"Why wouldn't it? You could put a handful of Drymnu bodies aboard something the size of a fighter, and as long as they didn't get too far from the mother ship, they'd still be connected to the hive mind."

And at that moment Waskin sealed his fate. Everyone else that I'd had this talk with had needed to be reminded that hivies couldn't function at all in groups of less than a few thousand... and then had needed to be reminded that the thirty-thousand-klick range meant that small scouts or fighters could, indeed, have limited use for them. "You're right," I nodded to Waskin. "Absolutely right. So why won't the Drymnu expect us to use small fighters?"

He made a face. "You're enjoying this, aren't you? This is your revenge for all the poker games you've lost, right?"

God knew there wasn't a lot about this situation that was even remotely enjoyable... but in a perverse way I did rather like being ahead of Waskin for a

change. The fact that my years in the Services gave me a slight advantage was totally irrelevant. "Never mind me," I told him shortly. "You just concentrate on you. Why won't he expect fighters?"

He snorted, then shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe a single ship-sized mind can't handle that many disparate viewpoints. No, that doesn't make sense."

"It's actually pretty close," I had to admit. "It's loosely tied into the reason for that thirty-thousand-klick range. That number suggest anything?"

"It's the distance light travels in a tenth of a second," he said promptly.

"I'm not that ignorant, you know."

He was right; that part of the hivies' limitation was pretty common knowledge.

"Okay, then, that leads us immediately to the fact that the common telepathic link behaves the same way light does, with all the same limitations. So what do you get when you have, say, a dozen high-speed fighters swarming out from the mother ship vectoring in on your target?" "What do you—? Oh. Oh, sure. High relative speeds mean you'll be getting into relativistic effects."