She took one last look at the sleet on Eridani II. "It"s not even snow," she said. "Snow would have at least had the decency to cover the dead."

The thirty-six-hour trip back to Mu Ca.s.siopeaie was no joy. Our latest stardrive made a light-year an hour. But it was still too long when your only companion didn"t feel like talking.

"The scenario you outlined is still valid," I tried again over breakfast on the last day of our voyage. "And we"re running out of other options.""I know that!" She smashed her fist on the table. Two cups of tea, one mug of juice, and one gla.s.s of water from the fourth planet of Chi Ceti all shimmered precariously. "I know that," she said a bit more calmly. "What about the cc-20s?"

Good. The cc-20s were marginal in this, and we both knew it. "They"re having trouble with the light bursts. Throws off their highsight. Best estimates now are that they"ll be little if any help to us."

She frowned. She was pretty in a blonde sort of way, but that meant nothing to me. "It"s not only a question of winning the war," she said slowly. "It"s a question of what kind of universe we"ll have after that. We"ve respected the ban for so long-both sides. To break it now could be worse than losing."

"Losing means death," I replied. "Like those bodies on Eridani II. More than that. The death of our culture. Our way of life. What could be worse than that?"

She looked at me with her deep brown eyes. "Don"t you see that breaking the ban would also kill our culture? It"s the one thing that keeps us-and them-human." She shuddered. "No. We"re not at that point yet. Inspect the troops after we dock, and give me a full report tomorrow morning."

"As you wish, General."

I had to admit that the troops looked sharp in the G5V sunlight of Mu Ca.s.siopeaie. They gleamed brightly as they marched in formation on the fourth planet of this yellow sun, not only bigger but richer than Sol in its light. But appearances weren"t everything.

Colonel Boden briefed me on their readiness. "So you see, Adjutant, that they"re superior to the enemy on every count."

"I"m afraid I can"t share your optimism."

Boden"s beefy face creased in surprise. "But the numbers are on our side. Surely-"

"Numbers aren"t everything," I interrupted. "Besides, we"ve got to look at the entire picture on this.

Sometimes winning a battle can lose you the war."

"At this point, losing any major battle could lose us the war," Boden countered.

"Not if losing the battle got us to change our tactics," I replied.

"So you"re suggesting, what?" Boden asked, struggling in vain to fathom what I was getting at.

"That I could use a second opinion on your troop a.s.sessment," I said, and leveled the new brain scrambler that I"d acquired on Eridani II at the earnest colonel.

"Medic!" I shouted. Sudden cessation of brain function still happened from time to time-much like the cerebral hemorrhages of the ancients-especially to officers who labored under the colonel"s burden.

He"d be irrevocably dead before any medical attention arrived.

Tsung-Yung, Boden"s replacement, was supposed to be more cautious than the late colonel. I certainly hoped the reports on her were right.

I told her, "I agree with you and the colonel that our force here is more than equal to the enemy." The cardinal rule in convincing opponents was to first show them how well you understood their position.

"But that"s precisely why I think we need to be careful, and not risk everything on this one battle."

Tsung-Yung considered. Rain clouds caused the triple moonlight to flutter on her face as we walkedalong the sh.o.r.e in the cool evening. It made her look even more anxious than she was. "I need more time to think about this," she said.

"We don"t have more time," I said. "The Supreme General expects a final report from me in the morning.

Boden- Colonel Boden-agreed with me completely. I have to get the a.s.sessment from you now."

"It"s all happening too quickly," she protested. "I never expected Colonel Boden to die like this-we"re a.s.sessment officers, not battle leaders. Why didn"t he record his a.s.sessment?"

"We don"t make records of such a.s.sessments. You know why. Too many eyes and ears of the enemy among us."

Treena reluctantly embraced Tsung-Yung"s recommendation and sent out only three quarters of the force from Mu Ca.s.siopeaie. "I"m not happy about sending out a weakened force," she said to me, "but I guess it"s always good to leave a little in reserve."

"I"m not happy about sending any force in these circ.u.mstances," I responded. "We need to think in radically different directions."

Treena waved me off. "We"ve been through that already. Forget it."

No chance of that. In fact, all was going according to plan-even if the plan was last-minute and desperate.

