by B. V. Larson
“You brought them out here. I figured you would take more of an interest in their survival.”
“I am, sir,” she said. She stepped closer, and whispered her next words. I smelled her faint perfume, and enjoyed it. “Kyle,” she said, “if we don’t win this fight, they’re all dead anyway.”
I frowned. “Not if Crow wins. The worst they could expect would be transport back to Earth in chains.”
She shook her head. “No. You saw Decker. It won’t be any different when the next commander comes. They’re rebels. Earth never wants to hear from them again.”
I had a hard time believing life had become so cheap back on my homeworld. I guess that when you have billions, a few thousand seems less important. Out here, where humans were rare, I placed a very high value on every one of these people.
“Okay,” I said, “but even if they do come and break us and capture this system, some will survive if we spread them out on the planets. There’s nowhere else to run after this, Jasmine. They can’t go to the next system, they’ll be killed there as well.”
Finally, she agreed with me. She’d been so focused on staying in their ships and running, I don’t think she’d realized they’d come to the end of their journey. Live or die, Eden was the end of the line for her refugee train. There simply was nowhere else to go.
Although most of the population was unfit for duty, our ranks had swelled by a few thousand fresh recruits that with proper training and nanotizing, would someday make fine marines. I decided to issue every one of them a kit, with basic training in the use of modern weaponry, and put them down on the three worlds in strategic locations. They were to dig in and form a last-ditch defense of the civilians—should it come down to that. I even left them nanite injections and a steel chair on each planet—a steel chair with plenty of tough straps. I figured “what the hell”. I’d started out with less. If all else failed, maybe they could rebuild upon our ashes.
As this fight was destined to be fought primarily in space, I focused our factory output on mass-producing more gunships. I had a stockpile of them anyway, more ships that I had qualified pilots. Gleaning the fliers from the new recruits quickly changed that, and we were able to loft over a hundred ships within a day or two. It wasn’t enough, but it was better than nothing.
During this time of mad-scrambling and defense-building, I slept little and took pills now and then to keep going. Marvin tried to come to me and whine about his plans now and then, but I didn’t give him a moment of my time. I’d heard enough about his muddy pools on Eden-6. I was sure they’d all dried out by now, or escaped into the oceans, but really, didn’t much care.
It wasn’t until I had a weak moment that Marvin managed to corner me. I’d been training the new pilots hard, and had just witnessed a doubly-fatal crash in space during maneuvers. Two new pilots had slapped their ships together and managed to kill one another. As a testament to the tough, barrel-like design of the ships, the vessels themselves were reparable—after the smeared organic contents had been scraped out.
For some reason, this minor training tragedy struck me the wrong way. Maybe it was the long hours, or a side effect of the pills I’d been taking to keep going. In any case, I retired to my anteroom and poured myself a beer. Soon, I found I’d had several, and I was feeling better, if less effective.
Marvin hit me up again at this precise moment. He played it smart this time, too. He’d waited outside my chamber, no doubt stepping from tentacle to tentacle in his impatience. When he finally peeped a single camera inside, he had another tentacle underneath his camera. Dangling from this low-slung tentacle was a fresh squeeze bottle of beer.
I eyed him and the beer, and I have to admit, it was love at first sight. I could see the bottle was cold. There were traces of vapor coming off it, and the exterior was covered in half-frozen droplets.
“Is that thing going to pop on me if I open it?” I asked.
“No sir. I’ve measured the chemical composition and the temperature precisely. If you open it and take a big drink, it should keep from freezing solid. It will however, form a slush-like material upon contact with the atmosphere.”
I nodded. It was just the way I liked a beer—especially one of these bitter-tasting brews we had out here on the frontier.
“How did you get it to that precise temperature?”
“I pushed it out through the hull into space for several seconds. The hull nanites can be most accommodating when you know how to talk to them.”
I grunted. If there was one thing Marvin knew, it was how to talk to other machines. Knowing I would regret it, I reached out my gloved hand for the offered beverage. Marvin scuttled forward, and somehow his entire hulking body was in my antechamber with me in a moment. I had that slushy beer in my hands by that time, however, and barely cared.
A bouquet of cameras studied me. “Are you enjoying your beverage, Colonel Riggs?”
I was, in fact, enjoying it very much. By the time I lowered the drink to regard him, half the contents were missing. “What do you want?”
“To help Star Force. To defeat all our enemies. To expand the knowledge of science.”
I snorted. “You mean you want to indulge yourself in god-like fantasies. You know what I think, Marvin? I think you enjoy toying with these Microbes so much as a form of revenge. You like the idea of training tiny living beings to jump through hoops, just as we do with the nanites. This is all repressed hostility!”
I barely knew what I was talking about, but none of my tirade seemed to affect Marvin in any case.
“Colonel Riggs,” he said, “I have a proposal. What if I could increase the effective size of your fleet by an order of magnitude within a week?”
“I don’t know if we have a week left.”
“Yes, but suppose we do? Would this not be helpful?”
“Of course it would,” I stared at him, and he stared back, quietly. I knew then that he wasn’t going to say anything else. He had me hooked, and we both knew it.
