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retreated.
    The humans had shown the aliens that chasing us was a bad idea.
    Kris turned back to her own battle.
    First Fleet might have lost a ship if the five alien ships had concentrated on a single frigate.
    Instead, the aliens seemed mesmerized by the glow from the Earth frigates. What fire they had, they concentrated on them. The ships took their hits, absorbed them, and radiated them back into space.
    The five Earth ships showed hull damage as their crystal armor heated up. Kris had suggested to Yi that his ships might benefit from a layer of honeycomb cooling under their crystal belt. He’d declined, with his usual attitude that seemed to say nothing good could come from the Rim worlds. He was of Earth .
    Kris had chosen not to make it an order. She wasn’t all that sure that the ships could be redesigned. Certainly not in the time before she ordered this operation.
    Without orders, the secondaries opened up on the alien ships as the range closed to less than fifty thousand kilometers.
    The forward batteries were over half recharged.
    At this range, even a half-strength laser would be deadly.
    “Prepare to fire forward batteries,” Kris ordered.
    Ships blinked back their reply.
    “Fire,” Kris almost whispered.
    One hundred and ninety-two lasers reached out at reduced strength for the four surviving warships.
    They vanished in hellish blazes.
    “We got a problem,” came from the commander of BatRon 12.
    “Report,” Kris said.
    “There’s a lot of crap showing up on my sensors. I think they seeded the space behind them with whatever those mines were that hit Admiral Yi so badly.”
    “I think you’re right,” Kris said. “Captains, have your secondary batteries take on anything close to your ships.”
    Again, ships blinked their acknowledgments.
    Then something exploded close on to the Longbow .
    “There’s a whole lot of this crap,” Admiral L’Estock reported. “And some of it’s moving.”
    “Nelly,” Kris said.
    “I’m taking a feed off the Princess Royal ’s scientific sensors,” Kris’s computer reported. Most of the ships had sailed without their science teams, leaving them behind to explore Alwa and its star system. Kris had insisted on having at least a team aboard her flag. She also had Doc Meade to offer her expertise if they had a chance to talk to some real-live aliens.
    Now her boffins were passing along information that Kris could hardly believe.
    A picture appeared on one of Kris’s unused screens. It showed a tiny spacecraft. A rocket motor, a small crew compartment that appeared to hold a single alien, and a big bulge in front that Kris suspected was explosives, maybe atomics.
    Kris was not shocked.
    She had been shocked when the aliens started hurtling ships into the Alwa system, intent on crashing the planet and killing people by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Possibly even rendering the planet uninhabitable.
    “How can any living person do that?” Kris had asked. Then Nelly answered. Kris got a lesson on Kamikazes andJihadist suicide bombers and others from Old Earth’s bloody and dark history.
    Admiral Furzah had added examples from Sasquan history. “Do not mistake my meaning,” she added. “We consider those who resort to this as fools. They have never won a war, but they have certainly made their mark on our history.”
    Now Kris saw space between her and the monstrous alien mother ship littered with these tiny weapons, propelled by hate and guided by a living mind.
    “Kris, some of the ships are larger,” Nelly reported. “I think there is room for two, maybe three. It is possible that these carry the outlawed atomic weapons.”
    Outlawed by humans. Not so outlawed by these bug-eyed monsters that looked just like us.
    “Nelly, warn the fleet. Get the big ones before they get you.”
    “Warning sent, Kris.”
    A loose cluster of three alien ships were coming in range, hurtling themselves like some bug to a flame. Kris ordered her ships to