range and began launching missiles. Our ships responded in kind, but before our missiles were even half-way to their targets, the Cacks turned and fled again.

Our ship's point defenses stopped most of the missiles, but a few more ships showed up yellow or red on the display who hadn't been that color before.

I looked at the ships transiting through the stations. Our defenders were decreasing in numbers and the odds were shifting against us. I couldn't allow half the fleet to be trapped here and I didn't dare try and call the rest of the fleet back.

"We can't allow this to continue," I said. "I need options."

"We could attack them with fighters," Chris suggested.

"I think they'd have to be manned fighters," Debbie said. "Drones probably wouldn't catch them on reaction drives."

She sounded uncertain, though she was obviously correct. Cathrine, I thought, would have been more confident. I sudden blade of loss stabbed through me. I hadn't thought about her much since the attack and I didn't have time to grieve for her now. I wondered if I would ever live long enough to do that. I took a deep breath and focused on my displays.

We had precious few manned fighter craft. Their expensive H-drives required even more expensive CAs and living pilots. In the cost/benefit analysis of our corporate masters, it was considered best to have the pilots flying slower, dumber and above all less expensive drones remotely from the relative safety of the battle cruisers.

"Would they even have the range?" I asked.

"Enough to deal with this."

"Well, that's an option," I said. "Assuming we can scrape up enough fighters across the fleets." I watched the Cack ships go back out to 2AU and stop. "But we need a more immediate solution."

I kept glancing between the gravimetric display of the Cack fleet, the tac monitor, and my fleet status display. "Brian, Debbie, it looks like your wings were hardest hit. Go ahead and move them back to either side of the transit station. I want to shift more traffic to the far side, away from our attackers."

"Right."

"Yes, sir."

"Mike, keep your fleet where it is and guard this side of the station. Chris and I are going to try and take some of the heat off you."

"Ok."

"You got a plan?" Chris asked.

"Considering how the Cacks have run every time we've fought them, I'm hoping a show of force will discourage them from continuing this harassment."

"How are we going to do that?"

"Ever heard of a game called chicken?"

"Now you're talking!"

"We'll be going in FTL and the coms will be unavailable, so warn your tac officers to keep an eye on our gravimetrics so they'll know when to advance and when to stop. I'll let you make the formation assignments, but the idea is to interrupt the rhythm of their attack and throw them off."

"Got it."

We began flagging ships, sending them formation assignments and briefing the tactical officers on the plan. We had barely finished when the Cacks started another attack run.

"Here they come." Chris actually sounded excited.

I sent him an intercept course plot I had calculated. "We'll go when they get to this point."

"That puts our intercept just outside missile range of the fleet."

"That's the idea."

The Cacks crossed the line and we accelerated toward them in a tight formation. I could almost see them startle as various ships dropped out of FTL or veered to one side distorting their formation. A number of ships seemed to panic and fired missiles while they were still well out of range. We easily dodged the missiles since they couldn't track us while we were FTL and kept going. Those missiles would be inert shells by the time they neared the fleet. As we closed with the Cack ships, they turned and ran away. Unfortunately they were faster than our battle cruisers and so quickly outdistanced us. I was really wishing I had some Fast Attack Craft as I watched them pull away from us on the gravimetrics. I ordered the ship to stop and the rest of the two wings stopped and formed up alongside us. We had raced nearly halfway across the system and I didn't want to get too far away from the fleet.

We had about six seconds warning. I saw the Cacks turn toward us on the gravimetrics and just had enough time to warn the other ships on the com laser. Not all the connections had established so some of our ships' first warning was the sudden appearance of Cack warships slicing into them with high energy beam weapons. We fired back and, perhaps scored a couple of minor hits, but the Cacks leaped away. They didn't go far.

The Cacks began to circle us in overlapping orbits, each ship circling on a different plane so that we would soon be englobed. I had seen this maneuver taught while I was in the MDF and it was very useful for trapping a slower or lest numerous foe. "Go! Go! Go!" I shouted on all command channels, and the Phoenix turned and went FTL, risking a collision with one of the encircling ships. The rest of the two wings followed and, this time, the Cacks chased us.

It's no good leading them back to the fleet, I thought. If only we could communicate while traveling faster than light. We could coordinate an ambush and concentrate our fire. I ordered the captain to stop and turn about and fire a volley of anti-matter missiles. We nearly hit a couple of ships, forcing others to veer off but the missiles were largely wasted. Other ships of the wing, repeated our move, though they stopped later and further away. While they fired, we turned back and went FTL, then stopped and fired again once we had passed them. In this way we leaped-frogged each other all the way back to the transit station, giving something like covering fire for each other and occasionally getting in a lucky hit. The Cacks gave as good or better than they got, so that by the time the last of our ships transited, most of my two wings had a long list of damages that needing repairing.

