Radar and long-range imaging showed what appeared to be a partly assembled radio telescope dish, with a few smaller objects floating nearby. It was a reasonable assumption that Pritchard’s alien master wanted to “phone home”. So far, though, there’d been no detectable response from anything in the target area. Moore was suspicious; Pritchard had shown enough ingenuity in the previous debacle. But perhaps there really was nothing he could do. Or perhaps this was a decoy construction of some kind, designed to distract them while Pritchard ran in another direction.

Bah. Pointless speculation. They would have to get there and check it out. And then destroy it.

A quick discussion with Lê confirmed Moore’s estimate of their military capability. They had some hours before they would need to finalize plans. Moore decided that would be the time to thoroughly read Lê in.

Moore walked around the bridge, listening in on the low buzz of conversation between specialists. Exchanges involving the strength of solar wind, level of magnetic flux, amount of radio traffic from civilian sources, unexpected density of interplanetary dust, gravity gradients, and so on. He was struck again by a wave of nostalgia. As a captain, he’d felt like he had the world on his shoulders. Now he saw it for the easy, focused job that it was. Following policy was so much easier than setting it.

He glanced up at the captain and smiled, then returned to his customary position.

Interplanetary dust. Dust? “Shit!”

The outburst caused every head in the room to swivel to face him.

“Captain, get us out of here! Abort!” Moore felt the panic on his face, and didn’t care.

“Too late Admiral.”

That wasn’t Captain Lê’s voice. Or the voice of anyone in the room. It came from the intercom. Moore looked over at Lê, who sat, gripping his chair arms, frozen with confusion.

Moore groaned. “Pritchard.”

“You bet, Admiral. Your ships have all been infected, and are under my control. More or less. Of course, you don’t know what’s more and what’s less, so maybe don’t test me, okay? I’m still pissed at you for the nuke thing, by the way.”

Moore gritted his teeth and said nothing.

Captain Lê stood and paced over to stop at each console and talk to his bridge crew. As he moved from station to station, his expression became steadily darker.

“For what it’s worth, Admiral, you’ve delayed me, at least. I had to toss all my spare nanites your way in order to have a hope of getting every ship. Now I have to wait until I breed up a new batch before I can continue construction of my communications station.”

“And the ones that missed? What if they hit Earth?”