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The Centaurs were talking again, so I took up my headset and pressed it to my ear.

“We gift you our wisdom. We gift you the knowledge of our people and all those we have come into contact with.”

I madly waved for my staff to get onto recording this incoming data. It was raining gold, and I wanted everyone to grab a bucket and fill it now.

“Allied herds,” I said, feeling a bit sour as I spoke the words. I didn’t like how quickly I’d learned to manipulate these honest beings. I had a feeling they had no salesmen or con artists in their society. “We are honored by your gift. We will send you what we can in return.”

After I’d sent the message, I turned to Welter, Sarin and Gorski, who had just joined us on the bridge. He looked worn out. “I want you to upload one of our brainboxes to them.”

They stared at me for a second, then Sarin and Gorski got to work on it. Welter looked unhappy. “Is that wise, sir?”

“They are our allies,” I said. “They are giving us everything they have.”

“Yes, it would appear so,” Welter said, massaging his chin. “But that doesn’t mean it is in our best interest to hand over information to an alien we’ve only just come into contact with.”

“I’ve met them before. I fought with them years ago in the Nano ships.”

“Yes, of course,” Welter said as if my words were meaningless. Perhaps to him they were.

 Sarin and Gorski had the files up and on the screen. Gorski worked with both hands, tapping on the file. Options came up, and he tapped in the frequency and correct port to transmit through. “Are you ready, sir?”

“Is the Centaur transmission still incoming?” I asked.

“Gigabytes per second, sir. And it shows no sign of letting up.”

I licked my lips hungrily. Such valuable intel…I felt almost greedy thinking of it. What treasures would we find in those files? I bet it would keep General Kerr and his Pentagon analysts busy for years to come if we could get it home.

“Colonel, if I might lodge an objection?” Major Welter asked.

“Talk to me—quickly.”

“They will know the precise location of Earth. They will know all about us. What if these beings give this information to another race? What if they hand all that over to the next alien that wanders by?”

I stared at him, thinking hard. He had a point. They were rather gullible. Still, I had to wonder if they would keep transmitting if we didn’t reciprocate. I wanted their data, even at risk of my own. I wondered what course I was setting myself and all humanity upon. I shrugged slightly; there was no way of knowing.

“Send it to them,” I ordered. “We said we would exchange data. They started transmitting first. If we can’t trust the first friendly race we meet, who are we going to trust?”

Gorski tapped the send option on the screen. The file began loading up. A green bar appeared and grew fractionally larger as seconds ticked by.

“We don’t know what they’ll do with it!” Major Welter insisted. He was leaning over the big screen now. His eyes were on the progress bar. He looked as if he wanted to smash it with his fist. “Couldn’t we edit it down first?”

“We don’t have time for that,” I said. “Listen, I understand your concerns. But we’ve got to start trusting someone, Major. We can’t go it alone out here. Big gains take big risks.”

Major Welter looked at me and smiled a sickly smile. “You’re nothing if not a risk-taker, Riggs.”

I snorted, taking the comment as a compliment. I wasn’t sure it was meant that way.

I keyed a new transmission to our Centaur friends: “I would ask as we depart if you have ever made contact with the Blues…by that I mean the people who created the Nanos.”

Another long delay. “They have no sky and no eyes with which to see it. They are a strange herd and a sad people. Some among them lack honor. There is much information about the people you speak of in the transmissions we have sent.”

These comments got me to thinking. I turned to Major Sarin. “Dial up the map of this system, please.”

She did it with deft taps. The interface was the same as the one we’d had in the command brick, fortunately. The screen was only about half the size, however. If I’d had time, I would have ordered the factories to make me a bigger one. The one thing I didn’t have, however, was spare time.

I looked at the system. The yellow star still sat in the center, burning with unusual stability. The hot planets hugged the star’s waist. Farther out was the band of six lovely, inhabitable worlds. Farther out was the lone gas giant and at the border of the system were the far-flung ice-balls.

My eyes ran to the gas giant. I’d always suspected the Blues came from a world like that one. Hydrogen-helium worlds like this were a fairly common variety of planet, I knew. This system was unusual for having only one of them.

“How long until we hit the ring?” I asked.

“Not long now, sir,” Sarin said.

“Fellow herds,” I said, “we of the human herds ask you for a clarification. You said the creators of the Macros have no eyes and no sky. We think they are from a world unlike yours and mine, a world of frozen hydrogen and helium. A world where there is no ground for the feet to rest upon. A world where it is forever dark with clouds. Are we right? Where is this planet? And did they create some of these machine beings?”

The answer came back after an agonizing period. “The people you speak of created all the machines. Their world bathes in the light of a pleasant star. The machines once served them, but that which once made them proud, they now avoid in mortal dread. They are our herd-brothers, as you have become.”

I listened to the flowery words, then had Major Sarin replay them twice. I thought hard, staring at the star map. We were close to the ring now. I thought I might have time for one more question.

“Their world bathes in the light of a pleasant star? You mean the Blues live in
this
star system, on the one gas giant world?”

The message took longer than ever to come back, as the distance had grown even greater. I realized I shouldn’t have used my colloquial term, the Blues. That might confuse them. If they had to have a consultation about how to answer my question, it would take too long. But it was pointless to reword the question now. By the time they got my new message and answered it, we would have flown through the ring.

Finally, at long last, the answer came in. They must have known that it would barely make it. They knew they didn’t have time to make a speech or a squeeze in a dozen extraneous references to herds, the sky, honor, or anything else.

“Yes,” they said.

The answer was simple, direct and staggering. I’d finally found the Blues.

