In a single fluid motion, Lal reached out from his resting rack and handed his subordinate the order. "Implement this at once. And be sure you don't annihilate more than the mass fraction specified, else this whole solar system might be destroyed."

"I'm quite acquain... " e'Kraft was prevented from digging himself a grave by the appearance of one of his aides. The man's three-dimensional image flickered, then steadied.

"Pruissance, General." The aide bowed to Lal and then to e'Kraft. "Thirteen seconds ago we detected a gravitic disturbance near the sun. Someone has entered the system."

"So!" Lal fumed. When he got his talons into the insubordinate wretch that dared enter the combat zone without prior announcement--

The aide continued excitedly, "Puissance, it doesn't respond to our IFF. It's not one of ours."

Prince Lal turned sharply to Harl. "Could the Mush-faces be experimenting with interstellar drive?"

Unlikely, Puissance. The largest mass they've ever assembled in free fall was less than one hundred thousand tons. The smallest drive unit we have masses more than a billion."

That was the Dorvik's other trump. Without mass-energy converters, it was essentially impossible to hoist a drive unit into orbit, where it could operate.

The aide turned to look at someone outside of pickup range, and his excitement changed to pale and groveling terror. "The intruder is exactly one kill-radius from... from the sun!"

To convert a star-Lal gasped. While he had been ordering the destruction of a single inhabited planet, someone--something--absolutely evil had fused a bomb to murder a galaxy.

It was, where an instant before nothing had been.