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on a catered platter. Grit swirled into the hole in the windshield and pelted his exposed tongue and formed a thin dusty film over his teeth, but he ignored it all and went on laughing.

Three

    The Parent spent the days before planetfall analyzing incoming data from the passive sensors and planning her strategy. Studying the planet with enhanced optics, she decided to invade the larger of the two continents. The majority of the aliens were concentrated near the southern pole, indicating that the high temperature of the surface was generally not to their liking. This helped her decisions in designing the genetic make-up of her offspring.
    Breaking out the feeding tubes, she stimulated her ovaries and prepared her birthing chambers for use. In less than a day, she would internally hatch and then birth several larvae. Using the ship’s precious supply of protoplasm judiciously, the larvae would grow to adult offspring by the time the invasion began.
    Laying back in a bath of simmering mud and earth salts, the Parent felt her body quake with excitement. The combination of the hormonal stimulation of the conception process and the mud bath was most pleasurable. Ovulation after so long was a real treat. It would be good to have offspring about again.
    In this state of near-bliss, with her ovaries working and her glands producing a steady stream of delicious secretions, she recalled the long war with the Tulk. At first the Tulk, an ancient and powerful race of fading glory, had fallen easily to the hot aggression of the young Imperium. They were a shy race of philosophers, seemingly evolved beyond the crude machinations of warfare. They still retained vast wisdom from their past, however, and cleverly used other beings to fight for them. Eventually the tide had turned and despite all their early victories the Imperium had been driven back.
    The seedships were part of the last effort of the dying Imperium to perpetuate itself. Sent out into the unknown to start new colonies at the end of the losing war with the Tulk, the seedships had slipped quietly through the interstellar void for millennia, dropping into any inhabitable system. Sadly, she was the only Parent in this system, possibly the only Parent of her kind currently alive and active anywhere. She had to assume that the future of her race had been left to her alone.
    With intense interest, the Parent studied the datastream coming in from her long-range optics. It appeared that the enemy was quite well entrenched on the hot water-world. Within hours, she had located all the major spaceports open to local system traffic and identified the largest one at the southern pole where the huge ship orbited.
    Ah, the ship! What a fantastic vessel she was. Her incredible size could only mean she was built for interstellar travel. The ship was a great blot that must have shadowed a significant portion of the gleaming watery surface a thousand miles below her. The Parent considered the capture and control of the ship to be one of her primary strategic goals. What was more incredible than her size, suitable for transporting hundreds of thousands of offspring, was her apparent lack of weaponry. In a way, this was a sad note on the disintegration of the Imperium. Surely, if the Skaintz Imperium had still been a viable military force in the region then no such ship would be without escort. The Parent’s dim hopes of support from her own kind were all but extinguished by this one logical conclusion.
    But not all the data was bad, not by any means. For one thing there was no sign that her presence was suspected. Equally important, there seemed to be a simple method by which she could secretly pilot the ship down to the planet surface. By studying the traffic patterns, it seemed clear that small ships the size of her own seedship were regularly landing and departing without official sanction. As many as one in twenty landings were accompanied by tiny shadows, the small ship riding close in the