But I didn"t foresee the next step at all. "I want you at the battle scene-I don"t trust anyone else,"

Treena said. "I"ve got a zip-ship ready to take you. You"ll join the main force at our staging area around Iota Persei in sixteen hours."

"Iota Persei?" Another surprise-we had decided to change the staging area because word might have leaked out to the enemy- "Yes," Treena replied. "Undoing a change meant to con-fuse the enemy can sometimes be the best confusion. Can you leave right now?"

"Of course." What choice did I have?

Iota Persei was a strange star system-actually, not a star system at all, because it had no planets. But it looked and was much like Sol, which raised questions. Why no planets? Why was bright Persei without family? Could its planets have been destroyed in some earlier war between foolish intelligences?

The lack of planets, at least, made the star ideal as a military staging area-no earthly distractions.

I joined I. M. Max on the bridge of the command ship. "An impressive force," he said, and gestured to the gleaming mult.i.tude in s.p.a.ce. "Persei has a million children now."

"Impressive indeed, Commander," I agreed. The war ships shone whiter than stars on the wide view screen. "My compliments."

"Yes, but impressive for what? Most of those vessels will be worthless rubble after the battle," Max said.

"The price of war," I replied.

Max scoffed. He pointed again to the view screen. "We have our armadas of light, the enemy has theirs.

We move them around like pieces in a chess game. What"s the point? Why not just play a game of chess itself and be done with it?"I said nothing. A philosopher in a uniform was a dangerous combination.

"Chess pieces," Max continued. "p.a.w.ns and knights and rooks. We move them from here to there. They move theirs. We knock some down. Vice versa. We both put some more on the board, and knock them down again."

"Civilians get destroyed too," I said. "You"ve seen the pictures from Eridani II. You"ve seen the bodies.

Believe me, they were worse in person."

The commander swore. "I was too far away, if only-"

"No," I interrupted. "You couldn"t have made much of a difference, even if you"d been right there on the d.a.m.n planet. The enemy was too strong."

"Will they be too strong for us tomorrow?"

"I don"t know," I replied. "The General thinks not. But- maybe the time has come to think about other means." The Commander of the Combined Fleets whirled around from the screen and stared at me.

"You mean the weapon- the General"s doomsday plan?"

"Yes."

Max shook his head. "She no longer believes in it."

"She might again, given the right inducements." Max shook his head even more. "I"m not sure I would want to risk it either. We could well get outsmarted by our own weapon."

I fingered the brain scrambler, tucked inside my inner pocket. No, two brain cessations in such close proximity would never pa.s.s as coincidence. I"d have to play this out the hard way.

The battle-the meeting of the flying p.a.w.ns, as Max liked to call it-was supposed to take place literally in the middle of nowhere, twenty-three light-years out from Iota Persei, with nothing else closer than twenty-eight light-years away.

The enemy, seen to be approaching from even farther away, suddenly disappeared as we were four hours-four light-years-from our expected intersection.

"How could that be?" I stared at the screen in disbelief.

Max scowled. "Any one of several reasons. My guess is that they have some form of travel blindingly faster than ours. Once the speed of light is surpa.s.sed, any speed is in principle possible-there are no real barriers beyond 186,000 miles per second."

"Why haven"t we developed something like that?"

Max shrugged. "Technological progress is uneven. We develop one thing, they develop something else.

In the end, it usually balances out. a.s.suming that both sides survive long enough."

I looked out at the emptiness on the view screen. For the first time, I felt a mixture of something akin to fear and regret. Maybe I was wrong to try to sabotage this battle on behalf of a larger good...

Max was glaring at me. No, maybe just looking. "I know what you"re thinking," he said. "Don"t even bother to say it. That smart weapon you"re thinking of isn"t a step forward. It"s a big step backward."

"I wasn"t really thinking about that now," I said, truthfully. "I was thinking: so what do we do now to getout of here?"

"We turn around, head back to Iota, keep our eyes open, our lasers white, and hope for the best."

They were waiting for us back near Iota Persei. Max had apparently been right: they"d doubled back behind us at a speed so fast our instruments had missed them. The only good thing about the enemy formation that now lay straight ahead of us was that it seemed smaller than we had expected.

"Probably means they"re holding back a few waves to attack us from behind once the battle is underway.

