The Sa'arm force dropped out of hyper just over one point four million kilometers from the Earth's moon. They were almost fifty thousand kilometers above the plane of the ecliptic.

Three hive spheres, two recon spheres and their heavy escorts formed into an arrowhead formation and accelerated onto a straight line run, heading roughly past the moon and towards the planet on the other side. As the human defenders started maneuvering, the hive spheres started disconnecting and launching their light ships. At the three G's of constant acceleration that the spheres were using, if the Sa'arm went straight for the Earth without slowing, they could be there in less than three hours. For a zero-speed, zero-distance intercept ending in an orbit around Earth, they would be there in just under four hours. Either way, the Confederacy Navy was waiting for them.

Flag Bridge, aboard CVA016, John F. Kennedy

"Admiral, CIC labels the five larger bogies as one Voluptas class Hive Conquest Sphere, two Virtus class Hive Colonizer Spheres and two Volumna Class Recon Spheres. The big one is half a billion tons. All five are deploying their light ships. If they all have full complements, by our most current information, total count will be sixty-three in-system lights as well as fifty-one hyper capable lights. The non-hyper, light ships consist of thirty-six Lima in-system attack fighters and twenty-seven Lactanus in-system corvettes. The hyper capable lights consist of thirty-three Vacuna class hyper capable scouts, nine Vaginatus hyper corvettes and nine Venti class hyper destroyers. The Voluptas has deployed a heavy escort of three battleships and nine cruisers. Each of the two medium spheres has deployed three battle ships and six cruisers. The recon hive ships have three cruisers apiece as well. Thirty-six heavies total." Lt Jenkins looked up from his display panel. His face was pale in the bridge lights. The enemy had about twice the support ships than the earlier, limited scans at the Oort cloud had indicated. The admiral showed no emotions, but his flag lieutenant knew that he was worried.

"OK, ignore all that in-system stuff unless they come after us. Take down those lightweight hyper-capable ships. They are the only things that should be able to make it back out of the system. We let the Raptor and Semmes classes take out some heavies and then we'll hit the big boys. Our lights can pick off the Limas and Lactani as the opportunity presents. Stupid naming system! Who makes an 'attack fighter' that is slower than almost everything we have and that has at least ten crew?"

The human task force was heavily outnumbered by total ship count and by tonnage. Earth was home, but there were a lot of important places to cover.

The day before yesterday, hyper drive sensors had detected transits in the region of the Oort cloud, roughly one light year out. The Sa'arm had formed up and waited almost a day before heading into hyper drive again. Confederacy ships had significantly faster hyper-drives than the Sa'arm ships did, with a speed of roughly twenty light years per day, as opposed to one light year per day for the big hive ships. The hive's escorts were a bit faster than that. Unfortunately for the humans, the escorts and the scouts had all stayed with the hives. This meant there was no chance to defeat them in detail. For much of the past day, the enemy fleet had been shadowed in from their first hyper-space exit and rally point, with hyper-jump drones bringing the reports well in advance of the Swarm. A modified Archerfish was still trailing them, but it had very few missiles and had fired off nearly its entire complement of drones notifying the system of the impending invasion.

Confederacy ships also had much higher normal space acceleration rates, with some ships capable of hitting one hundred G's of acceleration. The Confederacy had long had the means to make their ships that fast, but prior to the Swarm invasion and the recruitment of the humans, they had never thought that those rates were safe, or really needed. Gravitic compensators made it possible. Occasional compensator failures made it lethally dangerous. Warfare made it needed. The Sa'arm's highest acceleration rate was the twenty-five Gs that the Ventis could reach. The Venti was actually a copy of a captured Confederacy ship, refitted with Sa'arm weapons and now being used by the Sa'arm as a weak, but fast destroyer class. It could even hit thirty-two Gs in an emergency, but it only had weak gravitic compensators that negated about ten percent of the felt acceleration. No one had ever seen the Sa'arm using its full capabilities. The big hive spheres could only push up to five Gs in an emergency while their battleship and cruiser escorts could do only eight Gs. Nonetheless, in combat, quantity has a quality all its own. The Sa'arm outnumbered the Confederacy forces by two to one in actual numbers and much more in total tonnage. Only the two human carriers were as large as the Swarm battleships.

