Final Assault by Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page A

surprised by that. Just frustrated.
    Terribly frustrated.
    He had made it through a mound of plates before he had to let the water out again. His hands were chapped and slime-covered. He washed them off, then bent over and tried to figure out how to work the large industrial-strength-sized dishwasher.
    The problem—and it was one he had told no one— was that he wasn’t certain the squiggles they had found in the alien ship were a written language. They might have been symbols that designated how the controls worked, for example, the way that international symbols worked—like the one of a person in a wheelchair that indicated handicapped access. If that was the case, he knew, even with his limited education in this area, that none of his people would crack a code. They would be baffled by this until the end of time.
    He cleared the dishes out of the washer and began to stack the greasy pots and pans inside.
    The other problem that he had was that he had no real sense of the aliens’ culture. He knew a lot about them, given that he hadn’t even known that aliens existed a year ago, but he didn’t know as much as he wanted to.
    He had already told Maddox a lot about the aliens, but he would formalize what he knew into the report. Some of what he had received from the other members of the Project would help in the attack. Some of it might become useful later on, in ways that Cross wasn’t sure of yet.
    What he did know was this: the aliens had a hierarchical society. The command center of their ships was laid out so that one creature rose above the rest. That creature had the best view of the others, and the most information on his console—based primarily on size of the unit.
    He also knew that these creatures were extremely intelligent and that for hundreds of thousands of years their culture was significantly more advanced than that of humans. He suspected that they were startled to have humans attack them in space—as startled as humans would be to learn that ants had developed space travel.
    That advantage was lost though; the aliens now knew that they were fighting a more advanced race than the ones they had seen two thousand years ago.
    The aliens had a knowledge of tactics. The fact that they did not harvest the same area each time told him that they understood the value of planning. Several of his biologists theorized from the way the aliens changed their method of attack in the last real battle that they also had an understanding of emotions.
    Retaliation, or so he was told, was not an intellectual concept. Its initial basis lay in emotion. Retaliation came from anger, and an escalated response was designed to subdue a lesser force.
    Humans had not been subdued. Therefore, some of the biologists theorized, the aliens would try harder to put humans in their places and out of the way.
    Cross closed the dishwasher door and started it. It whirred to life with a force that startled him. There were still countless dishes around him. But he had no interest in them any longer.
    He was beginning to get a handle on his report.
    But Cross knew, because he saw all of the information, and because he, too, had been studying the aliens, that what was most important to the aliens wasn’t revenge or subduing Earth.
    It was survival.
    Everything about the aliens showed that they had to conserve. They had developed a way to survive even after they had lost their original sun. It required them to suffer long periods of darkness and, the experts hypothesized, a cold sleep that lasted centuries. It was a brilliant solution for the aliens, but it imposed strict limitations on them.
    He ticked off the limitations in his mind.
    —They had only a small amount of time in which to harvest all the food and energy they needed for two thousand years.
    —If they could still reproduce, they had to do so in the short span of time they were near the sun.
    —If they had to build or repair new things, they had to do so within that same short