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“But is it working?”

I glanced at her. “You know it isn’t. They haven’t even responded to our channel requests.”

“They’re clouds, Kyle. Maybe they don’t even feel your projectiles. Maybe they just
fall through their bodies like raindrops.”

“You could be right. I’d hoped this would work.”

She looked at me fixedly. “What’s your next move? Are you going to back off or double
down?”

“What do you think?” I asked, staring down at the murky world. I didn’t meet her eye.

“Lord help us if you’re wrong on this one, Kyle,” she said quietly, and left the room.

I stared down at the falling blue-white stars for another ten minutes. The Blues never
answered, they ignored us completely. Finally, I opened the command channel.

“Cease bombardment,” I said loudly, “reload your cannons with fusion warheads. Commence
bombardment, starting at the nine thousand mile depth and proceeding deeper. I want
a better spread this time—ten miles apart, with a slower rate of fire. Let’s not have
our shells going off too close and destroying one another.”

No one said anything, but the sparks stopped falling on Eden-12 for a few minutes.
Then, finally, I saw a new kind of activity. Flashing projectiles fired downward,
leaving trails of orange plasma behind them until they vanished into the atmosphere.
We’d built these from our own mines. Each was a small nuclear device loaded on a short
range platform. They were slow and inaccurate, but they didn’t have to hit the target
squarely. They were designed for saturation bombing on the cheap.

Jasmine came to visit me next. She stood behind me, without saying anything for a
moment. Then the flashes began. Deep down, inside the cloud layers, the planet brightened
suddenly. Then more bright, circular spots began to appear in rapid succession. The
top layer of the atmosphere stirred and bubbled slightly in response.

“If you’re here to talk me out of this, you’re going to be disappointed,” I told her.

“I know,” she said. “But we’re killing them, Kyle. You know that don’t you? We must
be hitting something—someone. They’re biotics, not machines. They should be our allies.”

“I agree, they should be. But they’ve never cooperated with us. They’re a proud people,
proud to the point of arrogance. But I can’t believe they care so little about their
own existence that they’re willing to—”

At that moment, my helmet squawked. “Kyle? They’re answering our call.”

“Ceasefire, I repeat, all ships, ceasefire! Sandra, open the channel.”

“Open.”

The orange streaks and flashes continued for another ten seconds. It was hard to turn
off the engines of war with perfect precision. Now that they were talking, I found
each falling bomb painful to watch. I winced as they streaked, glimmered, then flashed.

“I’m known as
Empathy
,” said the Blue who had hailed us. “I’ve been chosen to speak to the barbarians.”

“Empathy?” I asked. “Are you in charge of diplomacy for the Blues?”

“You’re concepts lack meaning.”

“Do you speak for your planet?”

“I feel my world. I feel the sea around me and sense its unease.”

I rolled my eyes and decided to try another approach. “All right,” I said. “Do you
wish the bombardment to stop?”

“Yes.”

“Good. We agree on something. We have the same goal. Now, let me tell you how we can
achieve that goal. You must stop the approaching Macro fleet. You must stop it from
traveling through the ring from the neighboring system to this one. Do you understand
me?”

“No.”

“What part do you not get?”

“I find it disorienting to interact with a being I can’t touch.”

“Yeah, well I find it annoying to be probed by your wind-fingers, too. We all have
to adapt in order to survive. Do you understand what you must do to stop the bombardment?”

There was a silence. After ten seconds or so, I was worried we’d lost the connection.
I had a horrible thought: what if one of the shockwaves from my bombs had finally
reached this thoughtful cloud and blow it to mist?

But then Empathy came back on the line. “Why must we adapt in order to survive? We
have made very few changes to our physical structure for millions of years.”

I grimaced. “It was an idiom. What I mean is that you must change your behavior in
order to survive this attack. We will stop bombing if you get the Macros to reverse
course.”

“We can’t sense the approaching machines you speak of. Something is wrong with our
sensory systems.”

I thought about that, and turned to Jasmine, who was still standing there beside me
in the dimly lit observatory. “Go get Marvin to shut down the jamming of the Thor
ring. I think they’re saying they can use sensors through it.”

Her eyes were big, brown and glittered as she turned and ran out of the room. She
was talking into her com link in an urgent, hushed voice.

I turned back to the planet under my boots again. It looked quiet down there now.
I wondered for a few seconds how many of them I’d killed. I hoped the number wasn’t
too horrible. I told myself I’d done what I had to do. I told myself billions of Centaurs
and thousands of humans would have been lost, at the very least, if I hadn’t forced
them to talk.

But I couldn’t quite buy my own bullshit. Not yet. They hadn’t shown me they could
stop the Macros. For all I knew, I was abusing a helpless people who had collaborated
with the enemy, but who could not do what I was demanding of them. It was a grim situation
in that case. I hoped I wasn’t using enhanced interrogation techniques on a subject
who truly didn’t have the information I was demanding.

“Try to use your sensors now,” I said. “The rings should work and allow you to operate
them normally.”

There was another delay—a long one. At last, Empathy came back on the line. “You have
surprised us.”

“The Macros have surprised us as well.”

“We did not think your technology was sufficient to manipulate the rings.”

“Right, well, we’re full of surprises. I said I would bomb you if the Macros didn’t
halt their attack. You should be able to see now that they’re still approaching and
in fact are about to come through the ring into this system. We aren’t sure we can
defeat their fleet this time.”

“We doubt that you can prevail. We’re transmitting all your tactics, force positions,
levels of readiness and—”

“Let me get this straight,” I shouted, “you’re sending all that intel to the Macros
right now? Don’t you understand we will retaliate? We will let our bombs fall deeper,
and annihilate your planet? Stop those transmissions immediately!”