I took another long drag on his frosty little beer. I took a deep breath, and sighed. “Okay,” I said, “what do you have for me? I warn you Marvin, this better not be bullshit.”
“There is no bovine excrement involved, sir,” he said seriously. “What I propose is to transform the Centaur volunteers under your command into effective space fighters. With proper training and a modified kit, Centaur troops could fill a great volume of space and do a great deal of damage to incoming enemy ships.”
I laughed aloud then. “You’re crazy. I always knew it, and here you come along with fresh proof.”
“Could you clarify that statement, sir?”
I lifted a nanocloth-gloved hand and began ticking off the flaws in his plan. “First of all, the damned mountain goats don’t like space. They don’t like ships, and they don’t like flying. They won’t even submit to being nanotized.”
“Excellent points, sir. But what if I could change a portion of their psychology?”
I blinked at him. My glove was still up, ready to tick off my next point. I frowned. “What? How?”
“By the application of a new organic agent I’ve been working on.”
“You’ve got something from the Microbes that will change their brains?”
“Exactly.”
“Is that even possible?”
“You’ve changed the brains of countless brainboxes personally. Reprogramming and rewiring structural synapses is not as easy in an organic subject, but it is not any more difficult than, for example, rebuilding a human foot using hamburger as a base material.”
I peered at him thoughtfully. I was beginning to believe he was serious. Could it really be possible to erase an instinctual fear from the mind of a living being? I supposed that if you knew exactly where to look, and what synapse to destroy, and you had an impossibly tiny surgeon…
“It’s freaky, but I’ll give you that one,” I said. “Still, I don’t think the Centaurs will go for it. They’ve already refused to unde
rgo nanotization treatments. Why would they agree to this abomination performed upon their very minds?”
“I’ve already asked them. In these delicate situations, I’ve found that careful wording is critical to receptivity in biotic subjects.”
“They said yes?”
“Yes. They agreed to go through the process as I described it. I told them it would make them braver, and thus would confer honor upon any warrior who agreed to undertake the baths. After ruminating for many hours, they volunteered.”
“How many volunteered?”
“As far as I can determine…all of them.”
I sat back, stunned. The whole herd—all of the herds—were willing to undergo microbial treatments to change their mentalities? It was stunning.
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “You’ve got me seriously considering this course of action. I don’t like how you’ve circumvented the command of chain, but I’m going to overlook that.”
“You often give speeches on the topic of personal initiative.”
“Yes, yes,” I said, “okay, I’m going to give you that one. But there are other practical considerations. How will we arm these new space-troops?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Marvin said, “but don’t we have a large surplus of kits outfitted for Centaur ground troops? With rebreather units and nanocloth coverage, they could become vacuum-ready.”
I squinted at him. “What about delivering these troops to the battlefield? We can’t fit them into my gunboats.”
“We have a surplus of empty transport craft at the moment, do we not?”
I nodded and squeezed the last drops out of my beer. Marvin’s cameras zoomed in on my hands, my face—everything. I knew he was trying to determine the verdict from my slightest gesture. I tried hard not to let him know what I was thinking ahead of time. I hoped the suspense was killing him.
“All right,” I said at last. “Set up your baths. Breed your microbes. I don’t know how you will produce enough of them in time, but that’s your problem.”
“That will not be difficult. A tiny injection into the prefrontal cortex is all that’s required. No more than a single milliliter of fluid per subject.”
“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you Marvin?”
“Yes Colonel Riggs, I believe that I have.”
-23-
The following days were a whirlwind of activity. We posted scout ships on the other side of the rings at either end of the Eden system. They had orders to sit just on the other side of the ring, watching for anything unexpected. These border guards were crucial, as they could give us advanced warning of any imminent attack. If anything showed up in the system, they had plenty of time to withdraw and transmit their report back in the Eden system.
So far, my scouts hadn’t seen any enemy activity. It was quiet in space, but the rings were agitated. The increased level of traffic going through the rings was dramatic—and annoying. We could monitor the level and frequency of the traffic, but could not determine what was being said or who was talking. Perhaps saying these transmissions were bothering me was an understatement: They were driving me bananas. I knew that someone was talking to someone else about invading Eden—but I didn’t have any details. We had the option to jam the signals at any time, but we were still trying to figure out what was being said. It was a maddening situation.
I didn’t want to give up the chance to listen in on the chatter by jamming it and thus revealing our knowledge of the technology, but at the same time I didn’t want them to keep communicating freely at our expense. It was a classic strategic dilemma, one I’d studied in books long ago in what now seemed like my distant past. Should a commander sacrifice a current tactical advantage in order to gain a future, potentially greater advantage? There was no perfect answer, and whatever the leader did, he was bound to feel stressed in the present.
Back in the Mideast wars, I’d been a reserve officer, and I’d done my tour. I’d read up on military strategy, as only seemed logical for any officer in a war zone. One legendary case I remembered vividly had once befallen Winston Churchill. In charge of defending England against Germany in a vicious air campaign, he’d been breaking the enemy codes for some time. After the war, members of the code-breaking group claimed they’d warned him of an attack against the city of Coventry, but in order to keep Germany from being tipped-off about the broken code, Churchill had not ordered the English defenses to center on the doomed city.
