I huffed. “Was that it?” I asked. “Base trickery?”
“Isn’t that how you do everything?”
I considered, and had to admit she had a point.
“I’m thinking about the war I’ve restarted,” I said.
Sandra sat up and crossed her legs. She tossed her head, but her hair was too short to cover her bare chest. “You shouldn’t have done it if we can’t win,” she said.
“You’ve got a point there,” I said.
“Can we win?”
“I don’t know. If the Macros can get a hundred cruisers to Earth in a year, then maybe. But if they can get a thousand cruisers to Earth-we’re toast.”
Her eyes widened in alarm. “You mean you don’t know if you just killed us all or not?”
“Nope,” I admitted.
“Everyone thinks you know exactly what you’re doing. You know that don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It helps with morale.”
“They would follow you to Hell and back.”
“Some would argue they already have,” I said. “But don’t tell anyone I’m adlibbing, okay?”
She stared at me seriously. She nodded her head. “Okay. But why did you restart the war?”
I shrugged. “The Macros were going to keep sending us into fights until we were all dead. It was just a matter of time. I figured that if I was going to turn on them, it was best to do it before I lost one more marine.”
“Okay,” she said. “I get that. But why do it at all? If it jeopardizes all of Earth-our entire species. You shouldn’t have restarted things if you weren’t sure we could win.”
Her words hurt, but I didn’t let on.
“Good points,” I said. “Honestly, I considered butchering all the Centaurs as the Macros ordered. I probably could have done it. In retrospect, all we really had to do was pop each of their satellites, putting a hole in every habitat’s ‘sky’. They would have all been sucked out into space, one satellite at a time. Problem solved.”
“That would have been horrible.”
“Exactly. I had never intended to sign us on to exterminate an entire biotic species. We are not machines ourselves. We have a bond with these other beings. More importantly, I think these machines are intolerable masters. I’ve come to believe it will turn out to be us or them in the end. The machines are just too different from us to live with peaceably. They might be out-fought and negotiated with to the point of a truce, but it will always be a pause-point, a period of time they will use to build up their next annihilating attack against us. They have no intention of letting any biotic group survive in the long run.”
Sandra stared at me in growing alarm. “So, you restarted the war now because it was going to happen eventually? But are we ready?”
“No,” I admitted, “the decision wasn’t cold or logical. Probably, the right thing to do would have been to order every marine to open his suit and commit mass suicide.”
“You’d never get our men to follow that order.”
“No, not even after a rousing speech.”
She stared at me, disturbed. “Hypothetically, if we’d tried that, what would the Macros have done?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug. “They might have figured we’d ‘malfunctioned’ and just gone back to Earth for more troops. But at least we would not have killed more innocent biotics, nor would we have restarted the war.”
“This is a pretty grim situation, if suicide was our best move all along.”
“I don’t think it was, and besides it would have been a quitters move, and I don’t go for that kind of strategy. We are the best, the most experienced fighting forces Earth has right now. Why give the machines a break by taking ourselves out? Even more importantly, we have a lot of intel to take home with us. We have learned a great deal about our little corner of the galaxy, and I wanted to bring that back to Earth. Rebellion then, was the only option I had left.”
“But we’ve hurt them pretty badly. We’ve taken out three big ships.”
I shook my head. “In my estimation, that doesn’t mean much to the Macros. They lost five cruisers in a single assault on the Worm homeworld. It took them months, but they brought forward hundreds of ships against Earth at the end of the first war. We don’t know how big their network of star systems is. They could have a hundred planets churning out ships.”
Sandra thought about that for a minute or so. Her face was serious, but determined. She was no crybaby.
“You must have a plan-some way to win.”
“I always have a plan,” I said. I figured it was only a half-lie this time. I did have plans to build our forces, to unite the local biotics and mine the rings. But these thoughts could be better categorized as ideas rather than plans.
She read my face and realized I was feeding her some sunshine. She knew me better than the others. I supposed it was a natural hazard one could only expect to run into when you were sleeping with one of your bridge officers.
“I thought we were headed home as conquering heroes,” she said at last. “You’re telling me we are in for another fight to the finish.”
“Don’t demand the truth if you don’t want to hear it,” I said, giving her a grim smile.
“Next time, I won’t,” she said seriously. “I liked the fairytale better.”
Cover
— 47 When things were quiet on the bridge, I sought out Marvin. It took me a long time to find him, and I finally had to call Sandra to give me a hint. She directed me to look in the engine compartments. We fragile humans didn’t like to go into that region due to the high levels of particle radiation. Grumbling, I ratcheted open a difficult hatch and stepped into the ‘light gamma’ zone.
“Damned robot,” I mumbled. Like a housecat, Marvin was hard to find when you wanted him, but ubiquitous when you didn’t.
I found him nosing around amongst the cooling tanks. He had ripped up a bit of the insulation and was tapping at the smooth metal tank underneath.
“Hey there,” I said, “don’t cause a leak.”
One camera swiveled my way. The rest stayed on the tank’s gauges, which were not visual, but tactile. They consisted of swellings in the deck plates near the tank. As closely as we could figure out, the Macros read these like graphs-a long bar of raised metal indicated a high temperature or pressure reading.
“I must determine the fullness of the vessel,” Marvin said. He continued tapping. “No leakage will be caused by this action.”
“Why do you want to determine the status of that tank, Marvin?” I asked.
A second camera eye swung to focus on me. I stood with him, examining the tanks as he did. I noticed now that many of them had ripped insulation. There was no sign of dents due to his tapping, fortunately.
“We’ll have to tape up this insulation,” I told him. “I wonder if the radiation down here has made your logic circuits malfunction.”
He didn’t answer. I hadn’t made a request or posed a question. Marvin typically ignored statements that made no demands upon him to respond.
“Do you agree with my assessment of your condition, Marvin?”
“No,” he said. The second camera swung away from me again.
I’d come to realize after dealing with Marvin on many occasions that the number of cameras he directed toward an entity was an indicator of his interest in it.
“Don’t you think this is odd, pointless behavior?” I asked. “What possible use to you are the pressure levels in these tanks?”
“I’m attempting to measure the fluid levels in the tanks,” Marvin corrected me. “Not the pressure, the pressure is indicated by the gauges under our feet. When the deck gauges-”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Why are you testing fluid levels?”
