“I know about fighting,” I said softly.

“Do you?”

I nodded, then got to my feet again and left her standing in the middle of her tent, looking more troubled than angry. I knew about fighting, from the Ice Age battles against the Neanderthals to the sweeping conquests of the Mongol hordes. From the war against Set’s dinosaurs and intelligent reptilians to the sieges of Troy and Jericho.

I knew about fighting. But what did I know about leading a hundred soldiers in a war that spanned the galaxy, a nexus in space-time that would decide the existence of the continuum?

I began to find out.

Outside Frede’s medical tent, most of my troopers were busy assembling the transceiver that would be the hub of our base on planet Lunga. I could see from the number of modules they had already uncrated that we would have to knock down some of the trees to make room for the assembly. Two of the sergeants already had a team working on that, on the other side of what I now considered to be our base camp.

One squad was setting up the antimissile lasers, the only heavy weaponry that had been sent down with us.

“Nice of the big brass to send this down with us,” one of the troopers was saying as she connected cables from the power pack to the computer that directed the lasers.

“Yeah, sure,” groused the man working alongside her. “They don’t want their nice shiny transceiver bombed into a mushroom cloud.”

“Well, the lasers protect us, too, you know.”

“Yeah, sure. As long as we’re close to the transceiver we’ll be safe from nuclear missiles.”

“That’s something, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, sure. The brass loves us. They stay up nights worrying about our health and safety.”

The young woman laughed.

Other troopers were setting up bubble tents and stacking our supplies. All of them had shed their armor in the morning warmth and were working in their fatigues, which were rapidly becoming stained with sweat.