Empress Wu was in orbit around the second planet, an Earth sized orb that was dark except for ice patches at the poles.

There were no missiles this time.

"What do we have on the primary?" Chang asked the Shaka's ruling AI software.

"Very little in catalogue. We are outside the ITAA-mapped region of the galaxy on red-dwarf level.

Nearest marker stars are 0009-13A and 0009677; both are at least five hundred lightyears from here. "

"Anything else?"

"It appears to be an irregular dwarf. There are scorch marks all over this system. The inner planets have been baked. "

"There was a nova. "

"Perhaps many."

"So an irregular dwarf, the remains of a nova flash star."

"The planet we're approaching has little if any atmosphere. It's rock with a sprinkling of ice at the poles.

Atmosphere breakdown gives carbon dioxide as primary component, 70 percent approximately.

Nitrogen 29 percent; other trace gases fill in the rest. "

Captain Ton was incredulous. "Is this it? Is this the homeworld of the alien lifeform?"

They stared at the bleak, dead world on the viewscreen.

"More confirmation on those atmosphere readings, although we are now expecting a full one-percent oxygen level. Temperatures on the dark side are pretty low; the CO, freezes out in places. "

Chang whispered, "This is what the Starhammer can do to a solar system. This was the home system to our enemy. It died a billion years ago. "

The Empress Wu disappeared behind the dead planet as Shaka approached, but before she vanished a shuttle launch was detected.

"Shuttle away, four degrees' separation at this distance."

"We are in the same orbit as the Empress Wu now."

"That's it, there they go. "

Chang stared hard at the screen. Did the thing that controlled the Wu know they still followed it? Had it been watching to see them flash into existence each time they'd jumped? Or had it been simply laying another deceptive path?

And now was this its real attempt to land?

And why was it landing here, on this dead world, unless it truly was the homeworld?

"Track that shuttle," Ton barked. "How about getting some of these troopers into motion, Colonel. We could use some room on this ship. "

"I don't think that's the shuttle our enemy will use. This will be the feint. He always feints, every time, that's the rule."

"Feints?"

"It's ingenious, I mean it has to work at least fifty percent of the time no matter what. Every time he strikes he sets up a feint, a demonstration, even a suicide attack. "

"Suicide attack, how many of them are there?"

"The alien is protean, changeable, it changes shape depending on what sort of material it has to hand.

And it's omniparasitic. It adapts to parasitize any sufficiently large animal. It converts humans en masse into the other things we've found. "

"But this thing on the Wu is enormous, what did it use there? "

"Obviously it combined a lot of people somehow. Or ate them and grew this thing with the tentacles, I don't know. We'll never know unless we can defeat it somehow and capture it. "

"Why this visit to a dead world?"

"This has to be the homeworld. It went home. "

"Home. " Ton mouthed the word.

There were still no missiles or mines.

"He's not making any hostile moves," Ton said: "Does that mean he's given up?"

They tracked the shuttle down to the ground. It made a rough landing on a plain covered in smoothed debris.

On high magnification they watched the shuttle far below. The thin atmosphere left everything very clear.

Nothing moved after the shuttle came to rest, no doors opened.

The Shaka sped past, two hundred miles up.

Ton was glowering at Chang, his screens, his crew, just about everything. Chang left the bridge; until the next shuttle was spotted, if there was a next shuttle, she had time for something with pseudo caffeine in it. As well as another square of ancilophen. She needed something right away; these Fleet officers were about to drive her completely crazy.

The Shaka's little lounge area, of course, was filled with members of Blake's squad, who were returning their skeletals, something that filled the air with metallic hiss and crunch.

Luisa grabbed some instacaf, hot cappuccino style. She got a seat at the end of the space, as far away from the troopers as possible, and dug out the ancilophen dispenser.

Hopester came over, his face and eyes strangely bright.

She sipped cappuccino and swallowed.

Poor Darel; he'd lost his whole life now. They were so far from Wexel that relativistic effects made it unlikely he would ever see his family again, only their descendants. If he ever made it back to Wexel at all.

"I'm afraid this turned out to be more than we expected," she said by way of an apology for kidnapping the poor man and dragging him across the galaxy.

