"Oh, quit being such a floundering minnow! Nothing's going to happen. They're quite defenseless, I'm convinced."
"If that's the case, then you are under injunction of the Curule Assembly to make peaceful contact!"
"Drown peaceful contact!" the Chancellor swore. "I'm supposed to exercise my judgment out here!"
"But—"
"Flotsam! There will be no peace. If that's what the aliens wanted, they wouldn't have come out here in the first place. We are going to blast them. And from here we'll go on!"
"Go on?" Mittich repeated cautiously. "Where?"
Vrausot's eyes glazed over and his disarray of teeth were exposed to the gums as he paced the deck and beat his arms against his side in a fit of frantic expectation.
"We know where their relay base is," he explained. "We'll strike that next! Then, capitalizing on the element of surprise, we'll continue to their World of Origin and destroy it outright. On the way back we'll probably knock out one or two other planets."
He turned on a dumfounded Mittich. "The war—if there is to be one—will be short. We'll have only to return to the Tzarean Shoal and muster a fleet before we wipe out the rest of their civilization. And once again ours will be the glory of conquest—such as we have not experienced in, oh, how many millennia?"