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aren’t so incompetent that we’d miss it.”
    “I wasn’t being critical. It’s just that every place on the surface looks identical.”
    Seed said from the command chair, “Notice the four tall mountains to the north?”
    Carter widened his scan and said, “Those are mountains?”
    “It doesn’t look like it from a scan but they are over twenty thousand feet high. The uniform orange color tends to hide them.”
    Carter looked at them with an active scan and saw that she was right. He looked back at the plain and saw something. There was a patch of ground that wasn’t orange. “Do you see that?”
    “Yes we do; and it’s growing.”
    Carter watched and saw Weed was right. The small patch seemed to double in size in less than five minutes. As he watched over the next hour the patch grew from a hundred square yards to a hundred square miles. He backed his scan out and saw thousands of areas on the surface that were losing their orange color. He heard Weed say, “That storm really scattered the spores. We should get a major change in the next thirty minutes; that’s when the second generation of spores begins doing their work.”
    Carter moved his scan to the ocean and saw the orange colored seas were not showing any change. He wondered about that but looked back at the original site. He saw hundreds of clear patches of land on the surface that had stopped growing. He checked his watch and waited thirty minutes. What he saw stunned him. The clear patches were expanding at a phenomenal rate. From orbit it looked like the orange surface was retreating before an advance of brown colored dirt. He looked closer and saw the orange plants were falling apart and dissolving. Nothing remained after that brown wave washed over them. He looked back at the oceans and saw the change there was even more dramatic. It was like giant ripples were leaving the center of clear patches of ocean and routing the orange waters before them.
    Carter looked at Seed, “Did you think it was going to react this fast?”
    Seed looked at Carter leaning back, “No! This is beyond anything we envisioned. That orange plant offers no resistance to our spores.” Seed looked back at the display, “At the current rate of expansion, the planet will be clear in less than two days.”
    Carter looked at Seed and shook his head, “If these spores are on a starship, the addicted crew might be dead in less than an hour after the spores activate.”
    “You’re probably right. We need to change the delay from thirty days to ninety days.”
    “Why?”
    “We must make sure the spores are spread around the Invader’s fleets and planets. This would give them a warning before they could be spread.”
    “How long will it take to make the change?”
    “About four months. We’ll start working on the change while we’re here.”
    Carter looked down on a clear continent and knew that someone was going to be really angry at whoever caused this to happen to their drug supply. He needed to see Alex again and soon.
    * * *
    Weed, Seed and Carter looked down on a planet that had nineteen black ships in orbit around it. The Invaders had entered a new universe now that the strongest civilizations had been destroyed. Carter looked at Weed and said, “How do you want to handle this?”
    “I want you to go to each city those ships are going to sent their warriors and drop a packet into the middle of the city.”
    “Why?”
    “I want all nineteen ships to bring back some of the spores when their shuttles return. These ships will support other landings and the chance of contamination goes up.”
    “What do we do after that?”
    “We’ll teleport to as many planets as we can find and teleport a packet into one of the farms. If we’re discovered we’ll just teleport away. Are you ready?”
    Carter turned on his armor and saw the nineteen coordinates on his data screen. He fed them into his guidance module and stuffed nineteen clear bags into the outer surface of