The Dead Sun(Star Force Series #9)

-12-



Our missiles met with the enemy’s first barrage in open space. They destroyed one another in a cascade of ghostly fire. In the airless void between planets, nuclear explosions are odd, glimmering affairs. There’s no mushroom cloud, no fireball. Each release of energy resembles a cold-looking puff of light and energy as if tiny stars are being born, then winking out a fraction of a second later. As our missiles struck theirs, hundreds of infant stars were born and quickly died away as we watched.


“Some of their birds got through,” Jasmine said. “Seventy-four of them. I’m surprised they haven’t released another wave.”

“They plan to get in close before hitting us again,” I told her. “Why waste good missiles when they know their main guns can shred us soon enough? They’ll save their ammo for the killing strikes.”

I realized my shoulders were hunched, and that I must have looked defeated. I made an effort to straighten up. I knew the staffers were watching me. I had to look firmly in command and confident. Slumping over the command table at a bad moment wasn’t acceptable. Looking cool when I didn’t feel like it was one of the hardest parts of my job.

“Give me an update on Marvin,” I said to Jasmine.

“He’s not responding to any transmissions. He can hear us, but he’s running with radio silence at his end.”

“What about a ring-to-ring transmission system? Surely, he took one with him. The enemy can’t listen in on that.”

“He did, but the Macro ships are jamming all the rings now. We’re left with radio. If he transmits, he’ll give away his position.”

I nodded in understanding. There was no way Marvin was going to answer us while scooting away on a small, vulnerable target under enemy guns. I couldn’t blame him for that.

“All right then. How long until the Macros get into range?”

“Eleven hours and forty-nine—”

“Colonel,” Admiral Newcome spoke up beside me. He sounded as if he couldn’t stand by quietly any longer.

“What is it, Newcome?”

“We should launch another attack now. Give our missiles time to get up to high velocity and slam into them. We can at least make a good accounting of ourselves before they catch us.”

“We don’t have a lot of hardware left. I’d rather hold onto it until we get in closer.”

Newcome nodded curtly and stepped away from me. I could tell he didn’t like my answer at all, but he wasn’t going to say so. As an ex-Imperial officer, he was used to being shut down by superiors. In a way, I wished more of my regular staffers had his respect for the chain of command. We Star Force types were still less than one hundred percent professional. We were more like some kind of revolutionary outfit full of personalities and shouting.

I could now see why dictators since time immemorial—whether they were called kings, presidents or emperors—had often executed their noisiest subordinates. The thought occurred to me with regularity these days and each time it took an effort to push it away. Stress, high stakes and total power were a heady combination. Newcome seemed to appreciate this. He never pushed his luck.

Hours crawled by. Sometimes, having a finite amount of time to wait seemed to make events happen more slowly. This was one of those times. But at last, there was news to report when the enemy was no more than three hours behind us.

“Sir,” Jasmine said, “we have new contacts.”

I frowned at the screens. I was looking for a fresh wave of missiles or new Macros at the ring, but I was looking in the wrong direction and for the wrong colored contacts. The new images were friendlies, and I finally spotted them blinking in green at the Eden ring.

“Who’s that?”

“Remember the carrier force we left to supervise the Blues? They’ve come to our aid.”

“Hmm,” I said, uncertain as to how I should respond to this. I’d never ordered the carrier to come to the Thor System. “Open a channel to the commander.”

“Done.”

“Is this Captain…?” I asked, but I couldn’t recall the fellow’s name. I looked at Jasmine and snapped my fingers.

“Captain Grass,” she said quietly, putting her hand over her microphone.

Grass? I froze for a second, then winced in recollection. This was the single large ship in our fleet that was commanded by a non-human. Like most Centaurs, he had a name only his own people could relate to. Almost all of them were named after the sky, or grass, rivers, honor, fur, etc. This wasn’t as strange in their native language as it was to us. They had over a hundred names for grass, each of which connoted some delicate variance, such as the way it rippled when wind ran over a field. When their names went through our translation systems, they all came out as “Grass” no matter what other nuances there might be for them.

The bigger problem, besides the name, was the fact that the commander was a Centaur. I’d had a lot of trouble with Centaur officers as ground troops. Now, I had an untested alien captain coming to my rescue in command of a major ship.

I’d put him in command of the ship as a diplomatic gesture. It had seemed rude to everyone that the Centaurs were included in our alliance, and were integrated into our ranks, but weren’t given commanding roles. To show we weren’t prejudiced—when, of course, we really were—I’d placed Captain Grass in command of the biggest ship in the quietest system in the Empire. And then, I’d promptly forgotten about him.

“Captain Grass,” I said, putting on a welcoming tone. “This is Colonel Kyle Riggs.”

“I stand ready to charge, Colonel!” came the reply.

