contact with the enemy. We can no longer do anything other than destroy him at the earliest opportunity.”
I glanced at Major Sarin, thinking she might offer an opinion. She frowned down at the screen, not meeting my eyes. I knew her well enough to read her thoughts. She didn’t know what to do. She knew Marvin better than the others and was as conflicted as I was.
“We haven’t seen the nose of a single Macro ship yet,” I said. “Let’s see what Marvin says, first.”
The clock ticked down. We all watched it, and the yellow blip that was Marvin. It seemed to me that it had shifted slightly closer to the ring.
“Is he moving toward the ring?” I asked.
Major Sarin nodded. Everyone stared quietly, except for Crow, who muttered a steady stream of curses in Aussie slang. I understood the sentiment. It appeared Marvin was going toward the ring, which could only mean one thing. He had thought it through and decided to act before we could carry out our threats.
“He’s going to run back to his new Macro friends,” Crow said. “I’m giving the order to my ships to fire Kyle, whether you agree or not.”
Reluctantly, I nodded. Crow ordered his ships to move. It would take them time to receive the order then time to travel down through the atmosphere and to reach effective firing range. In any case, time was definitely running out for Marvin. It was running out for all of us.
At long last, the timer went negative. The response came in quickly. “What do you want me to do, Colonel Riggs?” Marvin asked. “As you can see, I’ve reset one of the devices.”
I could see it now, a new tiny contact lit up on the board. It hardly mattered, however. It would take him hours to turn them all back on. At least as long as it had to turn them all off. He was hovering very close to the ring now. Our ships were descending. They’d entered those turbulent clouds. They already had orders to fire.
“Put up another timer,” I ordered Sarin. “Estimate how long we have until our ships are within range. Subtract five minutes from it for the propagation delay.”
Major Sarin worked the screen with her fingers. A timer swam up with light blue digits displaying twenty- two minutes. That was how long Marvin had to convince me I should let him live.
I tilted my head up and reviewed the worried faces. Everyone was staring at me. “I want to hear opinions. You each have ten seconds to give them.”
“You know what I think,” Crow said. “No choice. No choice at all. Talk him into standing still long enough for us to blast him.”
I shifted my eyes to Major Barrera.
“The Admiral is correct, sir,” he said. “The risk is too high. I have to vote with him.”
I turned to Major Sarin next.
She sighed, shaking her head. “I’ll miss Marvin, but I can’t see any other path. We can’t trust him. The stakes are too high.”
My eyes lingered on her face. Of all of them, her opinion meant the most to me. She’d worked with Marvin, and she wasn’t quick to pull a trigger on anyone.
Something caught my eye then, out the window. It was Sandra, still outside clinging to the ledge. I reflected that she never seemed to get cold or hot anymore. She rarely reported discomfort of any kind. Crouching on ledges out in the elements seemed to agree with her, in fact. When she saw that she’d caught my eye, she gave me a thumbs-down gesture. I nodded, accepting her vote along with the others.
I rubbed my face with my palm for a moment, thinking hard. Finally, I keyed open the channel and spoke to Marvin.
“All right Marvin,” I said. “Here’s what I want you do to, if you want to live another hour. Fly through to the other side. Tell the Macros you’ve cleared all the mines you can. Tell them they can come through the ring safely, right now. After that, I would run away and hide, if I were you.”
I tapped the send box on the screen. All the officers standing around me stared in disbelief.
“You tremendous bastard,” Crow said, breathing hard. “You’re going to trust him? On the basis of some kind of Yankee intuition? Do you realize you may have just killed us all?”
I avoided their gazes and stared down at the screen, nodding.
“Possibly,” I admitted.
Long minutes went by. Another tiny contact went gold on the screen during that span. Marvin had dutifully used the time to activate another mine. At least this one was close to the ring and might actually do some good.
Suddenly, we saw Marvin moving toward the ring. Almost simultaneously, his last message returned to us.
“Command accepted,” the message said.
A moment later, Marvin’s golden oval was gone. He’d vanished on his way to another star system.
— 7
If I’d found the waiting tough before, now it was excruciating. Crow spent the next half-hour pacing and cursing at me. I didn’t argue with him. Quite possibly, he was right. Finally, however, I’d had enough. I’d expected Marvin to pop back out of the ring by now, or a Macro to show its nose. Neither had happened. That wasn’t good from our point of view. I decided to attempt to explain my reasoning to the others.
“Look,” I said. “If the Macros come through now, they will find a small minefield at the ring, but when they come up out of the atmosphere, they will hit lot more of them. Our orbital field is still in place and we put it right where they gathered the last time they brought their fleet through.”
“Okay,” Crow said, furious. “I’ll give you that. We’ll destroy a ship or two.”
“More than that. We’ve run simulations. Barrera, have you run new numbers given our current distribution and past Macro performance?”
“These are only estimates,” Barrera said, “But they should lose fifty ships, more or less.”
Fifty ships. I knew that wasn’t enough. Unfortunately, Crow knew it too.
“That’s a joke, that is,” he said. “Right-well, right. At least we know what to put on our planet’s tombstone. I can see it now: We invited the Macros in, and managed to kill nearly ten percent of their battle fleet. Please urinate on our fool graves, it makes the grass grow. ”
I ignored Crow. “Major Barrera, let’s factor in their knowledge of the minefield at the ring. If they decided to come in hot, how could they do it?”
“Their probable approach would be a barrage of nuclear missiles fired through ring to clear the mines.”
“If they are ready to come through now, why haven’t they done so already?”
“Do you want speculation, sir?”
“Yes.”
“They must want to achieve some level of surprise. Perhaps they thought they could slip in and gather their strength behind Venus as they did last time. We made no move against them on that occasion because we had no fleet strength.”
“I agree,” I said. “They were trying to sneak in. But they were going to come in any case.”
“You still haven’t given me a good reason to invite them in now,” Crow complained.
“These machines- especially these machines-are quite capable of learning. But they tend to be predictable. If something works for them once, they like to repeat the same move until thoroughly convinced it is no longer working.”
I cited cases for them, such as the sequential suicidal approach of invasion ships when we’d first met the Macros. They’d lost several before changing tactics to a larger force. Then there was the lining up of ships when entering the Worm system. They’d allowed two thirds of their task force to be destroyed in that instance before achieving bombardment superiority and suppressing the Worm counter fire. The list went on. They were more than willing to allow a large portion of their forces to be destroyed, once committed to an action. But they would then weigh the results afterward and alter their tactics deliberately.
I thought the crucial difference in their behavioral patterns was an absence of factors such as morale. This
