Conquest

-7-

If I’d found the waiting tough before, now it was excruciating. Crow spent the next half-hour pacing and cursing at me. I didn’t argue with him. Quite possibly, he was right. Finally, however, I’d had enough. I’d expected Marvin to pop back out of the ring by now, or a Macro to show its nose. Neither had happened. That wasn’t good from our point of view. I decided to attempt to explain my reasoning to the others.

“Look,” I said. “If the Macros come through now, they will find a small minefield at the ring, but when they come up out of the atmosphere, they will hit lot more of them. Our orbital field is still in place and we put it right where they gathered the last time they brought their fleet through.”

“Okay,” Crow said, furious. “I’ll give you that. We’ll destroy a ship or two.”

“More than that. We’ve run simulations. Barrera, have you run new numbers given our current distribution and past Macro performance?”

“These are only estimates,” Barrera said, “But they should lose fifty ships, more or less.”

Fifty ships. I knew that wasn’t enough. Unfortunately, Crow knew it too.

“That’s a joke, that is,” he said. “Right—well, right. At least we know what to put on our planet’s tombstone. I can see it now: We invited the Macros in, and managed to kill nearly ten percent of their battle fleet. Please urinate on our fool graves, it makes the grass grow.”

I ignored Crow. “Major Barrera, let’s factor in their knowledge of the minefield at the ring. If they decided to come in hot, how could they do it?”

“Their probable approach would be a barrage of nuclear missiles fired through ring to clear the mines.”

“If they are ready to come through now, why haven’t they done so already?”

“Do you want speculation, sir?”

“Yes.”

“They must want to achieve some level of surprise. Perhaps they thought they could slip in and gather their strength behind Venus as they did last time. We made no move against them on that occasion because we had no fleet strength.”

“I agree,” I said. “They were trying to sneak in. But they were going to come in any case.”

“You still haven’t given me a good reason to invite them in now,” Crow complained.

“These machines—especially these machines—are quite capable of learning. But they tend to be predictable. If something works for them once, they like to repeat the same move until thoroughly convinced it is no longer working.”

I cited cases for them, such as the sequential suicidal approach of invasion ships when we’d first met the Macros. They’d lost several before changing tactics to a larger force. Then there was the lining up of ships when entering the Worm system. They’d allowed two thirds of their task force to be destroyed in that instance before achieving bombardment superiority and suppressing the Worm counter fire. The list went on. They were more than willing to allow a large portion of their forces to be destroyed, once committed to an action. But they would then weigh the results afterward and alter their tactics deliberately.

I thought the crucial difference in their behavioral patterns was an absence of factors such as morale. This enemy didn’t feel fear, or regret. They calculated odds. If they lost a hundred ships, they analyzed why and built a hundred more. They didn’t run screaming from a battlefield, hang their failed generals or fall prey to combat stress disorder. In short, they tended to make big sweeping moves and once they’d decided to make those moves they stuck with them until they won or were wiped out. Retreats were rare, but once they’d decided to pull back, they did so with as much certainty and determination as they exhibited when attacking.

“Okay,” Crow said, with a tone of weariness. “We know they are alien machines that don’t think the way we do. Now, tell us why you invited them to visit here today.”

“Because I think they might accept the invitation. Please understand, they are going to come soon, one way or another. I’m hoping they haven’t gathered all their strength yet. I’m hoping to face them before they are ready. What if they only have fifty ships? We will probably destroy them all with little loss and rebuild our minefield for the next wave. We have to hurt them at every opportunity.”

“But the risk, man…”

“Yes,” I said, “there is always a great deal of risk in war. We are on the losing side in this conflict and we must take risks in order to win. We have to roll the dice. If we simply throw all our ships up against theirs, we lose. But maybe, if we can pull a rabbit or two out of our hats, we can hold on. The Macros don’t like losing in a strategic sense. If we kill enough of them, they will mark us down on their ledgers as more dangerous than previously estimated. That will translate to more time for us to prepare before they come again.”

“If they have the kind of strength you’re talking about, Colonel,” Major Sarin said, “then they could fly here today, suffering all the losses we can inflict, and still annihilate Earth.”

“Now you’ve got the picture, Major.”

Sarin’s face fell. Maybe she didn’t like the picture, now that she had gotten it. She became quiet, studying the vivid, high definition image of Venus that lay between us. Venus itself was a swirling, light creamy-brown, but it had so many contacts floating around with it the planet reminded me of a Christmas ornament. If new red contacts began pouring out of the ring and spiraling upward, the Christmas ornament look would be complete.

“Do you trust Marvin to deliver the message you gave him?” Crow asked.

I thought about it. “Not entirely. But he’s not an idiot, Crow. He was already approaching the ring. He wasn’t going to let your ships get within range anyway. He would have run. This way, he might do us some good.”

