“Ready, warriors?” he called. Up and down his line, males shouted and waved their arms to show they were. “Then shove!” the domain master yelled.

The Omalo had spent the last few days dragging as many large stones as they could to the edge of Ervis Gorge. Now, by ones, twos, threes, sixes, they stood behind the stones. At Reatur’s command, they strained against them, pushed them down into the gorge.

The slope was shallow. Some of the boulders just skidded briefly. Others turned over one or twice, then fetched up against rocks sticking up from the ground and stopped. But still others picked up speed, crashed into the ranks of the Skarmer.

The Omalo shouted again, watching row upon row of their enemies go down in writhing heaps. “Don’t just stand there!” Reatur shouted. “More stones!”

But as the males swarmed back to the next piles of stones, something dreadful happened. It was so far outside the domain master’s experience that at first he did not fully grasp it. He saw flashes of light coming from a male in the front rank of the Skarmer, heard a loud, barking roar unlike anything he had known before. Something went craaack past an arm. And somewhere not far away, males, Reatur’s males, were falling down and screaming.

He and his warriors, all of whom were seeing and hearing the same things, took a long, terrible moment to understand that all those strange, terrible things were eyestalks of the same beast. For Reatur, the realization came when he saw a human near the male from whom the flashes of light and the terrible noise were coming.

He had never seen the humans he knew using anything like this-weapon, he supposed it was-but it was too strange to have come from his own people, or even from the Skarmer. Compared to humans, he thought, surprised at himself, the Skarmer were closest kin. If humans had weapons, they would be strange, too.

Strange and deadly. A male not two steps from Reatur was on the ground, thrashing. The domain master saw that he had a hole in him, the sort a spear might give, between two of his arms. As Reatur watched, the male voided bloodily and stopped moving.

Craaack! Another-whatever it was-whizzed by Reatur. He heard a wet slapping noise. A male behind him started to shriek. It all happened in the same instant. The domain master pointed to the Skarmer with the weapon. “Get him!” he shouted. “Get him!”

More stones rumbled down. One just missed the human, another would have smashed the male with the weapon had it not kicked up and flown over his eyestalks. The Skarmer kept right on wielding it, though, and Reatur’s males kept going down.

“More stones!” Reatur yelled. “More! More!”

His males heaved against a few more boulders. Others, though, stayed where they were, for the Omalo who should have pushed them into Ervis Gorge were running back toward Reatur’s castle. In a way, the domain master did not blame them. He wanted to run away, too, especially since a male died or was horribly wounded almost every time the strange weapon flashed and barked.

And now the rest of the Skarmer, encouraged both because of their foes’ dismay and because they were no longer being pelted so heavily, reached the rim of the gorge. They were eager; Reatur’s males, even the ones who had not fled, were wavering.

Off to one side, the Skarmer who had already gained the flatlands were starting to swing round to cut Reatur’s males off from the way back. If they could manage that, they could surround and destroy them at their leisure, even without their cursed weapon. With it… Reatur did not like to think about what would happen with it.

“Back!” he shouted, hating himself for it but seeing no better course. He quickly added another command he hoped his males would obey: “Keep your order as you go!”

Most of them did. And, to his relief, the Skarmer let them escape. Why not, the domain master thought bitterly. They’ll already done what they needed to do. Reatur tried to stay optimistic. He thought about how much his avalanche had battered the invaders.

Enoph tramped by. He said just what Reatur was thinking:

“We hurt them.”

“Aye.” The domain master sighed; he could not afford the luxury of wishful thinking, not now. “But they hurt us worse. They beat us, Enoph, and right now I have no idea how to keep them from beating us again.”

“What are we going to do?” Sarah hated having to rely on Emmett Bragg. Making a career soldier mission commander had always struck her as part and parcel of the Washington mindset about extraterrestrial intelligence, which, she was convinced, had been formed by too many bad science fiction movies-aliens had to be enemies, therefore had to be fought, therefore a soldier should be in charge. Simple. Simpleminded, too.

But now the crew of Athena found itself in the middle of a war. The aliens weren’t all enemies; some of them had become good friends. They were better friends, certainly, than Oleg Lopatin ever would be, and Oleg Lopatin’s AKT4 had killed and maimed more of them than she liked to think about.

Her medical training had not prepared her for war wounds. They were as ghastly on Minervans as on people, not just for themselves but because they were deliberately inflicted.

So she turned to Emmett. Having him in charge suddenly looked like a good idea after all. The trouble was, instead of instantly coming up with an answer that would solve their problems, he only scowled and said, “What are we going to do? I don’t see too much we can do, right now. Maybe the best thing to hope for is that old Oleg didn’t bring that many spare clips for his rifle.”

Sarah felt her lips tighten. That wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She said, “In your cubicle-”

He grinned at her, put her offstride. “What do you know about that? Haven’t hardly coaxed you in there.”

“Will you shut up?” The heat of her fury amazed her. Picking her words carefully, saying them even more carefully, she went on, “In your cubicle, there is a cabinet you keep locked. I thought that perhaps-”

“-I had an Armalite stashed away there-a rifle,” he amended quickly, seeing that she did not follow. She gave him reluctant credit for being all business once more. “Or maybe a crate of grenades. Trouble is, I don’t.”

Sarah set hands on hips. “Well, what the hell do you keep in there, then?” She was furious at him all over again, this time for having her hopes dashed.

“This and that,” he said. She thought that meant he wasn’t going to tell her, but he did, a little. “Some real special codes, for one thing, the kind you hope you never have to use-I mean, there’s a lot worse things could go wrong than one crazy Russian.”

“Like for instance?” Sarah asked, genuinely curious.

“Like the whole crew of Tsiolkovsky attackin’ us on purpose when we set out, remember, we didn’t know how far apart we were from them. Or like the natives bein’ high-tech after all, just without radio on account of they’re telepaths or some stupid thing, and overrunnin’ Athena. They’d have to be ready back home then, in case we had somethin’ happen out of Invaders from Minerva.”

In spite of herself, Sarah giggled. “Stupid damn movie,” she said, having watched it on TV at least two dozen times since she was a kid. A late-fifties low-budget scifi classic turkey, it featured “Minervans”-who looked nothing like real Minervans-remarkable chiefly because the zippers in their costumes were visible in several scenes. Every so often, coming up with something silly like that, Emmett could surprise her and remind her that he was human, too.

“Isn’t it?” he said now, quietly laughing himself. “I’ll tell you what I wish I had in there, and it’s got nothin’ to do with guns and such.” He waited for Sarah to raise an eyebrow, then went on, “I wish I had a couple o’ bottles o’ good sippin’ whiskey put away, for celebrating gettin’ down here, gettin’ back home…” He paused, studied her in that way she found alarming and attractive at the same time. “Maybe sharin’ a little, now and again.”