The young man showed mild interest. “But surely you know something about it now?”

The commander shook his head sadly. “No, we don’t. We know more than we did, certainly, but not nearly enough. These bastards are wickedly clever. But I’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s first look at what we do know, or can deduce, about our enemy.” He turned in his desk chair and punched a button. A blank wall bunked and became a visor screen showing an enormous collection of stars, thousands of which blazed a reddish color.

“The Confederacy,” the commander stated needlessly. “Seven thousand six hundred and forty-six worlds, by last count, over a third of a galaxy. Quite an accomplishment for a race from a single planet out there on that one little arm. Planets terraformed, planets where the people were adapted to the place, even planets with sixty other intelligent native life forms on them, all now nicely acculturated to our way of doing things. We own it, we run it our way, and we’ve always had our own way. Not a single one of those other races was ever in any position to challenge, us. They had to accept us and our way, or they died in much the manner our own native world was pacified so many centuries ago. We’re the boss.”

The young man didn’t respond. He felt no need to. Born and raised in this culture, he simply took what Krega was saying for granted, as did everyone else.

“Well, we’ve now met our technological equals, perhaps even slight technological superiors,” the commander continued. “Analysis made the obvious deductions. First, we’re always expanding. Obviously there is another dominant race and culture doing the same from some other point in the galaxy. They discovered us before we discovered them—bad luck for us.