The intercom rasped as First Officer Wong, who had replaced Kittredge on the bridge, cleared his throat delicately. "I presume there's no way to expunge that... suggestion... from the log?"

"That your idea or one of Waskin's?" the captain snorted. Perhaps he was remembering it was Waskin's fault we were here in the first place. "Of course there's no way. And it wasn't a suggestion, it was an order—a legal one, our resident military expert tells me." He turned his glare full force onto me.

I refused to shrivel. He'd asked me a question, and it wasn't my fault if he hadn't liked the answer.

"But this is crazy," Wong persisted. "We're a freighter, for God's sake. How in hell did he expect us to take on a warship with eighteen thousand Drymnu aboard?"

"It wasn't a warship," I put in. "Couldn't have been. The Drymnu don't have any warships."

"You could have fooled me," Kittredge growled. "I hope you're not suggesting he just happened to have a cargo of full-spectrum bombs aboard and somehow lost his grip on them."

"I said he didn't have any warships," I shot back. "I didn't say the attack wasn't deliberate."

"The difference escapes me—"

"Let's keep the discussion civil, shall we?" the captain interrupted. "I think it's a given that we're all on edge here. All right, Travis, you want to offer an explanation as to why a race ostensibly as peaceful as the Drymnu would launch an unprovoked attack on a human installation?"

"I don't know why he did it," I told him. "But keep in mind that the Drymnu isn't really 'peaceful'—I wouldn't call him that, anyway. He isn't warlike, but he's competitive enough, to the point of having deliberately wiped out at least one class of predators on his home world. All the hivies are that way. It's just that in space there's so much room and territory that there's no reason for one of them to fight any of the others."