The Swarm formation started shaking out. As seen from the human fleet, the spheres themselves were in a flattened two-dimensional diamond formation. The Conquest Sphere was in the center of the diamond, with a Colonizer Sphere to either side, one Recon Sphere 'up above', and one 'down below'. The heavy escorts were in front of the spheres and the lighter ships were deployed even farther to the front, except for a few which were trailing the entire formation. Each hive ship had one third of their scouts in the very front, one third just behind the light attack craft and one third in the rear. The biggest sphere had none of the light attack craft but it seemed to be using its larger, non-hyper capable corvettes in the same role. It also had a solid clump of destroyers and hyper capable corvettes in the center just ahead of the cruisers and the battle ship. The Colonizer Spheres used their non-hyper corvettes in a similar manner. To get to the spheres, you would have to fight through the entire length of the spear-point shaped formation.

The Admiral looked at his plot as if he was hoping for more friendly forces to just appear at his wish. The system forces had been scattered all over the system on patrols, training maneuvers, and posted at the gas giants when the first signals came in. Now they were straggling in, one squadron at a time, as fast as they got the news and could make a hyper transit. Finding nothing new, he casually gave the expected signal. "Signal to the flankers. Execute Plan W2 - Wolves - Harry the prey.'"

OR, you could already be behind and to the flanks when the Swarm dropped out of hyper in the first place. A squadron of six Semmes class missile cruisers in three divisions was trailing the enemy fleet from three sides, left, right and 'above'. If they had been cars on the freeway, they would all have been one lane over in the Swarm's blind spots. Per standing orders, they had each flushed their tubes of all four light missiles and the two heavy torps as soon as the enemy started dropping out of hyper. Now, reloading quickly, they got a second aimed salvo off with the missiles before the Swarm even realized they were there. The heavy torps had a lot more range and final speed but their launchers were slower to reload. With the Semmes' huge acceleration advantage of seventy-five Gs, they then slipped out of the range of the spheres' heavy weapons. The attacks had been done from just inside the missiles' extreme range while on a parallel course. Their later missile attacks would require speed runs tangential to the Sa'arm fleet's weapons envelope. This would only place the ships at risk during the moments of closest approach. Three of the Swarm in-system corvettes, a battleship and a cruiser were quickly destroyed and two more cruisers were seriously damaged by the first salvos. The largest sphere had also taken a hit and was trailing atmosphere and debris. True to their reputation, even in an ambush situation, the Swarm ships managed to knock out many of the incoming missiles with their particle beams and lasers, but one big torpedo had hit the hive sphere even after it was itself lasered and no longer accelerating. Several tons of scrap metal hit the sphere at one hundred kilometers per second. The half a billion-ton ship pressed on, now a bit lighter, accompanied by an expanding cloud of debris. One of the deploying in-system corvettes had taken another hit that would have smashed into its mother ship. The Colonizer Sphere took no damage from the nearby explosion, but the corvette was completely destroyed.

Also available were twenty of the newer 'Raptor' class medium cruisers. Designed from the ground up to fight hive spheres at the maximum possible closing speeds, their launchers contained no formal missiles. Instead, they carried 'barrels' full of 'sand', chaff, sensors and/or countermeasures.

