"That's up to you," I said as she turned around and walked, stiff-backed, to the door. It opened for her, and she left.

With an odd feeling in my stomach, I realized that I had just set a pleasant little bonfire in the center of my line of retreat. If I didn't come up with a

workable battle plan now, I would humiliate myself in front of Kittredge—and probably everyone else aboard ship, too. In my mind's eye I could see Kittredge's I-knew-you-couldn't-do-it contempt, the captain's maddeningly understanding look, Waskin's outright amusement...

Alone in my cabin, the images still made me cringe. More undeserved shame...

and for once, I suddenly decided I would rather die than go through all of that again. I would draw up a battle plan—and it was going to be the best damned plan Waskin or Kittredge had ever seen.

I would start with a concerted effort to dredge up those three vaguely remembered hivey weaknesses from their dusty hiding places in my memory. And maybe with a trip through the ship's references to find out just what the hell this Crecy was that Kittredge had referred to. We started making preparations immediately, of course. Unfortunately, there weren't a lot of preparations that could be made.

The Volga, as was pointed out to me with monotonous regularity, was not a warship. We had no shielding beyond the standard solar radiation and micrometeor stuff, our sole weapon was a pair of laser cannons designed to blow away more dangerous meteors—those up to a whopping half-meter across—and our drive and mechanical structure had never been designed for anything even resembling a tight maneuver. We were a waddling, quacking duck that could be blown into mesons half a second after the Drymnu decided we were dangerous to it.

The trick, therefore, was going to be to make the Volga seem as harmless as possible... and then to figure out how we could stop being harmless when we wanted to. That much was basic military strategy, the stuff I'd learned my second week in basic. Fortunately, there was one very trivial way to accomplish that.