Yoshi threw it back to me with a puzzled expression.

I shook off Hunter until he gave me a slider, then threw the meanest pitch I could, which broke to the outside just before it reached the Tau.

She didn't swing.

"Ball one!" Chirac cried.

I stretched to loosen up my shoulder, which had twinged a bit on delivery. The Tau didn't swing at bad pitches much anymore. Their incredible eyesight and observational skills were pretty hard to beat. But this was a new player. She was awfully cool for a creature who'd never held a baseball bat before.

Were they reading our signs again?

When Hunter signaled for a fastball, I nodded.

And threw a change-up.

Hunter may have been fooled, but the batter reached out with impeccable timing and tapped the ball backward at about forty-five degrees. One of the xeno team a.s.sisting Yoshi was already there, and threw it back to Hunter.

I swallowed. The Taus, or one of them anyway, had come up with a strategy.

Hunter must have realized I wasn't sure about our signs, and his fingers flashed gobbledygook.

I nodded, and threw a curve ball. The Tau left it alone again, and it zoomed past an unprepared Hunter.

"Ball two!"

I tried three more fast b.a.l.l.s in succession. The Tau tapped the first two away effortlessly, but by the third my arm was wearing, and she remained motionless as the ball carried low and outside.

"Ball three!"

I threw one into the dirt, aiming for the Tau's bat.

It stepped back, and the ball bounced off Hunter's glove, rolling back toward me across the sheetgra.s.s.

"Ball four. Take your base!" Dr. Chirac cried.

I tugged on my cap and looked around at the fielders. They stared back at me a bit befuddled. We had walked Tau batters before, but none had ever deserved it like this batter. She'd worked the ball like a pro, and frustrated me into giving her the base.

I stretched my arm, hoping there weren't going to be any more at-bats like that one.

There were.

The next batter, a regular player with broad gray stripes that faded in the middle of her thorax, also sat out the first two pitches. But once she had two strikes on her, she consistently tipped the ball over Hunter's head, defending the strike zone with effortless precision. I didn't throw her any intentional b.a.l.l.s, but she finally walked when my arm faltered after twelve hard pitches.

"Take your base!"

For the first time ever, a Tau was in scoring position.

I tried deception next. Hunter and I rotated through my selection of curve b.a.l.l.s, knuckleb.a.l.l.s, and sliders. I did my best to stay on the periphery of the strike zone, trying to give Dr. Chirac some tricky calls.

This Tau also proved too smooth for me, though. She took a stab at anything even approaching a strike, only leaving the obvious wild pitches alone. Since she didn't need a solid hit, she could swing and connect with everything that wasn't garbage. The b.a.l.l.s eventually came.

The bases were loaded.

With the next Tau I went inside, hoping the thin end of the bat might pop one up for Hunter to catch. But that extra elbow came in handy; she pulled back easily and used the top of the sweet spot, sending every ball fast and high over Hunter's head. He was getting exhausted from chasing b.a.l.l.s.

The first Tau, that new one, walked into home. The Tau had scored their first run.

The usual cheer came from the alien audience, with what sounded to my untrained ear like a little something extra. A few of the humans managed to find their voices as well.

I called Hunter to the mound, and Alex jogged over from third base.

"You need relief, Colonel?"

I rubbed my arm, which was screaming. "Not yet. Let's try one more thing. Hunter, how about you stand up?"

"What?"

"It'll put you in better position to catch the high tips."

"Yeah, with my face." Although we had a catcher's mask, Hunter didn't have a proper chest protector. I made a mental note to request one.

"I'll send some slow ones in. See if we can't get a foul out."

"Okay?" He sounded dubious.

"What are you smiling about?"

Alex shrugged. "This is great. They've found a way to score. Talk about strategic thinking. A whole new way to play baseball."

"Yeah. I guess. If you can call it baseball."

The rest of the inning went much the same way. I got one actual out, managing to squeeze a pop fly from the bottom of their order, the pitcher. After that, they scored five more runs to make it an even ten, walking all the way. Then the next two stood impa.s.sively and let me strike them out, which took some doing at that point, my arm on fire from shoulder to fingertips.

