Desperate Measures — C.R. Daems

The Commonwealth of Stars, COS, has been invaded by the Issog, a bat-like species who considers the humans not only animals, but livestock. Over the past several years of war they have encroached farther into COS space, and the consensus is for the Issog to defeat the Commonwealth within the next five years. To make matters worse, the Arrith nation, a lizard-like species, is building up its fleets to take on the winner -- the bats or the monkeys as they refer to them -- since the winner will have all but exhausted its navy. The Commonwealth's only hope is that a newly developed technology can help them defeat the Issog and retain sufficient resources afterward to force the Arrith to continue their twenty-year nonaggression treaty. But the technology is unproven and possibly beyond the humans' ability to adapt.