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“Negative,” I said. “We’re knocked out for now.”

“What can I do to help, sir? Do you need rescue operations?”

“Negative. I want you to return immediately to your primary mission. Join your wingman
on the far side of the ring. Scout the Thor system and scan for any evidence of a
follow-up attack. If it’s coming, I need to know immediately.”

“Roger that, Colonel. Becker out.”

Becker left through the ring. We were left behind standing on a dark bridge lit only
by glowing emergency lamps. I felt helpless and increasingly pissed-off.

“These crawdads had better know what they’re doing,” I muttered. “‘Cause I’m not happy
standing around in my skivvies in the dark.”

“We should recall the rest of the local Fleet, Kyle,” Sandra said.

I shook my head. “Welter, report our status to the other commanders. Do not order
an emergency assistance mission—not yet. We don’t know their true goals. Maybe they
want
us to pull back from the Helios ring.”

Sandra frowned at me. “Are you suggesting the Lobsters are working with the Macros?
Or with Crow?”

“We simply don’t know.”

“But Kyle, how could they have made contact? They’re stuck in their own system, aren’t
they?”

I shook my head. “Remember Marvin’s experiment with ring-to-ring communications? He
was able to use the rings to transmit and relay messages. I’ve always suspected the
Macros could do it, and I know the Blues can. Maybe the Crustaceans have this technology,
too. Maybe they’ve been working treacherously under our noses.”

Marvin had only recently discovered the technology that allowed us to use the rings
to transmit interstellar messages at a speed that was effectively faster than light.
It was done by creating a mini-ring, using sympathetic quantum mechanics. It operated
using the principles of quantum entanglement. The important thing was the resulting
communication, which was essentially instantaneous over any distance, once two objects
were attuned.

Welter had been listening to us intently, and joined the conversation at this point.
“But sir, what could they gain from hitting us like this? They have to know we have
the strength to destroy them if we want to. We have far more ships and this station
alone is more deadly than anything they could throw at us.”

“Is it?” I asked grimly. “They just took it out with one simple ruse.”

“Yes, but we’ll get it back online within days sir, I’m sure of that.”

I wasn’t so confident, but I didn’t argue with him. “They may be in league with our
enemies. They must have a plan, something that will shock us just as much as this
strike did. Something to follow up on their advantage.”

They couldn’t argue about that. All of us were worried, wondering what underhanded
nightmare they had in store for us next.

After I’d managed to pull on some old-fashioned spare coveralls and bandage my hands,
I went below decks.

“Where are you going?” Sandra asked me sharply.

“To find Marvin.”

“Is he still alive?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.”

“I want to come with you.”

“I need you here on the bridge. Keep Welter alive and listen for the scouts. They
should come back and report soon. When they do, come find me and relay the message.”

She didn’t want to be left behind, but she didn’t argue. I found the hatch Marvin
had wriggled into and slid inside.

Without nanites, much of the battle station had been crippled. There wasn’t a major
system on the station that didn’t depend on Nano technology. Even many of the doors,
which normally operated by forming openings in the skin of nanites that formed temporary
walls, now resembled gaping wounds in the hull. At the base of each of these ragged
holes drifted eddies of dead nanites, looking like piles of ground-up metal.

Recalling that Marvin had said he was going to the generator chambers, I followed
the Jefferies tubes in that direction. As the big station was parked in orbit over
Hel, there was naturally little or no gravity. Our station had zones that provided
gravitational fields for convenience, but the Jefferies tubes weren’t on that list.
The tubes allowed access to rarely-visited regions of the vast structure that were
too remote and underutilized to warrant building a full-fledged corridor.

As I passed into the generator zone, I saw massive walls of shielding which the tubes
pierced. I nodded to myself and pressed ahead. Down here, the lights were dim and
few, but there was enough to see by. It felt cold now, as the heating systems had
failed and the freezing temperatures of the void seeped in.

I saw movement ahead of me, something dark that slid away with a rasping sound. The
noise reminded me of a steel brush dragging across a concrete floor.

“Marvin?” I called as calmly as I could. “I know you’re here. Talk to me.”

“Why have you come, Colonel Riggs?”

“To talk to you, Marvin.”

“About what?”

“About exactly how you knew what the Crustacean ship was going to do.”

Marvin hesitated. I could see him now, in the dim light—or rather I could see one
of his cameras peeping out. He was hiding around a corner of a tube that teed off
to the right. I crept a few feet closer and gathered my feet under me, tucking my
knees to my chest. There was no room to stand here, but I could squat under the low
roof.

“Are you armed, Colonel?” Marvin asked.

I glanced down at the laser pistol in my hand. I’d taken it along without a thought
when I’d abandoned my limp flight suit back on the bridge.

“Yes, I am.”

“Might I ask why, sir?”

“I’m a Star Force marine, and we just suffered a serious attack. I’d have to be a
fool to wander around the station unarmed.”

There was a bit more shuffling and rasping ahead of me. I saw shadowy, tentacle-like
shapes move into view, then retreat. Two cameras floated into sight, their activation
lights glowing in the darkness.

“I suppose that makes sense. In answer to your original question, I didn’t know what
the Crustacean ship was going to do. I simply took logical precautions.”

“Like hiding down here? Inside a shielded area?”

“Exactly.”

“Okay, do you know what kind of attack just hit us?”

“I suspect it was an electromagnetic pulse—a powerful one. It has damaged most of
the ship’s systems.”

I realized then the extent of Marvin’s guilt. He’d known what was coming—or at least
had expected it—and had said nothing to us.

