The Catalyst

-Chapter 48-


When we finally flew through the last ring—the one that led us to Earth’s Oort cloud, we took it slowly and painstakingly. First, I eased the cruiser down to a crawl. We swung the engines around and applied heavy thrust to reduce speed for the last entire day. The great ship shuddered and shook as we braked with all her power. When we’d stopped near the ring, I sent through several men on flying dishes to scout. I didn’t want to rush through, only to find a dozen mines Crow or even the Worms had put up in the meantime, or to learn there was a human fleet waiting there for us. I knew we would look like a damaged Macro cruiser to anyone who scanned us. Possibly, the Macros had already brought the war home to Earth. I didn’t want anyone to mistakenly fire on us.
The men on the dishes flittered ahead bravely, acting as our scouts. The mission was led by Kwon. I couldn’t spare any other officers, and I trusted him to follow my orders to the letter. He was to get to the other side, use passive sensor arrays to scan the system, and then return without making any transmissions. I wanted to know what was going on, and I didn’t want anyone to know I was back yet.
Sure, I was paranoid. I believed losing ninety-plus percent of one’s force would have transformed any commander. We had all become hard-eyed veterans. We were survivors.
The waiting was hard. The ship sat parked in space, and that never felt good. Without velocity, which took time to build up, any ship was vulnerable. There was nothing to do about it, so we waited, fully suited-up and tense. Every eye was wide and glassy.
Kwon’s voice came in snatches as he crossed the ring from elsewhere back into our space. He must have been transmitting the moment he came through. “…repeating that, sir. Enemy signatures in system. What are your orders?”
“Kwon, download the data,” I said.
I leaned over the new command table we’d built as the data came in. I’d taken the time to fancy up the bridge over the last few days with the help of the nanites. We had a nice steel table that grew up out of the floor in a single piece. The surface was a perfectly made, dull metal finish. We hadn’t been able to duplicate an Earth style screen, but this sheen of nanites was trained to form beads and give us a good representation of the external environment. I felt right at home with the interface. As an improvement, it responded to touch. Most of my bridge crew had never flown a Nano ship and were unused to the technology, but I figured they could learn. One of the key advantages of this type of system was the lack of a glass surface. This screen couldn’t break.
The first contacts that came up were the sun and the planets. Much smaller green and red beads appeared. The green ships were all clustered near Earth. The red beads were out past the orbit of Mars. Nothing moved, as this was a snapshot, not a live feed.
“What are those enemy contacts?” I demanded. “Macros?”
“Yes sir,” Kwon said. “Three cruisers. There is evidence of more of them, but they are drifting hulks.”
My eyes scanned the scene. We were coming into the middle of a battle. Had the Macros already hit Earth? How many millions had they killed this time?
I counted only seventeen ships around Earth, and they looked small. When I had left, Crow had been building fast and there had been at least thirty. We’d taken a beating too.
“I know where they are,” Major Sarin said suddenly, reaching out to touch the beads of reddish metal. “That’s the new asteroid mining facilities. We were just beginning to explore out there for easily accessed minerals. They must have found the mining expeditions and blown them up.”
I nodded. I knew the Macros were big on chewing metal out of asteroids. I’d seen the vast machines they used for the purpose up-close and personal. Knowing to some degree how Macros thought, I figured they must have clashed with Earth’s forces then retreated when they took a loss or two. The only reason they would retreat was the discovery of a higher priority target or to wait for reinforcements. I hoped it wasn’t the latter.
“Any signs of mines, Kwon?”
“No sir. Orders?”
“You are to get your ass back aboard this ship. Get in front of the launch bay, and prepare for a rough landing. We’ll scoop you up under heavy acceleration. Turn your dish into the braking position and try to match our speed so you don’t get smashed.”
“Yes Colonel, Kwon out.”
I nodded toward Major Welter, who waited anxiously at the helm like a concert pianist who was dying to play.
“Get us underway,” I said. “Take us through the ring.”
