“Alpha dog, that’s me,” I admitted. I felt like kissing her when she came close, but I figured this wasn’t the time.
“That’s not all of it. You are also a risk-taker. A daredevil. I’ve read all about it. Women are attracted to your type, because they feel protected—but then when they become involved, they don’t like it anymore. They are upset by the very traits that drew them in the first place. Strange, isn’t it?”
“Sounds unfair to me,” I said. I was beginning to frown. I didn’t like where this conversation might be headed. Was she trying to pull back?
She sensed my mood and reached out a hand, touching my wrist. “Don’t worry. I’m not changing my mind about anything. I just wanted to read up on us, about our relationship.”
I sighed and tried to calm down. As always, I didn’t want to lose Sandra. Especially not to some bullshit she’d read in an article somewhere.
“What I’m trying to get to,” she said, “is that I don’t want you to take unnecessary personal risks. Not this time. You’ve given your entire life to this world. It has given you little back.”
“I don’t know,” I said, waving to the swathe of empty plates between us. “The food is pretty good.”
“Stop joking around,” she snapped, “I don’t want you to go out there again and die on me. You can die. You do know that, don’t you?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Promise me then. Promise me you won’t try to kill yourself, or—”
“Look,” I said, then paused. How could I delicately tell her I was going to do whatever I damned well thought needed doing? “This isn’t just about my ego or personality. I’m leading Earth through a war. Risks have to be taken. Look at my record. I’ve done some amazing things and here I am, still in one piece. I need you to trust me.”
Sandra stared at me. I could tell by the way she had tightened her dark, lovely eyes she didn’t trust me as far as she could throw me—which was quite a distance.
It was her turn to sigh and lean back. “I had to try,” she said. “Let’s get out of here. I want to make love before these aliens come and kill us all.”
“Okay.”
We headed for our on base quarters, an unimpressive but private bungalow, and we did make love. I was glad no one shared a wall with us, they would have complained. This time, we broke the couch and the coffee table. We both had a few scratches when we were done, but we hardly noticed as the nanites knitted our skins back together.
Sandra broke out a bottle of whiskey, but I waved it away. “Nothing so strong,” I said. “I have to stay reasonably sharp—in case the call comes.”
She didn’t ask what call I was talking about. We both knew. She put away the whiskey for a happier future night and brought out a giant bottle of beer. It was malted stuff, the kind they only seem to have at all-night convenience stores. We shared it and laughed, talking about happier times. It was a good evening.
I was lying on the broken couch at an odd angle when the call finally did come in. Sandra was draped over me. Despite all her strength and agility, she didn’t seem to weigh much more than a housecat.
I picked up my headset and held it to my ear. I didn’t even open my eyes.
“There’s something down there, sir,” Major Barrera buzzed in my ear.
Didn’t the man ever sleep? It had to be four a. m.
“Down where?” I asked.
“Hugging the surface of Venus.”
I lifted myself off the couch. Sandra’s body was tossed up and out of the way. I knew she was too tough to be hurt. She sank back down on the couch, moaned in protest and buried her face in the cushions.
“A ship?” I said, hunting for my shoes with fumbling hands. “A Macro ship?”
“No, sir. I think it’s one of ours.”
-5-
I reached my new headquarters building less than three minutes later. In the hallways and stairwells, a few janitorial people scattered at my thundering approach. It was a good thing too, as I might have plowed right through them in my haste. Without nanites in their bodies to harden their flesh, they would have gone down hard.
I hit the doors of my office at a run. They opened with a cracking sound that sounded expensive. I didn’t care. If the mahogany broke, I’d replace it with steel—or better yet a nanite wall.
Major Barrera stood over the table alone. He didn’t look up as I charged in.
“The contact is right there,” he said. “Very close to the ring.”
I saw a yellow-gold collection of pixels on the screen. There was no identifying stream of letters behind it. Our two ships were in close now, they had come down into the upper clouds of sulfuric acid. I’d been in those clouds and it was no picnic, but they were determined to gather all the information they could. I was proud of the pilots. They knew the score, so they’d taken the risk.
“Any radio contact?”
“They haven’t tried yet. They spotted it on their sensors and contacted us first.”
I nodded. “Get me in touch with that unknown vessel,” I ordered. “Patch me through relaying the signal through our ships. We should be able to open a channel down to the surface from here.”
Barrera worked the table. It took him longer than Major Sarin to do the task.
“Where’s Major Sarin?” I asked.
“Getting out of bed. I contacted her second.”
“How far is Venus right now? What kind of propagation delay are we going to have?”
“About a hundred million kilometers range from Earth,” he said. “Any message will take five minutes to get there and five minutes back. Ten minutes round trip to hear the response.”
“I’ll send the message blind, then. Send this: Unknown contact on Venus, please respond and indicate your intent. You are not authorized to be in this region. If you are damaging Star Force equipment, you will be held accountable.”
Major Barrera glanced up at me. “Do we want to start off with a threatening position, sir?”
“Just send it. If the ship is one of ours I’m definitely in a threatening mood.”
The signal went out, and we waited for the response. Major Sarin trotted in as we waited and we briefed her on the situation. She took over communications and Major Barrera went back to whipping people out of bed. We soon had staffers wandering the top floor, looking bleary and worried at the same time. Donuts, coffee and bacon arrived just in time, and I dug in.
While sipping the coffee and chewing a piece of bacon, I continued to stare at the screen. Two more mines had gone off the board since I’d sent out the message. Out of roughly fifteen hundred mines, we were down to about six hundred now. We could rebuild them, but it would take time to get them out there.
I happened to glance back out on the ledge outside. There was Sandra, on the other side of that thick glass, watching us. For the first time since we’d returned from deep space, she looked worried.
Crow was the last man on deck as usual. By then, the response was due back from Venus, if they were going to respond. Finally, it came in.
“Hello? Colonel Riggs? Is that your voice? I’m authorized to be here. You gave me that authorization.”
Everyone exchanged glances. We all knew the voice. It was Marvin.
On our fateful return journey from Helios and Eden, we’d rebelled against our machine masters, the Macros. We’d formed an informal alliance with other biotic races we met along the way, including the Centaurs, a herd people with an odd outlook on life. I’d asked for an exchange of information, and they’d sent me the neural contents of a grand old brainbox. It was so full of petabytes of information, we’d barely been able to build a brainbox big enough to hold the download. Unfortunately, we’d had to retreat from the Eden star system before we could complete the transmission.