“Indeed it has,” I said in a surprisingly calm voice. I knew it was best not to show
Marvin how angry you were when you wanted to get information out of him. He was much
more likely to answer you squarely if he thought he had nothing to worry about. Right
now, I was boiling inside. I wanted to dismantle him and scatter him in pieces in
an orbit bound for Eden’s bright yellow star. But I didn’t want him to know that.
He would not be able to talk about anything else if he understood my true mood.

When I could think clearly and continue in an even voice, I asked him another question
that didn’t directly revolve around his guilt in this matter: “Why do you think they
did it? Why do you think they attacked us?”

“To destroy us, to drive us from the Eden system.”

“Logical. But they can’t hope to defeat us on their own. I have therefore deduced
that they might have allies in this situation.”

“Agreed. I’ve calculated the probability at higher than ninety-two percent.”

My right hand twitched and tightened on my laser pistol. I had no shielding, no autoshades
to protect my eyes. But if I aimed it at him at this close range and simply slapped
my left hand over my eyes, I figured I could burn him down without losing my vision.
It was hard to think of doing anything else. But I knew I needed information more
than I needed revenge, so I pressed ahead.

“So, let’s assume they have allies. They’ve aligned themselves with a foreign power,
such as the Macros.”

Marvin rustled and slid his bulk closer. I saw three cameras now. A fourth wandered,
looking in various directions down the tubes. I hoped this indicated only a natural
curiosity rather than a search for an escape route.

“It could be the Macros,” Marvin said. “But the signal didn’t travel in that direction.”

I frowned. “What signal?”

“The one they sent through the rings recently. I’d been meaning to tell you about
it, but I was worried you would suspect I’d caused it somehow and remove me from my
passion.”

“Your
passion
? You’re passionately interested in fooling with the rings as communications relays
now?”

“Of course. Imagine the possibilities! The rings go on and on for an unknowable distance
in every direction, a chain of new worlds, peoples, cultures. I find them fascinating.”

Some months ago, Marvin had figured out how to use the rings to transmit messages.
It didn’t seem surprising they could do so, after all, they were capable of transmitting
something as bulky as a spaceship, so why not a use them as a repeater for a radio
signal that could hop from system to system? The application of the technology seemed
so obvious that it was staggering we hadn’t seen it before.

At the time, however, I had no time for experimentation with the ring-to-ring transmissions.
Every hand had been needed working on getting the battle station operational. If an
enemy fleet had arrived in the meantime, everything else we’d done would have been
a complete waste of time.

But facts had caught up with me. Apparently, as best I could gather from Marvin’s
hinting, my enemies had been using the rings to transmit messages and Marvin hadn’t
seen fit to tell me about it.

“So, let me see if I have this scenario hammered down in my mind,” I said, changing
position so my butt and back curved with the wall of the tube behind me. It wasn’t
as comfortable as sitting a chair, but it was better than hunkering forward or crouching
on my knees. “You overheard messages between the Crustaceans and the Macros—which
you monitored but did not report. Then, when the Crustacean Ambassador came in to
dock, you feared for your safety, and fled to this region of the station where an
EMP blast couldn’t destroy your nanite-packed brain.”

 Marvin’s cameras studied me. “There are occasional truths in your account, but as
a whole, it is peppered with falsehoods. I didn’t know it was the Crustaceans and
the Macros who were conversing via the rings, therefore I’m not guilty of consorting
with the enemy in any way. I believed I’d detected some kind of traffic, and was performing
a detailed analysis when the crisis came to a head.”

“You deny that you knew this attack was coming, and the form it would take?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then why did you retreat to the one area that would be immune to this form of attack
and hide here, telling us nothing of your suspicions about the origins of the messages?
Telling us nothing, in fact, about the existence of these messages.”

“My actions were based upon concerns that were very likely false. They were merely
precautions that turned out to be accurate by chance. I had no desire to trouble you,
my human allies, with my idle fantasies. There was no gain in doing so for me. If
I’d been wrong, you would have lowered your estimate of my usefulness as a Star Force
officer.”

“But you turned out to be right, and you could have prevented a lot of damage!”

“Really? What would you have done, Colonel Riggs, if I had warned you? What if I’d
explained the threat as the Crustacean Ambassador approached? Would you have shot
him down? Based on a hunch from a single officer?”

I thought about it and shrugged. “Probably not,” I admitted. “I would have let them
come in, hoping for peace.”

“Exactly.”

“So, that’s why you’re hiding down here, to avoid the blast? If so, you can come out
now. The enemy ship has been destroyed.”

“You misunderstand my actions. I have a cache of valuables down here. Could you help
me retrieve them? I’m having difficulties.”

I scooted forward warily. Part of me couldn’t help but wonder if Marvin had changed
sides. He’d done so in the past, and I knew I could never
fully
trust him. But what I saw him struggling with when I rounded the T section of the
tube and stared downward made me smile.

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

There were barrels of fresh nanites down there, jammed into the tubes. There were
at least two dozen large containers. The nanites were alive and well, I could tell
by looking into the glittering mass of them pressed up against the tiny observation
window. I grabbed a handle, and together, Marvin and I pulled the first one loose
and dragged it up into the unshielded portions of the station.

As we worked together, I pondered Marvin and his alien patterns of thought. I considered
lecturing him on working together with one’s allies, on the necessity of honorable
dealings and honesty. But would such a lecture sink in? Was it even a good idea to
try? He’d always had his own way of dealing with humanity, and he’d always been invaluable
in a fight.