go

all the fights and squabbles we'd get into over which nation should have the privilege of serving as your 'host.' After all, if I can see the advantages to grabbing you off, so can anyone else. And even if they weren't so nefarious as to want you for their own purposes, they'd sure as hell want to make sure that none of their rivals got hold of you."
"I see." Ludmilla gazed at him calmly, then cocked her head. "Obviously, I'm pleased to hear you coming up with all those reasons you should let me go, Mr. President. But are you certain you've really thought this through? We may have killed the Troll, but as you just pointed out, the Kangas are still out there, and they will be along in less than eighty years."
"Indeed they will," Armbruster agreed. "But we fought them to a standstill when they arrived in your own past, and that was without even knowing they were coming. This time we'll be forewarned—thanks to you—and, I feel quite certain, forearmed—thanks to Grendel's fighter. I'm sure we'll hit lots of problems in figuring out how it works, but those sorts of problems bring out the best in people and help pull them together, which is exactly what we need. So I'm confident that we will get it figured out . . . and I also hope that you'll be good enough to give us the coordinates of the Kangas' home systems before you swiftly and silently vanish away?"
"Oh, I think you can be reasonably confident of that, Mr. President," she said with a quirky smile.
"Well, then—there you have it!" Armbruster raised both hands shoulder high, palms uppermost, and grinned at her. "Yakolev, Henderson, Stallmaier, and I will use possession of the fighter and access to it as bait to draw the rest of the world into our coils. At the same time, we'll use our combined military strength to discourage anyone who might have thoughts of gaining control of it for themselves or simply destroying it to deprive anyone else of it. Once we've got the world headed in the right direction, we'll