"I signed on, I guess. I don't know, I haven't been able to think about all that yet. I mean, I'll never see them again; I can't face that yet. "

Chang nodded, wondering why she couldn't commiserate more. Was she jealous of that family life, was that her problem? She'd always said she didn't need that, she'd believed that the ITAA was enough. And yet she knew how dreadfully attractive the human nuclear family could be. She would never be a mother now, and that was something that recently she had found hard to think about honestly.

"We're all alone out here, aren't we?" Hopester said unexpectedly.

"Correct."

"What about the sector fleets?"

"Never get here in time. Whatever happens is up to us and us alone."

"Just this little ship against the Empress Wu?"

"Let's hope Captain Ton is skilled enough, eh?"

"It doesn't seem like we gave it much of a challenge. I mean, it's been winning all along the line, hasn't it?" Hopester sounded genuinely angry now.

Chang sighed; unfortunately there was a lot of truth to what he'd said.

"We have to find it and we have to stop it doing whatever it's trying to do. As to whether it's winning, I can't tell you, Mr. Hopester; I guess we haven't done that well so far. Our enemy is clever and skilled beyond anything we understand. "

This admission seemed to calm him somewhat.

"What does it want here?"

"Unknown, absolutely unknown. Superweapon that it knows about? Message in a bottle for Mama?

Your guess is as good as mine. "

"Mama? Do they have mothers?"

She laughed, choked up on the cappuccino for a moment, and almost spilled some on her uniform.

"I don't know, Mr. Hopester, I really don't."

A beep from the bridge summoned her. She was sure she knew what it would be.

A shuttle had detached some time before and had landed on the surface. There were tracks beside it: four sets of humanoid tracks, people in spaceboots.

"You were right, this appears to be the real attempt to land. "

"They came down early, this was launched before we even reached this system."

"Where's the monster, then?" Ton said.

"The krakenoid form will be on the Empress Wu just waiting for us to show ourselves."

"It thinks we have followed it, then?"

"I think it knows we had to." "It seems very confident." Chang nodded.

"He has the initiative, and he knows what he's doing. We don't have the haziest notion.

" She turned away, signaling to Povet to approach and calling Blake on the commo.

"Blake here. "

"Captain, what's our status for an immediate drop?"

"All units are effective and ready to go."

"Scramble. "

Chang headed out of the bridge.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR.

ALTHOUGH HE HAD A SENSE THAT ENORMOUS EVENTS WERE IN motion around him, Rhem Kerwillig's ability to comprehend the situation had slipped somewhat. In the general excitement he had taken too many of the little yellow triangles.

When Admiral Heldheim endeavored to ask him questions, Rhem was unable to think straight long enough to answer him. Any answer at all seemed fatuous. He kept getting the giggles.

Heldheim gave up in irritation after a few minutes, convinced that the fellow was insane. The whole situation was insane; Heldheim wasn't clear about a lot of things.

One thing was clear to Rhem, however: no matter what happened, his old life on Wexel was over.

Everyone he had ever known would be dead long before he could see them again.

Meanwhile, events moved swiftly. A series of wrenching Baada-drive shifts occurred. Rhem and Heldheim were given just enough warning to get into webbed seats before it began.

And as it went on, the vast pink body that occupied half the Wu's bridge grew a seven-foot-long projection like a gargantuan penis. Straight out of a wall of meat nine feet high came this bump that lengthened like an enormous watermelon, pulsing and wobbling.

Rhem was astonished anew; the thing grew out to be the size of a giant man in a matter of minutes.

There were throbbing processes shuddering within it; the whole thing shook as if bursting with life.

Then it began to shrink and compress, and the surface darkened from pink to deep red and almost to black. The motions subsided and then ceased altogether.

Finally, with a cracking and a slight struggle this shape split open to disgorge something new.

Rhem's gaze was riveted to the thing that emerged. A completely new form of life.

It was bipedal but it had no arms and no head. A line of tentacles, whippy and smooth, sprouted from the shoulder regions. These tentacles were of several different widths and lengths; some were trunklike, others were more like twigs, or ferns.

Overall the skin was a deep pink, streaked with gray, a pattern that Rhem had seen before. The "head"