Since these tactics had been effective so long, the Hive species had not altered them, or its ships and armaments, in the centuries that the Mrdini had been defending themselves. The Mrdinis had, on the other hand, improved space ships, peripheral technologies, and more effective unmanned missiles. They had managed to protect their own colony worlds, all the time searching for allies, the Hive home world and new resources to help them win the final victory.
Humans had far too long eschewed wars: naval strength being deployed more in the search for colonial worlds, or as deterrent against the occasional renegade privateer. Consequently, minor incidents of friction were bound to occur between a war-honed species and one which had been at peace, where the only casualties had occurred in space accidents which were then so ruthlessly investigated that repetitions were unlikely.
On the positive side, since the Alliance had been formed and great efforts made by both species to improve communications and appreciation of each other, there had been significant developments that ought to have had a morale-building effect. The fortuitous discovery of the ion trails of three Hive ships had given the Alliance the splendid opportunity to send an expedition to backtrack and locate the Hive home world. The trail had led first to the hulk of the biggest Hive ship ever seen by the Mrdini: a hulk which had been partially destroyed by a searing nova explosion.
To discover if the nova had indeed destroyed the system which had spawned the Hive species, one resolute `Dini ship, with Prime thian Lyon on board, had driven to the origin of the fading ion trail.
Discovery of the damaged Hive ship disclosed that three escape pods had managed to leave the mother ship shortly before the nova shockwave hit it. The human ships had gone in search of the pods to prevent even a single queen from surviving to start a new colony on an hospitable world: a circumstance that the Alliance wished to thwart.
One pod had already been captured and it contained a live queen.
She had been `decanted’, as someone termed it, at the Heinlein Moon Facility from which escape was unlikely. Her apprehension made her the first live specimen of this enigmatic species for both human and Mrdini. Shortly after her arrival at the moon facility, she had laid a huge mass of eggs.
The other two pods had also been accounted for: or rather the remnants of the one which had collided with an asteroid and the other whose occupant had died when its supply of oxygen had given out.
The KTLZ, through Thian, had reported the absolute surety that the Hive home system had been incinerated by its nova-sun.
Squadrons C and D were still in pursuit of the other two Hive ships, going firther and firther from their home worlds. One lobby urgently wanted the squadrons to return on the grounds that the two Hive ships were light years beyond any Alliance system and therefore no further threat.
`No immediate threat,’ another faction rebutted and urgently wanted the squadrons to explore the significant number of G-type star systems with M-5 planets that had been identified during the pursuit: to see why the Hive ships had ignored them. Were these already infested with the Hive species? But investigation was certainly in order to discover if these primaries had generated planets suitable for colonization for either species of the Alliance.
The quandary of continued pursuit now obsessing the High Councillors was ethical in substance. Was it right, knowing that once the Hive ships found the sort of world they needed to colonize, to let them exterminate whatever lifeform might exist? Certainly one of the avowed aims of the Alliance was to seek out and identify worlds that had been taken over by the Hive species and prevent them developing to the point where their population had expanded to the point of recolonizing.
Twenty eggs of the captive Hive queen had suddenly hatched, producing creatures who were apparently limited to attendance on the queen, cleaning her, bringing her food, or sent scurrying down the empty corridors of the Heinlein Base: useless errands since there was nothing but unfurnished rooms, offering only more empty space.