“What has me curious are the five escorts. They look heavily armed,” I said, zooming in and twiddling my fingers to spin around one of the escorts, drawn in wire-frame. The AI identified no less than four missile ports on each of the Macro killers. I shook my head, the Macros really believed in missiles. They never seemed to use beam-cannons for anything other than anti-personnel weapons. I suppose it was a matter of power usage. Nuclear missiles were a form of stored energy, and did not use power when they fired that could better be directed to shields or propulsion. Our design was quite the opposite. We were all about small beam ships, rather than large missile ships.
“We have designated them as cruiser-class vessels, sir,” said Robinson, finally melting open the entrance that led to the hallway and stepping into the command post.
“Sensible,” I said, spinning the Macro with my fingers. “Looks like they will still outgun our destroyers—when we have destroyers. What’s this here?”
Robinson took his post at the far side of the computer table. He isolated a part of the big screen for himself with quick, deft hand-motions and linked his image to mine so he could examine what I was looking at.
“I don’t know, sir,” he said.
“Robinson,” I said, “they are over Wake Island now, we don’t have a lot of time.”
“I know sir, but we haven’t been able to examine their ships this closely before. The ones they sent to China, they didn’t have a system like that.”
“It looks like a cannon of some kind.”
“Yes sir,” he said.
“Are they copying us? Are they building beam weapons to counter our longer-ranged ships?”
“I don’t know, sir,” said Robinson, sounding stressed. “It could be some kind of long-range sensor.”
Analyzing enemy ship designs was a function of Fleet, not the Marines, but at this point Crow had yet to get his act together. Fleet barely existed. Recently, we’d spent all our time building up the ground forces we’d promised the Macros and whatever material we had left had gone into building up our own defenses on Earth. None of us trusted NATO farther than we could throw them. In the absence of Fleet intel, I’d given Robinson the task of classifying and analyzing what we knew of all Macro capabilities. I’d figured he would be a useful resource, seeing as he was coming with me on this little jaunt into the blue.
I outlined the protuberance in question on my screen with a circling finger. It did indeed resemble a cannon. As I watched, it shifted and tracked something.
“It has a barrel, a turret. That is definitely a weapon,” I said, “and we have no idea what it does?”
“Correct, sir. We have no record of that type of weapon on a cruiser. They might have been on the vessels you met when the initial Macro fleet came to Earth. But they were so far out we don’t have any close-up recordings of ship configuration.”
“Well,” I said, “I suppose we’ll have to wait until they fire on something, then we’ll have some intel on these big turrets.”
“I suppose, sir.”
I turned toward Captain Sarin, who hovered nearby. “Get an ETA clock up on the board.”
She jumped and went to work on her section of the big screen. I was annoyed, but I tried to hide it. She should have put up an ETA clock automatically. My entire command crew was very green. Here we were, facing an implacable enemy with unknown intentions, and we still had few procedures in place concerning the operation of our own equipment. I tried to cut them some mental slack, but I couldn’t.
“Staff, I want to say something right here, right now,” I barked, sweeping my eyes over the group. I noted that everyone looked ashamed. I supposed they all knew they were in for a spanking, for one thing or another.
“We’ve got to pull it together,” I said loudly. I would have hammered the tabletop with my fist, but I didn’t want to accidentally crack the ballistic glass that covered it. “This is it, this is the real deal. Drink some coffee or something, but wake up! Now, who has made sure that our defense turrets are off, so the Macros can come down without getting blasted?”
“Isn’t that Fleet traffic-control’s responsibility, sir?” asked Major Robinson.
“Yes, it is. But do you trust them so completely that you don’t want to confirm it has been done?”
A hand went up timidly to half-mast. It was Captain Sarin, the same staffer I’d set on building my ETA clock. She was still working the menus with the other hand. “I confirmed it, sir,” she said.
I nodded to her in appreciation. “You see? Captain Sarin has done some forward-thinking.”
The ETA clock, when it was finally operating, counted down from twenty-two minutes. I tried to give them all something to do while we waited. Waiting was always hard on troops. I’d learned that during my one active-duty tour in the Gulf as a Lieutenant. When stressed, it was much better for the mind to be doing something—even if it was pointless.
There came a moment however, during the final three minutes, that we had nothing to do but watch the Macro ships. The five escorting cruisers sat up in orbit over the Bahamas. The biggest ship, the transport, lowered itself gracefully down toward us. Dawn was breaking over the ocean. The sky turned pink in the east behind the transport, turning the monstrous ship into a hulking, black silhouette.
We’d planned this out long ago. We’d scripted traffic-control instructions and now transmitted them to the Macros using their own binary language. We landed the transport out in the Caribbean itself, as there wasn’t an area large enough on land. The huge cylinder was the size of a skyscraper. It was like watching three supertankers, all bundled into one mass, lowering out of the sky. The Macro transport had huge feet, but I doubted it would use them for much. Instead, gravity-repellers like the ones that moved our hovertanks kept the monstrous ship floating just above the cobalt-blue waves.
Nothing happened for a minute or so after the big ship sank down. I addressed the brainbox that ran the command brick. It had an interface like any Nano ship. I’d found it easiest and fastest just to copy the personality and knowledge of the Socorro.
“Command module: respond,” I said aloud.
“Responding.”
“Are there any incoming transmissions from the Macro vessel?”
“Negative,” said the module.
“Transmit the following: We are ready to embark.”
“Incoming Message: Fulfill the terms of our agreement immediately.”
I felt a tickle of sweat under my arms. What did the Macros want? Everyone had their eyes on me. I was the architect of this entire thing, and if I had monumentally screwed up by misunderstanding the terms of our agreement, the existence of my race was in question. I swallowed, and tried to look confident and tough. I thought about exiting the room and working from my office. It would be easier to think if I wasn’t being stared at by a half-dozen scared people.
I drew in a breath. I decided to brazen things through. The Macros seemed to respond well to that sort of thing.
“We are ready. We have prepared the promised cargo. Now, open your cargo bay doors so we can load your transport.”
“Incoming Message: We measure insufficient mass. Agreed-upon terms have been violated.”
Insufficient mass? I blinked, wondering if we had screwed up somehow. Had they measured tons in an entirely different fashion? Did they have scales from some tiny world where a single ton metal was the size of a mountain? Had we promised them troops in tonnage equal to the size of the Earth itself?
My head swam as I groped for a next move. I rejected the mistaken scaling concept. That didn’t make sense, as their holds couldn’t support much more mass than what we’d promised them. Something else was wrong….