Gracen closed her eyes. To have come this close and have it all end like this, she couldn’t stand it. Reality, however, had a way of overriding what she could and could not stand.

“Susan, you’d best get me SPACECOM.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Tachyon detection grids were not supremely common on planet Earth. In fact, there were only a half a handful, and most of them reported directly to SPACECOM. So by the time Admiral Gracen’s request was on the line, that entire organization was in more than a bit of a tizzy, to say the least.

It took only minutes for the general in command of SPACECOM, normally a very quiet and routine position to hold, to find himself on the line with the admiral in charge of the quasi-human fleet of ships and with the President himself.

“We don’t have enough power to take them on, Mr. President. It’s the same thing as last time, sir. I’m sorry,” Gracen said softly, shaking her head.

Conner nodded slowly, seriously. He’d known that without being told. Oh sure, there had been some hope that the alien ships the admiral commanded might hide some sort of ace in their superstructures, but he’d known better than to expect it.

“What kind of lift capacity do you have, Admiral?” he asked after a long moment.

“For an evacuation? We can carry a hell of a lot, sir,” she admitted. “The problem is getting them onto the ships before we have no chance of escaping.”

“So that’s the game, then?” General Alexander asked grimly. “There’s no chance? Nothing we can do?”

“We have a few waveguide cannons and some munitions for them on Earth,” Conner admitted. “However, even assuming a one hundred percent hit rate, which we know from experience is effectively impossible, our combined munitions would only account for half the enemy ships. Is that correct, Admiral?”

“A little over,” Gracen nodded, “which would leave five hundred or so of the enemy ships to handle inside knife range. We just don’t have that sort of capability.”

“The Odyssey and the Wei Fang eliminated well over a thousand of the enemy ships in practically a single strike . . .,” Alexander objected.

“That was because Eric Weston is a tactical genius, General,” Gracen said stiffly. “He saw a flaw in their approach and realized that he could use a quirk of the space-warp drive Captain Sun commanded to his advantage. The problem now is that they’re not coming in grouped like that. Originally they were in tight formation, but the group has since begun to spread, most likely to counter that very tactic.”