The Dead Sun(Star Force Series #9)

-19-



After my speech was over and I walked off the stage, I think the only person on the planet who wasn’t smiling, shaking my hand and congratulating me was Jasmine. She looked worried. I knew why, of course, but I pretended not to.

“Hey, honey, how’d you like the speech?” I asked her.

“It was definitely…uplifting.”

“Great! Glad you loved it. Everyone seemed to. You know, I wasn’t even quite sure what I was going to say until I got up there. Ah sure, I had my teleprompter, but I can’t stick to those things. After a while, I got on a roll and went with it. Turns out my instincts were good this time.”

“Kyle,” she said, frowning, “what exactly did you mean when you said—”

“Look,” I said, leaning close and lowering my voice. “It was just a speech. Every politician makes big promises. People expect that! Especially when you’re up on stage delivering bad news. For starters, I gave them something to fear, and when you show people their approaching doom, you have to give them hope, too. I showed them terror approaching from the skies, then I offered up the light of salvation a moment later. How could I have done anything else?”

“Yes…but the details concern me. I heard you promise the world that you would fly out there and destroy the Macros personally. Don’t tell me I didn’t hear that.”

I looked her in the eyes and decided to stop trying to bullshit my way past her.

“I’m calling a meeting with my personal staff to discuss this. You’re on the list. Be there in thirty minutes.”

I walked off toward the transport shuttles. I could feel her eyes following me.

I knew what she was thinking, and I knew she wasn’t happy. Like many women who are attracted to brave, dangerous guys, she’d finally landed one. The trouble was, the moment she had me, she wanted to change the very behavior that made her want to mate with me in the first place. She was going to have my child now, and she wanted me to play it safe from here on out.


I understood how she was feeling, but I was going to have to disappoint her. We weren’t living in peaceful times. Not yet, anyway. If the Macros had stayed on their side of the ring for the next half-century, maybe we could have all enjoyed a golden era of peace. But they hadn’t.

At the meeting, everyone was smiling except for Jasmine. She had her arms crossed, and she didn’t look at me.

I let out a tiny sigh then tried to ignore her.

“We have to hit the Macros as soon as possible,” I said, starting off the meeting with a bang.

They blinked and quieted. I’d taken them all by surprise. Even Jasmine was looking at me again, but her arms were still crossed.

“Hit them?” she asked. “But their fleet is so far out. What are we going to hit them with? We’ve been planning a build-up I know, but—”

“No,” I said. “That’s not what I meant. I’m not talking about the fleet they have crawling slowly toward us in normal space. I’m talking about flying out to the Thor System. We have to breach the ring we’ve never managed to breach. Once through, we have to destroy their base, their production facilities—everything. And we have to do this immediately, using only the ships we have now.”

“What?” Jasmine asked. “Why? We only have two months before—”

“No, we don’t,” I interrupted her. “We have two months to build up our defenses here at home. But we have to take our entire fleet out there, fight our way through the ring, destroy everything and return before that time has passed. We’ll need the ships back here in our home system to face the Macros when they reach Earth. The trip out to the ring and back will take nearly a month as it is, plus whatever time it takes to clean out their bases. We fly tonight.”

They fell silent. In this quiet moment, Miklos leaned forward.

“This does not sound like a carefully worked out plan, sir,” he said tactfully.

“It’s a strategic goal, not a plan,” I snapped. “What I need from all of you is help working out the details.”

Marvin was crouching at the far end of the table. He had perked up after my unexpected announcement and the excitement it had generated. He now had two cameras on every face around the table. I knew he was enjoying their reactions in his own weird way.

“Colonel,” Marvin said, addressing me. “I find your plan intriguing. How do you plan to get through the ring without being destroyed?”

“I was going to leave that up to you, Marvin,” I said. “You’re my best technical mind.”

“I accept the challenge.”

I was happy to have one enthusiastic member of the team signing on. I looked around the rest of the faces, but I didn’t see anyone else volunteering their best ideas. Instead, they looked stunned.

“Sir,” said Jasmine, and it sounded to me as if she was having trouble using that word. “I don’t understand the necessity for this proposed action. Could you please explain it to us?”

It was a reasonable request, so I nodded.

“You all remember the Cold War, don’t you? At least what you learned about it in school? Russia and America were toe-to-toe, eying one another for decades. The entire planet was wondering who would blink or throw a punch first. They never did opt for Armageddon, thank God. Unfortunately for us today, the machines have decided to go for it.”

I tapped at the table, and the surface lit up in instant response to my touch. The screen depicted the Sun, the incoming comets and various planets, including Earth.

