The Rowan and Jeff Raven had five children. The precocious Damia, the second daughter of their marriage, emerges as a Prime Talent too, and is sent to occupy the Tower at Iota Aurigae’s new mining planet.² There she encounters an intelligence on a distant spaceship, known as Sodan. He tries to lure her into giving him directions to her planet. Her family becomes suspicious of her enchantment with this “mind” and sends her brother, Larak, and Afra to divert her. In the ensuing meeting of minds, Larak is killed by a brutal telepathic bolt from Sodan, who is only a mind. Damia and Afra are seriously injured too. While recuperating on Deneb, Damia and Afra are contacted by the “dreams” of the Mrdini. An alien race, they have been fighting the dread spheres of the Hiver queens, who were the invaders which Jeff and the Rowan had thwarted.

The Mrdini are exceedingly impressed by the fact that Deneb was able to defeat the attacking Hiver sphere without loss of life. They have been fighting the Hivers for two centuries and only suicide squadrons are able to penetrate and destroy the spheres.

In order to cement relations between the two species, Mrdini young are placed with Human young and grow up learning each other’s language and culture. Damia’s children, ³ starting with young Laria, each have a pair of Mrdini young.

When Laria reaches sixteen years of age, she is sent to Clarf, one of the five Mrdini worlds. On Clarf, Laria teaches Basic to Mrdinis and learns their “adult” language, accompanied by her two ’Dinis, Tip and Huf. At eighteen, she takes over as FT&T Prime at Clarf Tower as the Star League Alliance of Human and Mrdini continues to track down or resist the Hiver incursions.

Then three Hiver spheres penetrate League Space and three pursuit squadrons of mixed Human and Mrdini ships are sent after each of the Hiver ships, to track them to their separate destinations. Another group is sent to trace their ion trails back to their planet of origin. In order to continue these searches most effectively, FT&T is asked to supply the flagship of each group with a Prime, or sufficient lesser Talents, to keep in touch with the League Base and to “receive” additional supplies of food and material on what could be long voyages.

Young Thian Raven, Laria’s brother, is sent to the Vadim, under the command of Captain Ashiant, as he and the ships backtrack the fleeing Hiver spheres. Thian himself comes under threat when the nova-blasted, derelict Great Sphere of the Hivers is found in space. A jealous latent Talent attacks him while he is part of a team exploring the dead sphere, and he is nearly killed. Damia assists him in identifying his assailant.

Meanwhile one of the queens fleeing the Great Sphere has been captured and is incarcerated in an unused facility on Heinlein Moon Base, where she can be studied from a viewing station carefully placed safely out of her reach in her “prison.” Mrdini and Humans alike await her exit from the pod. Attempts to contact the huge, mantislike queen are futile, as she does not recognize any other species. All hopes to establish negotiations and thus curtail Hiver incursions in the Star League are thwarted.

The Mrdini are not convinced that the nova which had devastated the Great Sphere has destroyed the Hiver homeworld and wish to have proof. Thian, bravely recovering from the attack, agrees to accompany the Mrdini ship the KLTL in its Search, thus making sure of supplies and contact during what is possibly a yearlong trek. By doing so, he will prevent any young Mrdinis from “going on the line”—a Mrdini euphemism for self-sacrifice to feed their crewmates.

The League decides to try to salvage what they can of the Great Sphere to learn more about Hiver space engineering.

Afra accompanies his second-born son, Rojer, to the Genesee under Captain Etienne Osullivan, for special duty when a sphere is tracked to a Hiver-occupied system identified on Mrdini maps as Xh-33. Despite being of the same species, the sphere is fired upon from the planet and its queens are destroyed as they try to escape the bombardment of their ship in pods.

Back on Iota Aurigae, Zara Lyon, sister of Laria, Thian and Rojer, becomes quite upset about the condition of the queen in Heinlein Base and determines to assist the captive. She manages to sneak a ride to Earth’s Moon. Her interference results in saving the life of the captive queen, who has been slowly freezing. Even before this incident, Damia and Afra have worried about Zara’s potential as a Tower Prime. Jeff and Rowan Raven agree that Zara might be better suited to another profession and Zara is, with Elizara Reidinger, as a dedicated medical T-1.

