"If you say so," he said dubiously.

"We manage things a lot better now," she assured him, "but all this was four or five hundred years ago, remember." She paused again, a brief stab of pain and loss showing in her eyes. "Anyway," she said softly, "four hundred years from when I got into this mess.

"At any rate, they put together a fleet and sent it off. Of course, a fleet of Bussard rams produces a hell of a lot of light when it decelerates, and they had to start decelerating well short of Sol. Terran astronomers spotted them while they were still over a year out and realized someone was coming-a lot of someones, in fact. We're a pretty nasty and suspicious lot ourselves, and it was possible our visitors weren't friendly, so prudence suggested sending somebody out to see.

"But if they were friendly, none of the Terran blocs wanted their rivals getting in first and making some kind of private deal with them. There was a lot of time pressure, but they got themselves organized in a hurry and sent out an 'international' welcoming party made up of ships from all the major power blocs." She flashed that tigerish grin again. It really made her look much less like a teenager, he thought uneasily.

"The Kangas freaked. There they were, ready to smash a bunch of people they expected to find fooling around with atmospheric aircraft, and instead they were being intercepted by ships using a nuclear-powered torch drive! It never occurred to them that we might even consider the possibility of peaceful contact-their minds don't work that way. They were still six months out when our ships came into weapon range and they opened fire.

"They wiped us, of course, but we hadn't sent totally unarmed ships, and we got a couple of them, as well. That really upset them, because they were still decelerating, which committed them to entering our system-either that, or they had to duck back into alpha-space, bypass us, stop, get back up to speed on a home-bound vector, and come back in another seventy or eighty years. And who knew what we'd be capable of by then?

"So they decided to carry out their original plan, and it was our side's turn to freak. I've never seen a Bussard ship myself. They've been obsolete for centuries now, but they were big bastards, and they had a lot of them. Terra assumed the worst, and it's amazing how friendly enemies can get in those stances. By the time the Kangas were down to maneuvering speed and passing Neptune, the major power blocs had decided to bury their differences.

"The Kanga force was two or three times as strong as they'd expected to need-I said they were logical-but their estimate had been too low. Their ships were big, but their mass-to-drive ratio was poor, and the sides were a lot more even than they'd planned or we thought. They never did get any planet-busters into range of Terra, but they wiped every human in the asteroid belt and did the same for Mars. We lost every regular warship and most of the merchant conversions we had, but only a few of their light attack craft got close enough to hit Terra, and they didn't have anything much bigger than a couple of megatons."

Aston felt his remaining fringe of hair trying to stand on end at how casually she used the term "megatons."

"We stopped them, but they killed four and a half billion people, most of them civilians. Of course, from the Kanga viewpoint, there's no such thing as 'civilians' or 'noncombatants,' but we were pretty ired."

Her words were light again, but her eyes were not.

"We learned a lot from the Kangas' wreckage. Not as much as we would have liked, but more than they probably expected we could. Unfortunately, the Kangas are logical, and they'd left one ship out where we couldn't get at it. As soon as it saw how things were going, it headed home at max.

"The result back home when it got there was pandemonium-and it must have been even worse because they didn't have any samples of our technology. But they did have a head start, and they'd been working hard at R&D ever since they sent their first fleet out, just in case. They knew none of their FTL transports had been captured intact, so they figured we hadn't gotten any samples of their multi-dee-that's what makes FTL travel possible-but they were only half right. Their long-range missiles used a cruder form of the same principle, and we did get our hands on a couple of them.

"Anyway, they went to crash building rates to put together another fleet, and they had eighteen major planetary populations and an undamaged deep-space industrial capacity. They were scared, but they got over their panic when they started puting the odds. Besides, God was on their side.

"Meanwhile, we were doing the same thing. It was obvious we couldn't go after them-we didn't even know where they were-but it was equally obvious that power projection over interstellar distances was a difficult proposition. We didn't have to be able to match them one-for-one or even one-for-ten to defend ourselves.

"To make a long story short, we were ready when they came back. In fact, our weapons were actually more advanced than theirs-not by much, but by a little-and we blew hell out of them. We even got a few prisoners, though Kangas don't last long in finement. They can't handle being captured by 'devils;' it does something to them, and they just stop living.

"But we got a little nav data-enough to realize some of what we were up against. We couldn't quite grasp that any sort of negotiations would be impossible, but we knew it was going to be tough. The one good point was that we seemed to be better scientists-which we are, up to a point. They hadn't realized how well we do in physics and the inorganic sciences; we didn't realize how well they do in the bio sciences.

"By the time we'd wiped their second attack force, we had better n-space drives and more efficient multi-dees than they did, and we sent out a task force of our own. It surprised the nearest Kanga outpost and captured the planet, but at that point technology allowed combat only in normal-space at sublight speeds, and they got away with a few prisoners of their own. We'd only been in possession for about twenty years when they came back with the first of their bio weapons."

She paused, and her face lost all expression for just a moment. She sat very still, then she gave herself a little shake.

"The planet was Midgard," she said in a quiet, washed-out voice. "In many respects, it wasn't all that nice a place-it's on the chilly and dry side by Earth standards-but it's quite capable of sustaining human life. We needed the living space, and even if we hadn't, it was the only Kanga outpost we knew about. We figured they'd want it back, and we needed something short of Sol that would hold their attention and keep them busy outside of any possible attack range of Earth. So we decided to colonize the place, and we had almost two million civilians and one hell of a military presence on it by the time they got around to the expected counterattack. We blew them apart, but not before they dusted the planet-" she looked straight into his eyes "-and killed over ninety-nine percent of its population."

She paused again, and he swallowed as he realized she was talking about her planet and, from the way she spoke, her own ancestors. He shivered at the thought and looked away. His pipe had gone out, and he busied himself relighting it to give her time.

"That shook us up," she continued after a moment, "but it made our options pretty clear. Our total casualties were far lower than from their first attack on Sol, but it seemed worse, somehow. Partly because it was the complete destruction of an entire population, but even more because the way it was done made it clear their intention was genocidal. After that, we began to understand-really understand-what we were up against. There wasn't any more talk about negotiating, and anybody who'd thought we were already on a total war footing found out better.