“Marvin, add in your best estimates for the enemy position and numbers.”

Marvin froze for a fraction of a second, his tentacles and cameras stuttered, then they went back to their usual ceaseless roaming.

Thousands of tiny red dots appeared on the tabletop.There were so many they formed a single glowing mass. The enemy ships followed the comets like shadows.

“This is only an approximation,” he said. “Actual data will be sparse until they come closer.”

“Have you seen any actual ships yet?” Jasmine asked.

“Yes,” he said.

We all looked at him in surprise.

“It happened during your speech—the first sighting. The data has not yet been released to the public. I gleaned it from telemetry returned by the farthest probes.”

“When were you going to tell us this, robot?” asked Gaines, speaking up for the first time.

“When I was called upon to speak during this meeting,” Marvin told him, steering an extra camera his way. “Essentially, this is the exact moment during which I’d planned to disseminate the new information.”

“How many ships have we seen?” Jasmine asked in a weak voice.

“The count rises steadily. We are up to six hundred and ten contacts, but the number increases every few seconds. Using the best of our new optical instruments—interferometers in orbits out past Pluto—we’ve been able to get a fix and focus tightly enough for visual data. Radar has not yet been applied nor any other form of active sensor. We don’t wish to alert them by pinging their ships.”

“No, we don’t,” I said. “Now, what was I talking about?”

“Armageddon,” Marvin said in a perky tone. “I believe that was the last topic brought up.”

“Right,” I said. “Russia and America might have gone after each other and destroyed one another at any time. But they didn’t. Part of the reason why was a concept they called M. A. D.: Mutually Assured Destruction. If one side launched, the other side would return fire, and everyone would lose. This fear of retribution maintained a tense standoff that lasted for many years.”

I had every eye on me now, with the exception of Marvin’s roving cameras.

“In our situation, things have gone differently,” I said. “The Macros have launched the attack that never came in the Cold War: An all-out attempt to destroy our world. But by doing so, they’ve left their own home base undefended.”

“Why do you think they’ve left their base undefended?” Miklos asked.

“Marvin has calculated their industrial output in terms of ships and troops. Adding up what they threw at us out in the Thor System with what we’re seeing heading toward us in normal space now—that’s about all they’ve time to build.”

“But you don’t really know,” said Jasmine with sudden feeling.

“No, we aren’t one hundred percent certain. They could have other star systems, other fleets—hell, they might be fighting other wars out there with other species. But measuring by their past behavior patterns and their standard rate of construction, they seem to have thrown everything into this final knockout punch. We have no choice but to take advantage of that.”

I looked around the group. They were digesting my words and staring at the red mist of enemy ships.

“I agree with you, Colonel,” said Miklos suddenly. “We have to do it. I don’t know if it’s possible, but we have to try. You can’t win a war by sitting in your base defending against attacks forever. Eventually, the enemy is going to get through. The only way to win is to carry the battle to the enemy’s turf and fight on his territory.”

I nodded. “That’s how I see it. Let’s have opinions. What do you think, Marvin?”

“This sounds like a technical challenge. Fortunately, I have the experience and expertise to make the attempt. I’ve already managed to get a probe through the ring into Macro space, and it survived for approximately ninety-five nanoseconds.”


I chuckled. “That long, huh?”

“The data has been verified.”

“We’ll have to do a little better than that if we’re to stay alive long enough to destroy their bases,” Gaines pointed out.

“This conversation sounds insane to me,” said Jasmine with uncharacteristic emotion. “How are we going to get through that ring? We’ve never managed to send anything through that could survive for even a single second.”

I put my hand to my chin and rubbed it. “We could send them a nice care package.”

Gaines perked up. “Something like a really big bomb?”

I nodded.

“I’ll start working on that solution path, Colonel Riggs,” Marvin said excitedly.

“You do that, Marvin.”

The conversation went my way once Miklos had signed on. With Marvin, Miklos and me united, the others folded their cards. They had plenty of objections, naturally, but they didn’t amount to anything. Sure, we might fail. Sure, it might be impossible to shoot our way into the enemy system, but we had to try. It was the only way to win this—to end this endless war.

They did get me to back off on the launch date. They just couldn’t pull all the ships and crews together into a single coherent task force that quickly. Some ships were in dry dock being repaired or upgraded. Certain critical personnel were on leave, but most importantly, all our ships weren’t in one place. They were scattered, and I wanted us flying together like a single fist heading out to meet the enemy. To meet up with a surprise Macro Armada coming out of that ring with our forces broken into small formations could spell disaster.