Check, but not yet checkmate," Max said, then shrugged. I was beginning to see this was one of his favorite gestures. "We have no choice but to engage them now. We don"t have enough energy to go hurtling back out into deep s.p.a.ce. And we can"t chance the enemy attacking us as we refuel."

At this distance, the. enemy ships looked no different from ours. I wondered what we and they might look like to a primitive, solar-bound intelligence staring out at us from its first off-planet telescopes far away. Two swarms of light inevitably converging, some splendid form of stellar reproduction-the aftermath of cosmic love-except the aftermath of our engagement would be lots of death.

We began to see differences in the enemy vessels as we got closer. "Look at that, and that." Max pointed to two close-ups from different angles on the big screen. The focus zoomed in. "Those changes in design are consistent with what we might expect of ships that could move twice as fast as ours."

"How come our scouts missed that?" I asked.

Max shrugged again. "Camouflaging a new design in the sh.e.l.l of an old design is an ancient strategy. This is apparently the first time the enemy has tried this."

"Could they use that speed to come at us at closer quarters? Show up right in front of us out of nowhere?"

"Let"s hope not," Max said. "My guess is if they could have, they already would have. Most long-range transport is awkward and even unworkable at short range."

Max was right again.

Still, the battle once joined was close and increasingly desperate. Not in the sense that I"d seen those civilians slaughtered on Eridani II. This was somehow more abstract, more universal, and maybe even more frightening. Huge storms of light winking in and out of existence. A bizarre ballet in which the dancing diamonds grew fewer and fewer, vessels evaporating like teardrops under lasers-"we"re eyes that cannot cry," Max muttered at one juncture-directors of a throbbing light show that seemed to point to the end of light itself.

It lasted five continuous days.

Max kept a constant watch out beyond Iota Persei for a second enemy attack from s.p.a.ce. But none materialized.

The enemy ships were apparently a little less effective in close combat than they"d been in the past. Max thought that their new design for speed twice as fast as ours at long distance-two light-years an hour, he"d calculated-somehow slowed them down a bit at short range. "Let"s hope they learn that lesson too late.""

I thought of dispatching Max with my brain scrambler many times. Losing this battle was the only way that Treena would be moved to implement the smart weapon, I was sure. Yet in the heat of battle-in thesway of those swirling strands of keen white lights on the big view screen-I didn"t really want to lose this one. Despite all of my careful planning, I just couldn"t bring myself to do this to our side. To I. M.

Max.

At the beginning of the sixth day, the enemy withdrew what was left of their fleet. A few flickering flashlights limped back out into s.p.a.ce.

Our side was scarcely better off, but we"d held our ground on Iota Persei.

"We didn"t give them one iota," Max said.

I grimaced at his pun, but was not unhappy.

"They were not only a little slower in close combat than we"d figured," Max continued, "but I think their number was also less than we"d first projected."

I frowned more deeply at the implication of that. "So there"s a bigger part of their fleet-bigger than what we first estimated-still out there somewhere."

Max nodded. "I doubt we can handle them, if they come at us now in our present condition."

His comm chimed, as if on cue.

"Word from Treena," he said, a minute later. He looked tired, grave. "An enemy force a third bigger than what you left on Mu Ca.s.siopeaie just materialized beyond that solar system. Treena"s struggling to get a workable strategy going, but she"ll be badly outnumbered."

Not what I wanted. Treena"s defeat would be the end of it for our side. If only she"d consider the smart weapon...

"Not much that we can do to help, I"d a.s.sume," I said.

The commander shook his head, grimly. "Not much at all. What we have left of our force here would take far too long to get there."

I looked at the variety of vessels, mostly ours, a few captured from the enemy, in various glistening angles and close-ups on the screen.

"Let"s say at least you got there," I said. "You"re the master strategist. Would that help?"

"Sure, but-"

"Any chance we could prevail upon one of the enemy to tell us how to fly one of their faster ships?"

The enemy wasn"t stupid. They had programmed their new speed drives to self-destruct the instant the hull had been breached enough to prevent travel. As an extra precaution against their new technology coming into our possession, the drives were also programmed to burn out any time the ship was motionless for more than five minutes, and an override wasn"t manually entered to stop the self-destruct.