The Dead Sun(Star Force Series #9)

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The next stage of the battle was downright fun. I’d been worried that the Macro fleet would split apart into task forces and go for different targets. After all, there were thousands of them. They could have sent half their force after the fleet and the other half directly to Earth. But they didn’t.

Fortunately, our ships were no longer slower than the Macros. We’d upgraded them since the initial contact at the Thor ring. In fact, our factories had built very little other than emergency evac balloon-ships, gravity guns on moon bases and extra engines. With so little time to react to the approaching Macro armada, we’d made our choices, and now it was time to see if they were the right ones.

They followed us like baby ducks. I was grinning ear-to-ear when they passed our Neptune moonbases, and I gave the order to spring our little surprise.

What was so great about the gravity cannons in this situation was their relative invisibility. There was a release of energy, but that had been dampened by having buried the systems in the frozen methane and icy rock of Neptune’s moons Nereid, Triton and Sao. There was very little evidence concerning the source of the attack.

I watched as their ships began to implode. Chunks of matter were crushed down to less than a hundredth of their original size. A direct hit could reduce a cruiser to the size of a pickup truck—a smashed-looking one.

We whooped and high-fived one another as the hit-counts rolled in. The first ten minutes were the best: over a hundred kills. After that, Nereid slipped out of range behind Neptune, and Triton’s base couldn’t get a perfect bead on the enemy fleet due to their trajectory. Fortunately, Sao was still hitting them dead-on, destroying a ship every thirty seconds.

“Any reaction?” I asked the weapons people.

They shook their heads, smiling. “They don’t know what’s hitting them, so they’re ignoring it. They’ll just plow straight ahead, hoping it stops.

Unfortunately, it did stop after another two hours and about two hundred fresh strikes. They were out of the reach of the Neptune bases by then.

“Set course for Saturn,” I said, “but try not to be too obvious about it.”

Jasmine came to me after complying with the order.

“I don’t like hitting them this way, with one small set of guns at a time.”

“This is a fine time to bring that up.”

She made a face, indicating she was not fooled. “Would you have moved the gravity cannons if I’d brought up objections during the planning stages?”

“Probably not,” I admitted. “But I would have made a note of your complaints.”

She huffed. We both knew what that meant.

“Look,” I said, “I know it would have been nice to put all the batteries in one location to shred their ships, but we didn’t know how they would manage their approach. Space-based defensive systems are vulnerable. If I put them all on one rock, they might take it out in a single counterpunch. This way, we’ve got lots of assets all around the Solar System. If they find one, they won’t find them all.”

“Yes, but this way some of the stations might not see action at all. That means many of the fortifications were a waste of resources to build.”

I put up a single finger of admonishment and wagged it at her. Underlings always hated that.

“Not so. We can withdraw with our final force to whatever bases are left. With luck, they’ll all be destroyed trying to hunt down our fleet in the end.”

Newcome nodded, watching projected course lines.

“I like the defensive gauntlet we’ve built. The key is to keep them following us. Should we tease them, Colonel?”

“I’m not sure I’m getting your suggestion—how would we tease them?”

“Let a ship develop engine trouble. Have it lag behind, keeping just barely ahead of the protective umbrella of the rest. They will eagerly attack it.”

“Not so pleasant for the crew,” Jasmine pointed out.

Newcome shrugged. “With such a simple task, surely we could get a brainbox to do it.”

“Hmm,” I said, musing. “I like that idea, Admiral. We’ll do it. Set up a decoy and abandon her on pinnaces. We’ll let her slip behind us and simulate a radiation leak from her core. They’ll pounce, but we’ll give her more power in fits and starts, keeping the ship one jump ahead of the Macros.”

Long before we reached Saturn, we let them devour an empty cruiser. They swarmed like a pack of angry sharks, but there was no meat to be had. Not a single human life was lost, and they were still following us.

When we came within reach of Saturn, I decided to play it much less cautiously.

“When the batteries come in range with a good chance of a kill-shot,” I said, “they can fire at will. Make sure they aren’t targeting the same vessels, however. I want zero mistakes.”

The batteries reached out and began destroying the enemy. There were over five hundred lost by the time they passed by the planet. The killing was intense then, as they were under the firing arc of many of our gravity weapons at once. They spread out further, but it was hopeless. We picked them off one after another.

“Sir, they’re launching a new missile barrage,” Jasmine reported suddenly.

