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“Done.”

We waited for thirty seconds, then thirty more. Gorski licked his lips and tapped madly at his tablet. I could tell he was sweating it. “I should prepare my missiles tubes, just in case,” he said.

“Good idea,” I said. “Open them now, Captain.”

“But wouldn’t that be interpreted—”

“Yes,” I said, “exactly. It will be interpreted as a threat. If we are going to do what they want, they have to reciprocate. Otherwise, this isn’t an alliance.”

“Opening the missile ports, sir,” Gorski said unhappily.

“Repeat our message three more times, Marvin.”

“Done.”

Another span of time went by. No one talked, but the tension was thick in the room. “Order everyone to put on their battle suits,” I said quietly.

Everyone jumped into action. It was as if they had been waiting for this order—and they probably had. I was already wearing mine, but most of the bridge crew was not. They were cumbersome, especially when tapping at fragile screens. More than one of us had cracked a tablet screen with an exoskeletal, enhanced-strength fingertip.

“Incoming message: the red sun,” Marvin said.

“What’s the meaning?” I asked.

“It is generally a positive symbol of agreement or good fortune,” Marvin said.

“They are slowing down, sir,” Gorski said.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. “Send them hunter-machine-destroy again,” I said. “Gorski, close the missile ports. Welter, get us the hell out of here!”

The ship rocked with applied power before I’d finished my sentence. People cursed all around me, caught by surprise with their battle suits half on. They swayed and reached for balance. A few of them had to pick themselves up, including Major Sarin. I moved to help her up, but caught Sandra’s stern eye. I stopped and turned back to the control boards, pretending I hadn’t noticed Jasmine as she fell over and then picked herself up.

Within a few minutes we were through the ring and flying across the Alpha Centauri system bound for home.

-46-

We took our time crossing the Alpha Centauri system. For the first time in a long while, we had the chance to survey a planetary system without any enemy ships poised to strike. I was still anxious to get home, but I didn’t want to squander this opportunity. I had the factory bricks build passive sensory satellites and we dropped them off behind us. I dropped them off in orbits all around the system. The last time a fleet had come to Earth, they’d done it through the other ring, the one on Venus that led to the blue giant system. But for all I knew, they had another large fleet past Eden. After learning of what we’d done, we had to expect a major reprisal. It was only a matter of time.

I thought about planting a minefield of our own at the ring between Helios and Alpha Centauri, but decided against it. We’d just made our first steps toward understanding with the Worms. All the biotic species had to work together, in my estimation, to defeat the Macros. How would it look if we blew up a few of their ships when they got around to nosing their way into this neutral system?

On a relatively peaceful mission, we cruised across the vast tri-star system and catalogued what we found there. The two G-class yellow suns known as Alpha and Beta Centauri were both lovely stars. Alone somewhere else in space, either of these twins could probably have grown a nice family of planets, maybe even worlds with life. But because there were two large stars, plus the smaller red dwarf Proxima Centauri, no large chunk of real estate had survived. There were swirls of dust and plenty of asteroids floating around, but nothing that could support an atmosphere, much less life.

The star system was effectively a desert, but deserts still had their strategic uses. We would militarize it. It would form a buffer between us and the Worms. I was glad, in a way, to have the system between us and Helios. It represented more travel time between our world and alien strongholds. I realized now that having the rings in the Solar System placed at a fair distance from Earth was helpful. If we had a ring sitting in orbit over our world, we would be much less likely to survive. Aliens could pop in at any moment to ravage our world without warning. This way we could hold this territory and fight over Alpha Centauri, rather than war close to home where billions might die.

I shook my head and sighed. Sandra murmured beside me, asleep. She had a clutching hand on my bare chest. Whenever I tried to move away, her arm tightened, and I knew I would have to wake her up to escape. It was slightly irritating, but overall it felt good to have her back.

We now slept together regularly in the closet full of tubes. When we weren’t here, Sandra stalked Marvin on his forays around the ship while I served on the bridge. There wasn’t much for a communications officer to do while we crossed a quiet system alone.

Sandra was different now. She wasn’t the same girl I’d met years ago on the Alamo. Whatever the microbes had done to her had affected her mind somewhat as well as her body. She was more prone to violence and paranoia. Her natural emotional swings could turn deadly. I loved her for all of that, but I had to watch what I did around her more closely than before. I knew, when I returned to Earth, she would become my bodyguard, replacing Kwon. I smiled, thinking of the kind of surprises she would provide any potential assassin.

My mind drifted back to thoughts of strategic defense points. There were two entries into the Solar System that we knew of. One was the Oort cloud ring that connected with Alpha Centauri. The second was the ring on Venus, which led to a system with a blue giant star. A system which crawled with Macro mining machines. Both would have to be guarded from now on. We needed ships, and we needed a lot of them.

I reflected that my plans had now moved forward in unexpected new directions. I was planning at an entirely new level now. I was thinking beyond survival, a nice change of pace. I wasn’t thinking in the direction of buying peace with tribute, either. My thoughts had turned toward lofty concepts of territory and militarily defensible positions. If nothing else, this expedition had provided me with the knowledge I needed to make such plans. There was only one critical element missing: we didn’t know the strength or position of the enemy fleets. That’s what made the whole thing scary.

“What are you thinking so hard about?” Sandra asked, awakening. Her head still rested on my shoulder.

I looked down at her lovely face. She stared back with dark, serious eyes. Her lips were parted, and her teeth were fine and white. One of the front teeth had a chip in it. I wondered vaguely when that had happened. Apparently, neither the Nanos nor the microbes did dental work.

“I’ve been wondering how I ever captured such a fine woman,” I lied. I ran my eyes over her shapely form, indulging myself.

Her tongue pressed against her teeth as she smiled, enjoying my scrutiny. She soon changed her mind, however. She picked at my bare skin with her fingers, suddenly grabbing up a pinch of flesh and twisting.

“Tell me the truth,” she said.

I slapped her hand away. “I really don’t know how I did it. You are way too pretty for me.”

“You got me killed twice,” she said, “then took credit for bringing me back to life. You’re my hero.”

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.”

-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.