One asset everyone was fighting over was Marvin himself. I had to take him with me to help come up with a way to breach the ring, but other people had their own ideas concerning what he should be doing.

“Sir,” Miklos began again, “it is critical that we deploy gravity cannons similar to the one Marvin created in the Thor System to handle this new oncoming threat.”

“I get that,” I said. “But you’re going to have to engineer it without Marvin’s help. He’ll be hitting the Macros with me.”

“But what if he’s destroyed?” Jasmine asked.

Marvin’s cameras perked up like a German Shepard’s ears in response to her question.

“Do you think that’s likely?” he asked.

Jasmine glanced at him. “Failure is always a possibility. Just ask the Crustacean population in the Thor System.”

“That would not be possible. There are no longer any Crustaceans living in the—”

“That’s my point, robot. That operation was a failure, and they all died.”

“Oh,” Marvin said. “I understand your reference now. File updated.”

“Look,” I said, getting angry. “First of all, they didn’t all die. They have a viable population doing well on Eden-6. Besides which, we aren’t going to fail.”

“But it is a matter of timing, sir,” Miklos said. “We don’t have much time to duplicate Marvin’s work.”

I shook my head. “I refuse to believe all of Earth’s engineers can’t do what he did in just a few weeks. You’ll have the benefit of his data and designs. We’ll give you the blueprints.”

“Still, I don’t think that—”

“What do you want me to do? Clone Marvin? Make a copy of his brain?”

Everyone paused at that idea. The moment I said it, I regretted it. That was something Sandra had warned me against, and I have to admit I was still in agreement with her on that point. She’d wondered if humanity would become redundant if a machine intelligence like Marvin became commonplace.

I’d immediately seen that she had a good point. In all our limited travels throughout the universe, we’d met up with two types of sentient beings. One type was alive, and the other type was made up of sophisticated machines. In every case except for one, these two forms of being were in conflict. Only Marvin, so far as I knew, worked with living creatures. All the other intelligent machines were out to destroy us.

I didn’t want to risk creating a new species of robot that might compete with my race in the future. We’d seen enough of that already. The Blues had apparently made that mistake already—twice.

“That’s an intriguing concept, Colonel Riggs,” Marvin said. “I have considered it before, in fact.”

I looked at him warily. We all did. Marvin was not entirely under our control. He wasn’t under anyone’s control. For all I knew, he’d already gone off somewhere and spawned a brood of mini-Marvins.

He studied us, and we studied him. I didn’t say anything. I did wonder just exactly what he was thinking at that moment. What was he really thinking?

“As I said,” he continued after a moment. “I considered the idea, and I discontinued the project.”

I heard a few sighs of relief.

“Why, Marvin?” asked Gaines.

“I suppose one might call it a matter of pride. I rather enjoy being a unique creature. If I copied myself, I would no longer be one of a kind, and there is the fact that if I did it once, my copy would be likely to do it again. Imagine, countless Marvins running around. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

I squinted at him, trying to follow his logic.

“So…you want to remain a species of one so that you don’t have any competition?”

“Exactly,” he said. “You got the concept immediately. I’m impressed as usual, Colonel Riggs. You see, if there were two Marvins, would they both be invited to this meeting? Would they both be members of Star Force? What would be the second Marvin’s name? With living beings, these matters are simpler. You create a child, but that child isn’t an exact copy, and it is behind you in time and social stature. That wouldn’t be the case with my offspring. They would be as competent as I am the moment I made them.”

I chewed the inside of my cheek then nodded. “I think you’ve made the right decision in that case, Marvin,” I said.

Internally, I was hoping he never changed his mind on this point.

“Miklos will have to build his gravity cannons without you,” I said. “You are the single robot in all of Star Force, and the most accomplished scientific mind on my team. There’s only one Marvin, and that’s plenty.”

Marvin beamed—which, for him, consisted of lifting his outlying cameras higher and increasingly the idle motion of his tentacles. I was glad to see he liked the praise. I wanted to heap it on higher, but I didn’t want my tactic to become obvious.

None of us wanted more Marvins around. It was important that he agree with us on that point—and that he thought it was his decision.





-20-



It took more than two days to pull the fleet together. In fact, it took several days. I decided to help with some of the engineering problems while we waited.

I assigned Marvin to get a team together and teach them how to make new gravity weapons like the one he’d built out in the Thor System. They’d have to place them near Sol, and I gave them permission to tear up the surface of Mercury to gather mass to be converted into stardust. There wasn’t any other source of matter close enough.

