this? We’ll leave a small ship behind at the ring. Their job will be to dash back and forth through it, every few hours. They can relay messages and scan both systems. If we do that at every ring we pass through, it won’t cost us many ships, and will put us within a few days transmission time from several systems away.”
He nodded appreciatively. “A pony express system?”
“Something like that,” I said, smiling.
“They said you were inventive.”
“They told me you were a hard-ass.”
We both laughed and turned our attention back to the screen. We had just about reached the ring. The time came and passed when the enemy missiles should have showered through, trying to hit us in the face. I had just begun to smile, figuring I had Miklos on this one, when a mass of contacts did appear.
“Evasive action, sir?” the helmsman asked, his voice cracking.
“How many are there?”
“Sixteen, sir.”
“Decelerate! Shoot them down!”
My hundred-odd ships all began firing at once. This time, we were playing the part of the Macro vanguard, leading the way at the head of a column of ships into the unknown. Beams slashed out from hundreds of projectors. The missiles popped one after another, but two got through. There were no direct hits, but the explosions buffeted our destroyer when they went off nearby. I could see by the boards we’d lost at least one small ship-and then everything on the screens vanished and reset.
“We’re going through the ring, sir!”
“I feel it.”
I hadn’t even had time to assess fleet damage. We’d have to figure that out on the far side of the ring. As always it sent a thrill through my body like an electric shock to know I was traveling across lightyears of space in an instant. When we came out on the other side of the ring, however, we got the biggest surprise of the voyage.
“Enemy ships sir!” the helmsman all but screamed.
I scanned the screens in irritation. Of course there were enemy ships. What did the young officer think we had been chasing?
But then I saw the panels shift and shimmer. The new system leapt into life. The three stars were there, Alpha, Beta and the distant, dim red dwarf known as Proxima Centauri. None of this was surprising. What did shock me were the number of enemy ships that quickly populated the scene. There were somewhere around two hundred of them, plus clouds of what could only be debris-fragments of destroyed spacecraft.
“What the hell?” I asked no one. My mind leapt to a dozen conclusions, none of them good.
“The Macros must have known they had supporters out here,” Captain Miklos said. “They weren’t running from us, they were luring us into a trap.”
“Trap?” I asked. “There are a lot of blown-up ships here.”
“Maybe our mines took some of them out as they passed through.”
None of it made sense to me. Things looked bad, but I refused to panic.
“Are we under fire?”
“No sir, no reports of incoming fire. Our ships have locked on the nearest alien vessels-they are quite small, sir.”
“Hold your fire,” I ordered the gunner. “Relay that, helmsman.”
“But sir-”
“Show me the configuration of the new ships,” I demanded. “What are we facing?”
“They are considerably smaller than any Macro ships we’ve ever encountered.”
“Put one up on the damned screen,” I told him. “Give me a close-up.”
The new enemy ships finally came into sight. There was a large wing of them moving after the Macro Cruisers. They looked vaguely like the old NASA shuttlecrafts to me, but a bit larger. They had stubby wings and a pointed snout. They were clearly designed for atmospheric travel as well as voyaging in space.
I squinted at the vessels. The lines were unmistakable.
“That’s a Worm ship!” I shouted. I whooped for joy, and the crew looked at me as if I were mad. “Show me more, what are they doing?”
Data poured in and the reports were good. All good. The Worms had nearly two hundred vessels. They were all small, but they were pursuing the fleeing Macro cruisers and firing on them. I shook my head in amazement. They’d been busy. I had to admit, of all the people’s I’d met in space so far, these creatures impressed me the most. They’d never even considered surrender or peace agreements. They simply fought the Macros and they’d died in their millions, but the moment they’d been given a breather they were back at it, putting up an offensive fleet rather than focusing purely on defense and rebuilding their lost cities. If anything, they were even tougher than we were.
Fortunately, I had had the foresight to transfer translation neural patterns from Marvin for all known species into every brainbox in the fleet. Our ships could talk to these aliens. But I knew from experience such translations were not that simple. The symbolic pictographs of the Worms and the idiomatic poetry of the Centaurs were challenging mediums, even after you had established a means of communication.
The Worms were particularly challenging to communicate with. They used images to communicate remotely and sculptures to communicate in person. They were tactile, rather than audio or optical in their conversations. When using radio communications, they’d fortunately developed a simplified set of pictographic symbols to express ideas. They weren’t words, exactly, but rather images that conveyed concepts. When combined together, they communicated meaning. It was rather like having a pen pal who only understood Egyptian hieroglyphs.
“Barbarossa,” I said, addressing the ship directly. “I need to open up a channel to the Worm ships.”
“Clarification required: Worm ship. Please define.”
“Scan the nearby vessels. Many of the smaller ships are not Star Force ships, nor do they meet the definition known as Macro cruisers. These ships are known to us as Worm ships.”
“Definition complete. Associations established.”
“Good,” I said pausing for a moment to think. “We need to transmit something to them. Access your data on translations of English into Worm pictographs.”
“A one-to-one translation of human speech into Worm pictographs is not possible. It is suggested-”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, interrupting in annoyance. “Believe me, I know all about it. I need the pictograph for hunting together-some kind of fat, sliced-grub thing. Send that along with the images for machine and destruction.”
Captain Miklos looked at me with a bloodless face. We were in the domain of new aliens, and I sensed this crew felt out of their depth. Well, that was just too bad. You had to pick things up quickly in space-either that, or you died.
“Symbol group selected,” Barbarossa said. “Transmitting.”
“Let me know when you get a response from them.”
There were perhaps thirty long seconds to wait. During that time, much of my fleet had flown through the ring after me. They came in two or three abreast and advanced quickly after us. We were not yet in firing range. I squirmed in my chair, and my armor squinked as I did so, the cringe-worthy sound of metal rasping against metal.
“Incoming repeating message from Worm ships: grub, machine, destruction.”
“Good,” I said in relief. “Accelerate to full speed, helmsman. Relay to the fleet, we are going to chase down those Macros and engage them. No one is to fire upon a Worm ship without authorization. Maybe with luck, we can catch some or all of the Macros before they reach the far side of this system.”
I wanted to get into the fight, but it was going to take some time. We’d slowed down before plunging through the ring, and that delay had cost us a lot of momentum. Even with our faster ships, we’d have to accelerate hard for days to catch up and join the running battle.
Captain Miklos leaned toward me and eyed my screen. “What the heck do those symbols mean, Colonel?”
“The grub means hunting, a team interaction. The machine symbol clearly refers to the Macros. Destruction indicates we are going to destroy the machines. The Worms communicate differently than we do. Did you attend
