“This is not a game,” Jardbrass said in a freezing voice intended to silence the uppity youngsters.
“Yes, it is,” Menno insisted, completely unintimidated. “It is a game, and the Capasins think it’s a game, and if we don’t play — we lose. It’s why they’ve come. They’ve come to play. They’ve come at our invitation.”
Jardbrass started to speak. But no words came. He collapsed all at once. The hard set of his face, his determined expression, all dissolved. “Twelve crystals?” he whispered pitifully. “It cannot be.”
“What does he mean ‘at our invitation’?” Farsight asked Menno directly.
Menno didn’t answer. He smiled at me, a haunted shadow of the cocky gamer I’d met at the Dance By.
I knew what he meant. I knew what they had done. “They’ve found a way to wave broadcast,” I said. “But it must have been fairly recently. How could wave broadcasts have traveled so far off-world and reached the Capasins?”
“We linked to a Zero-space transponder,” Menno said proudly. “We’re a century ahead of you Equatorials, you know. We can punch a signal through the background radiation. And we can bounce it through Z-space. In ten years we’d have had a full airfoil crystal and been the hub of a global uninet. And soon thereafter we could have linked directly to the Generationals and the Illamans on their home worlds. It would have been a revolution!”
“What signals did you bounce through Z-space, Polar?” I asked.
“Can’t you guess, my Equatorial friend? Simple mathematical formulas at first, for the earliest tests. But we had to see whether the system could handle heavy data traffic.”
“Mother Sky, you broadcast games! You bounced games through Z-space.”
“Yes. Brilliant, wasn’t it?” Menno sneered. “Except for the slight, small fact, that some species don’t know the difference between games and reality. These aliens are here to exterminate us because they’ve seen our games and believe them to be real. They think we make toys of other species. That we interfere with their development with utter indifference to the results. They aren’t here to do evil. They’re here to annihilate what they believe to be a race of murderers.”
This horrifying news was still ringing in the stunned silence when someone cried, “Look!”
Every head turned.
Two Capasin ships emerged from the clouds. I didn’t wait for orders; I beat wing to the Crate.
I slid down through the hatch and barreled into Lackofa. “They’re —” I panted.
“I saw them!”
“Fifty percent thrust!”
I grabbed the controls as we shot away from the EmCee. Which target? Left or right? Left was closest to the Polar Orbit High. Stop them first, then —
A beam of light sliced the nub of a wing from the Polar. A chunk of new crystal fell, dragging thirty or more Ketrans down with it. Who had fired? Behind us! On top of us!
I spun the Crate, let momentum carry us skimming beneath the belly of the ship, and fired right up into it.
At the same moment the other two Capasin ships blazed with flechettes. The tiny shrapnel caught the Polars from two sides. Maybe someone lived through that. But not enough to provide even a semblance of lift.
It was my home all over again. Only this time no desperate wings fought gravity. This time the docked males and females, juvies and oldsters, were all nothing more than ballast. Dead weight.
Polar Orbit High Crystal fell like an unstrung corpse. Simply fell from the sky.
The Capasin ship above us veered off, having now seen the peril that we represented. Too late to matter. Polar Orbit High was gone. And it was three Capasin ships against the EmCee’s force field and the Crate’s pitiful weapons.
No winning move. Nothing left but to fly away. Retreat. A valid strategy; I had seen many a species retreat from an attack, regroup, renumber, resurge.
Fly away.
“Reverse thrust,” I said.
Lackofa didn’t respond.
“It’s the only move, Lackofa. The Crate. We have to save it. It’s the only weapon we have. Our only chance.”
“They’ll kill everyone. Everyone, won’t they? Every crystal, one by one.”
“Not us,” I said harshly. “Not if we run. Lackofa, we’re it. We’re all we have now. All of the Ketran race. Now reverse thrust. Do it.”
The Capasin ships didn’t bother to pursue us as the EmCee and we two in the Crate blew toward space. High above our lost, doomed planet we rendezvoused with the EmCee and were accepted back inside the force field.
It was the end of Ket. And, although there were still seventy-two Ketrans alive at the moment, it was also the end of my race.
“Commander, the system appears to have six true planets and nine moons. Two of the moons — both orbiting the second planet — may be habitable. None of the planets.”
I nodded. “We’ll go take a look. Fields at full power, passive sensors to maximum range, active sensors off, fighters to alert status two.”
My words became actions. The ship’s defensive force field shimmered, distorting my view of the system’s sun and the stars beyond. A probe extruded through the field to gather every bit of electronic data available. Our active sensors, what we called the “pingers,” were shut down: They could alert possible enemies to our presence. And far down in the waist of the ship three wing-tied pilots slid into the snug cockpits of heavily armed fighters, and keyed up engine and weapons power. Nine more pilots remained at ready station, prepared to go hostile in less than three minutes.
It was the seventy-ninth time we had entered a system and carried out our search for a home. The days and years of excitement were long since past. It was a routine now. It was what we did. Hope and disappointment and all the rest of the emotional baggage had slowly drained away, failure after bitter failure.
We had learned to expect nothing. We’d learned to discount every encouraging datum and to believe every ill omen. Seventy-nine systems in