Fortunately, the pursuing Cacks didn't immediately transit and continue to harass us. I could tell our crews were dispirited, feeling they had somehow let each other and the rest of the fleet down. The other ships was already awaiting us in orbit about the system's sole inhabited world, their fleet commanders sending urgent messages asking us what had happened as our wounded ships came limping up late. I knew there would be a full debriefing afterward, but as I gave a quick thumbnail synopses to the other commanders, I could tell Smith was very angry, and not just at the Cacks.

* * *

"That was very foolish." Smith glared at me from the monitor. "It was a rookie mistake. What did they teach you at the academy?"

I didn't have the heart to tell him New Athen's Academy wasn't a military academy, so I just remained silent.

"You shouldn't have let yourself get separated from the fleet. They could have easily destroyed your two wings." Abrams added.

Maxwell and Dexter, the two newer fleet commanders just sat in v-space looking uncomfortable but saying nothing.

"You are, of course, quite right," I said, "which is only obvious. I just couldn't stand by and allow them to destroy our ships without trying to stop them and so I allowed myself to get drawn into a futile chase. Thank the Maker there weren't more enemy ships or none of my fleet would have made it through the transit station.

"This has, however, pointed out a flaw in our defenses," I continued. "We need to have at least one wing of fast attack craft stationed in the rear of the fleet to deal with these hit-and-run attacks. I know we have captured a few Cack FACs and, I believe, we have some other fast ships that might be converted into gunships or even missile carriers. Finally, I have heard the Freemen colony engineers have a method of adapting particle emission weapons to handle anti-matter, and since I know we have a number of them in the fleet, I suggest we try and adapt the particle emission weapons on what FACs we can find. I know handling anti-matter presents special problems, but we are going to run out of missiles quickly whereas if we save the waste anti-matter from the TCR generators, we should have a nearly limitless supply."

I could see their minds turning my suggestions over, my previous embarrassing actions temporarily forgotten. They finally agreed and assignment me the task of putting together something like a FAC wing. Before the morning shift, I had identified twenty fast ships whose particle weapons the engineers assured me could be adapted and another five genuine Cack FACs. We stayed in the system a whole day making emergency repairs to the damaged ships while the engineers planned their modifications to our new FACs and gathered the resources they would need.

"How goes the conversions?" I asked a Chief Master Engineer Droemer the next day.

"Very well! It seems like these particle weapons were nearly built to handle this. We just have to add some extra safeguards and, of course install the anti-matter bottles and delivery systems, but we should have that done in no time."

"Excellent. Do you think, then, there might be any delays in starting out tomorrow?"

"I'm sorry, when did you say we were leaving?"

"Tomorrow."

"There's no way we'll be ready by tomorrow."

"Well, when can we leave then?"

"Next week!"

"But you said—We have to leave tomorrow! The Cacks could attack us at any moment. We have to try and get some distance between us while we have the chance."

"Look, in a ship-yard, this would normally take at least six to nine months, minimum."

"Yes, well, we all know how bureaucracy normally works. How long will it take without the paperwork, union work stoppages and with your crews working around the clock?"

"I figured round-the-clock work crews into my estimates."

"Is there any way to cut the time? Do you need more tools or more workers?"

"We're already cutting the safety margin to a bare minimum." Droemer looked thoughtful. "We might be able to use a few extra hands, though. Let me talk to my master engineers and I'll get back to you."

"Anything you need, you just tell me. We have to get those ships ready immediately."

* * *

We left the next day, anyway. We tried to keep the periods of acceleration to a minimum to accommodate the engineering crews still working on the weapons, but it wasn't possible to transit through a gate under H-drive. (At least no one had tried it because the theoretical physicists told us the gravitational forces would play havoc with the quantum wave field.) We spread out a compliment of recon drones behind us, just knowing that God's Gift or some other agent of Bright Fortune would try to catch us as we transited the gate. We made it across without incident and hurried through the next system towards the next gate trying to put some distance between us and the attackers we knew had to be following us. Nor were we disappointed.

We had just transited to the following system and gotten half-way to the next gate when God's Gift appeared suddenly behind us. We later learned that, overestimating the damage he had done in the last exchange, he had promised to capture us and hand us over to Bright Fortune. This time, however, he had obtained from Bright Fortune an additional one hundred FACs plus four hundred other gunships and missile carriers.

As his fleet transited behind us, we stopped, turned around and formed up so my rear-guard became the vanguard. Our new FACs we hid just behind the lead ships, ready to leap to the attack when needed. Most still did not have working particle weapons, but we loaded as many up with missile pods as possible.

We waited until they attacked. I could only wonder what was going through the thing God's Gift called a head. From what I can tell, we Solarians had a mixed reputation of being both backwards and stupid and, at the same time, ruthlessly clever and dangerous. As we waited for them to come into range, did we seem paralyzed by dull-witted indecision or was it a confident—almost arrogant—aggression?

They passed the outer missile limit and continued their attack. At this point I figured they intended to use beam weapons. I made my ships wait until the last possible moment and then called for our attack.