The Raptors had taken the predicted final hyper-space exit points, used their hyper-space drives to position themselves and then they had started their speed runs in pairs. Ten were ahead of the fleet, closing to meet the enemy head on, and ten more were coming in from behind. The first pair of the outgoing group had already passed their assigned breakout point, gotten outside the hyper limit and had engaged their hyper drives to go back around to their starting point. Of the trailing group, 'Kite' and 'Fish Eagle' were quite a ways back, having been the ones to cover the earliest and thus, the furthest away, of the projected exit locations. 'Cuckoo-hawk' and 'Kestrel' were also in the rear, but they would make their pass just before the fleet closed. Another pair was on another pattern, too far to one side and they could not be back in position for three hours. 'Sea Eagle' and 'Aquila' were well in front, but were now going the wrong way. They would try to make a tight, high-speed orbit around the Earth to catch the Swarm napping. 'Sparrow Hawk' and 'Snake Eagle' were the second pair heading outbound from Earth. They had already passed the hyper exit point and would take at least an hour just to stop before they could start blasting back. They were probably out of the fight. Currently 'Buzzard' and 'Vulture' were on the best and earliest intercept course. Moving at one percent of the speed of light, they had been accelerating for nearly an hour at their full emergency thrust of ninety-five Gs, 931 meters per second squared of acceleration. Upon hyper breakout, they had adjusted course to close on the enemy. Their course was nearly identical to that of the enemy fleet's and they had an intercept point in only two minutes. 'Vulture' sounded its battle cry over the internal intercom systems. "Patience my ass! Let's kill something!" They killed their acceleration except for the necessary minor course corrections. Both ships launched twenty-four 'sand' barrels from the twelve broadside launchers, three launchers per broadside, rolling ship by ninety degrees each time and timing the launches so that each side fired in the same direction in rapid succession. The four bow launchers each fired a sand canister followed by a chaff canister, which both quickly burst to partially cover the ships' locations. Then, the ships used maneuvering thrusters to decelerate, just a little, and let their sand and chaff move out in front of them. The Swarm escorts were already shooting at the Semmes and their missiles, or preparing for the gauntlet run of the main battle wall. They were looking in front and to the sides, not back into the electromagnetic haze of their engines. Also, the Swarm had crummy sensors. Coasting ships were hard to see. The barrels silently disintegrated and the contents started to spread out, moving like forty-eight giant shotgun patterns. The first that the Swam knew of the danger was when about a large handful of sand, weighing only one tenth of a kilogram, clipped a rear-guard scout at three thousand kilometers per second. The kinetic energy impacting the scout was 45 gigajoules, the equivalent of an explosion of just over ten tons of TNT. The scout's shields went down and the ship continued on a slightly different course as a spinning, dispersing collection of wreckage. More sand was now hitting the other swarm ships. Even minor amounts, such as ten grams, hit with the force of a ton of explosives. Space is vast and hitting something as small as a ship is hard, but the bigger the ship, the easier the target and the more sand that generally hit at the same time. In a lucky shot, nearly half a barrel impacted on a cruiser. Its debris spattered several nearby lights with damage. The formation started to open up and spread out. As the rear guard scouts and the heavy cruisers turned to face the new danger, their length now became a new weakness as they presented a larger target cross section. The chaff was simple, lightweight, metallic-coated Mylar ribbon that humanity had been using for anti-radar chaff for decades. Mass is mass though, so when it hit, it also had the effect of blasting the enemy ships, but since it showed up so well, it was more easily avoided. Its primary purpose was to confuse the Swarm ships' sensors, and it did that. 'Buzzard' and 'Vulture' screamed though the enemy formation at a closing speed of nearly three thousand kilometers per second; launching more barrels whenever they could get even close to a solution. At this range their twelve medium and four heavy particle beams had a good chance of hitting and they accounted for more damage, destroying four more light ships and scoring hits on several others. Then, they were through and they started blasting for a clear path to a safe area to regroup. One Swarm cruiser managed to get 'Buzzard' in its firing range and it came apart. There was no point in checking for survivors. Much of the debris would impact the moon in less than an hour. Another salvo of twelve heavy torpedoes from the Semmes finished off a damaged cruiser and punched a hole into another hive ship. While the Swarm escorts were scrambling to cover the hives, 'Raptor' and 'Condor' flashed in from the front. They were following several layers of thinly spread sand that probably would not even degrade the enemy shields, but it covered their presence until the last few seconds. Being slightly 'below' the enemy formation as they closed, they first hit one of the recon spheres' light ship screen. They killed a leading scout, damaged one attack-fighter and destroyed another before climbing through the screen into the central mass of the fleet. There, two of the in-system corvettes were damaged. One hyper capable corvette and a destroyer were destroyed and a cruiser literally fell apart under multiple strikes from small batches of sand followed by some heavy particle beams at close range. Out the other side of the formation, while damaging the colonizer sphere and destroying one of the scouts of its rear screen, 'Raptor' took hits from several enemy beams, but it survived the gauntlet to start its long deceleration run. Half of the fighters from the carriers were with the fleet in a defensive posture, but there were nine squadrons of A-28 attack fighters and F-104 space superiority fighters screaming in behind the Semmes class ships. The F-104 Starfighters in particular were capable of killing a pilot just by letting them try to go too fast. Few fighter pilots were willing to believe that they could not handle everything their craft could do, but the Starfighter only had compensation for the first 120 Gs of acceleration. After that, there were another sixty Gs available that could be tolerated for seconds at most. The hive fleet was now moving at ten kilometers per second and had moved two thousand kilometers closer to earth. It had come out of hyper less than six minutes earlier.

