“They learn, honey,” he whispered. “But we never do.”

They hadn’t learned in the unexpected skirmishes before the war officially started, when they lost Fredericksburg and almost lost Washington. When lightly armed “fast frigates” had been thrown willy-nilly at battleglobes.

The battleglobes were constructed of layer upon layer of combat ships. A direct hit by an antimatter warhead would strip a layer off a section of the exterior but the inner ships would simply blow the damage off and reengage. Thus the theory of using a massive punch to break them up and then engaging the scattered ships with “secondaries.” But that required not only fleets of secondary ships, fighters, frigates and destroyers, but a massive central capital ship.

However, rather than wait until the Fleet was fully prepared the Galactic command had thrown more and more ships, practically right out of the shipyards, into the battle. Pissing them away in dribs and drabs not only in Terran space but over Barwhon and Irmansul. The loss of the ships, the secondaries that were vital to the overall plan, was bad enough, but the loss of trained personnel had been devastating.

The invasion of Earth had practically cut it off from space and none of the other races of the Galactic Federation could fight. To provide the planned crews for the Fleet, Earth had been stripped of likely candidates and they were put through months and years of simulator training in preparation for when they would venture forth to triumph in space. Instead, they had been thrown away in skirmish after skirmish, none of them doing any noticeable damage to the Posleen. Thus, the limited number of off-planet forces had been bled white before the first capital ship was completed.

The second invasion wave was fully in swing before the first “superdreadnought” was launched. This massive ship, nearly four kilometers long, was designed to use its spinal hypercannon to break up the globes. And it worked with remarkable facility. Coming in at high velocity from Titan Base the Lexington smashed two of the globes headed for Terra. And then it was swarmed.