by B. V. Larson
I cleared my throat. “The good news you’ve already seen. Screen please.”
Behind me, a massive display lit up. It was a hundred meters high and just as wide. A prepared vid began to play with the sound muted. It looked like some kind of action movie. There were explosions and red contacts crawling across the screen. I was there at the command table shouting orders and presiding over the victory. Snippets of action were all the vids showed, pasted together by the PR people.
The audience buzzed. They were eating it up. I felt bad having to bring up the bad news now.
“The Macros attacked us, and we survived. We destroyed them rather easily, in fact. Unfortunately, their attack isn’t over with yet.”
The audience stilled. It was a shock. It had to be. I could see some of them, and their faces were confused. It was almost as if they weren’t able to process my words properly.
“Next screen,” I said with a heavy heart.
I showed them everything Marvin had shown us. I walked them through it. They stirred, and there were a few gasps, but for the most part they sat there in stunned silence. They saw new details that we’d only just gathered. We knew where the Macros ships were now, the ones hiding in the wake of those twirling chunks of ice.
“Each of these ice chunks is bigger than we’d initially realized,” I explained. “They’re not normal comets. Each is a planetoid, on the order of a small moon: About twenty to fifty miles across, they’re quite dangerous all by themselves.”
The grim drumbeat of facts fell from my mouth and beat down their spirits. I felt like some kind of harbinger of doom. Perhaps that’s exactly what I was.
My staffers had argued with me, naturally. They hadn’t wanted me to do this. They hadn’t wanted the information to get out so soon. They spoke of panic. They spoke of depression.
But I’d told them I wasn’t going to hold back information like this. I wanted people to know what was coming. I wanted them to know the real score. If humanity was about to go out like a candle flickering in the wind, I wasn’t going to be the last public official to tell a big lie to everyone.
“I know this isn’t the news you were hoping for today,” I concluded. “But it is what it is. All we can do is defeat the machines. We have some time, as they won’t be here for months. We’ll prepare. We’ll build up. We’ll win.”
I could tell that wasn’t enough. They weren’t cheering. They were hardly speaking.
“I know that every man, woman and child on this green Earth wants to keep breathing. In order to do so, we’re going to have to work as we’ve never worked before. I have a dozen proposals here with me today. I’d like you to pull the documents up on your screens, and we’ll discuss them. The budgets are huge, and the state may well go bankrupt, but I’m asking for your approval anyway. If we live, we’ll figure out how to pay for it all later.”
They’d heard that one before. We all had. But there it was. We were in emergency-mode now. All our means of production had to be converted to the war effort.
“I want you to know that I’m certain we’ll win this fight. I’ve almost never lost, have I? Have confidence, give me your best, and we’ll win again.”
Now, finally, they were beginning to clap. The applause was scattered, however, and it quickly died.
“We have to become as cold and hard as the machines themselves. They don’t feel tired. They don’t get depressed. What they do is work relentlessly. We have our advantages as well. We’re more flexible than they are. We learn faster and adapt. When fighting their fleet last week, I discovered they had several new technological advances. We know about them now—they won’t surprise us again.”
The applause was a little louder on that line, but it still died fast.
I leaned forward, gripping the lectern and looking into their faces. I didn’t speak for several long seconds.
“You know,” I began slowly. “I’m feeling an urge to break from the script.”
I chuckled, but no one joined me.
“At this very moment, I know there are people backstage looking for a way to hang themselves, but I’m going to do it anyway. All of you people at home deserve that.”
They waited quietly, and I honestly don’t think any of them knew what I was about to say.
“The moment I heard about the Macros out there, spinning their webs in space, I thought of an old Latin proverb: Si vis pacem, para bellum. That means ‘if you want peace, prepare for war.’ Everyone knows the Romans were a feisty bunch, but they predicted the spot we find ourselves in today. We had a brief rest and immediately became lazy.”
There was a muttering at that. They didn’t like it. I raised my hand, and they quieted.
“I know many of you work hard. I know you’ve gone through a lot, as have I. And I know we are war-weary as a people. We just want this to end. You thought we’d achieved peace because the enemy had stopped coming. You dared hope the enemy had vanished into the night just as mysteriously as they’d first come. But that’s not how it’s going to be.”
I made spinning motion with my hand to the stage director, suggesting she back up the vids.
“Play the second one again, please,” I said.
The engineers obliged. Cold dark images of ice chunks were again displayed. They were more detailed than they had been when I’d first seen them in my conference room. After Marvin’s warning, we’d put every telescope and probe we had on that part of the sky. We still couldn’t make out individual ships, but we knew a lot about the comets.
“We have to defeat this threat, but we have to do more than that. We have to go out into space, find every last one of these machines, and destroy it. There can never be peace with them. You can’t deal with a predator. Either it eats you, or you kill it. That’s the case here. And right now, before the heavens and the people of Earth, I swear to do this. I’ll go out there and kill them all—or die trying.”
