The Dead Sun(Star Force Series #9)

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“Scramble the fighters,” I ordered, forcing my voice to be calm. “Jasmine!”

She jumped and glanced at me. She’d been frozen by the sight of Phobos, which had yet to finish dying. The big ship was going down into Neptune’s upper atmosphere now. A thousand mile long flaming line crossed the bluish planet as the friction from reentry vaporized the massive hull.


“Yes, sir?” she said, working her console.

“The fighters!”

“Right! On it.”

“Newcome,” I said to the bug-eyed Admiral, “spread the fleet out. Encircle each large ship with fighters and destroyers. The missiles shouldn’t get through, but if they do and they land troops—”

“Troops, sir?” he asked in confusion. “Isn’t the situation clear? These are large nuclear-tipped warheads. They’re hitting with significant megatonnage.”

“First of all, follow my orders.”

“Immediately, sir,” he said, not liking my tone of voice which had turned dark.

He did as I’d asked, then looked up while we all waited for the next stage of the attack. The surviving enemy missiles wouldn’t reach our fleet for a few more minutes.

“Sir?” Newcome asked. “Why do you still think the enemy missiles have troops on them? They clearly have warheads.”

I sucked in a breath. I was annoyed, but I figured I had time to tell him.

Marvin beat me to it. He’d been on the bridge reprogramming brainbox systems. During the battle, we had to coordinate thousands of smart weapons. Doing so required either a thousand techs—or Marvin.

“Admiral Newcome,” he said, “I believe I can shed some light on that subject. The Macro missiles are almost certainly bearing troops, but they’re also armed with warheads.”

Newcome furrowed his frosty-white brows. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Not for human weapon designs, but Macros are inherently self-sacrificing. If the pilots of those missiles felt they should commit suicide, killing their complement of troops and themselves, they would do so without hesitation. Once that decision was made collectively, they drove their small ships into the surface of Phobos and detonated their warheads.”

“How very strange,” said Newcome thoughtfully. “I do believe you’re correct, robot. They’re both troop carriers and warhead-armed missiles. Grim. Doesn’t bear thinking about—but we have no choice, do we?”

Newcome went back to his staff, and I stared down at the screens. Jasmine came up behind me and touched my shoulder.

“You did the right thing,” she said.

“Don’t I always?” I asked with false bravado.

Anyone else might have been fooled but not Jasmine. She could tell I was hurting. I’d let Phobos die by putting the ship out in front of the fleet, and that would cost us dearly before this battle was done.

“I should have foreseen this,” I said, seeing the look in her eyes. “I shouldn’t have put Phobos up there alone.”

She gave my arm a regretful squeeze, then went back to her station.

“They would have hit our ships, in that case,” Marvin said. “I calculated a probable twenty percent loss of our ships if we attempted to stop the barrage with the full fleet.”

I shook my head, still full of regrets. Phobos’ commander, Captain Zhou, had been a winner. She was the type I never had enough of.

Deciding not to let myself be shaken by the fortunes of war, I returned to the boards. We still had a war to win even if we’d lost an irreplaceable ship.

Although Phobos itself was gone, we’d learned to duplicate her most important gravitational technology. We still didn’t have any ships with gravity-drive as that required more power than anything smaller could muster, but we had gravity cannons.

Sometimes, stealing your neighboring alien tech was like that: it came with trade-offs. For example, we’d long ago learned to build shielded vehicles with spheres of protective force, but it was just too expensive. With an engine and many weapons aboard, a ship operating with a shield up would be too hard to power. It would have moved slowly or hardly be able to fight. For these reasons, we’d never built a ship with shields like Macro domes or very large Macro crawling machines. Maybe we’d learn how to employ these advanced technologies, I told myself—if there was to be a future for mankind.

As the missiles came into range, all our defensive systems came online and began trying to shoot them down. The missiles, in turn, deployed countermeasures.

“In a way,” I said to my command staff, which had fallen quiet and glum, “this battle is an amazing achievement. Both sides have improved their technology. In our case, in particular, it’s a wonder to see. In the span of little more than five years, we’ve gone from a basic, computer-driven level of technology to advanced propulsion, energy generation and weapons systems.”

