But before that, while the fighting still raged, Birk turned his attention to the area of most crucial concern—the alien spaceship. He did not know how the alien commander would respond to this new situation. If he simply sent the rest of his troops out to fight, they would be slaughtered along with the rest—but Birk could not count on the enemy to be that blatantly suicidal. A more reasonable commander, seeing that this battle was lost, might try to retreat by taking off in the ship, and the success of that maneuver would depend entirely on the effectiveness of an unproven invention.
Birk wiped his hands nervously on his clothes to dry the sweat. He knew the theory of his hyperprop jammer backward and forward. It should work—but then, every engineer was familiar with things that should h