I don’t know quite what I was thinking about as I said those words, but I meant them. Maybe I was thinking about all the dead we’d lost in this war already. Maybe I was thinking of my unborn child in Jasmine’s womb, who’d never yet had a chance to see the light of day.
Whatever the case, there was real feeling in my statement. I wasn’t bullshitting anymore, and they knew it, because they cheered. They finally, really stood up and cheered for me.
I smiled back tightly, wondering all the while how I was going to deliver on the promise I’d just made.
After a moment, I had the answer: I didn’t really have to deliver. All I had to do was my best. I would head out to the stars and face the dragon. Either I killed it and became the hero again, or it ate me. If I lost, I wouldn’t care about the rest of it. If I won, everything was grand.
I was covered either way. I couldn’t lose.
Thinking that strange thought, I grinned at them and shook my fists over my head with absolute confidence.
The crowd loved it, and they cheered harder than ever.
-19-
After my speech was over and I walked off the stage, I think the only person on the planet who wasn’t smiling, shaking my hand and congratulating me was Jasmine. She looked worried. I knew why, of course, but I pretended not to.
“Hey, honey, how’d you like the speech?” I asked her.
“It was definitely…uplifting.”
“Great! Glad you loved it. Everyone seemed to. You know, I wasn’t even quite sure what I was going to say until I got up there. Ah sure, I had my teleprompter, but I can’t stick to those things. After a while, I got on a roll and went with it. Turns out my instincts were good this time.”
“Kyle,” she said, frowning, “what exactly did you mean when you said—”
“Look,” I said, leaning close and lowering my voice. “It was just a speech. Every politician makes big promises. People expect that! Especially when you’re up on stage delivering bad news. For starters, I gave them something to fear, and when you show people their approaching doom, you have to give them h
ope, too. I showed them terror approaching from the skies, then I offered up the light of salvation a moment later. How could I have done anything else?”
“Yes…but the details concern me. I heard you promise the world that you would fly out there and destroy the Macros personally. Don’t tell me I didn’t hear that.”
I looked her in the eyes and decided to stop trying to bullshit my way past her.
“I’m calling a meeting with my personal staff to discuss this. You’re on the list. Be there in thirty minutes.”
I walked off toward the transport shuttles. I could feel her eyes following me.
I knew what she was thinking, and I knew she wasn’t happy. Like many women who are attracted to brave, dangerous guys, she’d finally landed one. The trouble was, the moment she had me, she wanted to change the very behavior that made her want to mate with me in the first place. She was going to have my child now, and she wanted me to play it safe from here on out.
I understood how she was feeling, but I was going to have to disappoint her. We weren’t living in peaceful times. Not yet, anyway. If the Macros had stayed on their side of the ring for the next half-century, maybe we could have all enjoyed a golden era of peace. But they hadn’t.
At the meeting, everyone was smiling except for Jasmine. She had her arms crossed, and she didn’t look at me.
I let out a tiny sigh then tried to ignore her.
“We have to hit the Macros as soon as possible,” I said, starting off the meeting with a bang.
They blinked and quieted. I’d taken them all by surprise. Even Jasmine was looking at me again, but her arms were still crossed.
“Hit them?” she asked. “But their fleet is so far out. What are we going to hit them with? We’ve been planning a build-up I know, but—”
“No,” I said. “That’s not what I meant. I’m not talking about the fleet they have crawling slowly toward us in normal space. I’m talking about flying out to the Thor System. We have to breach the ring we’ve never managed to breach. Once through, we have to destroy their base, their production facilities—everything. And we have to do this immediately, using only the ships we have now.”
“What?” Jasmine asked. “Why? We only have two months before—”
“No, we don’t,” I interrupted her. “We have two months to build up our defenses here at home. But we have to take our entire fleet out there, fight our way through the ring, destroy everything and return before that time has passed. We’ll need the ships back here in our home system to face the Macros when they reach Earth. The trip out to the ring and back will take nearly a month as it is, plus whatever time it takes to clean out their bases. We fly tonight.”
They fell silent. In this quiet moment, Miklos leaned forward.
“This does not sound like a carefully worked out plan, sir,” he said tactfully.
“It’s a strategic goal, not a plan,” I snapped. “What I need from all of you is help working out the details.”
Marvin was crouching at the far end of the table. He had perked up after my unexpected announcement and the excitement it had generated. He now had two cameras on every face around the table. I knew he was enjoying their reactions in his own weird way.
“Colonel,” Marvin said, addressing me. “I find your plan intriguing. How do you plan to get through the ring without being destroyed?”
“I was going to leave that up to you, Marvin,” I said. “You’re my best technical mind.”
“I accept the challenge.”
I was happy to have one enthusiastic member of the team signing on. I looked around the rest of the faces, but I didn’t see anyone else volunteering their best ideas. Instead, they looked stunned.
“Sir,” said Jasmine, and it sounded to me as if she was having trouble using that word. “I don’t understand the necessity for this proposed action. Could you please explain it to us?”
It was a reasonable request, so I nodded.
