"I'd kill for it," she admitted with a sigh.

"Well, drink up," he invited, pouring another cup and handing it over. She took it eagerly, and he watched curiously as she sipped delicately. Her conscious eating manners were far different from her unconscious ones, and she was savoring it as if it were a rare treat.

She looked back up and saw his eyes.

"Sorry," she said. "For some reason, coffee doesn't grow well off Terra. The fide thing's expensive."

"Not anymore," he said with a smile, enjoying her enjoyment. "But you were about to tell me-?"

"So I was," she agreed. She took another sip, then leaned back against the bulkhead, looking even more absurdly young in his over-sized tee-shirt. But he wasn't tempted to smile again, for there was a grimness in her eyes and a tightness to her lips.

"If this is 2007," she began, "then in about eighty years, the human race is going to meet the Shirmaksu. When we do, it will be the beginning of a war which will last for the next four hundred years."

"Four hundred years?" he asked softly.

"At least," she said grimly. "You see, the Kangas-that's what we call Shirmaksu-aren't very nice. They introduced themselves by trying to exterminate us."

Her level voice sent a chill down his spine.

"But why?" he asked.

"Because they're Kangas," she said simply. "The way they think, only one sentient race has any right to exist: theirs. It took us quite a while to believe that, I understand." She shrugged. "By the time I was born, we'd had lots of practice."

"But there had to be a reason," he protested.

"Oh, lots of them," she agreed, "and we weren't the first species they tried to cide. So far, we've identified twenty-seven sentient or presentient species they've wiped. Mankind would've been twenty-eight." She shrugged again. "Of course, a lot of what we 'know' is guesswork and deduction, but what it comes down to is that the Kangas had an unhappy racial childhood." She flashed a tight, humorless smile.

"As nearly as we can piece it, there were two intelligent species on their home world, and they hated each other. We don't know why, but, then, enough human groups have hated each other for reasons no one else ever understood. At any rate, they probably started trying to wipe each other while they were still living in caves; by the time they got to pikes and muskets, the Kangas were the only thinking species left on the planet."

She sighed.

"I like to think humanity would've wanted to get the killing out of its system by then, but not the Kangas. They're a strange bunch. They're xenophobic, paranoid, and so cautious they're cowardly, by human standards, but if logic says to take a chance, they will. They'll cover their asses every way they can, but they'll do it. They're big on logic.

"Unfortunately, they've got their own weird streak of mysticism, too. We're pretty hazy on how it works-they haven't exactly talked it over with us, and they arranged things so there aren't any other species around, so we've never been able to study comparative alien psychology-but they put together a 'religion' that makes the most intolerant human fanatic look ecumenical.

"The way they see it, God created one race in His image: theirs. The devil, on the other hand, assumes an endless series of different shapes and forms, and he's constantly trying to destroy God. Which makes the entire universe one huge battleground and means anybody who doesn't look like a Kanga is automatically on the devil's side. And so, of course, the only logical thing to do is to exterminate them."

Her words were almost light, but her tone was not.

"Anyway, their policy was set long before they ran into us. They tend to think in biological terms-not too surprising, I guess, given their history-and they're very good bio-engineers. They're less bright about other things, but their standard procedure whenever they encountered another intelligent species or anything that might turn into one was to grab a few specimens for research, then crank a bio weapon to wipe out only that species and dust its planet. It worked quite well until they ran into us."

Aston noticed her cup was empty and refilled it. She smiled briefly and sipped, then continued.

"By that time, they'd turned their entire civilization into a killing machine. They weren't just wiping anyone they happened to run into, they were out looking for other intelligences to cide. They were even sending out survey ships expressly to find new targets-which is what happened to us.

"One of their scouts got close enough to Sol to pick up some radio transmissions, and that scared hell out of them, because they'd never encountered another race more advanced than the early steam age, and their 'priesthood' had more or less decided that was a divine dispensation. When their scout commander realized he'd found a bunch of devils more advanced than any of the others they'd met, he abandoned the rest of his mission and headed straight home at max.

"When he got there, the Kangas decided they had to forget their usual strategy. They hadn't come up with an FTL com system, though they had FTL travel-of a sort-but the best speed they could manage was about five times light-speed, and the closest system with a heavy Kanga population was over a hundred light-years away. Not only that, but their scout's crew was so scared by what they were picking up-remember, by their standards they'd just found a whole race of horribly powerful demons-that they never came closer to Sol than twenty light-years, so what they were seeing was already twenty years old. It took the scout almost twenty-five years to get home with the news, and it would take them another thirty-plus years to send out their sampling ships just to collect specimens, much less take them home, produce a bug for us, and send it back out. Even if they modified their strategy by sending an entire research ship to develop the bug on-site, we'd have had almost eighty years to develop between the time those signals originated and the time they could get back to Solarian space again.

"They were scared, but they were still logical. Rather than risk warning us with a sampling mission or by hanging around in orbit with a research vessel, they decided to forget nice, neat biological solutions this once and rely on brute force. It would only take them another ten years or so to muster a fleet of warships, and taking the time to make sure they were loaded for draken seemed logical to them.

"But-" she grinned, a sudden, tigerish expression that struck him with a chill "-they made a mistake. They polated our rate of progress based on their own, and humans are much better gadgeteers than they are. Not only that, we've always been a bloodthirsty bunch. They'd fought their last real war with pikes and black powder, and they didn't have the least idea how military competition pressurizes R&D.

"By the time they got back to Sol, there were colonies on Luna and Mars and large-scale mining operations in the asteroids. Political relations were still pretty shaky, too, and all the promises not to militarize space had collapsed once there was a thriving presence in space to protect-or prey upon. Nobody had a real 'space navy,' but there were quite a few armed ships. Most of the colonies had some sort of rudimentary defensive systems, and Terra had some pretty advanced orbital defenses. Most of them were aimed at planetary threats, but the existence of armed spacecraft meant they'd been designed to shoot the other way, too."

She sipped more coffee, and he remembered what she'd said about being a 'histortech.' He could believe it; she had the air of someone expounding on a special interest area.

"They had FTL, but they were still using reaction drives. Basically, they used what you'd call the Bussard ram principle to accelerate in normal-space before they translated." She paused at his puzzled expression, then shrugged. "I can explain that later-right now, just remember that they managed interstellar travel by first accelerating and then ducking into another dimension where the velocity attained in this one is effectively accelerated to a multiple of light-speed, then dropping back into normal-space and decelerating. That's one reason the trip would take them so long; they needed to accelerate in normal-space before they could kick in their FTL systems. Okay?"