Agent of Vega & Other Stories

SHE LOVES ME, SHE LOVES ME NOT, SHE LOVES ME SHE LOVES ME NOT!!!

Eight large ships came individually out of the darkness between the stars that was their sea, and began to move about the planet Noorhut in a carefully timed pattern of orbits. They stayed much too far out to permit any instrument of space-detection to suspect that the Noorhut might be their common center of interest. Though the men who crewed the eight ships bore the people of Noorhut no ill will, hardly anything could have looked less promising for Noorhut than the cargo they had on board.

Seven of them were armed with a gas which was not often used any more. A highly volatile lethal catalyst, it sank to the solid surface of a world over which it was freed and spread out swiftly there to the point where its presence could no longer be detected by any chemical means. However its effect of drawing the final breath almost imperceptibly out of all things that were oxygen-breathing was not noticeably reduced by diffusion.

The eighth ship was equipped with a brace of torpedoes, which were normally released some hours after the gas-carriers dispersed their invisible death. They were quite small torpedoes, since the only task remaining for them would be to ignite the surface of the planet that had been treated with the catalyst.

All those things might presently happen to Noorhut. But they would happen only if a specific message was flashed from it to the circling squadron—the message that Noorhut already was lost to a deadly foe who must, at any cost now, be prevented from spreading out from it to other inhabited worlds.

IN THIS SERIES:

Telzey Amberdon

T 'n T: Telzey & Trigger

Trigger & Friends

The Hub: Dangerous Territory

Agent of Vega & Other Stories

Baen Books by Eric Flint:

Mother of Demons

1632

The Philosophical Strangler

The Belisarius series, with David Drake:

An Oblique Approach

In the Heart of Darkness Destiny's Shield

Fortune's Stroke

The Tide of Victory

with Dave Freer:

Rats, Bats & Vats

Pyramid Scheme