-22-

I thought deeply about the fact that I’d been in the presence of the Blues all this time without knowing it, without trying to contact them or get a slice of revenge. What I would have liked most was information. If they would have engaged in a conversation, which I doubted, they might have been able to tell us how to switch off their crazy machines, big and small. Their technology must be amazing, too. If they had created these rings, or these factories we depended on, they were technologically far ahead of the other species we’d come into contact with thus far.

The Blues,
right here!
I could scarcely believe it.

We shot through the ring at an incredible velocity. I didn’t have a lot of time after that to ponder the Blues or the Centaurs. As we exited the system, I made myself a mental note to name it
Eden
. Those six unbelievably gorgeous worlds, each exploding with life, wouldn’t be served by any other name. I found the name Eden pleasing to the ear and the mind in any case—it just sounded right. I was sure some astronomer had already christened the star with a boring name, like HR 6998, which was Gorski’s best guess as to which one it was. Sarin disagreed with him after studying the same data, pointing out the star’s metallic content was higher than HR 6998 was reported to be from the point of view of Earth—which immediately got her into a nerdy argument with Gorski. To me, it was all moot. Eden could be in another galaxy for all it mattered. The rings changed everything strategically. All that mattered was that with a ring in the system, it was linked to Earth. It didn’t matter whether it was 42 lightyears away as HR 6998 was supposed to be, or not. Effectively, it was three ring-hops from Earth, which made the systems close neighbors.

 “Sir?” Major Sarin asked. I had the impression she’d tried to get through to me several times.

It wasn’t her words that got through to me in the end. It was the screen, which swam and refocused, showing the giant red sun and Helios, the arid planet of the Worms.

I looked up slowly to Sarin. “Did we get all of it?” I asked.

“What sir?”

“The transmission from the Centaurs.”

She shook her head. “No sir,” she said. “Not all of it. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. That and the fact that we’re moving too fast.”

I stared at the star system. We had been accelerating at maximum for hours. Apparently, the Worms hadn’t had time to set up more defenses, because we didn’t get blown away immediately.

My mind came back together then. I had a plan, and I had to get it going
now
.

“Emergency braking!” I shouted. “All hands strap in, secure the cargo. We’ve got to slow down.”

Sarin relayed the instructions, and even with inertial dampeners, I could feel the cruiser deck shift underneath me. I hoped no one was too injured among the poor marines who were in the bricks on the cruiser’s hull. I vaguely thought I was going to have to try to get the bricks inside the cruiser the moment we got a breather, even if I had to burn a hole in the hull to do it. But we hadn’t been given a break yet.

I slapped Gorski’s chest. “You wanted to know what the nanites I had you make were for?” I asked. “Now’s the time.”

I set off at a bouncing jog through the ship. Gorski was right behind me.

“You put the barrels of fresh constructive nanites near the breach like I told you, right?”

“Absolutely, sir.”

I called over my com-link to Kwon. I ordered him to get a squad of marines to the breach. We would be working at the limits of the inertial fields, so we wouldn’t have to fight the G-forces rippling through the decelerating ship.

The area under the breach had become something of a staging area for operations. Much of our equipment was there, as the wound in the ship formed a large open area that was close to the bricks above. We’d stockpiled equipment there and battened it down with skinny black arms made of nanites. Part of that stockpile was a large number of items that looked like old-fashioned caltrops.

Using a brainbox to communicate with the newly-hatched constructives, I had them form up into chains and then shape themselves into fresh, wobbly arms. They flowed out of the barrels in a river that resembled a living spill of mercury.

“Get up there, that’s right. One arm about every yard or so. The last arm, just over the engines—that one has to be bigger, stronger.” The nanites worked with astounding speed.

The marines Kwon had brought with him jogged into sight and I shouted orders at them next. “Get the boxes out. Break out every one of those weird spiky things. That’s right. But whatever you do,
don’t
switch them on, dammit!”

I gave more instructions to the arms, and soon I had the chain formed. It ran from our breach all the way back to the aft edge of the hull. It was a bucket-brigade of skinny black arms.

“Give me one of those,” I barked. A marine handed me a mine—because that’s what they were, magnetic mines. I didn’t switch it on, but I handed it to the nearest nanite arm. The arm was a baby, and it trembled a bit when I put the weighty object into its three-fingered, tripod-like hand.

“All right,” I said, talking to the brainbox that instructed the new arms. “Now, what we need you to do is hand this thing back, all the way to the end of the ship, all the way to the last, big arm.”

The nanite arm snatched the mine from me and handed it up to the next arm. In less than a second, it was whisked away and out of sight.

“Ah, good,” I said, trying not to appear startled. I hadn’t intended it to take
immediate
action, but I didn’t want the watching marines to realize I’d screwed up. “Now, the last arm will throw that mine directly behind the ship.”

“Done,” responded the brainbox without hesitation.

I grunted. I hadn’t activated the mine yet. “I’m going to give you another one. When I do, the last big arm will activate it before it throws it. You will not throw it in such a way that it touches the hull of this ship. You will throw each mine at a random trajectory, forming a cone of dispersal, no more than thirty degrees in breadth. You will not allow the spines to touch metal, especially after you activate it. If you do so, the mission will be a failure. Do you understand the program?”

“Ready.”

I had to admit, I was sweating. I reached for another mine, and I handed it to the tiny arm. It grabbed it with wrenching force and whisked it away and out of the breach, handing it up to its brothers in a blur of motion. I could only hope the last arm wasn’t a screw-up. Everything depended on that one, because it would handle the mine when it went live.