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command their armies of slaves.”
    “What do these command ships look like?”
    “Display Sythian behemoth cruiser.”
    The cadaverous Gor disappeared and a long, organically-shaped cruiser began rotating above the desk. It had a dark blue and lavender hull with glimmering patterns that shifted subtly as the ship turned. It looked just like a bulkier version of the Sythian ships he’d seen in the Rokan Defense simulation.
    “Hmmm . . . so that’s it?” Ethan asked. “That’s our real enemy?” The ship didn’t look so menacing. “How many of them are there?”
    “According to the data the Gors gave us, there are seven command ships in the Sythian armada. One for each cluster—or fleet.”
    “Only seven?”
    Atton nodded to the holo. “Check the scale.”
    Ethan leaned forward to peer more closely at the glowing white numbers hovering at the bottom of the projection. His eyes widened as he read them. “That can’t be right,” Ethan said. “The scale says this ship is over thirty kilometers long.”
    “The scale is correct.”
    “No ship is that big! How do they fit through our gates?”
    “Only just.”
    Ethan sat back in his chair, looking startled. “We were even more outmatched than we thought. Just one of those ships would rival a whole fleet of ours. Why didn’t they ever join the fighting?”
    Atton shrugged. “The Sythians aren’t willing to risk their own lives in battle, so they send in the Gors. Apparently the Sythians’ courage is quite legendary.” Atton added that last part with laughing eyes.
    “So all those fleets and millions of armored soldiers which overran us were . . .”
    “Gors. Slave armies.”
    Ethan’s eyes narrowed. “And the Sythians? Do we even know what they look like?”
    “I wouldn’t have trusted the Gors if they hadn’t come to us the way they did. They brought us High Lord Kaon of the Sythian First Fleet and military intelligence on the numbers and positions of all the ships in the Sythians’ seven fleets.”
    “Lord Kaon, huh?” Ethan rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
    Atton nodded. “We keep him prisoner on Obsidian Station—our supply point for the prime worlds’ strike force.”
    “You have a picture of this . . . Kaon?”
    Atton smiled. “I have better.” He glanced at the holo projector once more and said, “Play back recording: Obsidian Interrogation.”
    Ethan watched the holo of the cruiser disappear, replaced by a view into a dark room. The camera was bobbing, heading toward a large, brightly-illuminated transpiranium cube in the center of the room. As the camera closed in on the cube, they were given a closer look at what was inside—nothing. Just an empty steel cot and a trough which looked suspiciously like it served as a latrine. There was also a tray piled high with green mush, and a cup of water lying untouched in front of a slot-sized opening in the base of the cube.
    The camera moved up to a section of the cube wall which contained a control panel and a metal grill that might be a speaker. Now the cameraman began to talk. “Hello, Kaon.”
    There was no reply, but someone off camera said, “He doesn’t want us to see him.”
    “We’ll have to smoke him out.” A hand reached into the camera’s field of view and touched a button on the wall-mounted control panel. Suddenly, jets opened up in the ceiling and walls of the cube, and pressurized white streams shot out. The streams reached a certain point inside the cube and then came to a sudden stop in midair, spraying out in all directions around an invisible obstacle, quickly coating it. The jets turned off a few seconds later, but the thick, gummy ‘smoke’ had adhered to the creature’s body and defined a rough shape. He was bipedal with two arms and two legs, but Ethan couldn’t discern much else about him. Based on his size, he could have even been human.
    “There you are, Kaon,” the cameraman said.
    This time there was a reply. It sounded like some version of the