She nodded, and that was that. If I hadn't been there, they'd have done a quick, futile grid search and then gone running hotfoot to report the attack to some authority or other without trying the emergency beacon trick. We'd have missed entirely the fact that there was indeed a survivor of the attack.

And we sure as hell would have missed getting mixed up in mankind's first interstellar war. His name was Lieutenant Colonel Halveston, and he was dying.

He knew that, of course. The Services were good at making sure their people had any and all information that might have an influence on their performance or survival. Halveston knew how much radiation he'd taken, knew that at this stage there was nothing anyone could do for him... but countering that was a strong will to hold out long enough to let someone know what had happened. The Services were good at developing that, too.

We didn't get to talk to him on the trip up from Messenia, partly because the doc needed Halveston's full attention for the bioloop stabilization techniques to work and partly because long chatty conversations on an open radio didn't seem like a smart idea. It was nerve-racking as hell... and so when the captain, Kittredge, and I were finally able to gather around Halveston's sickbay bed, we weren't exactly in the greatest of emotional shapes.

Not that it mattered that much. Halveston's report would have been a full-spec bombshell no matter what our condition.

"It was the Drymnu," he whispered through cracked lips. "The Drymnu did this."

I looked up from Halveston to see Captain Garrett's mouth drop open slightly.

That, from the captain, was the equivalent of falling over backwards with shock... which was about what I felt like doing. "The... Drymnu?" he asked carefully. "The Drymnu? The hive race?"

Halveston winced in a sudden spasm of pain. "You know any other aliens by that name?" he said. I got the impression he would have snarled it if he'd had the strength to do so.

"No, of course not," the captain said. "It's just that—" He paused, visibly searching for a diplomatic way of putting this. "I've just never heard of a hivey attacking anyone before."

A little more of Halveston's strength seemed to drain out of him. "You have now," he whispered.

The Captain looked up at Kittredge and me, back down at Halveston. "Could it have been a group of human pirates, say, pretending they were a Drymnu ship?"

Halveston closed his eyes and shook his head weakly. "Outposts get a direct cable feed from the main base's scanners. If you'd ever seen a Drymnu ship, you'd know no one could fake something like that."

"Travis?" the captain murmured.

I nodded reluctantly. "He's right, sir. If he actually saw the ship, it couldn't have been anyone else."

"But it doesn't make any sense," Kittredge put in. "Why would any Drymnu ship attack a human outpost?"

It was a damn good question. All the aliens we'd ever run into out here were hive races, and hive races didn't make war. Period. They weren't constitutionally oriented that way, for starters; aggression in hivies nearly always focused on studying and understanding the universe, and as far as I knew the Drymnu were no exception. It was why hivies nearly always discovered the Burke stardrive and made it into space, while fragmented races like humanity nearly always blew themselves to bits before they could do likewise.

"I don't know why," Halveston sighed. "I don't have any idea. But whatever the reason, he sure as hell did it on purpose. He came in real close, discussing refueling possibilities, and when he was too close for us to have any chance at all, he just opened up and bombed the hell out of the base."

The speech took too much out of him. His eyes rolled up, and he seemed to go a

little more limp beneath his safety webbing. I looked up, caught the captain's eye.

"We'd better get out of here," I said in a low voice. "It looks like he's long gone, but I don't think we want to be here if he comes back."

"And we need to report this right away, too," Kittredge added.

"No!"

I would've jumped if there'd been any gravity to do it with. "Take it easy, colonel," the captain soothed him. "There's no one else alive down there—trust us, we made a complete infrared grid search while you were being brought up.

We've got to warn the Services—"

"No," Halveston repeated, much weaker this time. "You've got to go after him.

Now, before he gets too far away."

"But we don't even know what direction he's gone in," Kittredge told him.

"My pack... has the records of our... three nav satellites." Clearly, Halveston was fading fast. "He didn't think... take them out. Got the... para-Cerenkov rainbow... when he left."

And with the rainbow recorded from three directions we did indeed have the direction the ship had taken—at least until he came out of hyperspace and changed vectors. But it would normally be several days at the least before he did that. "All the more reason for us to go sound the alarm," I told Halveston.

"No time," Halveston gasped. "He'll get away, regroup with other Drymnu ships...

never identify him then. And the whole mind will know... how easily he got us."

And suddenly, for a handful of seconds, the pain cleared almost entirely from his face and a spark of life flared in his eyes. "Captain Garrett... as a command-rank officer of the Combined Services... I hereby commandeer the Volga... and order you to give chase... to the Drymnu ship... that destroyed Messenia. And to destroy it. Carry out your... orders... captain." And as his eyes again rolled up, the warbling of the life-failure alert broke into our stunned silence. Automatically, we floated back to give the med people room to work. We were still there, still silent, when the doc finally shut off the med sensors and covered Halveston's face. "Well?" the captain asked, glaring at the intercom and then at Kittredge and me in turn. "Now what do we do?"

The intercom rasped as First Officer Wong, who had replaced Kittredge on the bridge, cleared his throat delicately. "I presume there's no way to expunge that... suggestion... from the log?"

"That your idea or one of Waskin's?" the captain snorted. Perhaps he was remembering it was Waskin's fault we were here in the first place. "Of course there's no way. And it wasn't a suggestion, it was an order—a legal one, our resident military expert tells me." He turned his glare full force onto me.

I refused to shrivel. He'd asked me a question, and it wasn't my fault if he hadn't liked the answer.

"But this is crazy," Wong persisted. "We're a freighter, for God's sake. How in hell did he expect us to take on a warship with eighteen thousand Drymnu aboard?"

"It wasn't a warship," I put in. "Couldn't have been. The Drymnu don't have any warships."

"You could have fooled me," Kittredge growled. "I hope you're not suggesting he just happened to have a cargo of full-spectrum bombs aboard and somehow lost his grip on them."

"I said he didn't have any warships," I shot back. "I didn't say the attack wasn't deliberate."

"The difference escapes me—"

"Let's keep the discussion civil, shall we?" the captain interrupted. "I think it's a given that we're all on edge here. All right, Travis, you want to offer an explanation as to why a race ostensibly as peaceful as the Drymnu would launch an unprovoked attack on a human installation?"

"I don't know why he did it," I told him. "But keep in mind that the Drymnu isn't really 'peaceful'—I wouldn't call him that, anyway. He isn't warlike, but he's competitive enough, to the point of having deliberately wiped out at least one class of predators on his home world. All the hivies are that way. It's just that in space there's so much room and territory that there's no reason for one of them to fight any of the others."