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<Nor do I understand anything more than a glimmer of the way you think,> said Human. <But isn't that a good thing, too? The mystery is endless. We will never cease to surprise each other.>
<Till death ends all surprises,> said the Hive Queen.
Chapter 14 -- "HOW THEY COMMUNICATE WITH ANIMALS"
"If only we were wiser or better people, perhaps the gods would explain to us the mad, unbearable things they do."
-- from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao
The moment Admiral Bobby Lands received the news that the ansible connections to Starways Congress were restored, he gave the order to the entire Lusitania Fleet to decelerate forthwith to a speed just under the threshold of invisibility. Obedience was immediate, and he knew that within an hour, to any telescopic observer on Lusitania, the whole fleet would seem to spring into existence from nowhere. They would be hurtling toward a point near Lusitania at an astonishing speed, their massive foreshields still in place to protect them from taking devastating damage from collisions with interstellar particles as small as dust.
Admiral Lands's strategy was simple. He would arrive near Lusitania at the highest possible speed that would not cause relativistic effects; he would launch the Little Doctor during the period of nearest approach, a window of no more than a couple of hours; and then he would bring his whole fleet back up to relativistic speeds so rapidly that when the M.D. Device went off, it would not catch any of his ships within its all-destroying field.
It was a good, simple strategy, based on the assumption that Lusitania had no defenses. But to Lands, that assumption could not be taken for granted. Somehow the Lusitanian rebels had acquired enough resources that for a period of time near the end of the voyage, they were able to cut off all communications between the fleet and the rest of humanity. Never mind that the problem had been ascribed to a particularly resourceful and pervasive computer saboteur program; never mind that his superiors assured him that the saboteur program had been wiped out through prudently radical action timed to eliminate the threat just prior to the arrival of the fleet at its destination. Lands had no intention of being deceived by an illusion of defenselessness. The enemy had proved itself to be an unknown quantity, and Lands had to be prepared for anything. This was war, total war, and he was not going to allow his mission to be compromised through carelessness or overconfidence.
From the moment he received this assignment he had been keenly aware that he would be remembered throughout human history as the Second Xenocide. It was not an easy thing to contemplate the destruction of an alien race, particularly when the piggies of Lusitania were, by all