Humans are diurnal creatures. We sleep in darkness and are active during the daylight hours. The Skorpis, my briefings had informed me, were descended from felines. They were nocturnal. All the more reason why our night landing made no sense. All the more reason to believe that Manfred was right; the next Skorpis attack would be at night.

I wanted to be prepared for it, but I was caught on the horns of a dilemma. The more men I put to guarding our perimeter, the fewer were available to assemble the matter transceiver. Without the transceiver we could not get the heavy weapons and sensors that we needed to make our makeshift base reasonably secure from attack.

We had one heavy weapon: the pair of antimissile lasers that, once assembled, could knock missiles out of the sky at ranges far enough to protect us from nuclear warheads. Or so the briefing tapes claimed. I shuddered at the thought of having nuclear weapons used against us. Apparently the high command had the same fear: hence the antimissile system. Our orders were to assemble it first, which we had very happily set out to do.

I gambled and put as many of the troops on the assembly task as possible. That meant roughly half of them. More would simply get in each other’s way. The others guarded the perimeter while the construction job—heavy lasers and transceiver—hurried along.

I walked the perimeter myself, studying the landscape, searching for whatever advantages I could find in the natural fall of the terrain.