-32-
Hope can be a terrible thing. When the helpless, terrified man is offered salvation, he always takes it—and he will do anything to get that dangling carrot.
“Admiral,” I said, “you’re absolutely correct. We should all be fighting the real enemy. The aliens. There are many more of them than there are of us out there. I’ve seen them, sir. I’ve strangled them with these hands on many occasions.”
He watched me, saying nothing. He licked his lips and straightened his ice cream colored uniform.
“I took this ship from just such an alien enemy,” I continued. “I turned it against them. Behind us, several systems away, three worlds that once teemed with trillions of alien lifeforms lie dead and irradiated. Nothing lives in that system now. Do you believe me, sir?”
“I’ve seen the vids. I know what kind of bloodthirsty pirates you people are. I—”
“No sir,” I said. “Come on, you must know most of what you see on the net is bullshit. Let’s not be children. Your emperor is a pompous tyrant. He’s no fool, but he’s at least as much of a devil as I am.”
“I—I don’t understand. Are we discussing a truce, or—”
“Or what,” I said firmly. “Just hear me out. I don’t want to destroy your ships. Right now, I’m costing myself lives by not firing on you. If I wipe out half your real vessels before we make contact, that’s less trouble for me. But I’m trying to find some common ground, here. I’m trying to end a civil war that will leave humanity weak.”
Newcome nodded. He could not argue with my logic. “You realize I’m risking my life by listening to you? All of my crew is?”
I hadn’t realized that, but it made sense. That detail moved him up another notch in my estimation.
“Well, if it’s any consolation, if these talks end badly, you’ll be dead anyway. I’m sure Crow will call you a martyr and a hero back home, for as many days as he has left to rule.”
“How did you know? How did you know our ships are decoys? How did you know which ones to fire at?”
“It took a little deductive work, I’ll admit. But to put it simply, we shot at a number of your fake ones and they didn’t blow up. The ones that had already fired missiles at us did explode. There was only one answer to that riddle.”
“Of course,” he said, looking defeated. “We’ve lost nearly a hundred ships. We can’t take that kind of loss.”
“No, you’ve only just begun rebuilding after the Macros came through this way last year. I understand. You did make a valiant effort. Earth always does. There is no shame in coming to terms, sir. Let us do so now.”
Suddenly, he seemed to grow a spine. He straightened in his chair and brought his fist down upon the arm of it.
“I won’t simply surrender. I won’t disable my ships, nor will I allow you to board them.”
I almost grinned, but I stopped myself in time. Somehow, we’d gone from discussing the possibility of surrender—his surrender—to talking about how we were going to work out the details. We were talking terms, and that meant we’d already won the battle.
I signaled Jasmine, and she gave me a quiet, knowing nod. She was already shutting down our attack. The fighters began decelerating, as did Phobos and the rest of the fleet. Marvin was still picking targets, but Miklos had stopped him from shooting down any more of their ships. The Commodore had picked up on the changing situation even before I’d told him to shift us into neutral.
Admiral Newcome and I talked for several more minutes. For an Imperial, he was able to see reason very clearly. We worked out a plan that was acceptable to both sides. He would scoot his ships out of my path, setting them on a long, elliptical course that would eventually take him back to a refueling station on Mars.
My fleet, in the meantime, would press on toward Earth. I learned that the Admiral and his senior people had been discussing the possibility of withdrawal even before they began to spar with my fleet. There were certain political officers who would have to be neutralized, but the rest would all join in the ruse when explaining the situation to their crews. They’d tell the rank and file they’d come to terms with the pirates, describing it as a ceasefire.
None of this would be acceptable to Crow, naturally. But he was out of reach. The fleet would stop talking to Earth. By the time Newcome and his ships returned to Earth, it would all be over. The Imperial government would be toppled.
Or so everyone hoped.
“You look like the cat that has eaten the spinster’s pet bird,” Miklos told me.