“Good thing we’re excellent adopters of alien ideas,” Newcome observed.

I gave him a slight frown. There was always someone around who tried to rain on one of my little pep-speeches, but I hadn’t expected it to be him.

To his credit, he caught his mistake, coughed into his hand and shut the hell up.

“Most of the advances have been from captured alien sources, naturally,” I said. “I’ve never met another race that learns, adapts and improves faster than we do to survive.”

I looked around quickly gauging the mood. Most of them were looking at their screens. Even Marvin had only a single camera aimed in my direction. That kind of irritated me. After all, the robot had more than ten eyes all of which could focus on something different. Rating only one camera from Marvin was akin to an insult.

When I spoke again, I was louder and more forceful.

“Take Phobos, for example. We stole it, the entire ship. We stripped out the good stuff and left an empty shell behind. We’ve lost the ship now, but since it was a freebie in the first place—”

“Excuse me, sir,” Jasmine said. “But we didn’t strip any equipment from Phobos.”

At least someone was paying attention. I forced a smile.

“Not literally, figuratively. The good stuff was the tech. We have gravity cannons now and a number of other key technological advances. None of those things we pirated have been lost.”

She nodded vaguely and went back to her screens.

I cleared my throat and started tapping at the big central display. I got into the options and began changing things around. This got Jasmine’s immediate attention.

“I have that set up in a very specific way, Colonel.”

“And I’m making an adjustment... Damn. Help me get all the gravity cannons on our moon bases to display on this thing, will you? I want to see their maximum-range arcs of fire.”

Jasmine nodded and tapped her way into the options box. The display I’d requested must have been preprogrammed because it immediately appeared. She’d already built the interface addition I’d been trying to figure out how to add.

“Excellent,” I said. “Let’s take a look at the arcs. Already, the enemy fleet is within range of the Neptune bases. We only have them under fourteen big guns now, but that will change the deeper they travel into—”

“Sir,” Jasmine interrupted, “the enemy missiles are down to half their count, but we now estimate that about thirty percent of those remaining will make it through the barriers to their target ships.”

“Thank you, Jasmine,” I said. “Deploy marine platoons in full kit on every large ship.”

I received a few odd looks but pressed on with my lecture.

“We could fire at them with the bases on Nereid and Triton right now, for example. That would—”

“I would not recommend that action,” Newcome said quickly.

I tossed him another acid glance.


“Sorry, sir.”

“Look,” I said, finally becoming annoyed. “I’m not going to fire on them yet. We’ll follow the plan. I want to show you all how it’s playing out graphically.”

I had more eyes now. Even Marvin had spared three cameras for me and my display. I touched a virtual button to put the table into planning mode and advanced the timing slider by a few hours.

“See this? The projections are now set for 0300. The enemy fleet will be just past our Neptune bases. We’ll hit them then.”

They were all frowning, going over my scenario.

“Won’t they stop and fire on the bases?” Newcome asked.

“Maybe,” I said, “but in that case, we’ll escape them.”

“You mean—our ships?”

“Exactly. Don’t forget, our ships are their real goals. They want to destroy our fleet then destroy Earth. Without ships, they believe the home planet is pretty much helpless. But they’re wrong about that. We’ve got our best armament on rocks like these all around the system. My plan is simple: we’ll drag them past one moon base after another, pounding them. If they ignore the bases, they get to pound the enemy until they are out of range. If they turn on the bases, we’ve succeeded in delaying them, and our ships escape. Either way, we win.”

They were dubious but curious. Below our feet the deck shuddered repeatedly.

“Potemkin is deploying countermeasures, sir,” Jasmine said.

“We’re on!” I said, and I grinned at them.

I put my helmet on, lowered the visor and checked my laser carbine. Jasmine looked upset but didn’t try to talk me out of it. She knew that, in my heart, I belonged with the security forces repelling the invaders, but she didn’t like the idea at all.

Things didn’t go quite as I’d planned when the last enemy missiles breached our lines. Instead of landing troops on our hulls—they fired them out in a spray.

