When there came a moment of relative calm, Tom made a mental note. Remind me next time, he told himself, not to go around kicking hornets' nests.

He sucked on one end of the makeshift breathing tube. The other end protruded from the surface of a tiny opening in the weedscape. Fortunately, he didn't have to pull in quite so much air this time, to supplement what his mask provided. There was more dissolved oxygen in this area.

Battle beams sizzled overhead again, and weak cries carried to him from the miniature war going on above. Twice, the water trembled from nearby explosions.

At least this time I don't have to worry about being baked by the near misses, he consoled himself. All these stragglers have are hand weapons.

Tom smiled at that irony. All they had were hand weapons.

He had picked off two of the Tandu in that first ambush, before they could snap up their particle guns to fire back.

More importantly, he managed to wing the shaggy Episiarch before diving head-first into a hole in the weeds.

He had cut it close. One near-miss had left second degree burns on the sole of his bare left foot. In that last instant he glimpsed the Episiarch rearing in outrage, a nimbus of unreality coruscating like a fiery halo around its head. Tom thought he momentarily saw stars through that wavering brilliance.

The Tandu flailed to stay upon their wildly bucking causeway. That probably was what spoiled their much vaunted aim, and accounted for his still being alive.

As he had expected, the Tandu's vengeance hunt had led them westward. He popped up, from time to time, to keep their interest keen with brief enfilades of needles.

Then, as he swam between openings in the weedscape, the battle seemed to take off without him. He heard sounds of combat and knew his pursuers had come into contact with another party of ET stragglers.

Tom had left then, underwater, in search of other mischief to do.

The battle noise drifted away from his present position. From his brief glimpse an hour ago, this particular skirmish seemed to involve a half-dozen Gubru and three battered, balloon-tired rover machines of some type. Tom hadn't been able to tell if they were robots or crewed, but they had seemed unable to adapt to the tricky surface, for all of their firepower.

He listened for a minute, then coiled his tube and put it away in his waistband. He rose quietly to the surface of the tiny pool and risked lifting his eyes to the level of the interwoven loops of weed.

In his mosquito raids, he had moved toward the eggshell wreck. Now he saw that it was only a few hundred meters away. Two smoking ruins told of the fate of the wheeled machines. As he watched, first one, then the other slowly sank out of sight. Three slime-covered Gubru, apparently the last of their party, struggled over the morass toward the floating ship. Their feathers were plastered against their slender, hawk-beaked bodies. They looked desperately unhappy.

Tom rose up and saw flashes of more fighting to the south.

Three hours before, a small Soro scoutship had come diving in, strafing all in sight, until a delta-winged Tandu atmospheric fighter swooped out of the clouds to intercept it. They blasted away at each other, harassed by small arms fire from below, until they finally collided in a fiery explosion, falling to the sea in a tangled heap.

About an hour later the story repeated itself. This time the participants were a lumbering Pthaca rescue-tender and a battered spearship of the Brothers of the Night. Their wreckage joined the smoky ruins which slowly subsided in every direction.

No food, no place to hide, and the only race of fanatics I really want to see is the one not represented out here in this dribble-dribble charnel house.

The message bomb pressed under his waistband. Again, he wished he knew whether or not to use it.

Gillian has to be worried by now, he thought. Thank God, at least she's safe.

And the battle's still going on. That means there's still time. We've still got a chance.

Yes. And dolphins like to go for long walks along the beach.

Ah, well. Let's see if there's some more trouble I can cause.

The Soro, Krat, cursed at the strategy schematic. Her clients took the precaution of backing away while she vented her anger by tearing great rips out of the vletoor cushion.

Four ships lost! To only one by the Tandu! The recent battle had been a disaster!

And meanwhile, the sideshow down at the planet's surface was bleeding away her small support craft in ones and twos!

It seemed that tiny remnants of all of the defeated fleets, stragglers that had hidden out on moons or planetoids, must have decided the Earthlings were hiding near that volcano down in Kithrup's mid-northern latitudes. Why did they think that?

Because surely nobody would be fighting over nothing at all, would they? The skirmish had a momentum all its own by now. Who would have thought that the defeated alliances would have hidden away so much firepower for one last desperate attempt at the prize?

Krat's mating claw flexed in wrath. She couldn't afford to ignore the possibility that they were right. What if the distress call had, indeed, emanated from the Earthlings' ship? No doubt this was some sort of fiendish human distraction, but she could not risk the chance that the fugitives actually were there.

"Have the Thennanin called yet?" she snapped.

A Pil from the communications section bowed quickly and answered. "Not yet, Fleet-Mother, though they have pulled away from their Tandu allies. We expect to hear from Buoult soon:'

Krat nodded curtly. "Let me know the very instant!" The Pil assented hurriedly and backed away.

Krat went back to considering her options. Finally, it came down to deciding which damaged and nearly useless vessel she could spare from the coming battle for one more foray to the planet's surface.

Briefly, she toyed with the idea of sending a Thennanin ship once the upcoming alliance against the now-pre-eminent Tandu was consummated. But then she decided that would be unwise. Best to keep the priggish, sanctimonious Thennanin up here where she could keep her eyes on them. She would choose one of her own small cripples to go.

Krat contemplated a mental image of the Earthlings — dough-skinned, spindly, shaggy-maned humans, who were sneakiness embodied-and their weird, squawking, handless dolphin clients.

When they are finally mine, she thought, I will make them regret the trouble they are causing me.

We've arrived.

For the last four hours I've been the matriarch of a madhouse. Thank heaven for Hannes and Tsh't and Lucky Kaa and all the beautiful, competent fen we've missed for so long. I hadn't realized until we arrived just how many of the best had been sent ahead to prepare our new home.

There was an ecstatic reunion. Fen dashed about bumping each other and making a racket that I kept telling myself the Galactics couldn't really hear… The only real pall came when we thought about the absent members of our crew, the

six missing fen, including Hikahi, Akki, and Keepiru. And Tom, of course.

It wasn't until later that we discovered that Creideiki was missing, also.

After a brief celebration, we got to work. Lucky Kaa took the helm, almost as sure and steady as Keepiru would have been, and piloted Streaker along a set of guide rails into the cavity in the Thennanin wreck. Giant clamps came down and girdled Streaker, almost making her part of the outer shell. It's a snug fit. Techs immediately started integrating the sensors and tuning the impedances of the stasis flanges. The thrusters are already aligned. Carefully disguised weapons ports have been opened, in case we have to fight.