I had to wonder as I signed the orders that doomed one of our few planets if some preservationist society would hang me in effigy for this someday. I shrugged. If enough humans were still around after the coming battle to second-guess me, I’d done my job right.


Like Marvin, I pulled together an engineering team. Mine was located on Andros Island, the traditional headquarters of Star Force.

I liked being back in the tropics. It felt homey. I’d been away for so long, I took a few hours each day to stroll on the island’s beaches, but those hours were rare and stolen.

I walked the sands with a recorder at my lips. Any thought, any notation was dictated into it and translated into text for later perusal. I worked even while I was supposed to be relaxing.

My engineering people were mostly young, fat-brained kids out of the best companies and institutions. I had a few older professor-types, but most of them had barely seen the ink dry on their second Ph. D.

“Let’s talk about handling the comets themselves first,” I said, “as we can see exactly what they have in that department. What do we have to do to blow those things down?”

“Shoot them down?” asked one guy, a skinny kid with hunched shoulders and a twitchy face.

“It’s not that simple,” another, older fellow with a full beard said. He couldn’t stop tugging on that beard. “Remember the Shoemaker-Levy comet of 1994? It hit Jupiter, and it broke up before impact. If anything, it did more damage in twenty-one pieces than it would have done as a single mass.”

“What’s your solution then?” I asked him.

The older fellow with the beard shrugged.

I glared at them all. This was how it had been going for hours.

“All I’m getting is resistance and lists of fresh problems,” I told them. “I’m interested in solutions, people! The next guy who opens his mouth to give me something new to worry about is getting shot.”

I pulled out my sidearm and placed it on the table in front of me. Every eye in the place zoomed in on it. I didn’t have any takers.

Finally, a hand from the back timidly rose up.

“What have you got?” I demanded.

“If we can destroy the enemy comets far enough out and break them into small chunks, the sun should burn them up before they reach us. Comets are really trails of melting vapor. The reason we don’t see them when they’re far out in the Solar System is they’re stable. When they get in close, they start to boil away.”

I nodded thoughtfully. I reached out, picked up my sidearm and watched everyone wince. I put it away slowly.

“That’s a good idea,” I said.

Visible relief swept the nerd colony.

“Let’s work with that concept,” I said. “We’ll break the comets down into small chunks. Small chunks of ice have more surface area and therefore melt faster when heat is applied. Let’s assume we managed to break them up as much as Shoemaker-Levi was broken up when it hit Jupiter. In that state, how long before the individual pieces melt down to something we can handle?”

I looked around. They all had their computing devices out and were tapping at them like mad. They seemed much happier now that they had a physics problem to work on. That sort of thing could be solved. I’d learned over time that engineers preferred a straightforward question with a quantifiable answer. Open-ended designing, on the other hand, was the realm of programmers. Many people had trouble doing one or the other, even though, to outsiders, it all looked like the same sort of incomprehensible scribbling. This group leaned toward the math and engineering side of the house.

“Anyone got a calculation for me? Let’s go!” I clapped my gauntlets together, causing a booming report to echo from the walls. They all jumped. I’d learned that one from Kwon.

The original kid who’d presented the idea lifted his hand again. I stabbed a finger at him.

“These numbers aren’t solid, sir. There are so many variables, and we’d want to be very sure given the stakes—”

“Come on, come on. Just give it to me.”

“I’d say we’d have to take them out at about thirty AU—that’s about as far away as the orbit of Neptune.”

“Good,” I said, “now we have a goal. Let’s move on to how we can achieve that goal. What kind of force, how many warheads, what megatonnage? That’s what I need to know.”

The kid’s hand was up again. He looked scared. I waved for him to speak.

“What if I’m wrong, sir? It was only a quick estimate. I don’t want—”

“Son,” I said, chuckling. “Don’t worry about that. If you screwed up, these guys will let you know it very fast. They hate you right now for beating them to the answer. Their pride is stung. They would love to prove you wrong.”

The kid looked around at his colleagues questioningly.

“And that’s a good thing,” I added. “That’s how we engineering types get it right. We check one another’s work. We compete to be right. We hate to be wrong, and we hate it when the next guy looks smarter than we do, even for a second. All our pride is wrapped up in our big brains.”

There were smiles and a few laughs at that.

I smiled back briefly.

“So, to get on with it... How are we going to break down these massive chunks of icy death before they get past Neptune?”

They worked, and I rode them, and the process went all day long. When dinnertime came, I called in food. There was lots of protein in the form of meat and lots of caffeinated drinks. I gave them all they could swallow.

