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defense of humanity’s worlds, and they’d made the Gbaba pay a hideous price in dead and broken starships.
    But the Gbaba had chosen to pay it. Not even the xenologists had been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation for why the Gbaba flatly refused to even consider negotiations. They—or their translating computers, at any rate—obviously comprehended Standard English, since they’d clearly used captured data and documents, and the handful of broken, scarred human prisoners who’d been recovered from them had been “interrogated” with a casual, dispassionate brutality that was horrifying. So humanity had known communication with them was at least possible, yet they’d never responded to a single official communication attempt, except to press their attacks harder.
    Personally, Pei wondered if they were actually still capable of a reasoned response at all. Some of the ships the Federation had captured or knocked out and been able to examine had been ancient almost beyond belief. At least one, according to the scientists who’d analyzed it, had been built at least two millennia before its capture, yet there was no indication of any significant technological advance between the time of its construction and its final battle. Ships which, as Alban had suggested, were brand-new construction had mounted identical weapons, computers, hyper drives, and sensor suites.
    That suggested a degree of cultural stagnation which even Pei’s ancestral China, at its most conservative rejection of the outside world, had never approached. One which made even ancient Egypt seem like a hotbed of innovation. It was impossible for Pei to conceive of any sentient beings who could go that long without any major advances. So perhaps the Gbaba no longer were sentient in the human sense of the term. Perhaps everything—all of this—was simply the result of a set of cultural imperatives so deeply ingrained they’d become literally instinctual.
    None of which had saved the human race from destruction.
    It had taken time, of course. The Gbaba had been forced to reduce humanity’s redoubts one by one, in massive sieges which had taken literally years to conclude. The Federation Navy had been rebuilt behind the protection of the system fortifications, manned by new officers and ratings—many of whom, like Nimue Alban, had never known a life in which humanity’s back was not against the wall. That navy had struck back in desperate sallies and sorties which had cost the Gbaba dearly, but the final outcome had been inevitable.
    The Federation Assembly had tried sending out colony fleets, seeking to build hidden refuges where some remnants of humanity might ride out the tempest. But however inflexible or unimaginative the Gbaba might be, they’d obviously encountered that particular trick before, for they’d englobed each of the Federation’s remaining star systems with scout ships. Escorting Navy task forces might attain a crushing local superiority, fight a way through the scouts and the thinner shell of capital ships backing them up, but the scouts always seemed able to maintain contact, or regain it quickly, and every effort to run the blockade had been hunted down.
    One colony fleet had slipped through the scouts…but only to transmit a last, despairing hypercom message less than ten years later. It might have eluded the immediate shell of scout ships, but others had been sent out after it. It must have taken literally thousands of them to scour all of the possible destinations that colony fleet might have chosen, but eventually one of them had stumbled across it, and the killer fleets had followed. The colony administrator’s best guess was that the colony’s own emissions had led the Gbaba to them, despite all of the colonists’ efforts to limit those emissions.
    Pei suspected that long-dead administrator had been right. That, at any rate, was an