Being from Eastern Europe, he sometimes didn’t get our idioms quite right, but I knew what he meant.
“The bird cage stands empty, my friend,” I said, laughing. I was in an excellent mood. Possibly, this was the best I’d felt since Sandra died.
Miklos was happy it was over, but I could tell he was also slightly annoyed I’d won so quickly after he’d advised me to withdraw. It made him look foolish.
“How did you know, sir?” he demanded when we had a private moment in my office.
This sort of question is often posed to me, and it always represents a dilemma. I could tell him the truth, which was that I’d been unable to quite believe in those seven thousand ships. I’d only figured out they were fake when we kept shooting at them and missing the ones that had never done anything.
But the truth isn’t always the best policy. It leads people to think you were just lucky, rather than amazingly good. I’d rather have people think I was some kind of wizard. Morale and discipline are much easier to maintain when people have almost supernatural faith in you.
As usual, I took the middle ground. Something in-between the truth and claiming I was a full-blown oracle.
“I’d begun suspecting something was up from the start,” I told him. “There couldn’t have been seven thousand ships out there—I knew that the moment I saw them. They just couldn’t be there. Earth’s fleet had been smashed less than a year ago. Unless they had a fantastic level of industrial output, those ships couldn’t be real.”
“But why didn’t you test the theory immediately? You could have done so in several ways.”
I nodded. Fortunately, I was ready for this obvious back-up question.
“I wasn’t absolutely sure they were fake. I was worried, honestly, that when Crow captured the Bellatrix system he might have discovered and captured a number of Macro factories as we did. Just think of that. What if he’d found those new factories and managed to get them working over the last few months? That’s the only way I could believe he’d managed to churn out thousands of ships.”
“Ah,” said Miklos, nodding. “I get it. If the Imperials really had these ships, that would be the only way they could have built them so quickly. With new production facilities we knew nothing about.”
“Exactly. They could have been real if that had been the case. I also knew for certain some percentage of the ships were real. So, I made my moves conservatively. It looked bad, but I wasn’t willing to fold my hand and run for the door. If the ships were fake, we could win. Keep in mind, I didn’t know how many were fake. I was kind of thinking the first rank—meaning the first thousand—were real. If they had been, that still would have been a hard, hard battle.”
Miklos nodded, staring off into space. He had an Irish coffee in his hand, and he didn’t drink much. His eyes were thoughtful and slightly glassy.
I braced myself for the next question: But sir, why didn’t you tell us you thought most of the enemy ships were fake?
But that question wasn’t asked. I’m not sure why not. Maybe he didn’t think of it, or maybe my spiked coffee and the natural relief of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat had made him not care.
Whatever the case, the question never came. I stood up and put the bourbon bottle on the table.
“Have another shot, Nicolai. You’ve earned it.”
Then I left and went to review the damage. Overall, it was pretty light. Sure, we’d taken a beating on the surface of Phobos, but that was the one part of this fleet we could easily fix. Unfortunately, this was one repair job that was too big for nanites to do on their own. We’d calculated it would take months to get the hull back to full density, but we might as well begin now. Already, the transports were dragging chunks of asteroid rock and ice to drop into the biggest holes. Crawlers were rumbling over the surface of the ship, pushing loose material into the cracks and troweling over the scorch marks.
On the bridge, I met with Jasmine and Gaines. The Major had recovered significantly, only a day after any competent medical person would have pronounced him dead.
We shook hands all around.
“I can’t believe you talked them into pulling out without blasting a single ship of ours.”
“Hold on!” I said. “Have you seen the surface of this vessel? I’d say we were blasted pretty heavily.”
“Exactly where we wanted to take the damage, right on this rock’s face, the only place we could withstand the punishment.” Gaines shook his head and looked at me with honest disbelief. “I thought we were dead—did you know that?”
“Happens all the time,” I told him. “This is Riggs’ Pigs, remember.”
“It’s unforgettable. Well sir, I guess I’m heading amidships for some R&R.”