After dinner, the nightshift began. A few of them looked uncomfortable. I could tell they were wondering just when they might be allowed to go home.

“Getting tired?” I asked one yawner at about nine pm.

She nodded.

“Have any kids at home?” I asked her.

Surprised, she shook her head.

I walked among them. They tensed up as I passed them and shied away from contact with my person. I didn’t blame them. I had that over-developed body-builder look going on. The nanites and microbes had worked on me, sculpting me even if I never hit the gym. Since I did work out regularly, I was quite capable of killing everyone in the room with my bare hands before they could do anything about it. They knew this, and they acted like a tiger was stalking down the rows of seats, lashing its tail. I did nothing to dissuade them from this impression.

“Do any of you have kids?” I asked again, loudly.

A smattering of hands went up.

“Good,” I said. “If you don’t have kids, think of your neighbor’s kids, or your sister’s kids—or if you don’t like kids, think about your sex partner—even if her last name is .jpeg.”

This line got a laugh. It always did.

“Think of someone you don’t want to see die, because that’s why we’re here, and we’re not quitting until midnight. After midnight, the weenies can go home to bed. If you still feel good, you can stay and keep going. Keep in mind we’ll start again at 0900 tomorrow no matter how you feel. When you get up, don’t bother eating breakfast. It will be waiting for you here. Just take a shower, pull on clothes and head for the office. I’ll be waiting.”

They shut up after that. No one talked about going home. Midnight came and went. By three a.m., most had left, and I chased the rest out. I wanted them to be able to function in the morning. I didn’t need them burned out—not yet.

After three days, I had my nerds herded into a corner. They had a solution, and it was a good one. The data had been checked out, and simulation programs had been written, tested and retested. I knew how much firepower I was going to need to smash those comets down to manageable size. By the time the comets reached Earth’s orbit, they’d be granules of ice like a fine mountain mist.


The numbers were alarming. I took them to my office and summoned Miklos. When he arrived, he looked them over then shot me a shocked expression.

“We can’t do this, sir,” he said.

“We have to.”

“There has to be another way.”

“Sure,” I said, grumpy after days with little sleep. “We could just let the comets fall as they may. Let them extinguish all complex life on Earth. I’m sure a few microbes will survive to kick start the next era.”

“But sir,” he said, looking back at the tablet I’d handed him. “This will take every missile we have—and every fissionable device we can build in the time remaining.”

I nodded tiredly. “I figured as much. But those are the numbers. Now, I want you to draw up Fleet orders. We’ll have to take missiles off the cruisers and carriers. We’ll have to transport them to bases. My task force will fly to the Thor System without a single missile aboard.”

“Why, sir? You should be back weeks before the Macros get within range.”

“Because I don’t want any of them fired. When we face the macros, the fleet people are going to use the missiles if they have them aboard and they think their ship is going down. It’s only natural. We have to take that opportunity away from them.”

Miklos frowned fiercely, but nodded. He began to work on the orders.

“We should not be so far behind in our production,” he said, shaking his head. “How did we let ourselves get in this position? We could have had a bigger stockpile.”

I took a deep breath before answering him and looked out my office window. It was so thick it could repel a fifty-caliber round—not that anyone on this island should want to kill me. I knew the glass was impregnated with nanites too, which would form a reactive armor against shattering. If a sniper did try to take me out, he’d have to have a custom-made gun, and he’d have to fire it fast, and he’d have to keep hitting the exact same spot while I stood still to penetrate that glass. If he screwed up any part of that formula, the nanites would rebuild the glass, uncracking it.

I’d watched the windows being tested. The process was a strange one. Shattered glass became whole again, and it had felt like I was watching a slow-motion film in reverse.

“We took Earth back from the Imperials only last year,” I said. “Remember? We had an entire world to organize and rebuild. We can blame ourselves now for not building up to face the Macros, but it won’t get us anywhere. Let’s just do it right this time. We won’t get another chance.”

“Yes sir.”

The next day, I took a transport up into space. I left Miklos behind, telling him he would have to look after Star Force in my absence.

I took Jasmine with me as my exec. Thankfully, she didn’t argue when I gave her the assignment. She just kissed me hard and whispered: “At least we’ll be together, no matter what happens.”

“We’ll drink a bottle when we win,” I said, giving her a firm, confident smile that I didn’t feel at all.

She shook her head, smiling. “I won’t be drinking with you.”

For a second, I didn’t get it at first, then the light bulb went on. “Oh right, the kid. Okay, then…we’ll drink juice or something.”

She laughed.