“I hope you’re right, mate.”

More waiting. It was difficult, but after some thirty minutes, new contacts appeared.

“Something’s coming through sir. Lots of somethings.”

“Order your ships to pull back, Admiral,” I said.

Crow relayed the command, but it was too late. They were too close to the ring. They got off a few shots as the Macro cruisers began to wriggle through the ring, one after another. Then one of them vanished.

“Dammit,” Crow whispered as the second of his two ships winked out.

“Give me a count, Barrera.”

“Thirty-five ships, sir. Single file, all cruisers. They’ve only lost two so far due to the mines we had left waiting for them at the ring.”

I ground my teeth, and felt the muscles in my cheek jumping of their own accord. “How long before they can reach Earth?”

“Two days—maybe less.”

We all watched as the parade continued. When the first cruisers nosed up into orbit over Venus’ cloud layer, we had our moment of revenge.

“They’ve run into the orbital minefield, Colonel. Looks like the first nine ships are going down.”

We all cheered, we couldn’t help it. The heavy mahogany doors opened with a bang then. We all looked up, startled. Sandra stood there, dripping wet. She had a long black raincoat and a black fedora on her head, but she was still soaking.

“Everybody knows,” she said.

I could hear some cheering behind her. I walked out into the open floor with its ranks of cubicles. Every screen was watching some version of our visual.

Sandra was right behind me, whispering over my shoulder. “I thought you should know,” she said. “If this is supposed to be a secret, the whole world is watching with you.”

“Great,” I said, feeling slightly more tense, if such a thing were possible.

“Sir?” Major Sarin called to me from my office. “It’s General Kerr, sir. He’s on the line—conference-calling with the President of the United States.”

I turned around and slammed the big doors. I made a dismissive gesture toward Major Sarin, the President and Kerr. They could all wait. I had a war to run.

I heard Sarin speaking quietly into the headset. “Colonel Riggs is unavoidably detained by the situation, sirs. He apologizes and will get back to you at the earliest opportunity.”

“Kyle,” Sandra whispered at my shoulder.

I glanced back at her. She had a wild, suspicious look on her face. “Don’t you get in a ship and go out there. Not this time. I don’t even want you thinking about it.”

I looked at her. “Honestly, I hadn’t even thought of that one yet. We have many hours before we scramble the Fleet.”

“Just don’t scramble with them.”

I shook my head. “No promises.”

She crossed her arms and glared at the image of Venus. The rest of the command staff stood around, operating different sections of the big table, talking to others on headsets. Crow was counting his ships and ordering pilots to report in. Major Barrera had called out the hovertank reserves and ordered them to take up stations around the island.

“It’s not fair,” Sandra said. “We just got home. We deserved a longer break than this.”

“I’ll file a complaint with Macro Command tomorrow, my dear,” I said.

“Don’t be a smart ass. We’re all about to die.”

I thought about denying it, but there didn’t seem to be any basis on which I could blow any happiness into her ears. Things were bad, and getting worse with each Macro ship that flowed out of the ring and sailed gracefully up to orbit Venus.

We were aided somewhat by the vicious clouds and pressure of Venus in the end. Normally, it took as many as ten mines to take out a cruiser. But when you added in high winds, sulfuric acid and intense pressure, the ships we damaged even lightly were often disabled.

“Forty-six ships have been disabled or destroyed, sir,” Barrera reported after another twenty minutes.

“How many have survived?”

“Ninety-two,” he said.

“All cruisers?” I asked.

“Yes, sir. They stopped coming through a moment ago.”

I strode to the table and stared at it, fixated. “You didn’t tell me they were all through.”

“I’m not sure they are, sir. They could have another wave coming.”

I shook my head and a slow, grim smile spread over my face. “No, Major. The Macros don’t work that way. If there are more ships coming, they are days away at least. They are gamblers who push their whole pile of chips into the pot when they make a bet. This is all they have at the moment.”

We watched closely for another hour, but ninety-two ships remained the total. About a quarter of what I’d faced years ago when their battle fleet had last come to our system.

“They are forming up ranks behind Venus, sir,” Major Barrera said.

I didn’t bother to respond. I watched the Macros morph into a long crescent of glittering red contacts.

“Why are they waiting?” Sandra asked.

“Repairs,” I said, shrugging. “Or maybe they are on hold until reinforcements arrive.”

“Reinforcements? There are more of them? Where are they now?” Sandra asked, voicing the questions in everyone’s mind.

“We don’t know,” I said. “But I’m damned glad they aren’t here at the moment.”

“So many… Can Fleet destroy them all, Kyle?”

I eyed the screen. “No,” I said. “But we might not have to.”