“You all remember the Cold War, don’t you? At least what you learned about it in school? Russia and America were toe-to-toe, eying one another for decades. The entire planet was wondering who would blink or throw a punch first. They never did opt for Armageddon, thank God. Unfortunately for us today, the machines have decided to go for it.”
I tapped at the table, and the surface lit up in instant response to my touch. The screen depicted the Sun, the incoming comets and various planets, including Earth.
“Marvin, add in your best estimates for the enemy position and numbers.”
Marvin froze for a fraction of a second, his tentacles and cameras stuttered, then they went back to their usual ceaseless roaming.
Thousands of tiny red dots appeared on the tabletop.There were so many they formed a single glowing mass. The enemy ships followed the comets like shadows.
“This is only an approximation,” he said. “Actual data will be sparse until they come closer.”
“Have you seen any actual ships yet?” Jasmine asked.
“Yes,” he said.
We all looked at him in surprise.
“It happened during your speech—the first sighting. The data has not yet been released to the public. I gleaned it from telemetry returned by the farthest probes.”
“When were you going to tell us this, robot?” asked Gaines, speaking up for the first time.
“When I was called upon to speak during this meeting,” Marvin told him, steering an extra camera his way. “Essentially, this is the exact moment during which I’d planned to disseminate the new information.”
“How many ships have we seen?” Jasmine asked in a weak voice.
“The count rises steadily. We are up to six hundred and ten contacts, but the number increases every few seconds. Using the best of our new optical instruments—interferometers in orbits out past Pluto—we’ve been able to get a fix and focus tightly enough for visual data. Radar has not yet been applied nor any other form of active sensor. We don’t wish to alert them by pinging their ships.”
“No, we don’t,” I said. “Now, what was I talking about?”
“Armageddon,” Marvin said in a perky tone. “I believe that was the last topic brought up.”
“Right,” I said. “Russia and America might have gone after each other and destroyed one another at any time. But they didn’t. Part of the reason why was a concept they called M. A. D.: Mutually Assured Destruction. If one side launched, the other side would return fire, and everyone would lose. This fear of retribution maintained a tense standoff that lasted for many years.”
I had every eye on me now, with the exception of Marvin’s roving cameras.
“In our situation, things have gone differently,” I said. “The Macros have launched the attack that never came in the Cold War: An all-out attempt to destroy our world. But by doing so, they’ve left their own home base undefended.”
“Why do you think they’ve left their base undefended?” Miklos asked.
“Marvin has calculated their industrial output in terms of ships and troops. Adding up what they threw at us out in the Thor System with what we’re seeing heading toward us in normal space now—that’s about all they’ve time to build.”
“But you don’t really know,” said Jasmine with sudden feeling.
“No, we aren’t one hundred percent certain. They could have other star systems, other fleets—hell, they might be fighting other wars out there with other species. But measuring by their past behavior patterns and their standard rate of construction, they seem to have thrown everything into this final knockout punch. We have no choice but to take advantage of that.”
I looked around the group. They were digesting my words and staring at the red mist of enemy ships.
“I agree with you, Colonel,” said Miklos suddenly. “We have to do it. I don’t know if it’s possible, but we have to try. You can’t win a war by sitting in your base defending against attacks forever. Eventually, the enemy is going to get through. The only way to win is to carry the bat
tle to the enemy’s turf and fight on his territory.”
I nodded. “That’s how I see it. Let’s have opinions. What do you think, Marvin?”
“This sounds like a technical challenge. Fortunately, I have the experience and expertise to make the attempt. I’ve already managed to get a probe through the ring into Macro space, and it survived for approximately ninety-five nanoseconds.”
I chuckled. “That long, huh?”
“The data has been verified.”
“We’ll have to do a little better than that if we’re to stay alive long enough to destroy their bases,” Gaines pointed out.
“This conversation sounds insane to me,” said Jasmine with uncharacteristic emotion. “How are we going to get through that ring? We’ve never managed to send anything through that could survive for even a single second.”
I put my hand to my chin and rubbed it. “We could send them a nice care package.”
Gaines perked up. “Something like a really big bomb?”
I nodded.
“I’ll start working on that solution path, Colonel Riggs,” Marvin said excitedly.
“You do that, Marvin.”
The conversation went my way once Miklos had signed on. With Marvin, Miklos and me united, the others folded their cards. They had plenty of objections, naturally, but they didn’t amount to anything. Sure, we might fail. Sure, it might be impossible to shoot our way into the enemy system, but we had to try. It was the only way to win this—to end this endless war.
They did get me to back off on the launch date. They just couldn’t pull all the ships and crews together into a single coherent task force that quickly. Some ships were in dry dock being repaired or upgraded. Certain critical personnel were on leave, but most importantly, all our ships weren’t in one place. They were scattered, and I wanted us flying together like a single fist heading out to meet the enemy. To meet up with a surprise Macro Armada coming out of that ring with our forces broken into small formations could spell disaster.
One asset everyone was fighting over was Marvin himself. I had to take him with me to help come up with a way to breach the ring, but other people had their own ideas concerning what he should be doing.