“Whoa,” I said, “hold on there. I know you’re a little banged up, but you still have a large command full of damaged marines to look after, Major.”
“Yes sir. They’ll come first.”
After he’d left to go back to the barracks, I looked over the flight plan with Captain Sarin. She had it all worked out.
“We’ll head toward the inner planets at maximum velocity,” she said. “In one way, the location of the Tyche ring is a helpful starting point.”
“How so?”
“This ship—this drive system, I mean—it’s kind of like sailing, sir. Any large gravitational pull works like the wind. Because the largest wind in any system is the central star, and we want to go almost directly toward it, we’re in luck.”
I looked over the charts, nodding. I saw our position, far, far out from the Sun. From this position, the inner planets were a long haul. The angle of approach was almost the same for Earth as it was for the Sun itself.
“All we have to do is aim at the Sun and let it pull us,” I said. “I can see how that would be easier than crossing a system from one ring to the next. The rings themselves don’t have big gravity fields and we have to work with lateral forces pulling and pushing us.”
“Right,” she said. “Navigating a system like Alpha Centauri was much harder and slower. The drive isn’t built for it. You have to kind of tack your way—taking pulls and pushes from planets along the route. Again, it’s like navigating a sailing ship with a crosswind.”
“How long until we reach Earth?”
“You mean if they just sit there and wait for us?”
I nodded.
“Over a week. Eight days, plus a little bit.”
“A long time. But less than I’d thought it might be. I can see Earth is pretty well lined up with the Sun. That makes it even easier.”
“There are no incoming contacts, either,” she told me before I could ask. “At least, nothing we’ve detected. No missiles, no ships, no transmissions.”
“Excellent!” I said.
She nodded. There was a pause in the conversation. I sensed she wanted to say something, so I kept quiet. Finally, she started to speak, stopped, then started again.
“What are we going to do when we get there?” she asked suddenly.
“Do? We’re going to take out the Imperials. We’re going to demand they lay down their arms and surrender. And they’ll do it, too. Just like their fleet did.”
Jasmine zoomed in on Earth. We had some readings from our homeworld by now. I was as transfixed by the image as she was. There were newly scorched areas, I saw. Places that had been green were now brown streaked with gray-black. I noticed a lot more cloud cover than there had been in the old days as well.
“The ecosystem has taken a beating,” she said. “They still haven’t recovered from the Macro assault. There were bombings—a lot of dust was kicked up into the upper atmosphere. Crops have failed in many key areas.”
I looked at my world. It felt odd to be coming home like this. In the past, we’d been accounted heroes. Now, people gazed up at the sky and feared when they heard Star Force ships were coming.
I frowned. “I’m going to fix all that.”
“The planet?”
“No—yeah. I mean, not just that. I’m going to get people to believe in us again.”
She looked up and met my eyes. “What if they don’t surrender? What if they fight out of fear or stubbornness? How many will we have to kill?”
That was a hard question. The hardest I’d heard all day.
“I don’t know, Jasmine,” I told her quietly. “I guess it’s up to them, really.”
“Not entirely. We’re the ones with the ships and the bombs. You could stand off in space and blast them to dust.”
“I don’t want to do that,” I said with feeling.
“No, but do you really think we can invade? We have a few thousand marines…but not enough to take over a planet with billions of inhabitants.”
I lifted a finger and shook it at her. “You need to take a better look at history. Sometimes, grand political events go down without vast bloodshed.”
“Civil wars are traditionally bloody.”
“Granted. But I don’t think this is one. This is more like a coup—or the reversal of a coup. The people don’t love Crow. I’m not an outside invader they’ll resist to the last man. They may be frightened of me, but if we play this right, they may come to welcome us with open arms.”
“I hope you’re right, Kyle. I really do.”
I was just as worried as she was, but I couldn’t say that. I gave her a smile and walked away nonchalantly. I did everything I could to appear calm, confident and in control. Fortunately, these things come naturally to me.