There were two-dozen corvettes of the Patrician and Castle classes waiting close in to the Earth and Moon. Due to their low accelerations, they were nearly obsolete now; they could not keep up with the fleet. However, they could still handle twice their weight in lightweight hive ships. They were backed up by a dozen of the new Shiro Class frigates. These were designed much like a Castle corvette on steroids. Bigger, faster and better armed, they could take on anything up to a hive cruiser and be confident of victory. They, along with three hundred plus Fl05 'Star Arrow' fighters from defensive bases in orbit around the Earth and the moon and the seventy-two fighters each from the Margaret Thatcher, William Pitt and the John Fitzgerald Kennedy, got the job of killing the light ships and 'attack fighters'.

Four Hero and four Goddess class battlecruisers formed the main battle line. Even without the enemy hives, they were barely an even match, mass-wise, with the enemy battleships and cruisers. Luckily, a dozen Asia and Africa class destroyers, and four Europa light cruisers backed them up. The Asia class was armed with an extremely short-ranged beam weapon and was primarily used now for mine sweeping, defense against light ships in close and various 'utility infield' jobs. The fleet was engaged in a complicated dance, trying to confuse the enemy as to their actual intentions, but they would wait near the home planet before moving to higher speeds. The Swarm had to slow down to land, and the fleet wanted to be there, waiting for them, rather than trying to slow down and speed back after having passed through the enemy fleet. The hostile spaceships in the area were an indicator of resources available. Rarely had the Hive been actively resisted in space, but the gestalt did have vague memories of it happening before. The change in procedures would necessarily be extensive. The Hive communed.

"Admiral, the hive ships, all of them, seem to have quit firing or maneuvering. CIC is postulating a hive memory upload. Confidence high."

"All flankers: move in and bite 'em again. Put them through the gauntlet and prepare to break off as they come out of it."

Raptor and Semmes class ships slashed alongside or dove through the incoming fleet. Missiles, beams and tons of sand pummeled the enemy. The Swarm fleet's formation was in tatters. Escorts were dead and dying. Half of the cruisers were destroyed or crippled. One of the Hive Colonizers was spinning without drive power.

Twenty minutes later, the hive formation seemed to shake itself and start to maneuver again. Several missiles had gotten through while no defensive fire had gone out. Two more Raptors had made passes through the formation and they had scrubbed one hive sphere clean of light ships. The Semmes had slipped back and gotten off several missile salvos and two more torpedo salvoes. The Swarm fleet was nearing fifty kilometers per second in speed. Now the escorts started after the Semmes class ships on their flanks. Flights of either three attack fighters or three corvettes moved out past the formation boundary and pursued the Semmes. The cruisers used their acceleration advantage to stay well outside the two hundred kilometer range of the enemy particle beams and, once the escorts were far enough away from the formation, the human ships launched full salvos. The Swarm point defense systems were overwhelmed. Out of fifteen Swarm ships chasing them, only two survived to return to the formation. Other hive escort ships pulled in closer. The Swarm had learned that lesson quickly.

Forty-five minutes. Eighty kilometers per second of closing speed. One point three million kilometers to Earth.

And slowly, surely, the Swarm took their attackers with them as they died. Half of the Raptor class ships did not survive their speed runs. The 40,000 metric ton ships were killing nearly three times their weight in enemy warships and they had totally scrambled the Swarm formation, but there was too much debris in the battlefield for their speed now. The Semmes class ships were relegated to launching their dwindling supplies of heavy torpedoes from their extreme range. The lighter missiles were just too slow to get in close. Two ships had tried to take them in closer before launch and they had died. Two hours into the battle, the Swarm were committed. They did their turnover maneuver to decelerate for a zero-zero intercept with Earth. At their current speeds, the big ships could no longer stop short of Earth, so they would only be able to pass it by, orbit or try to land. Moving at almost 200 kilometers per second, they were still over two light seconds from the Earth and one light second from the moon. The admiral watched the vectors and information floating in his holographic display tank. When he judged the moment was right, he gave his next order. "Signal the fighters. Loose the Arrows." Twenty-six squadrons of F-l05 Star Arrows started their runs. They had been sitting in space with the moon between them and the enemy. Now they started accelerating for a low altitude pass around the moon, to be followed by all three hundred plus of them rushing the enemy ships as the Swarm were clearing the orbit of the moon. They each had a load of short-range missiles and a Gatling gun that was a direct successor to the air-breathing A-10's tank busting GAU-8. The F-105s were based on the moon and on a few space stations disguised as orbital rocks. The size of their missile bay, their two-man crew, large fuel capacity and other features made the craft so large that they were not used on carriers. Limited control surfaces allowed for extreme upper atmospheric usage, but it was not recommended. Those were not useful or needed for the low pass over the airless moon's surface, though. The Star Arrows were on a heading for an intercept of the enemy fleet at its closest approach to the moon. After 30 minutes at 100 Gs of acceleration, they would come in on the fleet's left flank at a speed of 1,764 kilometers per second. One half of one percent the speed of light would give both their missiles and the depleted uranium Gatling gun rounds a significant closing advantage and substantial kinetic energy. The fighters skimmed the surface of the moon and left it behind. The enemy was ahead of them, passing to the left, moving in towards the Human fleet. It was now moving at a speed of just over one hundred ten kilometers per second and decelerating as it went. The fighters were moving ten times that speed as they closed upon the enemy. They would only get one pass before having to decelerate and head back to base, out of munitions.