“Sir…” Jasmine said in confusion. She frowned at her screen and then looked up at me. “The enemy ships seem to be disintegrating—just moments before they hit their targets.”

“Excellent!” I said. “Open up an all-ships channel. I’ll congratulate the gunners.”

“No, sir, I mean—”

“We’ve got a hit!” Newcome shouted. “That’s the Lexington. She’s down and out, sir.”

My expression went from jubilation to confusion, then to grim concern, within the next minute. Ships were being hit and taken out. They weren’t being struck by anything easy to detect.

“Shoot down those Macro infantry we’ve got floating around out there.”

“There are thousands. They seem to be hiding behind their own chaff and other countermeasures, sir, we aren’t—”

I slammed my helmet visor closed and marched toward the troop bay. While I marched, I shouted orders over the ship’s command channels.

“Jasmine, protect this ship. After we’re out, evade the enemy troops. We’ll signal you when they’ve been destroyed. Gaines, Kwon, outfit the men with surfboards. We’re going to have a little space-hunt on our hands.”

Surfboards were small, one-man flight systems we’d developed for maneuvering in space. I hadn’t ridden one of the tricky little machines for a long time.

Jasmine quickly came on the line, concerned and confused.

“What’s going on?” she asked me. “Are you exiting the ship?”

“Exactly. Newcome, relay this to all commanders: send your marines outside the ships. Deploy them immediately. They must search and destroy enemy machines. And tell our gunners to make sure they know friend from foe before firing, once we’re out there.”

A private channel blinked on my HUD as I reached the troop bay and mounted a surfboard. I didn’t want to open the channel, but I did.

“This is going to be fun,” I told Jasmine before she could speak. “I haven’t ridden one of these things in a year.”

“Kyle,” she said, “what are you doing? I don’t understand—”

“The enemy isn’t going to land on our hulls and drill through—not this time. I have to give Macro Command a point or two more IQ on the old chart this time. They’re copying us again. They’ve given their marines charges, and they’re lobbing them in from close range. We’ve done the same before. That’s probably why they hit Phobos so hard. Each missile wasn’t armed with a single massive charge, but rather sixteen or so small ones. Arranged to go off simultaneously, they packed quite a punch. It is an ingenious system, really.”

As I spoke, the airlock lights went from green, to yellow to dull red. The air had been sucked from the chamber. The door flashed open, but there was no sound. We launched ourselves one after another into open space.

Jasmine complained in my ear. She didn’t want me to jump out. She didn’t want me to fight the Macros at all. I barely heard her.

I was overawed by the glowing light blue sphere that spanned so widely below us it looked like a wall. There were other, smaller spheres out there in the dark—moons we called them. But really, they were cold little worlds of their own.

“Wish me luck, love,” I said.

She paused in whatever speech she was giving me and said, “Luck.”

The channel closed. I knew she didn’t have any more time for me. She had a ship to run.

Spinning around slowly onto my back, I saw Potemkin. The ship was ugly when compared to the perfect glowing disk of Neptune. Stubby weapons swiveled and spat out invisible rays of light. Only their tips lit up glowing with heat when they fired. The beams themselves weren’t in the visible spectrum.

My visor knew the beams were there, even if I couldn’t see them. It dimmed and flashed, protecting my eyes from the retina-burning rays. As I watched, the lateral jets fired. The ship began to change course, to evade and slip away from us. Jasmine was pulling out just as I’d ordered her to do.

I spun back to where my troops were spreading out. Kwon was on my left, a large trooper with green-glowing lines on his armor. Gaines was lit up in light blue, a shade close to Neptune’s natural color.

On my HUD, the enemy positions were displayed as red triangles. They were superimposed on my vision.

“Spread them out, Gaines. Let’s do this with two-man teams. I’ll take Kwon.”

“No fair, sir,” he said, chuckling.

We chose our targets and zoomed to do battle. Kwon was my wingman, as always. I could feel him there on my flank. It was a good feeling, like knowing I had a huge guardian angel in my wake.