 Who are the Karna?
Number two suffered from some sort of emotional block that left him continually on the horns of one dilemma or another. No two men were alike, and yet there sometimes seemed to be an eternal sameness about all men. Out there was the terrible emptiness of interstellar space—a great, yawning, infinite chasm capable of swallowing men, ships, planets, suns, and whole galaxies without filling its insatiable void. Somewhere out there, the ships of Earth were ranged against the ships of the alien Karna in the most important war that Mankind had yet fought. The Saarkkada themselves were humanoid in physical form—if one allowed the term to cover a wide range of differences—but their minds just didn't function along the same lines. To have shown himself to one of them would have meant instant loss of prestige. The Occeq of Saarkkad himself was never seen except by a handful of picked nobles, who, themselves, were never seen except by their underlings. To violate the rigid social setup of Saarkkad would mean the instant closing off of the supply of biochemical products that the Saarkkadic laboratories produced from native plants and animals—products that were vitally necessary to Earth's war, and which could be duplicated nowhere else in the known universe. Not the worst ones, of course; there were places in the galaxy that were less important than Saarkkad to the war effort. "A special communication for you has been teletyped in from Earth. Miss Drayson stood there calmly, her face a mask; her emotions were a secret. The Karna, slowly being beaten back on every front, were suing for peace. Interstellar war is too costly to allow it to continue any longer than necessary, and this one had been going on for more than thirteen years now. The trouble was that the Karna had a reputation for losing wars and winning at the peace table. If they won the armistice, they'd be able to retrench and rearm, and the war would break out again within a few years. They could be forced to allow supervision of the production potential, forced to disarm, rendered impotent. They had sent a full delegation to Saarkkad V, the next planet out from the Saarkkad sun, a chilly world inhabited only by low-intelligence animals. The Karna considered this to be fully neutral territory, and Earth couldn't argue the point very well. In addition, they demanded that the conference begin in three days, Terrestrial time. It would take more than a week for the Earth government to get a vessel to Saarkkad V. Earth had been caught unprepared for an armistice.
 The Karna are the second most powerful race in the galaxy. They are skilled negotiators.
 The Karna are the second most powerful race in the galaxy. They are skilled negotiators.  The Karna are a race of warriors bent on destroying the Earth.  The Karna are a peaceful species trying to negotiate a surrender to Earth.  The Karna are a predator race who are trying to invade the Earth, to use humans as a food source.