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“Over the past several hours, I’ve become aware of enemy movements and warning signs.
We now believe two fleets are approaching Eden.”

Jasmine tapped at the screen so fast her fingers were a blur. The woman was a virtuoso
on the touchscreen. Two amorphous blobs like reddish clouds of blood appeared beyond
the far rings on our three system diagram. One of those rings led to Alpha Centauri,
where we believed Crow’s fleet now lurked. On the other side, another blob of red
was shown, hovering just beyond the water-moons of the Thor system.

“We believe the Macros are on the move again on the far side of the Thor system, where
the Lobsters live on their three moons. Frankly, I’m not too worried about these guys,”
I lied glibly, “as we’ve recently beaten them. They haven’t had time to rebuild everything
they lost last time. On the other side of us, however, there are more new contacts
approaching. These are coming from the direction of Earth. We can only surmise they
are Imperial ships.”

My last sentence caused a buzzing to build up in my headset. I signaled to Sarin,
and she cut out all cross traffic and let my signal dominate all others on the channel.
I normally didn’t like doing that, but it was the only way to get their attention
and hold it. As we weren’t yet in a pitched battle, I figured the most important thing
was to get my message across. They could all gossip and second-guess me after I had
made my speech.

“Due to the seriousness of these two threats against the system, I’ve decided to accelerate
our swearing-in process. I want every recruit who can hear me now to stand up, and
place his or her hand over their hearts.”

I could not hear it, but I could imagine the startled thousands obeying my instructions.
“Repeat after me, with witnesses: ‘I do pledge my loyalty to Star Force. I will, to
the best of my ability, defend Star Force and Earth from all enemies, foreign or domestic.
I will follow the orders of my lawfully appointed superiors, and follow them to Hell
and back, if necessary. Long live Earth, long live Humanity, and long live Star Force!’”

By the end of this speech, I knew I had them. Even on the bridge, where my staffers
were standing and pledging along, the veterans around me were thrilling to my words.
When I’d first made my announcements concerning the approaching enemy forces, there
had been a period of shock, followed by whispering. Now, there were only ringing words
being repeated by thousands of throats separated by thousands of miles of space. Inside
our steel ships, we all stood and made our pledge.

“Now, let me read a piece by Gordon Dickson concerning the difficult task of all space-borne
warriors: ‘Soldier, ask not—now or ever, Where to war your banners go…’”

I read the entire poem to them, and even though it might not have been understood
by all those that listened, they understood the spirit behind the words. The poem
was a call to sacrifice without question. A call to die frozen in space for honor,
if need be. By the time I was finished, none of them were whispering to each other.
On the bridge around me, it was quiet enough to hear the nanites rustling in the walls.

“I now pronounce all who have heard this transmission and made this pledge to be members
of Star Force. You have only one commander now: me. You’re all members of Riggs’ Pigs,
whether you fly a ship with big ideas or hump along on the ground with a thousand
pounds of gear on your back. Your deployment orders will be transmitted to your shortly.
Riggs out.”

I let Captain Sarin open the channels then, and listened to the cheering and the questions.
I smiled. They were pumped up, and ready to follow me into battle. I only hoped I
wouldn’t let too many of them down this time.

-22-

After the glow of an uplifting speech fades, the reality of a huge workload always
looms. Like a wedding ceremony, soaring oratory rarely bears much resemblance to what
follows. I got my people working immediately. Fortunately, we had plenty of weaponry
and battlesuits. We’d constructed somewhere around a half million of them for the
Centaurs, expecting a huge ground battle against the Macros when we’d originally reconquered
the lovely planets of Eden. With a few modifications, I was able to outfit every Star
Force veteran and new recruit alike.

I was surprised to learn just how many of my reinforcements were new people. Apparently,
they’d come from far and wide and begged to get into the transports. The civilian
population had taken a hit due to Decker’s bloodthirsty attacks, however. They’d started
out with over thirty thousand civies, and we still had something in the neighborhood
of twenty thousand to take care of. I saw this as a mixed blessing. They were more
than welcome to join us out here on the frontier, but they had to be cared for—and
I just didn’t have the resources for that now.

Instead of landing them all on Eden-8, I ordered them to be transported and dropped
off evenly among the three inner planets we’d claimed with the Centaurs’ blessings.
The transports spent a lot of valuable time doing this population shuffle, but I didn’t
see how I could play it any other way. Sarin and I spent some time discussing the
issue. She wanted them to load up into their ships, while I’d wanted them planet-side.

“We can’t let them just die up here in space,” I said.

“They don’t have to die. They can be parked in orbit on the far side of various worlds.
That way, they can run if danger comes their way.”

I shook my head in disagreement. “No. There is nowhere in this system to hide if the
Macros roll in past our battle station and fire just one missile at every transport.
They will be hunted down and destroyed. I want these people spread out on the ground.
It’s far harder to dig a population out of bunkers in a planetary atmosphere. They’ll
have cover and be dispersed.”

“It’s taking up too much time,” Sarin complained. “We need those transports full of
combat marines to win this fight.”

“You brought them out here. I figured you would take more of an interest in their
survival.”

“I am, sir,” she said. She stepped closer, and whispered her next words. I smelled
her faint perfume, and enjoyed it. “Kyle,” she said, “if we don’t win this fight,
they’re all dead anyway.”

I frowned. “Not if Crow wins. The worst they could expect would be transport back
to Earth in chains.”

She shook her head. “No. You saw Decker. It won’t be any different when the next commander
comes. They’re rebels. Earth never wants to hear from them again.”

I had a hard time believing life had become so cheap back on my homeworld. I guess
that when you have billions, a few thousand seems less important. Out here, where
humans were rare, I placed a very high value on every one of these people.