“You are a demanding being.”

“Have you stopped the transmissions or not?”

“Yes.”

I smiled. I felt this might just work. They’d finally responded to a threat and done
what I’d asked them to do. It was like training a housecat. I now wondered even more
seriously if they’d ever told the Macros to stop. From my perspective, their message
to the machines appeared to have been something like: “take it slow, danger ahead.”

I checked with Marvin, who was monitoring ring traffic. He confirmed that there had
been a burst of activity, and now nothing. I nodded to myself. Better and better.
I’d have these tabby-cats leaping through hoops before I was done.

“Now,” I said, “in order to keep the ceasefire, in order to save yourselves, you must
tell the Macros to turn around.”

“What, exactly, do you propose that we tell them?”

I squinted down at the soupy world below my boots. “Tell them to retreat.”

“They do not follow our commands.”

“I know you’ve been talking to them. I know you have an active conspiracy with them,
and they have been responding to your transmissions.”

“Yes, this is true.”

“Then tell me, if they don’t take your orders, what is the nature of your relationship
with the Macros?”

“Capitulation. Obedience. Subjugation.”

My mouth sagged open. I stared down at Eden-12, at a loss. Everything instantly made
sense—in a horrible, twisted way. When I’d threatened them, I’d been under the impression
they were calling for help, that they were in an alliance with the machines. Apparently,
I’d misinterpreted the situation. Ask any of my staff, it was far from the first time.
But on this occasion, I’d been way, way off.

“I’m asking for confirmation,” I said. “You are taking orders from the Macros, not
giving them?”

“Yes.”

“They are your allies, your overlords? When did this arrangement begin?”

“When you destroyed our defensive fleet.”

“The Nano ships?” I asked, thinking about it. “Let me see if I have this straight,
you called the Nano ships back to cover your home planet. But we lured them away and
they were destroyed by the Macros. After that, you swore obedience to the Macros.
But why?”

“Because an alien species had invaded our system, and we were helpless against these
unknown barbarians.”

I squinted my eyes and tightened my mouth into a line. I felt like a true barbarian
at that moment. A Vandal, or a Visigoth, perhaps. Maybe even a Hun. I’d scared the
Blues into an alliance with the Macros. Then, just as they’d feared, I threatened
them and bombed them. What had been their reaction? To call for help, of course, from
the only other regional power: the Macros.

All of this wouldn’t be so bad, except that I’d counted on the Blues being able to
stop the Macros for me. I’d bet the farm on it—all the farms. But they weren’t in
control of the machines. Instead, they were just another race of terrified servants.
All I’d managed to do was pushed them further into the arms of my enemy.

“How the hell do I get out of this one?” I asked the universe.

The stars and the chocolate-swirl planet beneath me made no response. I was on my
own.

-32-

The bombardment had long since halted. I’d been floating in orbit over Eden-12, the
homeworld of the mysterious Blues, uncertain about what to do next. I’d talked to
them at length, trying to understand their point of view, their capabilities, and
most importantly, their leverage with the Macros.

The results weren’t positive. They didn’t have much in the way of a military. The
Macros and Nanos
were
their military forces. It seemed they were a cerebral lot, and didn’t like to get
their aerogel hands dirty. Direct conflict was a turn-off for them. They didn’t even
enjoy talking to other species, much less fighting with them. They’d built their terrible
machines to do that sort of thing for them. But that hands-off, send-in-the-drones
approach hadn’t worked out as well as they’d hoped, obviously.

“What kind of deal have they cut with the Macros?” Jasmine asked me. She’d come to
stand in the observatory again, where I was pacing on frosty glass and thinking hard.

“A trade of sorts. They’ve been providing intel to the Macros in return for neutrality.”

“We have to get leverage.”

“Yes, but how?”

“I can see a way to threaten the Blues,” she said. “Besides bombing them, I mean.”

“Tell me,” I said.

She looked down to gather her thoughts, frowning at the huge planet under our feet.
I let her think quietly, watching her in the half-dark. The only light in the observatory
came up from the planet, reflected from the distant star of the Eden system. It illuminated
her face in an unusual way. Her hair was down in places. None of us were keeping our
kits perfect, not even Jasmine. It was a clear indicator we were all greatly stressed.
Still, it made her look softer somehow, more vulnerable. I felt an urge to comfort
her—which I resisted with difficulty. Touching Jasmine had gotten me into plenty of
trouble with Sandra in the past.

“We could tell the Macros that the Blues fed them false information,” she said. “We
could transmit recordings of what they’ve told us today. The Macros won’t care if
the Blues did it because we forced them to. They don’t care about circumstances.”

I nodded slowly, frowning. “It might work. The Macros would then mark them down for
death again. That doesn’t mean they’ll give us an alliance, however, just for ratting
out the Blues.”

“No, no,” she said, stepping closer. “I didn’t mean we should actually
tell
the Macros that. What if we just
threaten
to do so?”

I smiled. “I like that. Leverage. Okay, that gives us leverage over the Blues. It
is somewhat redundant, in that we are standing in orbit over their homeworld, and
we’ve already been bombarding them—killing them.”

“What else can we do?”

It was my turn to think along those lines. It’d been a few years since I’d done any
dealings like this, and trickery with the Macros was always dangerous, but sometimes
fantastically rewarding. If you could convince their computer brains to do something,
they tended to do it absolutely. Peace and war, due to their lack of lingering emotions
on the subject, these two states could be flipped on and off. You just had to discover
the location of the switch.