She nodded, and that was that. If I hadn't been there, they'd have done a quick, futile grid search and then gone running hotfoot to report the attack to some authority or other without trying the emergency beacon trick. We'd have missed entirely the fact that there was indeed a survivor of the attack.

And we sure as hell would have missed getting mixed up in mankind's first interstellar war. His name was Lieutenant Colonel Halveston, and he was dying.

He knew that, of course. The Services were good at making sure their people had any and all information that might have an influence on their performance or survival. Halveston knew how much radiation he'd taken, knew that at this stage there was nothing anyone could do for him... but countering that was a strong will to hold out long enough to let someone know what had happened. The Services were good at developing that, too.

We didn't get to talk to him on the trip up from Messenia, partly because the doc needed Halveston's full attention for the bioloop stabilization techniques to work and partly because long chatty conversations on an open radio didn't seem like a smart idea. It was nerve-racking as hell... and so when the captain, Kittredge, and I were finally able to gather around Halveston's sickbay bed, we weren't exactly in the greatest of emotional shapes.

Not that it mattered that much. Halveston's report would have been a full-spec bombshell no matter what our condition.

"It was the Drymnu," he whispered through cracked lips. "The Drymnu did this."

I looked up from Halveston to see Captain Garrett's mouth drop open slightly.

That, from the captain, was the equivalent of falling over backwards with shock... which was about what I felt like doing. "The... Drymnu?" he asked carefully. "The Drymnu? The hive race?"