“Wait…If you could get in here, you can surely escape completely. Our troops can’t be far off. Or any farmer hereabouts will hide you.”

She shook her head. “No. I’ll stay with them. Maybe I can help in some other small way. What else has there been to keep me alive, but the hope of—It wouldn’t be any better, living here, if we’re all conquered. There’s to be a final attack, three decades hence. Do you know that?”

“Yes. Our side takes prisoners too, and quizzes them. The first episode puzzled us. Many thought it had only been a raid by—what’s the word?—by pirates. But now we know they really do intend to take our planet away.”

“You must have developed some good linguists,” she said, seeking impersonality. “To be able to talk with your prisoners. Of course, you yourself, after capture, could be educated by the hypnopede.”

“The what?”

“The language-teaching machine.”

“Oh, yes, the enemy do have them, don’t they? But we do too. After the first raid, those who thought there was a danger the aliens might come back set about developing such machines. I knew Chertkoian weeks before my own capture.”

“I wish I could help you escape,” she said dully. “But I don’t know how. That bottle is all I can do. Isn’t it?”

“Yes.” He regarded the thing with a fascination.

“My patron—Golyev himself—said his men would rip you open to get your knowledge. So I thought—”

“You’re very kind.” Ivalo grimaced, as if he had tasted something foul. “But your act may turn out pointless. I don’t know anything useful. I wasn’t even sworn to secrecy about what I do know. Why’ve I held out, then? Don’t ask me. Stubbornness. Anger. Or just hating to admit that my people—our people, damn it!—that they could be so weak and foolish.”

“What?” Her glance jerked up to him.

“They could win the war at a stroke,” he said. “They won’t. They’d rather die, and let their children be enslaved by the Third Expedition.”

“What do you mean?” She crouched to hands and knees, bowstring-tense.

He shrugged. “I told you, a number of people of Vaynamo took the previous invasion at its word, that it was the vanguard of a conquering army. There was no official action. How could there be, with a government as feeble as ours? But some of the research biologists—”

“Not a plague!”

“Yes. Mutated from the local coryzoid virus. Incubation period, approximately one month, during which time it’s contagious. Vaccination is still effective two weeks after exposure, so all our people could be safeguarded. But the Chertkoians would take the disease back with them. Estimated deaths, ninety percent of the race.”

“But—”

“That’s where the government did step in,” he said with bitterness. “The information was suppressed. The virus cultures were destroyed. The theory was, even to save ourselves we couldn’t do such a thing.”

Elva felt the tautness leave her. She sagged. She had seen small children on Chertkoi too.