There were several continents on this new world. The one in the polar region was unsuitable. The largest conjoined landmass could take two hives, two more would take the two continents in the other hemisphere and one of the recon spheres would land on the smallest continent.

Two hours, forty-five minutes after hyper emergence.

As the fleet neared the orbit of the large satellite planetoid, the gestalt discovered that there was an interloper here. On the planet, a small hive was already in place! Quickly! Muster every unit for the struggle! Awaken the sleepers! Contend! Dominate! Or pass into darkness! The Swarm formation froze. Weapons quit firing. No course changes happened. The fighters had a turkey shoot as they passed through. Light ships died and missiles struck spheres and battle ships with impunity. "Admiral, they've locked up again." "It looks like they don't like fighters. We can't pass this up. General fleet advance. Focus on those big ships. We have an hour and a half to kill them before they can land."

The fleet gestalt was in trouble. The majority of the units were in dormancy aboard the larger spheres. They were just starting the schedule to awaken. The gestalt had started with nearly three to the eighth active units and another three to the eleventh in dormancy. They had lost three to the seventh active units already and unknown numbers of dormant units. The enemy gestalt had started with smaller numbers and it had been in physical contention with native life forms for some time. Their numbers were perhaps reduced by a third. However, their units were all fully alert. Unless the dormant units could all be awakened before they had been scheduled, the gestalt would pass into oblivion.

The fighters headed for the swarm fleet much like the arrows that they were named for. At these closing speeds, they could not really maneuver as fighters in an atmosphere would. Instead, they went ballistic, rotating in space to put their missiles and Gatling bursts on intercept courses for whichever target they could hit and fired them off. Seconds later, they could no longer get a solution on that target, and it was too late to look for new ones. In those few seconds they had passed through the formation, out the other side and were making a turnover to start their deceleration. Ships were burning and exploding behind them.

The Hive Conquest Sphere was the biggest structure in the enemy fleet. It had taken damage in the initial missile and torpedo salvos and its escorts had been damaged as well. Now, the Star Arrows dealt it a blow that would reverse on them in a way that no one had expected. Several missiles and bursts of 35 mm Gatling gun ammo hit the ship with the combined force of seven hundred tons of explosives. The hive ship started spinning and then broke apart; taking the majority of the active minds with it, as well as nearly one million swarm units that had been in dormancy until the coming landing.

The incoming gestalt was doomed. The gestalt on the planet quickly overcame the remainder in space and now the entirety of the swarm units in the system were united under one purpose. A few more moments and the ships were allocated for their landings. Included were instructions for targeting. The nest on the ground had priority for survival. Those vermin ships were not ignorable. Destroy them; the largest ones first. The escort ships were released from their defensive roles. "Admiral, the light craft are leaving their hives behind and closing on the fleet." "Very well, we had better take them out. Signal the lights. Carriers, release your fighters."