Despite orders from the High Council to maintain a watching brief,⁴ a Mrdini ship’s captain attempts to coerce Rojer into teleporting the ship’s missiles to destroy Hiver settlements on Xh-33. Rojer’s two ’Dini friends, Kat and Gil, are killed defending him from the Mrdini captain. Rojer barely escapes with his life. His mother, Damia, arrives to succor him and removes him to his grandmother’s quiet home on Deneb Five to recuperate from the loss of his dear friends.⁵

The Rowan, arriving on the Genesee in the Xh-33 system, helps Captain Etienne Osullivan execute a daring plan to “steal” the refugee sphere, and to destroy the two Hiver vehicles in orbit about Xh-33. She requires the assistance of Thian, returned from his post on the Mrdini ship, and Flavia, a T-1 from the Rowan’s native planet, Altair. With the use of Talent, the sphere is purloined from the system and sent on its way to the League, thus giving the Alliance a relatively undamaged Hiver spaceship for Mrdini and Human engineers to examine. Teleported explosives blow up any chance for the Xh-33 Hiver population to leave the surface. The smaller Hiver scout ships that emerge from an underground hangar to fight back are also destroyed. The Alliance sets up on one of the Xh-33 moons to monitor the surface.

Once the intact sphere ship is moored off Phobos Moon Base, teams are set up to examine it in detail. This is best accomplished with the help of Talents. To avoid the aggravating “sting-pzzt” emanating from Hiver artifacts, the Talents control the exploration from a distance. Thian heads the team that includes the newest engineering graduate, his brother Rojer, Flavia and other assorted Talents, including several latent ones (Lieutenant Commander Semirame Kloo) who discover that they are bothered by the sting-pzzt emanations of Hiver artifacts. (Only Talents are affected by this phenomenon.)

While the Talented team is able to search the intricate labyrinth of a Hiver ship, including the “bridge” apparently staffed by twelve queens, they are unable to power it up. The Talents decide that the only recourse is to teleport the Heinlein Base queen into the bridge and see how she activates the ship. Ever watchful of his grandchildren, Jeff Raven, Earth Prime, approves of this ploy and comes along to be sure the queen does not escape. She shows the watching Primes the power-up sequence and is then deftly ’ported back to her prison.

Meanwhile, other squadrons are following a sphere designated Number Three, which seems uninterested in many likely M-5 worlds that it passes. These are briefly investigated by Talents, in one instance by T-2 Kincaid Dano, whose capacity is overtaxed by the scope of the mission. Before he can be burned out, either by his duties and by the unfortunate struggle for his attentions by officers on the ship, he is transferred to Laria’s Tower on Clarf with his ’Dinis, Nil and Plus. He insists, despite his fatigue, on contacting Earth Prime with a report that there are more Hiver-occupied worlds than previously suspected: Hivers now occupy four of the twenty likely planets he has probed. He recommends that these worlds be examined by the League as possible colonial worlds to relieve the pressure on overpopulated Mrdini planets.

Consequently, while the main squadron under Captain Ashiant continues to follow the sphere so obviously headed in a special direction, another group, under the command of Captain Vestapia Soligen on the Columbia, is staffed to explore the four M-type worlds: Talavera, Waterloo, Marengo and Ciudad Rodrigo. Prime Talent Flavia, Zara Lyon and Lieutenant Rhodri Eagles, T-3 and incidentally cousin to the Lyon children, are part of that contingent.

Suddenly more spheres are identified, some uncomfortably close to the Columbia while others speed to join or assist the Hiver that Captain Ashiant is tracking. This unexpected development suggests that the Hivers do have some form of communication. It would appear that this sphere is searching for a star as near to their homeworld’s primary as possible. But what are the parameters? From records of earlier star maps in the general area of the nova, the signature of the primary, before it was destroyed by its primary, is verified. Thus the searchers are able to discover exactly what sort of primary the Hivers are looking for.

Following Number Three, the astrogators spot a primary with the requisite signature and Captain Ashiant engages some of the enemy spheres in a space battle. At first the Human/Mrdini ships are overwhelmed, until Thian realizes that Talent can end the battle by teleporting explosives to detonate the fuel tanks of the Hiver ships. As Talents are not supposed to engage in defensive, or offensive, maneuvers, there is some criticism of Thian’s actions. However, the explosives do destroy the spheres. Captain Soligen’s squadron, also being pursued by Hivers, is able to use this method, too, to destroy the spheres. In contrast to a direct confrontation, the Hivers do recognize other spaceships as threats, so the Hivers are prevented from establishing a new homeworld.

While that threat is eliminated, many more Hiver worlds have been located during the chase. All of them must be identified, and since the ethics of the Human/Mrdini Alliance do not include species genocide, how can the Hivers be prevented from following their cyclic behavior of overpopulating their planets and looking for new worlds to inhabit? How can FT&T under Jeff Raven’s capable management find enough suitable Talents to keep up with the ever-expanding demand for Primes?