If Churchill really had made that fateful decision so long ago, I felt for him now, many long years later. Every day I delayed and didn’t order the jamming of the rings, I felt a drumbeat in my head. I had no real idea what the final outcome of this delay would be. Although Marvin and a dozen others tried to break the code, we hadn’t managed to do it yet, raising the grim possibility that I was letting my enemies converse without anything to show for it.
On the sixth day after Captain Sarin and her flotilla of refugees had joined us, I called a meeting of my senior staff to discuss our next move. I was no longer willing to let it all ride and hope for the best. I felt an overwhelming urge to do something.
“I suspect the weak link in our code-breaking department is Marvin himself,” Miklos said. “He is also probably the only one who can achieve success.”
“Explain,” I said, making an impatient gesture. Miklos had a way of talking around things, and today I wanted direct answers.
“Well sir,” he began, “the problem is simple enough: he’s distracted with his primordial soup and the Centaurs he’s been injecting with the vile stuff. Most of his test subjects have died by the way, Colonel.”
“I’m well aware of that. Are you suggesting I call off his experiments? Is the code-breaking more important than the addition of thousands of space-borne infantry to our defenses?”
Miklos shrugged. “They are both hypotheticals. I’d rather deal in realities.”
I glowered and reached for a cup of coffee.
“Sir,” said Kwon, hunkering forward over the table. “I say we let the robot work on the Centaurs, not the codes. What good is the code? We know they are coming at us from both ends of the system. Who cares about the details? To win the battle, we need more troops. If the robot makes thousands of fighters, nothing else matters.”
I nodded, appreciating Kwon’s point of view. “Down to Earth advice as usual, Kwon,” I said. “But you’re correct as well, Miklos. We are dealing in hypotheticals. I recall, however, that the atomic bomb was once a crazy theory. So were jet aircraft and radar towers. The outcome of a major war is often affected by technological developments, and this one is no different.”
Miklos looked tired, and somewhat annoyed. “So, what are we to do about it? What are your orders, sir?”
“I’ve been thinking, and I believe it’s time to look outside the box for answers. I’ve come up with a plan that may greatly enhance our odds of survival in this coming conflict.”
They all looked at me expectantly. Sandra was the only one that looked worried, the rest appeared merely curious. I guess that’s because she knew me the best.
“I’m going to meet with the Blues again,” I said. “I think it’s pretty clear they’re somehow involved in all these transmissions. If I go to their world and talk to them about their position in this conflict, I might be able to convince them to stop helping the Macros and whoever else they’re talking to.”
“Are you going to convince them with a few nukes, sir?” Kwon asked excitedly. “Nukes can be very convincing!”
I laughed. “I was hoping a more diplomatic approach would work.”
Kwon frowned, sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. If it didn’t involve blowing things up, it was all a waste of time to him.
“Okay,” I said, looking around at the doubtful faces, “maybe it won’t work. But that isn’t the only purpose for going there. If I confront them and let drop certain pieces of data, they’re likely to report it via the rings. This will give us two important advantages:
First of all, if traffic spikes, we know the Blues are likely behind it. Remember, we can’t detect the transmissions except at the rings themselves, so we can’t be sure who’s sending the messages. The transmissions could be coming from the Centaurs, for all we know. But I think it’s safe to assume the Blues are doing it.”
Sandra leaned forward. I could tell right away she wasn’t keen on my idea. “Is this scheme more important than the life of our top commander?”
“The Blues didn’t harm me the last time I went down there. I think I’ll be all right. Besides, I’m the only person in Star Force that’s been altered to take the pressure on their world.”
“Okay, let’s say I buy that—which I don’t. What’s the second thing we can gain from this adventure, Kyle?”
“The second thing is a seed I plan to plant. I’ll tell them something specific, giving us a marker. Then, when they retransmit it, we’ll be able to look at the message with foreknowledge concerning the contents. In order to break any code, it helps a great deal to know what at least part of the message says.”
Several heads were nodding, but not Sandra’s. After the meeting broke up, she followed me into the corridor and grabbed my arm. I was too strong for her now, and broke free easily. She followed me toward my quarters, pouting.
“I don’t want you to go down into that soup again,” she said. “That planet almost killed you the last time. Now, the Blues are open enemies. They might decide to finish you off if their world doesn’t do it for them.”
“I don’t think they operate that way,” I said, removing my nanocloth crewman’s suit and beginning to assemble my armor.
She watched me with growing alarm on her face. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m suiting up,” I said, “I’ve got a destroyer waiting at the aft dock. Don’t worry, I’ll be back before you know it.”
Sandra kicked me then, aiming for a sensitive region. Fortunately, I had my under-armor on and I was ready for the move. I grabbed her ankle and felt the shock run up my arm. A normal man would have broken the bones in his hand—if he could have moved fast enough to catch that flashing foot in the first place. In my case, I only grunted.
