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“Two hits,” I said thoughtfully.

“You cheated!”

“Yes,” I said. “And that’s the essence of my plan.”

She had a dark look in her eyes. I wondered if she was about to crack me one with
the bat. I rather hoped she wouldn’t do it. I suspected I would feel it if she did.

Sandra tossed the bat away and tilted her head to one side. “You’re looking smart
to me again,” she said. “I can’t kill you when you’re doing that. It’s not fair, really.
You know my weaknesses too well.”

We kissed for a few minutes, then she pulled away. “Tell me your plan. How will you
screw the Macros?”

“I’m not sure it will work.”

“It worked on me.”

I nodded. “I got the idea from you, really. You mentioned the mines. We’ve largely
discounted them lately, as they aren’t as effective as they used to be. By firing
in swarms of missiles and having dense point-defense fire, I’ve seen them defeated
recently. Only intelligent delivery systems, such as my marines delivering nuclear
grenades, have been effective in recent battles.”

Sandra walked around the pool room, snatched a few balls out of the air where they
floated, and rolled them between her fingers thoughtfully. When she suddenly turned
around to face me, I winced, expecting the balls in her hands to smack me painfully
at point-blank range. But they didn’t. Apparently, she had forgotten about my little
trick. I was glad.

“I think I get it. You want the mines to
move
. You want them to come flying at them, so they can’t knock them out while they’re
sitting in space? Something like that, right? But how will you bounce them into the
Macros at an unexpected angle?”

I smiled. She was catching on. I took the ball from her hand and held it up between
us. It was green, and had the number six printed on it.

“I wasn’t going to bounce them, not exactly. But I do want them to be flying around
at high speeds. A moving target is harder to hit, harder to predict. You can’t knock
it down as easily as a sitting target. Just like these balls. When you serve and crack
that bat into one that’s stationary—that’s easy. But if it is flying hard from an
unexpected angle, and there are several of them, a few are bound to get through.”

She nodded and came closer to look at the six-ball.

“What I want to do is set the mines up in an orbital stream around the planet below
us. They need to move fast, and come in like a shower from an unexpected direction.
Rather than sitting around the ring waiting for the enemy to arrive they’ll be swinging
in a fast orbit and will come crashing into the Macros out of the dark, pelting them
like a swarm of projectiles. Unlike a missile, they’ll produce no emissions and will
be hard to detect and shoot down, hard to avoid.”

Sandra frowned, nodding. She took the six-ball from me and rolled it around in her
hand. “There’s a problem. If they’re going too fast they’ll break orbit, won’t they?”

“Yes, exactly. That’s the problem I’m working on. How do I set up an environment like
this room? The key difference between this room and space is the walls. Out there,
there is nothing for the balls to bounce against, nothing to keep them on target.
They’ll fly off into the void.”

She looked around the room thoughtfully. “I have an idea. What if you make a bumper
for them out there?”

I snorted. “They’d smash into it and explode, or at least be disintegrated.”

“No, not a physical barrier. I mean another gravity point. Something that will catch
them like a hand and throw them in a different direction.”

I stared at her for a second then nodded slowly. “You know,” I said, “that just might
work.”

Sandra looked very pleased with herself. I grabbed her then, and she resisted at first,
but soon relaxed. Her body was already slightly slick with sweat from our workout.
We made love in the pool room, and I was as surprised about it as she was. Our passion
was brief, but intense.

“I hope the cameras were off,” she said when we’d finished.

“All nonessential equipment is still dead.”

“What turned
you
on?” she asked—then she smiled. “Never mind, you’re almost
always
on.”

I shook my head. “It was more than that,” I said. “I guess you looked smart to me.”

She laughed, and kissed me again. I knew I’d said the right thing and scored some
easy points.

-5-

The Macros reached a high cruising speed on their rush across the Thor system and
did little in the way of slowing down as they approached our ring. Apparently, they
wanted to give us as little time as possible for repairing the station as they could.
I cursed as their tactic became increasingly clear. I was ahead of the game due to
Marvin’s nanite supply, but I needed every hour.

Forty hours might sound like a long time, but it really isn’t. Especially when most
of your systems are knocked out to begin with. Even the basics like communications
and life support were sputtering. I kept luxuries like that to a minimum and kept
working on weapons systems. The battle station had independent factories, of course.
But only one of them was had been spared by the EMP blast. Having been sheltered near
the generators, the most heavily shielded section of the structure, this single factory
was critical to our strategy.

After about twenty hours of churning out replacement nanites of various types, I switched
production up a notch to something slightly more complex: mines. These units and a
few more nanites were all I had time to create before the enemy reached us. The only
other specialty system I allowed to be built was the space-bumpers Sandra had dreamed
up: large generators welded to extremely powerful gravity plates. We launched these
when we had less than ten hours to go, and my two scout ships maneuvered them into
position. Dark, hulking chunks of equipment, they sat parked in far orbit over Hel,
waiting.

Even with Marvin’s help, the math was tricky. We needed to project a new kind of orbit,
one that was theoretical in our calculations but which was destined to take physical
form. We had to release the tiny, sputnik-like mines in a pulsed stream pattern. They
were to orbit Hel seven times before they built up too much velocity and achieved
speeds capable of escaping orbit. Hel wasn’t a powerful, tugging gas giant, so at
about nineteen thousand miles per hour, they came loose and drifted up into high orbit.
Without any further controlling influences, they would break out of the gravity well
of the icy world and probably impact with the distant sun years from now.

