“If we have to, we fight,” Stone answered. “That’s what I was coming to. The fighting controls are right here.” He pointed. “We’ve got machine guns and missiles for close-in defense. None of that stuff is much different than what you used on the Peregrine, so you know what it can do.”

“Nuclear tips on the missiles and all?” Johnson asked.

“That’s right,” the senior pilot said, “except you carried two and we’ve got a couple dozen. And that doesn’t say anything about the mines.” He pointed to another rank of switches.

“Mines, sir?” Johnson raised an eyebrow. “Now you’ve got me: I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“There are five of them, one controlled by each switch here,” Stone explained. “They’re the strongest fusion bombs we can build… and they’re equipped with the most sensitive timers we’ve got. If we know the Lizards are trying to come up our rear ends, we leave them behind, timed to explode right when the enemy ship is closest to them. Maybe we nail it, maybe we don’t, but it’s sure as hell worth a try.”

“Even if we don’t wreck it, we might fry its brains.” Johnson grinned. “I like that. Whoever thought of it has a really sneaky mind.”

“Thank you,” Walter Stone said.

Johnson’s eyebrows jumped. “Was it you?”

Stone grinned at him. “I didn’t say that. I said, ‘Thank you.’ Here, let’s fire up the simulator and see what you do if the Lizards decide to take a whack at us after all.”

The simulator was a far cry from the Link machines on which Johnson had trained before the Lizards came. Like so much human technology, it borrowed-stole, really-wholesale from things the Race knew and people hadn’t back in 1942. The end result was something like a game, something like a God’s-eye view of the real thing, with the Lewis and Clark reduced to a glowing blip on a screen, the hypothetical Lizard pursuit ship another blip, and all the things they might launch at each other angry little sparks of light.