Eight years of shipbuilding, dogfighting, bombing, and firefights on the ground yielded nothing but death and poverty. No system had surrendered, no ceasefire had been ordered, no spacefleet had stopped attacking and no defenders had stopped repelling them. Against an enemy that had to squeeze its attackers through a 200-meter-wide hole in single file, any system could dig in and hold its own forever.
Any system that had an enormous military when the Pentagon War started out, anyway.
Human-Centauri's defenses had begun to fail over the last two years. Even without the inherent waste of mounting extra-system attacks against their neighbors, the attacks against Human-Centauri's forces had been whittling them down faster than Human-Centauri could rebuild them. A year ago, a wide enough crack had emerged in their defensive planes for Sirius to lob antimatter bombs on the New France and New Mars areas of Plate I, along with a few smaller metropolitan areas. Now, another such attack might get through at any time.
The Sirius bombing raid had convinced a frightened Human-Centauri citizenry that it was time to form an alliance with CN Leonis. Yukariah Heap had almost won CN Leonis's approval, except the Leonians insisted on access to Plates I, III, and IV — the citizen areas — as bases of operations. Few Human-Centauri citizens were willing to make such a terrible sacrifice. Occupying their system space was one thing, but polluting the youngest generation with the CN Leonis version of the Emotional Plague was quite another.
Now, though, the need for an alliance was overwhelming. Yukariah Heap met face-to-face with Krammer for the second time since the start of the War, this time in the underground capitol of CN Leonis II.
No other options were left. Perhaps the century-and-a-half of weeding out plague behavior had made the citizens strong enough to repel such an infection. Perhaps the Leonians stationed in Human-Centauri wouldn't interfere with life as much as everyone had feared. Perhaps.
The Pentagon War is continued in chapter
10.
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