The colony was covered with goo, a coating of slime mold several centimeters thick in some places. It dripped off power lines and was all over the communication equipment. This was good news—there was now a possibility that the mold had simply overwhelmed the equipment's transmission ability. This momentary burst of optimism was brought to an abrupt halt when Thomas' squad got to the animal pens to find all of the livestock dead and deeply decomposed thanks to the industrious work of the mold. They found the colonists shortly thereafter, in much the same state. Nearly all of them (or what was left of them) were in or near their beds; the exceptions being families, who were often found in children's rooms or the hallways leading to them, and the members of the colony working the graveyard shift, who were found at or near their posts. Whatever hit, hit late and so fast that colonists simply didn't have time to react.

Thomas suggested taking one of the corpses to the colony's medical quarters; he could perform a quick autopsy that might give some insight into what had killed the colonists. His squad leader gave assent, and Thomas and a squadmate hunkered over one of the more intact bodies. Thomas grabbed under the arms and the squadmate took the legs. Thomas told his squadmate to lift on the count of three; he got to two when the slime mold rose up from the body and slapped him wetly on the face. He gasped in surprise; the slime mold slid into his mouth and down his throat.

The rest of Thomas' squad immediately cued their suits to provide faceplates, and not a moment too soon, since in a matter of seconds, slime mold leaped from every crack and crevice to attack. All over the colony, similar attacks were made nearly simultaneously. Six of Thomas' platoon mates also found themselves with a mouthful of slime mold.

Thomas tried to pull the slime mold out of his mouth, but it slid farther into his throat, blocking his airway, pushing into his lungs and down his esophagus into his stomach. Thomas sent via his BrainPal that his squadmates should take him to the medical quarters, where they might be able to suction enough of the mold out of his body to allow him to breathe again; the SmartBlood meant they would have almost fifteen minutes before Thomas began to suffer permanent brain damage. It was an excellent idea and probably would have worked, had not the slime mold begun to excrete concentrated digestive acids into Thomas' lungs, eating him from the inside while he was still alive. Thomas' lungs began to dissolve immediately; he was dead from shock and asphyxiation minutes later. The six other platoon mates joined in his fate, the fate that had, everyone later agreed, also befallen the colonists.

Thomas' platoon leader gave orders to leave Thomas and the other victims behind; the platoon retreated to the transport and made its way back to the Tucson. The transport was denied permission to dock. The platoon was led in, one by one, in hard vacuum to kill whatever mold was still lingering on their suits, and then subjected to an intense external and internal decontamination process that was every bit as painful as it sounds.

Subsequent unmanned probes showed no survivors of Colony 622 anywhere, and that the slime mold, beyond possessing enough intelligence to mount two separate coordinated attacks, was nearly impervious to traditional weaponry. Bullets, grenades and rockets affected only small portions while leaving other portions unharmed; flamethrowers fried up a top layer of slime mold, leaving layers underneath untouched; beam weaponry slashed through the mold but did minimal overall damage. Research on the fungicide the colonists had requested had begun but was halted when it was determined that the slime mold was present almost everywhere on the planet. The amount of effort to locate another inhabitable planet was deemed less expensive than eradicating the slime mold on a global scale.

Thomas' death was a reminder that not only don't we know what we're up against out here, sometimes we simply can't imagine what we're up against. Thomas made the mistake of assuming the enemy would be more like us than not. He was wrong. He died because of it.

Conquering the universe was beginning to get to me.

The unsettled feeling had begun at Gindal, where we ambushed Gindalian soldiers as they returned to their aeries, slashing their huge wings with beams and rockets that sent them tumbling and screeching down sheer two-thousand-meter cliff faces. It had really started to affect me above Udaspri, as we donned inertia-dampening power packs to provide better control as we leaped from rock fragment to rock fragment in Udaspri's rings, playing hide-and-seek with the spiderlike Vindi who had taken to hurling bits of the ring down to the planet below, plotting delicate decaying orbits that aimed the falling debris directly on top of the human colony of Halford. By the time we arrived at Cova Banda, I was ready to snap.

It might have been because of the Covandu themselves, who in many respects were clones of the human race itself: bipedal, mammalian, extraordinarily gifted in artistic matters, particularly poetry and drama, fast breeding and unusually aggressive when it came to the universe and their place in it. Humans and the Covandu frequently found themselves fighting for the same undeveloped real estate. Cova Banda, in fact, had been a human colony before it had been a Covandu one, abandoned after a native virus had caused the settlers to grow unsightly additional limbs and homicidal additional personalities. The virus didn't give the Covandu even a headache; they moved right in. Sixty-three years later, the Colonials finally developed a vaccine and wanted the planet back. Unfortunately, the Covandu, again all too much like humans, weren't very much into the whole sharing thing. So in we went, to do battle against the Covandu.

The tallest of whom is no more than one inch tall.

The Covandu are not so stupid as to launch their tiny little armies against humans sixty or seventy times their size, of course. First they hit us with aircraft, long-range mortars, tanks and other military equipment that might actually do some damage—and did; it's not easy to take out a twenty-centimeter-long aircraft flying at several hundred klicks an hour. But you do what you can to make it difficult to use these options (we did this by landing in Cova Banda's main city's park, so any artillery that missed us hit their own people) and anyway, eventually you'll dispose of most of these annoyances. Our people used more care destroying Covandu forces than they typically might, not only because they're smaller and require more attention to hit. There's also the matter that no one wants to have been killed by a one-inch opponent.

Eventually, however, you shoot down all the aircraft and take out all the tanks, and then you have to deal with the individual Covandu themselves. So here's how you fight one: You step on him. You just bring your foot down, apply pressure and it's done. As you're doing this, the Covandu is firing his weapon at you and screaming at the top of his tiny little lungs, a squeak that you may just be able to hear. But it's useless. Your suit, designed to apply brakes on a human-scale high-powered projectile, barely registers the bits of matter flung at your toes by a Covandu; you barely register the crunch of the little being you've stomped. You spot another one, you do it again.

We did this for hours as we waded through Cova Banda's main city, stopping every now and then to sight a rocket on a skyscraper five or six meters high and take it down with a single shot. Some of our platoon would spray a shotgun blast into a building instead, letting the individual shot, each big enough to take a Covandu's head clean off, rattle through the building like mad pachinko balls. But mostly, it was about the stomping. Godzilla, the famous Japanese monster, who had been undergoing his umpteenth revival as I left the Earth, would have felt right at home.