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man, one who believed absolutely in the underlying premises of Operation Ark. Like every other man and woman under Pei’s command, he was about to give his life to ensure that Operation Ark succeeded, and the admiral couldn’t tell him that his own commanding officer was part of a plot against the people charged with making that success happen.
    â€œDo you think we gave them enough of a shock that they may start actively innovating, Sir?” Thiessen asked after a moment. Pei looked at him and raised one eyebrow, and the chief of staff shrugged with a crooked smile. “I’d like to think we at least made the bastards sweat, Sir!”
    â€œOh, I think you can safely assume we did that,” Pei replied with a humorless smile of his own. “As to whether or not it will change them, I really don’t know. The xenologists’ best guess is that it won’t. They’ve got a system and culture which have worked for them for at least eight or nine thousand years. We may have been a bigger bump in the road than they’re accustomed to, but the formula worked in our case, too, in the end. They’ll probably be a little nervous for a century or three, if only because they’ll wonder if we got another colony away somewhere without their noticing, but then they’ll settle back down.”
    â€œUntil the next poor dumb suckers come stumbling into them,” Thiessen said bitterly.
    â€œUntil then,” Pei agreed quietly, and turned back to the display.
    Eight or nine thousand years , he thought. That’s the xenologists’ best guess, but I’ll bet it’s actually been longer than that. God, I wonder how long ago the first Gbaba discovered fire!
    It was a question he’d pondered more than once over the four decades it had taken the Gbaba Empire to destroy the human race, for two things the Gbaba definitely were not were innovative or flexible.
    At first, the Gbaba had clearly underestimated the challenge mankind posed. Their first few fleets had only outnumbered their intended victims three- or four-to-one, and it had become quickly and painfully obvious that they couldn’t match humanity’s tactical flexibility. The first genocidal attack had punched inward past Crestwell to take out three of the Federation’s fourteen major extra-Solar star systems, with one hundred percent civilian casualties. But then the Federation Navy had rallied and stopped them cold. The fleet had even counterattacked, and captured no less than six Gbaba star systems.
    Which was when the full Gbaba fleet mobilized.
    Commander Pei Kau-zhi had been a fire control officer aboard one of the Federation’s ships-of-the-line in the Starfall System when the real Gbaba Navy appeared. He could still remember the displays, see the endless waves of scarlet icons, each representing a Gbaba capital ship, as they materialized out of hyper like curses. It had been like driving a ground car into crimson snowflakes, except that no snow had ever sent such an ice-cold shudder through the marrow of his bones.
    He still didn’t know how Admiral Thomas had gotten any of her fleet out. Most of Thomas’ ships had died with her, covering the flight of a handful of survivors whose duty had been not to stand and share her death, but to live with the dreadful news. To flee frantically homeward, arriving on the very wings of the storm to warn mankind Apocalypse was coming.
    Not that humanity had been taken totally unawares.
    The severity of the opening Gbaba attack, even if it had been thrown back, had been a brutal wakeup call. Every Federation world had begun arming and fortifying when the first evidence of the Gbaba’s existence had appeared, ten years before Crestwell. After Crestwell, those preparations had been pressed at a frenetic pace, and a star system made an awesome fortress. The surviving fleet elements had fallen back on the fixed defenses, standing and fighting to the death in