but

already on

already on a total war footing found out better.
"I won't bore you with the details of four centuries of fighting. They never have caught up with us in physics, and we never have caught up with them in the organic sciences. They're a bit ahead of us in chemistry, too, but we've got a huge edge in weapons, computer science, FTL technology—all the hardware aspects of fighting a war in space—and we're better strategists. Their caution works against them, and we're a lot more tuitive. They can kill any planet they can range on, but so can we, and our advantages mean that they've been pushed onto the defensive. They have to get past the fleet to attack our planets, and we've shoved them further and further back with every generation. By now, they're penned up in just three star systems, and we've got them pretty much blockaded there."
She paused again, and he cocked his head to one side.
"Excuse me," he said, "but I don't quite understand. If you're so much better fighters, how have they lasted this long?"
"They aren't stupid, Ster Aston," she said grimly, "just xenophobic and fanatical. Somewhere fairly early in the fighting, they decided that some fundamental difference in the way our minds work gave us an inherent advantage. It must have galled them, but the fact was that we were better fighters, and they were losing. Not all the time, and not all the battles, but most of the big ones. So they decided to do something about it."
"But what could they do?"
"They used their own strengths. If we had some kind of inbred advantage, they had to acquire the same advantage for themselves. So they built a race of cyborgs."
"Cyborgs?"
"Cyborgs. Machines with organic brains."
"But if the problem was inbred—"
"I didn't say machines with Kanga brains, Ster Aston," she said harshly. "They had prisoners of their own, and they're fantastic biological engineers. They developed a method to build total obedience