I paused with my mouth open for a full second. “Charge? Charge where?”

“Toward the enemy on your flank! The enemy is right behind you, sir!”

I heaved a sigh. Centaurs weren’t subtle warriors. Most of what we called “tactics”, they saw as dishonorable trickery. Honor, to them, was a straight out charge into the teeth of the enemy. By dint of superior numbers and ferocity, the best would win. They understood the concept of being beaten and driven into submission, but only after a bloody defeat. To them, my retreat in the face of the enemy without a fight was baffling.

“I haven’t given the order to charge yet,” I said.

There was a moment of delay, probably due to confusion on the part of Captain Grass.

“Are your engines operating properly, Colonel?” he asked finally. “I see that they are…you’re under power… I can only imagine that your sensors are out of operation. I will render assistance transmitting the coordinates of their fleet to your systems. You’re headed in the wrong direction, sir!”

This was exactly why I’d never promoted any other Centaur officers to the rank of captain. I’d done so in Captain Grass’ case, assuming he’d remain stationed in the Eden System indefinitely, to fight the Blues if they dared to reappear, or to blunt the attack of a new fleet of Macros. His ship was old and unimportant, so if he blew it up, it didn’t really matter.

But today was different. I had to win this fight, if only to stay breathing. And here was Captain Grass, doing exactly what I’d imagined he would do when faced by a real live enemy: revving himself up to charge against overwhelming odds. He naturally expected me to join the charge with him, hell-bent on death and glory. The only problem was I didn’t want to kill myself just to look tough in his eyes.

How does one explain tactical actions to a being that barely comprehends them? I opted for my usual approach: I’d give him stern orders, and then do whatever I needed to do. I decided to play on his defensive instincts as part of the home guard. In Centaur herds, when a war band took to the fields they always left behind a few rams to protect the young in springtime.

“Captain Grass, you will stay at your position guarding the ring to Eden. The machines know nothing of honor. Do not let them slip past you and slaughter our young as they frolic under an open sky!”


“Don’t worry, Colonel! We will paint the skies with our blood as if it were grass. We will never allow the machines to sneak past us like burrowing creatures in the night. If the honor of the river were between the two of us, Colonel, I would drink with you in this moment!”

The exact meaning of his words was lost on me, but he seemed happy so I went with the spirit of things.

“Right!” I shouted enthusiastically. “Hold your ground as if it were the highest hill under the blazing sun! Riggs out.”

I made slashing motions to Jasmine, who quickly disconnected the channel. Even as she did so, the Centaur began a new windy speech about honor and rivers. Captain Grass seemed to be big on rivers.

“Are they holding at the ring as they said they would?” I asked.

She tapped up a closer image, and I could see the carrier task force was slowing and retreating back toward the ring.

“They’re taking up their position as ordered,” she said.

“They were about to charge, weren’t they? Without orders, as usual.”

“To them, orders are subservient to honor,” she said.

“Yeah, great,” I said. “Where’s Marvin now?”

“He’s in orbit around the white star. He’s been there for a couple of hours. We have no emission readings from the sun station. I don’t know what he’s doing. For all we know, he’s hiding in there.”

I frowned, eyeing the screens and the holotank. There was no information there, but I had a hunch.

“No,” I said. “He’s a sneaky robot. He’s up to something. If we’re lucky, it will be something helpful.”

After the Centaurs had settled down, we only had the enemy to watch. The contacts crawled after us on the screens. Each was a tiny triangle of red light trailed by a gently fading contrail that glimmered away to nothing. There were a lot of red triangles converging upon our position—far too many of them.

When there was less than an hour to go something good finally happened.

“Sir?” Jasmine asked suddenly. “I think—I think one of the enemy ships has suffered a malfunction.”

My eyes glazed over from staring at the creeping doom for so long.

There had been things to do, of course. I’d ordered additional anti-missile turrets to be installed all over our fantails. The enemy missiles were only a few minutes behind us. I wasn’t too worried about them as there were only seventy-four of them left, and they were coming in pretty slowly in relative speed. They’d been cruising for hours, and we’d been accelerating trying to outrun them. I was confident our ship-based anti-missile systems would take them all out.

What worried me were the enemy main gun turrets. They were going to be in range an hour from now, and we didn’t have any effective defense against them.

Jasmine’s comment woke me up, however, and I eyed the screens closely. There were so many hundreds of triangles it took me a moment to figure out what she was trying to show me. Jasmine had helpfully popped a pulsing circle around the spot.

As I watched, the contact’s movement slowed, falling behind the rest.

“Maybe that new engine of theirs can run out of gas,” I said excitedly. “Let’s keep an eye on—where’d it go?”

What had been a slowing triangle now became an arc of fading light. It vanished from my screen.

