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while that they really didn’t know what we were going up against,” I said.
    “Maybe they’ve attacked this star system before, and gotten their butts kicked,” Gorski suggested.
    “Maybe. What I did get out of them is the stations are in fixed orbits, so our relative velocities shouldn’t be too huge. I got the feeling that they weren’t too well-armed, either.”
    “I hope they aren’t,” Gorski said. “I don’t see how this small force could do much if they are strongly defended.”
    “I’m sure the Macros have taken that into account,” I lied smoothly. I reflected that I’d gotten better at lying to my subordinates to keep their morale up. Internally, I figured the odds were good this was an insane suicide mission. After all, hadn’t they thrown their own ships at Earth at times, heedless of our defenses? The only time they’d hesitated was when they had their massed fleets. Then, they’d known the penalty for failure would be high, and they’d blinked. That was the weak moment that had allowed me to negotiate the peace agreement between Earth and the machines.
    Pushing negative thoughts out of my head, I found I still didn’t like some of the assumptions we had to make while building these assault ships. I’d tried to get as much out of the Macros as I could over the last day or so during a number of short sessions with Macro Command. I’d asked about the exact count of the enemy targets, the size, relative velocity and armament. I hadn’t gotten much. There would be somewhere around ten to one hundred target space stations. There may, or may not be enemy ships defending them. The stations may or may not have defensive weaponry. It was hopeless.
    We went back to work fine tuning the propulsion systems. They were critical elements. If they didn’t have enough power we might take days to reach the enemy target and be sitting ducks in space. Or, we might be going too fast relative to our target at the moment of launch and be unable to brake down to a reasonable speed before running into the enemy.
    We struggled with the problem of predicting relative velocities. What would we do if we had to slow down to invade an enemy structure, not speed up? In space, if a ship was flying toward an enemy station and you wanted to dock with it—or in this case, invade it—you had to slow down your approach at the end, rather than continuing to accelerate. When they fired us out of this invasion ship, we would already be moving at the same speed as the ship that had launched us, just like an object tossed out of a car window on a highway. If the attacking ship was moving toward the target at say, 50,000 knots, then an assault ship launched from it was going to hit a stationary target at 50,000 knots, even without using its engines at all. At that point, our ships would effectively be missiles, not an invasion force. Missiles with soft payloads of dead marines.
    If we encountered this situation, the assault ships would have to brake hard, using their engines to slow down to a speed that would allow a safe landing on the surface of the target.
    “In the worst case,” Gorski said as we reviewed our latest design, “I figure we could turn the main repellers around a hundred and eighty degrees and use the main unit for braking if necessary.”
     “Maybe we should make a single large propulsion unit, and make it mobile,” I said. “We could forget about all the smaller repellers, and use only one unit for maximum power. That way, we could direct it at any angle and get maximum thrust for braking once we are in close.”
    Gorski sucked in air between his teeth, making a hissing sound. He did that a lot, and it was irritating, but I didn’t complain. Most programmers were irritating people, and I included myself in that category. You had to ignore minor oddball habits to get good work out of your dev team. I once knew a guy who had to snap himself with rubber bands to work effectively. Snap, snap, snap. No one