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I

In free fall, Atvar the fleetlord glided over to the hologram projector He poked the stud at the base of theabove the projector was one the Race’s probe had sent back froht hundred local years earlier

A Big Ugly warrior sat mounted on a beast He wore leather boots, rusty chainmail, and a dented iron helmet; a thin coat woven from plant fibers and dyed blue with plant juices shielded his armor from the heat of the star the Race called Tosev To Atvar, to any male of the Race, Tosev 3 was on the chilly side, but not to the natives

A long, iron-pointed spear stood up from a boss on the contraption the warrior used to stay atop his animal He carried a shield painted with a cross On his belt hung a long, straight sword and a couple of knives

All you could see of the Tosevite himself were his face and one hand They were plenty to shoas almost as fuzzy as the beast he rode Thick, wiry yellow fur covered his jaws and the area around his mouth; he had another stripe above each of his flat, irew on the back of the visible hand

Atvar touched his own s at all that fur lies didn’t itch all the ti one eye turret ai the other in the direction of Kirel, shiplord of the127th E,” he said bitterly

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said His body paint was almost as colorful and complex as Atvar’s Since he commanded the bannership of the conquest fleet, only the fleetlord out-ranked him

Atvar stabbed at the projector control with his left index claw The Big Ugly warrior vanished In his place appeared a perfect three-die of the nuclear explosion that had destroyed the Tosevite city of Roround terrain But it could as easily have been the boo or Breslau or Miami or the spearhead of the Race’s assault force south of Moscow

“As opposed to the foe we thought we faced, this is e are actually dealing with,” Atvar said

“Truth,” Kirel repeated, and, as h

Atvar let out a long, hissing sigh Stability and predictability were two of the pillars on which the Race and its Empire had flourished for a hundred thousand years and expanded to cover three solar syste see such troubles here The Big Uglies did not play by any of the rules its savants thought they knew

With another hiss, the fleetlord poked at the control stud oncecloud froe that replaced it was even raph of a base the Race had established in the region of the SSSR known to the locals as Siberia, a place whose frigid cli

“The ainst duly constituted authority,” Atvar said heavily “Worse, the coainst co their o over to them instead”

“This is truly alarh “If we choose males from a distant air base to bomb the mutineers out of existence, then, will it truly solve the problem?”

“I don’t know,” Atvar said “But what I really don’t know, by the Emperor”-he cast down his eyes for a n-“is how the mutiny could have happened in the first place Subordination and integration into the greater scheme of the Race as a whole are drilled into our hood How could they have overthrown them?”

Now Kirel sighed “Fighting on this world corrodes males’ moral fiber as badly as its ocean water corrodes equip the war that was planned before we set out froood many males”