“It’s gone, sir,” Jasmine said. “It just isn’t there anymore, according to our sensors. I have several probes out there relaying data to us from multiple angles. I’m certain that ship just disappeared.”

I began to grin. “Put Marvin’s position up on the screens,” I said.

“Marvin’s position?”

“The sun factory near Loki. Put it up.”

She tapped away, and after a few seconds a new contact appeared. It was green and circular, and it was right where I thought it was.

“Another ship has been destroyed just now…I think,” Jasmine said.

I watched as a second red triangle winked out.

“What’s going on, Colonel?” Newcome asked me. He’d come over from the defensive operations team to join us at the command table.

“Marvin is what’s going on,” I said with confidence. “See his position relative to the Macros? They’re too far away and going too fast at this point to turn on him. He knows they can’t change course now. They’ve been pursuing us for too long.”

“I don’t understand, sir,” Newcome said, frowning at the screen. “Are you saying your robot is destroying their ships?”

“Yes, of course. He’s held his fire until this moment, probably for hours, waiting until they were too far past him to turn around and take him out. Now he’s zapping them, taking them out one at a time.”

Before I’d finished explaining it, another ship vanished.

“I see!” Newcome said, his big blue eyes brightening. “This is excellent news.”

Newcome began poring over the data intensely. I had to like him for one thing: the man understood numbers. He knew that rates of fire, ranges and relative velocities often meant the difference between life and death in any space battle. He had a calculator up on the screen and was tapping at the numbers and connecting a small program to various changing data points by swiping and moving them.

“He’s knocking them out very fast,” Newcome said. “That first salvo must have been a near miss. The first ship struck was hit in the engine region. After that, every strike has been amidships, destroying the target. He’s taking out a ship every forty-nine seconds, by my estimates.”

“Recharge and retargeting time,” I said, nodding. “Gravity weapons always take time to cycle and fire again.”

“The enemy is taking evasive action, Colonel,” Jasmine warned me.

I could see them now, splitting apart and dodging.

“It won’t save them, but it may buy them more time,” I said. “What I want to know is whether Marvin can destroy them all before they reach firing range on this fleet?”

Newcome and Jasmine worked on this. I was surprised that Newcome came up with a definitive answer first.

“Negative, Colonel. They will lose at least two thirds of their ships, but not all of them. They will come within range with…I’d say about a hundred and thirty vessels.”

I frowned. We only had thirty, even if one of them was a carrier.

“That’s not good enough,” I said. “Launch every missile we have. Put them out in pulses, but give them a dozen targets each. If one blows up, they should be programmed to automatically target the next one without too much overkill.”

Almost before I finished explaining what I wanted, I felt the ship shudder under me. I knew that our birds were flying. Every few seconds, the ship shuddered again.

Admiral Newcome gave me a crooked smile. “Not conserving your ammo today, eh sir?”

I smiled back. “This is our chance. They don’t even know what’s hitting them. If we can chew them up all at once, slamming them from every angle, we might pull this little fleet out of the system without losing a single ship.”

Newcome’s expression indicated he thought the odds of that were slim, but he did look a lot happier than he had ten minutes earlier. Hell, we all did.

“Unload the transports and form up the fighters into strike groups,” I ordered. “The marines and fighters will go in right after the missile strikes. Set up the timing on that, Jasmine. Don’t let our missiles blow up our attacking troops.”


“Working on it, sir.”

The next hour zoomed by. When you’re doing something effective in battle, and you think your odds of winning are pretty good, time flies. Their ships kept winking out, one at a time. When half of them had been destroyed, we were all smiles. Sure, it was still two hundred to thirty, but they were being annihilated at a horrific rate.

Jasmine caught my attention with a frown at that point, however. “Sir…I don’t understand it, but the rings are back online. They’ve stopped jamming them. We’re in connection with Star Force again.”

I hooted. “We must have gotten their jamming ship.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. They were all jamming. Every last one of them. But for some reason…”

She trailed off and put her hand to her headset. Her frown deepened.

“I’m getting a channel request,” she said. “They’re asking for you, sir.”

“What? The Macros are calling me begging to surrender? Request denied!”

I said these words with glee in my heart and a grin on my face. For years, the Macros had been slamming the phone down on my calls and pleas for mercy and diplomacy. It felt great to give them the finger for once. They were all going to burn this time.

But Jasmine was still frowning; she still had her hand cupped over her earpiece. She shook her pretty head.

“No sir,” she said. “It’s not the Macros calling us. It’s the Blues.”

I stared at her for a second, and my face fell. I turned my gaze back to the screens. Yes, we were winning. Yes, we were tearing apart the Macro ships like toys. And apparently, someone had heard about it, and didn’t like it. The Macros had called up their collective mommies begging for help against the big bad man.

The question was: what could the Blues do to stop me?