"Tell me," Jared said. "Tell me how she can possibly be alive. The Obin killed everyone at Covell."

"The Obin saved Zoe," Boutin said. "It was the Rraey who attacked Covell and Omagh, not the Obin. The Rraey did it to get back at the Colonial Union for their defeat at Coral. They didn't even actually want Omagh. They just picked a soft target to attack. The Obin found out about their plans and timed their arrival for just after the first phase of the attack, when the Rraey would still be weak from their fight with the humans. Once they pried the Rraey off Covell, they went through the station and found the civilians jammed into a meeting room. They were being held there. The Rraey killed all the military staff and scientists because their bodies are improved too much to make for good eating. But the colonist staff—well, they were just fine. If the Obin hadn't attacked when they did, the Rraey would have slaughtered and eaten them all."

"Where are the rest of the civilians?" Jared asked.

"Well, the Obin killed them, of course," Boutin said. "You know the Obin don't usually take prisoners."

"But they saved Zoe, you said," Jared said.

Boutin smiled. "While they were going through the station, the Obin did a tour of the science labs to see if there were any ideas worth stealing," he said. "They're excellent scientists, but they're not very creative. They can improve on ideas and technology they find from other places, but they're not very good at originating the technology themselves. The science station is one of the main reasons they were interested in Omagh at all. They found my work on consciousness, and they were interested. They found out I wasn't on the station, but that Zoe was. So they kept her while they were looking for me."

"They used her as blackmail," Jared said.

"No," Boutin said. "More as a goodwill gesture. And I was the one who demanded things from them."

"They held Zoe, and you demanded things from them," Jared said.

"That's right," Boutin said.

"Like what?" Jared asked.

"Like this war," Boutin said.

Jane Sagan edged closer to the eighth and final gun emplacement. Like the others it tracked her and then warned her the closer she got to it. As near as she could tell if she got closer than about three meters, the gun would fire. Sagan picked up a rock and threw it directly at the gun; the rock struck and bounced off harmlessly, the gun's systems tracking but otherwise ignoring the projectile. The gun could differentiate between a rock and a human. That's some fine engineering, Sagan thought, not very charitably.

She found a larger rock, stepped up to the edge of the safe zone, and chucked it to the right of the gun. It tracked the rock; farther to her right another gun trained on her. The guns shared targeting information; she wasn't going to get past them by distracting one of them.

The bowl they were in was shallow enough that Sagan could see over the lip; as far as she could see there weren't any Obin soldiers in the area. Either they were hiding or they were confident the humans weren't going anywhere.

"Yes!"

Sagan turned and saw Daniel Harvey coming toward her with something squirmy in his hand. "Look who's got dinner," he said.

"What is that?" Sagan asked.

"The hell if I know," Harvey said. "I saw it slithering out of the ground and caught it before it went back in. Put up a fight, though. I had to grab its head to keep it from biting me. I figure we can eat it."

By this time Seaborg had limped over to look at the creature. "I'm not eating that," he said.

"Fine," Harvey said. "You starve. The lieutenant and I will eat it."

"We can't eat it," Sagan said. "The animals here aren't compatible with our food needs. You might as well eat rocks."

Harvey looked at Sagan as if she had just taken a dump on his head. "Fine," he said, and bent down to let the thing go.

"Wait," Sagan said. "I want you to throw that."

"What?" Harvey said.

"Throw that thing at the gun," Sagan said. "I want to see what the guns will do to something living."

"That's kind of cruel," Harvey said.

"A minute ago, you were thinking about eating the damn thing," Seaborg said, "and now you're worried about cruelty to animals?"

"Shut up," Harvey said. He cocked his arm back to throw the animal.

"Harvey," Sagan said. "Don't throw it directly at the gun, please."

Harvey suddenly realized that the trajectory of the projectiles would lead directly back to his body. "Sorry," he said. "Stupid of me."

"Throw it up," Sagan said. "Way up." Harvey shrugged and launched the thing high into the air, in an arc that took the thing away from the three of them. The creature writhed in midair. The gun tracked the creature as far up as it could, roughly fifty degrees up. It rotated and shot the thing apart as soon as it came back into its range, shredding it with a spray of thin needles that expanded on contact with the poor creature's flesh. In less than a second there was nothing left of the thing but mist and a few chunks falling to the ground.

"Very nice," Harvey said. "Now we know the guns really work. And I'm still hungry."

"That's very interesting," Sagan said.

"That I'm hungry?" Harvey said.

"No, Harvey," Sagan said, irritated. "I don't actually give a damn about your stomach right now. What's interesting is that the guns can only target up to a certain angle. They're ground suppression."

"So?" Harvey said. "We're on the ground."

"Trees," Seaborg said, suddenly. "Son of a bitch."

"What are you thinking, Seaborg?" Sagan asked.

"In training, Dirac and I won a war game by sneaking up on the opposing side in the trees," he said. "They were expecting us to attack from the ground. They never bothered looking up until we got right up on them. Then I almost fell out of the tree and nearly got myself killed. But the idea worked."

The three of them turned to look at the trees inside their perimeter. They weren't real trees, but the Aristian equivalent: large spindly plants that reached meters high into the sky.

"Tell me we're all having the same bugshit crazy thought," Harvey said. "I'd hate to think it was just me."

"Come on," Sagan said. "Let's see what we can do with this."

"That's insane," Jared said. "The Obin wouldn't start a war just because you asked them to."

"Really?" Boutin said. A sneer crept onto his face. "And you know this from your vast, personal knowledge of the Obin? Your years of study on the matter? You wrote your doctoral thesis on the Obin?"

"No species would go to war just because you asked them to," Jared said. "The Obin don't do anything for anyone else."

"And they're not now," Boutin said. "The war is a means to an end—they want what I can offer them."

"And what is that?" Jared asked.

"I can give them souls," Boutin said.

"I don't understand," Jared said.

"It's because you don't know the Obin," Boutin said. "The Obin are a created race—the Consu made them just to see what would happen. But despite rumors to the contrary, the Consu aren't perfect. They make mistakes. And they made a huge mistake when they made the Obin. They gave the Obin intelligence, but what they couldn't do—what they didn't have the capability of doing—was to give the Obin consciousness."

"The Obin are conscious," Jared said. "They have a society. They communicate. They remember. They think."

"So what?" Boutin said. "Termites have societies. Every species communicates. You don't have to be intelligent to remember—you have a computer in your head that remembers everything you ever do, and it's fundamentally no more intelligent than a rock. And as for thinking, what about thinking requires you to observe yourself doing it? Not a goddamned thing. You can create an entire starfaring race that has no more self-introspection than a protozoan, and the Obin are the living proof of that. The Obin are aware collectively that they exist. But not one of them individually has anything that you would recognize as a personality. No ego. No 'I.'"