But it didn't happen. We moved farther and farther into the ship, setting fires and torching everything that looked torchable, and still the Drymnu held back.

For a while I wondered if he was simply waiting for us to run out of fuel; for a

shorter while I wondered if he had indeed given up. But the radio jamming continued, and he didn't seem to care that we were using up our fuel destroying his home, and so for lack of a better plan we just kept going.

We got up a couple of ramps, switched corridors twice, and were at a large, interior corridor when we finally found out what he had in mind.

It was just the fortune of the draw that Powers was point man as we reached that spot... just the fortune of the draw that he was the one to die. He glanced around the corner into the main corridor, started to step through—and was abruptly hurled a dozen meters sideways by a violent blast of highly compressed air. Waskin, behind him, leaned into the corridor to spray torch fire in that direction, and apparently succeeded in neutralizing the weapon. But it cost us precious seconds, and by the time we were able to move in and see what was happening to Powers, it was too late. The dark tide of bodies withdrew readily from before our flames, and we saw that Powers, still inside his reinforced suit, had nevertheless been beaten to death.

"With tools, looked like," Fromm said. Even through the muffling of the helmets his voice was clearly shaking. "They clubbed him to death with ordinary tools."

"So much for him not understanding the techniques of warfare," Waskin bit out.

"He's figured out all he really needs to know: that he's got the numbers on his side. And how to use them."

He was right. Inevitable, really; the only mystery was why it had taken the Drymnu this long to realize that. "We'd better keep moving," I shouted as we pressed our helmets together in a ring.

"Why bother?" Brimmer snarled, his voice dripping with anger and fear.

"Waskin's right—he knows what he's doing, all right. He's suckered us into coming too far inside the ship and now he's ready to begin the slaughter."

"Yeah, well, maybe," Fromm growled, "but he's going to have one hell of a fight before he gets us."

"So?" Brimmer shot back. "What difference does it make to him how many of his bodies he loses? He's got eighteen thousand of them to throw at us."

"So we kill as many as we can," I put in, struggling to regain control.

"Every bit helps slow him down."

"Oh, hell!" Brimmer said suddenly. "Look—here they come!"

I swung around... and froze.

The entire width of the hallway was a mass of dark bodies charging down on us—dark bodies, with hands that glinted with metal tools.

This was it... and down deep I knew Brimmer was right. For all my purported tactical knowledge, I'd been taken in by the oldest ploy in human military history: draw the enemy deep inside your lines and then smother him. I glanced around; sure enough, the bodies filled the corridor in the other direction, too.

And for the last time in my life I had wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Except that this time I wouldn't be the only one who paid the price.

We had already shifted into a back-to-back formation, and three lines of torch fire were licking out toward each half of the imploding waves. Leaning my head back a few degrees, I touched the helmet behind me. "Looks like this is it," said, trying hard to keep my voice calm. "Let's try to at least take as much of the Drymnu down with us as we can—we owe Messenia that much. Go for head shots—pass it down to the others."

The words were barely out of my mouth when I was deafened by another of the air blasts that had gotten Powers. Automatically, I braced myself; but this time they'd added something new. Along with the burst of air threatening to sweep us off our feet came a cloud of metal shrapnel.

It hit Waskin squarely in the chest.

I didn't hear any gasp of pain, but as he fell to his knees I clearly heard him utter something blasphemous. I gave the approaching wave one last sweep with my torch and then dropped down beside him. "Where does it hurt?" I shouted, pressing our helmets together.

"Mostly everywhere," he bit out. "Damn. I think they got my air system."

As well as the rest of the suit. I gritted my teeth and broke out my emergency patch kit, running a hand over his reinforced air hose to try and find the break. Suit integrity per se shouldn't be a big problem—we'd modified the standard suit design to isolate the helmet from everything else with just this sort of thing in mind. But an air system leak in an unknown atmosphere might easily prove fatal, and I had no intention of losing Waskin to suffocation or poisoning while he could still fight. I found the leak, gripped the piece of metal still sticking out of it—

"Oh, hell, Travis," he gasped. "Hell. What am I using for brains?"

"What?" I called. "What is it?"

"The Drymnu, damn it. Forget the head shots—we got to stop killing them."

Hysteria so quickly? "Waskin—"

"Damn it, Travis, don't you see? It's a hive mind—a hive mind. All experiences are shared commonly. All experiences—including pain!"

It was like a tactical full-spec bomb had gone off in the back of my brain.

Hive Mind Weakness Number Three: injure a part and you injure the whole. "That's it!"

I snapped, standing up and slamming my helmet against the one behind me.

"Fire to injure, everyone, not to kill. Go for the arms and legs—try and take the bodies out of the fight without killing them. Pass the word—we're going to see if we can overload the Drymnu with pain."

For a wonder, they understood, and by the time Waskin and I were back in the game ourselves it was already becoming clear that we indeed had a chance. It was far easier to injure the bodies than to kill them—far easier and far quicker—and as the incapacitated bodies fell to the deck, their agonized thrashing hindered the advance of those behind them. The air-blast cannon continued its attacks for a while, but while all of us got painfully pincushioned by the flying shrapnel, Waskin's remained the only seriously life-threatening injury. We kept firing, and the bodies kept charging, and I gritted my teeth waiting for the Drymnu to switch tactics on us.

But he didn't. I'd been right, all along: for all his sophistication and alien intelligence, the Drymnu had no concept of warfare beyond the brute-force numbers game he'd latched onto. Even now, when it was clearly failing, he could come up with no alternative to it, and with each passing minute I could feel the attack becoming more sluggish or more erratic in turn as the Drymnu began to lose his ability to focus on us. Eventually, it reached the point where I knew there would be no more surprises. The Drymnu, agonized probably beyond anything he had ever felt before, and with more pain coming in faster than it could be dealt with, had literally become unable to think straight.

Approximately five minutes later, the attacking waves finally began to retreat back down the corridor; and even as we began to give chase, the radio jamming abruptly ceased and the Drymnu surrendered. The full story—or at least the official story—didn't surface from the dust for nearly two months, but it came out pretty nearly as we on the Volga had already expected it to. The Drymnu—either the total thing or some large fraction of it—had apparently decided that having a fragmented race out among the stars was both an abomination of nature and highly dangerous besides, and had taken it upon himself to see whether humanity could indeed be destroyed. Point man—or point whatever—in a war that was apparently already over. The Drymnu, defeated by a lowly unarmed freighter, had clearly learned his lesson.

And I was left to meditate once more on the frustrations of my talent.