I rubbed my face with my palm for a moment, thinking hard. Finally, I keyed open the channel and spoke to Marvin.
“All right Marvin,” I said. “Here’s what I want you do to, if you want to live another hour. Fly through to the other side. Tell the Macros you’ve cleared all the mines you can. Tell them they can come through the ring safely, right now. After that, I would run away and hide, if I were you.”
I tapped the send box on the screen. All the officers standing around me stared in disbelief.
“You tremendous bastard,” Crow said, breathing hard. “You’re going to trust him? On the basis of some kind of Yankee intuition? Do you realize you may have just killed us all?”
I avoided their gazes and stared down at the screen, nodding.
“Possibly,” I admitted.
Long minutes went by. Another tiny contact went gold on the screen during that span. Marvin had dutifully used the time to activate another mine. At least this one was close to the ring and might actually do some good.
Suddenly, we saw Marvin moving toward the ring. Almost simultaneously, his last message returned to us.
“Command accepted,” the message said.
A moment later, Marvin’s golden oval was gone. He’d vanished on his way to another star system.
-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.