“Watch this,” Welter said. He reached out and tapped a single control-point. The ship smoothly accelerated forward. “I’ve been working on my hotkeys,” he explained proudly.
We headed into home space knowing we were outgunned three to one. No one complained, however. I was proud of them all.
“No one transmit anything,” I ordered. “All external transmissions are on blackout. No radio beyond suit-to-suit.”
Sandra relayed my order without hesitation. She was back on communications for the big homecoming. I was sorry it wasn’t going to be a happy one. I’d had fantasies of returning to our little bungalow on Andros Island. We’d had a lot of good times there. Now, I wasn’t sure we were going to make it home at all. We were so close, it almost hurt.
“Sandra,” I said, turning to her, “get Marvin’s butt up here, pronto.”
She smiled. “My pleasure,” she said, and she was gone in a blur.
Everyone else watched her move with alarm. All of us were fast and strong, but there was something unnatural about the way Sandra could move when she wanted to. I figured she could probably kill anyone on the ship if she surprised them. They just wouldn’t be able to react before they were dead. Knowing this filled me with a strange mixture of pride and concern.
Just as we caught the last of Kwon’s scouts and went through the ring, Sandra returned with Marvin. She had ripped loose the control wires that went down to his dish. Like exposed earthworms, the nanite wires writhed, seeking to reconnect. His cameras whipped around anxiously. I felt a moment of worry. She had obviously taken my order as an opportunity to rough-up the robot. That hadn’t been my intent. She was still blaming him for Ning’s demise. I still wasn’t convinced she was right about that. After all, the entire ship had blown up a few minutes later. A lot of things could have gone wrong. Ning could have simply been knocked out during the attack and fallen into the medical pod. The microbials would have mistaken her for raw materials. I had to admit, however, I hadn’t asked Marvin about it. Maybe I was just avoiding a good reason to unplug the roaming little robot.
“Marvin,” I said, gaining the attention of several cameras. “I need you to translate for me now. Sandra, put him down and let him reconnect his systems.”
With poor manners, Sandra dumped him onto the deck plates. Marvin clattered and rattled, sorting himself out. One of his cameras fell to the floor, the supporting arm having evidently lost power. The nanites struggled to chain-up and lift it again.
I frowned at Sandra. She ignored me and stalked back to her station. Major Sarin refused to look at either Sandra or I, perhaps fearing another attack. Gorski stared with his mouth open, wondering if it was a bad idea to say anything. Major Welter still tapped at his flight controls, so absorbed he didn’t even seem to have noticed the drama.
Marvin’s fourth camera was moving again. He used it to track Sandra closely. I didn’t blame him. He had never given me an acknowledgement, of course. I hadn’t demanded a response.
“Marvin, are you ready to translate? Talk to me.”
“No,” he said. “I believe I’ve suffered internal injuries. I’m rearranging some of my neural chains. Shutting down.”
“What?” I asked. “Dammit.”
He shut down, his cameras all clattering to the floor at once.
“Sandra, did you have to do that?” I hissed.
“He’s a murderer. Are you afraid of him?”
“No,” I said, “I’m worried he won’t cooperate if he knows he’s been abused.”
“Oh, he knows about that. Don’t worry.”
I sighed. Major Sarin was smirking at her computer. Gorski was shaking his head and Major Welter was still absorbed in his control system. At least one of them was doing their job. I again told myself I’d have to get Sandra off my bridge in the near future. This was getting very unprofessional. I recalled reading stories about long spaceflights, how discipline was predicted to break down over time as people would never get a respite and could not maintain tight order in their lives for such a long, unbroken period. We’d never been all that disciplined in the first place, so I supposed the process was happening faster in our military organization. I’d have to work on that. We needed a big book of regulations.
Marvin regained consciousness just as we crossed the border between Alpha Centauri and the Solar System. We came in at a relative crawl. I watched the readouts and the metallic-relief situation table with great interest. There were the three cruisers, still in the same spot. I couldn’t tell if they were firing on something, or waiting, or what.
“Hope you’re feeling better, Marvin,” Sandra said as he turned on again and stood himself up.