“Okay,” I said, “but even if they do come and break us and capture this system, some
will survive if we spread them out on the planets. There’s nowhere else to run after
this, Jasmine. They can’t go to the next system, they’ll be killed there as well.”

Finally, she agreed with me. She’d been so focused on staying in their ships and running,
I don’t think she’d realized they’d come to the end of their journey. Live or die,
Eden was the end of the line for her refugee train. There simply was nowhere else
to go.

Although most of the population was unfit for duty, our ranks had swelled by a few
thousand fresh recruits that with proper training and nanotizing, would someday make
fine marines. I decided to issue every one of them a kit, with basic training in the
use of modern weaponry, and put them down on the three worlds in strategic locations.
They were to dig in and form a last-ditch defense of the civilians—should it come
down to that. I even left them nanite injections and a steel chair on each planet—a
steel chair with plenty of tough straps. I figured “what the hell”. I’d started out
with less. If all else failed, maybe they could rebuild upon our ashes.

As this fight was destined to be fought primarily in space, I focused our factory
output on mass-producing more gunships. I had a stockpile of them anyway, more ships
that I had qualified pilots. Gleaning the fliers from the new recruits quickly changed
that, and we were able to loft over a hundred ships within a day or two. It wasn’t
enough, but it was better than nothing.

During this time of mad-scrambling and defense-building, I slept little and took pills
now and then to keep going. Marvin tried to come to me and whine about his plans now
and then, but I didn’t give him a moment of my time. I’d heard enough about his muddy
pools on Eden-6. I was sure they’d all dried out by now, or escaped into the oceans,
but really, didn’t much care.

It wasn’t until I had a weak moment that Marvin managed to corner me. I’d been training
the new pilots hard, and had just witnessed a doubly-fatal crash in space during maneuvers.
Two new pilots had slapped their ships together and managed to kill one another. As
a testament to the tough, barrel-like design of the ships, the vessels themselves
were reparable—after the smeared organic contents had been scraped out.

For some reason, this minor training tragedy struck me the wrong way. Maybe it was
the long hours, or a side effect of the pills I’d been taking to keep going. In any
case, I retired to my anteroom and poured myself a beer. Soon, I found I’d had several,
and I was feeling better, if less effective.

Marvin hit me up again at this precise moment. He played it smart this time, too.
He’d waited outside my chamber, no doubt stepping from tentacle to tentacle in his
impatience. When he finally peeped a single camera inside, he had another tentacle
underneath his camera. Dangling from this low-slung tentacle was a fresh squeeze bottle
of beer.

I eyed him and the beer, and I have to admit, it was love at first sight. I could
see the bottle was cold. There were traces of vapor coming off it, and the exterior
was covered in half-frozen droplets.

“Is that thing going to pop on me if I open it?” I asked.

“No sir. I’ve measured the chemical composition and the temperature precisely. If
you open it and take a big drink, it should keep from freezing solid. It will however,
form a slush-like material upon contact with the atmosphere.”

I nodded. It was just the way I liked a beer—especially one of these bitter-tasting
brews we had out here on the frontier.

“How did you get it to that precise temperature?”

“I pushed it out through the hull into space for several seconds. The hull nanites
can be most accommodating when you know how to talk to them.”

I grunted. If there was one thing Marvin knew, it was how to talk to other machines.
Knowing I would regret it, I reached out my gloved hand for the offered beverage.
Marvin scuttled forward, and somehow his entire hulking body was in my antechamber
with me in a moment. I had that slushy beer in my hands by that time, however, and
barely cared.

A bouquet of cameras studied me. “Are you enjoying your beverage, Colonel Riggs?”

I was, in fact, enjoying it very much. By the time I lowered the drink to regard him,
half the contents were missing. “What do you want?”

“To help Star Force. To defeat all our enemies. To expand the knowledge of science.”

I snorted. “You mean you want to indulge yourself in god-like fantasies. You know
what I think, Marvin? I think you enjoy toying with these Microbes so much as a form
of revenge. You like the idea of training tiny living beings to jump through hoops,
just as we do with the nanites. This is all repressed hostility!”

I barely knew what I was talking about, but none of my tirade seemed to affect Marvin
in any case.

“Colonel Riggs,” he said, “I have a proposal. What if I could increase the effective
size of your fleet by an order of magnitude within a week?”

“I don’t know if we have a week left.”

“Yes, but suppose we do? Would this not be helpful?”

“Of course it would,” I stared at him, and he stared back, quietly. I knew then that
he wasn’t going to say anything else. He had me hooked, and we both knew it.

I took another long drag on his frosty little beer. I took a deep breath, and sighed.
“Okay,” I said, “what do you have for me? I warn you Marvin, this better not be bullshit.”

“There is no bovine excrement involved, sir,” he said seriously. “What I propose is
to transform the Centaur volunteers under your command into effective space fighters.
With proper training and a modified kit, Centaur troops could fill a great volume
of space and do a great deal of damage to incoming enemy ships.”

I laughed aloud then. “You’re crazy. I always knew it, and here you come along with
fresh proof.”

“Could you clarify that statement, sir?”

I lifted a nanocloth-gloved hand and began ticking off the flaws in his plan. “First
of all, the damned mountain goats don’t like space. They don’t like ships, and they
don’t like flying. They won’t even submit to being nanotized.”

“Excellent points, sir. But what if I could change a portion of their psychology?”

I blinked at him. My glove was still up, ready to tick off my next point. I frowned.
“What? How?”

“By the application of a new organic agent I’ve been working on.”

“You’ve got something from the Microbes that will change their
brains?
”