I glanced at her, then at the swarm of new contacts.

“A desperate move,” I said confidently. “We took out their last flock of missiles without breaking a sweat. We’ll do the same to these weapons.”

“Sir, enemy missile courses plotted.”

“Display it.”

She was already tapping, putting it all up on the screens. I watched closely as the data became stronger and the projected path of the missiles became clearer.

My frown quickly turned into a baffled look.

“What are they doing?”

“It appears they aren’t firing on our fleet,” Jasmine said.

“Back us out and project possible courses.”

She did so as quickly as she could. The view of local space swam and shrunk sickeningly. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the missiles didn’t target Earth. I figured they’d finally wised up and decided to destroy our home planet instead of chasing phantom ships.

But they hadn’t done that—at least, not yet. Instead the missiles were—

“Alert the base on Titan!” I shouted.

“Already done,” she said.

Without being told, she zoomed back in to a tight focus of the space around Saturn. The space around the ringed planet was filling up with ships, missiles and beams of gravitational force.


“The missile barrage is splitting up,” she said.

We watched in frustration as the missiles steered in flocks toward our bases. Thousands of men were down there garrisoning those stations. Every one of those Star Force troops had been brave enough to come out here and man a post on an inhospitable rock. Now, they were about to die for their homeworld.

“Should I tell them to pull out, sir?” Jasmine asked. “There’s still time for a full evacuation. After the battle, we can have them picked up.”

“Do they have families with them?” I asked.

“Sir, we can’t—” Newcome began whispering at my side.

I shushed him with a chopping gesture. I knew what he was going to say. We couldn’t afford to have those batteries stop pounding the enemy fleet. They were taking out ships every few seconds. We needed every kill they could chalk up—and a lot more as well.

“No, sir,” Jasmine said. “No families.”

I nodded. “Tell them to man their posts and fire to the last. Tell them they are the pride of Earth, and their sacrifice today will ensure that humans will continue to breathe centuries from now.”

“I’ve transmitted your words.”

I knew she’d recorded what I’d said and simply relayed it to the stations. I hoped it would be enough.

The missiles began falling on the moons. The garrisons had to pull out right now to escape destruction.

Not one of them did. They understood the score. They stayed at their posts, cursing and firing with ferocious intensity until the last of them was turned into radioactive slag on an airless rock.

The mood aboard Potemkin wasn’t jubilant anymore. We’d lost a lot of good people, but in the grim math of war we’d done well. The worst part was the enemy had figured us out: They’d located our bases.

“What’s our next destination?”

“Jupiter, sir.”

I looked at the star maps. Jupiter was pretty far away. It wasn’t directly lined up with Earth, either. As we led the Macros on a wild goose chase, they had to be noticing that each time we’d led them to a world bristling with fortresses to eat their ships. They’d already lost about half of their force.

The question was whether they’d keep following us and keep losing ships. I didn’t know the answer, but I couldn’t think of a better play to make.

For the next few hours, we crawled across space. No one spoke much, other than to report required information. I ordered everyone to take a break when it became clear the enemy was still following us.

I was asleep in my bunk ten hours after the battle at Saturn when I was summoned back to the bridge. Bleary-eyed, I met the back-up crews and stood at my post sipping bad coffee.

“What have we got?”

“We’re about ten hours out from Jupiter,” a staffer told me. “But the enemy is slowing and changing course.”

I nodded grimly. I summoned Jasmine and Newcome back to the bridge.

“They’re veering off,” I told them, showing them the data. “They’ve figured it out. They thought they were chasing us down at first. Now, they’ve finally realized we’re not going to let them catch us, and each planet we lead them to is a fresh trap. Show me their new course.”

The plot was arcing and indirect. I soon saw why: the Macros were going to thread a narrow path between the planets, avoiding them. The course eventually took them to Earth on a semi-elliptical path that led all the way around the sun and back in from behind. They were carefully threading our gauntlet without tripping any more traps.

“Show me our arcs of fire,” I ordered. “Will we get any shots at them at all?”

There were a few bright spots. Mars would have several minutes to pound them, and our biggest base, Luna, would be front and center during the final conflict.

“We should take another thousand of them down with us,” Newcome said quietly. “It’s something.”

“That’s not good enough,” I said as I reviewed the figures.

Newcome looked worried, and I knew what he was thinking: Oh God, Riggs is about to charge into Hell with me at the helm again.

And he was partly right.