"I'm hoping we'll come out of it a bit better than that," I told him.

"Uh-huh. Sure."

We finished the rest of the trip to the bay in silence, to find that the captain had already had the other five members of the team assemble there.

I tried giving them a short pep talk, but I wasn't particularly good at it and they weren't much in the mood to be pepped up, anyway. So instead we spent a few minutes checking one last time on our equipment and making as sure as we could that our specially equipped suits and weapons were going to function as desired.

Afterward, we all sat in the boat, breathed recycled air, and sweated hard.

And I tried one last time to think. One: hivies don't form small groups. Two: all members of a hive mind have the same experience level. Three:...

Still no use.

I don't know how long we sat there. The plan was for the captain to take the Volga as close in as he could before the Drymnu's inevitable attack became too much for the ship to handle, but as the minutes dragged on and nothing happened, a set of frightening possibilities began to flicker through my already overheated mind. The Volga's bridge blown so quickly that they'd had no time even to cry out... the rest of us flying blind toward a collision or to sail forever through normal space...

"The Drymnu's opened fire," the captain's voice crackled abruptly in our headsets. "Antimeteor lasers; some minor sensor damage. Get ready—"

With a stomach-jolting lurch, we were dumped out through the bay doors... and got our first real look at a Drymnu hive ship.

The thing was huge. Incredibly so. It was still several klicks away, yet it still took up a massive chunk of the sky ahead of us. Dark-hulled, oddly shaped, convoluted, threatening—it was all of those, too, but the only word that registered in that first heart-stopping second was huge. I'd seen the biggest of the Services' carriers up close, and I was stunned. God only knows how the others in the boat felt.