I flashed a glare at her, and she backed off with pursed lips. “Earth may be under attack. Let’s pull it together, people,” I said.
Sandra looked at me and took a deep breath. She seemed to know the comment was directed at her.
“No external emissions,” I said. “Not even active sensory equipment. I don’t want these Macros to know who we are. As far as they are concerned, we are their fourth cruiser, coming to complete the diamond. Let’s steer toward them, helmsman.”
Welter did everything but press his knees on the control panel. With a slight shudder, the ship began to turn and change course, still accelerating. I was impressed. After having taken a crack at that control system, I knew this thing was harder to steer than a broken shopping cart.
“Good job, Major,” I said. “You are a big part of this. If we can make our flight path look natural, they are more likely to be convinced.”
“We’re being scanned, sir,” Major Sarin said suddenly. “Radar and laser-targeting.”
“By whom?” I asked.
“The Macro squadron. They are definitely looking us over.”
“Any incoming messages yet?”
“Not that I can determine.”
“Good, we’ll let it ride. If we approach at this pace, how long will we have until we are in range, Gorski?
“In range sir?”
“To fire upon the Macros.”
Gorski swallowed hard. “About ten hours, sir. If they hold still.”
Marvin’s cameras drifted from one face to the next. “Should I contact them now?” he asked.
“Not yet. We’ll let them call us first. We will only respond, not initiate communications. You are important now, Marvin. You need to imitate a Macro Command responding to another Macro Command that is calling.”
All of Marvin’s cameras were on me now, except for one that was keeping an eye on Sandra. “I can’t do that,” he said.
“Why not?” I snapped. I suddenly felt like beating on him myself.
“I’m only one unit. I do not possess the appropriate protocols or multitasking capacities to simulate an entire Macro crew.”
I thought about it and exposed my teeth in a grimace. He had a point, knowing what I did of Macro group-think. They were really a single mass-mind for command purposes. If we were really Macros, we would connect up to the rest of them as would a distributed computer system connected via a network. Back on Earth, I’d studied such projects, which involved the use of thousands of computers linked by the internet that would normally sit quietly at night. These machines were signed up by their owners to share their small amount of cpu power with all the others to form a vast computer system to solve large problems. Researchers working on things like the cure for cancer could avail themselves of this ready computer power when they needed it.
I’d suspected for some time the Macros operated on a similar principal. When it came to command decisions, there was no commander. Every Macro in the region offered up part of its brain to the rest and everyone shared in the effort to come to a single decision. At that point, they were effectively one computer. When they communicated, Macro Command was really all of them talking to me at once.
The problem facing me now was grim. We were in a Macro ship and knew how to send Macro signals. But we couldn’t pretend to be dozens of Macros machines. I only had Marvin. I supposed he might be able to pretend he was one Macro, but not a crowd of them.
I banged my fist on the metal table. That was another thing I liked about metal beads for screens. They didn’t break on you when you expressed your frustration.
“Okay,” I said, “we can’t bullshit them all the way. But we’ll still give it a try. Marvin, when they talk to us, tell me what they say. Listen in. We will transmit nothing back. We have a big hole in our snout. Most of the sensory systems were up there. They might just believe our ship’s transmitters are out. If we act appropriately, we can receive their instructions and appear to follow them.”
“That can’t work forever,” Gorski said suddenly. “Um, sorry sir, but once we get close, any normal Macro would be able to transmit ship-to-ship directly.”
I nodded. “You’re right about that. Marvin, what is the typical range of a Macro unit’s built-in transmitter?”
“Under normal electromagnetic conditions, it should be one to one hundred miles.”
I huffed. “That’s quite a variable range.”
He began to explain, but I shushed him. “Okay, I don’t care. In space, a thousand miles is short range. We’ll have to make our move before we get that close, or we will sound like a ship full of ghosts to them.”
“When you say ‘make our move’, do you mean what I think you mean, Colonel?” Gorski asked.
“Hell yeah,” I said. “You didn’t think we were up here to cooperate with the enemy, did you Gorski?”