Across the rest of the game, we put up a mighty struggle, posting eleven runs of our own, more than we had in ages. We subbed through five different pitchers (I was done after that first inning), but no one managed to get more than one out per inning. It was always the Tau who decided when their ups were over. They scored exactly ten runs per inning, and when the game was done they had walked into home an even ninety times.

For the first time in history, humanity had lost a baseball game.

By seventy-nine runs.

The usual xeno team was there, all on time for once, along with the military and McGill. I sat down and turned to Yoshi.

"So what the h.e.l.l happened?"

"They got a new strategy, I guess."

"No kidding. But how did it happen so fast? From zero runs to ninety in one game."

He nodded. "It surprised me, too. But now that I've thought about it, the real question is: Why didn't they do it all along?"

He queued a field recording, a Tau frozen in the pixelated grayscale of a fly-sized spycam. The creature held a spear out before itself like a sword.

Yoshi eye-moused, and the screen jumped into motion. The Tau wove and dodged, hitting at flying objects with the spear.

"This is one of their pre-hunting rituals, or games, or punishments. I've been focusing on it since our first game with the Tau. The other adults in the hunt are slinging rocks at her, and she's fending them off with her spear."

"Looks dangerous," Jenny said.

"Not for a Tau. Their hand-to-eye is too good, and with those double elbows they can cover their whole body efficiently. The Tau may not swing with any power, but they're good at blocking an object that's coming toward them."

I frowned. "So they've always been capable of the batting they showed today?"

"Sure. Those slings can get a projectile up to two hundred K. And they don't hold back. Any adult Tau could fend off b.a.l.l.s thrown by humans. Add a little understanding of the strike zone, and they can get a walk pretty much at will."

"Two hundred kilometers per hour?" I repeated.

He nodded. "Yep. Much faster than any pitch you're going to manage, Colonel."

I opened my mouth, then closed it again.

"So why did they wait until now to kick our a.s.ses?" Alex asked.

Yoshi shrugged. " 'Cause they didn't think of it?"

Dr. Chirac spoke up. "It wasn't part of the grammar of baseball as they understood it. Human players generally try to get a hit. Look at your terminology: You think of the tipped ball as 'foul,' or bad. You count the first two as strikes. But for a player with the Taus' skill set, the foul ball ultimately puts the batter in control." She nodded to herself. "It seems probable that until now they were imitating us, trying to play the way we do. They were probably more interested in experiencing the game's normal rituals than in beating us."

"But that new player," I said, "the one who led off today, had a different idea."

"She wanted to win," Alex said.

Dr. Chirac lowered her voice. "This is the conceptual breakthrough we have been hoping for."

"And the PR save we needed," McGill said happily. "The Tau finally got a game off us, and they did it by figuring out a totally new way to play baseball."

"Not exactly, Mr. McGill."

We all looked at Alex.

"The way they were playing reminded me of something I read about when I was a kid. While you guys on the field were getting mopped up by aliens, I burned most of my data allowance doing some historical research."

A headsup limned her face, dense fields of scrolling stats. "It turns out this is not a new way to play baseball. In 1887, there was a St. Louis Browns player named James Edward O'Neill. He was known generally as 'Tip' O'Neill, because of his expertise at foul tips. He could keep any ball in play, never striking out, wearing down pitchers until he could get on base. Back then, walks were part of your batting average, so he didn't care if he walked or hit his way on. His average was .485 that year."

"Almost five hundred?" Yoshi shook his head. "That's pretty d.a.m.n good."

"Yeah, but our six-legged friends are about twice that good."

"They should be," Yoshi said. "They're designed for it."

"So someone must have found a way to stop this O'Neill guy," I said. "I mean, I've never heard of him."

"They didn't stop him," Alex said. "They changed the rules. Since that year, walks don't count in your average. So these days, collecting four b.a.l.l.s earns you about as much glory as getting hit by a pitch."

"Yeah," Yoshi said, "except that the Tau don't know about batting averages. We don't even know if they can conceive of averages."

"h.e.l.l," I muttered. "We don't even know if they can count. I mean, they beat us like a rented mule. Seventy-nine runs!"

"They clearly can count," Chirac said. "They were quite exact in scoring ten runs each inning."