"SAR-14 to Fletcher 3. Gimli, I can't get to you before your bird hits the upper atmosphere. Can you orient for a skip off the top?" "Negative, Sar-14. Too much damage. That's Ok. I can go deeper with my attitude thrusters." "Gimli, That's no good. I can't go deep." "Not asking you to, SAR-14. Coop is gone already. Tell our families we made it back to Earth." "Will do, Fletcher 3." The radar image of Fletcher flight 3, call sign Gimli and Cooper, flared as the pilot ejected from his crippled Arrow fighter. Two bright traces made momentary meteor trails in the sky. The fighter itself took longer to heat up, tumble and finally burn. Three hours after hyper emergence. One hundred forty four thousand kilometers to Earth. Swarm fleet speed is down to eighty-four kilometers per second.

"Admiral, the spheres. All three of them are powering up their hyper drives."

"Aren't they well inside their limit? Hell they have a worse limit than we do. What are they doing?"

The three spheres suddenly spit out one large chunk of ship from each one. It was like they were laying three huge eggs. "Admiral," an excited ensign shouted, "they just dumped their warp cores." "Warp cores?" he responded. "Too much Star Trek, Ensign. But, why would they dump their hyper drives?" They watched the numbers scrolling for a moment before someone gave an answer. "Sir, they are lighter now, with the same thrust, so they are now decelerating faster. And the warp ... err, the hyper drives are still operating, so they can't be shot from behind." "Sir," the ensign was suddenly deathly calm. "Sir, the drives are closing on us. Two are heading our way, and one is aimed at Iron Maggie. Sir, I think they're weapons." The admiral took a moment to confirm the facts and suddenly he agreed. "Carriers, evade. Scatter the fleet, get all the fighters away from us." He opened up a channel to Odysseus. "Commodore Dalkin, it looks like you may be inheriting command shortly. Make sure they pay." "Yes Sir, I will." "Shelly will be distraught, but I have assigned my family to you. Her mother will be a help. Take care of your little sister. Good luck, Son." "Thank you, Dad. We'll get them all." The first two runaway hyper drives from the recon spheres discharged before they reached their targets, but the volume affected was nearly a hundred kilometers in diameter. Several smaller ships, both Human and Swarm, ceased to exist. Dozens of fighters from the carriers were gone and one entire squadron of F105s from a lunar base was later found to have been transiting the area as well. The carriers were both damaged and thrown off course. Several systems went down and most personnel were disoriented. The last drive discharged much closer and it was even larger. Both carriers were nearly totally destroyed. Half the Human fleet was damaged or destroyed. Swarm ships were destroyed as well, but the Swarm seemed to be able to recover faster and many light ships made suicide runs against any Human ship that they could reach. Many Human ships managed to recover in time, but a few were lost due to collisions. The William Pitt was seriously damaged by the hyper disturbance, debris from its own escorts and a collision with a supposedly worthless Venti class destroyer. The Venti's speed had allowed it to make a devastating attack by ramming the carrier. The Swarm fleet now seemed to have a new purpose other than landing: kill Human ships. Surprisingly, this made it easier for the Confederacy, and the Humans' individual ship superiority let them take on one batch of Swarm after another and eliminate them. One Recon Sphere died quickly and then a Colonizer Sphere followed it. The last Recon Sphere made a pass over North America and three of its scouts made a landing in Texas, but that was not a real threat. It took a day to hunt down everything, but finally no Swarm were left alive in the system. Besides the Carriers, Earth fleet lost all four Asia class destroyers that had been close defense for them. Three more Asias died as they engaged large ships. Other losses were one Hero class and two Goddess battlecruisers, as well as ten Raptors and four of the Semmes class cruisers. Two Europas had died along with five Africans, ten Castles, six Patricians and five of the Shiros. The carriers had launched 212 fighters at the start of the battle. Eighty-seven survived. Of the 316 F105s from the moon, less than half made it back in one piece. No Swarm ships escaped or survived. Commodore Dalkin looked at the wreckage being brought in, piece by piece. Everything they could find was going into the replicators as soon as they were certain that there were no living humans on board. Well over eleven thousand naval personnel were dead, as well as another nine thousand concubines who helped out on the ships. The non-crew concubines were supposed to have been offloaded before the battle, but several captains had not enforced that order, so nearly two thousand unnecessary deaths had occurred. Word had been sent out to other colonies and in six or maybe seven weeks, Earth would be reinforced enough to be able to stop another attack like this one. In the meantime, he had a grieving family to deal with and a fleet to rebuild. Six more weeks, that was all they needed. They got five.

The end of the Third Battle of Earthat.

Not the end of Earth.

** END **

Thank you to the Swarm Writers group and Tomken in particular for editing help and supporting criticism.