But that wasn’t my plan. Instead, I’d placed my bumpers high above Hel. Dumping repellant
gravity waves they were able to drive the mines back down into orbit, where they flew
with increasing speed around the planet. I fired them off in thick pulses, rather
than a steady stream. When they hit, flying out of the cold darkness at blinding speed,
I wanted them to hit hard.

“You’ve built a trap for them,” Sandra said, admiring my work as she studied it with
me in the holotank.

“Pretty neat, huh?”

“What are you going to call this trick—this new tactic?”

I glanced at her and smiled. “The
Sandra Special
. A flying kick in the ass when you are least expecting it.”

She snorted and shook her head. “I’m not sure if I’m flattered or not.”

I could tell by the curve of her lips that she
was
flattered, so I left it at that. “What have we got in the way of working weapons
systems now, Welter?”

“Twelve heavy railguns arranged in three batteries. The nanite brainboxes are young
on those, and need guidance. We’ll have to have a human gunner in each bunker to help
operate the systems. We also have three heavy beam weapons. They have extended range
and hit very hard—but there are only three of them. We don’t have the power to operate
more.”

“Okay, what else?”

“Six flocks of mines, all flying around Hel in tight groups. I’ve aligned them with
the station itself, so they’ll fly over our shoulder every half-hour and shower directly
into the face of anything exiting the ring. Depending on when the enemy comes in,
they should be in for a nasty surprise.”

I nodded. “What about lighter lasers? Point-defense systems?”

“We don’t have much in that category,” he admitted. “Those systems have to be automated,
and the brainboxes are so young I’ve been worried they’re as likely to shoot each
other as incoming missiles.”

I shook my head. “Not good enough. You have to have a hundred small PD systems active
before the Macros come in, minimum. They love missiles, and we have to knock them
down. Get the software for the brainboxes from Marvin. I’m sure he has it stored in
his monstrous neural chain somewhere.”

Welter looked as if he were about to object, but shrugged instead and turned back
to his console. I knew he didn’t like Marvin much, and more importantly didn’t fully
trust him. I couldn’t blame anyone for that. The idea of allowing Marvin to seed our
defensive the brainboxes sounded crazy on the face of it. The trouble was we didn’t
have any choice. There simply wasn’t enough time to rewrite and debug the code for
gunner brainboxes now. We couldn’t setup simplistic self-learning boxes, either. By
the time they figured out which way was up and how to fire their weapons, the Macros
would be all over us.

About ten hours later, the scout ships came in and made their final report. The enemy
ships were going to arrive sooner than we’d projected. They were slowing down now,
but only at the last minute, using maximum burn. I deduced from this they knew something
about our fleet disposition. Our own ships would not make it to the battle in time.
They’d raced toward us, crossing the Thor system as fast as they could, starting the
moment the EMP blast had been delivered.

In the final hours before the attack struck us, Welter pulled me aside for a huddled
conversation on this very topic. Marvin was in the control center, tweaking the holotank
settings. His metal arms snaked out in a dozen directions. Some supported his central
mass, while others held aloft cameras or worked tools.

“I don’t like it, sir,” Welter said quietly, nodding toward Marvin.

I glanced toward Marvin, who scanned us with a half-interested camera before turning
back to the work at hand.

“Explain yourself, Commander,” I said.

“He knew when the attack was coming. He stashed himself in the single spot aboard
the station where the EMP wave wouldn’t reach him. Then, he comes out full of nanites,
the very substance we need. Next, we use his software to program our PD systems.”

“I understand your thinking, and you make a strong case, but—”

“That’s not all, sir,” Welter said. “The enemy knows what we have and where it is.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because they’re going to arrive less than an hour before our reinforcements do. You
can’t tell me that’s just a coincidence.”

“You think Marvin told them?”

“Didn’t he just ‘discover’ how to use the rings to make transmissions? Isn’t he the
only one who really knows how to do it? Who else ratted us out to aliens in remote
star systems?”

I sighed. “You have a point. But I don’t see what we can do about it.”

“We can pull the software on the PD systems and disconnect that self-built robot.”

I shook my head. “We’ve got nothing to put into the PD lasers. We don’t have enough
human gunners and we can’t train new software. We’re out of time.”

Commander Welter frowned at Marvin suspiciously. “Is that all you’ve got for a solution?
We’ll just have to wait until we see how this all plays out?”

I nodded. “That’s right. If Marvin has ratted us out, we’re all as good as dead. That’s
just how it is. I understand how difficult it is accepting our situation, but try
to be a realist. We’re out of time for second guesses.”

Welter looked at me oddly, and raised his eyebrows. “I have another possible solution,”
he said quietly.

“Talk.”

“Let’s retreat from the base. We’ll leave everything on automatic and evacuate.”

I stared at him. “You want to bail out on this station?”

“If we are compromised, we’re going to lose anyway. My way, no one dies. If we aren’t
compromised, I still don’t like our odds. Let the enemy chew on the station. We’ll
come in with the fleet and clean up afterward.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I knew you wouldn’t. It’s your call, sir.”

I turned away from him and approached the holotank. I had to give his idea serious
thought. I certainly didn’t want to abandon the battle station, but I didn’t want
to fall for an enemy trick twice in the span of a few days—and die a fool.

“Marvin,” I said, “we need to have a private little chat.”

“I’m heavily engaged at the moment, Colonel,” he replied.

I warranted the attention of only a single camera, and that gave me a fleeting glance.
The rest of them were hard at work at the base of the holotank, which he had opened
to the guts.

“What are you doing right now, anyway?” I asked.