"Do you think that's significant?" Alex asked. "Is it some kind of SETI thing, like they're trying to establish a base-ten rubric for future communication?"

"Perhaps they were declaring," Ashley Newkirk said. "In the mother game, a far better side doesn't keep relentlessly thrashing an opponent once they've beat them. Wouldn't be cricket."

"But ninety runs?" I said. "That's one h.e.l.l of a safety margin."

Yoshi grunted. "It's nothing to the score they could have racked up. They let us off the hook after ten runs an inning. Our pitching only ever got their pitcher out, and then only about every other at-bat."

"Thank G.o.d they don't know about designated hitters," Jenny muttered.

Alex still had her headsup on, and her fingers moved. "So we manage only one out every eighteen ups, which is three outs every fifty-four. That's fifty-one runs an inning. Which is . . . four hundred fifty-nine runs a game."

"Good G.o.d," Ashley said, "that sounds rather like a-" He stopped without saying another word.

"Like a royal a.s.s-kicking," Jenny Flagg said.

There's only one thing worse than always winning, and that's always losing.

The games went incredibly long now. The Tau innings were torturous. Each lasted thirteen at-bats, and every one of those went at least ten pitches. The Tau went through relief pitchers like potato chips on Super Bowl Sunday, leaving half the human inhabitants of the planet walking around with their arms in a sling. Late in the game, we had to intentionally walk to save our arms for the gimme outs. Otherwise, there'd be no one left who could throw a strike at all.

Playing the Tau was so depressing that it became hard to motivate nine players onto the field. Chirac and the rest of the xenos were merciless, however. They weren't about to give up their close contact just because a bunch of whining soldiers and construction workers didn't want to get their b.u.t.ts kicked every day. And Chirac refused to give us a bigger strike zone. Just as she had when the Taus were losing, she insisted on sticking with Alexander Cartwright's rules.

Halihunt and NASA didn't like the way things were going any more than we did. The U.S. media took less than a week to go into crisis mode, with long essays about how the country's ascendancy was clearly over. Beaten at our own game by the first aliens we'd run into. My team's inability to get an out became the current metaphor for America's outdated infrastructure, our dependence on old paradigms and fossil fuels, our preference for force over finesse. Halihunt's sponsorship schemes crumbled like a cheap taco in a Texas tornado, and their stock price took a beating. How was our little colony supposed to save the American economy if we couldn't throw a strike?

Needless to say, the rest of the world just ate it up with a spoon. Finally, the little guys were kicking our a.s.s. But we were forbidden from giving up the game. The last thing Houston, or Washington for that matter, could abide was for us to look like bad losers.

We were still d.a.m.ned if we did and d.a.m.ned if we didn't.

And boy, was my right arm sore.

Other than our troubles on the field, everything was going swell. Work on the array was still on schedule. The solar collection elements were finally propagating in the mica-rich soil, turning a huge mountainside into a shimmering mirror. It was beautiful at sunrise, and generated enough power to contribute significantly to the tube. Our transport rations tripled, then tripled again, and we even got to the point where we could reverse the usual flow, sending a few specks of Tau dust back to Houston for a.n.a.lysis. As our power increased and the math held up, morale recovered quickly from our perpetual losing streak. Once the tube got wider and more stable, humans could pa.s.s through safely. The nagging question of when and if we were all getting back to Earth had been answered.

We had a long dry spell, the Coriolis rains not interrupting our power supply for long enough to fully charge our batteries, and managed to keep the tube open for fifteen straight days. Finally we had the stability to make every teleport a smooth one, and that's when some genius in Houston got the idea . . .

It was Alex and Yoshi and me again. This time in secret.

We kept the transport shed unlit, using the night vision on our headsups. It was local midnight, when the fewest humans would be awake to notice our little brownout. If something went wrong-a one-in-forty chance at our current power levels-we didn't want anyone to know what had happened, here on Tau or back in the rest of humanity. I would have kept Yoshi out of it, but he was the only MD who I could imagine being sympathetic to our little plan.

Alex stepped up to the tube controls, checking the connection strength, and nodded to me. I could see her fingers crossed in the grainy green of my headsup.

"Night vision off, unless you want to go blind," I said. My accomplices, the tube, and shed disappeared into blackness.